Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

Three steps between them.

Two.

She squeezed the trigger, emptied the Uzi's last rounds into the scuttling form, chopping it into four-five-six bloodless pieces that tumbled and flopped down a few steps, where they lay squirming.

Squirming ceaselessly. Supple and snakelike again. Eagerly and silently questing toward one another.

Its silence was almost the worst thing about it. No screams of pain when it was shot. No shrieks of rage., Its patient and silent recovery, its deliberate continuation of the assault, mocked her hopes of triumph.

At the foot of the stairs, the apparition had pulled itself erect. The Giver, still hideously bonded to the corpse, started up the steps again.

Heather's spell of madness shattered. She fled to the landing, grabbed.the can of gasoline, and scrambled to the second floor, where Toby and Falstaff were waiting.

The retriever was shuddering. Whining rather than barking, he looked as if he'd sensed the same thing Heather had seen for herself: effective defense was impossible. This was an enemy that couldn't be brought down with teeth or claws any more than with guns.

Toby said, "Do I have to do it? I don't want to."

She didn't know what he meant, didn't have time to ask. "We'll be okay, honey, we'll make it."

From the first flight of steps, out of sight beyond the landing, came the sound of heavy footsteps ascending. A hiss. It was like the sibilant escape of steam from a pinhole in a pipe-but a cold sound.

She put the Uzi aside and fumbled with the cap on the spout of the gasoline can.

Fire might work. She had to believe it might. If the thing burned, nothing would be left to remake itself. Bodies are. But bodies reduced to ashes could not reclaim their form and function, regardless of how alien their flesh and metabolism. Damn it, fire had to work.

"It's never afraid," Toby said in a voice that revealed the profound depths of his own fear.

"Get away from here, baby! Go! Go to the bedroom! Hurry!"

The boy ran, and the dog went with him.

At times Jack felt that he was a swimmer in a white sea under a white sky on a world every bit as strange as the planet from which the intruder at Quartermass Ranch had traveled. Though he could feel the ground beneath his feet as he slogged the half mile to the county road, he never got a glimpse of it under the enduring white torrents cast down by the storm, and it seemed as unreal to him as the bottom of the Pacific might seem to a swimmer a thousand fathoms above it. The snow rounded all forms, and the landscape rolled like the swells of a mid-ocean passage, although in some places the wind had sculpted drifts into scalloped ridges like cresting waves frozen in the act of breaking on a beach. The woods, which could have offered contrast to the whiteness that flooded his vision, were mostly concealed by falling and blowing snow as obscuring as fog at sea.

Disorientation was an unremitting threat in that bleached land. He got off course twice while still on his own property, recognizing his error only because the flattened meadow grass underneath the snow provided a spongier surface than the hard-packed driveway.

Step by hard-fought step, Jack expected something to come out of the curtains of snow or rise from a drift in which it had been lying, the Giver itself or one of the surrogates that it had mined from the graveyard. He continually scanned left and right, ready to pump out every round in the shotgun to bring down anything that rushed him… He was glad that he had worn sunglasses. Even with shades, he found the unrelieved brightness inhibiting. He strained to see through the wintry sameness to guard against attack and to make out familiar details of the terrain that would keep him on the right track.

He dared not think about Heather and Toby. When he did so, his pace slowed and he was nearly overcome by the temptation to go back to them and forget about Ponderosa Pines. For their sake and his own, he blocked them from his thoughts, concentrated solely on covering ground, and virtually became a hiking machine.

The baleful wind shrieked without surcease, blew snow in his face, and forced him to bow his head. It shoved him off his feet twice-on one occasion causing him to drop the shotgun in a drift, where he had to scramble frantically to find it-and became almost as real an adversary as any man against whom he'd ever been pitted. By the time he reached the end of the private lane and paused for breath between the tall stone posts and under the arched wooden sign that marked the entrance to Quartermass Ranch, he was cursing the wind as if it could hear him.

He wiped one gloved hand across the sunglasses to scrape off the snow that had stuck to the lenses. His eyes stung as they sometimes did when an opthalmologist put drops in them to dilate the pupils prior to an examination.

Without the shades, he might already have been snowblind.

He was sick of the taste and smell of wet wool, which flavored the air he drew through his mouth and scented every inhalation when he breathed through his nose. The vapor he exhaled had thoroughly saturated the fabric, and the condensation had frozen. With one hand he massaged the makeshift muffler, cracking the thin, brittle ice and crumbling the thicker layer of compacted snow, he sloughed it all away so he could breathe more easily than he'd been able to breathe for the past two or three hundred yards.

Though he found it difficult to believe that the Giver didn't know he had left the house, he had reached the edge of the ranch without being assaulted. A considerable trek remained ahead, but the greatest danger of attack would have been in the territory he had already covered without incident.

Maybe the puppetmaster was not as omniscient as it either pretended or seemed to be.

A distended and ominous shadow, as tortured as that of a fright figure in a fun house, rose along the landing wall: the puppetmaster and its decomposing marionette laboring stiffly but doggedly toward the top of the first flight of stairs. As the thing ascended, it no doubt absorbed the fragments of strange flesh that bullets had torn from it, but it didn't pause to do so.

Although the thing was not fast, it was too fast for Heather's taste, too fast by half. It seemed to be racing up the damned stairs.

In spite of her shaky hands, she finally unscrewed the stubborn cap on.the spout of the fuel can. Held the container by its handle. Used her other hand to tip the bottom. A pale gush of gasoline arced out of the spout. She swung the can left and right, saturating the carpet along the width of the steps, letting the stream splash down the entire top flight.

On the first step below the landing, the Giver appeared in the wake of its shadow, a demented construct of filth and slithering sinuosities.

Heather hastily capped the gasoline can. She carried it a short distance along the hall, set it out of the way, and returned to the stairs.

The Giver had reached the landing. It turned to face the second flight.

Heather fumbled in the jacket pocket where she thought she had stowed the matches, found spare ammo for both the Uzi and the Korth, no matches. She tried another zipper, groped in the pocket-more cartridges, no matches, no matches.

On the landing, the dead man raised his head to stare at her, which meant the Giver was staring too, with eyes she couldn't see.

Could it smell the gasoline? Did it understand that gasoline was flammable? It was intelligent. Vastly so, apparently. Did it grasp the potential for its own destruction?

A third pocket. More bullets. She was a walking ammo dump, for God's sake.

One of the cadaver's eyes was still obscured by a thin yellowish cataract, gazing between lids that were sewn half shut.

The air reeked of gasoline. Heather had difficulty drawing a clear breath, she was wheezing. The Giver didn't seem to mind, and the corpse wasn't breathing.