Chapter 44

Although they’d talked by phone, Deacon had refused to come by the house after work until Max’s stitches were removed. “You need to go to bed early, until you’re fully healed.”

Max had pooh-poohed that idea but Deacon had been inflexible. “No more stitches, and hopefully less nightmares.”

Max had had three of them in the last five days. Short ones, thankfully, but intense. They all involved him trying to escape a faceless attacker wielding a large machete. “Why a machete, I have no clue,” he’d said to Deacon after telling him about the second one. In each of them, he’d been running through a house he’d never seen before. There were dozens of rooms and each time he opened a door to leave one of them, his attacker had been facing him, holding the weapon in one hand, and a dead rat in the other. Each dream ended with the machete descending while Max cowered in a chair, trying to cover his head with his arms. Just as a shot rang out in the dream, he’d awakened.