Dean Koontz - The Servants of Twilight

Frank pulled aside the drape at the second window-and cried out in surprise.

The shotgun blast was louder than the clashing armies of the thunder storm.

The window exploded inward.

Christine leaped up as a shower of glass and blood cascaded over her.

Before he had time to reach for his own gun, Frank was lifted off his feet by the force of the blast and pitched backward.

Christine's chair fell over with a bang.

The bodyguard collapsed across the desk in front of her. His face was gone. The shotgun pellets had hammered his skull into bloody ruin.

Outside, the gunman fired again.

Stray pellets found the ceiling light, pulverizing it, bringing down more glass, some plaster, and darkness. The desk lamp already had been knocked to the floor when Frank Reuther had fallen against it. The room was in darkness except for what little light came through the open doorway from the hall.

The pellet-shredded draperies were seized by an intrusive gust of wind.

Tattered fragments lashed at one another, fluttered and whirled in the air, like the rotted burial garments of an animated corpse in a carnival funhouse.

Christine heard someone screaming, thought it was Joey, realized it was a woman, then discovered it was her own voice.

A squall of rain burst through the ribboned drapes. But the rain wasn't the only thing trying to get inside. Frank Reuther's killer was also clambering through the shattered window.

Christine ran.

In an adrenaline-hot, fear-scorched, dreamlike fever, with the urgent yet weirdly slow-motion time sense of a nightmare, Christine ran from her study to the living room. The short journey required only a few seconds, but it seemed as if the distance from one end of her house to the other was a hundred miles and that hours passed during her panicky progress from one room to another. She knew she was awake, yet she felt as if she were asleep. This was reality yet unreal.

When she reached the living room, Pete Lockbum and Joey were just entering from the direction of the boy's bedroom.

Lockburn's revolver was in his hand.

Chewbacca came behind them, ears flattened, tail down, barking loudly.

A shotgun blast tore the lock out of the front door. Even as the wood chips were still flying, a man burst into the house. He crouched in the foyer that opened into the living room, holding a shotgun in front of him, eyes wide, face white with anger or terror or both, an incongruously ordinary-looking man, short and husky, with a thick black beard jeweled with raindrops. He saw Christine first and leveled his weapon at her.

Joey screamed.

A hard, ear-shattering explosion rocked the room, and Christine was certain that she was in the last milliseconds of her life.

But it was the intruder who was hit. His shirt blossomed with an ugly red flower of blood.

Pete Lockburn had fired first. Now he fired again.

A spray of blood erupted from the intruder's shoulder. The stranger's shotgun spun out of his hands, and he stumbled backwards. Lockburn's third shot caught him in the neck, catapulting him off his feet. Already dead, he was pitched into a small foyer table; his head slammed backwards, striking a mirror above the table, cracking it, and then he collapsed in a gory heap.

As Joey bolted into Christine's arms, she shouted to Lockbum: "There's another man! The study-"

Too late. The gunman who had killed Frank Reuther was already in the living room.

Lockbum whirled. Fast but not fast enough. The shotgun roared. Pete Lockburn was blown away.

Although he had been their dog less than a day, Chewbacca knew where his loyalties ought to lie. Snarling, teeth bared, he leapt at the gunman, bit the intruder's left leg, sank his fangs in deep and held on tight.

The man cried out, raised the shotgun, slammed the heavy butt down on top of the retriever's golden head. The dog.yelped and crumpled in a heap.

"No!" Joey said, as if the loss of a second pet was worse than the prospect of his own slaughter.

Sobbing in pain, obviously frightened, the gunman said, "God help me, God help me, God help me," and he turned the 20gauge on Christine and Joey.

She saw that he, like the bearded man, did not really appear to be mad or degenerate or evil. The ferocity of the terror that gripped him was the most unusual thing about him. Otherwise, he was quite ordinary.

Young, in his early twenties. Slightly overweight. Fair-skinned, with a few freckles and rain-soaked reddish hair that was plastered to his head. His ordinariness was the very thing that made him so scary; if this man could become a mindless killer under the influence of Grace Spivey, then the old woman could corrupt anyone; no one could be trusted; anyone might be an assassin in her thrall.

He pulled the trigger.

There was only a dry click.

He had forgotten that both barrels were empty.

Whimpering and squealing as if he were the one in danger, the killer fumbled in his jacket pocket and withdrew a pair of shotgun shells.

With a strength and agility born of terror, Christine scooped Joey up and ran, not toward the front door and the street beyond, for they would surely die out there, but toward the stairs and the master bedroom, where she had left her purse-the purse in which she'd been carrying her own pistol. Joey clung desperately to her, and he seemed to weigh nothing at all; she was briefly possessed with a more-than-human power, and the stairs succumbed to her pumping legs. Then, almost at the top, she stumbled, nearly fell, grabbed at the banister, cried out in despair.

But it was a good thing she had stumbled, for, in that same moment, the gunman below opened fire, discharging both barrels. Two waves of buckshot smashed into the railing at the top of the stairs, reducing the oak handrail to splinters, tearing plaster from the wall, blowing out the ceiling light up there, at the very place she would have been if she hadn't misstepped.

As the killer reloaded yet again, Christine plunged ahead, into the upstairs hall. For a moment she hesitated, clutching Joey, swaying, disoriented. This was her own house, more familiar to her than any place in the world, but tonight it was alien; the angles and proportions and lighting in the rooms seemed wrong, different. The hallway, for instance, appeared infinitely long, with distorted walls like a passageway in a carnival maze. She blinked and tried to repress the heart-hammering panic that twisted her perceptions; she hurried forward and made it to the master bedroom door.

Behind her, from the stairway, came the sound of the killer's footsteps as he raced after her, favoring his bitten leg.

She stepped into the bedroom, slammed the door behind her, latched it, put Joey down. Her purse was on the nightstand. She grabbed it just as the assassin reached the door and rattled the knob. Her fingers were too frantic; for a moment she couldn't work the zipper. Then she had her purse open, the gun in hand.

Joey had crawled into a corner, beside the highboy. He cringed, trying to make himself even smaller than he was.

The bedroom door shook and partially dissolved in a storm of buckshot. A hole opened on the right side of it. One hinge was torn out of the frame; it spun into the air, bounced off a wall, clattered across the top of the dresser.

Holding her pistol in both hands, painfully aware that she wasn't holding it steady, Christine swung toward the door.

Another blast ruined the lock, and the door swung inward, hanging on only one hinge.

The young, red-haired killer stood in the doorway, looking even more terrified than Christine felt. He was gibbering senselessly. His hands were shaking worse than hers. Snot hung from one of his nostrils, but he seemed unaware of it.

She pointed the pistol at him, pulled the trigger.