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the wood—and at the top of the steps he pauses to turn over his gum a few times with his tongue. “Not unless you’re dead you’re done with us.”
     
    Later, she ties on two ankle scabbards and stabs into them a matching pair of Gerber serrated combat knives. To cover them she yanks down her jeans and shoves her feet into steel-tipped cowboy boots. She straps on and tightens the shoulder holster for the Glock and pulls on a black denim jacket. She steps outside and waits on the porch for a good five minutes, listening, the wind gone now, the forest a whispery hush interrupted by the occasional bird calling, twig snapping.
    She then clomps down the steps and crunches down the gravel path and circles the Ramcharger, peering in its windows and quickly under its hood, before climbing into the cab and locking the doors and keying the ignition.
    Her eyes dart between the mirrors and the road when she drives the quarter-mile driveway that leads to a pitted strip of county two-lane that snakes down the mountain before connecting up with a highway that takes her to La Pine, Oregon. Along the way her foot feathers the brake and her eyes scan back and forth across the road as if something might burst from the woods that wall her in.
    At the grocery store she fills her cart with canned vegetables, dried fruit, bags of jerky, boxes of cereal, and granola bars; and at the pharmacy she collects some gauze and disinfectant, a needle and thread, an Us Weekly ; and at the Ace hardware she buys an electric drill, an electric handsaw, a steel entry door, ten sheets of plywood, three two-by-fours, four motion-sensor lights, four Magnum flashlights, five packs of D batteries, three boxes of four-inch screws, and two empty five-gallon water bottles. On her way out of town, she swings into the service station, one final stop, where she picks up two five-gallon gas containers and fills them with unleaded.
    It takes several trips to unload the truck, and she pauses to survey the woods again every time she steps outside. An open-air shed, cluttered with garbage cans, yard tools, a wheelbarrow, rusted rolls of chicken wire, stands a ways off from the driveway. She collects an extension ladder from it. The cabin is shaped like a shoebox, with its porch and entryway on the shorter face of it. She climbs the ladder to install two motion detectors beneath its gables and centers the other two along the broad sides of the cabin.
    She opens the entry door and uses a hammer and flathead screwdriver to knock the pins from the hinges. She is strong enough to wobble only a little when she picks up the wooden door and lays it on the porch and excises its knob and deadbolt and hinges and then screws them into the steel door with the price still stickered to it. After thirty minutes the new door is hung, not strong enough to keep Magog out, she knows, but enough to slow him down.
    Inside, she snaps her measuring tape along the windows and jots down their dimensions on a piece of paper she pockets. There are ten windows in the house, all of them the same size except for the bathroom, the kitchen, and the big bay window in the living room. She lays out each sheet of plywood in the yard and uses the measuring tape and a Magic Marker to sketch out their shape. From the shed she collects two sawhorses with lichen furring them over and sets them in the front yard and heaves the sheets up on them and sets to work cutting their edges and then, into their centers, a foot-wide slit big enough to accommodate her eyes or the muzzle of a gun.
    This takes a long time because she lets the saw spin for only thirty seconds at a time, its blade spitting out sawdust like freshly fallen snow, and then she lifts her finger from the trigger, the whine of the blade receding as she surveys the woods.
    There is a tall stack of firewood at the leeward side of the cabin, and she tosses the litter of plywood there before dragging the freshly cut sheets inside. Twilight has come and she