By the Light of the Moon

39

Once they reached the landing and started to climb the second flight, Dylan felt safer, but his relief immediately proved to be premature. A bullet cracked up through a tread three steps ahead of them, and slammed into the stairwell ceiling.

He realized that the underside of this second flight of stairs faced the front door. Essentially, beneath their feet lay the back wall of a shooting gallery.

Proceeding was dangerous, retreating made no sense whatsoever, and halting in midflight meant certain death later if not sooner. So they hauled more aggressively on Shepherd's belt, Jilly with both hands, Dylan with one, dragged-heaved-bounced him up the second set of stairs, and this time 'Where's all the ice?' squeaked from him in a semifalsetto.

Dylan expected to be shot through the soles of his feet, in an arm, through the bottom of his chin, or all of the above. When they arrived in the upper hall without any of them yet resembling a morgue photo in a forensic-pathology textbook, he let go of his brother and leaned with one hand on the newel post to catch his breath.

Evidently, Vonetta Beesley, their housekeeper, had put her hand on the newel cap earlier in the day, for when Dylan made contact with her psychic trace, images of the woman flared through his mind. He felt compelled to seek her out at once.

If this had occurred the previous evening, if he hadn't learned to control his response to such stimuli, he might have plunged down the stairs, into the maelstrom below, as he had raced recklessly to Marjorie's house on Eucalyptus Avenue. Instead, he snatched his hand off the post and dialed down his sensitivity to the spoor.

Already Jilly had pulled Shepherd farther into the hall, away from the head of the stairs. Raising her voice to compete with the explosive tumult below, she pleaded with him to fold them out of here.

Joining them, Dylan saw that his brother remained icebound. The issue of ice continued to bounce around inside Shep's head to the exclusion of virtually everything else.

No formula existed to determine how long Shepherd would take to extract himself from the tar pit of this latest obsession, but wise money would have to take short odds on a long period of distraction. He was more likely to awaken to the world around him in an hour than in two minutes.

Focusing tightly on one narrow question or area of interest was, after all, another way to insulate himself when the inflow of sensory stimuli became overwhelming. In the midst of gunfire, he couldn't choose a safe corner and turn his back to the chaos behind him, but he could flee to a symbolic corner in a dark room deep in the castle of his mind, a corner that contained nothing to consider except ice, ice, ice.

'Where's all the ice?'

'When they're done downstairs,' Jilly asked, 'what's next?'

'They blast the second floor. Maybe come up on the porch roofs to do it.'

'Maybe they come inside,' she said.

'Ice, ice, ice.'

'We've got to get him off this ice,' Jilly worried.

'That'll only happen with time and quiet.'

'We're screwed.'

'We're not screwed.'

'Screwed.'

'Not screwed.'

'You got a plan?' she demanded.

Dylan's only plan, which Jilly in fact suggested, had been to get above the gunfire. Now he realized that the gunfire would come to them wherever they went, not to mention the gunmen.

The ferocious clatter-bang downstairs, the fear of a stray bullet finding its way up the stairwell or even through the ceiling of the lower hall and the floor of the upper hall: All this made concentrating on tactics and strategy no easier than lassoing snakes. Once again, circumstances thrust upon Dylan a deeper understanding of how his brother must feel when overwhelmed by life, which in Shep's case was nearly all the time.

Okay, forget about the money he kept in a lockbox. The Beatles had been right: Money can't buy you love. Or stop a bullet.

Forget about the 9-mm pistol that he'd bought after his mother's murder. Against these assailants' artillery, the handgun might as well have been a stick.

'Ice, ice, ice.'

Jilly coaxed Shepherd to skate out of the ice and rejoin them, so he could fold them to someplace safe, but with his eyes closed and thought processes frozen, he remained resistant to sweet talk.

Time and quiet. Although they couldn't buy much time, every minute gained might be the minute during which Shep would come back to them. Deep quiet was beyond attainment during this jihad, but any reduction in the bang and clangor would help the kid find a way out of that corner of ice.

Dylan crossed the hallway and threw open the door to the guest bedroom. 'In here.'

Jilly seemed to be able to tug Shepherd along in a reasonably fast shuffle.

The impact of the fierce barrage sent shudders upward through the walls of the house. The second-floor windowpanes rattled in their frames.

Moving ahead of Jilly and Shep, Dylan hurried into the bedroom, to a walk-in closet. He switched on the light.

A cord dangled from a pull-down trapdoor in the closet ceiling. He yanked on the cord, lowering the trap.

Downstairs, the deafening volume of gunfire, which had sounded like the fiercest moment during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, as Dylan had once seen it portrayed on the History Channel, abruptly grew louder.

He wondered how many major splintering hits the wall studs could sustain before structural damage became critical and one or another corner of the house sagged.

'Ice, ice, ice.'

Arriving at the closet door with Shep, referring to the ungodly racket on the lower floor, Jilly said, 'We got a double scoop of Apocalypse now.'

'With sprinkles.' A ladder in three folded segments was mounted to the back of the trapdoor. Dylan lowered it.

'Some of Proctor's experimental subjects must've developed weird talents a lot scarier than ours.'

'What do you mean?'

'These guys don't know what we can do, but they're so wet-pants scared of what it might be, they want us seriously dead, faster than fast.'

Dylan hadn't thought about that. He didn't like thinking about it. Before them, Proctor's nanobots had evidently produced monsters. Everyone expected him and Jilly and Shep to be monsters, too.

'What?' Jilly asked disbelievingly. 'You want us to go up that freakin' ladder?'

'Yeah.'

'That's death.'

'It's the attic.'

'The attic is death, a dead end.'

'Everywhere we can go is a dead end. This is the only way we can buy some time for Shep.'

'They'll look in the attic.'

'Not right away.'

'I hate this,' she declared.

'You don't see me dancing.'

'Ice, ice, ice.'

Dylan said to Jilly, 'You go first.'

'Why me?'

'You can coax Shep from the top while I push from below.'

The gunfire ceased, but the memory of it still rang in Dylan's ears.

'They're coming.'

Jilly said, 'Crap.'

'Go.'

'Crap.'

'Up.'

'Crap.'

'Now, Jilly.'