Mr. Murder

Six

1

He stands in his parents’ kitchen, watching the falling snow through the window above the sink, shaking with hunger, and wolfing down leftover meatloaf.

This is one of those decisive moments that separate real heroes from pretenders. When all is darkest, when tragedy piles on tragedy, when hope seems to be a game only for idiots and fools, does Harrison Ford or Kevin Costner or Tom Cruise or Wesley Snipes or Kurt Russell quit? No. Never. Unthinkable. They are heroes. They persevere. Rise to the occasion. They not only deal with adversity but thrive on it. From sharing the worst moments of those great men’s lives, he knows how to cope with emotional devastation, mental depression, physical abuse in enormous quantities, and even the threat of alien domination of the earth.

Move, move, confront, challenge, grapple, and prevail.

He must not dwell on the tragedy of his parents’ deaths. The creatures he destroyed were surely not his mother and father, anyway, but mimics like the one that has stolen his own life. He might never learn when his real parents were murdered and replaced, and in any event he must delay grieving for them.

Thinking too much about his parents—or about anything—is not merely a waste of precious time but anti-heroic. Heroes don’t think. Heroes act.

Move, move, confront, challenge, grapple, and prevail.

Finished eating, he goes to the garage by way of a laundry room off the kitchen. Switching on fluorescent lights as he crosses the threshold, he discovers two vehicles are available for his use—an old blue Dodge and an apparently new Jeep Wagoneer. He will use the Jeep because of its four-wheel drive.

The keys to the vehicle hang on a pegboard in the laundry room. In a cabinet, he also finds a large box of detergent. He reads the list of chemicals on the box, satisfied with what he discovers.

He returns to the kitchen.

The end of one row of lower cabinets is finished with a wine rack. After locating a corkscrew in a drawer, he opens four bottles and empties the wine into the sink.

In another kitchen drawer he finds a plastic funnel among other odds and ends of cooking implements. A third drawer is filled with clean white dish towels, and a fourth is the source for a pair of scissors and a book of matches.

He carries the bottles and the other items into the laundry room and puts them on the tiled counter beside the deep sink.

In the garage again, he takes a red five-gallon gasoline can from a shelf to the left of the workbench. When he unscrews the cap, high-octane fumes waft out of the container. Spring through autumn, Dad probably keeps gasoline in the can to use in the lawn mower, but it is empty now.

Rummaging through the drawers and cabinets around the workbench, he finds a coil of flexible plastic tubing in a box of repair parts for the drinking-water filtration system in the kitchen. With this he siphons gasoline out of the Dodge into the five-gallon can.

At the sink in the laundry room, he uses the funnel to pour an inch of detergent into the bottom of each empty wine bottle. He adds gasoline. He cuts the dishcloths into useable strips.

Although he has two revolvers and twenty rounds of ammunition, he wants to add gasoline bombs to his arsenal. His experiences of the past twenty-four hours, since first confronting the false father, have taught him not to underestimate his adversary.

He still hopes to save Paige, Charlotte, and little Emily. He continues to desire reunion and the renewal of their life together.

However, he must face reality and prepare for the possibility that his wife and children are no longer who they once were. They may simply have been mentally enslaved. On the other hand, they might also have been infected by parasites not of this world, their brains now hollow and filled with writhing monstrosities. Or they might not be themselves at all, merely replicants of the real Paige, Charlotte, and Emily, just as the false father is a replicant of him, arising out of a seed pod from some distant star.

The varieties of alien infestation are limitless and strange, but one weapon has saved the world more often than any other: fire. Kurt Russell, when he was a member of an Antarctic scientific-research outpost, had been confronted by an extraterrestrial shape-changer of infinite forms and great cunning, perhaps the most frightening and powerful alien ever to attempt colonization of the earth, and fire had been by far the most effective weapon against that formidable enemy.

He wonders if four incendiary devices are enough. He probably won’t have time to use more of them, anyway.

If something bursts out of the false father, Paige, or the girls, and if it’s as hostile as the things that had burst out of people in Kurt Russell’s research station, he would no doubt be overwhelmed before he could use more than four gasoline bombs, considering that he must take the time to light each one separately. He wishes he had a flame-thrower.

2

Standing by one of the front windows, watching heavy snow filter through the trees and onto the lane that led out to the county route, Marty plucked handfuls of 9mm ammunition out of the boxes of ammo they’d brought from Mission Viejo. He distributed cartridges in the numerous zippered pockets of his red-and-black ski jacket and in the pockets of his jeans as well.

Paige loaded the magazine of the Mossberg. She’d had less time than Marty to practice with the pistol on the firing range, and she felt more comfortable with the 12-gauge.

They had eighty shells for the shotgun and approximately two hundred 9mm rounds for the Beretta.

Marty felt defenseless.

No amount of weaponry would have made him feel better.

After hanging up on The Other, he had considered getting out of the cabin, going on the run. But if they had been followed this far so easily, they would be followed anywhere they went. It was better to make a stand in a defendable location than to be accosted on a lonely highway or be taken by surprise in a place more vulnerable than the cabin.

He almost called the local police to send them to his parents’ house. But The Other would surely be gone before they got there, and the evidence they collected—fingerprints and God knew what else—would only make it appear that he had murdered his own mother and father. The media had already painted him as an unstable character. The scene at the house in Mammoth Lakes would play into the fantasy they were selling. If he were arrested today or tomorrow or next week—or even just detained for a few hours without being booked—Paige and the girls would be left on their own, a situation that he found intolerable.

They had no choice but to dig in and fight. Which wasn’t a choice so much as a death sentence.

Side by side on the sofa, Charlotte and Emily were still wearing their jackets and gloves. They held hands, taking strength from each other. Although they were scared, they weren’t crying or demanding reassurance as many kids might have been doing in the same situation. They had always been real troupers, each in her own way.

Marty was not sure how to counsel his daughters. Usually, like Paige, he was not at a loss for the guidance they needed to get them through the problems of life. Paige joked that they were the Fabulous Stillwater Parenting Machine, a phrase that contained as much self-mockery as genuine pride. But he was at a loss for words this time because he tried never to lie to them, did not intend to start lying now, yet dared not share with them his own bleak assessment of their chances.

“Kids, come here, do something for me,” he said.

Eager for distraction, they scrambled off the sofa and joined him at the window.

“Stand here,” he said, “watch the paved road out there. If a car turns into the driveway or even goes by too slow, does anything suspicious, you holler. Got that?”

They nodded solemnly.

To Paige, Marty said, “Let’s check all the other windows, make sure they’re locked, and close the drapes over them.”

If The Other managed to creep up on the cabin without alerting them, Marty didn’t want the bastard to be able to watch them—or shoot at them—through a window.

Every window he checked was locked.

In the kitchen, as he covered a window that looked out onto the deep woods behind the cabin, he remembered that his mother had made the drapes on her sewing machine in the spare bedroom of the house in Mammoth Lakes. He had a mental image of her, sitting at the Singer, her foot on the treadle, intently watching the needle as it chattered up and down.

His chest clogged with pain. He took a deep breath, let it shudder out of him, then again, trying not only to expel the pain but also the memory that engendered it.

There would be time for grief later, if they survived.

Right now he had to think only about Paige and the kids. His mother was dead. They were alive. The cold truth: mourning was a luxury.

He caught up with Paige in the second of the two small bedrooms just as she finished adjusting the draperies. She had switched on a nightstand lamp, so she wouldn’t be in darkness when she closed off the windows, and now she moved to extinguish it.

“Leave it on,” Marty said. “With the storm, it’ll be a long and early twilight. From outside, he’ll probably be able to tell which rooms are lit, which aren’t. No sense making it easier for him to figure exactly where we are.”

She was quiet. Staring at the amber cloth of the lampshade. As if their future could be prophesied from the vague patterns in that illuminated fabric.

At last she looked at him. “How long have we got?”

“Maybe ten minutes, maybe two hours. It’s up to him.”

“What’s going to happen, Marty?”

It was his turn to be silent a moment. He didn’t want to lie to her, either.

When he finally spoke, Marty was surprised to hear what he told her, because it sprang from subconscious depths, was genuine, and indicated greater optimism than he was aware of on a conscious level. “We’re going to kill the fucker.” Optimism or fatal self-delusion.

She came to him around the foot of the bed, and they held each other. She felt so right in his arms. For a moment, the world didn’t seem crazy any more.

“We still don’t even know who he is, what he is, where he comes from,” she said.

“And maybe we’ll never find out. Maybe, even after we kill the son of a bitch, we’ll never know what this was all about.”

“If we never find out, then we can’t pick up the pieces.”

“No.”

She put her head on his shoulder and gently kissed the exposed penumbra of the bruises on his throat. “We can never feel safe.”

“Not in our old life. But as long as we’re together, the four of us,” he said, “I can leave everything behind.”

“The house, everything in it, my career, yours—”

“None of that’s what really matters.”

“A new life, new names . . . What future will the girls have?”

“The best we can give them. There were never any guarantees. There never are in this life.”

She raised her head from his shoulder and looked into his eyes. “Can I really handle it when he shows up here?”

“Of course you can.”

“I’m just a family counselor specializing in the behavioral problems of children, parent-child relations. I’m not the heroine of an adventure story.”

“And I’m just a mystery novelist. But we can do it.”

“I’m scared.”

“So am I.”

“But if I’m so scared now, where am I going to find the courage to pick up a shotgun and defend my kids from something . . . something like this?”

“Imagine you are the heroine of an adventure story. ”

“If only it were that easy.”

“In some ways . . . maybe it is,” he said. “You know I’m not much for Freudian explanations. More often than not, I think we decide to be what we are. You’re a living example, after what you went through as a kid.”

She closed her eyes. “Somehow, it’s easier to imagine myself as a family counselor than as Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone.”

“When we first met,” he said, “you couldn’t imagine yourself as a wife and mother, either. A family was nothing but a prison to you, prison and torture chamber. You never wanted to be part of a family again.”

She opened her eyes. “You taught me how.”

“I didn’t teach you anything. I only showed you how to imagine a good family, a healthy family. Once you were able to imagine it, you could learn to believe in the possibility. From there on, you taught yourself.”

She said, “So life’s a form of fiction, huh?”

“Every life’s a story. We make it up as we go along.”

“Okay. I’ll try to be Kathleen Turner.”

“Even better.”

“What?”

“Sigourney Weaver.”

She smiled. “Wish I had one of those big damned futuristic guns like she got to use when she played Ripley.”

“Come on, we better go see if our sentries are still at their post.”

In the living room, he relieved the girls of their duty at the only undraped window and suggested they heat some water to make mugs of hot chocolate. The cabin was always stocked with basic canned goods, including a tin of cocoa-flavored milk powder. The electric heaters still hadn’t taken the chill off the air, so they could all use a little internal warming. Besides, making hot chocolate was such a normal task that it might defuse some of the tension and calm their nerves.

He looked through the window, across the screened porch, past the back end of the BMW. So many trees stood between the cabin and the county road that the hundred-yard-long driveway was pooled with deep shadows, but he could still see that no one was approaching either in a vehicle or on foot.

Marty was reasonably confident that The Other would come at them directly rather than from behind the cabin. For one thing, their property backed up to the hundred acres of church land downhill and to a larger parcel uphill, which made an indirect approach relatively arduous and time-consuming.

Judging by his past behavior, The Other always favored headlong action and blunt approaches. He seemed to lack the knack or patience for strategy. He was a doer more than a thinker, which almost ensured a furious—rather than sneak—attack.

That trait might be the enemy’s fatal weakness. It was a hope worth nurturing, anyway.

Snow fell. The shadows deepened.

3

From the motel room, Spicer called the surveillance van for an update. He let the phone ring a dozen times, hung up, and tried again, but still the call went unanswered.

“Something’s happened,” he said. “They wouldn’t have left the van.”

“Maybe something’s wrong with their phone,” Oslett suggested.

“It’s ringing.”

“Maybe not on their end.”

Spicer tried again with no different result. “Come on,” he said, grabbing his leather flight jacket and heading for the door.

“You’re not going over there?” Oslett said. “Aren’t you still worried about blowing their cover?”

“It’s already been blown. Something’s wrong.”

Clocker had pulled on his tweed coat over his clashing orange cashmere sweater. He didn’t bother to put on his hat because he had never bothered to take it off. Tucking the Star Trek paperback in a pocket, he also headed for the door.

Following them with the black briefcase, Oslett said, “But what could’ve gone wrong? Everything was moving along so smoothly again.”

Already, the storm had put down half an inch of snow. The flakes were fine and comparatively dry now, and the streets white. Evergreen boughs had begun to acquire Christmasy trimmings.

Spicer drove the Explorer, and in a few minutes they reached the street where Stillwater’s parents lived. He pointed out the house when they were still half a block from it.

Across the street from the Stillwater place, two vehicles were parked at the curb. Oslett pegged the red recreational van as the surveillance post because of the mirrored side windows in its rear section.

“What’s that florist’s van doing here?” Spicer wondered.

“Delivering flowers,” Oslett guessed.

“Fat chance.”

Spicer pulled past the van and parked the Explorer in front of it.

“Is this really smart?” Oslett wondered.

Using the cellular phone, Spicer called the surveillance team one more time. They didn’t answer.

“We don’t have a choice,” Spicer said as he opened his door and got out into the snow.

The three of them walked to the back of the red van.

On the blacktop between that vehicle and the delivery van, a large floral arrangement lay in ruins. The ceramic container was shattered. The stems of the flowers and ferns were still embedded in the spongy green material that florists used to fix arrangements, so the mild wind had not blown any of them away, though they looked as if they had been stepped on more than once. The colors of some flowers were masked by snow, which meant they hadn’t been disturbed in the past thirty to forty-five minutes.

The ruined blossoms and frost-paled ferns had a curious beauty. Snap a photo, hang it in an art gallery, title it something like “Romance” or “Loss,” and people would probably stand before it for long minutes, musing.

As Spicer rapped on the back door of the surveillance vehicle, Clocker said, “I’ll check the delivery van.”

No one answered the knock, so Spicer boldly opened the door and climbed inside.

As he followed, Oslett heard Spicer say softly, “Oh, shit.”

The interior of the van was dark. Little light penetrated the two-way mirrors that served as windows. Only the scopes and screens of the electronic equipment illuminated the space.

Oslett took off his sunglasses, saw the dead men, and pulled the rear door shut.

Spicer had taken off his sunglasses too. His eyes were an odd, baleful yellow. Or maybe that was just a color they reflected from the scopes and gauges.

“Alfie must’ve been coming to the Stillwater place, spotted the van, recognized it for what it was,” Spicer said. “Before he went over there, he stopped here, took care of business, so he wouldn’t be interrupted across the street.”

The electronic gear operated off banks of solar batteries wired to flat solar cells on the roof. When surveillance was conducted at night, the batteries could be charged in the conventional fashion, if necessary, by starting the van’s engine for short periods. Even on overcast days, however, the cells collected enough sunlight to keep the system operative.

Without the engine running, the interior temperature of the van was nonetheless comfortable, if slightly cool. The vehicle was unusually well insulated, and the solar cells also operated a small heater.

Stepping over the corpse on the floor, looking through one of the view windows, Oslett said, “If Alfie was drawn to that house, it had to be because Martin Stillwater was already there.”

“I guess.”

“Yet this team never saw him go in or out.”

“Evidently not,” Spicer agreed.

“Wouldn’t they have let us know if they’d seen Stillwater, his wife, or kids?”

“Absolutely.”

“So . . . is he over there now? Maybe they’re all over there, the whole family and Alfie.”

Peering through the other window, Spicer added, “And maybe not. Somebody left there not long ago. See the tracks in the driveway?”

A vehicle with wide tires had backed out of the garage that was attached to the white clapboard house. It had reversed to the left as it entered the street, then had shifted into forward and had driven away to the right. The snow had barely begun to fill in the multiple arcs of the tracks.

Clocker opened the rear door, startling them. He climbed inside and pulled the door shut after him, with no comment about the bloody ice axe on the floor or the two murdered operatives. “Looks like Alfie must’ve stolen the florist’s van for cover. The deliveryman’s in the back with the flowers, dead as the moon.”

In spite of the extended wheelbase that added extra room to the interior of the van, the space unoccupied by surveillance equipment and corpses was not large enough to accommodate the three of them comfortably. Oslett felt claustrophobic.

Spicer pulled the seated dead man out of the swivel chair in which he’d died. The corpse tumbled to the floor. Spicer checked the chair for blood before sitting down and turning to the array of monitors and switches, with which he appeared to be familiar.

Uncomfortably aware of Clocker looming over him, Oslett said, “Is it possible there was a phone call to the house that these guys never got a chance to report to us before Alfie wasted them?”

Spicer said, “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

As Spicer’s fingers flew over the programming keyboard, brightly colored graphs and other displays popped onto the half dozen video monitors.

Contriving, in those tight quarters, to ram his elbow into Clocker’s gut, Oslett turned again to the first of the side-by-side view windows. He watched the house across the street.

Clocker stooped to look out the other window. Oslett figured the Trekker was pretending to be at a starship portal, squinting through foot-thick glass at an alien world.

A couple of cars passed. A pickup truck. A black dog ran along the sidewalk; with snow on his paws, he looked as if he was wearing four white socks. The Stillwater house stood silent, serene.

“Got it,” Spicer said, taking off a set of headphones he had put on when Oslett had been staring out the window.

What he had, as it turned out, was a telephone call monitored, traced, and recorded by the automated equipment perhaps as long as thirty minutes after Alfie killed the surveillance team. In fact, Alfie had been in the Stillwater house when the call came through and had answered it after seven rings. Spicer played it back on a speaker instead of through headphones, so the three of them could listen at the same time.

“The first voice you hear is the caller,” Spicer said, “because the man who picks up the receiver in the Stillwater house doesn’t initially say anything.”

“Hello? Mom? Dad?”

“How did you win them over?”

Stopping the tape, Spicer said, “That second voice is the receiving phone—and it’s Alfie.”

“They both sound like Alfie.”

“The other one’s Stillwater. Alfie also speaks next.”

“Why would they love you more than me?”

“Don’t touch them, you son of a bitch. Don’t you lay one finger on them.”

“They betrayed me.”

“I want to talk to my mother and father.”

“MY mother and father.”

“Put them on the phone.”

“So you can tell them more lies?”

They listened to the entire conversation. It was over-the -top creepy because it sounded as if one man was talking to himself, a radically split personality. Worse, their bad boy was obviously not just a renegade but flat-out psychotic.

When the tape ended, Oslett said, “So Stillwater never stopped at his parents’ house.”

“Evidently not.”

“Then how did Alfie find it? And why did he go there? Why was he interested in Stillwater’s parents, not just Stillwater himself?”

Spicer shrugged. “Maybe you’ll get a chance to ask the boy if you manage to recover him.”

Oslett didn’t like having so many unanswered questions. It made him feel as if he wasn’t in control.

He glanced out the window at the house and at the tire tracks in the snow-covered driveway. “Alfie’s probably not over there any more.”

“Went after Stillwater,” Spicer agreed.

“Where was that call placed?”

“Cellular phone.”

Oslett said, “We can still trace that, can’t we?”

Pointing to three lines of numbers on a display terminal, Spicer said, “We’ve got a satellite triangulation.”

“That’s meaningless to me, just numbers.”

“This computer can plot it on a map. To within a hundred feet of the signal source.”

“How long will that take?”

“Five minutes tops,” Spicer said.

“Good. You work on it. We’ll check the house.”

Oslett stepped out of the red van with Clocker close behind.

As they crossed the street through the snow, Oslett didn’t care if a dozen nosy neighbors were at their windows. The situation was already blown wide open and couldn’t be salvaged. He, Clocker, and Spicer would clear out, with their dead, in less than ten minutes, and after that no one would ever be able to prove they’d been there.

They walked boldly onto the elder Stillwaters’ porch. Oslett rang the bell. No one answered. He rang it again and tried the door, which proved to be unlocked. From across the street it would appear as if Jim or Alice Stillwater had opened up and invited them inside.

In the foyer, Clocker closed the front door behind them and drew his Colt .357 Magnum from his shoulder holster. They stood for a few seconds, listening to the silent house.

“Be at peace, Alfie,” Oslett said, even though he doubted that their bad boy was still hanging around the premises. When there was no ritual response to that command, he repeated the four words louder than before.

Silence prevailed.

Cautiously they moved deeper into the house—and found the dead couple in the first room they checked. Stillwater’s parents. Each of them somewhat resembled the writer—and Alfie, too, of course.

During a swift search of the house, repeating the command phrase before they went through each new doorway, the only thing of interest they found was in the laundry. The small room reeked of gasoline. What Alfie had been up to was made apparent by the scraps of cloth, funnel, and partly empty box of detergent that littered the counter beside the sink.

“He’s taking no chances this time,” Oslett said. “Going after Stillwater as if it’s war.”

They had to stop the boy—and fast. If he killed the Stillwater family or even just the writer himself, he would make it impossible to implement the murder-suicide scenario which would so neatly tie up so many loose ends. And depending on what insane, fiery spectacle he had in mind, he might draw so much attention to himself that keeping his existence a secret and returning him to the fold would become impossible.

“Damn,” Oslett said, shaking his head.

“Sociopathic clones,” Clocker said, almost as if trying to be irritating, “are always big trouble.”

4

Sipping hot chocolate, Paige took her turn at guard duty by the front window.

Marty was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with Charlotte and Emily, playing with a deck of cards they’d gotten from the game chest. It was the least animated game of Go Fish that Paige had ever seen, conducted without comment or argument. Their faces were grim, as if they weren’t playing Go Fish at all but consulting a Tarot deck that had nothing but bad news for them.

Studying the snowswept day outside, Paige suddenly knew that both she and Marty shouldn’t be waiting in the cabin. Turning away from the window, she said, “This is wrong.”

“What?” he asked, looking up from the cards.

“I’m going outside.”

“For what?”

“That rock formation over there, under the trees, halfway out toward the county road. I can lie down in there and still see the driveway.”

Marty dropped his hand of cards. “What sense does that make?”

“Perfect sense. If he comes in the front way, like we both think he will—like he has to—he’ll go right past me, straight to the cabin. I’ll be behind him. I can pump a couple of rounds into the back of the bastard’s head before he knows what’s happening.”

Getting to his feet, shaking his head, Marty said, “No, it’s too risky.”

“If we both stay inside here, it’ll be like trying to defend a fort.”

“A fort sounds good to me.”

“Don’t you remember all those movies about the cavalry in the Old West, defending the fort? Sooner or later, no matter how strong the place was, the Indians overran it and got inside.”

“That’s just in the movies.”

“Yeah, but maybe he’s seen them too. Come here,” she insisted. When he joined her at the window, she pointed to the rocks, which were barely visible in the sable shadows under the pines. “It’s perfect.”

“I don’t like it.”

“It’ll work.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You know it’s right.”

“Okay, so maybe it’s right, but I still don’t have to like it,” he said sharply.

“I’m going out.”

He searched her eyes, perhaps looking for signs of fear that he could exploit to change her mind. “You think you’re an adventure-story heroine, don’t you?”

“You got my imagination working.”

“I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.” He stared for a long moment at the shadow-blanketed jumble of rocks, then sighed and said, “All right, but I’m the one who’ll go out there. You’ll stay in here with the girls.”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way, baby.”

“Don’t pull a feminist number on me.”

“I’m not. It’s just that . . . you’re the one he’s got a psychic bead on.”

“So?”

“He can sense where you are, and depending on how refined that talent is, he might sense you’re in the rocks. You have to stay in the cabin so he’ll feel you in here, come straight for you—and right past me.”

“Maybe he can sense you too.”

“Evidence so far indicates it’s only you.”

He was in an agony of fear for her, his feelings carved in every hollow of his face. “I don’t like this.”

“You already said. I’m going out.”

5

By the time Oslett and Clocker left the Stillwater house and crossed the street, Spicer was getting behind the wheel of the red surveillance van.

The wind accelerated. Snow was driven out of the sky at a severe angle and harried along the street.

Oslett walked to the driver’s door of the surveillance van.

Spicer had his sunglasses on again even though the last hour or so of daylight was upon them. His eyes, yellow or otherwise, were hidden.

He looked down at Oslett and said, “I’m going to drive this heap away from here, clear across the county line and out of local jurisdiction before I call the home office and get some help with body disposal.”

“What about the delivery man in the florist’s van?”

“Let them haul their own garbage,” Spicer said.

He handed Oslett a standard-size sheet of typing paper on which the computer had printed a map, plotting the point from which Martin Stillwater had telephoned his parents’ house. Only a few roads were depicted on it. Oslett tucked it inside his ski jacket before either the wind could snatch it out of his hand or the paper could become damp from the snow.

“He’s only a few miles away,” Spicer said. “You take the Explorer.” He started the engine, pulled the door shut, and drove off into the storm.

Clocker was already behind the wheel of the Explorer. Clouds of exhaust billowed from its tailpipe.

Oslett hurried to the passenger side, got in, slammed the door, and fished the computer map out of his jacket. “Let’s go. We’re running out of time.”

“Only on the human scale,” Clocker said. Pulling away from the curb and switching on the wipers to deal with the wind-driven snow, he added, “From a cosmic point of view, time may be the one thing of which there’s an inexhaustible supply.”

6

Paige kissed the girls and made them promise to be brave and to do exactly what their father told them to do. Leaving them for the uncertainty of what lay ahead was one of the hardest things she had ever done. Pretending not to be afraid, in order to help them with their own quest for courage, was even harder.

When Paige stepped out the front door, Marty went with her onto the porch. Blustery wind hissed through the screen walls and rattled the porch door at the head of the steps.

“There’s one other way,” he said, leaning close to her to be heard above the storm without shouting. “If it’s me that he’s drawn to, maybe I should get the hell out of here, on my own, lead him as far away from you as I can.”

“Forget it.”

“But without you and the girls to worry about, maybe I can deal with him.”

“And if he kills you instead?”

“At least we wouldn’t all go down.”

“You think he won’t come looking for us again? He wants your life, remember. Your life, your wife, your children.”

“So if he finishes me off and comes after you, you’d still have a chance to blow his brains out.”

“Oh, yeah? And when he shows up, during that little window of opportunity I’ll have before he gets close to me, how would I know whether it was him or you?”

“You wouldn’t,” he admitted.

“So we’ll play it this way.”

“You’re so damned strong,” he said.

He couldn’t know that her bowels were like jelly, her heart was knocking violently, and the faint metallic taste of terror filled her dry mouth.

They hugged but briefly.

Carrying the Mossberg, she went through the porch door, down the steps, across the shallow yard, past the BMW, and into the woods without looking back, worried that he would become aware of the depth of her fear and insist on dragging her back into the cabin.

Under the Quonset curve of sheltering evergreen boughs, the wind sounded hollow and distant except when she passed beneath a couple of flue-like openings that soared all the way up to the blind sky. Pummeling drafts shrieked down those passages, as cold as ectoplasm and as shrill as banshees.

Although the property sloped, the ground beneath the trees was easy to traverse. Underbrush was sparse due to a lack of direct sunlight. Many trees were so old that the lowest branches were above her head, and the view between the thick trunks was unobstructed all the way out to the county road.

The soil was stony. Tables and formations of granite broke the surface here and there, all ancient and smooth.

The formation she had pointed out to Marty was halfway between the cabin and the county road, only twenty feet upslope from the driveway. It resembled a crescent of teeth, blunt molars two to three feet high, like the fossilized dental structure of a gentle herbivorous dinosaur much larger than any ever before suspected or imagined.

Approaching the granite outcropping, in which shadows as dark as condensed pine tar pooled behind the “molars,” Paige suddenly had the feeling that the look-alike was already there, watching the cabin from that hiding place. Ten feet from her destination, she halted, skidding slightly on the carpet of loose pine needles.

If he was actually there, he would have seen her coming and could have killed her any time he wished. The fact that she was still alive argued against his presence. Nevertheless, as she tried to get moving again, she felt as if she had plunged to the bottom of a deep ocean trench and was struggling to make progress against the resisting mass of an entire sea.

Heart pounding, she circled the crescent formation and slipped into its shadowed convexity from behind. The look-alike wasn’t waiting for her.

She stretched out on her stomach. In her dark-blue ski jacket with the hood covering her blond hair, she knew that she was as good as invisible among the shadows and against the dark stone.

Through gaps in the stone, she could monitor the entire length of the driveway without raising her head high enough to be seen.

Beyond the shelter of the trees, the storm swiftly escalated into a full-scale blizzard. The volume of snow coming down into the driveway between flanking stands of trees was so great that it almost seemed as if she was looking into the foaming face of a waterfall.

Her ski jacket kept her upper body warm, but her jeans couldn’t ward off the penetrating cold of the stone on which she lay. As body heat leached away, her hip and knee joints began to ache. She wished she were wearing insulated ski pants, and she realized she should have at least brought a blanket to put between herself and the granite.

Under the influence of the building gale, the highest branches of the firs and pines creaked like scores of doors easing open on rusty hinges. Not even the muffling boughs of the evergreens could soften the rising voice of the wind.

The gradually dimming light of the day’s last hour was the steely shade of ice on a winter pond.

Every sight and sound was cold and seemed to exacerbate the chill that pressed into her from the granite. She began to worry about how long she could hold out before she would need to return to the cabin to get warm.

Then a deep-blue Jeep station wagon came uphill on the county road and made a hard, sharp turn into the driveway. It looked like the Jeep that belonged to Marty’s parents.

Rheostat at seven degrees. South from Mammoth Lakes, through billowing curtains of snow, through whirling snowdevils, through torrents and lashes and blasts and cataracts and airborne walls of snow, along a highway barely defined beneath the deepening mantle, passing slow-moving traffic at high speed, flashing his headlights to encourage obstructionists to pull over and let him go by, even passing a county snowplow and a cinder-spreading truck crowned with yellow and red emergency beacons that briefly transform the millions of white flakes into glowing embers. A left turn. Narrower road. Uphill. Into forested slopes. Long chain-link fence on the right, capped with spiral razor wire, broken down in places. Not there yet. A little farther. Close. Soon.

The four gasoline bombs stand in a cardboard box on the floor in front of the passenger seat, wedged into the knee space. The gaps between them are packed with folded newspapers, so the bottles will not clatter against one another.

Pungent fumes arise from the saturated cloth wicks. The perfume of destruction.

Guided by the magnetic attraction of the false father, he makes an abrupt right turn into a single-lane driveway already half hidden by snow. He brakes as little as possible, cornering in a slide, and moving his foot to the accelerator again even as the Jeep is still finding purchase and both rear tires are spinning-squealing fiercely.

Directly ahead, at least a hundred yards into the woods, stands a cabin. Soft light at the windows. Roof capped with snow.

Even if the BMW was not parked to the left of the place, he’d know he’d found his quarry. The imposter’s hateful magnetic presence pulls him forward.

At first sight of the cabin, he decides to make a full frontal assault, regardless of the wisdom or consequences. His mother and father are dead, wife and children probably long dead, too, forms and faces mockingly imitated by the vicious alien species that has stolen his own name and memories. He seethes with rage, hatred so intense it’s physically painful, anguish like a fire in his heart, and only swift justice will bring desperately needed relief.

The churning tires bite through the snow into dirt.

He rams his foot down on the accelerator.

The Jeep bolts forward.

A cry of savage fury and vengeance escapes him, and the mental rheostat spins from seven degrees to three hundred and sixty.

Marty was at the front window when headlight beams pierced the falling snow out on the county road, but at first he couldn’t see the source. Coming uphill, the vehicle was hidden by trees and roadside brush. Then it burst into sight—a Jeep—turning hard into the driveway at high speed, the back end fishtailing, plumes of snow and slush erupting behind its spinning rear tires.

An instant later, as he was still reacting to the arrival of the Jeep, he was stricken by a brutal psychic tidal wave as strong as anything he had previously experienced but of a different quality. This was not merely the urgent, questing power that had hammered him on other occasions, but a blast of black and bitter emotion, raw and uncensored, which put him inside the mind of his enemy as no human being ever before could have been inside the mind of another. It was a surrealistic realm of psychotic rage, desperation, infantile self-absorption, terror, confusion, envy, lust, and urgent hungers so vile that a flood of sewage and rotting corpses could not have been as repulsive.

For the duration of that telepathic contact, Marty felt as if he had been pitched into one of the deeper regions of Hell. Though the connection lasted no more than three or four seconds, it seemed interminable. When it was broken, he found himself standing with his hands clamped against his temples, mouth open in a silent scream.

He gasped for breath and shuddered violently.

The roar of an engine brought his eyes back into focus and drew his attention to the day beyond the window. The Jeep station wagon was accelerating up the driveway, toward the cabin.

Maybe he was misjudging the degree of The Other’s recklessness and insanity, but he had been in that mind, and he thought he knew what was coming. He spun away from the window, toward the girls.

“Run, get out the back, go!”

Having already scrambled up from the living-room floor and the two-hand card game in which they’d been pretending to be engrossed, Charlotte and Emily were sprinting toward the kitchen before Marty had finished shouting the warning.

He ran after them.

All in a second, spinning through his mind, an alternate strategy: stay in the living room, hope the Jeep got hung up in the porch and never made it to the front wall of the cabin, then rush outside, after the impact, and shoot the bastard before he climbed out from behind the steering wheel.

And in another second, the dark potential of that strategy: maybe the Jeep would make it all the way—cedar siding, shattered two-by-fours, electrical wiring, chunks of plaster, broken glass exploding into the living room with it, rafters buckling, ceiling collapsing, murderous slate roof tiles thundering down on him—and he would be killed by flying debris, or survive but be trapped in the rubble, legs pinned.

The kids would be on their own. Couldn’t risk it.

Outside, the roar of the engine swelled nearer.

He caught up with the girls as Charlotte grasped the thumb-turn of the dead-bolt lock on the kitchen door. He reached over her head, slapped open the latch-bolt as she disengaged the lower lock.

The scream of the engine filled the world, curiously less like the sound of a machine than like the savage cry of something huge and Jurassic.

The Beretta. Rattled by the telepathic contact and the hurtling Jeep, he had forgotten the Beretta. It was on the living-room coffee table.

No time to go back for it.

Charlotte twisted the knob. The howling wind tore the door out of her hand and shoved it into her. She was knocked off her feet.

Then wham, from the front of the house, like a bomb going off.

The big station wagon shot past Paige’s hiding place so fast she knew she wasn’t going to have a chance to wait for the son of a bitch to park, then creep up on him stealthily from tree to tree and shadow to shadow in the manner of the good adventure heroine that she envisioned herself. He was playing by his own rules, which meant no rules at all, and his every action would be unpredictable.

By the time she scrambled to her feet, the Jeep was within seventy or eighty feet of the cabin. Still accelerating.

Praying her cold-stiffened legs wouldn’t cramp, she clambered over the low rock formation. She raced toward the cabin, parallel to the driveway, staying in the gloom of the woods, weaving between tree trunks.

Because the BMW was not parked squarely in front of the cabin but to the left, the Jeep had a clear shot at the porch steps. Less than an inch of snow was insufficient to slow it down. The ground under that white blanket wasn’t frozen rock-solid as it would be later in the winter, so the tires cut into bare earth, finding all the traction they needed.

The driver seemed to be standing on the accelerator. He was suicidal. Or convinced of his invulnerability. The engine screamed.

Paige was still a hundred feet from the cabin when the left front tire of the Jeep hit the low concrete porch steps and climbed them as if they were a ramp. The right front tire spun through empty air for an instant, then grabbed the porch floor as the bumper tore through the wall of screen.

She expected the porch to give way under the weight. But the Jeep seemed airborne as the rear left tire launched it off the top of the three steps.

Flying. Taking out panels of screen and the frames that hold them in place, as if they’re spider webs, gossamer.

Straight at the door. Like an incoming round of mortar fire. A two-ton shell.

Closes his eyes. Windshield might implode.

Bone-jarring impact. Thrown forward. Safety harness jerks him back, he exhales explosively, currents of pain briefly scintillate through his chest.

A percussive symphony of boards splintering, jack studs cracking in half, door jamb disintegrating, lintel fracturing. Then forward motion ceases, the Jeep crashes down.

He opens his eyes.

The windshield is still intact.

The Jeep is in the living room of the cabin, facing a sofa and an overturned armchair. It’s tipped forward because the front wheels broke through the flooring into the air space below.

The Jeep doors are above the cabin floor and unobstructed. He disengages the seatbelt and gets out of the station wagon with one of the .38 pistols in his right hand.

Move, move, confront, challenge, grapple, and prevail.

He hears creaking overhead and looks up. The ceiling is broken and sagging but will probably hold together. Powdery snow and dead brown pine needles sift down through the cracks.

The floor is littered with broken glass. The windows flanking the cabin door have shattered.

He is thrilled by the destruction. It inflames his fury.

The living room is deserted. Through the archway he can see most of the kitchen, and no one’s in there, either.

Two closed doors are featured in the wide pass-through between living room and kitchen, one to the left and one to the right. He moves to the right.

If the false father is waiting on the other side, the very act of opening the door will trigger a fusillade.

He wants to avoid being shot if at all possible because he does not want to have to crawl away to heal again. He wants to finish this now, here, today.

If his wife and children have not already been replicated and replaced by alien forms, they will surely not be permitted to remain human much longer. Night is coming. Less than an hour away. From movies, he knows these things always happen at night—alien assault, parasite injection, attacks by shape-changers and soul-stealers and things that drink blood, all at night, either when the moon is full or there is no moon at all, but at night.

Instead of throwing the door open even from a safe position to one side, he steps in front of it, raises the .38, and opens fire. The door is not solid wood but a Masonite model with a foam core, and the hollow-point rounds punch big holes at point-blank range.

Jolting through his arms, the recoil of the Chief’s Special is enormously satisfying, almost a sexual experience, bringing a small measure of relief from his intense frustration and anger. He keeps squeezing the trigger until the hammer clicks on empty chambers.

No screams from the room beyond. No sounds at all as the roar of the last gunshot fades.

He throws the gun on the floor and draws the second .38 from the shoulder holster under his varsity jacket.

He kicks open the door and goes inside fast, the gun thrust out in front of him.

It’s a bedroom. Deserted.

Soaring frustration fans the flames of rage.

Returning to the pass-through, he faces the other closed door.

For a moment the sight of the Jeep flying across the porch and slamming through the front wall of the cabin brought Paige to a halt.

Although it was happening in front of her and though she had no doubt that it was real, the crash had the unreal quality of a dream. The station wagon seemed to hang in the air an impossibly long time, virtually floating across the porch, wheels spinning. It appeared almost to dissolve through the wall into the cabin, vanishing as if it had never been. The destruction was accompanied by a great deal of noise, yet somehow it was not cacophonous enough, not half as loud as it would have been if the crash had taken place in a movie. Immediately in the wake of it, the comparative quiet of the storm reclaimed the day, with only the moaning of the wind; snow fell in a soundless deluge.

The kids.

In her mind’s eye, she saw the wall bursting in on them, the hurtling Jeep right behind it.

She was running again before she realized it. Straight toward the cabin.

She held the shotgun with both hands—left hand on the fore-end slide handle, right hand around the grip and finger on the trigger guard. All she would have to do was halt, swing the bore toward the target, slip her finger to the trigger, and fire. Earlier, loading the Mossberg, she had pumped a round into the breech, so she could fit an extra shell into the magazine tube.

As she sprinted out of the woods and into the driveway, when she was no more than thirty feet from the porch steps, gunfire erupted in the house. Five rounds in quick succession. Instead of giving her pause, the shots spurred her across the driveway and shallow front yard as fast as she could move.

She slipped in the snow and fell to one knee just as she reached the foot of the porch steps. The pain wrung a soft, involuntary curse from her.

If she hadn’t stumbled, however, she would have been on the porch or all the way into the living room when Charlotte rounded the corner of the cabin. Marty and Emily appeared close behind Charlotte, running hand in hand.

He fires three times into the door on the left side of the pass-through, kicks it open, scuttles across the threshold fast and low, and finds another deserted bedroom.

Outside, a car door slams.

Marty left the driver’s door open while he got in behind the steering wheel, fumbling under the seat with one hand in search of the keys, and he didn’t even think to warn Charlotte and Emily not to slam their door until the act was done and the echo of it reverberated through the surrounding trees.

Paige hadn’t gotten into the BMW yet. She was standing at her open door, watching the house, the Mossberg raised and ready.

Where were the damn keys?

He leaned forward, crunching down, trying to feel farther back under the seat.

As Marty’s fingers closed over the keys, the Mossberg boomed. He snapped his head up as an answering shot missed Paige, passed through the open car door, and smashed into the dashboard inches from his face. A gauge shattered, showering him with shards of plastic.

“Down!” he shouted to the girls in the back seat.

Paige fired the shotgun and again drew return fire.

The Other stood in the gaping hole where the front door of the cabin had been, framed by jagged ruins, his right arm extended as he squeezed off the shot. Then he ducked back into the living room, perhaps to reload.

Though the shotgun would keep him from coming any closer, he was too far away to be greatly hurt by it, especially considering his unusual recuperative abilities. His handgun, however, packed a solid punch at that distance.

Marty jammed the key in the ignition. The engine turned over without a protest. He released the hand brake, put the BMW in gear.

Paige got in the car, pulled her door shut.

He looked over his shoulder through the rear window, reversed past the front of the cabin, and then turned into the tire tracks left by the Jeep on its kamikaze run.

“Here he comes!” Paige cried.

Still backing up, Marty glanced through the windshield and saw The Other bounding off the porch, down the steps, across the yard, a wine bottle in each hand, rag wicks in the necks, flames leaping off both. Jesus. They were burning furiously, might explode in his hands at any second, but he seemed to have no concern for his own safety, a savage and almost gleeful look on his face, as if he was born for this, nothing but this. He skidded to a stop and cocked his right arm like a quarterback ready to pass the ball to his receiver.

“Go!” Paige shouted.

Marty was already going, and he didn’t need encouragement to go faster.

Instead of turning to look through the back window, he used the rearview mirror to be sure he stayed on the driveway and didn’t angle off into any trees or ditches or jutting rocks, so he was aware of the first bottle arcing through the snow and shattering against the BMW’s front bumper. Most of the contents splashed harmlessly onto the driveway, where a patch of snow seemed to burst into flames.

The second bottle slammed into the hood, six inches from the windshield, directly in front of Paige. It shattered, the contents exploded, burning fluid washed the glass, and for a moment the only forward view they had was of seething fire.

In the back, seatbelts engaged, staying down, holding tightly to each other, the girls shrieked in terror.

Marty couldn’t do anything to reassure them except to keep backing up, as fast as he dared, hoping the fire on the hood would burn out and the heat wouldn’t cause the windshield to implode.

Halfway to the county road. Two-thirds. Accelerating. A hundred yards to go.

The blaze on the windshield was extinguished almost at once, as the thin film of gasoline on the glass was consumed, but flames continued to leap off the hood and off the fender on the passenger side. The paint had ignited.

Through fire and billowing black smoke, Marty saw The Other running toward them again, not as fast as the car but not a whole lot slower, either.

Paige fished two shotgun shells out of a pocket of her ski jacket and stuffed them into the magazine tube, replacing the rounds she had expended.

Sixty yards to the county road.

Fifty.

Forty.

Because of intervening trees and vegetation, Marty could not see downhill, and he was afraid he’d reverse into the path of an oncoming vehicle. Yet he didn’t dare slow down.

The roar of the BMW prevented him from hearing the shot. A bullet hole appeared, with a sharp snap, in the windshield below the rearview mirror, between him and Paige. An instant later a second round drilled the windshield, three inches to the right of the first, so close to Paige it was a miracle she wasn’t hit. With the second violation, a chain-reaction of millions of tiny cracks webbed across the tempered glass, rendering it milky-opaque.

The transition between the end of the dirt lane and the pavement wasn’t smooth. They slammed backward onto the county road hard enough to make them bounce in their seats, and the crazed safety glass collapsed inward in gummy chunks.

Marty pulled the wheel to the right, reversing uphill, and braked to a full stop when they were facing straight down the road. He could feel the heat of the flames that were eating the paint off the hood, but they didn’t lick into the car.

A bullet ricocheted off metal.

He shifted out of reverse.

Through his side window, he could see The Other standing spread-legged fifteen yards from the end of the driveway, gun in both hands.

As Marty tramped on the accelerator, another round thudded into his door, below the window, but didn’t penetrate to the interior of the car.

The Other broke into a run again as the BMW shot downhill and away from him.

Although the wind carried most of the smoke off to the right, there was suddenly a lot more of it, blacker than ever, and enough churned into the car to make them miserable. Paige started coughing, the girls were wheezing in the back seat, and Marty couldn’t clearly see the road ahead.

“Tire’s burning!” Paige shouted above the howling wind.

Two hundred yards farther downhill, the burning tire blew, and the BMW spun out of control on the snow-skinned blacktop. Marty turned the wheel into the slide, but applied physics didn’t prove reliable this time. The car swung around a hundred and eighty degrees, simultaneously moving sideways, and they only stopped when they careened off the road and fetched up against the chain-link fence that marked the perimeter of the property owned by the defunct Prophetic Church of the Rapture.

Marty climbed out of the car. He yanked open the back door, leaned in, and helped the frightened girls disentangle themselves from their seatbelts.

He didn’t even look to see if The Other was still coming because he knew the bastard was coming. This guy would never stop, never, not until they killed him, maybe not even then.

As Marty extracted Emily from the back seat, Paige scrambled out of the driver’s door because her side of the car was jammed into the chain-link. Having withdrawn the manila envelopes of cash from under her seat, she stuffed them inside her ski jacket. As she zipped shut, she looked uphill.

“Shit,” she said, and the shotgun boomed.

Marty helped Charlotte out of the car as the Mossberg thundered again. He thought he heard the hard crack of small-arms fire, too, but the bullet must have gone wide of them.

Shielding the girls, pushing them behind him and away from the burning car, he glanced uphill.

The Other stood arrogantly in the center of the road, about a hundred yards away, convinced he was protected from the shotgun fire by distance, the deflecting power of the wailing wind, and perhaps his own supernatural ability to bounce back from serious damage. He was exactly Marty’s size, yet even at a distance he seemed to tower over them, a dark and ominous figure. Maybe it was the perspective. Almost nonchalantly, he broke open the cylinder of his revolver and tipped expended cartridges into the snow.

“He’s reloading,” Paige said, taking the opportunity to jam additional shells into the magazine of her shotgun, “let’s get out of here.”

“Where?” Marty wondered, looking around frantically at the snow-whipped landscape.

He wished a car would appear from one direction or another.

Then he canceled his own wish because he knew The Other would kill any passersby who tried to interfere.

They moved downhill, into the biting wind, using the time to put some distance between themselves and their pursuer while they figured what to do next.

He ruled out trying to reach one of the other cabins scattered through the high woods. Most were vacation homes. No one would be in residence on a Tuesday in December unless, by morning, the new snow brought them in for the skiing. And if they stumbled into a cabin where someone was at home, with The Other trailing after them, Marty didn’t want the deaths of innocent strangers on his conscience.

Route 203 lay at the bottom of the county road. Even in the early hours of a blizzard, steady traffic would be passing between the lakes and Mammoth Lakes itself. If there were a lot of witnesses, The Other couldn’t kill them all. He’d have to retreat.

But the bottom of the county road was too distant. They’d never make it before they ran out of shotgun shells to keep their enemy at bay—or before the greater accuracy and range of the revolver allowed him to pick them off one by one.

They came to a gap in the battered chain-link fence.

“Here, come on,” Marty said.

“Isn’t that place abandoned?” Paige objected.

“There’s nowhere else,” he said, taking Charlotte and Emily by the hand and leading them onto the church property.

His hope was that someone would come along soon, see the half-burned BMW, and report it to the sheriff’s department. Instead of fanning the fire that had been feeding on the paint, the wind had snuffed it, but the tire was still burning, and the battered car was hard to ignore. If a couple of well-armed deputies showed up to check out the area and could be enlisted in the struggle, they wouldn’t understand how formidable The Other was, but they wouldn’t be as naive and helpless as ordinary citizens, either.

After a brief hesitation, during which she glanced worriedly uphill at their nemesis, Paige followed him and the girls through the hole in the fence.

The speedloader slips from his fingers and drops into the snow as he removes it from the pouch on his belt. It is the last of the two he took from the dead man in the surveillance van.

He stoops, plucks it out of the snow, and brushes it off against the cranberry-red sweater under his varsity jacket. He brings it to the open revolver, slips it in, twists it, drops it, and snaps the cylinder shut.

He will have to use his last rounds carefully. The replicants are not going to be easy to kill.

He now knows that the woman is a replicant just like the false father. Alien flesh. Inhuman. She cannot be his Paige, for she is too aggressive. His Paige would be submissive, eager for domination, like the women in the Senator’s film collection. His Paige is surely dead. He must accept that, difficult as it is. This thing is only masquerading as Paige, and not well. Worse, if Paige is gone forever, so are his loving daughters. The girls, cute and convincingly human, are also replicants—demonic, extraterrestrial, and dangerous.

His former life is irretrievable.

His family is gone forever.

A black abyss of despair yawns under him, but he must not fall into it. He must find the strength to go on and fight either until he achieves victory in the name of all humankind—or is destroyed. He must be as courageous as Kurt Russell and Donald Sutherland were when they found themselves in similar dire straits, for he is a hero, and a hero must persevere.

Downhill, the four creatures disappear through a hole in the chain-link fence. All he wants now is to see them dead, scramble their brains, dismember and decapitate them, eviscerate them, set them afire, take every precaution against their resurrection, for they are not merely the killers of his real family but a threat to the world.

The thought occurs to him that, if he survives, these terrifying experiences will provide him with material for a novel. He surely will be able to get past the opening sentence, an accomplishment of which he was incapable yesterday. Though his wife and children are lost to him forever, he might be able to salvage his career from the ruins of his life.

Slipping and sliding, he hurries toward the gap in the fence.

The windshield wipers were caked with snow that was hardening into ice. They stuttered and thumped across the glass.

Oslett consulted the computer-generated map, then pointed to a turn-off ahead. “There, on the right.”

Clocker put on the turn signal.

Like the ghost ship Mary Celeste silently materializing from a strange fog with tattered sails unfurled and decks empty of crew, the abandoned church loomed out of the driving snow.

At first, in the obscuring storm and fading gray light of late afternoon, Marty thought the building was in good repair, but that impression was transient. As they drew nearer, he saw that a lot of roof tiles were missing. Sections of the copper rain gutter were gone, while other pieces dangled precariously, swaying and creaking in the wind. Most of the windows were broken out, and vandals had spray-painted obscenities on the once-handsome brick walls.

Rambling complexes of buildings—offices, workshops, a nursery, dormitories, a dining hall—stood immediately behind and to both sides of the steepled main structure. The Prophetic Church of the Rapture had been a cult that required its members to contribute all of their worldly belongings upon admittance and to live in a tightly governed commune.

They raced through the inch-deep snow, as fast as the girls could manage, toward the entrance to the church, rather than to one of the other buildings, because the church was closest. They needed to get out of sight as quickly as possible. Though The Other could track them through his connection with Marty no matter where they went, at least he couldn’t shoot at them if he couldn’t see them.

Twelve broad steps led up to a double set of ten-foot -high oak doors with six-foot-high fanlights above each pair. All but a few ruby and yellow shards of glass had been broken out of the fanlights, leaving dark gaps between the thick ribs of leading. The doors were recessed in a twenty-foot-high cinquefoil arch, above which was an enormous and elaborately patterned wheel window that still contained twenty percent of its original glass, most likely because it was a harder target for stones.

The four carved-oak doors were weather-beaten, scarred, cracked, and spray-painted with more obscenities that glowed softly in the ashen light of the premature dusk. On one, a vandal had crudely drawn the white hourglass shape of a female form complete with breasts and a crotch defined by the letter Y, and beside it was a representation of a phallus as large as a man. Beveled letters, cut by a master stone carver, made the same promise in the granite lintel above each set of doors, HE LIFTETH US UNTO HEAVEN; however, over those words, the spoilers had sprayed BULLSHIT in red paint.

The cult had been creepy, and its founder—Jonathan Caine—had been a fraud and pederast, but Marty was more chilled by the vandals than by the misguided people who had followed Caine. At least the faithful cultists had believed in something, no matter how misguided, had yearned to be worthy of God’s grace, and had sacrificed for their beliefs, even if the sacrifices ultimately proved to be stupid; they had dared to dream even if their dreams had ended in tragedy. The mindless hatred that informed the scrawlings of the graffitists was the work of empty people who believed in nothing, were incapable of dreaming, and thrived on the pain of others.

One of the doors stood ajar six inches. Marty grabbed the edge of it and pulled. The hinges were corroded, the oak was warped, but the door grated outward another twelve or fourteen inches.

Paige went inside first. Charlotte and Emily trailed close behind her.

Marty never heard the shot that hit him.

As he started to follow the girls, a lance of ice impaled him, entering the upper-left quadrant of his back, exiting through the muscles and tendons below the collarbone on the same side. The piercing chill was so cold that the blizzard hammering the church seemed like a tropical disturbance by comparison, and he shuddered violently.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on the snow-covered brick stoop in front of the door, wondering how he had gotten there. He was half convinced he had just stretched out for a nap, but the pain in his bones indicated he’d dropped hard onto his unlikely bed.

He stared up through the descending snow and wintry light at letters in granite, letters on granite.

HE LIFTETH US UNTO HEAVEN.

BULLSHIT.

He only realized he’d been shot when Paige rushed out of the church and dropped to one knee at his side, shouting, “Marty, oh God, my God, you’ve been shot, the son of a bitch shot you,” and he thought, Oh, yes, of course, that’s it, I’ve been shot, not stabbed by a lance of ice.

Paige rose from beside him, raised the Mossberg. He heard two shots. They were exceedingly loud, unlike the stealthy bullet that had knocked him to the bricks.

Curious, he turned his head to see how close their indefatigable enemy had come. He expected to discover the look-alike charging at him, only a few yards away, unfazed by shotgun pellets.

Instead, The Other remained at a distance from the church, out of range of the two rounds Paige had fired. He was a black figure on a field of white, the details of his too-familiar face unrevealed by the waning gray light. Ranging back and forth through the snow, back and forth, lanky and quick, he seemed to be a wolf stalking a herd of sheep, watchful and patient, biding his time until the moment of ultimate vulnerability arrived.

The poniard of ice that transfixed Marty became, from one second to the next, a stiletto of fire. With the heat came excruciating pain that made him gasp. At last the abstract concept of a bullet wound was translated into the language of reality.

Paige lifted the Mossberg again.

Regaining clarity of mind with the pain, Marty said, “Don’t waste the ammo. Let him go for now. Help me up.”

With her assistance, he was able to get to his feet.

“How bad?” she asked worriedly.

“I’m not dying. Let’s get inside before he decides to take another shot at us.”

He followed her through the door into the narthex, where the darkness was relieved only by faint rays penetrating the partly open door and glassless fanlights.

The girls were crying, Charlotte louder than Emily, and Marty tried to reassure them. “It’s okay, I’m all right, just a little nick. All I need is a Band-Aid, one with a picture of Snoopy on it, and I’ll feel all better.”

In truth, his left arm was half numb. He only had partial use of it. When he flexed his hand, he couldn’t curl it into a tight fist.

Paige eased to the eighteen-inch gap between the big door and the jamb, where the wind whistled and gibbered. She peered out at The Other.

Trying to get a better sense of the damage the bullet had done, Marty slipped his right hand inside his ski jacket and gingerly explored the front of his left shoulder. Even a light touch ignited a flare of pain that made him grit his teeth. His wool sweater was saturated with blood.

“Take the girls farther back into the church,” Paige whispered urgently, though their enemy could not possibly have heard her out there in the storm. “All the way to the other end.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“I’ll wait here for him.”

The girls protested. “Mommy, don’t.” “Mom, come with us, you gotta.” “Mommy, please.”

“I’ll be fine,” Paige said, “I’ll be safe. Really. It’ll be perfect. Don’t you see? Marty, when the creep senses you moving away, he’ll come into the church. He’ll expect us to be together.” As she talked, she put two more shells into the Mossberg magazine to replace the most recent rounds she’d expended. “He won’t expect me to be waiting right here for him.”

Marty remembered having this same discussion before, back at the cabin, when she wanted to go outside and hide in the rocks. Her plan hadn’t worked then, although not because it was flawed. The Other had driven past her in the Jeep, evidently unaware that she was lying in wait. If he hadn’t pulled such an unpredictable stunt, ramming the station wagon right into the house, she might have slipped up on him and dropped him from behind.

Nevertheless, Marty didn’t want to leave her alone by the door. But there was no time for debate because he suspected his wound was soon going to begin sapping what strength he still had. Besides, he didn’t have a better plan to suggest.

In the gloom, he could barely recognize Paige’s face.

He hoped this wouldn’t be the last time he saw it.

He shepherded Charlotte and Emily out of the narthex and into the nave. It smelled of dust and dampness and the wild things that nested there in the years since the cultists had left to resume their shattered lives instead of rising to sit at the right hand of the Lord.

On the north side, the restless wind harried snow through the broken windows. If winter had a heart, inanimate and carved of ice, it would have been no more frigid than that place, nor could death have been more arctic.

“My feet are cold,” Emily said.

He said, “Sssshhh. I know.”

“Mine too,” Charlotte said in a whisper.

“I know.”

Having something so ordinary to complain about helped to make their situation seem less bizarre, less frightening.

“Really cold,” Charlotte elaborated.

“Keep going. All the way to the front.”

None of them had boots, only athletic shoes. Snow had saturated the fabric, caked in every crease, and turned to ice. Marty figured they didn’t need to worry about frostbite just yet. That took a while to develop. They might not live long enough to suffer from it.

Shadows hung like bunting throughout the nave, but that large chamber was brighter than the narthex. Arched double-lancet windows, long ago relieved of the burden of glass, were featured along both side walls and soared two-thirds of the distance to the vaulted ceiling. They admitted sufficient light to reveal the rows of pews, the long center aisle leading to the chancel rail, the great choir, and even some of the high altar at the front.

The brightest things in the church were the desecrations by the vandals, who had sprayed their obscenities across the interior walls in greater profusion than they had done outside. He’d suspected the paint was luminous when he’d seen it on the exterior of the building; indeed, in dimmer precincts, the serpentine scrawls glowed orange and blue and green and yellow, overlapping, coiling, intertwining, until it almost seemed as if they were real snakes writhing on the walls.

Marty was tense with the expectation of gunfire.

At the chancel rail, the gate was missing.

“Keep going,” he urged the girls.

The three of them continued on to the altar platform, from which all of the ceremonial objects had been removed. On the back wall hung a thirty-foot-high cross of wood festooned with cobwebs.

His left arm was numb, yet it felt grossly swollen. The pain was like that of an abscessed tooth misplaced in his shoulder. He was nauseous—though whether from loss of blood or fear for Paige or because of the disorienting weirdness of the church, he didn’t know.

Paige shrank from the front entrance into an area of the narthex that would remain dark even if the door opened farther.

Staring at the gap between the door and jamb, she saw phantom movements in the fuzzy gray light and churning snow. She repeatedly raised and lowered the gun. Each time the confrontation seemed to have arrived, her breath caught in her throat.

She didn’t have to wait long. He came within three or four minutes, and he was not as circumspect as she expected him to be. Apparently sensing Marty’s movement toward the far end of the building, The Other entered confidently, boldly.

As he was stepping across the threshold, silhouetted in the waning daylight, she aimed for mid-chest. The gun was shaking in her hands even before she squeezed the trigger, and it jumped with the recoil. She immediately chambered another round, fired again.

The first blast hit him solidly, but the second probably ruined the jamb more thoroughly than it ruined him, because he pitched backward, out of the doorway, out of sight.

She knew she’d inflicted a lot of damage, but there were no screams or cries of pain, so she went through the door with as much hope as caution, ready for the sight of a corpse on the steps. He was gone, and somehow that wasn’t a surprise, either, although the manner of his swift disappearance was so puzzling that she actually turned and squinted up at the front of the church, as if he might be climbing that sheer facade with the alacrity of a spider.

She could search for tracks in the snow and try to hunt him down. She suspected he might want her to do that very thing.

Unnerved, she re-entered the church at a run.

Kill them, kill them all, kill them now.

Buckshot. In the throat, working abrasively deep in the meat of him. Along one side of the neck. Hard lumps embedded in his left temple. Left ear ragged and dripping. Lead acne pimples the flesh down the left cheek, across the chin. Lower lip torn. Teeth cracked and chipped. Spitting pellets. A blaze of pain but no eye damage, vision unimpaired.

He scuttles in a crouch along the south side of the church, through a twilight so flat and gray, so wrapped in gauzes of snow, that he casts no shadow. No shadow. No wife, no children, no mother, no father, gone, no life, stolen, used up and thrown away, no mirror in which to look, no reflection to confirm his substance, no shadow, only footprints in the new snow to support his claim to existence, footprints and his hatred, like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, defined by footprints and fury.

He frenziedly seeks an entrance, hastily inspecting each window as he passes it.

Virtually all of the glass is gone from the tall stained-glass panels, but the steel mullions remain. Much of the lead came that defined the original patterns remains between the mullions, though in many places it is bent and twisted and drooping, tortured by weather or by the hands of vandals, rendering the outlines of the original religious symbols and figures unrecognizable, and in their place leaving teratogenic forms as meaningless as the shapes in melted candles.

The next to the last nave window is missing its steel frame, mullions, and came. The granite stool marking the base of the window is five feet off the ground. He boosts himself up with the nimbleness of a gymnast and squats on his haunches on the deep sill. He peers into numberless shadows interleaved with strange sinuous streams of radiant orange, yellow, green, and blue.

A child screams.

Racing down the center aisle of the graffiti-smeared church, Paige had the peculiar feeling that she was underwater in tropical climes, beneath a Caribbean cove, in caverns of gaudily luminescent coral, equatorial seaweed waving its feathery and radiant fronds on all sides of her.

Charlotte screamed.

Having reached the chancel rail, Paige spun to face the nave. Swinging the Mossberg left and right, searching in panic for the threat, she saw The Other as Emily shouted, “In the window, get him!”

He was, indeed, squatting in one of the south-wall windows, a dark shape that seemed only half human against the fading light and the whitening showers of snow. Shoulders hunched, head low, arms dangling, he had an apelike aspect.

Her reflexes were quick. She fired the Mossberg without hesitation.

Even if the distance hadn’t been in his favor, however, he would have escaped untouched because he was moving even as she pulled the trigger. With the fluid grace of a wolf, he seemed to pour off the sill and onto the floor. The buckshot passed harmlessly through the space that he had occupied and clattered off the window jambs that had framed him.

Evidently on all fours, he vanished among the rows of pews, where the deepest shadows in the church were humbled. If she went hunting for him there, he would drag her down and kill her.

She backed through the chancel rail and across the sanctuary to Marty and the girls, keeping the shotgun ready.

The four of them retreated into an adjoining room that might have been the sacristy. A pair of casement windows admitted barely enough light to reveal three doors in addition to the one through which they’d entered.

Paige closed the door to the sanctuary and attempted to lock it. But it wasn’t equipped with a lock. No furniture was available to brace or blockade it, either.

Marty tried one of the other doors. “Closet.”

Shrill wind and snow erupted through the door that Charlotte opened, so she slammed it shut.

Checking the third possibility, Emily said, “Stairs.”

Among the pews. Creeping. Cautious.

He hears a door slam shut.

He waits.

Listens.

Hunger. Hot pain fades quickly to a low heat. Bleeding slows to a trickle, an ooze. Now hunger overwhelms him as his body demands enormous amounts of fuel to facilitate the reconstruction of damaged tissues.

Already he’s metabolizing body fat and protein to make urgent repairs to torn and severed blood vessels. His metabolism accelerates unmercifully, an entirely autonomic function over which he has no power.

This gift that makes him so much less vulnerable than other men will soon begin to exact a toll. His weight will decline. Hunger will intensify until it is nearly as excruciating as the agony of mortal wounds. The hunger will become a craving. The craving will become a desperate need.

He considers retreating, but he is so close. So close. They are on the run. Increasingly isolated. They cannot hold out against him. If he perseveres, in minutes they will all be dead.

Besides, his hatred and rage are as great as his hunger. He is frantic for the sweet satisfaction that only extreme violence can assure.

On the movie screen of his mind, homicidal images flicker enticingly: bullet-shattered skulls, brutally hammered faces, gouged eyes, torn throats, slashed torsos, flashing knives, hatchets, axes, severed limbs, women on fire, screaming children, the bruised throats of young prostitutes, flesh dissolving under a spray of acid. . . .

He crawls out from among the pews, into the center aisle, rising into a crouch.

The walls swarm with glowing extraterrestrial hieroglyphics.

He is in the nest of the enemy.

Alien and strange. Hostile and inhuman.

His fear is great. But it only feeds his rage.

He hurries to the front of the room, through a gap in a railing, toward the door beyond which they retreated.

Light as thin as fish broth seeped down from unseen windows above and around the turns in the spiral staircase.

The buildings to which the church was attached were two stories high. There might be a connecting passage between these stairs and another structure, but Marty had no idea where they were headed. For that reason he almost wished they had taken the door that led outside.

However, the numbness in his arm hampered him severely, and the pain in his shoulder, which grew worse by the minute, was a serious drain on his energy. The building was unheated, as cold as the world outside, but at least it offered shelter from the wind. Between his wound and the storm, he didn’t think he would last long beyond the walls of the church.

The girls climbed ahead of him.

Paige came last, worrying aloud because the door at the foot of the stairs, like the sacristy door, did not have a lock. She edged up backward, step by step, covering the territory behind them.

They soon reached a deep-set multifoil window in the outer wall, which had been the source of the meager illumination below. Most of the clear glass was intact. The light on the twisting stairs above was of an equally dreary quality and most likely came from another window of the same size and style.

Marty moved slower and his breathing grew more labored the higher they ascended, as if they were reaching altitudes at which the oxygen content of the air was drastically declining. The pain in his left shoulder intensified, and his nausea thickened.

The stained plaster walls, gray wooden steps, and dishwater light reminded him of depressing Swedish movies from the fifties and sixties, films about hopelessness, despair, and grim fate.

Initially, the handrail along the outer wall was not essential to his progress. However, it swiftly became a necessary crutch. In dismayingly short order, he found that he could not rely entirely on the strength of his increasingly shaky legs and also needed to pull himself upward with his good right arm.

By the time they came to the second multifoil window, with still more steps and gray luminosity ahead, he knew where they were. In a bell tower.

The stairwell was not going to lead to a passageway that would connect them to the second floor of another building, because they were already higher than two floors. Each additional step upward was an irreversible commitment to this single option.

Gripping the rail with his good right hand, beginning to feel lightheaded and afraid of losing his balance, Marty stopped to warn Paige that they better consider going back. Perhaps her reverse perspective on the stairwell had prevented her from realizing the nature of the trap.

Before he could speak, the door clattered open below, out of sight beyond the first few turns.

His last clear thought is the sudden realization that he does not have the .38 Chief’s Special any longer, must have lost it after being shot at the front entrance to the church, dropped it in the snow, and has not noticed the loss until this moment. He has no time to retrieve it, even if he knew where to search. Now his primary weapon is his body, his hands, his murderous skills, and his exceptional strength. His ferocious hatred is a weapon, as well, because it motivates him to take any risk, confront extreme danger, and endure cruel suffering that would incapacitate an ordinary man. But he is not ordinary, he is a hero, he is judgment and vengeance, he is the rending fury of justice, avenger of his murdered family, nemesis of all creatures that are not of this earth but would try to claim it as their own, savior of humanity. That is his reason for existence. His life has meaning and purpose at last: to save the world from this inhuman scourge.

Just before the door opened below Paige, the narrow winding stairs called to mind lighthouses she had seen in movies. From the image of a lighthouse, she leapt to the realization that they were in the church bell tower. Then the lower door opened, out of sight beyond the curving walls of the spiral stairwell, and they had no choice but to continue to the top.

She briefly considered charging downward, opening fire when she was about to come upon him. But hearing her descend, he might retreat into the sacristy, where already the heavy yarn of dusk was knitting into darkness, where he could stalk her in the gloom and attack when her attention was diverted to the wrong skein of shadows.

She could also wait where she was, let him come to her, and blow his head off as soon as he rose into sight. If he sensed her waiting, however, and if he opened fire as he rounded the bend, he couldn’t miss her in those tight confines. She might be dead before she could pull the trigger, or might at best get off a shot into the ceiling of the stairwell as she fell, harming nothing but plaster.

Remembering the black silhouette on the sill of the nave window and the uncanny fluidity with which it had moved, she suspected that The Other’s senses were sharper than her own. Lying in wait with the hope of surprising it was probably a fool’s game.

She continued upward, trying to convince herself that they were in the best of all possible positions: defending high ground against an enemy that was allowed only one narrow approach. It seemed as if the bell-tower platform ought to be an unassailable redoubt.

Awash in agonies of hunger, sweating with need and rage, lead pellets popping from his flesh, he heals step by rising step but at a cost. Body fat dwindles and even some muscle tissue and bone mass are sacrificed to the wildly accelerated mending of buckshot wounds. He gnashes his teeth with the compulsive need to chew, chew and swallow, rend and tear, feed, feed, even though there is no food to satisfy the terrible pangs that rack him.

At the top of the tower, one half of the space was completely walled, providing a landing for the stairs. An ordinary door gave access from that vestibule to another portion of the platform that was exposed to the elements on three sides. Charlotte and Emily opened the door without difficulty and hurried out of the stairwell.

Marty followed them. He was dismayingly weak but even dizzier than feeble. He gripped the door jamb and then the cast-concrete cap of the waist-high wall—the parapet—that enclosed the other three sides of the outer bell-tower platform.

With the wind-chill factor, the temperature must have been five or ten degrees below zero. He winced as the bitter gale lashed his face—and didn’t dare think about how much colder it would seem ten minutes or an hour later.

Though Paige might have enough shotgun shells to prevent The Other from reaching them, they wouldn’t all survive the night.

If the weather reports proved correct and the storm lasted until well past dawn, they wouldn’t be able to use the Mossberg to try to draw attention to their plight until morning. The wailing wind would disperse the crash of gunfire before that telltale sound could reach beyond church property.

The exposed platform was twelve feet across with a tile floor and scuppers to let out rainwater. Two corner posts, about six feet high, stood atop the perimeter wall and, with the assistance of the full wall on the east side, supported a peaked belfry roof.

No bell hung in the belfry. When Marty squinted up into the dim recesses of that conical space, he saw the black shapes of what might have been loudspeaker horns from which the taped tolling of bells had once been broadcast.

Appearing to grow ever whiter as the day steadily darkened, snow slanted into the belfry on the northwest wind. A small drift was forming along the base of the south wall.

The girls had fled directly across the deck to the west side, as far as they could get from the door, but Marty felt too wobbly to traverse even that short distance without support. As he circled the platform to join them, leaning with his right hand against the waist-high parapet, the floor tiles seemed slippery though they were textured to be less treacherous when wet.

He made the mistake of glancing over the edge of the parapet at the phosphorescent mantle of snow on the ground six or seven stories below. The view prompted an attack of vertigo so strong that he almost passed out before averting his eyes from the long fall.

When he reached his daughters, Marty was more nauseous than ever and shivering so badly that any attempt to speak would have resulted in shuddery chains of sounds only vaguely resembling words. As frigid as he was, perspiration nonetheless trickled the length of his spine. Wind howled, snow whirled, night descended, and the bell tower seemed to be turning like a carrousel.

The pain from the wound in his shoulder had spread through his upper body, until the fiery point of injury was only the center of a more generalized ache that throbbed with every thud of his rapidly pounding heart. He felt helpless, ineffective, and cursed himself for being so useless at that very moment when his family needed him most.

Paige hadn’t joined Marty and the girls on the platform. She stood on the far side of the open door, on the enclosed landing, peering down the curved stairs.

Flames spouted from the bore of the gun, making shadows dance. The boom of the shot—and echoes of it—tolled across the bell-tower platform, and from the stairwell came a shriek of pain and rage that was less than human, followed immediately by a second shot and an even more shrill and alien screech.

Marty’s hopes soared—and collapsed an instant later when the agonized cry of The Other was followed by Paige’s scream.

Along the curved wall, step by step, burning with hunger, filled with fire, the body’s furnace stoked to a white-hot blaze, tortured by need, alert for a sound, higher, higher, higher in the darkness, churning within, seething, desperate and driven, driven by need, then the looming thing, the Paige-thing on the landing above, a silhouette wrapped in shadows but recognizably the Paige-thing, repulsive and deadly, an alien seed. He crosses his arms over his face, protecting his eyes, absorbing the first hard blast, a thousand spikes of pain, hammered deep, almost knocked backward down the stairs, rocking on his heels, arms paralyzed for an instant, bleeding and torn, afire with need, need, inner pain worse than the outer, move-move-confront -challenge-grapple-and-prevail, lunging forward, upward, screaming involuntarily, the second blast a sledgehammer to the chest, heart stutters, stutters, blackness swoops, heart stutters, left lung pops like a balloon, no breath, blood in his mouth. Flesh rips, blood spurts, flesh knits, blood seeps. He inhales, inhales and is still moving upward, upward into the woman, never having endured such agony, a world of pain, cauldron of fire, lava in his veins, a nightmare of all-consuming hunger, testing his miraculous body’s limits, teetering on the edge of death, smashes into her, drives her backward, claws at the weapon, tears it away from her, pitches it aside, going for her throat, her face, snapping at her face, biting at her face, she’s holding him back, but he needs her face, face, her smooth pale face, alien meat, sustenance to slake the need, the need, the terrible burning endless need.

The Other tore the shotgun out of Paige’s grasp, threw it aside, slammed into her, and knocked her backward through the doorway.

The area under the belfry seemed to be illuminated more by the natural phosphorescence of the falling snow than by the fast-fading light of the dying day. Marty saw The Other had been gruesomely wounded and had undergone strange changes—was still undergoing them—although the ashen twilight shrouded details of its metamorphosis.

Paige fell onto the bell-tower platform. The Other dropped atop her like a predator upon its prey, tearing at her ski jacket, issuing a dry hiss of excitement, gnashing its teeth with the ferocity of a wild creature from out of the mountain woods.

It was a thing now. Not a man. Something dreadful if not quite identifiable was happening to it.

Driven by desperation, Marty found within himself one last well of strength. He overcame dizziness bordering on total disorientation, and he took a running kick at the hateful thing that wanted his life. He caught it squarely in the head. Although he was wearing sneakers, the kick had tremendous impact, shattering all the ice that had formed on the shoe.

The Other howled, tumbled off Paige, rolled against the south wall, but at once came onto its knees, then into a standing position, cat-quick and unpredictable.

As the thing was still tumbling, Paige scrambled to the kids, crowding them behind her.

Marty lunged for the discarded gun on the landing, inches beyond the other side of the open door. He crouched and, with his right hand, grabbed the Mossberg by the barrel.

Paige and one of the girls yelled a warning.

He didn’t have time to reverse his grip on the weapon and pump a round into the chamber. He rose and turned in one movement, issuing a savage scream not unlike the sounds his adversary had been making, and swung the shotgun by the barrel.

The Mossberg stock hammered into The Other’s left side, but not hard enough to shatter any ribs. Marty had been forced to wield it with one hand, unable to use his left, and the jolt of the blow rang back on him, sent pain through his chest, hurting him worse than it hurt The Other.

Wrenching the Mossberg from Marty, the look-alike didn’t turn the gun to its own use, as if it had devolved into a subhuman state in which it no longer recognized the weapon as anything more than a club. Instead, it pitched the Mossberg away, whirled it over the waist-high wall into the snowy night.

“Look-alike” no longer applied. Marty could still see aspects of himself in that warped countenance, but, even in the murky dusk, no one would mistake them for brothers. The shotgun damage wasn’t primarily what made the difference. The pale face was strangely thin and pointed, bone structure too prominent, eyes sunken deep in dark circles: cadaverous.

The Mossberg was still spinning into the falling snow when the thing rushed Marty and drove him into the north wall. The waist-high concrete cap caught him across the kidneys so hard it knocked out of him what little strength he had managed to dredge up.

The Other had him by the throat. Replay of the upstairs hall, yesterday, Mission Viejo. Bending him backward as he’d been bent over the gallery railing. Farther to fall this time, into a darkness blacker than night, into a coldness deeper than winter storms.

The hands around his neck felt not like hands at all. Hard as the metal jaws of a bear trap. Hot in spite of the bitter night, so hot they almost scorched him.

It wasn’t just strangling him but trying to bite him as it had tried to bite Paige, striking snakelike, hissing. Growling in the back of its throat. Teeth snapped shut on empty air an inch from Marty’s face. Breath sour and thick. The stench of decay. He had the feeling it would devour him if it could, rip out his throat and take his blood.

Reality outstripped imagination.

All reason fled.

Nightmares were real. Monsters existed.

With his good hand, he got a fistful of its hair and pulled hard, jerking its head back, frantic to keep its flashing teeth away from him.

Its eyes glittered and rolled. Foaming spittle flew when it shrieked.

Heat poured off its body, and it was as hot to the touch as the sun-warmed vinyl of a car seat in summer.

Letting go of Marty’s throat but still pinning him against the parapet, The Other reached back and seized the hand with which he had clutched its hair. Bony fingers. Inhuman. Hard talons. It seemed fleshless, brittle, yet increasingly fierce and strong, and it almost crushed his hand before he let go of its hair. Then it whipped its head to the side and bit his forearm, ripped the sleeve of his jacket but not his flesh. Tore at him again, sank teeth into his hand, he screamed. It grabbed his ski jacket, pulling him off the parapet as he tried to lean into the void to escape it, snapped at his face, teeth clashing a fraction of an inch short of his cheek, rasped out a single tortured word, “Need,” and snapped at his eyes, snapped, snapped at his eyes.

“Be at peace, Alfie.”

Marty registered the words but initially wasn’t clear-headed enough either to realize what they meant or to grasp that the voice was one he had never heard before.

The Other reared its head back, as if about to make its final lunge for his face. But it held that posture, eyes wild, skeletal face as softly luminous as the snow, teeth bared, rolling its head from side to side, issuing a thin wordless sound as if it wasn’t sure why it was hesitating.

Marty knew that he should use the moment to ram a knee into the thing’s crotch, try to rush it backward across the platform, to the opposite parapet, up, out, and over. He could imagine what to do, see it in his writer’s eye, a fully realized moment of action in a novel or movie, but he had no strength left. The pain in his gunshot wound, throat, and bitten hand swelled anew, dizziness and nausea overwhelmed him, and he knew he was on the verge of a blackout.

“Be at peace, Alfie,” the voice repeated more firmly.

Still holding Marty, who was helpless in its ferocious grip, The Other turned its head toward the speaker.

A flashlight winked on, directed at the creature’s face.

Blinking toward the light source, Marty saw a bearlike man, tall and barrel-chested, and a smaller man in a black ski suit. They were strangers.

They showed a little surprise but not the shock and horror that Marty would have expected.

“Jesus,” the smaller man said, “what’s happening to him?”

“Metabolic meltdown,” said the larger man.

“Jesus.”

Marty glanced toward the west wall of the belfry, where Paige was crouched with the kids, sheltering them, holding their heads against her breast to prevent them from seeing too much of the creature.

“Be at peace, Alfie,” the smaller man repeated.

In a voice tortured by rage, pain, and confusion, The Other rasped, “Father. Father. Father?”

Marty was still tightly held, and his attention was again drawn to the thing that had once looked like him.

The flashlight-illuminated face was more hideous than it had appeared in the gloom. Wisps of steam were rising off it in some places, confirming his sense that it was hot. Scores of shotgun wounds pocked one side of its head, but they were not bleeding and, in fact, seemed more than half healed. As Marty stared, a black lead pellet squeezed out of the creature’s temple and oozed down its cheek in a thin trail of yellowish fluid.

The wounds were its least repulsive features. In spite of the physical strength it still possessed, it was as meagerly padded with flesh as something that had crawled out of a coffin after a year underground. Skin was stretched tightly over its facial bones. Its ears were shriveled into hard knots of cartilage and lay flat against the head. Desiccated lips had shrunk back from the gums, giving the teeth greater prominence, creating the illusion of a nascent muzzle and the wicked bite of a predator.

It was Death personified, the Grim Reaper without his voluminous black robes and scythe, on his way to a masquerade ball in a costume of flesh so thin and cheap that it was not for a moment convincing.

“Father?” it said again, gazing at the stranger in the black ski suit. “Father?”

Insistently: “Be at peace, Alfie.”

The name “Alfie” was so unsuited to the grotesque apparition still clutching Marty that he suspected he was hallucinating the arrival of the two men.

The Other turned away from the flashlight beam and glared at Marty once more. It seemed uncertain of what to do next.

Then it lowered its graveyard face to his, cocking its head as if with curiosity. “My life? My life?”

Marty didn’t know what it was asking him, and he was so weak from loss of blood or shock or both that he could only push at it feebly with his right hand. “Let me go.”

“Need,” it said. “Need, need, need, need, NEED, NEEEEEEEEED.”

The voice spiraled into a shrill squeal. Its mouth cracked wide in a humorless grin, and it struck at Marty’s face.

A gunshot boomed, The Other’s head jerked back, Marty sagged against the parapet as the creature let go of him, and its scream of demonic fury drew muffled cries of terror from Emily and Charlotte.

The Other clamped its skeletal hands to its shattered skull, as if trying to hold itself together.

The flashlight beam wavered, found it.

The fissures in the bone healed, and the bullet hole began to close up, forcing the lead slug out of the skull. But the cost of this miraculous healing became obvious as The Other’s skull began to change more dramatically, growing smaller and narrower and more lupine, as if bone was melting and reforming under the tight sheath of skin, borrowing mass from one place to rebuild damage in another.

“Cannibalizing itself to close the wound,” said the big man.

More ghostly wisps of vapor were rising from the creature, and it began to tear at the clothes it wore as if it could not tolerate the heat.

The smaller man shot it again. In the face.

Still holding its head, The Other reeled across the bell-tower platform and collided with the south parapet. It almost tipped over and out into the void.

It crumpled to its knees, shedding its torn clothing as if the garments were the tatters of a cocoon, squirming forth in a darker and utterly inhuman form, twitching, jittering.

It was no longer shrieking or hissing. It sobbed. In spite of its increasingly monstrous appearance, the sobbing rendered it less threatening and even pitiable.

Relentless, the gunman stepped toward it and fired a third shot.

The sobbing chilled Marty, perhaps because there was something human and pathetic about it. Too weak to stand, he slid down to the floor, his back against the waist-high parapet, and had to look away from the thrashing creature.

An eternity passed before The Other was entirely motionless and quiet.

Marty heard his daughters weeping.

Reluctantly he turned his eyes to the body which lay directly across the platform from him and which was bathed in the mercilessly revealing beam of the flashlight. The corpse was a puzzle of black bones and glistening flesh, the greater part of its substance having been consumed in its frantic attempts to heal itself and stay alive. The twisted and jagged remains more resembled those of an alien life form than those of a man.

Wind blew.

Snow fell.

A greater cold came down.

After a while, the man in the black ski suit turned away from the remains and spoke to the bearish man. “A very bad boy indeed.”

The larger man said nothing.

Marty wanted to ask who they were. His grip on consciousness was so tenuous, however, that he thought the effort of speaking might cause him to pass out.

To his partner, the smaller man said, “What’d you think of the church? As weird as anything Kirk and the crew have turned up, isn’t it? All those obscenities Day-Gloing on the walls. It’ll make our little scenario all the more convincing, don’t you think?”

Though he felt as lightheaded as if he had been drinking, and though he was having difficulty keeping his thoughts focused, Marty now had confirmed what he’d suspected when the two men first arrived: they were not saviors, merely new executioners, and only marginally less mysterious than The Other.

“You’re going to do it?” the larger of the two asked.

“Too much trouble to haul them back to the cabin. You don’t think this weird church is an even better setting?”

“Drew,” the big man said, “there are a number of things about you I like.”

The smaller man seemed confused. He wiped at the snow that the wind stuck to his eyelashes. “What’d you say?”

“You’re damned smart, even if you did go to Princeton and Harvard. You’ve got a good sense of humor, you really do, you make me laugh, even when it’s at my expense. Hell, especially when it’s at my expense.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“But you’re a crazy, sick son of a bitch,” the big man said, raised his own handgun, and shot his partner.

Drew, if that was his name, hit the tile floor as hard as if he had been made of stone. He landed on his side, facing Marty. His mouth was open, as were his eyes, though he had a blind man’s gaze and seemed to have nothing to say.

In the center of Drew’s forehead was an ugly bullet hole. For as long as he could hold fast to consciousness, Marty stared at the wound, but it didn’t appear to be healing.

Wind blew.

Snow fell.

A greater cold came down—along with a greater darkness.

7

Marty woke with his forehead pressed to cold glass. Heavy snow churned against the other side of the pane.

They were parked next to service station pumps. Between the pumps and through the falling snow, he saw a well-lighted convenience store with large windows.

He rolled his head away from the glass and sat up straighter. He was in the back seat of a truck-type station wagon, an Explorer or Cherokee.

Behind the steering wheel sat the big man from the bell tower. He was turned around in his seat, looking back. “How you doing?”

Marty tried to answer. His mouth was dry, his tongue stuck to his palate, and his throat was sore. The croak that escaped him was not a word.

“I think you’ll be all right,” the stranger said.

Marty’s ski jacket was open, and he raised one trembling hand to his left shoulder. Under the blood-damp wool sweater, he felt an odd bulky mass.

“Field dressing,” the man said. “Best I could do in a hurry. We get out of these mountains, across the county line, I’ll clean the wound and rebandage it.”

“Hurts.”

“Don’t doubt it.”

Marty felt not merely weak but frail. He lived by words and never failed to have the right ones when he needed them, so it was frustrating to find himself with barely enough energy to speak. “Paige?” he asked.

“In there with the kids,” the stranger said, indicating the combination service station and convenience store. “Girls are using the bathroom. Mrs. Stillwater’s paying the cashier, getting some hot coffee. I just filled the tank.”

“You’re . . . ?”

“Clocker. Karl Clocker.”

“Shot him.”

“Sure did.”

“Who . . . who . . . was he?”

“Drew Oslett. Bigger question is—what was he?”

“Huh?”

Clocker smiled. “Born of man and woman, but he wasn’t much more human than poor Alfie. If there’s an evil alien species out there somewhere, marauding through the galaxy, they’ll never mess with us if they know we can produce specimens like Drew.”

Clocker drove, and Charlotte occupied the front passenger seat. He referred to her as “First Officer Stillwater” and assigned her the duty of “handing the captain his coffee when he needs another sip of it and, otherwise, guarding against catastrophic spillage that might irreparably contaminate the ship.”

Charlotte was uncharacteristically restrained and unwilling to play.

Marty worried about what psychological scars their ordeal might have left in her—and what additional trouble and trauma might be ahead of them.

In the back seat, Emily sat behind Karl Clocker, Marty behind Charlotte, and Paige between them. Emily was not merely quiet but totally silent, and Marty worried about her too.

Out of Mammoth Lakes on Route 203 and south on 395, progress was slow. Two or three inches of snow were on the ground, and the blizzard was in full howl.

Clocker and Paige drank coffee, and the girls had hot chocolate. The aromas should have been appealing, but they increased Marty’s queasiness.

He was allowed apple juice. From the convenience store, Paige had purchased a six-pack of juice in cans.

“It’s the only thing you might be able to hold in your stomach,” Clocker said. “And even if it makes you gag, you’ve got to take as much of it as you can because, with that wound, you’re sure as hell dehydrating dangerously.”

Marty was so shaky that, even with his right hand, he couldn’t hold the juice without spilling it. Paige put a straw in it, held it for him, and blotted his chin when he dribbled.

He felt helpless. He wondered if he was more seriously wounded than they had told him or than they realized.

Intuitively, he sensed he was dying—but he didn’t know if that was an accurate perception or the curse of a writer’s imagination.

The night was filled with white flakes, as if the day had not merely faded but shattered into an infinitude of pieces that would drift down forever through an unending darkness.

Over the chittering of the tire chains and the grumble of the engine, as they descended from the Sierras in a train of cars behind a snowplow and cinder truck, Clocker told them about the Network.

It was an alliance of powerful people in government, business, law-enforcement, and the media, who were brought together by a shared perception that traditional Western democracy was an inefficient and inevitably catastrophic system by which to order society. They were convinced that the vast majority of citizens were self-indulgent, sensation-seeking, void of spiritual values, greedy, lazy, envious, racist, and woefully ignorant on virtually all issues of importance.

“They believe,” Clocker said, “that recorded history proves the masses have always been irresponsible and civilization has progressed only by luck and by the diligent efforts of a few visionaries.”

“Do they think this idea’s new?” Paige asked scornfully. “Have they heard of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tsetung? ”

“What they think’s new,” Clocker said, “is that we’ve reached an age when the technological underpinnings of society are so complex and so vulnerable because of this complexity that civilization—in fact, the planet itself—can’t survive if government makes decisions based on the whims and selfish motivations of the masses that pull the levers in the voting booths.”

“Crap,” Paige said.

Marty would have seconded her opinion if he’d felt strong enough to join the discussion. But he had only enough energy to suck at the apple juice and swallow it.

“What they’re really about,” Clocker said, “is brute power. The only thing new about them, regardless of what they think, is they’re working together from different extremes of the political spectrum. The people who want to ban Huckleberry Finn from libraries and the people who want to ban books by Anne Rice may seem to be motivated by different concerns but they’re spiritual brothers and sisters.”

“Sure,” Paige said. “They share the same motivation—the desire not merely to control what other people do but what they think.”

“The most radical environmentalists, those who want to reduce the population of the world by extreme measures within a decade or two, because they think the planet’s ecology is in danger, are in some ways simpatico with the people who’d like to reduce the world’s population drastically just because they feel there are too many black and brown people in it.”

Paige said, “An organization of such extremes can’t hold together for long.”

“I agree,” Clocker said. “But if they want power badly enough, total power, they might work together long enough to seize it. Then, when they’re in control, they’ll turn their guns on each other and catch the rest of us in the cross-fire.”

“How big an organization are we talking about?” she asked.

After a hesitation, Clocker said, “Big.”

Marty sucked on the straw, exceedingly grateful for the level of civilization that allowed for the sophisticated integration of farming, food-processing, packaging, marketing, and distribution of a product as self-indulgent as cool, sweet apple juice.

“The Network directors feel modern technology embodies a threat to humanity,” Clocker explained, switching the pounding windshield wipers to a slower speed, “but they aren’t against employing the cutting edge of that technology in the pursuit of power.”

The development of a completely controllable force of clones to serve as the singularly obedient police and soldiers of the next millennium was only one of a multitude of research programs intended to help bring on the new world, though it was one of the first to bear fruit. Alfie. The first individual of the first—or Alpha—generation of operable clones.

Because society was riddled with incorrect thinkers in positions of authority, the first clones were to be employed to assassinate leaders in business, government, media, and education who were too retrograde in their attitudes to be persuaded of the need for change. The clone was not a real person but more or less a machine made of flesh; therefore, it was an ideal assassin. It had no awareness of who had created and instructed it, so it couldn’t betray its handlers or expose the conspiracy it served.

Clocker downshifted as the train of vehicles slowed on a particularly snowswept incline.

He said, “Because it isn’t burdened by religion, philosophy, any system of beliefs, a family, or a past, there isn’t much danger that a clone assassin will begin to doubt the morality of the atrocities it commits, develop a conscience, or show any trace of free will that might interfere with its performance of its assignments.”

“But something sure went wrong with Alfie,” Paige said.

“Yeah. And we’ll never know exactly what.”

Why did it look like me? Marty wanted to ask, but instead his head lolled onto Paige’s shoulder and he lost consciousness.

A hall of mirrors in a carnival funhouse. Frantically seeking a way out. Reflections gazing back at him with anger, envy, hatred, failing to mimic his own expressions and movements, stepping out of one looking-glass after another, pursuing him, an ever-growing army of Martin Stillwaters, so like him on the outside, so dark and cold on the inside. Now ahead of him as well, reaching out from the mirrors past which he runs and into which he blunders, grasping at him, all of them speaking in a single voice: I need my life.

The mirrors shattered as one, and he woke.

Lamplight.

Shadowy ceiling.

Lying in bed.

Cold and hot, shivering and sweating.

He tried to sit up. Couldn’t.

“Honey?”

Barely enough strength to turn his head.

Paige. In a chair. Beside the bed.

Another bed beyond her. Shapes under blankets. The girls. Sleeping.

Drapes over the windows. Night at the edges of the drapes. She smiled. “You with me, baby?”

He tried to lick his lips. They were cracked. His tongue was dry, furry.

She took a can of apple juice from a plastic ice bucket in which it was chilling, lifted his head off the pillow, and guided the straw between his lips.

After drinking, he managed to say, “Where?”

“A motel in Bishop.”

“Far enough?”

“For now, it has to be,” she said.

“Him?”

“Clocker? He’ll be back.”

He was dying of thirst. She gave him more juice.

“Worried,” he whispered.

“Don’t. Don’t worry. It’s okay now.”

“Him.”

“Clocker?” she asked.

He nodded.

“We can trust him,” she said.

He hoped she was right.

Even drinking exhausted him. He lowered his head onto the pillow again.

Her face was like that of an angel. It faded away.

Escaping from the hall of mirrors into a long black tunnel. Light at the far end, hurrying toward it, footsteps behind, a legion in pursuit of him, gaining on him, the men from out of the mirrors. The light is his salvation, an exit from the funhouse. He bursts out of the tunnel, into the brightness, which turns out to be the field of snow in front of the abandoned church, where he runs toward the front doors with Paige and the girls, The Other behind them, and a shot explodes, a lance of ice pierces his shoulder, the ice turns to fire, fire—

The pain was unbearable.

His vision was blurred with tears. He blinked, desperate to know where he was.

The same bed, the same room.

The blankets had been pulled aside.

He was naked to the waist. The bandage was gone.

Another explosion of pain in his shoulder wrung a scream from him. But he was not strong enough to scream, and the cry issued as a soft, “Ahhhhhh.”

He blinked away more tears.

The drapes were still closed over the windows. Daylight had replaced darkness at the edges.

Clocker loomed over him. Doing something to his shoulder.

At first, because the pain was excruciating, he thought Clocker was trying to kill him. Then he saw Paige with Clocker and knew that she would not let anything bad happen.

She tried to explain something to him, but he only caught a word here and there: “sulfa powder . . . antibiotic . . . penicillin . . .”

They bandaged his shoulder again.

Clocker gave him an injection in his good arm. He watched. With all of his other pains, he couldn’t feel the prick of the needle.

For a while he was in a hall of mirrors again.

When he found himself in the motel bed once more, he turned his head and saw Charlotte and Emily sitting on the edge of the adjacent bed, watching over him. Emily was holding Peepers, the rock on which she had painted a pair of eyes, her pet.

Both girls looked terribly solemn.

He managed to smile at them.

Charlotte got off the bed, came to him, kissed his sweaty face.

Emily kissed him, too, and then she put Peepers in his good right hand. He managed to close his fingers around it.

Later, drifting up from dreamless sleep, he heard Clocker and Paige talking:

“. . . don’t think it’s safe to move him,” Paige said.

“You have to,” Clocker said. “We’re not far enough away from Mammoth Lakes, and there are only so many roads we could’ve taken.”

“You don’t know anyone’s looking for us.”

“You’re right, I don’t. But it’s a safe bet. Sooner or later someone will be looking—and probably for the rest of our lives.”

He drifted out and in, out and in, and when he saw Clocker at the bedside again, he said, “Why?”

“The eternal question,” Clocker said, and smiled.

Refining the eternal question, Marty said, “Why you?”

Clocker nodded. “You’d wonder, of course. Well . . . I was never one of them. They made the serious mistake of thinking I was a true believer. All my life I’ve wanted adventure, heroics, but it never seemed in the cards for me. Then this. Figured if I played along, the day would come when I’d have a chance to do serious damage to the Network if not vaporize it, pow, like a plasma-beam weapon.”

“Thank you,” Marty said, feeling consciousness slip away and wanting to express his gratitude while he still could.

“Hey, we’re still not out of the woods yet,” Clocker said.

When Marty regained consciousness, he wasn’t sweating or shivering, but he still felt weak.

They were in a car, on a lonely highway at sunset. Paige was driving, and he was belted in the front passenger seat.

She said, “Are you okay?”

“Better,” he said, and his voice was less shaky than it had been for a while. “Thirsty.”

“There’s some apple juice on the floor between your feet. I’ll find a place to pull over.”

“No. I can get it,” he said, not really sure that he could.

As he bent forward, reaching to the floor with his right hand, he realized that his left arm was in a sling. He managed to get hold of a can and yank it loose of the six-pack to which it was connected. He braced it between his knees, pulled the ring-tab, and opened it.

The juice was barely chilled, but nothing ever tasted better—partly because he had managed to get it for himself without help. He finished the entire can in three long swallows.

When he turned his head, he saw Charlotte and Emily slumped in their seatbelts, snoozing in the back.

“They’ve hardly gotten any sleep for the last couple of nights,” Paige said. “Bad dreams. And worried about you. But I guess being on the move makes them feel safer, and the motion of the car helps.”

“Nights? Plural?” He knew they had fled Mammoth Lakes Tuesday night. He assumed it was Wednesday. “What sunset is that?”

“Friday’s,” she said.

He had been out of it for almost three days.

He looked around at the vast expanse of plains swiftly fading into the nightfall. “Where are we?”

“Nevada. Route Thirty-one south of Walker Lane. We’ll pick up Highway Ninety-five and drive north to Fallon. We’ll stay at a motel there tonight.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Wyoming, if you’re up to it.”

“I’ll be up to it. I guess there’s a reason for Wyoming?”

“Karl knows a place we can stay there.” When he asked her about the car, which he had never seen before, she said, “Karl again. Like the sulfa powder and the penicillin I’ve been treating you with. He seems to know where to get whatever he needs. He’s some character.”

“I don’t even really know him,” Marty said, reaching down for another can of apple juice, “but I love him like a brother.”

He popped open the can and drank at least one-third of it. He said, “I like his hat too.”

Paige laughed out of all proportion to the feeble humor of the remark, but Marty laughed with her.

“God,” she said, driving north through gray, unpopulated land, “I love you, Marty. If you had died, I’d never have forgiven you.”

That night they took two rooms at the motel in Fallon, using a false name and paying cash in advance. They had a dinner of pizza and Pepsi in the motel. Marty was starved, but two pieces of pizza filled him.

While they ate, they played a game of Look Who’s the Monkey Now, in which the purpose was to think of all the words for foods that began with the letter P. The girls weren’t in their best playing form. In fact, they were so subdued that Marty worried about them.

Maybe they were just tired. After dinner, in spite of their nap in the car, Charlotte and Emily were asleep within seconds of putting heads to pillows.

They left the door open between the adjoining rooms. Karl Clocker had provided Paige with an Uzi submachine gun which had been illegally converted for full automatic fire. They kept it on the nightstand within easy reach.

Paige and Marty shared a bed. She stretched out to his right, so she could hold his good hand.

As they talked, he discovered that she had learned the answer to the question he’d never had a chance to ask Karl Clocker: Why did it look like me?

One of the most powerful men in the Network, primary owner of a media empire, had lost a four-year-old son to cancer. As the boy lay dying at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, five years ago, blood and bone-marrow samples had been taken from him because it was his father’s emotional decision that the Alpha-series clones should be developed from his lost boy’s genetic material. If functional clones could be made a reality, they would be a lasting monument to his son.

“Jesus, that’s sick,” Marty said. “What father would think a race of genetically engineered killers might be a suitable memorial? God Almighty.”

“God had nothing to do with it,” Paige said.

The Network representative assigned to obtain those blood and marrow samples from the lab had gotten confused and wound up with Marty’s samples instead, which had been taken to determine whether he would be a suitable donor for Charlotte if she proved in need of a transplant.

“And they want to rule the world,” Marty said, amazed. He was still far from recuperated and in need of more sleep, but he had to know one more thing before he drifted off. “If they only started engineering Alfie five years ago ... how can he be a grown man?”

Paige said, “According to Clocker, they ‘improved’ on the basic human design in several ways.”

They had given Alfie an unusual metabolism and tremendously accelerated healing power. They also engineered his phenomenally rapid maturation with human growth hormone and raised him from fetus to thirtyish adult with nonstop intravenous feeding and electrically stimulated muscle development over a period of less than two years.

“Like a damned hydroponic vegetable or something,” she said.

“Dear Jesus,” Marty said, and glanced at the nightstand to make sure the Uzi was there. “Didn’t they have a few doubts when this clone didn’t resemble the boy?”

“For one thing, the boy had been wasted by cancer between the ages of two and four. They didn’t know what he might have looked like if he’d been healthy during those years. And besides, they’d edited the genetic material so extensively they couldn’t be sure the Alpha generation would resemble the boy all that much anyway.

“He was taught language, mathematics, and other things largely by sophisticated subliminal input while he was asleep and growing.”

She had more to tell him, but her voice faded gradually as he surrendered to a sleep filled with greenhouses in which human forms floated in tanks of viscous liquid . . .

... they are connected to tangles of plastic tubing and life-support machines, growing rapidly from fetuses to full adulthood, all doubles for him, and suddenly the eyes click open on a thousand of them at once, along rows and rows of tanks in building after building, and they speak as with a single voice: I need my life.

8

The log cabin was on several acres of woodlands, a few miles from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which had yet to enjoy its first snow of the season. Karl’s directions were excellent, and they found the place with little difficulty, arriving late Saturday afternoon.

The cabin needed to be cleaned and aired-out, but the pantry was stocked with supplies. When the rust had been run out of the pipes, the water from the tap tasted clean and sweet.

On Monday, a Range Rover turned off the county road and drove to their front door. They watched it tensely from the front windows. Paige held the Uzi with the safety off, and she didn’t relax until she saw that it was Karl who got out of the driver’s door.

He had arrived in time to have lunch with them, which Marty had prepared with the girls’ help. It consisted of reconstituted eggs, canned sausages, and biscuits from a tin.

As the five of them ate at the large pine table in the kitchen, Karl presented them with their new identities. Marty was surprised by the number of documents. Birth certificates for all four of them. A high school diploma for Paige from a school in Newark, New Jersey, and one for Marty from a school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. An honorable discharge from the United States Army for Marty, issued after three years of service. They had Wyoming driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, and more.

Their new name was Gault. Ann and John Gault. Charlotte’s birth certificate said her name was Rebecca Vanessa Gault, and Emily was now Suzie Lori Gault.

“We got to choose our own first and second names,” Charlotte said with more animation than she’d shown in days. “I’m Rebecca like in the movie, a woman of beauty and mystery, haunting Manderley forever.”

“We didn’t exactly get to pick what names we wanted,” Emily said. “We didn’t get first choice, for sure.”

Marty had been deep in wounded sleep back in Bishop, California, when the names had been selected. “What was your first choice?” he asked Emily.

“Bob,” she said.

Marty laughed, and Charlotte giggled explosively.

“I like Bob,” Emily said.

“Well, you have to admit it isn’t really appropriate,” Marty said.

“Suzie Lori is cute enough to puke over,” Charlotte said.

“Well, if I can’t be Bob,” Emily said, “then I want to be Suzie Lori, and everyone has to always use both names, never just Suzie.”

While the girls washed the dishes, Karl brought in a suitcase from the Range Rover, opened it on the table, and discussed the contents with Marty and Paige. There were scores of computer discs containing Network files, which Karl had secretly copied over the years, plus at least a hundred microcassette tapes of conversations that he had recorded, including one at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Dana Point that involved Oslett and a man named Peter Waxhill.

“That one,” Karl said, “will explain the entire clone crisis in a nutshell.” He began returning the items to the suitcase. “These are all copies, the discs and the cassettes. You’ve got two full sets. And I’ve got other duplicates besides.”

Marty didn’t understand. “Why do you want us to have these?”

“You’re a good writer,” Karl said. “I’ve read a couple of your books since Tuesday night. Take all this, write up an explanation of it, an explanation of what happened to you and your family. I’m going to leave you the name of the owner of a major newspaper and a man high in the FBI. I’m confident that neither of them is part of the Network—because both of them were on Alfie’s list of future targets. Send your explanation and one set of discs and tapes to each of them. Mail it blind, of course, no return address, and from another state, not Wyoming.”

“Shouldn’t you do this?” Paige asked.

“I’ll try again if you don’t get the kind of reaction I expect you will. But it’s better coming from you first. Your disappearance, the action in Mission Viejo, the murders of your parents, the bodies I’ve made sure they found in that bell tower near your folks’ cabin—all of that has kept your story hot. The Network has made sure it’s kept hot, ’cause they’re desperate for someone to find you for them. Let’s use your notoriety to make it all backfire on them if we can.”

The day was cool but not cold. The sky was a crystalline blue.

Marty and Karl went for a walk along the perimeter of the woods, always keeping the cabin in sight.

“This Alfie,” Marty said.

“What about him?”

“Was he the only one?”

“The first and only operative clone. Others are being grown.”

“We have to stop that.”

“We will.”

“Okay. Suppose we blow the Network apart,” Marty wondered. “Their house of cards collapses. Afterward . . . can we ever go back home, resume our lives?”

Karl shook his head. “I don’t intend to. Don’t dare. Some of them will slip the noose. And these are people who hold a grudge from Sunday to Hell and back. Good haters. You ruin their lives or even just the lives of people in their families, and sooner or later they’ll kill all of you.”

“Then the Gault name isn’t just temporary cover?”

“It’s the best ID you can get. As good as real paper. I got it from sources the Network doesn’t know about. No one will ever see through this ID . . . or track you down by it.”

“My career, income from my books . . .”

“Forget it,” Karl said. “You’re on a new voyage of discovery, outward to worlds unknown.”

“And you’ve got a new name too?”

“Yes.”

“None of my business what it is, huh?”

“Exactly.”

Karl left that same afternoon, an hour before dusk.

As they accompanied him to the Range Rover, he withdrew an envelope from an inside pocket of his tweed jacket and handed it to Paige, explaining that it was the grant deed to the cabin and the land on which it stood.

“I bought and prepared two getaway properties, one at each end of the country, so I’d be prepared for this day when it came. Owned them both under untraceable false names. I’ve transferred this one to Ann and John Gault, since I can only use one of them.”

He seemed embarrassed when Paige hugged him.

“Karl,” Marty said, “what would have happened to us without you? We owe you everything.”

The big man was actually blushing. “You’d have done all right, somehow. You’re survivors. Anything I’ve done for you, it’s only what anyone would have.”

“Not these days,” Marty said.

“Even these days,” Karl said, “there are more good people than not. I really believe that. I have to.”

At the Range Rover, Charlotte and Emily kissed Karl goodbye because they all knew, without having to say it, that they would never see him again.

Emily gave him Peepers. “You need someone,” she said. “You’re all alone. Besides, he’ll never get used to calling me Suzie Lori. He’s your pet now.”

“Thank you, Emily. I’ll take good care of him.”

When Karl got behind the wheel and closed the door, Marty leaned in the open window. “If we wreck the Network, you think they’ll ever put it back together again?”

“It or something like it,” Karl said without hesitation.

Unsettled, Marty said, “I guess we’ll know if they do ... when they cancel all elections.”

“Oh, elections would never be canceled, at least not in any way that was ever apparent,” Karl said as he started the Rover. “They’d go on just as usual, with competing political parties, conventions, debates, bitter campaigns, all the hoopla and shouting. But every one of the candidates would be selected from Network loyalists. If they ever do take over, John, only they will know.”

Marty was suddenly as cold as he had ever been in the blizzard on Tuesday night.

Karl raised one hand in the split-finger greeting that Marty recognized from Star Trek. “Live long and prosper, ” he said, and left them.

Marty stood in the gravel driveway, watching the Rover until it reached the county road, turned left, and dwindled out of sight.

9

That December and throughout the following year, when the headlines screamed of the Network scandal, treason, political conspiracy, assassination, and one world crisis after another, John and Ann Gault didn’t pay as much attention to the newspapers and the television news as they had expected they would. They had new lives to build, which was not a simple undertaking.

Ann cut her blond hair short and dyed it brown. Before meeting any of their neighbors living in the scattered cabins and ranches of that rural area, John grew a beard; not to his surprise, it came in more than half gray, and a lot of gray began to show up on his head, as well.

A simple tint changed Rebecca’s hair from blond to auburn, and Suzie Lori was sufficiently transformed with a new and much shorter style. Both girls were growing fast. Time would swiftly blur the resemblance between them and whoever they once might have been.

Remembering to use new names was easy compared to creating and committing to memory a simple but credible false past. They made a game of it, rather like Look Who’s the Monkey Now.

The nightmares were persistent. Though the enemy they had known was as comfortable in daylight as not, they irrationally viewed each nightfall with an uneasiness that people had felt in ancient and more superstitious times. And sudden noises made everybody jump.

Christmas Eve had been the first time that John dared to hope they would really be able to imagine a new life and find happiness again. It was then that Suzie Lori inquired about the popcorn.

“What popcorn?” John asked.

“Santa’s evil twin put ten pounds in the microwave,” she said, “even though that much corn wouldn’t fit. But even if it would fit, what happened when it started to pop?”

That night, story hour was held for the first time in more than three weeks. Thereafter, it became routine.

In late January, they felt safe enough to register Rebecca and Suzie Lori in the public school system.

By spring, there were new friends and a growing store of Gault-family memories that were not fabricated.

Because they had seventy thousand in cash and owned their humble house outright, they were under little pressure to find work. They also had four boxes full of the first editions of the early novels of Martin Stillwater. The cover of Time magazine had asked a question that would never be answered—Where is Martin Stillwater?—and first editions that had once been worth a couple of hundred dollars each on the collectors’ market had begun selling, by spring, for five times that price; they would probably continue to appreciate faster than blue-chip investments in the years to come. Sold one or two at a time, in far cities, they would keep the family nest egg fat during lean years.

John presented himself to new neighbors and acquaintances as a former insurance salesman from New York City. He claimed to have come into a substantial though not enormous inheritance. He was indulging a lifelong dream of living in a rural setting, struggling to be a poet. “If I don’t start selling some poems in a few years, maybe I’ll write a novel,” he sometimes said, “and if that doesn’t turn out right—then I’ll start worrying.”

Ann was content to be seen as a housewife; however, freed from the pressures of the past—troubled clients and freeway commuting—she rediscovered a talent for drawing that she had not tapped since high school. She began doing illustrations for the poems and stories in her husband’s ring-bound notebook of original compositions, which he had been writing for years: Stories for Rebecca and Suzie Lori.

They had lived in Wyoming five years when Santa’s Evil Twin by John Gault with illustrations by Ann Gault became a smash Christmas bestseller. They allowed no jacket photo of author and artist. They politely declined offers of promotional tours and interviews, preferring a quiet life and the chance to do more books for children.

The girls remained healthy, grew tall, and Rebecca began selectively dating boys, all of whom Suzie Lori found wanting in one way or another.

Sometimes John and Ann felt they lived too much in a fantasy, and they made an effort to keep up with current events, watching for signs and portents that they didn’t even like to discuss with each other. But the world was endlessly troubled and tedious. Too few people seemed able to imagine life without the crushing hand of one government or another, one war or another, one form of hatred or another, so the Gaults always lost interest in the news and returned to the world they imagined for themselves.

One day a paperback novel arrived in the mail. The plain brown envelope bore no return address, and no note of any kind was included with the book. It was a science-fiction novel set in the far future, when humankind had conquered the stars but not all of its problems. The title was The Clone Rebellion. John and Ann read it. They found it to be admirably well-imagined, and they regretted that they would never have the opportunity to express their admiration to the author.