Winter Moon

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