At night, by candlelight, I lost myself in books, reading voraciously, as when I was a boy of ten and had not yet encountered all the requirement of adult life which demand time and attention.I read mostly what fell to hand. After Pet Semetary and And Quiet Flows The Don, I was working on Crime and Punishment, and, when my few days of reading bliss were brought to an end, had just gotten to the scene where Raskolnikov toys with Zametov in the Crystal Palace, dementedly hinting at his guilt in killing the old woman and her sister.

One morning Aaron and I talked it over and decided to go hunting, as we were all getting tired of our diet of canned food and oysters. In the almost total absence of people, the wild things were already making a comeback, and we had seen rabbits hopping through the trees and around the house, so we felt sure we’d be able to bag a couple of them without too much trouble – if the 12-gauge that I had appropriated from the unfriendly Mohler residents didn’t didn’t blow them to bits, that is. We walked into the woods behind the house, our feet slipping on the dew-covered grass, and I lost myself in a few moments of reverie with nature. In doing so, wandered ahead of Aaron without realizing how far. It happened quickly, too quickly – just as I was crouching and bringing the gun to my shoulder to fire on a scampering hare, I heard a muffled shout cut short by a sickening wet sound, and I wheeled around to see Aaron crumpling to the ground and locked eyes with a wild-haired man in filthy clothes with a gleaming, long-bladed knife in his hand. I pulled the trigger, but my aim had drifted as I fell to one side, my balance wobbled by the quick spin. The Remington boomed through the pines, breaking the stillness of the hushed morning and knocking me back onto one hip, and I saw the shot strike his shoulder, whirling him around in a spume of blood like the foam blown from a breaking wave, and his arm whipped violently and the knife went arching through the air and landed a good thirty feet away.

Ears ringing, I scrambled to my feet and cycled the shotgun’s action. Jack the Ripper was trying to get up on his good arm, but he was dazed from the blast of buckshot and not moving very fast. I walked toward him, wary at first, and then more quickly as I realized that I had the advantage of him, and the thirty yards between us closed to only a few. Shotgun to my shoulder, I looked down at him grunting and struggling and tried to decide what to do. Some of the pellets had caught his neck and face, and blood was running into his grimy, disheveled beard. He looked up at me with eyes that were crazed but also frightened – he wouldn’t die immediately, but he was laced with pellets and would lose blood fast. I felt a pang of sympathy for him mingled with the hot hatred at what he had done to Aaron. Maybe the best revenge was to let him die slowly, I thought, but before I could think about it any more my finger pounced on the trigger, and this time the shot hit him square in the chest, blasting him down flat against the ground and opening a grapefruit-sized hole which exposed his lungs. Then I looked at Aaron just in time to see his fingers quaver as the last of the life drained out of him, and squatted down close to him, hoping to catch some last word. There was none.

Daniel and Sarah came running to the edge of the graveled parking area when they heard the shot, and as I approached I called out, “Aaron’s dead. Don’t go out there, there might still be someone in the woods.” I explained what had happened, somehow managing to find words, and together we fetched Aaron’s body, wrapping it in a sleeping bag and carrying it the couple of hundred yards back downhill towards the house.

I wanted to bury them, because it seemed like it was my fault, and I didn’t want Daniel and Sarah to see the mangled bodies. But Jim and Sarah agreed that Aaron had been their friend too, so we took turns with the shovel. Digging out the hard-packed, sandy ground was rough work, and it took us most of the day to dig two graves. When we were done burying them, Daniel and Sarah collected rocks and assembled them in piles for headstones. Probably we all said our own internal prayers, but none of us could bring ourselves to speak.