He shifted out of reverse.
Through his side window, he could see The Other standing spread-legged
fifteen yards from the end of the driveway, gun in both hands.
As Marty tramped on the accelerator, another round thudded into his
door, below the window, but didn't penetrate to the interior of the car.
The Other broke into a run again as the BMW shot downhill and away from
him.
Although the wind carried most of the smoke off to the right, there was
suddenly a lot more of it, blacker than ever, and enough churned into
the car to make them miserable. Paige started coughing, the girls were
wheezing in the back seat, and Marty couldn't clearly see the road
ahead.
"Tire's burning!" Paige shouted above the howling wind.
Two hundred yards farther downhill, the burning tire blew, and the BMW
spun out of control on the snow-skinned blacktop. Marty turned the
wheel into the slide, but applied physics didn't prove reliable this
time. The car swung around a hundred and eighty degrees, simultaneously
moving sideways, and they only stopped when they careened off the road
and fetched up against the chain-link fence that marked the perimeter of
the property owned by the defunct Prophetic Church of the Rapture.
Marty climbed out of the car. He yanked open the back door, leaned in,
and helped the frightened girls disentangle themselves from their
seatbelts.
He didn't even look to see if The Other was still coming because he knew
the bastard was coming. This guy would never stop, never, not until
they killed him, maybe not even then.
As Marty extracted Emily from the back seat, Paige scrambled out of the
driver's door because her side of the car was jammed into the
chain-link. Having withdrawn the manila envelopes of cash from under
her seat, she stuffed them inside her ski jacket. As she zipped shut,
she looked uphill.
"Shit," she said, and the shotgun boomed.
Marty helped Charlotte out of the car as the Mossberg thundered again.
He thought he heard the hard crack of small-arms fire, too, but the
bullet must have gone wide of them.
Shielding the girls, pushing them behind him and away from the burning
car, he glanced uphill.
The Other stood arrogantly in the center of the road, about a hundred
yards away, convinced he was protected from the shotgun fire by
distance, the deflecting power of the wailing wind, and perhaps his own
supernatural ability to bounce back from serious damage. He was
exactly Marty's size, yet even at a distance he seemed to tower over
them, a dark and ominous figure. Maybe it was the perspective.
Almost nonchalantly, he broke open the cylinder of his revolver and
tipped expended cartridges into the snow.
"He's reloading," Paige said, taking the opportunity to jam additional
shells into the magazine of her shotgun, "let's get out of here."
"Where?" Marty wondered, looking around frantically at the snow-whipped
landscape.
He wished a car would appear from one direction or another.
Then he canceled his own wish because he knew The Other would kill any
passersby who tried to interfere.
They moved downhill, into the biting wind, using the time to put some
distance between themselves and their pursuer while they figured what to
do next.
He ruled out trying to reach one of the other cabins scattered through
the high woods. Most were vacation homes. No one would be in residence
on a Tuesday in December unless, by morning, the new snow brought them
in for the skiing. And if they stumbled into a cabin where someone was
at home, with The Other trailing after them, Marty didn't want the
deaths of innocent strangers on his conscience.
Route 203 lay at the bottom of the county road. Even in the early hours
of a blizzard, steady traffic would be passing between the lakes and
Mammoth Lakes itself. If there were a lot of witnesses, The Other
couldn't kill them all. He'd have to retreat.
But the bottom of the county road was too distant. They'd never make it
before they ran out of shotgun shells to keep their enemy at bay--or
before the greater accuracy and range of the revolver allowed him to
pick them off one by one.
They came to a gap in the battered chain-link fence.
"Here, come on," Marty said.
"Isn't that place abandoned?" Paige objected.
"There's nowhere else," he said, taking Charlotte and Emily by the hand
and leading them onto the church property.
His hope was that someone would come along soon, see the half-burned
BMW, and report it to the sheriff's department. Instead of fanning the
fire that had been feeding on the paint, the wind had snuffed it, but
the tire was still burning, and the battered car was hard to ignore.
If a couple of well-armed deputies showed up to check out the area and
could be enlisted in the struggle, they wouldn't under stand how
formidable The Other was, but they wouldn't be as naive and helpless as
ordinary citizens, either.
After a brief hesitation, during which she glanced worriedly uphill at
their nemesis, Paige followed him and the girls through the
hole in the fence.
The speedloader slips from his fingers and drops into the snow as he
removes it from the pouch on his belt. It is the last of the two he
took from the dead man in the surveillance van.
He stoops, plucks it out of the snow, and brushes it off against the
cranberry-red sweater under his varsity jacket. He brings it to the
open revolver, slips it in, twists it, drops it, and snaps the cylinder
shut.
He will have to use his last rounds carefully. The replicants are not
going to be easy to kill.
He now knows that the woman is a replicant just like the false father.
Alien flesh. Inhuman. She cannot be his Paige, for she is too
aggressive. His Paige would be submissive, eager for domination, like
the women in the Senator's film collection. His Paige is surely dead.
He must accept that, difficult as it is. This thing is only
masquerading as Paige, and not well. Worse, if Paige is gone forever,
so are his loving daughters. The girls, cute and convincingly human,
are also replicants--demonic, extraterrestrial, and dangerous.
His former life is irretrievable.
His family is gone forever.
A black abyss of despair yawns under him, but he must not fall into it.
He must find the strength to go on and fight either until he achieves
victory in the name of all humankind--or is destroyed. He must be as
courageous as Kurt Russell and Donald Sutherland were when they found
themselves in similar dire straits, for he is a hero, and a hero must
persevere.
Downhill, the four creatures disappear through a hole in the chain-link
fence. All he wants now is to see them dead, scramble their brains,
dismember and decapitate them, eviscerate them, set them afire, take
every precaution against their resurrection, for they are not merely the
killers of his real family but a threat to the world.
The thought occur
s to him that, if he survives, these terrifying
experiences will provide him with material for a novel. He surely will
be able to get past the opening sentence, an accomplishment of which he
was incapable yesterday. Though his wife and children are lost to him
forever, he might be able to salvage his career from the ruins of his
life.
Slipping and sliding, he hurries toward the gap in the fence.
The windshield wipers were caked with snow that was hardening into ice.
They stuttered and thumped across the glass.
Oslett consulted the computer-generated map, then pointed to a turn-off
ahead. "There, on the right."
Clocker put on the turn signal.
Like the ghost ship Mary Celeste silently materializing from a strange
fog with tattered sails unfurled and decks empty of crew, the abandoned
church loomed out of the driving snow.
At first, in the obscuring storm and fading gray light of late
afternoon, Marty thought the building was in good repair, but that
impression was transient. As they drew nearer, he saw that a lot of
roof tiles were missing. Sections of the copper rain gutter were gone,
while other pieces dangled precariously, swaying and creaking in the
wind. Most of the windows were broken out, and vandals had spray
painted obscenities on the once-handsome brick walls.
Rambling complexes of buildings--offices, workshops, a nursery,
dormitories, a dining hall--stood immediately behind and to both sides
of the steepled main structure. The Prophetic Church of the Rapture had
been a cult that required its members to contribute all of their worldly
belongings upon admittance and to live in a tightly governed commune.
They raced through the inch-deep snow, as fast as the girls could
manage, toward the entrance to the church, rather than to one of the
other buildings, because the church was closest. They needed to get out
of sight as quickly as possible. Though The Other could track them
through his connection with Marty no matter where they went, at least he
couldn't shoot at them if he couldn't see them.
Twelve broad steps led up to a double set of ten-foot-high oak doors
with six-foot-high fanlights above each pair. All but a few ruby and
yellow shards of glass had been broken out of the fanlights, leaving
dark gaps between the thick ribs of leading. The doors were recessed in
a twenty-foot-high cinquefoil arch, above which was an enormous and
elaborately patterned wheel window that still contained twenty percent
of its original glass, most likely because it was a harder target for
stones.
The four carved-oak doors were weather-beaten, scarred, cracked, and
spray-painted with more obscenities that glowed softly in the ashen
light of the premature dusk. On one, a vandal had crudely drawn the
white hourglass shape of a female form complete with breasts and a
crotch defined by the letter Y, and beside it was a representation of a
phallus as large as a man. Beveled letters, cut by a master stone
carver, made the same promise in the granite lintel above each set of
doors, HE LIFTETH US UNTO HEAVEN, however, over those words, the
spoilers had sprayed BULLSHIT in red paint.
The cult had been creepy, and its founder--Jonathan Cainc had been a
fraud and pederast, but Marty was more chilled by the vandals than by
the misguided people who had followed Caine. At least the faithful
cultists had believed in something, no matter how misguided, had yearned
to be worthy of God's grace, and had sacrificed for their beliefs, even
if the sacrifices ultimately proved to be stupid, they had dared to
dream even if their dreams had ended in tragedy. The mindless hatred
that informed the scrawlings of the graffitists was the work of empty
people who believed in nothing, were incapable of dreaming, and thrived
on the pain of others.
One of the doors stood ajar six inches. Marty grabbed the edge of it
and pulled. The hinges were corroded, the oak was warped, but the door
grated outward another twelve or fourteen inches.
Paige went inside first. Charlotte and Emily trailed close behind Marty
never heard the shot that hit him.
As he started to follow the girls, a lance of ice impaled him, entering
the upper-left quadrant of his back, exiting through the muscles and
tendons below the collar bone on the same side. The piercing chill was
so cold that the blizzard hammering the church seemed like a tropical
disturbance by comparison, and he shuddered violently.
The next thing he knew, he was lying on the snow-covered brick stoop in
front of the door, wondering how he had gotten there. He was half
convinced he had just stretched out for a nap, but the pain in his bones
indicated he'd dropped hard onto his unlikely bed.
He stared up through the descending snow and wintry light at letters in
granite, letters on granite.
HE LiftETH US UNTO HEAVEN.
BULLSHIT.
He only realized he'd been shot when Paige rushed out of the church and
dropped to one knee at his side, shouting, "Marty, oh God, my God,
you've been shot, the son of a bitch shot you," and he thought, Oh, yes,
of course, that's it, I've been shot, not stabbed by a lance of ice.
Paige rose from beside him, raised the Mossberg. He heard two shots.
They were exceedingly loud, unlike the stealthy bullet that had knocked
him to the bricks.
Curious, he turned his head to see how close their indefatigable enemy
had come. He expected to discover the look-alike charging at him, only
a few yards away, unfazed by shotgun pellets.
Instead, The Other remained at a distance from the church, out of range
of the two rounds Paige had fired. He was a black figure on a field of
white, the details of his too-familiar face unrevealed by the waning
gray light. Ranging back and forth through the snow, back and forth,
lanky and quick, he seemed to be a wolf stalking a herd of sheep,
watchful and patient, biding his time until the moment of ultimate
vulnerability arrived.
The poniard of ice that transfixed Marty became, from one second to the
next, a stiletto of fire. With the heat came excruciating pain that
made him gasp. At last the abstract concept of a bullet wound was
translated into the language of reality.
Paige lifted the Mossberg again.
Regaining clarity of mind with the pain, Marty said, "Don't waste the
ammo. Let him go for now. Help me up."
With her assistance, he was able to get to his feet.
"How bad?" she asked worriedly.
"I'm not dying. Let's get inside before he decides to take another shot
at us."
He followed her through the door into the narthex, where the darkness
was relieved only by faint rays penetrating the partly open door and
glassless fanlights.
The girls were crying, Charlotte louder than Emily, and Marty tried to
reassure them. "It's okay, I'm all right, just a little nick. All I
need is a Band-Aid, one with a picture of Snoopy on it, and I'll feel
all better."
In truth, his left arm was half numb. He only
had partial use of it.
When he flexed his hand, he couldn't curl it into a tight fist.
Paige eased to the eighteen-inch gap between the big door and the jamb,
where the wind whistled and gibbered. She peered out at The Other.
Trying to get a better sense of the damage the bullet had done, Marty
slipped his right hand inside his ski jacket and gingerly explored the
front of his left shoulder. Even a light touch ignited a flare of pain
that made him grit his teeth. His wool sweater was saturated with
blood.
"Take the girls farther back into the church," Paige whispered urgently,
though their enemy could not possibly have heard her out there in the
storm. "All the way to the other end."
"What're you talking about?"
"I'll wait here for him."
The girls protested. "Mommy, don't."
"Mom, come with us, you gotta."
"Mommy, please."
"I'll be fine," Paige said, "I'll be safe. Really. It'll be perfect.
Don't you see? Marty, when the creep senses you moving away, he'll come
into the church. He'll expect us to be together." As she talked, she
put two more shells into the Mossberg magazine to replace the most
recent rounds she'd expended. "He won't expect me to be waiting right
here for him."