Winter Moon

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