Four rings.
"Yeah, well, you're not the Snow Queen, either," Emily said.
"I am too."
Five.
"No, you're the Snow Troll."
"You're the Snow Toad," Charlotte countered.
siX.
"Snow Worm.
"Snow Maggot."
"Snow Snot."
"Snow Puke."
Marty gave them a warning look, which put a stop to the name calling
competition, though they stuck their tongues out at each other.
After the seventh ring, he put his finger on the END button.
Before he could push it, however, the connection was made.
Whoever picked up the receiver didn't say anything.
"Hello?" Marty said. "Mom? Dad?"
Managing to sound both angry and sad, the man on the other end of the
line said, "How did you win them over?"
Marty felt as if ice had formed in his veins and marrow, not because of
the penetrating cold in the cabin but because the voice that responded
to him was a perfect imitation of his own.
"Why would they love you more than me?" The Other demanded, his voice
tremulous with emotion.
A mantle of dread settled on Marty, and a sense of unreality as
disorienting as any nightmare. He seemed to be dreaming while awake.
He said, "Don't touch them, you son of a bitch. Don't you lay one
finger on them."
"They betrayed me."
"I want to talk to my mother and father," Marty demanded.
"My mother and father," The Other said.
"Put them on the phone."
"So you can tell them more lies?"
"Put them on the phone now," Marty said between clenched
"They can't
listen to any more of your lies."
"What have you done?"
"They're finished listening to you."
"What have you done?"
"They wouldn't give me what I needed."
With understanding, dread became grief. For a moment Marty could not
find his voice.
The Other said, "All I needed was to be loved."
"What have you done?" He was shouting. "Who are you, what are you,
damn it, what are you, what have you done?"
Ignoring the questions, answering them with questions of its own, The
Other said, "Have you turned Paige against me? My Paige, my Charlotte,
my sweet little Emily? Do I have any hope of getting them back or will
I have to kill them too?" The voice cracked with emotion. "Oh God, is
there even blood in their veins any more, are they human any more, or
have you made them into something else?"
Marty realized they could not conduct a conversation. It was madness to
try. However much they might look and sound alike, they were without
any common grounds. In fundamental ways, they were as unlike each other
as if they had been members of different species.
Marty pushed the END button.
His hands were shaking so badly that he dropped the phone.
When he turned from the window, he saw the girls were standing together,
holding hands. They were staring, pale and frightened.
His shouting into the telephone had brought Paige out of one of the
bedrooms where she had been adjusting the electric heater.
Images of his parents' faces and treasured memories of a life of love
crowded into his mind, but he resolutely repressed them. If he gave in
to grief now, wasted precious time in tears, he would be condemning
Paige and the girls to certain death.
"He's here," Marty said, "he's coming, and we don't have much time."
New Maps of Hell Those who would banish the sin of greed embrace the sin
of envy as their creed.
Those who seek to banish envy as well, only draw elaborate new maps of
hell.
Those with passion to change the world, look on themselves as saints, as
pearls, and by the launching of noble endeavor, flee dreaded
introspection forever.
--The Book of Counted Sorrows
Laugh at tyrants and the tragedy they
inflict. Such men welcome our tears as evidence of subservience, but
our laughter condemns them to ignominy.
--Endless River, Laura Shane S X 1.
He stands in his parents' kitchen, watching the falling snow through the
window above the sink, shaking with hunger, and wolfing down leftover
meatloaf.
This is one of those decisive moments that separate real heroes from
pretenders. When all is darkest, when tragedy piles on tragedy, when
hope seems to be a game only for idiots and fools, does Harrison Ford or
Kevin Costner or Tom Cruise or Wesley Snipes or Kurt Russell quit?
No. Never. Unthinkable. They are heroes. They persevere. Rise to
the occasion. They not only deal with adversity but thrive on it.
From sharing the worst moments of those great men's lives, he knows how
to cope with emotional devastation, mental depression, physical abuse in
enormous quantities, and even the threat of alien domination of the
earth.
Move, move, confront, challenge, grapple, and prevail.
He must not dwell on the tragedy of his parents' deaths. The creatures
he destroyed were surely not his mother and father, any way, but mimics
like the one that has stolen his own life. He might never learn when
his real parents were murdered and replaced, and in any event he must
delay grieving for them.
Thinking too much about his parents--or about anything--is * not
merely a waste of precious time but anti-heroic. Heroes don't think.
Heroes act.
Move, move, confront, challenge, grapple, and prevail.
Finished eating, he goes to the garage by way of a laundry room off the
kitchen. Switching on fluorescent lights as he crosses the threshold,
he discovers two vehicles are available for his use an old blue Dodge
and an apparently new Jeep Wagoneer. He will use the Jeep because of
its four-wheel drive.
The keys to the vehicle hang on a pegboard in the laundry room.
In a cabinet, he also finds a large box of detergent. He reads the list
of chemicals on the box, satisfied with what he discovers.
He returns to the kitchen.
The end of one row of lower cabinets is finished with a wine rack.
After locating a corkscrew in a drawer, he opens four bottles and
empties the wine into the sink.
In another kitchen drawer he finds a plastic funnel among other odds and
ends of cooking implements. A third drawer is filled with clean white
dish towels, and a fourth is the source for a pair of scissors and a
book of matches.
He carries the bottles and the other items into the laundry room and
puts them on the tiled counter beside the deep sink.
In the garage again, he takes a red five-gallon gasoline can from a
shelf to the left of the workbench. When he unscrews the cap,
high-octane fumes waft out of the container. Spring through autumn, Dad
probably keeps gasoline in the can to use in the lawn mower, but it is
empty now.
Rummaging through the drawers and cabinets around the work bench, he
finds a coil of flexible plastic tubing in a box of repair parts for the
drinking-water filtration system in the kitchen. With this he siphons
gasoline out of
the Dodge into the five-gallon can.
At the sink in the laundry room, he uses the funnel to pour an inch of
detergent into the bottom of each empty wine bottle. He adds gasoline.
He cuts the dishcloths into useable strips.
Although he has two revolvers and twenty rounds of ammunition, he wants
to add gasoline bombs to his arsenal. His experiences of the past
twenty-four hours, since first confronting the false father, have taught
him not to underestimate his adversary.
He still hopes to save Paige, Charlotte, and little Emily. He
continues to desire reunion and the renewal of their life together.
However, he must face reality and prepare for the possibility that his
wife and children are no longer who they once were. They may simply
have been mentally enslaved. On the other hand, they might also have
been infected by parasites not of this world, their brains now hollow
and filled with writhing monstrosities. Or they might not be themselves
at all, merely replicants of the real Paige, Charlotte, and Emily, just
as the false father is a replicant of him, arising out of a seed pod
from some distant star.
The varieties of alien infestation are limitless and strange, but one
weapon has saved the world more often than any other, fire.
Kurt Russell, when he was a member of an Antarctic scientific-re search
outpost, had been confronted by an extraterrestrial shape changer of
infinite forms and great cunning, perhaps the most frightening and
powerful alien ever to attempt colonization of the earth, and fire had
been by far the most effective weapon against that formidable enemy.
He wonders if four incendiary devices are enough. He probably won't
have time to use more of them, anyway. If something bursts out of the
false father, Paige, or the girls, and if it's as hostile as the things
that had burst out of people in Kurt Russell's research station, he
would no doubt be overwhelmed before he could use more than four
gasoline bombs, considering that he must take the time to light each one
separately. He wishes he had a flamethrower.
Standing by one of the front windows, watching heavy snow filter through
the trees and onto the lane that led out to the county route, Marty
plucked handfuls of 9mm ammunition out of the boxes of ammo they'd
brought from Mission Viejo. He distributed cartridges in the numerous
zippered pockets of his red-and-black ski jacket and in the pockets of
his jeans as well.
Paige loaded the magazine of the Mossberg. She'd had less time than
Marty to practice with the pistol on the firing range, and she felt more
comfortable with the 12-gauge.
They had eighty shells for the shotgun and approximately two hundred 9mm
rounds for the Beretta.
Marty felt defenseless.
No amount of weaponry would have made him feel better.
After hanging up on The Other, he had considered getting out of the
cabin, going on the run. But if they had been followed this far so
easily, they would be followed anywhere they went. It was better to
make a stand in a defendable location than to be accosted on a lonely
highway or be taken by surprise in a place more vulnerable than the
cabin.
He almost called the local police to send them to his parents' house.
But The Other would surely be gone before they got there, and the
evidence they collected--fingerprints and God knew what else--would only
make it appear that he had murdered his own mother and father.
The media had already painted him as an unstable character. The scene
at the house in Mammoth Lakes would play into the fantasy they were
selling. If he were arrested today or tomorrow or next week--or even
just detained for a few hours without being booked--Paige and the girls
would be left on their own, a situation that he found intolerable.
They had no choice but to dig in and fight. Which wasn't a choice so
much as a death sentence.
Side by side on the sofa, Charlotte and Emily were still wearing their
jackets and gloves. They held hands, taking strength from each other.
Although they were scared, they weren't crying or demanding reassurance
as many kids might have been doing in the same situation. They had
always been real troopers, each in her own way.
Marty was not sure how to counsel his daughters. Ilsually, like Paige,
he was not at a loss for the guidance they needed to get them through
the problems of life. Paige joked that they were the Fabulous
Stillwater Parenting Machine, a phrase that contained as much self
mockery as genuine pride. But he was at a loss for words this time
because he tried never to lie to them, did not intend to start lying
now, yet dared not share with them his own bleak assessment of their
chances.
"Kids, come here, do something for me," he said.
Eager for distraction, they scrambled off the sofa and joined him at the
window.
"Stand here," he said, "watch the paved road out there. If a car turns
into the driveway or even goes by too slow, does anything suspicious,
you holler. Got that?"
They nodded solemnly.
To Paige, Marty said, "Let's check all the other windows, make sure
they're locked, and close the drapes over them."
If The Other managed to creep up on the cabin without alerting them,
Marty didn't want the bastard to be able to watch them--or shoot at
them--through a window.
Every window he checked was locked.
In the kitchen, as he covered a window that looked out onto the deep
woods behind the cabin, he remembered that his mother had made the
drapes on her sewing machine in the spare bedroom of the house in
Mammoth Lakes. He had a mental image of her, sitting at the Singer, her
foot on the treadle, intently watching the needle as it chattered up and
down.
His chest clogged with pain. He took a deep breath, let it shudder out
of him, then again, trying not only to expel the pain but also the
memory that engendered it.
There would be time for grief later, if they survived.
Right now he had to think only about Paige and the kids. His mother was
dead. They were alive. The cold truth, mourning was a luxury.
He caught up with Paige in the second of the two small bed rooms just as
she finished adjusting the draperies. She had switched on a nightstand
lamp, so she wouldn't be in darkness when she closed off the windows,
and now she moved to extinguish it.
"Leave it on," Marty said. "With the storm, it'll be a long and early
twilight. From outside, he'll probably be able to tell which rooms are
lit, which aren't. No sense making it easier for him to figure exactly
where we are."
She was quiet. Staring at the amber cloth of the lampshade. As if
their future could be prophesied from the vague patterns in that
illuminated fabric.
At last she looked at him. "How long have we got?"
"Maybe ten minutes, maybe two hours. It's up to him."
"What's going to happen, Marty?"
It was his turn to be silent a moment. He didn't want to lie to her,
&nb
sp; either.
When he finally spoke, Marty was surprised to hear what he told her,
because it sprang from subconscious depths, was genuine, and indicated
greater optimism than he was aware of on a conscious level.
' We're going to kill the fucker." Optimism or fatal self-delusion.
She came to him around the foot of the bed, and they held each other.
She felt so right in his arms. For a moment, the world didn't seem
crazy any more.
"We still don't even know who he is, what he is, where he comes from,"
she said.
"And maybe we'll never find out. Maybe, even after we kill the son of a
bitch, we'll never know what this was all about."
"If we never find out, then we can't pick up the pieces."
"No."
She put her head on his shoulder and gently kissed the exposed penumbra
of the bruises on his throat. "We can never feel safe."
"Not in our old life. But as long as we're together, the four of us,"