by Dean Koontz
Jack looked grim. “Let’s prepare for the worst.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Shatters of snow ticked and pinged against the windows in the ground-floor study.
Though the outer world was whitewashed and full of glare, little daylight filtered into the room. Lamps with parchment shades cast an amber glow.
Reviewing their own guns and those that Eduardo had inherited from Stanley Quartermass, Jack chose to load only one other weapon: a Colt .45 revolver.
“I’ll carry the Mossberg and the Colt,” he told Heather. “You’ll have the Micro Uzi and the thirty-eight. Use the revolver only as backup to the Uzi.”
“That’s it?” she asked.
He regarded her bleakly. “If we can’t stop whatever’s coming at us with this much firepower, a third gun isn’t going to do either of us a damned bit of good.”
In one of the two drawers in the base of the gun cabinet, among other sporting paraphernalia, he found three game-hunting holsters that belted around the waist. One was crafted from nylon or rayon—some man-made fabric, anyway—and the other two were leather. Exposed to below-zero temperatures for an extended period, nylon would remain flexible long after the leather holster would stiffen; a handgun might snag or bind up slightly if the leather contracted around it. Because he intended to be outdoors while Heather remained inside, he gave her the most supple of the two leather rigs and kept the nylon for himself.
Their ski suits were replete with zippered pockets. They filled many of them with spare ammunition, though it might be optimistic to expect to have a chance to reload after the assault began.
That an assault would occur, Jack had no doubt. He didn’t know what form it would take—an entirely physical attack or a combination of physical and mental blows. He didn’t know whether the damn thing would come itself or through surrogates, neither when nor from what direction it would launch its onslaught, but he knew it would come. It was impatient with their resistance, eager to control and become them. Little imagination was required to see that it would next want to study them at much closer range, perhaps dissect them and examine their brains and nervous systems to learn the secret of their ability to resist.
He had no illusions that they would be killed or anesthetized before being subjected to that exploratory surgery.
Jack put his shotgun on the kitchen table again. From one of the cupboards he removed a round galvanized-tin can, unscrewed the lid, and extracted a box of wooden matches, which he put on the table.
While Heather stood watch at one window, Toby and Falstaff at the other, Jack went down to the basement. In the second of the two lower rooms, along the wall beside the silent generator, stood eight five-gallon cans of gasoline, a fuel supply they had laid in at Paul Youngblood’s suggestion. He carried two cans upstairs and set them on the kitchen floor beside the table.
“If the guns can’t stop it,” he said, “if it gets inside, and you’re backed into a corner, then the risk of fire might be worth taking.”
“Burn down the house?” Heather asked disbelievingly.
“It’s only a house. It can be rebuilt. If you have no other choice, then to hell with the house. If bullets don’t work—” He saw stark terror in her eyes. “They will work, I’m sure of that, the guns will stop it, especially that Uzi. But if by some chance, some one-in-a-million chance, that doesn’t stop it, fire will get it for sure. Or at least drive it back. Fire could be just what you need to give you time to distract the thing, hold it off, and get out before you’re trapped.”
She stared at him dubiously. “Jack, why do you keep saying ‘you’ instead of ‘we’?”
He hesitated. She wasn’t going to like this. He didn’t like it much himself. There was no alternative. “You’ll stay here with Toby and the dog while I—”
“No way.”
“—while I try to get to the Youngbloods’ ranch for help.”
“No, we shouldn’t split up.”
“We don’t have a choice, Heather.”
“It’ll take us easier if we split up.”
“Probably won’t make a difference.”
“I think it will.”
“This shotgun doesn’t add much to that Uzi.” He gestured at the whiteout beyond the window. “Anyway, we can’t all make it through that weather.”
She stared morosely at the wall of blowing snow, unable to argue the point.
“I could make it,” Toby said, smart enough to know that he was the weak link. “I really could.” The dog sensed the boy’s anxiety and padded to his side, rubbed against him. “Dad, please, just give me a chance.”
Two miles wasn’t a great distance on a warm spring day, an easy walk, but they were faced with fierce cold against which even their ski suits were not perfect protection. Furthermore, the power of the wind would work against them in three ways: reducing the subjective air temperature at least ten degrees below what it was objectively, pounding them into exhaustion as they tried to make progress against it, and obscuring their desired route with whirling clouds of snow that reduced visibility to near zero.
Jack figured he and Heather might have the strength and stamina required to walk two miles under those conditions, with snow up to their knees, higher in places, but he was sure Toby wouldn’t get a quarter of the way, not even walking in the trail they broke for him. Before they’d gone far, they would have to take turns carrying him. Thereafter, they would quickly become debilitated and surely die in that white desolation.
“I don’t want to stay here,” Toby said. “I don’t want to do what I might have to do if I stay here.”
“And I don’t want to leave you here.” Jack squatted in front of him. “I’m not abandoning you, Toby. You know I’d never do that, don’t you?”
Toby nodded somberly.
“And you can depend on your mom. She’s tough. She won’t let anything happen to you.”
“I know,” Toby said, being a brave soldier.
“Good. Okay. Now I’ve got a couple of things to do yet, and then I’ll go. I’ll be back fast as I can—straight over to Ponderosa Pines, round up help, get back here with the cavalry. You’ve seen those old movies. The cavalry always gets there in the nick of time, doesn’t it? You’ll be okay. We’ll all be okay.”
The boy searched his eyes.
He met his son’s fear with a falsely reassuring smile and felt like the most deceitful bastard ever born. He was not as confident as he sounded. Not by half. And he did feel as if he was running out on them. What if he got help—but they were dead by the time he returned to Quartermass Ranch?
He might as well kill himself then. Wouldn’t be a point in going on.
Truth was, it probably wouldn’t work out that way, them dead and him alive. At best he had a fifty-fifty chance of making it all the way to Ponderosa Pines. If the storm didn’t bring him down…something else might. He didn’t know how closely they were being observed, whether their adversary would be aware of his departure. If it did see him go, it wouldn’t let him get far.
Then Heather and Toby would be on their own.
Nothing else he could do. No other plan made sense. Zero options. And time running out.
Hammer blows boomed through the house. Hard, hollow, fearful sounds.
Jack used three-inch steel nails because they were the largest he had been able to find in the garage tool cabinet. Standing in the vestibule at the bottom of the back stairs, he drove those spikes at a severe angle through the outside door and into the jamb. Two above the knob, two below. The door was solid oak, and the long nails bit through it only with relentless hammering.
The hinges were on the inside. Nothing on the back porch could pry them loose.
Nevertheless, he decided to fix the door to the jamb on that flank as well, though with only two nails instead of four. He drove another two through the upper part of the door and into the header, just for good measure.
Any intruder that entered those back stairs could take two immediate routes once
it crossed the outer threshold, instead of just one as with the other doors. It could enter the kitchen and confront Heather—or-turn the other way and swiftly ascend to Toby’s room. Jack wanted to prevent anything from reaching the second floor because, from there, it could slip into several rooms, avoiding a frontal assault, forcing Heather to search for it until it had a chance to attack her from behind.
After he’d driven the final nail home, he disengaged the dead-bolt lock and tried to open the door. He couldn’t budge it, no matter how hard he strained. No intruder could get through it quietly anymore; it would have to be broken down, and Heather would hear it regardless of where she was.
He twisted the thumb-turn. The lock clacked into the striker plate again.
Secure.
While Jack nailed shut the other door at the back of the house, Toby helped Heather pile pots, pans, dishes, flatware, and drinking glasses in front of the door between the kitchen and the back porch. That carefully balanced tower would topple with a resounding crash if the door was pushed open even slowly, alerting them if they were elsewhere in the house.
Falstaff kept his distance from the rickety assemblage, as if he understood that he would be in big trouble if he was the one to knock it over.
“What about the cellar door?” Toby said.
“That’s safe,” Heather assured him. “There’s no way into the cellar from outside.”
As Falstaff watched with interest, they constructed a similar security device in front of the door between the kitchen and the garage. Toby crowned it with a glassful of spoons atop an inverted metal bowl.
They carried bowls, dishes, pots, baking pans, and forks to the foyer. After Jack left, they would construct a third tower inside the front door.
Heather couldn’t help feeling that the alarms were inadequate. Pathetic, actually.
However, they couldn’t nail shut all the first-floor doors, because they might have to escape by one—in which case they could just shove the tottering housewares aside, slip the lock, and be gone. And they hadn’t time to transform the house into a sealed fortress.
Besides, every fortress had the potential to become a prison.
Even if Jack had felt there was time enough to attempt to secure the house a little better, he might not have tried. Regardless of what measures were taken, the large number of windows made the place difficult to defend.
The best he could do was hurry from window to window upstairs—while Heather checked those on the ground floor—to make sure they were locked. A lot of them appeared to be painted shut and not easy to open in any case.
Pane after pane revealed a misery of snow and wind. He caught no glimpse of anything unearthly.
In Heather’s closet off the master bedroom, Jack sorted through her wool scarves. He selected one that was loosely knit.
He found his sunglasses in a dresser drawer. He wished he had ski goggles. Sunglasses would have to be good enough. He couldn’t walk the two miles to Ponderosa Pines with his eyes unprotected in that glare; he’d be risking snowblindness.
When he returned to the kitchen, where Heather was checking the locks on the last of the windows, he lifted the phone again, hoping for a dial tone. Folly, of course. A dead line.
“Got to go,” he said.
They might have hours or only precious minutes before their nemesis decided to come after them. He couldn’t guess whether the thing would be swift or leisurely in its approach; there was no way of understanding its thought processes or of knowing whether time had any meaning to it.
Alien. Eduardo had been right. Utterly alien. Mysterious. Infinitely strange.
Heather and Toby accompanied him to the front door. He held Heather briefly but tightly, fiercely. He kissed her only once. He said an equally quick goodbye to Toby.
He dared not linger, for he might decide at any second not to leave, after all. Ponderosa Pines was the only hope they had. Not going was tantamount to admitting they were doomed. Yet leaving his wife and son alone in that house was the hardest thing he had ever done—harder than seeing Tommy Fernandez and Luther Bryson cut down at his side, harder than facing Anson Oliver in front of that burning service station, harder by far than recovering from a spinal injury. He told himself that going required as much courage on his part as staying required of them, not because of the ordeal the storm would pose and not because something unspeakable might be waiting for him out there; but because, if they died and he lived, his grief and guilt and self-loathing would make life darker than death.
He wound the scarf around his face, from the chin to just below his eyes. Although it went around twice, the weave was loose enough to allow him to breathe. He pulled up the hood and tied it under his chin to hold the scarf in place. He felt like a knight girding for battle.
Toby watched, nervously chewing his lower lip. Tears shimmered in his eyes, but he strove not to spill them. Being the little hero.
Jack put on his sunglasses, so the boy’s tears would be less visible to him and, therefore, less corrosive of his will to leave.
He pulled on his gloves and picked up the Mossberg shotgun. The Colt .45 was holstered at his right hip.
The moment had come.
Heather appeared stricken.
He could hardly bear to look at her.
She opened the door. Wailing wind drove snow all the way across the porch and over the threshold.
Jack stepped out of the house and reluctantly turned away from everything he loved. He kicked through the powdery snow on the porch.
He heard her speak to him one last time—“I love you”—the words distorted by the wind but the meaning unmistakable.
At the head of the porch steps he hesitated, turned to her, saw that she had taken one step out of the house, said, “I love you, Heather,” then walked down and out into the storm, not sure if she had heard him, not knowing if he would ever speak to her again, ever hold her in his arms, ever see the love in her eyes or the smile that was, to him, worth more than a place in heaven and the salvation of his soul.
The snow in the front yard was knee-deep. He bulled through it.
He dared not look back again.
Leaving them, he knew, was essential. It was courageous. It was wise, prudent, their best hope of survival.
However, it didn’t feel like any of those things. It felt like abandonment.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Wind hissed at the windows as if it possessed consciousness and was keeping watch on them, thumped and rattled the kitchen door as if testing the lock, shrieked and snuffled along the sides of the house in search of a weakness in their defenses.
Reluctant to put the Uzi down in spite of its weight, Heather stood watch for a while at the north window of the kitchen, then at the west window above the sink. She cocked her head now and then to listen closely to those noises that seemed too purposeful to be just voices of the storm.
At the table, Toby was wearing earphones and playing with a Game Boy. His body language was different from that which he usually exhibited when involved in an electronic game—no twitching, leaning, rocking from side to side, bouncing in his seat. He was playing only to fill the time.
Falstaff lay in the corner farthest from any window, the warmest spot in the room. Occasionally he lifted his noble head, sniffing the air or listening; but mostly he lay on his side, staring across the room at floor level, yawning.
Time passed slowly. Heather repeatedly checked the wall clock, certain that at least ten minutes had gone by, only to discover that a mere two minutes had elapsed since she’d last looked.
The two-mile walk to Ponderosa Pines would take maybe twenty-five minutes in fair weather. Jack might require an hour or even an hour and a half in the storm, allowing for the hard slogging through knee-deep snow, detours around the deeper drifts, and the incessant resistance of the gale-force wind. Once there, he should need half an hour to explain the situation and marshal a rescue team. Less than fifteen minutes would be required for the return trip ev
en if they had to plow open some snowbound stretches of road and driveway. At most he ought to be back in two hours and fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour sooner than that.
The dog yawned.
Toby was so still he might have been asleep sitting up.
They had turned the thermostat down so they could wear their ski suits and be ready to desert the house without delay if necessary, yet the place was still warm. Her hands and face were cool, but sweat trickled along her spine and down her sides from her underarms. She unzipped her jacket, though it interfered with the hip holster when it hung loose.
When fifteen minutes had passed uneventfully, she began to think their unpredictable adversary would make no move against them. Either it didn’t realize they were currently more vulnerable without Jack or it didn’t care. From what Toby had said, it was the very definition of arrogance—never afraid—and might operate always according to its own rhythms, plans, and desires.
Her confidence was beginning to rise—when Toby spoke quietly and not to her. “No, I don’t think so.”
Heather stepped away from the window.
He murmured, “Well…maybe.”
“Toby?” she said.
As if unaware of her, he stared at the Game Boy screen. His fingers weren’t moving on the controls. No game was under way: shapes and bold colors swarmed across the miniature monitor, similar to those she had seen twice before.
“Why?” he asked.
She put a hand on his shoulder.
“Maybe,” he said to the swirling colors on the screen.
Always before, responding to this entity, he had said “no.” The “maybe” alarmed Heather.
“Could be, maybe,” he said.
She took the earphones off him, and he finally looked up at her. “What’re you doing, Toby?”
“Talking,” he said in a half-drugged voice.
“What were you saying ‘maybe’ to?”
“To the Giver,” he explained.
