Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

When he raised his head, he saw a bright glow ahead, intensely yellow at its core. It throbbed mysteriously in the cloaking veils of the storm, the source obscured, but he remembered the light in the trees of which Eduardo had written in the tablet. It had pulsed like this, an eerie radiance that heralded the opening of the doorway and the arrival of the traveler.

As he skidded to a halt and almost fell, the pulses of light grew rapidly brighter, and he wondered if he could hide in the drifts to one side of the road or the other. There were no throbbing bass sounds like those Eduardo had heard and felt, only the shrill keening of the wind. However, the uncanny light was everywhere, dazzling in the sunless day: Jack standing in ankle-deep gold dust, molten gold streaming through the air, the steel of the Mossberg glimmering as if about to be transmuted into bullion. He saw multiple sources now, not one light but several, pulsing out of sync, continuous yellow flashes overlaying one another. A sound above the wind. A low rumble.

Building swiftly to a roar. A heavy engine. Through the whiteout, tearing apart the obscuring veils of snow, came an enormous machine.

He found himself standing before an oncoming road grader adapted for snow removal, a brawny skeleton of steel with a small cab high in the center of it, pushing a curved steel blade taller than he was.

Entering the cleaner air of Toby's room, blinking away tears wrung from her by the caustic smoke, Heather saw two blurry figures, one small and one not. She desperately wiped at her eyes with her free hand, squinted, and understood why the boy was screaming.

Towering over Toby was a grotesquely decomposed corpse, draped in fragments of a rotted blue garment, bearing another Giver, aswarm with agitated black appendages.

Falstaff sprang at the nightmare, but the writhing tentacles were quicker than they had been before, almost faster than the eye. They.whipped out, snared the dog in mid-leap, and flicked him away as casually and efficiently as a cow's tail might deal with an annoying fly. Howling in terror, Falstaff flew across the room, slammed into the wall beside the window, and dropped to the floor with a squeal of pain.

The.38 Korth was in Heather's hand though she didn't remember having drawn it.

Before she could squeeze the trigger, the new Given-or the new aspect of the only Giver, depending on whether there was one entity with many bodies or, instead, many individuals-snared Toby in three oily black tentacles. It lifted him off the floor and drew him toward the leering grin of the long-dead woman, as if it wanted him to plant a kiss on her.

With a cry of outrage, furious and terrified in equal measure, Heather rushed the thing, unable to shoot from even a few steps away because she might hit Toby. Threw herself against it. Felt one of its serpentine arms-cold even through her ski suit-curling around her waist. The stench of the corpse.

Jesus. The internal organs were long gone, and extrusions of the alien were squirming within the body cavity. The head turned toward her, face-to-face, red-stipled black tendrils with spatulate tips flickering like multiple tongues in the open mouth, bristling from the bony nostrils, the eye sockets.

Cold slithered all the way around her waist now. She jammed the.38 under the bony chin, bearded with graveyard moss. She was going for the head as if the head still mattered, as if a brain still packed the cadaver's cranium, she could think of nothing else to do. Toby screaming, the Giver hissing, the gun booming, booming, booming, old bones shattering to dust, the grinning skull cracking off the knobby spine and lolling to one side, the gun booming again-she lost count-then clicking, the maddening clicking of the hammer on empty chambers.

When the creature let go of her, Heather almost fell on her ass because she was already straining so hard to pull loose. She dropped the gun, and it bounced across the carpet.

The Giver collapsed in front of her, not because it was dead but because its puppet, damaged by gunfire, had broken apart in a couple of key places and now provided too little support to keep its soft, heavy master erect.

Toby was free too. For the moment.

He was white-faced, wide-eyed. He'd bitten his lip. It was bleeding.

But otherwise he seemed all right.

Smoke was beginning to roil into the room, not much, but she knew how abruptly it could become blindingly dense… "Go!" she said, shoving Toby toward the back stairs. "Go, go, go!"

He scrambled across the floor on his hands and knees, and so did she, both of them reduced by terror and expediency to the locomotion of infancy. Got to the door. Pulled herself up against it. Toby at her side.

Behind them was a scene out of a madman's nightmare: The Giver sprawled on the floor, resembling nothing so much as an immensely complicated octopus, although stranger and more evil than anything that had ever lived in the seas of Farth, a tangle of wriggling ropy arms. Instead of trying to reach for her and Toby, it was struggling with the disconnected bones, attempting to pull the moldering corpse together and lever itself erect on the damaged skeleton.

She wrenched the doorknob, yanked.

The stairhead door didn't open.

Locked.

On the shelf behind the alcove bed, Toby's clock radio came on all by itself, and rap music hammered them at full volume for a second or two.

Then that other music. Tuneless, strange, but hypnotic.

"No!" she told Toby as she struggled with the dead bolt turn. It was maddeningly stiff. "No! Tell it no!" The lock hadn't been stiff before, damn it.

At the other door, the first Giver lurched out of the burning hall and through the smoke, into the room. It was still wrapped around and through what was left of Eduardo's charred corpse. Still afire. Its dark bulk was diminished.

Fire had consumed part of it.

The thumb-turn twisted slowly, as if the lock mechanism was rusted.

Slowly.

Slowly. Then: clack.

But the bolt snapped into the jamb again before she could pull open the door.

Toby was murmuring something. Talking. But not to her.

"No!" she shouted. "No, no! Tell it no!"

Grunting with the effort, Heather twisted the bolt open again and held tightly to the thumb-turn. But she felt the lock being reengaged against her will, the shiny brass slipping inexorably between her thumb and forefinger. The Giver.

This was the same power that could switch on the radio. Or animate a.corpse.

She tried to turn the knob with her other hand, before the bolt slammed into the striker plate again, but now the knob was frozen. She gave up.

Pushing Toby behind her, putting her back to the door, she faced the two creatures. Weaponless.

The road grader was painted yellow from end to end. Most of the massive steel frame was exposed, with only the powerful diesel engine and the operator's cab enclosed. This no-frills worker drone looked like a big exotic insect.

The grader slowed when the driver realized that a man was standing in the middle of the road, but Jack figured the guy might speed up again at first sight of the shotgun. He was prepared to run alongside the machine and board it while it was on the move.

But the driver brought it to a full stop in spite of the gun. Jack ran around to the side where he could see a door on the cab about ten feet off the ground.

The grader sat high on five-foot-tall tires with rubber that looked heavier and tougher than tank tread, and the guy up there was not likely to open his door and come down for a chat. He would probably just roll down his: window, keep some distance between them, have a shouted conversation above the shrieking wind-and if he heard something he didn't like, he'd tramp the accelerator and haul ass out of there. In the event that the driver wouldn't listen to reason, or wanted to waste too much time with questions, Jack was ready to climb up to the door and do whatever he had to do to get control of the grader, short of killing someone.