Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

The bad mom could step backward off the threshold, whip toward him, and peel him like an orange before he could say Oh, Lord.

Curtis is undaunted, however, because he is Roy Rogers without the singing, Indiana Jones without the fedora, James Bond without the shaken martini, steeped in heroism as defined in 9,658 films enjoyed over two days of an intense three-week cultural-preparation program, all 9,658 viewed by direct-to-brain megadata downloading prior to planetfall. In truth, he has been made just a smidgin crazy by all those movies, which he hasn't quite yet assimilated, and he isn't at all times able to sort out the truth from the fiction in what he has seen on his mental silver screen. But because movies have inspired in him such a glorious sense of freedom and such a passion for this strange world, he happily accepts the consequences of a temporary mental imbalance if that is the necessary price for those two days of unparalleled entertainment, education, and uplift.

Indeed, the examples set by film heroes prove to be what he needs, because he reaches the cashier's station and rises to his full height without alerting the bad mom. She still stands in the doorway, costumed in the dead woman's clothes, facing the pumps.

The window behind the cashier's station is clouded by dust, but Curtis can see the Fleetwood. Cass leans against it, facing the bad pop, and appears not to have been alerted to their danger.

Two minutes have passed since Polly received the message through the dog. She no doubt will act soon. The time has come for Curtis to provide the necessary distraction.

When he picks up the pistol from the counter, he notices beside it a paperback romance by Gabby's favorite novelist, Nora Roberts. Evidently, everyone reads her, but he assumes that this copy belongs to one of the dead people out back rather than to one of the killers, and that Ms. Roberts's popularity is not yet multiplanetary.

The external safety on the pistol isn't engaged. He holds the weapon with his right hand, steadies his right with his left, and dares to inch toward the. open door, angling for a clearer shot.

The killer remains unaware of him.

Nine feet from the door. Eight feet.

He halts. This line of fire is ideal.

Standing with feet apart for maximum balance, his right foot ahead of the left, leaning forward from the waist to prepare for the recoil, he hesitates because the target in the doorway looks so much like an ordinary woman, appears so vulnerable. Curtis is ninety-nine percent certain that she is only slightly less vulnerable than an armored tank and that she's not a woman at all, let alone an ordinary one, yet he can't quite bring himself to apply the final increment of killing pressure to the trigger.

That one percent of doubt inhibits him, though his mother always said that nothing in this life is absolutely certain and that refusal to act on anything less than a hundred percent certainty is in fact an act of moral cowardice, an excuse never to take a stand. He thinks of Cass and Polly, and lost in a vast wasteland of one percent doubt, he wonders if the dead woman in the SUV might have an identical twin who stands now before him. This worry is ridiculous, considering the off-world transport disguised as a Corvette, considering the broken-necked victims. Yet the boy stands in this purgatory of indecision because although he is his mother's son and although, in her company, he has endured heated battles and has seen terrible violence, he's never before killed, has trained with various weapons but has never fired upon another creature, and here in this small crossroads store, he discovers that killing, even for heroic purpose, is harder than his mother warned him that it could be and much harder than ever it appears to be in movies.

Alerted by scent or by intuition, the woman in the open doorway turns her head so quickly, so sharply that a snap should be audible, and on sight she knows Curtis. Her eyes flare wide, as any startled woman's would, and she raises one hand defensively as though to ward off bullets, as any frightened woman might, but in the same instant, she is betrayed by her smile, which is as inappropriate here as would be a sudden burst of song: a predatory smile of serpent cracking wide to swallow mouse, of leopard poised to make a deadly pounce.

In the telling moment, when you either have the right stuff or you don't, Curtis discovers he has it, and in abundance. He squeezes the trigger once, twice, rocked by the recoils, and he neither falls back in the face of the assassin's fierce shriek nor merely holds his ground, but takes a step forward and fires again, again, again.

Any fear that this woman might be the legitimate twin of the one lying dead in the SUV is put to rest even as the first round from the pistol shreds through her torso. Although the human form serves well the wars of this world, it isn't the ideal physiology for a warrior species, and even before the first bullet leaves the barrel, the bad mom begins to morph into something that Curtis would rather not have seen this soon after consuming an entire large bag of cheese popcorn washed down with Orange Crush.

In the first instant, the killer launches itself at him, but it is mortal, not supernatural, and though its rage would drive it into the teeth of death, its cunning overcomes blind fury. Even in the act of springing at Curtis, it kicks off the corner of the cashier's station and launches itself in a new trajectory, toward the tall shelves of packaged goods.

Of the four additional shots that Curtis fires, three find their mark, jolting the shrieking assassin, which scrambles quickly up the shelves as an acrobat might swarm a ladder with leaps and flourishes. Hampered by a cascade of cans and bottles and boxes, the killer is in fact scaling an avalanche, yet it blitzes past all tumbling obstacles to reach the summit even as the fourth shot strikes and the fifth misses.

During this lightning swift ascent, the killer morphs toward more than a single shape, simultaneously sampling a menagerie of murderous species, bristling with talons and beaks, with horns and spikes and scapulae. Hands grasp, pedipalpi quiver, spiracles ripple, pincers snap like scissors, and other ill-defined extrusions appear and at once vanish in a roiling tumult of glistening carapaces that melt into whipping tails, in snarls of coarse hair that smooth into scaly flanks, expressing a biological chaos that makes Curtis's confusion in the twins' bathroom seem, by comparison, merely an amusing faux pas. Clinging for but a fraction of a second to the crest of the shelves, hunched under the fluorescent lights, all shapes and none, and every shape a lie, the churning beast might be the Beast himself, recognizable to the poet Milton as the ruling prince of the "darkness visible" in Hell — and then it's gone into the next aisle.

Although mortal, the assassin will not die as easily as Curtis would have perished if it had reached him. The spirit of every evil is resilient, and in this case, so is its flesh. Its wounds won't heal miraculously, but those it has might not be sufficient to put it down permanently.

Curtis is loath to turn his back on this crippled but dangerous adversary; however, Cass and Polly are outside with the second killer and helpless against its savagery. With at most five rounds left in the pistol, he's committed to further distracting the remaining assassin in order to give the twins a chance to flee.

Frantic, clambering across the treacherously shifting drift of merchandise that has crashed from shelves to floor, he makes his way to the open door, praying that his two beautiful benefactors, glass-shod Cinderellas, fragile flowers of Indiana, will not have their kindness to him repaid by bloody death.

WHILE DIESEL FUEL FED the hungry belly of the Fleetwood, Earl Bockman droned on about the varieties of packaged macaroni dishes, frozen and not, that he and Maureen stocked in the store. He held forth not in the tone and manner of a merchant trying to drum up a few bucks' worth of business, but with the chatty enthusiasm of a pathetic social misfit who believed that sparkling conversation could be made from any subject short of the raw lists of names in the telephone directory, although perhaps he would get around to those, as well, before the cap was back on the tank.