Jerry leaned in and turned off the engine of the truck. Everything here was wrong. There was desolation on the wind. He walked across the yard. The door to the Benson house was wide open, held that way by a triangle of wood at its base. He stood at the base of the steps leading up to the porch and called out Bruce Benson’s name.

“Hello?” he said. “Anybody home?”

There was no reply. The door led directly into the Bensons’ kitchen. There was food on the table, but even from outside Jerry could tell it was rotting.

I should just call the cops. I should call them now, then wait for them to come.

But Jerry knew that he couldn’t do that. Instead, he went back to his truck, tipped open the glove compartment, and took the cloth-wrapped Ruger from under the accumulation of maps, restaurant menus, and unpaid parking fines. The gun wouldn’t change anything, not now, but he felt better for having it in his hand.

The kitchen smelled bad. The dinner of chicken and biscuits looked as if it had been there for a couple of days. Jerry recalled the dead fowl in the run, and the black substance that had oozed from the mouth of the bird he’d touched. Christ, if the chickens had somehow become contaminated, and that contamination had spread to the family…His thoughts went to the eggs that he had been collecting and delivering to town for the past six months, and to the chicken that Benson had given to him as a Thanksgiving present less than a week before. Jerry almost threw up there and then, but he regained his composure. In all his life, he’d never heard of anyone dying from a poultry disease, except maybe that flu they had over in Asia, and what killed the Bensons’ chickens didn’t look like any flu Jerry had ever seen.