But it was a good thing she had stumbled, for, in that same moment, the gunman below opened fire, discharging both barrels. Two waves of buckshot smashed into the railing at the top of the stairs, reducing the oak handrail to splinters, tearing plaster from the wall, blowing out the ceiling light up there, at the very place she would have been if she hadn't misstepped.
As the killer reloaded yet again, Christine plunged ahead, into the upstairs hall. For a moment she hesitated, clutching Joey, swaying, disoriented. This was her own house, more familiar to her than any place in the world, but tonight it was alien; the angles and proportions and lighting in the rooms seemed wrong, different. The hallway, for instance, appeared infinitely long, with distorted walls like a passageway in a carnival maze. She blinked and tried to repress the heart-hammering panic that twisted her perceptions; she hurried forward and made it to the master bedroom door.
Behind her, from the stairway, came the sound of the killer's footsteps as he raced after her, favoring his bitten leg.
She stepped into the bedroom, slammed the door behind her, latched it, put Joey down. Her purse was on the nightstand. She grabbed it just as the assassin reached the door and rattled the knob. Her fingers were too frantic; for a moment she couldn't work the zipper. Then she had her purse open, the gun in hand.
Joey had crawled into a corner, beside the highboy. He cringed, trying to make himself even smaller than he was.
The bedroom door shook and partially dissolved in a storm of buckshot. A hole opened on the right side of it. One hinge was torn out of the frame; it spun into the air, bounced off a wall, clattered across the top of the dresser.
Holding her pistol in both hands, painfully aware that she wasn't holding it steady, Christine swung toward the door.
Another blast ruined the lock, and the door swung inward, hanging on only one hinge.
The young, red-haired killer stood in the doorway, looking even more terrified than Christine felt. He was gibbering senselessly. His hands were shaking worse than hers. Snot hung from one of his nostrils, but he seemed unaware of it.
She pointed the pistol at him, pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The safety was on.
The assassin seemed startled to find her armed. His shotgun was empty again. He dropped it and pulled a revolver from the waistband of his trousers.
She heard herself saying, "No, no, no, no, no," in a chant of pure fear as she fumbled for the two safeties on the pistol.
She snapped off both of them, pulled the trigger again and again and again.
The thunder of her own gunfire, booming off the walls around her, was the sweetest sound she'd ever heard.
The intruder went to his knees as the bullets ripped into him, then sprawled on his face. The revolver fell out of his limp hand.
Joey was crying.
Christine cautiously approached the body. Blood was soaking into the carpet around it. With one foot she prodded the man.
He was dead weight.
She went to the door, looked into the shadowy hall, which was littered with fragments of the stairway railing and splinters of glass from the light fixture that had been struck by shotgun pellets. The carpet was spotted with blood from the dead gunman's bitten leg; he had left a trail from the head of the stairs.
She listened. No one moved or spoke downstairs. There were no footsteps.
Had there been just two assassins?
She wondered how many bullets she had left. The magazine held ten. She thought she had fired five. Five left.
Joey's sobbing subsided." M-Mom?"
"Sshhh, " she said.
They both listened.
Wind. Thunder. Rain on the roof, tapping the windows.
Four men dead. That realization hit her, and she felt nausea uncoiling in her stomach. The house was a slaughtering pen, a graveyard.
Wind-stirred, a tree branch scraped against the house.
Inside, the funereal silence deepened.
Finally she looked at Joey.
He was bleached white. His hair hung in his face. His eyes looked haunted. In a moment of terror, he had bitten his lip, and a thread of blood had sewn a curving red seam down his chin, along his jawline, and part of the way down his neck. As always, she was shocked by the sight of his blood. However, considering what had almost happened to him, this injury could be home.
The cemetery stillness lost its cold grip on the night. Outside, along the street, there were shouts, not of anger but of fear and curiosity, as neighbors at last ventured out of their homes. In the distance, a siren swelled.
PART THREE: THE HOUNDS
Satan hasn't a single salaried helper;
the Opposition employs a million.
The hounds, the hounds
come having at his heels.
The hounds, the hounds!
The breath of death he feels.
As the authorities went about their work, Christine and Joey waited in the kitchen because that was one of the few rooms in the house that wasn't splashed with blood.
Christine had never seen so many policemen in one place before. Her house was crowded with uniformed men, plainclothes detectives, police lab technicians, a police photographer, a coroner and his assistant.
Initially, she had welcomed the lawmen because their presence gave her a feeling of security, at last. But after a while she wondered if one of them might be a follower of Mother Grace and the Church of the Twilight.
That notion didn't seem far-fetched. In fact, the logical assumption was that a militant religious cult, determined to force its views upon society at large, would make a special point of planting its people in various law-enforcement agencies and converting those who were already employed in that capacity. She remembered Officer Wilford, the born-again Christian who had disapproved of her language and manner of dress, and she wondered if perhaps Grace Spivey had been the mid-wife of his "rebirth."
Paranoia.
But considering the situation, perhaps a measure of paranoia was not a sign of mental illness; maybe, instead, it was prudent, a necessity for survival.
As rain continued to spatter the windows and as thunder shoved its way roughly through the night outside, she watched the cops warily, regarded each unusual move with suspicion. She realized that she couldn't go through the rest of her life distrusting everyone; that would require a constant watchfulness and a level of tension that would utterly drain her physical, emotional, and mental energies. It would be like living a life entirely on a high wire. For the moment, however, she couldn't relax; she remained on guard, alert, her muscles half tensed, ready to spring at anyone who made a threatening move toward Joey.
Again, the boy's resiliency surprised her. When the police had first arrived, he had seemed to be in shock. His eyes had been glazed, and he hadn't been willing or able to speak. The sight of so much bloody violence and the threat of death had left a mark on him that, for a while, had seemed disturbingly profound. She knew this experience would scar him for life; there was no escaping that. But for a time she had been afraid that the harrowing events of the past couple of hours would render him catatonic or precipitate some other dangerous form of psychological withdrawal. But eventually he had come out of it, and she had encouraged him by getting his battery-powered Pac-Man game and playing it with him. The electronic Pac-Man musical theme and the beeping sounds made by the cookie-gobbling yellow circle on the game board made a bizarre counterpoint to the grimness of murder and the seriousness of the homicide investigation being conducted around them.