Dean Koontz - The Servants of Twilight

It was a man in brown insulated pants and a dark parka, not changing the machine gun's magazine but squinting at the ridge plateau beyond Charlie-until Charlie popped up and caught his attention. He cried out and swung the muzzle of the machine gun toward Charlie.

But Charlie had the element of surprise on his side and got off a round first. It struck the Twilighter in the throat.

The man appeared to take a great jump backwards, swinging his automatic weapon straight up and letting off a useless burst of fire at the snow-filled sky as he collapsed. His neck had been ripped apart, his spinal cord severed, and his head nearly taken off. Death had been instantaneous.

And in the instant Death embraced the machine gunner, as the sound of Charlie's shot split the cold air, he saw that there was a second man on the ridge, thirty feet behind the first and over to the right, near the rocky crest. This one had a rifle, and he fired even as Charlie recognized the danger.

As if battered by a sledgehammer, Charlie was spun around and knocked down. He struck the ground hard and lay behind the boulders, out of sight of the rifleman, out of the line of fire, safe but not for long.

His left arm, left shoulder, and the left side of his chest suddenly felt cold, very cold, and numb. Although there was no pain yet, he knew he had been hit. Solidly hit. It was bad.

The screams brought Christine out of the cul-de-sac, past the dying fire, onto the trail.

She looked up toward the ridge. She couldn't see all the way to the top of the valley wall, of course. It was too far. The snow and the trees blocked her view.

The screaming went on and on. God, it was awful. In spite of the distance and the muffling effect of the forest, it was a horrible, bloodcurdling shriek of pain and terror. She shivered, and not because of the cold air.

It sounded like Charlie.

No. She was letting her imagination run away with her. It could have been anyone. The sound was too far away, too distorted by the trees for her to be able to say that it was Charlie.

It went on for half a minute or maybe even longer. It seemed like an hour. Whoever he was, he was screaming his guts out up there, one scream atop the other, until she wanted to scream, too. Then it subsided, faded, as if the screamer suddenly had insufficient energy to give voice to his agony.

Chewbacca came out onto the trail and looked up toward the top of the valley.

Silence settled in.

Christine waited.

Nothing.

She returned to the sheltered niche, where Joey sat in a stupor, and picked up the shotgun.

It was a shoulder wound. Serious. His entire arm was numb, and he couldn't move his hand. Damned serious. Maybe mortal.

He wouldn't know until he could get out of his jacket and theirmal underwear and have a look at it-or until he began to pass out. If he lost consciousness in this bitter cold, he would die, regardless of whether the Twilighters came along to finish him off.

As soon as he realized he was hit, Charlie screamed, not because the pain was so bad (for there was no pain yet), and not because he was scared (though he was damned scared), but because he wanted the man who had shot him to know that he was hit. He shrieked as a man might if he were watching his own entrails pour out of a grievous wound in his stomach, screamed as if he knew he were dying, and as he screamed he turned onto his back, stretched out flat in the snow, pushed the rifle aside because it was of little use to him now that he no longer had two good hands. He unzipped his jacket, pulled the revolver out of his shoulder holster. Keeping the gun in his good right hand, he tucked that arm under him, so his body concealed the weapon.

His useless left arm was flung out at his side, the hand turned with the palm up, limp. He began to punctuate his screams with desperate gasping sounds; then he let the screams subside, though putting an even more horrible groan into them. Finally he went silent.

The wind died down for a moment, as if cooperating wah Charlie. The mountain was tomb-quiet.

He heard movement beyond the boulders that screened him from the gunman.

Boots on snow-free stone. A few quick footsteps. Then wary silence.

Then a few more footsteps.

He was counting on this man being an amateur, like the guy with the machine gun. A pro would be shooting when he came around the granite formation. But an amateur would want to believe the screams, would be congratutating himself on a good kill, and would be vulnerable.

Footsteps. Closer. Very close now.

Charlie opened his eyes wide and stared straight up at the gray sky. The rock formation kept some of the falling snow out of his way, but flakes still dropped onto his face, onto his eyelashes, and he needed all of his will power to keep from blinking.

He let his mouth sag open, but he held his breath because it would spiral up in a frosty plume and thus betray him.

A second passed. Five seconds. Ten.

In another half minute or so, he would need to breathe.

His eyes were beginning to water.

Suddenly this seemed like a bad plan. Stupid. He was going to die here. He had to think of something better, more clever.

Then the Twilighter appeared, edging around the hump of granite.

Charlie stared fixedly at the sky, playing dead; therefore, he couldn't see what the stranger looked like; he was aware of him only peripherally. But he felt sure that his performance as a corpse was convincing, and well it should have been, for he had provided a liberal display of his own blood as stage dressing.

The gunman stepped closer, stood directly over him, looking down, grinning.

Charlie had to strain not to focus on him, had to continue to look straight through him. It wasn't easy. The eye was naturally drawn toward movement.

The stranger still had a rifle and was still on his feet, better armed and more agile than Charlie. If he realized Charlie was still alive, he could finish the job in a fraction of a second.

A beat.

Another.

Irrationally, Charlie thought: He'll hear my heart!

That irrational terror gave rise to a more realistic fear-the possibility that the gunman would see Charlie's pulse beating in his neck or temple. Charlie almost panicked at that thought, almost moved.

But he realized that his coat and the attached hood concealed both his neck and his temples; he would not be betrayed by his own throbbing blood flow.

Then the Tstepped past him, to the lip of the ridge, and shouted down to his fellow churchmen on the slope below.

"I got him! I got the son of a bitch!"

The moment the gunman's attention was elsewhere, Charlie rolled slightly to the left, freeing his right hand, which had been under his buttocks, bringing up the revolver.

The TWilighter gasped, began to turn.

Charlie shot him twice. Once in the side. Once in the head.

The man went over the brink, crashed through some brush, roiled down between the trees, and came to a stop against the broad trunk of a pine, dead before he even had a chance to scream.

— Torning onto his stomach, Charlie pulled himself to the edge of the ridge and looked down. Some of Spivey's people had come out of hiding in response to the rifleman's shout of triumph. Apparently, not all of them realized their enemy was still alive. Most likely they thought the two subsequent shots had been fired by their own man, to make sure Charlie was dead, and they probably figured the body toppling off the crest was Charlie's. They didn't dive for cover again until he shouted,

"Bastards," and squeezed off two rounds from the revolver.

Then, like a pack of rats smelling a cat, they scuttled into safe dark places.

He loosed the remaining two rounds in the revolver, not expecting to hit anyone, not even taking aim, intending only to frighten them and force them to lie low for a while.