Dean Koontz - The Servants of Twilight

Here, he could lie at the very lip of the slope, in a gap between two lumpy outcroppings in a long series of granite formations, and look straight down a winding section of the deer trail that he and Christine and Joey had climbed and along which the TWilighters were certain to ascend. He inched forward, peered down into the trees, and was startled by movement hardly more than a hundred yards below. He quickly brought the rifle up, looked through the telescopic sight, and saw two people.

Jesus.

They were here already.

But only two? Where were the others?

He saw that this pair was moving up toward a blind spot in the trail, and he figured they must be the last in the party. The others, ahead of these two, had already gone around the bend and would soon reappear higher on the path.

Of the two who were in sight, the first was of average size, wearing dark clothing. The second was a strikingly tall man in a blue ski suit over which he was wearing a hooded brown parka, his face framed in a fringe of fur lining.

The giant in the parka must be the man Charlie had seen in Spivey's rectory office, the monster Kyle. Charlie shuddered.

Kyle gave him the creeps every bit as much as Mother Grace did.

Charlie had expected to have to wait here awhile, ten minutes or even longer, before they came into sight, but now they were almost on top of him. They must be climbing without pause, without scouting the way ahead, reckless, unafraid of an ambush. If he'd been a couple of minutes slower getting here, he would have walked right into them as they came over the crest.

The deer trail turned a corner. The two Twilighters moved out of sight behind a rock around a stand of interlaced pines and fir.

His heart racing, he shifted his sights to the point at which the trail emerged from those trees. He saw an open stretch of about eight yards in which he would be able to draw down on his targets. The distance between him and them would be only about seventy yards, which meant each round would be approximately one and three-quarters inches high when it impacted, so he would need to aim for the lower part of the chest in order to put a slug through the heart. Depending on how close together the bastards were, as many as three of them might have moved into that clear area before the first would be drawing close to the next blind spot. But he didn't think he would be able to pick off all three, partly because each would be in the way of the other; one target would have to fall to give him a good line on the next. They were also sure to leap for cover as the first shot slammed through the woods. He might bring down the second one during that mad rush for shelter, but the third would be hidden before he could realign his sights.

He would hope for two.

The first appeared, stepping out of shadows into a gray fall of light that splashed down in a gap among the trees. He put the cross hairs on target, and he saw it was a woman. A rather pretty young woman. He hesitated. A second Twilighter appeared, and Charlie swung the scope on that target. Another woman, less pretty and not as young as the first.

Very clever. They were putting the females first in hope of foiling an ambush. They were counting on his having compunetions about killing women, compunctions they did not have. It was almost amusing. They were the churchfolk, and they believed they were God's agents and that he was an infidel, yet they saw no contradiction in the fact that his moral code might be more demanding and inviolable than theirs.

Their plan might have worked, too, if he hadn't served in Vietnam. But fifteen years ago he had lost two close friends, had almost died himself, when a village woman had come to greet them, smiling, and then had blown herself up when they stopped to talk with her. These were not the first fanatics he had ever dealt with, although the others had been motivated by politics rather than religion. No difference, really. Both politics and religion could sometimes be a poison. And he knew that the mindless hatred and the thirst for violence that infected a true believer could turn a woman into a rabid killer every bit as deadly as any man with a mission. Institutionalized madness and savagery knew no limitations as to gender.

He had Joey and Christine to consider. If he spared these women, they would kill the woman he loved and her son.

They'll kill me, too, he thought.

He was repelled by the need to shoot her, but he brought his sights back to the first woman, put the cross hairs on her chest.

Fired.

She was lifted off her feet and pitched off the deer path. Dead, she slammed into the bristling branches of a black spruce, bringing a small avalanche of snow off its boughs and onto her head.

Then a bad thing happened.

Christine had just put more fuel on the fire and had settled down beside Joey again, under the rock overhang, when she heard the first rifle blast echo down through the forest.

Chewbacca raised his head, his ears pricking up.

Other shots were fired a second or so after the first, but they weren't from Charlie's rifle. There was a steady chatter of shots, a thunderous metallic ack-ack-ack-ack which she recognized from old movies, the blood-freezing voice of an automatic weapon, maybe a machine gun. It was a cold, ugly, terrifying sound, filling the forest, and she thought that, if Death laughed, this was how he would sound.

She knew Charlie was in trouble.

Charlie didn't even have time to line up the second shot before the machine gun chattered, scaring the hell out of him. For a moment the racket of automatic fire echoed and reechoed from a hundred points along the mountain, and it was difficult to tell where it came from. But the events of the past few days had shown that his hard-learned war skills had not been forgotten, and he quickly determined that the gunman was not on the slope below but on the ridge with him, north of his position.

They had sent a scout ahead, and the scout had laid a trap.

Pressing hard against the ground, trying to become one with the stone, Charlie wondered why the trap hadn't been sprung earlier. Why hadn't he been gunned down the moment he'd come onto the top of the ridge? Maybe the scout had been inattentive, looking the wrong way. Or maybe the heavy snow had closed around Charlie at just the right time, granting him a temporary cloak of invisibility. That was probably part of the explanation, anyway, because he remembered a particularly thick and whirling squall of snow just as he'd come over the crest.

The machine gun fell silent for a moment.

He heard a series of metallic clinks and a grating noise, and he figured the gunner was replacing the weapon's empty magazine.

Before Charlie could rise up and have a look, the man began to fire again. Bullets ricocheted off the boulders among which Charlie was nestled, spraying chips of granite, and he realized that none of the other shots had been nearly this close. The gunner had been pumping rounds into the rocks north of Charlie. Now the piercing whine of the ricochets moved away, south along the ridge line, and he knew the Twilighter was firing blind, unsure of his target's position.

There was, after all, a chance Charlie could get off the ridge alive.

He got his feet under him, still hiding behind the boulders, keeping low. He shuffled around a bit until he was facing north.

The gunner stopped firing.

Was he just pausing to study the terrain, moving to another position? Or was he changing magazines again?

If the former were the case, then the man was still armed and dangerous; if the latter, he was temporarily defenseless.

Charlie couldn't hear the noises he had heard when the magazine had been changed before, but he couldn't squat here and wait forever, so he jumped up anyway, straight up, and there was his nemesis, only twenty feet away, standing in the snow.