what the afternoon would feel like without that shade.
“Define ‘them,’” Ryan called back.
“The coamers,” the unseen man said. “The albino grave robbers. The ones you’re looking for.”
“Grave robbers, as young Ricky suggested,” Doc stated. “That adds a new dimension to our present difficulty.”
“Dark night,” J.B. muttered. “It surely does.”
The companions had been traveling single file along a game trail a couple miles southwest of their dig site, with Ryan in the lead and J.B. protecting their rear. They had just begun to fan out on entering the clearing when Jak’s warning birdcall brought them up short. They had immediately crouched or knelt, covering the brush-screen on the far side with their blasters.
“Mebbe,” Ryan said. “How do you know so much about them?”
“And how do you know what we’re looking for?” Mildred asked.
“I’ve roamed these woods nigh onto thirty years. I seen many a thing come and go, some stranger than most. And I seen the ones the locals call ‘coamers.’ They come and go, too. Currently they seem to be coming.”
J.B. grunted in interest.
“Come out where we can get a better look at you,” Ryan commanded.
“Don’t go shootin’ me, now.”
“If we were going to, we would’ve by now,” J.B. said. “That brush won’t stop many bullets.”
The branches rustled.
What appeared from the vegetation was anything but threatening, at first glance: a man of smallish to middle size, middle-aged to old, walking tentatively on rather bowed legs left bare by ragged and dirty cargo shorts with bulging pockets. A coonskin cap covered the top of his head. Around his shoulders he wore a cape made of shaggy bark that gave the locally abundant shagbark oak its name. Beneath that was a linen shirt. His round face was fringed by a shock of black hair and a beard with brushstrokes of gray in it. His eyes suggested strong Asian ancestry, but his accent, unsurprisingly, was pure western Kentucky.
He had his hands, clothed in shabby fingerless gloves, raised over his head to signal benign intentions, which was good, because he was clearly far from helpless: the butt of a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century replica longblaster stuck up over his right shoulder, supported by a beadwork sling, and he wore both a Bowie knife with worn staghorn grips and a single-action, cap-and-ball revolver on either hip in cross-draw holsters, likewise beaded in colorful geometric patterns.
“Osage Nation work,” Krysty said, nodding at the beaded accessories. “Nice.”
“That’s right, ma’am,” he said. “I’m a local boy, but I been everywhere. Abe Tomoyama is my name. Abe to my friends, so you can call me that, long as you don’t chill me.”
Ryan raised a hand. “Stand down, everybody,” he said. “Keep eyes skinned to all sides, in case the pale shadows decide to check us out.”
“Don’t worry,” Abe stated, “yet. Them coamers don’t attack when the sun’s high in the sky. They only like to come out when it gets low. Like it’s fixin’ to right directly. Surely you noticed that?”
“Surely we didn’t,” Mildred said sourly.
“It does fit observable facts,” Doc said. “The few we have been able to observe.”
“Reckon we need to talk,” Abe said. “Let’s find us a place to palaver. Say, I’m a feeling mite peckish. What do you say we go to one of my campsites and chow down while we do it.”
“Won’t say no,” Ryan said, but he had a wary furrow to his brow as he said it.
He was wondering what was in it for the strange man they’d run into. And they all had learned a hundred times over, in the Deathlands, if you didn’t know what somebody had coming out of a given interaction, that usually meant it was coming straight out of your hide.
* * *
“FOLKS’RE SCARED, HEREABOUTS,” Abe said. “They don’t rightly know of what—shadows dimly seen at dusk, strange cries in the dark. Rumors of people disappearin’ out in the woods in the dark of the night. But I reckon I do know.”
“Suppose you tell us why you think we’re hunting these coamers of yours?” Ryan asked as he seated himself next to Krysty, where she hunkered down across from a small, nearly invisible dry brush fire from their peculiar host.
“I know hunters when I clap eyes on ’em, I reckon you’ll allow,” Abe said. “But you show no interest in the wildlife, other than to keep eyes skinned for ones as might be dangerous. You’re huntin’ man or mutie, or something close to one or the other.”
Abe’s camp was nestled in a bare-dirt hollow among sandstone boulders at the crest of a low rise, surrounded by brush and stunted trees. Krysty thought it a sweet spot, giving the option of surveilling the surrounding area from a height without spotlighting the fact you were there. It was already cool here, or cool for the Pennyrile, shaded at this spot from the low sun’s slanting rays. The smell of a brace of ruffed grouse roasting on sticks over the little fire was tantalizing.
“So what are these coamers, anyway?” Mildred asked. “Man or mutie?”
“Ghosts,” he said, and laughed at their expressions. “I don’t mean the spirits of chills. I mean they appear and disappear sudden-like, and seem to leave no traces at all, as if they had no more substance than smoke. But they got substance, right enough. They eat, they bleed, they die. And they chill, with their long white claws and those double-big jaws of theirs, more like a dog’s than a person’s.”
“Or a baboon’s,” Mildred suggested.
“That sounds consistent with the description, yes,” Doc agreed. Mildred seemed surprised; usually the two would argue over whether the sun was coming up or going down at high noon on a cloudless day. “I have heard the term ‘dog ape’ in connection with the beasts.”
The hermit shook his head. “Dunno nothin’ about those. But I seen ’em. Just glimpses, mind, over the years. But I seen the bones they’ve cracked in those jaws and the carcasses of beasts they chilled for meat.”
“They known to eat humans?” Ryan asked.
“Other than dead ones,” Mildred added.
Abe shrugged. “Mostly I hear tell of them digging up chills and eatin’ those. Prefer ’em fresh-buried. But they ain’t what you’d call picky.”
He sighed and dropped his gaze to the flames. His hand reached out to turn over first one, then the other plump game-bird carcass on their willow-wand spits. It looked to Krysty as if he did that by pure muscle memory, no conscious thought or intention involved.
“But like I say, there’s…stories,” Abe said. “Tales of folks out wanderin’ the woods at night by they lonesome, who never come back, and are never heard from anymore. The Pennyrile’s a big, wild place, with plenty of dense brush and caves and sinkholes. Lotta ways for a body to go missin’, if you catch my drift.”
