Free THE PAIN OF OTHERS by Blake Crouch Page B

ready to drive the burros down to the stables, he notices something beyond the cribs at the south end of town. He puts George forward, trots through deep powder between the false-fronted buildings, and when he sees what caught his eye, whispers, “You old fool.”
    Just a snowman scowling at him, spindly arms made of spruce branches. Pinecones for teeth and eyes. Garland for a crown.
    He tugs the reins, turning George back toward town, and the jolt of seeing her provokes, “Lord God Amighty .”
    He drops his head, tries to allay the thumping of his heart in the thin air. When he looks up again, the young girl is still there, perhaps six or seven, apparition-pale and just ten feet away, with locomotive-black curls and coal eyes to match—so dark and with such scant delineation between iris and pupil, they more resemble wet stones.
    “You put a fright in me,” he says. “What are you doin out here all alone?”
    She backpedals.
    “Don’t be scart . I ain’t the bogeyman.” Brady alights, wades toward her through the snow. With the young girl in webs sunk only a foot in powder, and the muleskinner to his waist, he thinks it odd to stand eye to eye with a child.
    “You all right?” he asks. “I didn’t think there was nobody here.”
    The snowflakes stand out like white confetti in the child’s hair.
    “They’re all gone,” she says, no emotion, no tears, just an unaffected statement of fact.
    “Even your Ma and Pa?”
    She nods.
    “Where’d they all go to? Can you show me?”
    She takes another step back, reaches into her gray woolen cloak. The single-action Army is a heavy sidearm, and it sags comically in the child’s hand so she holds it like a rifle, Brady too surprised to do a thing but watch as she struggles with the hammer.
    “Okay, I’ll show you,” she says, the hammer locked back, sighting him up, her small finger already in the trigger guard.
    “Now hold on, wait just a—”
    “Stay still.”
    “That ain’t no toy to point in someone’s direction. It’s for—”
    “ Killin . I know. You’ll feel better directly.”
    As Brady scrambles for a way to rib up this young girl to hand him the gun, he hears the report ricocheting through the canyon, finds himself lying on his back, surrounded by a wall of snow.
    In the oval of gray winter sky, the child’s face appears, looking down at him.
    What in God’s—
    “It made a hole in your neck.”
    He attempts to tell her to stable George and the burros, see that they’re fed and watered. After all the work they put in today, they deserve at least that. Only gurgles emerge, and when he tries to breathe, his throat whistles.
    She points the Army at his face again, one eye closed, the barrel slightly quivering, a parody of aiming.
    He stares up into the deluge of snowflakes, the sky already immersed in bluish dusk that seems to deepen before his eyes, and he wonders, Is the day really fading that fast, or am I?

SNOWBOUND
    Published June 2010 by Minotaur Books
     
    DESCRIPTION: For Will Innis and his daughter, Devlin, the loss was catastrophic. Every day for the past five years, they wonder where she is, if she is—Will’s wife, Devlin’s mother—because Rachael Innis vanished one night during an electrical storm on a lonely desert highway, and suspected of her death, Will took his daughter and fled.
    Now, Will and Devlin live under different names in another town, having carved out a new life for themselves as they struggle to maintain some semblance of a family.
    When one night, a beautiful, hard-edged FBI agent appears on their doorstep, they fear the worst, but she hasn’t come to arrest Will. “I know you’re innocent,” she tells him, “because Rachael wasn’t the first…or the last.” Desperate for answers, Will and Devlin embark on a terrifying journey that spans four thousand miles from the desert southwest to the wilds of Alaska , heading unaware into the heart of a nightmare, because the truth is infinitely worse than