When I opened my eyes an instant later, two shrieking monkeys, each as large as the one that Angela had described, were already at the window again. Wary of the broken glass and of us, the pair swung inside, onto the granite counter. Wind churned in around them, plucking at their rain-matted fur.
One of them looked toward the broom closet, where the shotgun was usually locked away. Since their arrival, they hadn’t seen any of us approach that cupboard, and they couldn’t possibly spot the 12-gauge balanced on Bobby’s knees, under the table.
Bobby glanced at them but was more interested in the window opposite him, across the table.
Hunched and agile, the two creatures already in the room moved along the counter in opposite directions from the sink. In the dimly lighted kitchen, their malevolent yellow eyes were as bright as the flames leaping on the points of the candle wicks.
The intruder to the left encountered a toaster and angrily swept it to the floor. Sparks spurted from the wall receptacle when the plug tore out of the socket.
I remembered Angela’s account of the rhesus bombarding her with apples hard enough to split her lip. Bobby maintained an uncluttered kitchen, but if these beasts opened cabinet doors and started firing glasses and dishes at us, they could do serious damage even if we did enjoy an advantage in firepower. A dinner plate, spinning like a Frisbee, catching you across the bridge of the nose, might be nearly as effective as a bullet.
Two more dire-eyed creatures sprang up from the porch floor into the frame of the shattered window. They bared their teeth at us and hissed.
The paper napkin over Sasha’s gun hand trembled visibly—and not because it was caught by a draft from the window.
In spite of the shrieking-chattering-hissing of the intruders, in spite of the bluster of the March wind at the broken windows and the rolling thunder and the drumming rain, I thought I heard Bobby singing under his breath. He was largely ignoring the monkeys on the far side of the kitchen, focusing intently on the window that remained intact, across the table from him—and his lips were moving.
Perhaps emboldened by our lack of response, perhaps believing us to be immobilized by fear, the two increasingly agitated creatures in the broken-out windows now swung inside and moved in opposite directions along the counter, forming pairs with each of the first two intruders.
Either Bobby began to sing louder or stark terror sharpened my hearing, because suddenly I could recognize the song that he was singing. “Daydream Believer.” It was golden-oldie teen pop, first recorded by the Monkees.
Sasha must have heard it, too, because she said, “A blast from the past.”
Two more members of the troop climbed into the windows above the sink, clinging to the frames, hellfire in their eyes, squealing monkey-hate at us.
The four already in the room were shrieking louder than ever, bouncing up and down on the counters, shaking their fists in the air, baring their teeth and spitting at us.
They were smart but not smart enough. Their rage was rapidly clouding their judgment.
“Wipeout,” Bobby said.
Here we go.
Instead of scooting backward in his chair to clear the table, he swung sideways in it, rose fluidly to his feet, and brought up the shotgun as if he’d had both military training and ballet lessons. Flame spouted from the muzzle, and the first deafening blast caught the two latest arrivals at the windows, blowing them backward onto the porch, as though they were only a child’s stuffed toys, and the second round chopped down the pair on the counter to the left of the sink.
My ears were ringing as though I were inside a tolling cathedral bell, and although the roar of the gunfire in this confined space was loud enough to be disorienting, I was on my feet before the 12-gauge boomed the second time, as was Sasha, who turned away from the table and squeezed off a round toward the remaining pair of intruders just as Bobby dealt with numbers three and four.
As they fired and the kitchen shook with the blasts, the nearest window exploded at me. Air-surfing on a cascade of glass, a screaming rhesus landed on the table in our midst, knocking over two of the three candles and extinguishing one of them, spraying rain off its coat, sending a pan of pizza spinning to the floor.
I brought up the Glock, but the latest arrival flung itself onto Sasha’s back. If I shot it, the slug would pass straight through the damn thing and probably kill her, too.
By the time I kicked a chair out of the way and got around the table, Sasha was screaming, and the squealing monkey on her back was trying to tear out handfuls of her hair. Reflexively, she’d dropped her .38 to reach blindly behind herself for the rhesus. It snapped at her hands, teeth audibly cracking together on empty air. Her body was bent backward over the table, and her assailant was trying to pull her head back farther still, to expose her throat.
I dropped the Glock on the table and seized the creature from behind, getting my right hand around its neck, using my left to clutch the fur and skin between its shoulder blades. I twisted that handful of fur and skin so fiercely that the beast screamed in pain. It wouldn’t let go of Sasha, however, and as I struggled to tear it away from her, it tried to pull her hair out by the roots.
Bobby pumped another round into the chamber and squeezed off a third shot, the cottage walls seemed to shake as if an earthquake had rumbled under us, and I figured that was the end of the final pair of intruders, but I heard Bobby cursing and knew more trouble had come our way.
Revealed more by their blazing yellow eyes than by the guttering flames of the remaining two candles, another pair of monkeys, total kamikazes, had sprung into the windows above the sink.
And Bobby was reloading.
In another part of the cottage, Orson barked loudly. I didn’t know if he was racing toward us to join the fray or whether he was calling for help.
I heard myself cursing with uncharacteristic vividness and snarling with animal ferocity as I shifted my grip on the rhesus, getting both hands around its neck. I choked it, choked it until finally it had no choice but to let go of Sasha.
The monkey weighed only about twenty-five pounds, less than one-sixth of my weight, but it was all bone and muscle and seething hatred. Screaming thinly and spitting even as it struggled for breath, the thing tried to tuck its head down to bite at the hands encircling its throat. It wrenched, wriggled, kicked, flailed, and I can’t imagine that an eel could have been harder to hold on to, but my fury at what the little fucker had tried to do to Sasha was so great that my hands were like iron, and at last I felt its neck snap. Then it was just a limp, dead thing, and I dropped it on the floor.
Gagging with disgust, gasping for breath, I picked up my Glock as Sasha, having recovered her Chiefs Special, stepped to the broken window near the table and opened fire at the night beyond.
While reloading, apparently having lost track of the last two monkeys in spite of their glowing eyes, Bobby had gone to the light switch by the door. Now he cranked up the rheostat far enough to make me squint.
One of the little bastards was standing on a counter beside the cooktop. It had extracted the smallest of the knives from the wall rack, and before any of us could open fire, it threw the blade at Bobby.
I don’t know whether the troop had been busy learning simple military arts or whether the monkey was lucky. The knife tumbled through the air and sank into Bobby’s right shoulder.
He dropped the shotgun.
I fired two rounds at the knife thrower, and it pitched backward onto the cooktop burners, dead.
The remaining monkey might have once heard that old saw about discretion being the better part of valor, because he curled his tail up against his back and fled over the sink and out the window. I got two shots off, but both missed.
At the other window, with surprisingly steady nerves and nimble fingers, Sasha fumbled a speedloader from the dump pouch on her belt and slipped it into the .38. She twisted the speedloader, neatly filling all chambers at once, dropped it on the floor, and snapped the cylinder shut.
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I wondered what school of broadcasting offered would-be disc jockeys courses on weaponry and grace under fire. Of all the people in Moonlight Bay, Sasha had been the sole one remaining who seemed genuinely to be only what she appeared to be. Now I suspected that she had a secret or two of her own.
She began squeezing off shots into the night once more. I don’t know if she had any targets in view or whether she was just laying down a suppressing fire to discourage whatever remained of the troop.
Ejecting the half-empty magazine from the Glock, slamming in a full one, I went to Bobby as he pulled the knife out of his shoulder. The blade appeared to have penetrated only an inch or two, but there was a spreading bloodstain on his shirt.
“How bad?” I asked.
“Damn!”
“Can you hold on?”
“This was my best shirt!”
Maybe he would be all right.
Toward the front of the house, Orson’s barking continued—but it was punctuated now with squeals of terror.
I tucked the Glock under my belt, against the small of my back, picked up Bobby’s shotgun, which was fully loaded, and ran toward the barking.
The lights were on but dimmed down in the living room, as we had left them. I dialed them up a little.
One of the big windows had been shattered. Hooting wind drove rain under the porch roof and into the living room.
Four screaming monkeys were perched on the backs of chairs and on the arms of sofas. When the lights brightened, they turned their heads toward me and hissed as one.
Bobby had estimated that the troop was composed of eight or ten individuals, but it was obviously a lot larger than that. I’d already seen twelve or fourteen, and in spite of the fact that they were more than half crazed with rage and hatred, I didn’t think they were so reckless—or stupid—that they would sacrifice most of their community in a single assault like this.
They’d been loose for two to three years. Plenty of time to breed.
Orson was on the floor, surrounded by this quartet of goblins, which now began to shriek at him again. He was turning worriedly in a circle, trying to watch all of them at once.
One of the troop was at such a distance and angle that I didn’t have to worry that any stray buckshot would catch the dog. Without hesitation, I blew away the creature on which I had a clear line of fire, and the resulting spray of buckshot and monkey guts would cost Bobby maybe five thousand bucks in redecorating costs.
Squealing, the remaining three intruders bounded from one piece of furniture to another, heading toward the windows. I brought down another one, but the third round in the shotgun only peppered a teak-paneled wall and cost Bobby another five or ten grand.
I pitched the shotgun aside, reached to the small of my back, drew the Glock from under my belt, started after the two monkeys that were fleeing through the broken window onto the front porch—and was nearly lifted off my feet when someone grabbed me from behind. A beefy arm swung around my throat, instantly choking off my air supply, and a hand seized the Glock, tearing it away from me.
The next thing I knew, I was off my feet, lifted and tossed as though I were a child. I crashed into a coffee table, which collapsed under me.
Flat on my back in the ruins of the furniture, I looked up and saw Carl Scorso looming over me, even more gigantic from this angle than he actually was. The bald head. The earring. Though I’d dialed up the lights, the room was still sufficiently shadowy that I could see the animal shine in his eyes.
He was the troop leader. I had no doubt about that. He was wearing athletic shoes and jeans and a flannel shirt, and there was a watch on his wrist, and if he were put in a police lineup with four gorillas, no one would have the least difficulty identifying him as the sole human being. Yet in spite of the clothes and the human form, he radiated the savage aura of something subhuman, not merely because of the eyeshine but because his features were twisted into an expression that mirrored no human emotion I could identify. Though clothed, he might as well have been naked; though clean-shaven from his neck to the crown of his head, he might as well have been as hairy as an ape. If he lived two lives, it was clear that he was more attuned to the one that he lived at night, with the troop, than to the one that he lived by day, among those who were not changelings like him.
He held the Glock at arm’s length, executioner style, aiming it at my face.
Orson flew at him, snarling, but Scorso was the quicker of the two. He landed a solid kick against the dog’s head, and Orson went down and stayed down, without even a yelp or a twitch of his legs.
My heart dropped like a stone in a well.
Scorso swung the Glock toward me again and fired a round into my face. Or that was how it seemed for an instant. But a split second before he pulled the trigger, Sasha shot him in the back from the far end of the room, and the crack I heard was the report of her Chiefs Special.
Scorso jerked from the impact of the slug, pulling the Glock off-target. The floor beside my head splintered as the bullet tore through it.
Wounded but less fazed than most of us would have been once shot in the back, Scorso swung around, pumping out rounds from the Glock as he turned.
Sasha dropped and rolled backward out of the room, and Scorso emptied the pistol at the place where she had stood. He kept trying to pull the trigger even after the magazine was empty.
I could see rich, dark blood spreading across the back of his flannel shirt.
Finally he threw down the Glock, turned toward me, and appeared to contemplate whether to stomp my face or to tear my eyes from my head, leaving me blinded and dying. Opting for neither pleasure, he headed toward the broken-out window through which the last two monkeys had escaped.
He was just stepping out of the house onto the porch when Sasha reappeared and, incredibly, pursued him.
I shouted at her to stop, but she looked so wild that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see that dreadful light in her eyes, too. She was across the living room and onto the front porch while I was still getting up from the splintered remains of the coffee table.
Outside, the Chiefs Special cracked, cracked again, and then a third time.
Although it seemed clear now that Sasha could take care of herself, I wanted to go after her and drag her back. Even if she finished Scorso, the night was probably home to more monkeys than even a first-rate disc jockey could handle—and the night was their domain, not hers.
A fourth shot boomed. A fifth.
I hesitated because Orson lay limp, so still that I couldn’t see his black flank rising and falling with his breathing. He was either dead or unconscious. If unconscious, he might need help quickly. He had been kicked in the head. Even if he was alive, there was the danger of brain damage.
I realized I was crying. I bit back my grief, blinked back my tears. As I always do.
Bobby was crossing the living room toward me, one hand clamped to the stab wound in his shoulder.
“Help Orson,” I said.
I refused to believe that nothing could help him now, because even to think such a terrible thing might ensure that it be true.
Pia Klick would understand that concept.
Maybe Bobby would understand it now, too.
Dodging furniture and dead monkeys, crunching glass underfoot, I ran to the window. Silvery whips of cold, windblown rain lashed past the jagged fragments of glass still prickling from the frame. I crossed the porch, leaped down the steps, and raced into the heart of the downpour, toward Sasha, where she stood thirty feet away in the dunes.
Carl Scorso lay facedown in the sand.
Soaked and shivering, she stood over him, twisting her third and last speedloader into the revolver. I suspected that she had hit him with most if not all the rounds that I’d heard, but she seemed to feel she might need a few more.
Indeed, Scorso twitched and worked both outflung hands in the sand, as if he were burrowing into cover, like a crab.
With a shudder of horror, she lean
ed down and fired one last round, this time into the back of his skull.
When she turned to me, she was crying. Making no attempt to repress her tears.
I was tearless now. I told myself that one of us had to hold it together.
“Hey,” I said gently.
She came into my arms.
“Hey,” she whispered against my throat.
I held her.
The rain was coming down in such torrents that I couldn’t see the lights of town, three-quarters of a mile to the east. Moonlight Bay might have been dissolved by this flood out of Heaven, washed away as if it had been only an elaborate sand sculpture of a town.
But it was back there, all right. Waiting for this storm to pass, and for another storm after this one, and others until the end of all days. There was no escaping Moonlight Bay. Not for us. Not ever. It was, quite literally, in our blood.
“What happens to us now?” she asked, still holding fast to me.
“Life.”
“It’s all screwed up.”
“It always was.”
“They’re still out there.”
“Maybe they’ll leave us alone—for a while.”
“Where do we go from here, Snowman?”
“Back to the house. Get a beer.”
She was still shivering, and not because of the rain. “And after that? We can’t drink beer forever.”
“Big surf coming in tomorrow.”
“It’s going to be that easy?”
“Got to catch those epic waves while you can get them.”
We walked back to the cottage, where we found Orson and Bobby sitting on the wide front-porch steps. There was just enough room for us to sit down beside them.
Neither of my brothers was in the best mood of his life.
Bobby felt that he needed only Neosporin and a bandage. “It’s a shallow wound, thin as a paper cut, and hardly more than half an inch from top to bottom.”
“Sorry about the shirt,” Sasha said.
“Thanks.”
Whimpering, Orson got up, wobbled down the steps into the rain, and puked in the sand. It was a night for regurgitation.