A Gathering of Crows Read Free

repeatedly smashed her head into a gnarled, wide oak tree until brains and bark littered the ground. Deep inside its den, a rattlesnake swallowed its own tail, jaws opening wider to accommodate its length and girth. Driven by a nameless, unfathomable fear, a herd of deer flung themselves from a cliff and burst open on the jagged rocks below. A pack of coyotes that had been tracking the herd followed along a moment later, dashing themselves upon the deer’s broken bodies. Bones splintered. Blood splattered.
    Overhead, a thick bank of clouds drifted over the moon, slowly covering it until it was gone from sight.
    Down in Brinkley Springs, the darkness grew deeper and the dogs began to howl.
    When the power went out, Axel Perry was sitting in the wicker rocking chair on his sagging front porch, sipping a bottle of hard cider, listening to the spring peepers and thinking about his dead wife. For a few seconds, he didn’t notice the electrical outage. After all, he had no radio or television playing in the background. The only time he watched television was when the West Virginia Mountaineers were playing, and he had no patience for the radio these days—the country stations all sounded like rock stations, and everything else was just the white noise of talk radio. Axel hated talk radio. Everybody was a conservative or a liberal these days, with no room for folks in the middle of the road. All of the good stuff had moved over to satellite radio. He’d thought about buying one, but money was tight and satellite coverage here in the valley was spotty at best. Most of the time, the signals were weak or constantly interrupted. The same thing happened with cell phones and wireless Internet service. Axel had dial-up Internet service that his son and daughter-in-law had bought him to go along with the computer they’d given him for his birthday. They’d come to visit for a week—driving all the way from Vermont to Brinkley
    Springs—and had taken him to Wal-Mart and picked it out from the computers on display. Then they’d brought it home and made a big deal out of showing him how to work it. They said he’d be able to stay in touch more often, and that they could send him pictures of his grandkids instantly—he wouldn’t have to wait on the mail. He’d tried it a few times, but his curiosity had soon waned. Looking at pictures of his grandchildren on a computer screen just wasn’t the same as looking at them while paging through a photo album—and neither option compared to actually holding the kids in his arms or hearing them laugh and play in his backyard. Plus, staring at pictures of the grandkids just made his loneliness and sadness that much more complete.
    TWO
    At least once a day, Axel wished that he would die. If he’d had the nerve, he’d have killed himself. But he didn’t have the nerve. What if he messed up? What if he made a mistake? What if he lay there in his home, paralyzed or wounded and unable to call for help? Who would find him? The answer was nobody, because no one ever checked in on him. He was an old man living alone in an old house, with only his old, waning memories to keep him company.
    He missed his wife, Diane—gone ten years now, not from cancer or a heart attack or diabetes or any of the other plagues that came with old age, but from a drunk driver. They’d taken a bus trip together to Washington, D.C., to see the cherry blossoms for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. On the way back home, a drunken driver had drifted into their lane and sideswiped the bus. The bus driver then swerved off the road and hit a tree. A few folks were injured, but most escaped without a scratch.
    Except for Diane. She was thrown forward and banged her head against the seat in front of her— hard enough to cause her skull to separate from her spinal column. The doctor had called it internal decapitation. Axel had called it abandonment, and although he missed Diane every day and had been distraught over the