Winter Moon

unable to stop. She went down one, two, three, four, five steps in the

time that the crablike thing descended two. They were four steps apart

when the thing abruptly reversed direction without bothering to turn

around, as if front and back and sideways were all the same to it. She

stopped so fast she almost lost her balance, and the crab ascended

toward her a lot faster than it had descended.

Three steps between them.

Two.

She squeezed the trigger, emptied the Uzi's last rounds into the

scuttling form, chopping it into four-five-six bloodless pieces that

tumbled and flopped down a few steps, where they lay squirming.

Squirming ceaselessly. Supple and snakelike again. Eagerly and

silently questing toward one another.

Its silence was almost the worst thing about it. No screams of pain

when it was shot. No shrieks of rage.

, Its patient and silent recovery, its deliberate continuation of the

assault, mocked her hopes of triumph.

At the foot of the stairs, the apparition had pulled itself erect. The

Giver, still hideously bonded to the corpse, started up the steps

again.

Heather's spell of madness shattered. She fled to the landing, grabbed

the can of gasoline, and scrambled to the second floor, where Toby and

Falstaff were waiting.

The retriever was shuddering. Whining rather than barking, he looked

as if he'd sensed the same thing Heather had seen for herself:

effective defense was impossible. This was an enemy that couldn't be

brought down with teeth or claws any more than with guns.

Toby said, "Do I have to do it? I don't want to."

She didn't know what he meant, didn't have time to ask. "We'll be

okay, honey, we'll make it."

From the first flight of steps, out of sight beyond the landing, came

the sound of heavy footsteps ascending. A hiss. It was like the

sibilant escape of steam from a pinhole in a pipe--but a cold sound.

She put the Uzi aside and fumbled with the cap on the spout of the

gasoline can.

Fire might work. She had to believe it might. If the thing burned,

nothing would be left to remake itself. Bodies are. But bodies

reduced to ashes could not reclaim their form and function, regardless

of how alien their flesh and metabolism. Damn it, fire had to work.

"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