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there, just
    there and stare at her as she ran at it waving the broom, snowing not one ounce of fear until just before she could whack it, and then vault effortlessly over the ten-foot fence she had had especially constructed. The boys loved him and named him Bambi after that silly movie and- And.
    And the boys...
    The boys were all gone. The boys, her boys were all dead, all destroyed horribly and forever and...
    And for a long time the only sound in the room came from the muffled sobs filling the tiny stall.
    It was why they were moving. The Zoo, the nickname for the wing now holding seven unoccupied bedrooms, was empty. Empty and hollow and dark and sad. It had been the only post massacre order Jack had been able to manage. Near-incoherent with pain and rage and shame, his last comment before boarding the plane to Europe was to take everything home to Texas where they belonged.
    Annabelle had thus been left with the project of packing everything up, flying to Dallas, selecting and buying another house (with room for Carl's workshop), and most difficult of all, sorting out the boys' belongings.
    So many belongings. And such, such.. . boyish things. She smiled at that thought and wiped away another tear.
    Because they were such boys. They were grown men, too. All of them. The youngest almost twenty-five, the oldest just over forty, older even than Cat, the second in command.
    But they were such boys, too. Oh, she knew why. She did. She understood why. It was their job, the nature of it, the fear of it, the..
    The certainty of it.
    They weren't going to get married and raise children and grow old and pass away retired in some resort community. They were going to die. They were going to be killed by some desperate. lunge of talon or teeth, too fast for anyone to do anything to stop it. And then they were going to have to be staked and beheaded by the survivors who couldn't even use the funeral as a time to mourn because of it.
    They were going to die. And soon. And they knew it. Every single one of them knew it. They were going to die.
    And so they were kids. Her boys. She packed up so many toys. Video games and stereo sets and model airplanes and pinball games (everybody had to have his own machine) and hookah pipes and science fiction books and comic books, some of which were, inexplicably to Annabelle, in Japanese. (She could never understand that. None of the boys spoke Japanese, much less read it.) And then there were the stacks of porno books and magazines and she found it was apparently legal to actually entitle a magazine Fuck Me.
    So much stuff and plenty of money for it-the Man saw to that knowing they- would never live to accumulate their own fortunes. And they spent it.
    But what was appalling and, she admitted it, endearing to Annabelle was what they did with it all. All that healthy maleness and alcohol and fear pent up in even so large a place as the mansion made for an extremely vibrant household to say the least.
    The alcohol. So much alcohol. Team Crow got dead drunk the way normal people had a single cocktail. The monthly bill for liquor consumed on the premises was over a thousand dollars. And that didn't even count the bar tabs Annabelle was forever driving around to pay off. The huge garage area was filled with Corvettes and four-wheel drives and motorcycles everyone was too drunk to drive home. After eight DWIs in two weeks, Jack had installed a taxi-home policy for everyone not going out with Cat (who drunk, could talk any cop out of his gun).
    But it wasn't just the booze. They were none of them alcoholics. It was just all that overgrown energy. They terrorized the maid service, inevitably springing themselves on the poor women stark naked and dripping from the shower and offering to help. It was so hard to keep cooks they were finally forbidden to even enter the kitchen while the cook was on the property. If they wanted something they had to phone in and ask for it. The amount of food pleased and