"It's never afraid," Toby said in a voice that revealed the profound depths of his own fear.
"Get away from here, baby! Go! Go to the bedroom! Hurry!"
The boy ran, and the dog went with him.
At times Jack felt that he was a swimmer in a white sea under a white sky on a world every bit as strange as the planet from which the intruder at Quartermass Ranch had traveled. Though he could feel the ground beneath his feet as he slogged the half mile to the county road, he never got a glimpse of it under the enduring white torrents cast down by the storm, and it seemed as unreal to him as the bottom of the Pacific might seem to a swimmer a thousand fathoms above it. The snow rounded all forms, and the landscape rolled like the swells of a mid-ocean passage, although in some places the wind had sculpted drifts into scalloped ridges like cresting waves frozen in the act of breaking on a beach. The woods, which could have offered contrast to the whiteness that flooded his vision, were mostly concealed by falling and blowing snow as obscuring as fog at sea.
Disorientation was an unremitting threat in that bleached land. He got off course twice while still on his own property, recognizing his error only because the flattened meadow grass underneath the snow provided a spongier surface than the hard-packed driveway.
Step by hard-fought step, Jack expected something to come out of the curtains of snow or rise from a drift in which it had been lying, the Giver itself or one of the surrogates that it had mined from the graveyard. He continually scanned left and right, ready to pump out every round in the shotgun to bring down anything that rushed him… He was glad that he had worn sunglasses. Even with shades, he found the unrelieved brightness inhibiting. He strained to see through the wintry sameness to guard against attack and to make out familiar details of the terrain that would keep him on the right track.
He dared not think about Heather and Toby. When he did so, his pace slowed and he was nearly overcome by the temptation to go back to them and forget about Ponderosa Pines. For their sake and his own, he blocked them from his thoughts, concentrated solely on covering ground, and virtually became a hiking machine.
The baleful wind shrieked without surcease, blew snow in his face, and forced him to bow his head. It shoved him off his feet twice-on one occasion causing him to drop the shotgun in a drift, where he had to scramble frantically to find it-and became almost as real an adversary as any man against whom he'd ever been pitted. By the time he reached the end of the private lane and paused for breath between the tall stone posts and under the arched wooden sign that marked the entrance to Quartermass Ranch, he was cursing the wind as if it could hear him.
He wiped one gloved hand across the sunglasses to scrape off the snow that had stuck to the lenses. His eyes stung as they sometimes did when an opthalmologist put drops in them to dilate the pupils prior to an examination.
Without the shades, he might already have been snowblind.
He was sick of the taste and smell of wet wool, which flavored the air he drew through his mouth and scented every inhalation when he breathed through his nose. The vapor he exhaled had thoroughly saturated the fabric, and the condensation had frozen. With one hand he massaged the makeshift muffler, cracking the thin, brittle ice and crumbling the thicker layer of compacted snow, he sloughed it all away so he could breathe more easily than he'd been able to breathe for the past two or three hundred yards.
Though he found it difficult to believe that the Giver didn't know he had left the house, he had reached the edge of the ranch without being assaulted. A considerable trek remained ahead, but the greatest danger of attack would have been in the territory he had already covered without incident.
Maybe the puppetmaster was not as omniscient as it either pretended or seemed to be.
A distended and ominous shadow, as tortured as that of a fright figure in a fun house, rose along the landing walclass="underline" the puppetmaster and its decomposing marionette laboring stiffly but doggedly toward the top of the first flight of stairs. As the thing ascended, it no doubt absorbed the fragments of strange flesh that bullets had torn from it, but it didn't pause to do so.
Although the thing was not fast, it was too fast for Heather's taste, too fast by half. It seemed to be racing up the damned stairs.
In spite of her shaky hands, she finally unscrewed the stubborn cap on.the spout of the fuel can. Held the container by its handle. Used her other hand to tip the bottom. A pale gush of gasoline arced out of the spout. She swung the can left and right, saturating the carpet along the width of the steps, letting the stream splash down the entire top flight.
On the first step below the landing, the Giver appeared in the wake of its shadow, a demented construct of filth and slithering sinuosities.
Heather hastily capped the gasoline can. She carried it a short distance along the hall, set it out of the way, and returned to the stairs.
The Giver had reached the landing. It turned to face the second flight.
Heather fumbled in the jacket pocket where she thought she had stowed the matches, found spare ammo for both the Uzi and the Korth, no matches. She tried another zipper, groped in the pocket-more cartridges, no matches, no matches.
On the landing, the dead man raised his head to stare at her, which meant the Giver was staring too, with eyes she couldn't see.
Could it smell the gasoline? Did it understand that gasoline was flammable? It was intelligent. Vastly so, apparently. Did it grasp the potential for its own destruction?
A third pocket. More bullets. She was a walking ammo dump, for God's sake.
One of the cadaver's eyes was still obscured by a thin yellowish cataract, gazing between lids that were sewn half shut.
The air reeked of gasoline. Heather had difficulty drawing a clear breath, she was wheezing. The Giver didn't seem to mind, and the corpse wasn't breathing.
Too many pockets, Jesus, four on the outside of the jacket, three inside, pockets and more pockets, two on each leg of her pants, all of them zippered.
The other eye socket was empty, partially curtained by shredded lids and dangling strands of mortician's thread. Suddenly the tip of a tentacle extruded from inside the skull.
With an agitation of appendages, like the tendrils of a black sea anemone lashed by turbulent currents, the thing started up from the landing.
Matches.
A small cardboard box, wooden matches. Found them.
Two steps up from the landing, the Giver hissed softly.
Heather slid open the box, almost spilled the matches. They rattled.against one another, against the cardboard.
The thing climbed another step.
When his mom told him to go to the bedroom, Toby didn't know if she meant her bedroom or his. He wanted to get as far as possible from the thing coming up the front stairs, so he went to his bedroom at the end of the hallway, though he stopped a couple of times and looked back at her and almost returned to her side. e didn't want to leave her there alone. She was his mom. He hadn't seen all of the Giver, only the tangle of tentacles squirming around the edge of the front door, but he knew it was more than she could handle.
It was more than he could handle too, so he had to forget about doing anything, didn't dare think about it. He knew what had to be done, but he was too scared to do it, which was all right, because even heroes were afraid, because only insane people were never ever scared. And right now he knew he sure wasn't insane, not even a little bit, because he was scared bad, so bad he felt like he had to pee. This thing was like the Terminator and the Predator and the alien from Alien and the shark from Jaws and the velociraptors from Jurassic Park and a bunch of other monsters rolled into one- but he was just a kid. Maybe he was a hero too, like his dad said, even if he didn't feel like a hero, which he didn't, not one bit, but if he was a hero, he couldn't do what he knew he should do.