The dog's growling plucked her from her thoughts, but the worried Kate discerned nothing in the darkness. For just a moment, her guardian trembled, rose half to his feet, and tensed. After another thirty seconds of looking about, he slumped back down in her lap and resumed his innocent panting. He'd probably sensed a woodchuck—that was something Eli would say when the animal raised its hackles for no apparent reason—or at least she hoped.

For the nth time, she wondered about the animal's devotion to her. The hound showed her much affection and exercised tremendous vigilance at her home and for her person, had done so since the beginning and had recognized the danger of an intruder on her land without hesitation. Welcome guests came and went from her place with little more than an amatory sniff. Only one man had been bitten.

Still, the hound's sudden burst of watchfulness reminded her of where she was.

The notion of how ridiculous her actions were had assaulted her several times on the long walk to her current perch in the darkness. She'd only appeared in one slasher flick, as a minor character in a very minor bikini, but even she knew walking out into the dark alone to face some unknown terror broke Rule No. 1 in such situations.

The morbid thought of who in her life might survive a slasher movie, and who might get offed, and in what order, came to her from nowhere. To her delight, they all fared very well. Eli was near invincible. Five or six combat deployments and five gunshots had proven up his steel. The Sanchez family inhabited a ranch house vaguely reminiscent of the Alamo and stocked with more guns and ammunition than held by the average Kentucky militia. Sweet Leona Munson was just too gentle and polite for even the most soulless serial killer to harm. Kate also happened to know Leona kept a pistol under the front seat of her car. Country life was different.

She shared these thoughts with the dog as they came to her, along with slices of dried fruit from the bag in her pocket. As she did, it occurred to her that the only people in her life who wouldn't fare well were Thorne and Ellen Saenz. The beta male and the lead female's slutty friend were always the first go, typically while fornicating. That cast a dreary shadow on Ellen's chances for survival. Next to go usually were any characters played by ethnic minorities. Even if the moderately Hispanic Thorne survived that category, the next in the body-count was almost always the most annoying character, or two, often in some comic fashion. The notion of Thorne facing his imminent doom by machete, billhook, or wood-chipper caught the macabre side of her funny bone and caused her to laugh aloud.

The character most likely to survive was always the female lead, followed sometimes by her beau. There was a brief moment of panic when it occurred to her that she might not be the plucky female heroine. But who was she kidding? We are, each of us, always the leads in our own lives. The dog seemed to understand that fact intuitively while he chewed on what had felt to Kate like a dried slice of papaya when she'd fed it to him.

Looking directly into the dark was still too much for her, but since they'd settled in their current spot, her breathing had steadied and the trembling she now felt was more from the chill than any anxiety. A repositioning was called for, and when she and the dog finished the last of the dried fruit, she removed her large coat, eased back into her soft tuft of grass, and draped the garment over her like a blanket.

The hound was not to be excluded, and, over the next thirty minutes, he nuzzled, wiggled, and squirmed his way under her coat, until his head protruded from under it just below her chin. A stern barrage of sloppy licks to her neck and chin followed. It wouldn't have been so terrible had he not smelt so bad. In fact, the hound was very nearly as warm and comforting as Eli.

"Who bathes himself regularly," she grumbled. Their life of chastity and platonic friendship had not been without its virtues.

Time crept by.

At several points, she'd forced herself to open her eyes and stare, more-or-less unflinchingly, into the dark. The dark had not stared back, and her cringing had come less and less to dominate her. Kate was still frightened and intimidated, but as midnight approached, she'd seen not a sign of the Chupacabra and had come to think the worst of it was over. Despite that, she continued to dread the walk back. The small hillock upon which they waited was not her warm and happy home, but it provided some small comfort.

There were still a few minutes until midnight when she'd declared she'd had enough and stood to depart. To her surprise, most of her trembling had faded and, after looking about as best she could to orient herself, she slowly began working her way back toward home. The pace she set was slow, but it was faster and surer than when she'd made her way there.

Her pace was so sure, in fact, that it took her a while to realize that she could no longer hear the stream that she'd followed to her destination. It took her another frightened moment to realize that she'd nearly walked into a wall of trees and bushes. It took yet another moment for her to think, adjust herself, and then set off in what she was certain was the direction back to her hillock to try again.

It was not the right direction. It was clear after just a few minutes walking that her path was taking her downhill rather than up, and the gurgling of the springhead was not to be heard.

She stopped and breathed. The hound was still panting at her heel, but she realized she had no idea which direction was which. After fighting down a surge of panic, she reminded herself that she was not in the Canadian wilderness, and she was at no point farther than a half mile from home. She just needed to keep her wits about her and figure out which direction was north ... then go the opposite direction. Despite her best efforts, though, much of the anxiety she'd spent the past hours shedding returned in a rush.

The idea of staying put until daylight had not crossed her mind. That was many hours away, and despite her fear, she had enough presence of mind to be outraged at the idea of waiting six or seven hours to make a twenty-minute walk.

She felt about in the gloom and could discern uphill from down, and after many more minutes walking, she reached what she thought was a hilltop. From there, a scan of her surroundings told her little. The area was hilly, but she could make out what she thought was the horizon in two directions. There were several lights visible in the distance—she couldn't guess what they were—and the sky had a faint glow in one direction. She took the glow to be the combined luminescence of Lompoc and Vandenberg and surmised that direction must be northwest.

Kate reoriented herself and began walking slowly in the general direction of what she hoped was home. Ten minutes steady movement brought her to a barbed wire fence that was not hers. Clearly, she'd strayed off her property, which meant she was now walking through a brush-strewn field having belonged to the late Ted Phelps, who'd owned all the land adjacent to hers. She reoriented herself as best as she was able based on this new information and set out in a new direction.

Woman and hound soon were struggling through dense underbrush and woods that got thicker and thicker with her every step. Even the dog seemed concerned, given his mincing steps and occasional unhappy whimper. This was not the way home, but every direction she moved, the terrain got rougher and harder to navigate. Her mind told her she was in no real danger—she was armed, had her trusty protector, and wasn't really that far from home—but she felt panic building in her, and behind an enormous dam in her mind, one that seemed set to burst, was every ghost, demon, fiend, and bogie that had ever frightened her.

Where was she? And where was home? She wanted nothing more than to laugh the situation off and to chide herself over her own folly, but she couldn't. If someone would have told her then that she'd fallen through a crack between worlds, she would have believed. She'd never felt so lost and frightened, and a terror gripped her beside which even the dread of earlier that evening now paled.

That's when it came.

The howling of the dog and a sudden crashing, snapping, and whipping of leaves, limbs, and branches preceded it by just a moment, and then something—or perhaps it was someone—hurled past her like a hurricane, so close it nearly knocked her to the ground. As it was, she stumbled into some bushes, nearly lost the shotgun, and heard herself scream in terror.

It took a moment to right herself, and when she did, she caught the faintest outline of something gigantic crashing through the woods in the direction from whence she'd just come. The hound was snarling and baying in its fullest outrage and from the sound of it was fast on the tail of the gigantic adversary whose name she didn't dare say aloud.

It was never perfectly clear what possessed her, what induced her to do something so reckless, but she turned and raced in that direction, with her shotgun before her like a shield and her head lowered to avoid limbs and branches. The terrain was uneven, and she stumbled several times, but managed to keep her feet beneath her as she hurdled breakneck down the slope in front of her. The noise of the hound kept her on course, and by some miracle she followed his enraged baying at full tilt without running face-first into a tree.

At first, the sound of the dog's bawling receded, but as she raced, her friend's incessant yammer seemed to draw closer and closer. At the point where her wind nearly abandoned her, she burst through some bushes into what even in the faint light she could tell was an open field. The dog was baying unremittingly somewhere close ahead—she couldn't tell how far—and she paused to catch her breath and to load a round into the shotgun.

She hesitated.

The loathsome terror of accidentally shooting her friend got the better of her, and she dropped the shell back into her coat pocket. Whatever was out there was running from her, not toward her. In any event, she wasn't going to be the first person to kill a Bigfoot ... or to be killed by one.

Slowly, gently, gingerly, she began inching toward where the dog still howled, one hand on the shotgun, the other hand held cautiously out before her. Less than a minute later, after she'd crept to a point where the hound's incessant racket seemed just out of sight, his howl ended mid-note, and he bounced up from the gloom to present his muzzle for stroking. It was clear even in the starlight his tail was wagging affectionately, and he was again very much his normal self.

With one knee on the ground, she wrapped an arm around her hero, but froze when a Leviathan form loomed mere feet away.