One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 47

ALTHOUGH POLLY wasn't a Pollyanna, she liked most people she met, made friends easily, and seldom made enemies, but when the service-station attendant came up to her, grinning like a jack-in-the-box jester with a ticklish spring up its butt, saying, "Hi, my name's Earl Bockman and my wife's Maureen, we own this place, been here twenty years," she made an immediate judgment that he wasn't going to be one of the people she liked.

Tall, pleasant in appearance, his breath smelling of spearmint, looking freshly scrubbed and shaved, in neatly laundered clothes, he possessed many of the fundamentals necessary to make a good first impression, and though a tragic Pagliacci-smiling-through-heartbreak expression might have provided him a certain additional melancholy appeal, this toothy display was classic mad-clown grin from molar to molar.

"I'm originally from Wyoming," Earl said, "but Maureen is from around these parts, and now I've been here so long, it seems like I'm a native, too. Every last man, woman, and child in the county knows Earl and Maureen Bockman." He seemed to feel that he had to convince them of his bona fides before they would trust the purity of the fuel that he was selling. "Just say the names Earl and Maureen, and anyone will tell you that's the folks who own the little pump-and-grocery out at the federal-highway crossroads. And they'll probably tell you Maureen is a peach, too, because she's just as sweet as they come, and what I’ll tell you is I'm the luckiest man ever stood before an altar and took the vows, and never regretted it one minute since."

He babbled half this astonishing speech through his toothpaste-advertisement smile, wrapping the grin in and around the rest of it when punctuation gave him pause, and Polly was ready to bet ten thousand dollars against a pack of Hostess Cup Cakes that poor Maureen lay dead inside the store, perhaps strangled by Earl's bare hands, perhaps bludgeoned with an economy-size can of pork and beans, perhaps staked through the heart with a fossilized Slim Jim sausage that had hung neglected on a snack rack for fifteen years.

The insistent smile and the inappropriate deluge of personal chatter was enough to win Earl a place in Polly's let-him-vote-but-don't-let-him-run-for-President file, but there was also the matter of his wristwatch. The face of this unusual timepiece was black and blank: no hour numbers, no minute checks, no hands. It might have been one of those inconvenient digital chronometers that gave you the time in a luminous read-out only when you pushed a button on the casing; but she suspected that it wasn't a watch at all. From the moment that he arrived at the service island, Earl contrived to turn his body and his right arm to direct the numberless black face toward Cass, then toward Polly, and then toward Cass again, back and forth, while further contriving to glance repeatedly and furtively at the gadget in the inadequate light of the red and amber Christmas bulbs. If he'd ever taken a home-correspondence course in successful furtive behavior, he had wasted his money. Polly first thought that the thing on his wrist must be a camera, that he must be some brand of pervert who secretly took pictures of women for whatever sick purpose, but though his nervous folksiness definitely screamed PERVERT, she didn't believe that anyone had yet invented a camera that could see through women's clothing.

Cass liked more people than Polly did, and if she had popped out of Mom's oven with a twin whose personality had been identical to her own, she would have been a Pollyanna, trusting implicitly and equally in nuns and convicted murderers. During the twenty-seven years that they had lived together this side of the placenta, however, Cass's optimism had been tempered by Polly's more-reasoned expectations of people and fate. Indeed, Cass had grown so street-smart that by the time Karl had spoken only a single sentence, she cocked an eyebrow and tweaked her mouth in a Freak alert! expression that Polly had no difficulty reading.

Earl might have chattered at them until either he or one of them fell dead from natural causes, all the while not-so-secretly aiming his curious wristwatch at them — which suddenly seemed reminiscent of the way airport-security personnel sometimes used a handheld metal-detection wand to scan a traveler who had more than once failed to pass through the standard gate without setting off an alarm. But as Earl babbled, Cass examined the antique pump marked DIESEL, and when she found its workings to be more arcane than any she had previously encountered, she asked for assistance.

When Earl turned to the pump, Polly thought he looked baffled, as though he were no more familiar with its operation than was Cass. Frowning, he stepped to the pump, put one hand on it, stood as if in profound thought, almost as if through some sixth sense he were divining the workings of the machinery, soon broke again into that crackbrained-clown grin, and said cheerily, "Fill 'er up?" Assured that they wanted the tank topped off, he cranked a handle on the pump, disengaged the hose spout from the nozzle boot, and turned toward the Fleetwood, whereupon both he and his smile froze.

As it became clear that this seasoned pump jockey wasn't sure where to service the big motor home, Cass telegraphed What's wrong with this bozo? by way of a glance at her sister. She took the hose from Earl with the polite explanation that she, being a fussbudget loath to get a scratch on the paint around the fuel port, would be happier if she could tend to the task herself.

Polly flipped open the hinged lid of the port, twisted the cap off the tank, and stepped back as her sister jammed the spout into the Fleetwood, all the while surreptitiously keeping an eye on Earl, who, thinking that she was preoccupied, boldly aimed his trick watch at two windows of the motor home, twice glancing at the face of the timepiece as though reading something in its glossy black surface— which made him unique among men, who invariably checked out Polly's ass when they thought she wasn't looking, even gay men burning not with desire but with envy.

She might have judged him to be a harmless crank, a once-proud gasoline merchant made dolly by the vast open spaces of Nevada, by the frighteningly huge sky that hung so fiercely starred over the black land, by too little human contact or by too much contact with too many prairie rustics, or even by Maureen, that sweet peach. But even cranks, eccentrics, and certifiably insane men checked out her butt when they had a chance, and the more often she saw that teeth-drying grin of his, the less it reminded her of a clown, psychopathic or otherwise, and the more she flashed to the velociraptors in those Jurassic Park movies. The thought had formed, however odd, that Earl was something she had never before encountered.

Out of the night came Old Yeller, running, agitated as she had never been before, straight to Polly or rather straight to Polly's left sandal, which she seized by the acrylic heel and which she tried to shake as a terrier might shake a rat. Polly blurted out the name of a famous movie star she'd known when married to the film producer Julian Flackberg; the star was a dreadful actor as well as a deeply vile human being, and sometimes Polly used his famous name in place of an obscenity, usually in place of a four-letter word meaning "dung." Startled, Cass called to the dog, Polly tried to pull her foot away without hurting either the animal or herself, Old Yeller likewise seemed to be trying to avoid causing injury as she vigorously chewed on the footwear without even the softest of growls, and Smilin' Earl Bockman, believing himself to be unobserved in this uproar, aimed the wristwatch at the pooch and peered anxiously at the timepiece, as if it were an analytic device that could tell him whether or not the animal was rabid.

In trying to yank her foot away from Old Yeller, Polly pulled it out of the sandal, and the dog at once made off with the prize, stopping at the front corner of the motor home to look back and to adjust her grip until the shoe dangled from her mouth by one thin strap. The dog swung the sandal teasingly back and forth. Cass said, "She's inviting you to play," and Polly said, "Yeah, well, the way I interpret it, even cute as she is, she's asking me to drop-kick her over that string of Christmas lights," and for once Earl's maniacal smile almost seemed appropriate.

With the hose nozzle set securely in the fuel port and with at least five minutes required to fill the big tank, Cass's hands were free, and Polly had complete confidence in her sister's ability to deal with the likes of Earl Bockmnn, even if he might have this day received word from the Guinness Book of World Records that he had displaced the late Jeffrey Dahmer in the category of Most Severed Heads Kept in a Single Refrigerator. Hobbling, she pursued Old Yeller around the front of the Fleetwood, to the starboard flank, where the dog bounded through the open door and up the steps, into the motor home.

By the time Polly got inside, the sandal lay discarded on the floor of the lounge, directly under the only interior light that had been left burning, while in the kitchen area just beyond the lounge, the dog sprang onto the dining-nook booth, craned her neck across the table, and snatched the packet of playing cards in her teeth. As Polly picked up the sandal, Old Yeller returned to the lounge, shook the packet until the lid flap came untucked, and scattered the cards across the carpeted floor.

As one who had been raised in a rural community where cows and hogs and chickens provided examples of deportment and dignity seldom matched by human beings, as one who'd worked in a multimillion-dollar stage show where the two elephants, four chimps, six dogs, and even the python had been more amenable than sixty-six of the seventy-four dancers in the cast, Polly considered herself an animal lover, and she also qualified as an astute enough observer of animal conduct to know that Old Yeller was acting out of character and that something uncanny was happening. She didn't scold, therefore, and didn't begin at once to clean up the mess, as ordinarily she would have done, but gave the dog room and dropped to her knees to watch.

Half the cards had spilled faceup on the floor, and Old Yeller began to paw through these, making selections frantically and yet with clear deliberation, until she sorted out two clubs, two hearts, and one spade. The suits of the chosen cards were of no consequence, but the numbers on them were meaningful, because using her nose and her paws, the dog lined them up side by side in correct numerical order—3 of spades, 4 of clubs, 5 of hearts, 6 of clubs, 7 of hearts — and then grinned at Polly expectantly.

Gymnastic dogs balancing on rolling beachballs and walking on parallel bars, pyrophilic dogs leaping through flaming hoops, tiny dogs riding the backs of big dogs as those mounts raced and leaped through obstacle courses, mortified dogs in pink tutus dancing on their hind feet: In Vegas, Polly had seen trained dogs do impressive stunts, but she had never until now seen any mutt exhibit advanced numerical aptitude, so even as she watched Old Yeller paw the 6 of clubs into place and nose the 7 of hearts in line immediately after it, she muttered the name of the loathsome movie star not once but twice, made eye contact with this furry mathematician, shivered with a delicious sense of wonder, and said what Lassie must have been sick to death of hearing during her long years with Timmy on the farm: "You're trying to tell me something, aren't you, girl?"

INTENDING NO OFFENSE to Romulus, Tarzan, and HAL 9000, Cass judged Earl Bockman's social skills to be worse than those of a child nursed in infancy by wolves, subsequently adopted by a tribe of apes, and later educated entirely by machines.

He was stiff. Self-conscious. Fidgety. His facial expressions were seldom appropriate to what he happened to be saying, and every time he appeared to recognize an instance of this inappropriateness, he resorted to the same cartoon-cat-caught-at-the-canary-cage smile that he seemed to think was folksy and reassuring.

Worse yet, Earl was a droner. Each pause in conversation longer than two seconds made him nervous. He rushed to fill every brief silence with the first thing that came into his head, which reliably proved to be something tedious.

Cass decided that Maureen, Earl's wife and reputed peach, must be either a saint or as dumb as a carrot. No woman would stay with this man unless she was a religiosity who hoped to purify her soul through suffering or had no detectable cerebral function.

Leaning against the motor home, waiting for the tank to fill, Cass felt as if she were a condemned prisoner with her back pressed to the executioner's wall. Earl was a one-man firing squad, the bullets were his words, and boredom the method of execution.

And what was the story with the watch? No better skilled at surreptitious action than at conversation, Earl aimed the gadget at various points in the night around them. He even dropped to one knee to tie a shoelace that appeared to be tied perfectly well before he decided to tend to it, obviously as an excuse to direct the lace of the wristwatch toward the space under the Fleetwood.

Maybe he suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Maybe he was compelled to aim his wristwatch ceaselessly at people and things, just as some obsessives washed their hands four hundred times a day, and just as others counted the socks in their dresser drawers or the plates in the kitchen cupboards once every hour.

At first he'd been a little bit of a sad case, but then quickly he'd become amusing.

He wasn't amusing anymore.

Increasingly, he gave Cass the creeps.

During the three years she'd been married to Don Flackberg — film producer, younger brother of Julian — Cass moved in the highest levels of Hollywood society, where she had eventually calculated that of the entire pool of successful actors, directors, studio executives, and producers, 6.5 percent were sane and good, 4.5 percent were sane and evil, and 89 percent were insane and evil. In accumulating the experience to make this assessment, she had learned to recognize a series of eye expressions, facial ticks, and body-language quirks, as well as other physical and behavioral tells that unfailingly alerted her to the maddest of the mad and to the most monstrously wicked of the wicked before she fell prey to them. Following three minutes of observation, she believed that Earl Bockman, a simple pump jockey and grocer, was every bit as insane and evil as any of the richest and most highly honored members of the film community whom she had ever known.

IN THE DARKNESS behind the crossroads store, between the moon-drizzled faux Corvette and the Explorer stuffed with corpses, Curtis keeps a watch on the back door of the building and on both the north and the south corners, around either of which epic trouble might come at any moment.

Most of his attention, however, is reserved for the boy-dog bond that he's exploiting now more intensely than ever before. He is here with a dry breeze whispering through the prairie grass at his back, but he is also — and more completely — with his sister-become inside the motor home, dazzling Polly with canine arithmetic and then with an instrument more complicated than playing cards.

When he's sure that Polly understands his message, that she is alarmed, and that she'll act to save herself and her sister, Curtis retreats from the dog and from the motor home. Now he lives only here in the warm breath of the prairie, in the cold light of the moon.

These hunters always travel in pairs or squads, never alone. The fact that both of the mom-and-pop cadavers in the SUV were stripped of clothes indicates that in addition to the man out at the pumps, a killer masquerading as the chestnut-haired woman waits in the store.

The Corvette-what-ain't-a-Corvette is roomier than the sports car that it pretends to be. The vehicle can comfortably accommodate four passengers.

Ever hopeful, as he was raised to be, Curtis will operate under the assumption that only two assassins are present at the crossroads. Anyway, if there are four, he has no chance whatsoever of surviving a confrontation. And in that event, he wouldn't know how to fight a quartet of these vicious predators; consequently, faced with four, his only sensible strategy would be to run into the prairie in search of a high cliff or a drowning river, or in pursuit of some other death that might be easier than the one that the killers plan to measure out to him.

Although usually he would avoid a clash with even just two of these hunters — or with one! — he doesn't have the luxury of flight in this case, because he has an obligation to Cass and Polly. He's told them to run, but they might not be permitted to leave if they are thought to harbor him. In that case, he can only distract the enemy from the twins by revealing himself.

Quickly now, into the thick of it, between the meat-wagon Ford Explorer and the extraterrestrial road-burner, to the back door of the building. Try the knob carefully, quietly.

Locked.

Curtis challenges the door, willpower against matter, on the micro scale where will should win — as it won at the back door of the Hammond farmhouse in Colorado, as it won at the door of the SUV on the auto carrier in Utah, and elsewhere.

He has no sixth sense, no superpowers that would make him prime material for a series of comic books portraying him in colorful cape and tights. His main difference lies in his understanding of quantum mechanics, not as it is half understood on this world, but as it is more fully understood on others.

At the fundamental structural level of the universe, matter is energy; everything is energy expressed in myriad forms. Consciousness is the marshaling force that builds all things from this infinite sea of energy, primarily the all-encompassing consciousness of the Creator, the playful Presence in the dog's dreams. But even a mere mortal, having been granted intelligence and consciousness, possesses the power to affect the form and function of matter by a sheer act of will. This isn't the great world-making, galaxy-creating power of the playful Presence, but a humble power with which we can achieve only limited effects.

Even on this world, at its current early stage of development, scientists specializing in quantum mechanics are aware that at the subatomic level, the universe seems to be more like thought than like matter. They also know that their expectations, their thoughts, can affect the outcome of some experiments with elemental particles like electrons and photons. They understand that the universe is not as mechanistic as they once believed, and they have begun to suspect that it exists as an act of will, that this willpower — the awesomely creative consciousness of the playful Presence — is the organizing force within the physical universe, and that this power is reflected in the freedom that each mortal possesses to shape his or her destiny through the exercise of free will.

Curtis is already hip to all this.

Nevertheless, he remains afraid.

Fear is an unavoidable element of the mortal condition. Creation in all its ravishing beauty, with its infinite baroque embellishments and subtle charms, with all the wonders that it offers from both the Maker and the made, with all its velvet mystery and with all the joy we receive from those we love here, so enchants us that we lack the imagination, less than the faith, to envision an even more dazzling world beyond, and therefore even if we believe, we cling tenaciously to this existence, to sweet familiarity, fearful that all conceivable paradises will prove wanting by comparison.

Locked. The back door of the crossroads store is locked.

Then it isn't.

Beyond lies a small storeroom, revealed not by the single bare bulb dangling on a cord at ceiling center, but only by the light that sifts in from another room, around an inner door standing ajar, and dusts this chamber as if with a fine-ground fluorescent powder.

Curtis steps inside. He quietly closes the outer door behind him to prevent the breeze from shutting it with a bang.

Some silences soothe, but this one unnerves. This is the cold steel silence of the guillotine blade poised at the top of its track, with the target neck already inserted through the lunette below, the harvesting basket waiting for the head.

Ever hopeful even in his fear, Curtis eases toward the door that stands two inches ajar.

IN THE BEDROOM of the motor home, Polly grabbed the pump-action, pistol-grip, 12 — gauge shotgun from the mounting brackets at the back of the closet, where it was stored behind the hanging clothes.

The dog watched.

Polly yanked open a dresser drawer and seized a box of shells. She inserted one in the breech, three more in the tube-type magazine.

The dog lost interest in weaponry and began to sniff curiously at the shoes on the closet floor.

In the interest of a snug fit that was flattering to the figure, her white toreador pants had no pockets. Polly tucked three spare shells into her halter top, between her breasts, grateful that nature had given her sufficient cleavage to serve as an ammunition depot.

The dog followed from the bedroom, through the bath, into the kitchen, but then was distracted by a whiff of some tasty treat in the food cupboard.

As Old Yeller sniffed inquisitively at the narrow gap between the cabinet doors, Polly stepped into the lounge and stared down at the laptop computer on the floor. On her return from the bedroom, she'd been half convinced that she'd imagined the business with the dog and the computer; but the proof remained before her, glowing on the screen.

The laptop had been stored on a shelf in the entertainment center, under the TV. After the trick with the cards, the dog had stood on her hind feet, pawing at the shelf, until Polly moved the laptop to the floor, opened it, and switched it on.

Bewildered but game, her sense of wonder surprisingly intact after three years in the wonder-crushing upper echelons of the film industry, Polly had quickly set up the computer, while the dog had raced into the bathroom. Following a clatter, the pooch had returned with Cass’s toothbrush. Using the brush as a stylus, Old Yeller then tapped out a message on the keyboard.

RUM, the dog had typed, whereupon Polly had decided that any dog able to differentiate one playing card from another and possessed of advanced numerical skills ought to be allowed to indulge in an adult beverage if it wanted one, assuming that it could hold its booze and exhibited no tendency to alcoholism. Polly would have prepared Old Yeller a pina colada right then, or a mai tai, thought she suspected that she had lost her mind and that paramedics with psychiatric training, medevacked her to the prairie from the nearest metropolitan center, were even now approaching the Fleetwood with a straitjacket and a drawn dose of Thorazine in a syringe of a size usually employed to treat horses. Unfortunately, she had no rum, only beer and a small collection of fine wines, a fact that she conveyed to the dog along with an apology for being an inadequate hostess.

RUM had proved to be not the wanted word, but an error resulting from the understandable clumsiness of a dog gripping a toothbrush in its mouth as a stylus with which to type on a keyboard. With a whine of frustration but with admirable determination, Old Yeller had tried again: RUN!

So here and now, but a minute after the dog had finished typing, Polly stood staring down at the laptop, on which continued to burn the entire six-line message that had motivated her to race to the bedroom and load the shotguns.

RUM

RUN!

MAN EVIL

ALIEN

EVIL ALIEN

RUM!

On the face of it, the message was absurd, one level of order above meaningless gibberish, and if it had shown up on the screen as if resolving out of the ether or even if it had been typed by a preliterate child, Polly wouldn’t have acted upon it so quickly and might not have gone directly to the shotgun, but she felt justified in taking immediate and drastic action because the message had been typed by a dog with a toothbrush in its mouth! She’d never gone to college, and no doubt she’d lost a fearsome number of brain cells during the three years she spent in Hollywood, and she had no difficulty acknowledging that she was woefully ignorant about a long list of subjects, but she knew a miracle when she saw one, and if a dog typing messages with a toothbrush wasn’t a miracle, then neither was Moses parting the Red Sea nor Lazarus rising from the dead.

Besides, considering his peculiarities, Earl Bockman made more sense as an evil alien than as the bumpkin proprietor of a crossroads store and service station in the great Nevada lonesome. This was one of those seemingly impossible things that you intuitively knew were true the moment that you heard them: such as the recent report that none of the members of the hit rap-music group calling itself Sho Cop Ho Busters could read a musical note of music.

She wasn’t going to rush outside and blow Earl’s head off, if only because even in her fear and excitement, she could appreciate the difficulty of explaining this action in a court of law. She did not, in fact, know quite what she was going to do now that she had the shotgun, but she felt better with the weapon in hand.

A crackling noise caused her to spin around and bring up the 12-gauge, but Old Yeller was the source of the sound. The dog had gotten her head stuck in the empty cheese-popcorn bag that Curtis had left on the floor by the co-pilot’s chair.

Polly plucked the cellophane trap off the dog’s head, revealing a foolish grin, a wildly active tongue, and a popcorn-speckled face that she couldn’t easily relate to the determined messenger of alien doom that had labored so ingeniously over the keyboard. She turned to the computer once more, expecting the screen to be blank, but the exhortation to RUM! still burned in white letters on a blue field with five other lines of urgently conveyed information.

Old Yeller swabbed her snout with a propeller-action tongue that cleaned nose to chin to nose again, and Polly decided not to question miracles, not to dismiss the message because of the unlikely nature of the messenger, but to act, God help her, as the situation appeared to require.

And suddenly she realized: "Where's Curtis?"

The dog pricked her ears and whined.

Carrying the shotgun, Polly went to the door, took a deep breath, as she'd always taken just before she had disembarked, nude, from the flying saucer and had descended the neon stairs in that Las Vegas extravaganza, and she stepped into a prairie night turned as strange as any land reached by rabbit hole.

CURTIS HAMMOND IN COMMANDO MODE, as acutely aware as ever that he's more poet than warrior, concentrates on silence as he silently eases open the storeroom door, concentrates on stealth as stealthily he enters the store itself, concentrates on not screaming and running in terror as, not screaming and running in terror, he proceeds in a crouch along the first aisle, seeking the false mom of mom-and-pop.

The shelves of merchandise follow the rectangular shape of the store; therefore, the aisles are long, and the displays prevent him from seeing the front windows.

Apparently, prairie folk have little concern for a balanced diet, because no fresh fruits or vegetables seem to be sold here, only a variety of packaged goods. Along the back wall stand glass-door coolers stocked with beer, soft drinks, milk, and fruit juice.

At the end of the first aisle, Curtis hesitates, listening for any sound that might reveal the mom's position, but this killer seems to be concentrating on silence as assiduously as is Curtis himself.

Finally he leans forward and peers around the corner, past a display of batteries and butane lighters. This end aisle is short, leading directly to the front of the store, which in total offers only three long aisles formed by two islands of tall shelves.

He can see a portion of one dust-filmed window, but to determine if Cass and Polly have both boarded the Fleetwood, he would have to stand. The banks of shelves are taller than he is, which means if the bad mom is lingering near the front of the store, she won't see him; nevertheless, he remains in a crouch.

Soon he'll announce his presence to distract the pair of hunters and thus give the twins a chance to flee. Success, however, depends on choosing exactly the right moment to stand and reveal himself.

Moving past the batteries and the cigarette lighters, Curtis peeks warily into the middle aisle. Deserted.

He continues to the next aisle-end display — razor blades, nail clippers, penknives, regrettably no serious weaponry — and pauses again to listen.

The pooled silence is too deep, immeasurable fathoms beyond a mere stillness, deeper even than a hush. This deathly quiet makes Curtis want to shout just to prove that he remains among the living. A sudden chill on the nape of the neck. Looking behind himself, toward the fearful expectation of a creeping assassin, he almost cries out with relief when he sees that nothing stalks him. Yet.

He leans past packages of razor blades dangling from display hooks, and surveys the aisle nearest the front of the store, spotting the bad mom at once. She stands a few feet inside the open door, staring toward the pumps outside, and as far as he can tell, she's a ringer for the dead woman tumbled with her husband in the SUV.

More likely than not, these hunters are part of the pack that has been after him since Colorado, although it is possible that they are new to the mission. Because they aren't traveling in the stolen saddlery truck, aren't using local transport of any kind, he doubts that they are the two who, posing as cowboys, tracked him to the truck stop on Wednesday night.

Whether new to the hunt or members of the original pack, they are as violent and as dangerous as all the others, not individuals but members of a killing swarm. Their name is legion.

Drawn by activity at the pumps, the bad mom steps closer to the open door, and then moves all the way onto the threshold. She is now as much out of the store as in it, and she's no longer in a position to catch a glimpse of Curtis from her peripheral vision.

Between Curtis and the front door, on the counter near the cashier's station, a pistol lies in plain sight. Perhaps either the man or the woman now dead in the SUV had time to draw the handgun from under the counter but not enough time to use it. And the bad pop left it behind when he stepped outside to greet the Fleetwood.

The twins are no less endangered just because the hunter went to them unarmed. These are cruel assassins, as quick as vipers striking, more savage than crocodiles two days past their last good meal. They prefer to kill barehanded, though seldom with anything as prosaic as hands, to wade in the wet of death. The twins' beauty, kindness, wit, and high spirits will gain them not one split second of additional life if one of these hunters chooses to destroy them.

Gazing at the weapon on the counter, perhaps forty feet away, Curtis recognizes opportunity when he sees it. He doesn't even need to review his mother's numerous admonitions about the importance of seizing the moment, but sets out at once along the aisle, toward the cashier's station, proceeding in a crouch but otherwise as bold as any death-marked fool in battle who sees incoming tracers in the sky and assumes they are fireworks celebrating his impending triumph. He is halfway to the cash register when he wonders if he has mistaken bait for opportunity.

The bad mom could step backward off the threshold, whip toward him, and peel him like an orange before he could say Oh, Lord.

Curtis is undaunted, however, because he is Roy Rogers without the singing, Indiana Jones without the fedora, James Bond without the shaken martini, steeped in heroism as defined in 9,658 films enjoyed over two days of an intense three-week cultural-preparation program, all 9,658 viewed by direct-to-brain megadata downloading prior to planetfall. In truth, he has been made just a smidgin crazy by all those movies, which he hasn't quite yet assimilated, and he isn't at all times able to sort out the truth from the fiction in what he has seen on his mental silver screen. But because movies have inspired in him such a glorious sense of freedom and such a passion for this strange world, he happily accepts the consequences of a temporary mental imbalance if that is the necessary price for those two days of unparalleled entertainment, education, and uplift.

Indeed, the examples set by film heroes prove to be what he needs, because he reaches the cashier's station and rises to his full height without alerting the bad mom. She still stands in the doorway, costumed in the dead woman's clothes, facing the pumps.

The window behind the cashier's station is clouded by dust, but Curtis can see the Fleetwood. Cass leans against it, facing the bad pop, and appears not to have been alerted to their danger.

Two minutes have passed since Polly received the message through the dog. She no doubt will act soon. The time has come for Curtis to provide the necessary distraction.

When he picks up the pistol from the counter, he notices beside it a paperback romance by Gabby's favorite novelist, Nora Roberts. Evidently, everyone reads her, but he assumes that this copy belongs to one of the dead people out back rather than to one of the killers, and that Ms. Roberts's popularity is not yet multiplanetary.

The external safety on the pistol isn't engaged. He holds the weapon with his right hand, steadies his right with his left, and dares to inch toward the. open door, angling for a clearer shot.

The killer remains unaware of him.

Nine feet from the door. Eight feet.

He halts. This line of fire is ideal.

Standing with feet apart for maximum balance, his right foot ahead of the left, leaning forward from the waist to prepare for the recoil, he hesitates because the target in the doorway looks so much like an ordinary woman, appears so vulnerable. Curtis is ninety-nine percent certain that she is only slightly less vulnerable than an armored tank and that she's not a woman at all, let alone an ordinary one, yet he can't quite bring himself to apply the final increment of killing pressure to the trigger.

That one percent of doubt inhibits him, though his mother always said that nothing in this life is absolutely certain and that refusal to act on anything less than a hundred percent certainty is in fact an act of moral cowardice, an excuse never to take a stand. He thinks of Cass and Polly, and lost in a vast wasteland of one percent doubt, he wonders if the dead woman in the SUV might have an identical twin who stands now before him. This worry is ridiculous, considering the off-world transport disguised as a Corvette, considering the broken-necked victims. Yet the boy stands in this purgatory of indecision because although he is his mother's son and although, in her company, he has endured heated battles and has seen terrible violence, he's never before killed, has trained with various weapons but has never fired upon another creature, and here in this small crossroads store, he discovers that killing, even for heroic purpose, is harder than his mother warned him that it could be and much harder than ever it appears to be in movies.

Alerted by scent or by intuition, the woman in the open doorway turns her head so quickly, so sharply that a snap should be audible, and on sight she knows Curtis. Her eyes flare wide, as any startled woman's would, and she raises one hand defensively as though to ward off bullets, as any frightened woman might, but in the same instant, she is betrayed by her smile, which is as inappropriate here as would be a sudden burst of song: a predatory smile of serpent cracking wide to swallow mouse, of leopard poised to make a deadly pounce.

In the telling moment, when you either have the right stuff or you don't, Curtis discovers he has it, and in abundance. He squeezes the trigger once, twice, rocked by the recoils, and he neither falls back in the face of the assassin's fierce shriek nor merely holds his ground, but takes a step forward and fires again, again, again.

Any fear that this woman might be the legitimate twin of the one lying dead in the SUV is put to rest even as the first round from the pistol shreds through her torso. Although the human form serves well the wars of this world, it isn't the ideal physiology for a warrior species, and even before the first bullet leaves the barrel, the bad mom begins to morph into something that Curtis would rather not have seen this soon after consuming an entire large bag of cheese popcorn washed down with Orange Crush.

In the first instant, the killer launches itself at him, but it is mortal, not supernatural, and though its rage would drive it into the teeth of death, its cunning overcomes blind fury. Even in the act of springing at Curtis, it kicks off the corner of the cashier's station and launches itself in a new trajectory, toward the tall shelves of packaged goods.

Of the four additional shots that Curtis fires, three find their mark, jolting the shrieking assassin, which scrambles quickly up the shelves as an acrobat might swarm a ladder with leaps and flourishes. Hampered by a cascade of cans and bottles and boxes, the killer is in fact scaling an avalanche, yet it blitzes past all tumbling obstacles to reach the summit even as the fourth shot strikes and the fifth misses.

During this lightning swift ascent, the killer morphs toward more than a single shape, simultaneously sampling a menagerie of murderous species, bristling with talons and beaks, with horns and spikes and scapulae. Hands grasp, pedipalpi quiver, spiracles ripple, pincers snap like scissors, and other ill-defined extrusions appear and at once vanish in a roiling tumult of glistening carapaces that melt into whipping tails, in snarls of coarse hair that smooth into scaly flanks, expressing a biological chaos that makes Curtis's confusion in the twins' bathroom seem, by comparison, merely an amusing faux pas. Clinging for but a fraction of a second to the crest of the shelves, hunched under the fluorescent lights, all shapes and none, and every shape a lie, the churning beast might be the Beast himself, recognizable to the poet Milton as the ruling prince of the "darkness visible" in Hell — and then it's gone into the next aisle.

Although mortal, the assassin will not die as easily as Curtis would have perished if it had reached him. The spirit of every evil is resilient, and in this case, so is its flesh. Its wounds won't heal miraculously, but those it has might not be sufficient to put it down permanently.

Curtis is loath to turn his back on this crippled but dangerous adversary; however, Cass and Polly are outside with the second killer and helpless against its savagery. With at most five rounds left in the pistol, he's committed to further distracting the remaining assassin in order to give the twins a chance to flee.

Frantic, clambering across the treacherously shifting drift of merchandise that has crashed from shelves to floor, he makes his way to the open door, praying that his two beautiful benefactors, glass-shod Cinderellas, fragile flowers of Indiana, will not have their kindness to him repaid by bloody death.

WHILE DIESEL FUEL FED the hungry belly of the Fleetwood, Earl Bockman droned on about the varieties of packaged macaroni dishes, frozen and not, that he and Maureen stocked in the store. He held forth not in the tone and manner of a merchant trying to drum up a few bucks' worth of business, but with the chatty enthusiasm of a pathetic social misfit who believed that sparkling conversation could be made from any subject short of the raw lists of names in the telephone directory, although perhaps he would get around to those, as well, before the cap was back on the tank.

If Cass had been a criminal type or a rabid activist committed to the elimination of sound pollution, she might have shot Earl and put an end to her misery and his. Instead, she watched the gallons mount up in the tabulation windows on the antique pump and thanked God that she had developed such a high tolerance for boredom during her childhood and adolescence in rural Indiana and in a family whose friends were all college academics.

The gunfire in the store immediately enlivened the night — not merely of itself, but by the effect it had on Earl. Cass wasn't surprised that he reacted with alarm, as she did, but surprise was inadequate to describe her further reaction when she saw the changes occurring in his face during the four shots that followed the first. Unless Earl happened to be a werewolf out of phase with the moon, he wasn't in fact Earl the packaged-macaroni aficionado at all, but something that Cass might not have been prepared to cope with if she hadn't pursued an eight-year fascination with ufology.

She'd been leaning against the motor home, her left hand in the roomy purse slung from her shoulder, and on the sound of the first shot, she had stood up straight. By the time the flat crack of the fifth round split the air and echoed off the side of the Fleetwood, as Earl grew weary of his old dull personality and began to set loose the party animal within, Cass knew what to do, and did it.

When her left hand came out of the purse, it held a 9-mm pistol, which she conveyed to her right hand with a cross-body toss. As she opened fire on an Earl Bockman grown uglier than he had been boring, she thrust her left hand into the purse once more, withdrew a second pistol identical to the first, and opened fire with it, too, hoping that no round would hit a gasoline pump, sever a fuel line, and turn her into a dancing human torch more spectacular than any fabulously costumed role she had ever played on a Vegas stage.

AS SHE STEPPED OUT of the motor home with the 12-gauge, Polly heard the gunfire and knew at once that it didn't originate from the other side of the Fleet wood but came from a point somewhat farther away, perhaps from the store.

Because of a mutual lifelong interest in firearms inspired by Castor and Pollux, the mythological Greek warriors after whom they had been named, and because of a more recent mutual interest in self-defense and martial arts inspired by the three years that they had spent in the higher social echelons of the film industry, Polly and Cass traveled the lonely highways of America with confidence that they could handle any threat that might arise.

Rounding the front of the motor home, Polly heard a fusillade that originated nearer than the first. She recognized the distinct sound of Cass's twin pistols, which she had heard often enough on firing ranges over the years.

When she arrived on scene, shotgun at the ready, she discovered that her sister was dealing with one lonely-highway threat that, in all honesty, they had not foreseen. The evil alien of Old Yeller's succinct laptop message, bursting out of Earl Bockman's ripped and wrenched clothing, pitched violently backward between two gasoline pumps, reeling under the impact of hollow-point 9-mm slugs, twitching and squealing in pain and rage, flopping like a beached fish on the graveled ground between the pumps and the station.

"Got this covered," Cass said, though her face was ghastly pale even in the flattering amber-and-red glow of the Christmas lights, and though her eyes bulged like those of someone suffering from a wildly overactive thyroid gland, and though her hair was seriously in need of a comb. "Curtis must be inside," she added, before following the unpredictable Mr. Bockman between the pumps.

Fearful for Curtis, hurrying toward the building, Polly got a better look at the apparently terminal station proprietor, and she decided that she much preferred Earl when he'd been tall, bald, and boring. Writhing, spasming, coiling, flailing, hissing, snapping — and now shrieking even more furiously when Cass opened fire on him again — he resembled something tin fact, a hideous tangled mass of several somethings that you might call a pest-control company to deal with, assuming you knew a pest-control company that armed its exterminators with semiautomatic weapons and flame-throwers.

The dog sure knew what she was talking about.

USING A LOG-ROLLING TECHNIQUE to get across all the fallen cans of fruit and vegetables, Curtis reaches the front door just in time to see the second killer driven backward between two pumps by a noisy barrage of gunfire. Cass — identifiable by the large purse slung from one shoulder — follows with two pistols, flames spurting from both muzzles. Even in a ten-million-dollar Vegas stage production, surely she had never cut a more dramatic figure than this, not even when she had been nude with a feathered headdress. The boy wishes, however, that he could have had the experience of one of those performances — and at once blushes at this wish, even though it seems to indicate that in spite of his recent problems being Curtis Hammond to fullest effect, he is nonetheless steadily becoming human on a deep emotional level, which is a good thing.

Here comes Polly with a shotgun, looking no less dramatic than her sister, even though also fully clothed. When she sees Curtis in the open door, she calls out his name with evident relief.

Maybe he hears relief where he should hear an angrier quality, because as Polly arrives, she levels the pistol-grip 12-gauge at his head and shouts at him. She has every right to be furious with him, of course, for bringing a pair of otherworldly assassins into her life, and he won't blame her if she shoots him down right here and now, though he might have expected her to be more understanding and though he will be sorry to go.

Then he realizes that she's shouting "Down, dawn, down," and finally the word computes. He drops flat to the ground, and she fires at once into the store. She pumps four thunderous rounds before the bad mom, which he had previously wounded, stops shrieking behind him.

Scrambling to his feet, Curtis is so fascinated by the sight of Polly plucking shotgun shells from her cleavage with the flair of a magician producing live doves from silk scarves that he turns almost as an afterthought to peer into the store. Something that will strain the county coroner's powers of description lies just inside the door, midst the wreckage of a snack-food display rack, and a golden-orange blizzard of shotgun-blasted potato chips, Doritos, and Cheez Doodles slowly settles in salty drifts upon the carcass.

"Are there more of these damn things?" Polly asks breathlessly, having already reloaded the 12-gauge.

"Plenty more," says Curtis. "But not here, not now — not yet."

Cass has at last dispatched the second killer. She joins her sister, looking disarranged as Curtis has never seen her.

"The fuel tank's probably just about full," Cass says, staring strangely at Curtis.

"Probably," he agrees.

"We should probably be getting out of here real fast," Polly says.

"Probably," Curtis agrees, because although he doesn't want to further endanger them, he's even more averse to the idea of heading out from here alone, on foot into the night. "And real fast isn't fast enough."

"Once we hit the road," Cass says, "you've got some explaining to do, Curtis Hammond."

Hoping he doesn't sound like a sassy-assed, spit-in-the-eye, ungrateful, snot-nosed little punk, Curtis says, "You, too."