“They don’t have to. With their gadgets, they can follow from miles away.”
“And then just before you pulled into the driveway, I went out onto the porch ’cause I thought I heard a helicopter. Up in these mountains in this wind — does that make sense?”
“You better get her out of here,” Joe agreed.
As the wind slapped the electrical lines against the house, Louis paced to the fireplace and back, a hand pressed to his forehead as he tried to put the loss of Rose out of his mind long enough to think what to do. “I figured you and Rose…well, I thought the two of you were taking her. And if they’re onto me, then won’t she be safer with you?”
“If they’re onto you,” Joe said, “then none of us is safe here, now, anymore. There’s no way out.”
The lines slapped the house, slapped the house, and the lights pulsed, and Louis walked to the fireplace and picked up a battery-powered, long-necked butane match from the hearth.
The girl turned from the window, eyes wide, and said, “No.”
Louis Tucker flicked the switch on the butane match, and blue flame spurted from the nozzle. Laughing, he set his own hair on fire and then his shirt.
“Nina!” Joe cried.
The girl ran to his side.
The stink of burning hair spread through the room.
Ablaze, Louis moved to block the front door.
From the waistband of his jeans, Joe drew the pistol, aimed — but couldn’t pull the trigger. This man confronting him was not really Louis Tucker now; it was the boy-thing, reaching out three thousand miles from Virginia. And there was no chance that Louis would regain control of his body and live through this night. Yet Joe hesitated to squeeze off a shot, because the moment that Louis was dead, the boy would remote someone else.
The girl was probably untouchable, able to protect herself with her own paranormal power. So the boy would use Joe — and the gun in Joe’s hand — to shoot the girl point-blank in the head.
“This is fun,” the boy said in Louis’s voice, as flames seethed off his hair, as his ears charred and crackled, as his forehead and cheeks blistered. “Fun,” he said, enjoying his ride inside Louis Tucker but still blocking the exit to the porch.
Maybe, at the instant of greatest jeopardy, Nina could send herself into that safe bright blueness as she had done just before the 747 plowed into the meadow. Maybe the bullets fired at her would merely pass through the empty air where she had been. But there was a chance that she was still not fully recovered, that she wasn’t yet able to perform such a taxing feat, or even that she could perform it but would be mortally drained by it this time.
“Out the back!” Joe shouted. “Go, go!”
Nina raced to the door between the front room and the kitchen at the rear of the cabin.
Joe backed after her, keeping the pistol trained on the burning man, even though he didn’t intend to use it.
Their only hope was that the boy’s love of “fun” would give them the chance to get out of the cabin, into the open, where his ability to conduct remote viewing and to engage in mind control would be, according to Rose, severely diminished. If he gave up the toy that was Louis Tucker, he would be into Joe’s head in an instant.
Tossing aside the butane match, with flames spreading along the sleeves of his shirt and down his pants, the boy-thing said, “Oh, yeah, oh, wow,” and came after them.
Joe recalled too clearly the feeling of the ice-cold needle that had seemed to pierce the summit of his spine as he had barely escaped the Delmann house the previous night. That invading energy scared him more than the prospect of being embraced by the fiery arms of this shambling specter.
Frantically he retreated into the kitchen, slamming the door as he went, which was pointless because no door — no wall, no steel vault — could delay the boy if he abandoned Louis’s body and went incorporeal.
Nina slipped out the back door of the cabin, and a wolf pack of wind, chuffing and puling, rushed past her and inside.
As Joe followed her into the night, he heard the living room door crash into the kitchen.
Behind the cabin was a small yard of dirt and natural bunch-grass. The air was full of wind-torn leaves, pine needles, grit. Beyond a redwood picnic table and four redwood chairs, the forest rose again.
Nina was already running for the trees, short legs pumping, sneakers slapping on the hard-packed earth. She thrashed through tall weeds at the perimeter of the woods and vanished in the gloom among the pines and birches.
Nearly as terrified of losing the girl in the wilds as he was frightened of the boy in the burning man, Joe sprinted between the trees, shouting the girl’s name, one arm raised to ward off any pine boughs that might be drooping low enough to lash his eyes.
From the night behind him came Louis Tucker’s voice, slurred by the damage that the spreading flames had already done to his lips but nevertheless recognizable, the chanted words of a childish challenge: “Here I come, here I come, here I come, ready or not, here I come, ready or not!”
A narrow break in the trees admitted a cascade of moonbeams, and Joe spotted the girl’s cap of wind-whipped blond hair glowing with pale fire, the reflection of reflected light, to his right and only six or eight yards ahead. He stumbled over a rotting log, slipped on something slimy, kept his balance, flailed through prickly waist-high brush, and discovered that Nina had found the beaten-clear path of a deer trail.
As he caught up with the girl, the darkness around them abruptly brightened. Salamanders of orange light slithered up the trunks of the trees and whipped their tails across the glossy boughs of pines and spruces.
Joe turned and saw the possessed hulk of Louis Tucker thirty feet away, ablaze from head to foot but still standing, hitching and jerking through the woods, caroming from tree to tree, twenty feet away, barely alive, setting fire to the carpet of dry pine needles over which he shambled and to the bristling weeds and to the trees as he passed them. Now fifteen feet away. The stench of burning flesh on the wind. The boy-thing shouted gleefully, but the words were garbled and unintelligible.
Even in a two-hand grip, the pistol shook, but Joe squeezed off one, two, four, six rounds, and at least four of them hit the seething specter. It pitched backward and fell and didn’t move, didn’t even twitch, dead from fire and gunfire.
Louis Tucker was not a person now but a burning corpse. The body no longer harbored a mind that the boy could saddle and ride and torment.
Where?
Joe turned to Nina — and felt a familiar icy pressure at the back of his neck, an insistent probing, not as sharp as it had been when he was almost caught on the threshold of the Delmann house, perhaps blunted now because the boy’s power was indeed diminishing here in the open. But the psychic syringe was not yet blunt enough to be ineffective. It still stung. It pierced.
Joe screamed.
The girl seized his hand.
The iciness tore out its fangs and flew from him, as though it were a bat taking wing.
Reeling, Joe clamped a hand to the nape of his neck, certain that he would find his flesh ripped and bleeding, but he was not wounded. And his mind had not been violated, either.
Nina’s touch had saved him from possession.
With a banshee shriek, a hawk exploded out of the high branches of a tree and dive-bombed the girl, striking at her head, pecking at her scalp, wings flapping, beak click-click-clicking. She screamed and covered her face with her hands, and Joe batted at the assailant with one arm. The crazed bird swooped up and away, but it wasn’t an ordinary bird, of course, and it wasn’t merely crazed by the wind and the churning fire that swelled rapidly through the woods behind them.