Winter Moon

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.

Towering over Toby was a grotesquely decomposed corpse, draped in

fragments of a rotted blue garment, bearing another Giver, aswarm with

agitated black appendages.

Falstaff sprang at the nightmare, but the writhing tentacles were

quicker than they had been before, almost faster than the eye. They

whipped out, snared the dog in mid-leap, and flicked him away as

casually and efficiently as a cow's tail might deal with an annoying

fly. Howling in terror, Falstaff flew across the room, slammed into

the wall beside the window, and dropped to the floor with a squeal of

pain.

The .38 Korth was in Heather's hand though she didn't remember having

drawn it.

Before she could squeeze the trigger, the new Given-or the new aspect

of the only Giver, depending on whether there was one entity with many

bodies or, instead, many individuals--snared Toby in three oily black

tentacles. It lifted him off the floor and drew him toward the leering

grin of the long-dead woman, as if it wanted him to plant a kiss on

her.

With a cry of outrage, furious and terrified in equal measure, Heather

rushed the thing, unable to shoot from even a few steps away because

she might hit Toby. Threw herself against it. Felt one of its

serpentine arms--cold even through her ski suit--curling around her

waist. The stench of the corpse.

Jesus. The internal organs were long gone, and extrusions of the alien

were squirming within the body cavity. The head turned toward her,

face-to-face, red-stipled black tendrils with spatulate tips flickering

like multiple tongues in the open mouth, bristling from the bony

nostrils, the eye sockets.

Cold slithered all the way around her waist now. She jammed the .38

under the bony chin, bearded with graveyard moss. She was going for

the head as if the head still mattered, as if a brain still packed the

cadaver's cranium, she could think of nothing else to do. Toby

screaming, the Giver hissing, the gun booming, booming, booming, old

bones shattering to dust, the grinning skull cracking off the knobby

spine and lolling to one side, the gun booming again-she lost

count--then clicking, the maddening clicking of the hammer on empty

chambers.

When the creature let go of her, Heather almost fell on her ass because

she was already straining so hard to pull loose. She dropped the gun,

and it bounced across the carpet.

The Giver collapsed in front of her, not because it was dead but

because its puppet, damaged by gunfire, had broken apart in a couple of

key places and now provided too little support to keep its soft, heavy

master erect.

Toby was free too. For the moment.

He was white-faced, wide-eyed. He'd bitten his lip. It was

bleeding.

But otherwise he seemed all right.

Smoke was beginning to roil into the room, not much, but she knew how

abruptly it could become blindingly dense.

"Go!" she said, shoving Toby toward the back stairs. "Go, go, go!"

He scrambled across the floor on his hands and knees, and so did she,

both of them reduced by terror and expediency to the locomotion of

infancy. Got to the door. Pulled herself up against it. Toby at her

side.

Behind them was a scene out of a madman's nightmare: The Giver sprawled

on the floor, resembling nothing so much as an immensely complicated

octopus, although stranger and more evil than anything that had ever

lived in the seas of Farth, a tangle of wriggling ropy arms. Instead

of trying to reach for her and Toby, it was struggling with the

disconnected bones, attempting to pull the moldering corpse together

and lever itself erect on the damaged skeleton.

She wrenched the doorknob, yanked.

The stairhead door didn't open.

Locked.

On the shelf behind the alcove bed, Toby's clock radio came on all by

itself, and rap music hammered them at full volume for a second or

two.

Then that other music. Tuneless, strange, but hypnotic.

"No!" she told Toby as she struggled with the dead bolt turn. It was

maddeningly stiff. "No! Tell it no!" The lock hadn't been stiff

before, damn it.

At the other door, the first Giver lurched out of the burning hall and

through the smoke, into the room. It was still wrapped around and

through what was left of Eduardo's charred corpse. Still afire. Its

dark bulk was diminished.

Fire had consumed part of it.