The Servants of Twilight

He moved away from the tree, gritting his teeth as the fire in his shoulder blazed up a bit higher, and he descended along the deer path, moving faster than he had thought he could, though not as fast as he had come down the first time, when Christine and Joey had been with him. He was in a hurry, but he was also cautious, afraid of slipping, falling, and further injuring his shoulder and arm. If he fell on his left side, he would probably pass out from the subsequent explosion of pain, and then he might not come around again until Spivey's people were standing over him, poking him with the barrel of a gun.

Sixty or seventy yards below the ridge, he realized he should have brought the machine gun with him. Perhaps there were a couple of spare magazines of ammunition on the dead gunner's body. That would even the odds a bit. With a machine gun, he might be able to set up another ambush and wipe out all of them this time.

He stopped and looked back, wondering if he should return for the weapon. The rising trail behind him looked steeper than he remembered it. In fact the climb appeared as challenging as the most difficult face on Mount Everest. He breathed harder just looking up at it. As he studied it, the path seemed to grow even steeper. Hell, it looked vertical. He didn't have the strength to go back, and he cursed himself for not thinking of the machine gun while he was up there; he realized he wasn't as clearheaded as he thought.

He continued downward.

Tyards farther along the trail, the forest seemed to spin around him. He halted and planted his legs wide, as if he could bring the carrousel of trees to a stop just by digging in his heels.

He did slow it down, but he couldn't stop it altogether, so he finally proceeded cautiously, putting one foot in front of the other with the measured deliberation of a drunkard trying to prove sobriety to a cop.

The wind had grown stronger, and it made quite a racket in the huge trees. Some of the tallest creaked as the higher, slenderer portions of their trunks swayed in the inconstant gusts.

The woody branches clattered together, and the shaken evergreen needles clicked-rustled-hissed. The creaking grew louder until it sounded like a thousand doors opening on unoiled hinges, and the clicking and rustling and hissing grew louder, too, thunderous, until the noise was painful, until he felt as if he were inside a drum, and he staggered, stumbled, nearly fell, realized that most of the sound wasn't coming from the wind in the trees but from his own body, realized he was hearing his own blood roar in his ears as his heart pounded faster and faster. Then the forest began to spin again, and as it spun it pulled darkness down from the sky like thread from a spool, more and more darkness, and now the whirling forest didn't seem like a carrousel but like a loom, weaving the threads of darkness into a black cloth, and the cloth billowed around him, settled over him, and he couldn't see where he was going, stumbled again, and fell Pain!

A bright blast.

Darkness.

Blackness.

Deeper than night.

Silence.

He was crawling through pitch blackness, frantically searching for Joey.

He had to find the boy soon. He had learned that Chewbacca wasn't an ordinary dog but a robot, an evil construction, packed full of explosives. Joey didn't know the truth. He was probably playing with the dog right this minute. Any second now, Spivey would press the plunger, and the dog would blow up, and Joey would be dead. He crawled toward a gray patch in the darkness, and then he was in a bedroom, and he saw Joey sitting up in bed. Chewbacca was there, too, sitting up just like a person, holding a knife in one paw and fork in the other.

The boy and the dog were both eating steak. Charlie said, "For God's sake, what're you eating?" And the boy said, "It's delicious."

Charlie got to his feet beside the bed and took the meat away from the boy. The dog snarled. Charlie said, "Don't you see?

The meat's been poisoned. They've poisoned you."

"No," Joey said, "it's good. You should try some."

"Poison! It's poison!"

Then Charlie remembered the explosives that were hidden in the dog, and he started to warn Joey, but it was too late. The explosion came.

Except it wasn't the dog that exploded. It was Joey.

His chest blew open, and a horde of rats surged out of it, just like the rat in the battery room under the windmill, and they rushed at Charlie.

He staggered backward, but they surged up his legs. They were all over him, scores of rats, and they bit him, and he fell, dragged down by their numbers, and his blood poured out of him, and it was cold blood, cold instead of warm, and he screamed — and woke, gagging. He could feel cold blood all over his face, and he wiped at it, looked at his hand. It wasn't actually blood; it was snow.

He was lying on his back in the middle of the deer path, looking up at the trees and at a section of gray sky from which snow fell at a fierce rate. With considerable effort, he sat up.