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she asked.
    Bird eyed her, still hunting for the phone. “Not to worry,” he replied. “We’d see him on those.” He gestured to what looked like several portable TVs immediately to her left.
    Stepping farther inside the office, she spotted four monitors similar to the pair out by the registers. Along with the two cameras keeping watch on the interior of the store and the fueling area outside, an additional pair provided wide shots of the property. She spotted the van in the upper right corner of the third screen.
    “ So what if we do see him coming?” she prodded. “What if he comes into the store?”
    The large man smiled. He leaned across the desk and produced a short-barrel revolver from one of the drawers. “One problem. Six solutions.”
    She tried to emulate his level of confidence but only managed a strained grin.
    He found his cell phone and flipped it open. “I doubt it’ll come to that,” he reassured her, dialing the sheriff’s office. “He hasn’t even gotten out of the—”
    He trailed off in mid-sentence, staring at the phone.
    “ What about the phone lines, though?” she asked, again turning to the security monitors. “What if they’re not down because of the storm? What if he cut them? That would mean he’s already out there?”
    Before Bird could answer, the black and white images on the screens dissolved into static. One by one, they all went out.
    Penelope spun, mouth open, but stopped short at the look on Bird’s face.
    She froze. “What? What’s wrong?”
    “ Jason is dead,” he whispered, still staring at the cell phone. “That’s what the display on my phone says: Jason is dead.”
    The lights went out. Everything went black.
    The windowless office became a cocoon of darkness.
    “ What the hell?” one of the men asked from the main room.
    Glass shattered at the front of the store, chased by a piercing scream that choked off abruptly.
    “ Crap,” another man shouted, his profanity punctuated by the noise of several fishing poles crashing to the floor.
    Penelope’s hands swept the wall beside her, searching for the way out. Bird edged past her in the dark and shoved through the door. His massive silhouette charged toward the counter, and she raced to catch up to him.
    Battery-powered flood lamps mounted in the back corners of the room provided some relief from the darkness, but their orange light also helped to enhance the shadows between the aisles and those gathered in the checkout area.
    “ Hey, what’s going on?” one of the men in the fishing section demanded. “What the hell was that noise? I’m blind as a bat’s ass over here.”
    The two men had been separated from the rest of the store behind tall racks of fishing poles and nets. Now, in the blackout, she couldn’t see them at all.
    Penelope hurried onward. She caught up to Bird, finding him backed against a pyramid of stacked windshield washer bottles directly across from the registers.
    “ We shouldn’t go out the front,” she started to say, but fell silent when she saw his eyes had gone wide and his mouth had dropped open.
    Penelope turned, afraid the man had reacted to someone who’d approached from behind her, but saw no one at the empty checkout island or near—
    The display case.
    The glass lay shattered across the floor, the metallic framing blasted out of shape.
    All the knives were missing.
    Then she noticed the blood. It sprinkled out of the darkness like some hellish rain, splattering the floor in the center of the clerks’ work area. Shivering with fear, acting out of instinct rather than on command, Penelope looked up, tracing the liquid path back to its origin. She found Jason’s gutted body stuck to the ceiling, pinned in place with the stolen knives. The corpse remained half-hidden from view by overhead storage racks of cigarettes and lottery tickets, but she saw enough of him to know that his belly had been slit open and emptied.
    Penelope opened her mouth to scream but the sound