“Maberry will scare the hell out of you.” —Tess Gerritsen The final novel in the award-winning Pine Deep saga . . .   In the Pennsylvania town of Pine Deep, a handful of brave souls prepare for an unspeakable evil that has been gathering strength for thirty years. On Halloween night, the legend that has haunted their community will return with a vengeance. The dead will rise, the damned will take human form, and a red wave of terror will consume every man, woman, and child. For the few left standing, time is running out. Daylight is fading, and the ultimate battle between good and evil is about to begin . . .   “Horror on a grand scale, reminiscent of Stephen King.” — Publishers Weekly   “Jonathan Maberry’s horror is rich and visceral. It’s close to the heart . . . and close to the jugular.” —Kevin J. Anderson   “Maberry’s works will be read for many, many years to come.” —Ray Bradbury   “Unique and masterful.” —Richard Matheson JONATHAN MABERRY is a  New York Times  bestselling and five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning horror and thriller author, editor, comic book writer, magazine feature writer, playwright, content creator and writing teacher/lecturer. He was named one of the Today’s Top Ten Horror Writers by Horror Novel Reviews . His award-winning young adult novel Rot & Ruin is an American Library Association Top Pick. His novels Extinction Machine  and V-Wars are in development for TV, and Rot & Ruin is being developed for film. His books have been published in more than two-dozen countries. He lives in southern California. Readers are invited to visit him on Facebook and at www.jonathanmaberry.com. Bad Moon Rising By Jonathan Maberry KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP. Copyright © 2008 Jonathan Maberry All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4967-0541-9 Contents Acknowledgments, Author's Note, Prologue, Part One America's Haunted Holidayland, Part Two Born Under a Bad Sign, Part Three The Red Wave, Epilogue, Afterword, CHAPTER 1 Malcolm Crow wanted to kill someone. He wanted to take a gun, a knife, his hands ... and murder someone. He wanted it to hurt, and he wanted it to last. He wanted to run up and down the hospital hallways and find someone who needed killing, some black-hearted bastard whose death would mark the line between the way things were and the way they used to be. Or should be. Waiting was excruciating. It had been hours since he'd ridden with his fiancée Val in the ambulance to Pinelands Hospital and then watched the ER team take her away. He'd tried to bully his way in so that he could be with her while they checked to see how badly she'd been hurt — Val and the tiny baby just starting to grow inside of her. Their baby. Crow had tried to stay by her side, but the doctors had been insistent, telling him that he needed to leave, needed to let them work. Yeah, well ... what he really wanted was a villain he could find and hurt. He needed to have a big summer blockbuster ending to this madness, with explosions, CGI effects, a big body count, and the sun shining on the good guys as the bad guys lay scattered around them. Defeated, once and for all. That's what he needed, and he needed it bad. A snowball had a better chance of making it through August in Hell. The voice in his head was giving him a badass sneer and telling him he'd come too late to this dogfight. It was all over and if the good guys won, it had nothing to do with him. Not in this latest round. He stood looking at his reflection in the darkened window, seeing a small man, barely five-seven, slim, with a scuffle of black hair. He knew he was tougher than he looked, but toughness hadn't been enough to get him to Val's side in time to help her. To his eyes he just looked as weak as he felt. Karl Ruger was already dead — okay, to be fair Crow had killed him two weeks ago, right in this very hospital, but that was yesterday's news. Kenneth Boyd was dead, too, but Crow had no hand in that, though he wished he could fly counterclockwise around the world like Superman and roll time back to last night so he could change the way things happened. It would have been so much better if he had been the one to face Boyd down there at the Guthrie farm. Him ... rather than Val. It was crazy. Ruger was supposed to be the stone killer, not Boyd — his crooked but relatively harmless chum. But after Ruger died Boyd suddenly steps up and takes a shot at being Sick Psycho of the Year by killing two local cops at Val's farm, breaking into the hospital to steal Ruger's corpse from the morgue — and Crow didn't even want to think about what that was all about — and then, to really seal the deal, the rat-bastard tried to kill everyone at Val's farm. It had been a true bloodbath. Val's brother, Mark, was the first victim. He'd stormed off after a spat with his wife, Connie, and had apparently been sulking in the barn where he'd run into Boyd. For no sane reason that Crow could imagine, Boyd murdere