The niche between the driver's seat and the back wall of the cab was less than two feet deep and five feet wide. The ceiling was low. A couple of rectangular toolboxes were on the floor, and he had to share the space with them. While the driver leaned forward, Jack squirmed headfirst into that narrow storage area and pulled his legs in after himself, sort of half lying on his side and half sitting.
The driver shut the door. The rumble of the engine was still loud, and so was the whistling wind.
Jack's bent knees were behind the driver, and his body was in line with the gearshift and other controls to the right of the man. If he leaned forward only inches, he could speak directly into his rescuer's ear.
"You okay?" the driver asked.
"Yeah."
They didn't have to shout inside the cab, but they did have to raise their voices.
"So tight in here," the driver said, "we may be strangers now, but by the time we get there, we'll be ready for marriage." He put the grader in gear.
"Quartermass Ranch, all the way up at the main house?"
"That's right."
The grader lurched, then rolled smoothly forward. The plow made a cold scraping sound as it skimmed the blacktop. The vibrations passed through the frame of the grader, up through the floor, and deep into Jack's bones.
Weaponless. Her back to the stairhead door… Fire was visible through the smoke at the hall doorway.
Snow at the windows. Cool snow. A way out. Safety. Crash through the window, no time to open it, straight, through, onto the porch roof, roll to the lawn. Dangerous. Might work.
Except they wouldn't make it that far without being dragged down.
The volcanic eruption of sound from the radio was deafening. Heather couldn't think.
The retriever shivered at her side, snarling and snapping at the demonic figures that threatened them, though he knew as well as she did that he couldn't save them.
When she'd seen the Giver snare the dog, pitch him away, and then grab Toby, Heather had found the.38 in her hand with no memory of having drawn it.
At the same time, also without realizing it, she had dropped the can of gasoline; now it stood across the room, out of reach.
Gasoline might not have mattered, anyway. One of the creatures was already on fire, and that wasn't stopping it.
Bodies are.
Eduardo's burning corpse was reduced to charred bone, bubbling fat.
All the clothes and hair had gone to ashes. And there was barely enough of the Giver left to hold the bones together, yet the macabre assemblage lurched toward her.
Apparently, as long as any fragment of the alien body remained alive, its entire consciousness could be exerted through that last quiverring scrap of flesh.
Madness. Chaos.
The Giver was chaos, the very embodiment of meaninglessness, hopelessness, and malignancy, and madness. Chaos in the flesh, demented and strange beyond understanding. Because there was nothing to understand. That was what she believed of it now. It had no explicable purpose of existence. It lived only to live. No aspirations. No meaning except to hate. Driven by a compulsion to Become and destroy, leaving chaos behind it.
A draft pulled more smoke into the room.
The dog hacked, and Heather heard Toby coughing behind her.
"Pull your jacket ovel your nose, breathe through your jacket!"
But why did it matter whether they died by fire-or in less clean ways?
Maybe fire was preferable… The other Giver, slithering on the bedroom floor among the ruins of the dead woman, suddenly shot a sinuous tentacle at Heather, snaring her ankle.
She screamed.
The Eduardo-thing tottered nearer, hissing.
Behind her, sheltered between her and the door, Toby shouted, "Yes!
All right, yes!"
"Too late," she warned him; "No!"
The driver of the grader was Harlan Moffit, and he lived in Eagle's Roost with his wife, Cindi — with an i — and his daughters, Luci and Nanci — each of those with an i as well- and Cindi worked for the Livestock cooperative, whatever that was. They were lifelong residents of Montana and wouldn't live anywhere else. However, they'd had a lot of fun when they'd gone to Los Angeles a couple of years ago and seen Disneyland, Universal Studios and an old brokendown homeless guy being mugged by two teenagers on a corner while they were stopped at a traffic light. Visit, yes; live there, no. All this he somehow imparted by the time they had reached the turnoff at Quartermas Ranch, as he felt obliged to make Jack feel among friends and neighbors in his time of trouble, regardless of what the trouble might be.
They entered the private lane at a higher speed than Jack would have thought possible, considering the depth of the snow that had accumulated in the past sixteen hours.
Harlan raised the angled plow a few inches to allow the speed. "We don't need to scoop off everything down to bare dirt and maybe risk jamming up on a big bump in the road." The top three quarters of the snow cover plumed to the side.
"How can you tell where the lane is?" Jack worried, because the rolling mantle of white blurred definitions.
"Been here before. Then there's instinct."
"Instinct?"
"Plowman's instinct."
"We won't get stuck?"
"These tires? This engine?"
Harlan was proud of his machine, and it really was churning along, rumbling through the untouched snow as if carving its way through little more than air.
"Never get stuck, not with me driving. Take this baby through hell if I had to, plow away the melting brimstone and thumb my nose at the devil himself… So what's wrong up there with your family?"
"Trapped," Jack said cryptically.
"In snow, you mean?"
"Yes."
"Nothing steep enough around here for an avalanche."
"Not an avalanche," Jack confirmed.
They reached the hill and headed for the turn past the lower woods.
The house should be in view any second.
"Trapped in the snow?" Harlan said, worrying at it. He didn't look away from his work, but he frowned as if he would have liked to meet Jack's eyes.
The house came into view. Almost hidden by sheeting snow but vaguely visible.
Their new house. New life. New future. On fire.
Earlier, at the computer, when he'd been mentally linked to the Giver but not completely in its power, Toby had gotten to know it, feeling around in its mind, being nosy, letting its thoughts slide into him while he kept saying "no" to it, and little by little he had learned about it. One of the things he learned was that it had never encountered any species that could get inside its mind the way it could force itself into the minds of other creatures, so it wasn't even aware of Toby in there, didn't feel him, thought it was all one-way communication. Hard to explain. That was the best he could do. Just sliding around in its mind, looking at things, terrible things, not a good place but dark and frightening. He hadn't thought of it as a brave thing to do, only what must be done, what Captain Kirk or Mr.
Spock or Luke Skywalker or any of those guys would have done in his place or when meeting a new and hostile intelligent species out on the galactic rim. They'd have taken any advantage, added to their knowledge in any way they could.
So did he.
No big deal.
Now, when the noise coming out of the radio urged him to open the door-just open the door and let it in, let it in, accept the pleasure and the peace, let it in-he did as it wanted, though he didn't let it enter all the way, not half as far as he entered into it. As at the computer this morning, he was now between complete freedom and enslavement, walking the brink of a chasm, careful not to let his presence be known until he was ready to strike.