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the
figures were only a few feet away and Erica could start to make out
some of their features. There were three guys and a girl on the far
left. The two men on her right wore black t-shirts with nothing on
them and blue jeans. The next guy in line wore a white t-shirt like
Walt and the girl had dyed black hair and wore all black, the
layers so indistinguishable she could have just been wearing a
jumpsuit.
    "Walt," the second guy to the right said,
holding out his hand.
    "The Boys." Walt took the hand and shook it
vigorously. He wasn't exactly smiling. He looked crazed. "This is
Erica. Erica this is –" He went from right to left. "Jask, Blake,
Shump and . . ."
    "Dawn," Shump said.
    "She with you?" Walt said.
    Shump laughed and said, "She's with all of
us." He put his arm around the girl's shoulders and pulled her
close to him.
    "Good to see you again, man," Blake said.
"Got a good night planned. Let's go grab some beer."
    For a moment, Erica felt stupid for
worrying. This was just a get together of blue-collar mid-western
males. Something she was familiar with.
    Then she followed them into the barn.

 
    Shared Interests
     
    The light was so harsh it
took her eyes a moment to adjust. She didn't know what she
expected. Something sparser. Maybe something to do with cars or
woodworking. Something more normal. And there were cars in there, which is what she
noticed first. A silver Mercedes and a black BMW.
    The second thing she noticed was what she
thought was a dead dog, suspended from the ceiling by a chain,
dangling over a rusted barrel with a fire going in it. Whatever it
was, its fur had been burned off and the whole barn smelled like
burnt hair and cooking meat. The odd effect it created was
something like nausea with an underlying hunger.
    On the back wall was a pile of maybe ten
naked human corpses. Erica had seen concentration camp footage.
That's what this made her think of except they weren't all skinny.
In an effort to look away from this, her eyes took in everything
else in the barn: piles of watches and jewelry, piles of clothes,
vases and artwork, prescription bottles, liquor bottles, laptops,
cell phones, other things of relative mundaneness, the
obsessiveness of the themed piles and the quantity of items
contained therein the only things lending an air of peculiarity to
them.
    If Erica had let her fear subside during the
brief walk to the barn, it was now back with a raging
certainty.
    She hoped this wasn't what Walt meant when
he'd said the Boys were people like them. Because, so far, it
looked like they were murdering thieves.
    "Looks like you guys've been busy." Walt's
eyes scanned the contents of the barn. "Got anything good in the
pile over there?"
    Blake shook his head. "Nah. We let em get
too old. Gonna have to end up just burning them all. Feels like a
waste."
    Jask and Shump each had one side of a big
red Coleman cooler. They set it down and opened the lid. Jask
reached in and started passing around the cans of cheap beer. Erica
opened hers and took a big drink. She thought it might calm her
down. If something didn't calm her down soon, she was pretty sure
she would run screaming from this place and she wasn't sure she
wanted to know what would happen to her if she did that.
    "What've you been up to?" Blake asked.
    "This and that," Walt said.
    "Been in one place long?"
    "Nah. I've bounced around.
But we're headed to Dayton, Ohio. Might stick around there a
while." This was the first Erica had heard of this. She
thought, Dayton fucking Ohio? But, oh well, it would seem like the big city compared to
Shitsburg, Missouri.
    "Dayton, Ohio? Why the fuck you want to go
there?"
    "Passed through late last year. Not sure.
Felt something. A certain vibe."
    Blake smirked. "The I-don't-give-a-fuck
vibe?"
    Walt shrugged.
    Erica felt something unspoken pass between
them. It made her think of something rotten.
    Shump and Jask came back carrying green lawn
chairs. The old school kind with the scratchy plastic belts