He wanted to close his eyes and wish it away. Maybe, if you just didn't believe in it, the thing wouldn't exist.
It was stirring the drapes again, bulging against them, as if to say, Hello there, little boy. Maybe you had to believe in it just like you had to believe in Tinker Bell to keep her alive. So if you closed your eyes and thought good thoughts about an empty bed, about air that smelled of freshbaked cookies, then the thing wouldn't be there any more, and neither would the stink. It wasn't a perfect plan, maybe it was even a dumb plan, but at least it was something to do. He had to have something to do or he was going to go nuts, yet he couldn't take one more step toward the bed, not even if the retriever hadn't been blocking his way, because he was just too scared. Numb. Dad hadn't.said anything about heroes going numb. Or spitting up. Did heroes ever spit up? Because he felt as if he was going to spew. He couldn't run, either, because he'd have to turn his back to the bed. He wouldn't do that, couldn't do that. Which meant that closing his eyes and wishing the thing away was the plan, the best and only plan-except he was not in a billion years going to close his eyes.
Falstaff remained between Toby and the alcove but turned to face whatever waited there. Not barking now. Not growling or whimpering.
Just waiting, teeth bared, shuddering in fear but ready to fight.
A hand slipped between the drapes, reaching out from the alcove. It was mostly bone in a shredded glove of crinkled leathery skin, spotted with mold. For sure, this couldn't really be alive unless you believed in it, because it was more impossible than Tinker Bell, a hundred million times more impossible. A couple of fingernails were still attached to the decaying hand, but they had turned black, looked like the gleaming shells of fat beetles. If he couldn't close his eyes and wish the thing away, if he couldn't run, he at least had to scream for his mother, humiliating as that would be for a kid who was almost nine.
But then she had the machine gun, after all, not him.
A wrist became visible, a forearm with a little more meat on it, the ragged and stained sleeve of a blue blouse or dress.
"Mom!"
He shouted the word but heard it only in his head, because no sound would escape his lips.
A red-speckled black bracelet was around the withered wrist. Shiny.
New-looking.
Then it moved and wasn't a bracelet but a greasy worm, no, a tentacle, wrapping the wrist and disappearing along the underside of the rotting arm, beneath the dirty blue sleeve.
"Mom, help!"
Master bedroom. No Toby. Under the bed? In the closet, the bathroom?
No, don't waste time looking. The boy might be hiding but not the dog.
Must've gone to his own room.
Back into the hall. Waves of heat. Wildly leaping light and shadows.
The crackle-sizzle-growl-hiss of fire.
Other hissing. The Giver looming. Snap-snap-snapsnap, the furious.whipping of fiery tentacles.
Coughing on the thin but bitter smoke, heading toward the rear of the house, the can swinging in her left hand. Gasoline sloshing. Right hand empty.
Shouldn't be empty.
Damn!
She stopped short of Toby's room, turned to peer back into the fire and smoke.
She'd forgotten the Uzi on the floor near the head of the steps. The twin magazines were empty, but her zippered ski-suit pockets bulged with spare ammunition. Stupid.
Not that guns were of much use against the freaking thing. Bullets didn't harm it, only delayed it. But at least the Uzi had been something, a lot more firepower than the.38 at her hip.
She couldn't go back. Hard to breathe. Getting harder. The fire sucking up all the oxygen. And the burning, lashing apparition already stood between her and the Uzi.
Crazily, Heather had a mental flash of Alma Bryson loaded down with weaponry: pretty black lady, smart and kind, cop's widow, and one tough damned bitch, capable of handling anything. Gina Tendero, too, with her black leather pantsuit and red-pepper Mace and maybe an unlicensed handgun in her purse. If only they were here now, at her side. But they were down there in the City of Angels, waiting for the end of the world, ready for it, when all the time the end of the world was starting here in Montana.
Billowing smoke suddenly gushed out of the flames, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, dark and churning. The Giver vanished. In seconds Heather was going to be completely blinded.
Holding her breath, she stumbled along the wall toward Toby's room.
She found his door and crossed the threshold, out of the worst of the smoke, just as he screamed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
With the Mossberg twelve-gauge gripped in both hands, Jack moved eastward at an easy trot, in the manner of an infantryman in a war zone. He hadn't expected the county road to be half as clear as it was, so he was able to make better time than planned.
He kept flexing his toes with each step. In spite of — two pairs of heavy socks and insulated boots, his feet were cold and getting colder.
He needed to keep full circulation in them.
The scar tissue and recently knitted bones in his left leg ached dully from exertion, however, the slight pain didn't hamper him. In fact, he.was in better shape than he had realized.
Although the whiteout continued to limit visibility to less than a hundred feet, sometimes dramatically less, he was no longer at risk of becoming disoriented and lost. The walls of snow from the plow defined a well-marked path. The tall poles along one side of the road carried telephone and power lines, and served as another set of route markers.
He figured he had covered nearly half the distance to Ponderosa Pines, but his pace was flagging. He cursed himself, pushed harder, and picked up speed.
Because he was trotting with his shoulders hunched against the battering wind and his head tucked down to spare himself the sting of the hard-driven snow, looking only at the roadway immediately in front of him, he did not at first see the golden light but saw only the reflection of it in the fine, sheeting flakes. There was just a hint of yellow at first, then suddenly he might have been running through a storm of gold dust rather than a blizzard.
When he raised his head, he saw a bright glow ahead, intensely yellow at its core. It throbbed mysteriously in the cloaking veils of the storm, the source obscured, but he remembered the light in the trees of which Eduardo had written in the tablet. It had pulsed like this, an eerie radiance that heralded the opening of the doorway and the arrival of the traveler.
As he skidded to a halt and almost fell, the pulses of light grew rapidly brighter, and he wondered if he could hide in the drifts to one side of the road or the other. There were no throbbing bass sounds like those Eduardo had heard and felt, only the shrill keening of the wind. However, the uncanny light was everywhere, dazzling in the sunless day: Jack standing in ankle-deep gold dust, molten gold streaming through the air, the steel of the Mossberg glimmering as if about to be transmuted into bullion. He saw multiple sources now, not one light but several, pulsing out of sync, continuous yellow flashes overlaying one another. A sound above the wind. A low rumble.
Building swiftly to a roar. A heavy engine. Through the whiteout, tearing apart the obscuring veils of snow, came an enormous machine.
He found himself standing before an oncoming road grader adapted for snow removal, a brawny skeleton of steel with a small cab high in the center of it, pushing a curved steel blade taller than he was.
Entering the cleaner air of Toby's room, blinking away tears wrung from her by the caustic smoke, Heather saw two blurry figures, one small and one not. She desperately wiped at her eyes with her free hand, squinted, and understood why the boy was screaming.