The Servants of Twilight

PART FIVE: THE KILL

Christine said, "That's good. That's my boy," as Joey followed Charlie up through the trees, heading for a broad set-back in the slope, halfway to the ridge line.

She had been afraid that he wouldn't walk on his own, would just stand like a zombie. But perhaps he was not as detached from reality as he seemed; he didn't talk, didn't meet her eyes, seemed numb with fear, but apparently he was still enough in tune with this world to understand that he had to keep moving to avoid the witch.

His small legs were not strong, and his bulky ski suit hindered him a bit, and the ground was extremely steep in places, but he kept going, grabbing at rocks and at a few clumps of sparse brush to steady himself and pull himself along. He walked with increasing difficulty, crawled in some places, and Christine, following behind, often had to lift him over fallen timber or help him across a slippery, ice-crusted outcropping of rock. They couldn't move as fast with the boy as they could have without him, but at least they were covering some ground; if they'd had to carry him, they would have been brought to a complete halt.

Frequently, Chewbacca moved ahead of them, loping and scrabbling up the forested slopes as if he were not a dog at all but a wolf, at home in these primeval regions. Often, the retriever stopped above them and looked back, panting, with one ear raised in an almost comical expression. And the boy, seeing him, seemed to take heart and move forward with renewed effort, so Christine supposed she ought to be grateful the animal was with them, even if its resemblance to Brandy might have contributed to Joey's mental deterioration.

Indeed, she had begun to worry about the dog's chances of survival. Its coat was heavy, yes, but silky, not like the thick fur of a wolf or any other animal indigenous to these climes. Already, snow had frozen to the tips of the long hairs on its flanks and belly, as well as to part of its tail and to the furry tips of its ears. It didn't seem bothered yet, or too cold, but how would it feel an hour from now? Two hours? The pads of its feet were not made for this rugged terrain, either. It was a house pet, after all, accustomed to the easy life of suburbia. Soon its feet would be bruised and cut, and it would begin to limp, and instead of racing ahead it would be lagging behind.

If Chewbacca couldn't make it, if the poor mutt died out here, what would that do to Joey?

Kill him?

Maybe. Or send him irretrievably far off into his own silent, inner world.

For a couple of minutes, Christine heard a distant growling buzzing below and behind them, and she knew it must be the snowmobiles roaring into the upper meadow, closing in on the cabin. That grim fact must have penetrated Joey's fog, too, because for a few minutes he made a gallant effort, moved faster, clawing and scrambling upward. When the sound of the snowmobiles died, however, so did his energy, and he resumed a slower, more labored pace.

They reached the set-back in the ridge and paused for breath, but none of them spoke because speaking required energy they could put to better use. Besides, there was nothing to talk about except how soon they might be caught and killed.

Several yards away, something broke from a vine-entangled clump of gnarled dogwood and dashed across the forest floor, startling them.

Charlie unslung his rifle.

Chewbacca stiffened, gave a short, sharp yip.

It was only a gray fox.

It vanished in the shadows.

Christine supposed it was on the trail of game, a squirrel or a snow rabbit or something. Life must be hard up here, in the winter. However, her sympathies lay not with the fox but with the prey. She knew what it was like to be hunted.

Charlie slung the rifle over his shoulder again, and they started climbing once more.

Above the set-back, on the last slope before the ridge line, the trees thinned out, and there was more snow on the ground, although not enough to require snowshoes. Charlie found a deer path, which followed the route of least resistance toward the flat top of the ridge. Where the track passed unavoidably through deep snow that might have given Joey trouble, the deer had cleared the way-there must have been dozens of them through here since the last big storm, tamping the snow with their hooves-and the boy was able to proceed with only a little slipping and sliding.

Chewbacca became excited by the scent of the deer that had come this way before them, whimpered and growled in the back of his throat, but didn't bark. She realized he hadn't once barked since leaving the cabin. Even when startled by the fox, he had made only a small sound that couldn't have carried far, as if he sensed that a bark would have been a beacon for the witch. Or maybe he just didn't have enough energy to climb and bark at the same time.

Each upward step not only put ground between them and their pursuers but seemed to take them into worse weather. It was as if winter were a geographic reality rather than an atmospheric condition, a real place rather than a season, and they were walking deeper into its frigid kingdom.

The sky seemed only inches higher than the treetops. The flurries had changed to heavy snow that slanted down between the pines and firs. By the time they reached the crest of the ridge, where there were no trees at all, Christine could see that a new storm had moved in and that, judging by this early stage, it was going to be even worse than last night's storm. The temperature was well below zero, and the wind was beginning to churn up from the valleys, driven by the rising thermals, blowing harder and gusting more fiercely even as they stood there, trying to catch their breath. Within a couple of hours, the mountain would be a white hell. And now they were without the warm refuge of the cabin.

Charlie didn't immediately lead them down into the next valley. He turned and, standing at the edge of the ridge, stared thoughtfully back the way they had come. Something was on his mind, a plan of some sort.

Christine could tell that much, and she hoped it was a good plan. They were outnumbered and out gunned. They needed to be damned clever if they were going to win.

She stooped beside Joey. His nose was running, and the mucous had frozen to his upper lip and to one cheek. She wiped his face with her gloved hand, cleaning him as best she could, and she kissed each of his eyes, held him close, keeping his back to the wind.

He did not speak.

His eyes looked through hers, as before.

Grace Spivey, I will kill you, Christine thought, looking back the way they had come, into the woods. For what you've done to my little boy, I will blow your goddamned head off.

Squinting as the stinging wind blew snow into his face, Charlie surveyed the top of the ridge and decided it was just the place for an ambush. It was a long, treeless expanse, running roughly north and south, as narrow as fifteen feet in some places, as wide as thirty feet in others, mostly swept free of snow by the gales that punished its exposed contours. Rock formations, smoothed and carved by centuries of wind, thrust up all along the crest, providing a score of superb hiding places from which he could observe the ascending Twilighters.

At the moment there was no sign of Spivey's people. Of course, he could not see particularly far down into the shadowed woods. Although the trees were not as densely grown on the slope immediately under him as they were on the lower hills, nevertheless they appeared to close up into a wall no more than a hundred or a hundred and twenty yards below.

Beyond that point, an army could have been approaching, and he would have been unable to see it. And the wind, whistling and moaning across the top of the ridge, evoked a noisy hissing and rustling from the branches of the enormous trees, masking any sounds that pursuers might have made.

Instinctively, however, Charlie sensed that the cultists were still at least twenty minutes behind, maybe even farther back.

Climbing toward the top of the ridge, slowed down by Joey, Charlie had been sure they were losing precious lead time. But now he remembered that Spivey's gang would ascend cautiously, wary of another ambush, at least for the first quarter or half a mile, until their confidence returned. Besides, they had probably stopped to have a look in the cabin and had wasted a few minutes there.

He had plenty of time to arrange a little welcoming party for them.

He went to Christine and Joey, knelt beside them.

The boy was still detached, almost catatonic, even unaware of the dog rubbing affectionately against his leg.

To Christine, Charlie said, "We'll head down into the next valley, as far as we can go in five minutes, find a place for you to get out of the weather a little. Then I'll come straight back here and wait for them."

"No."

"I should be able to pick off at least one before they dive for cover."

"No," Christine said, shaking her head adamantly." If you're going to wait here for them, we wait with you."

"Impossible. Once I'm finished shooting, I want to be able to clear out fast, make a run for it. If you're here with me, we'll have to move slow. We'll lose too much of our lead on them."

"I don't think we should separate."

"It's the only way."

"It scares me."

"I've got to keep picking them off if I can."

She bit her lip." It still scares me."

"It won't be dangerous for me."

"Like hell it won't."

"No. Really. I'll be above them when I start shooting. I'll be well concealed. They won't know where the fire's coming from until it's too late, until I've already pulled out. I'll have all the advantages."

"Maybe they won't even follow us up here."

"They will."

"It's not an easy hike."

"We made it. They can, too."

"But Spivey's an old woman. She isn't up to this sort of thing."

"So they'll leave her behind at the cabin with a couple of guards, and the rest of them will come after us. I have to make it hard for them, Christine. I have to kill all of them if I can. I swear to you, an ambush won't be dangerous. I'll shoot one or two of them and slip away before they even have a chance to spot my location and return my fire."

She said nothing.

"Come on," he said." We're wasting time."

She hesitated, nodded, and got up." Let's go."

She was one hell of a woman. He didn't know many men who would have come this far without complaint, as she had done, and he didn't think he knew any other woman who would consent to being left alone in the middle of this frozen forest under these circumstances, regardless of how necessary the separation might be. She had as much emotional strength and stability as she had beauty.

Not far north along the ridge line, he found where the deer trail continued, and they followed it down into the next valley.

The path made two switchback turns to avoid the steepest slopes and take full advantage of the friendliest contours of the land.

Charlie hoped to lead them most of the way to the bottom before turning back to set the trap for Spivey's people. In five minutes, however, because the deer trail added distance as well as ease to the journey downward, they had not reached the floor of the valley, were not even halfway there.

He found a place where the trail turned a corner and passed urider a rocky overhang, creating a protected hollow, not a fullfledged cave but the next best thing, out of the wind and out of what little snow sifted down through the trees. At the far end of the niche, opposite the curve in the trail, the hillside bulged out, forming a wall, so that the natural shelter was enclosed on three of its four sides.

"Wait here for me," Charlie said." Better break off some of the dead branches toward the center of that big spruce over there, start a fire."

"But you'll only be gone. what. twenty or twenty-five minutes'? Doesn't seem like it's worth the effort to build a fire just for that long."

"We've been moving ever since we left the cabin," he said.

"We've continuously generated body heat. But sitting here, unmoving, you'll start to notice the cold more."

"We're wearing insulated-"

"Doesn't matter. You'll probably still need the fire. If you don't, Joey will. He doesn't have an adult's physical resources."

"All right. Or… we could keep moving, heading down along the deer trail, until you catch up with us."

"No. It's too easy to get lost in these woods. There might be branches in the trail. You might even pass one without seeing it, but I might see it, and then I wouldn't know for sure which way you went."

She nodded.

He said, "Build the fire here, on the trail, but just out beyond the overhang. That way the smoke won't collect under here with you, but you'll still be able to feel the heat."

" Won't they see the smoke?" Christine asked.

"No. They're still beyond the ridge, with no clear view of the sky." He quickly unstrapped the snowshoes from his backpack.

"Doesn't matter if they see it, anyway. I'll be between you and them, and I hope to take out at least one of them, maybe two, and make them lie low for at least ten minutes. By the time they get started again, this fire'll be out, and we'll be on down in the valley." He hurriedly slipped off his backpack, dropped it, kept only his rifle and pocketsful of ammunition." Now I've got to get back up there."

She kissed him.

Joey seemed unaware of his departure.

He headed back the way they had come, along the narrow deer path, not exactly running, but hurrying, because it was going to take longer to go up than it had to come down, and he didn't have a lot of time to waste.

Leaving Christine and Joey alone in the forest was the most difficult thing he had ever done.

Joey and Chewbacca waited under the rocky overhang while Christine went into the trees to collect dead wood for a fire.

Underneath the huge spreading branches that were green and healthy, close to the trunks, the evergreens provided a lot of dead branches thick with old pine cones and crisp brown needles that would make excellent tinder. These were all dry because the upper, living branches stopped the snow far above. Furthermore, the weight of those snow-bent upper branches had cracked and splintered the dead wood underneath, so she found it relatively easy to wrench and break off the kindling she needed. She swiftly assembled a big pile of it.

In short order, with a squirt of lighter fluid and a single match, she had a roaring blaze in front of the cul-de-sac where she and Joey and the dog took shelter. As soon as she felt the warmth of the fire, she realized how deeply the cold had sunk into her bones in spite of all the winter clothing she wore, and she knew it would have been dangerous to wait here, unmoving, without the fire.

Joey slumped back against a wall of rock and stared at the fire with a blank expression, with eyes that looked like two flat ovals of polished glass, empty of everything except the reflection of the leaping flames.

The dog settled down and began to lick one paw, then the other.

Christine wasn't sure if its feet were just bruised or cut, but she could see that it was hurting a little, even though it didn't whine or whimper.

Around them the stone began to absorb the heat from the bonfire, and because the wind didn't reach into the cul-de-sac, the air was soon surprisingly warm.

Sitting next to Joey, Christine pulled off her gloves, zipped open one of the pockets in her insulated jacket, and took out a box of shotgun shells. She opened the box and put it beside the gun, which was already loaded. That was in case Charlie never came back. and in case someone else did.

By the time Charlie reached the top of the ride, he was short of breath, and a stabbing pain thrust rhythmically through his thighs and calves.

His back and shoulders and neck ached as if the heavy pack was still strapped to him, and he repeatedly had to shift the rifle from hand to hand because the muscles in both arms were weary and aching, too.

He was not out of shape; back in Orange County, when life had been normal, he had gone to the gym twice a week, and he had run five miles every other morning. If he was beginning to tire, what must Christine and Joey feel like? Even if he could kill a couple more of Spivey's fanatics, how much longer could Christine and Joey go on?

He tried to put that question out of his mind. He didn't want to think about it because he suspected the answer would not be encouraging.

Running in a crouch because the wind along the ridge had grown violent enough to stagger him, he crossed the narrow rocky plateau. Snow was falling so thickly now that, on the treeless summit, visibility was reduced to fifteen or twenty yards, considerably less when the wind gusted. He had never seen such snow in his life; it seemed as if it were not just coming down in flakes but in cold-welded agglomerations of flakes, in clumps and wads. If he hadn't known exactly where he was going, he might have become disoriented, might have wasted precious time floundering back and forth on the ridge, but he moved unerringly to a jumble of weather-smoothed boulders along the crest and flopped down on his stomach at a place he had chosen earlier.

Here, he could lie at the very lip of the slope, in a gap between two lumpy outcroppings in a long series of granite formations, and look straight down a winding section of the deer trail that he and Christine and Joey had climbed and along which the TWilighters were certain to ascend. He inched forward, peered down into the trees, and was startled by movement hardly more than a hundred yards below. He quickly brought the rifle up, looked through the telescopic sight, and saw two people.

Jesus.

They were here already.

But only two? Where were the others?

He saw that this pair was moving up toward a blind spot in the trail, and he figured they must be the last in the party. The others, ahead of these two, had already gone around the bend and would soon reappear higher on the path.

Of the two who were in sight, the first was of average size, wearing dark clothing. The second was a strikingly tall man in a blue ski suit over which he was wearing a hooded brown parka, his face framed in a fringe of fur lining.

The giant in the parka must be the man Charlie had seen in Spivey's rectory office, the monster Kyle. Charlie shuddered.

Kyle gave him the creeps every bit as much as Mother Grace did.

Charlie had expected to have to wait here awhile, ten minutes or even longer, before they came into sight, but now they were almost on top of him. They must be climbing without pause, without scouting the way ahead, reckless, unafraid of an ambush. If he'd been a couple of minutes slower getting here, he would have walked right into them as they came over the crest.

The deer trail turned a corner. The two Twilighters moved out of sight behind a rock around a stand of interlaced pines and fir.

His heart racing, he shifted his sights to the point at which the trail emerged from those trees. He saw an open stretch of about eight yards in which he would be able to draw down on his targets. The distance between him and them would be only about seventy yards, which meant each round would be approximately one and three-quarters inches high when it impacted, so he would need to aim for the lower part of the chest in order to put a slug through the heart. Depending on how close together the bastards were, as many as three of them might have moved into that clear area before the first would be drawing close to the next blind spot. But he didn't think he would be able to pick off all three, partly because each would be in the way of the other; one target would have to fall to give him a good line on the next. They were also sure to leap for cover as the first shot slammed through the woods. He might bring down the second one during that mad rush for shelter, but the third would be hidden before he could realign his sights.

He would hope for two.

The first appeared, stepping out of shadows into a gray fall of light that splashed down in a gap among the trees. He put the cross hairs on target, and he saw it was a woman. A rather pretty young woman. He hesitated. A second Twilighter appeared, and Charlie swung the scope on that target. Another woman, less pretty and not as young as the first.

Very clever. They were putting the females first in hope of foiling an ambush. They were counting on his having compunetions about killing women, compunctions they did not have. It was almost amusing. They were the churchfolk, and they believed they were God's agents and that he was an infidel, yet they saw no contradiction in the fact that his moral code might be more demanding and inviolable than theirs.

Their plan might have worked, too, if he hadn't served in Vietnam. But fifteen years ago he had lost two close friends, had almost died himself, when a village woman had come to greet them, smiling, and then had blown herself up when they stopped to talk with her. These were not the first fanatics he had ever dealt with, although the others had been motivated by politics rather than religion. No difference, really. Both politics and religion could sometimes be a poison. And he knew that the mindless hatred and the thirst for violence that infected a true believer could turn a woman into a rabid killer every bit as deadly as any man with a mission. Institutionalized madness and savagery knew no limitations as to gender.

He had Joey and Christine to consider. If he spared these women, they would kill the woman he loved and her son.

They'll kill me, too, he thought.

He was repelled by the need to shoot her, but he brought his sights back to the first woman, put the cross hairs on her chest.

Fired.

She was lifted off her feet and pitched off the deer path. Dead, she slammed into the bristling branches of a black spruce, bringing a small avalanche of snow off its boughs and onto her head.

Then a bad thing happened.

Christine had just put more fuel on the fire and had settled down beside Joey again, under the rock overhang, when she heard the first rifle blast echo down through the forest.

Chewbacca raised his head, his ears pricking up.

Other shots were fired a second or so after the first, but they weren't from Charlie's rifle. There was a steady chatter of shots, a thunderous metallic ack-ack-ack-ack which she recognized from old movies, the blood-freezing voice of an automatic weapon, maybe a machine gun. It was a cold, ugly, terrifying sound, filling the forest, and she thought that, if Death laughed, this was how he would sound.

She knew Charlie was in trouble.

Charlie didn't even have time to line up the second shot before the machine gun chattered, scaring the hell out of him. For a moment the racket of automatic fire echoed and reechoed from a hundred points along the mountain, and it was difficult to tell where it came from. But the events of the past few days had shown that his hard-learned war skills had not been forgotten, and he quickly determined that the gunman was not on the slope below but on the ridge with him, north of his position.

They had sent a scout ahead, and the scout had laid a trap.

Pressing hard against the ground, trying to become one with the stone, Charlie wondered why the trap hadn't been sprung earlier. Why hadn't he been gunned down the moment he'd come onto the top of the ridge? Maybe the scout had been inattentive, looking the wrong way. Or maybe the heavy snow had closed around Charlie at just the right time, granting him a temporary cloak of invisibility. That was probably part of the explanation, anyway, because he remembered a particularly thick and whirling squall of snow just as he'd come over the crest.

The machine gun fell silent for a moment.

He heard a series of metallic clinks and a grating noise, and he figured the gunner was replacing the weapon's empty magazine.

Before Charlie could rise up and have a look, the man began to fire again. Bullets ricocheted off the boulders among which Charlie was nestled, spraying chips of granite, and he realized that none of the other shots had been nearly this close. The gunner had been pumping rounds into the rocks north of Charlie. Now the piercing whine of the ricochets moved away, south along the ridge line, and he knew the Twilighter was firing blind, unsure of his target's position.

There was, after all, a chance Charlie could get off the ridge alive.

He got his feet under him, still hiding behind the boulders, keeping low. He shuffled around a bit until he was facing north.

The gunner stopped firing.

Was he just pausing to study the terrain, moving to another position? Or was he changing magazines again?

If the former were the case, then the man was still armed and dangerous; if the latter, he was temporarily defenseless.

Charlie couldn't hear the noises he had heard when the magazine had been changed before, but he couldn't squat here and wait forever, so he jumped up anyway, straight up, and there was his nemesis, only twenty feet away, standing in the snow.

It was a man in brown insulated pants and a dark parka, not changing the machine gun's magazine but squinting at the ridge plateau beyond Charlie-until Charlie popped up and caught his attention. He cried out and swung the muzzle of the machine gun toward Charlie.

But Charlie had the element of surprise on his side and got off a round first. It struck the Twilighter in the throat.

The man appeared to take a great jump backwards, swinging his automatic weapon straight up and letting off a useless burst of fire at the snow-filled sky as he collapsed. His neck had been ripped apart, his spinal cord severed, and his head nearly taken off. Death had been instantaneous.

And in the instant Death embraced the machine gunner, as the sound of Charlie's shot split the cold air, he saw that there was a second man on the ridge, thirty feet behind the first and over to the right, near the rocky crest. This one had a rifle, and he fired even as Charlie recognized the danger.

As if battered by a sledgehammer, Charlie was spun around and knocked down. He struck the ground hard and lay behind the boulders, out of sight of the rifleman, out of the line of fire, safe but not for long.

His left arm, left shoulder, and the left side of his chest suddenly felt cold, very cold, and numb. Although there was no pain yet, he knew he had been hit. Solidly hit. It was bad.

The screams brought Christine out of the cul-de-sac, past the dying fire, onto the trail.

She looked up toward the ridge. She couldn't see all the way to the top of the valley wall, of course. It was too far. The snow and the trees blocked her view.

The screaming went on and on. God, it was awful. In spite of the distance and the muffling effect of the forest, it was a horrible, bloodcurdling shriek of pain and terror. She shivered, and not because of the cold air.

It sounded like Charlie.

No. She was letting her imagination run away with her. It could have been anyone. The sound was too far away, too distorted by the trees for her to be able to say that it was Charlie.

It went on for half a minute or maybe even longer. It seemed like an hour. Whoever he was, he was screaming his guts out up there, one scream atop the other, until she wanted to scream, too. Then it subsided, faded, as if the screamer suddenly had insufficient energy to give voice to his agony.

Chewbacca came out onto the trail and looked up toward the top of the valley.

Silence settled in.

Christine waited.

Nothing.

She returned to the sheltered niche, where Joey sat in a stupor, and picked up the shotgun.

It was a shoulder wound. Serious. His entire arm was numb, and he couldn't move his hand. Damned serious. Maybe mortal.

He wouldn't know until he could get out of his jacket and theirmal underwear and have a look at it-or until he began to pass out. If he lost consciousness in this bitter cold, he would die, regardless of whether the Twilighters came along to finish him off.

As soon as he realized he was hit, Charlie screamed, not because the pain was so bad (for there was no pain yet), and not because he was scared (though he was damned scared), but because he wanted the man who had shot him to know that he was hit. He shrieked as a man might if he were watching his own entrails pour out of a grievous wound in his stomach, screamed as if he knew he were dying, and as he screamed he turned onto his back, stretched out flat in the snow, pushed the rifle aside because it was of little use to him now that he no longer had two good hands. He unzipped his jacket, pulled the revolver out of his shoulder holster. Keeping the gun in his good right hand, he tucked that arm under him, so his body concealed the weapon.

His useless left arm was flung out at his side, the hand turned with the palm up, limp. He began to punctuate his screams with desperate gasping sounds; then he let the screams subside, though putting an even more horrible groan into them. Finally he went silent.

The wind died down for a moment, as if cooperating wah Charlie. The mountain was tomb-quiet.

He heard movement beyond the boulders that screened him from the gunman.

Boots on snow-free stone. A few quick footsteps. Then wary silence.

Then a few more footsteps.

He was counting on this man being an amateur, like the guy with the machine gun. A pro would be shooting when he came around the granite formation. But an amateur would want to believe the screams, would be congratutating himself on a good kill, and would be vulnerable.

Footsteps. Closer. Very close now.

Charlie opened his eyes wide and stared straight up at the gray sky. The rock formation kept some of the falling snow out of his way, but flakes still dropped onto his face, onto his eyelashes, and he needed all of his will power to keep from blinking.

He let his mouth sag open, but he held his breath because it would spiral up in a frosty plume and thus betray him.

A second passed. Five seconds. Ten.

In another half minute or so, he would need to breathe.

His eyes were beginning to water.

Suddenly this seemed like a bad plan. Stupid. He was going to die here. He had to think of something better, more clever.

Then the Twilighter appeared, edging around the hump of granite.

Charlie stared fixedly at the sky, playing dead; therefore, he couldn't see what the stranger looked like; he was aware of him only peripherally. But he felt sure that his performance as a corpse was convincing, and well it should have been, for he had provided a liberal display of his own blood as stage dressing.

The gunman stepped closer, stood directly over him, looking down, grinning.

Charlie had to strain not to focus on him, had to continue to look straight through him. It wasn't easy. The eye was naturally drawn toward movement.

The stranger still had a rifle and was still on his feet, better armed and more agile than Charlie. If he realized Charlie was still alive, he could finish the job in a fraction of a second.

A beat.

Another.

Irrationally, Charlie thought: He'll hear my heart!

That irrational terror gave rise to a more realistic fear-the possibility that the gunman would see Charlie's pulse beating in his neck or temple. Charlie almost panicked at that thought, almost moved.

But he realized that his coat and the attached hood concealed both his neck and his temples; he would not be betrayed by his own throbbing blood flow.

Then the Tstepped past him, to the lip of the ridge, and shouted down to his fellow churchmen on the slope below.

"I got him! I got the son of a bitch!"

The moment the gunman's attention was elsewhere, Charlie rolled slightly to the left, freeing his right hand, which had been under his buttocks, bringing up the revolver.

The TWilighter gasped, began to turn.

Charlie shot him twice. Once in the side. Once in the head.

The man went over the brink, crashed through some brush, roiled down between the trees, and came to a stop against the broad trunk of a pine, dead before he even had a chance to scream.

— Torning onto his stomach, Charlie pulled himself to the edge of the ridge and looked down. Some of Spivey's people had come out of hiding in response to the rifleman's shout of triumph. Apparently, not all of them realized their enemy was still alive. Most likely they thought the two subsequent shots had been fired by their own man, to make sure Charlie was dead, and they probably figured the body toppling off the crest was Charlie's. They didn't dive for cover again until he shouted,

"Bastards," and squeezed off two rounds from the revolver.

Then, like a pack of rats smelling a cat, they scuttled into safe dark places.

He loosed the remaining two rounds in the revolver, not expecting to hit anyone, not even taking aim, intending only to frighten them and force them to lie low for a while.

"I got both of them!" he shouted." They're both dead. How come they're both dead if God's on your side?"

No one below responded.

The shouting winded him. He waited a moment, drawing several deep breaths, not wanting them to hear any weakness in his voice. Then he shouted again: "Why don't you stand up and let God stop the bullets when I shoot at you?"

No answer.

"That would prove something, wouldn't it?"

No answer.

He took several long, slow breaths.

He tried flexing his left hand, and the fingers moved, but they were still numb and stiff.

Wondering whether he had killed enough of them to make them turn back, he did a little arithmetic. He had killed two on the ridge top, one on the trail, three down in the meadow where they had huddled around the Jeep and the snowmobiles.

Six dead. Six of ten. How many did that leave in the woods below him?

Three? He thought he'd seen three others down there: another woman, Kyle, and the man who had been in front of Kyle, toward the end of the line. But wouldn't at least one of them have stayed behind with Mother Grace? Surely she wouldn't have remained alone at the cabin. And she wouldn't have been able to come up here, on such an arduous hike. Would she? Or was she there among the trees right now, only sixty or seventy yards away, crouching in the shadows like an evil old troll?

"I'm going to wait right here," he shouted.

He fished half a dozen cartridges out of a jacket pocket and, hampered by having only one good hand, reloaded the revolver.

"Sooner or later, you're going to have to move," Charlie called down to them." You'll have to stretch your muscles, or you'll cramp up." His voice sounded eerie in the snowy stillness." You'll cramp up, and you'll slowly start freezing to death."

The anesthetizing shock of being shot was beginning to wear off. His nerves began to respond, and the first dull pain crept into his shoulder and arm.

"Any time you're ready," he shouted, "let's test your faith.

Let's see if you really believe God is on your side. Any time you're ready, just stand up and let me take a shot at you, and let's see if God turns the bullets away."

He waited half a minute, until he was sure they weren't going to respond, and then he holstered his revolver and eased away from the crest. They wouldn't know he had left. They might suspect, but they couldn't be sure. They would be pinned down for half an hour, maybe longer, before they finally decided to risk continuing their ascent. At least he hoped to God they would.

He needed every minute he could get.

With the dull pain in his shoulder rapidly growing sharper, he belly-crawled all the way across the flat top of the ridge, moving like a crippled crab, and didn't stand up until he had reached the place where the land sloped down and the deer trail headed off through the trees.

When he tried to rise, he found his legs were surprisingly weak; they crumpled under him, and he dropped back to the ground, jarring his injured arm-Christ! — and felt a big black wave roaring toward him. He held his breath and closed his eyes and waited until the wave had passed, refusing to be carried away by it. The pain was not dull any longer; it was a stinging, burning, gnawing pain, as if a living creature had burrowed into his shoulder and was now eating its way out.

It was bad enough when he was perfectly still, but the slightest movement made it ten times worse. However, he couldn't just lie here.

Regardless of the pain, he had to get up, return to Christine. If he was going to die, he didn't want to be alone in these woods when his time came. Christ, that was inexcusably negative thinking, wasn't it?

Mustn't think about dying. The thought is father to the deed, right?

The pain was bad, but that didn't mean the wound was mortal. He hadn't come this far to give up so easily. There was a chance. Always a chance. He had been an optimist all his life.

He had survived two abusive, drunken parents. He had survived poverty.

He had survived the war. He would survive this, too, dammit. He crawled off the plateau, onto the deer trail. Just over the edge of the crest, he grabbed a branch on a spruce and pulled himself upright at last, leaning on the trunk of the tree for support.

He wasn't dizzy, and that was a good sign. After he had taken several deep breaths and had stood there against the tree for a minute, his legs became less rubbery. The pain from the wound did not subside, but he found that he was gradually adjusting to it; he either had to adjust or escape it by surrendering consciousness, which was a luxury he could not afford.

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.

His throat was full of phlegm. He coughed and spat.

How long had he been unconscious?

No way to tell.

As far as he could see, the trail leading up toward the crest of the ridge was deserted. Spivey's people hadn't yet come after him. He couldn't have been out for long.

The pain in his arm and shoulder had sent questing tendrils across his back and chest, up his neck, into his skull. He tried to raise his arm and had some success, and he could move his hand a little without making the pain any worse.

He squirmed to the nearest tree and attempted to pull himself up, but he couldn't do it. He waited a moment, tried again, failed again.

Christine. Joey. They were counting on him.

He would have to crawl for a while. Just till his strength teturned. He tried it, on hands and knees, putting most of his weight on his right arm, but demanding some help from his left, and to his surprise he was able to shuffle along at a decent pace.

Where the angle of the slope allowed him to accept gravity's assistance, he slid down the trail, sometimes as far as four or five yards, before coming to a stop.

He wasn't sure how far he had to go before reaching the rocky overhang under which he had left Christine and Joey. It might be around the next bend-or it might be hundreds of yards away.

He had lost his ability to judge distance. But he hadn't lost his sense of direction, so he crabbed down toward the valley floor.

A few minutes or a few seconds later, he realized he had lost his rifle., it had probably come off his shoulder when he'd fallen.

He ought to go back for it. But maybe it had slipped off the trail, into some underbrush or into a jumble of rocks. It might not be easy to find. He still had his revolver. And Christine had the shotgun. Those weapons would have to be sufficient.

He crawled farther down the trail and came to a fallen tree that barred his way. He didn't remember that it had been here earlier, though it might have been, and he wondered if he had taken a wrong turn somewhere.

But on the first two trips, he hadn't noticed any branches in the trail, so how could he have gone wrong? He leaned against the log — and he was in a dentist's office, strapped into a chair. He had grown a hundred teeth in his left shoulder and arm, and as luck would have it all of them were in need of root canal work.

The dentist opened the door and came in, and it was Grace Spivey. She had the biggest, nastiest drill he had ever seen, and she wasn't even going to use it on the teeth in his shoulder; she was going to bore a hole straight through his heart — and his heart was pounding furiously when he woke and found himself slumped against the fallen log.

Christine.

Joey.

Mustn't fail them.

He climbed over the log, sat on it, wondered if he dared to try walking, decided against it, and slipped down to his knees again. He crawled.

In a while his arm felt better.

It felt dead. That was better.

The pain subsided.

He crawled.

If he stopped for a moment and curled up and closed his eyes, the pain would go away altogether. He knew it would.

But he crawled.

He was thirsty and hot in spite of the frigid air. He paused and scooped up some snow and put it in his mouth. It tasted coppery, foul.

He swallowed anyway because his throat felt as if it were afire, and the wretched-tasting snow was at least cool.

Now all he needed before moving on again was a moment's rest. The day wasn't bright; nevertheless, the gray light striking down between the trees hurt his eyes. If he could just close them for a moment, shut out the gray glare for a few seconds …

Christine didn't want to leave Joey and Chewbacca alone under the overhang, but she had no choice because she knew Charlie was in trouble.

It wasn't just the extended gunfire that had worried her. It was partly the screaming, which had stopped some time ago, and partly the fact that he was taking so long. But mainly it was just a hunch. Call it woman's intuition: she knew Charlie needed her.

She told Joey she wouldn't go far, just up the trail a hundred yards or so, to see if there was any sign of Charlie. She hugged the boy, asked him if he would be all right, thought he nodded in response, but couldn't get any other reaction from him.

"Don't go anywhere while I'm gone," she said.

He didn't answer.

"Don't you leave here. Understand?"

The boy blinked. He still wasn't focusing on her.

"I love you, honey."

The boy blinked again.

"You watch over him," she told Chewbacca.

The dog snorted.

She took the shotgun and went out onto the trail, past the dying fire.

She glanced back. Joey wasn't even looking at her.

He was leaning against the rock wall, shoulders hunched, head bowed, hands in his lap, staring at the ground in front of him.

Afraid to leave him, but also afraid that Charlie needed her, she turned away and headed up the deer path.

The heat from the fire had done her some good. Her bones and muscles didn't feel as stiff as they had awhile ago; there wasn't so much soreness when she walked.

The trees protected her from most of the wind, but she knew it was blowing furiously, for it made a wild and ghoulish sound as it raged through the highest branches. In those places where the forest parted to reveal patches of leaden sky, the snow came down so thick and fast that it almost seemed like rain.

She had gone no more than eighty yards, around two bends in the trail, when she saw Charlie. He was lying face-down in the middle of the path, head turned to one side.

No.

She stopped a few feet from him. She dreaded going closer because she knew what she would find.

He was motionless.

Dead.

Oh, Jesus, he was dead. They had killed him. She had loved him, and he had loved her, and now he had died for her, and she was sick with the thought of it. The somber, sullen colors of the day seeped into her, and she was filled with a cold grayness, a numbing despair.

But grief had to allow room for fear, as well, because now she and Joey were on their own, and without Charlie she didn't think they would make it out of the mountains. At least not alive.

His death was an omen of their own fate.

She studied the woods around her, decided that she was alone with the body. Evidently, Charlie had been hurt up on the ridge top and had managed to come this far under his own steam.

Spivey's fanatics were apparently still on the other side of the ridge.

Or maybe he had killed them all.

Slipping the shotgun strap over her shoulder, she went to him, reluctant to examine him more closely, not certain she had the strength to look upon his cold dead face. She knelt beside himand realized that he was breathing.

Her own breath caught in her throat, and her heart seemed to miss a beat or two.

He was alive.

Unconscious but alive.

Miracles did happen.

She wanted to laugh but repressed the urge, superstitiously afraid that the gods would be displeased by her joy and would take Charlie from her, after all. She touched him. He murmured but didn't come around. She turned him onto his back, and he grumbled at her without opening his eyes. She saw the torn shoulder of his jacket and realized he had been shot. Around the wound, lumps of dark and frozen blood adhered to the shredded fabric. It was bad, but at least he wasn't dead.

"Charlie?"

When he didn't reply, she touched his face and spoke his name again, and finally his eyes opened. For a moment they were out of focus, but then he fixed on her and blinked, and she saw that he was aware, sluggish and perhaps fuzzy-headed but not delirious.

"Lost it," he said.

"What? "

"The rifle."

"Don't worry about it," she said.

"Killed three of them," he said thickly.

"Good."

"Where are they?" he asked worriedly.

"I don't know."

"Must be near."

"I don't think so."

He tried to sit up.

Apparently, a dark current of pain crackled through him, for he winced and held his breath, and for a moment she thought he was going to pass out again.

He was too pale, corpse-white.

He squeezed her hand until the pain subsided a bit.

He said, "Still others coming," and this time he managed to sit up when he tried.

"Can you move?"

"Weak. "

"We've got to get out of here."

"Was… crawling.

"Can you walk?"

"Not by myself."

"If you lean on me?" "Maybe."

She helped him to his feet, gave him support, and encouraged him to descend the path. They made slow, halting progress at first, then went a bit faster, and a couple of times they slipped and almost fell, but eventually they reached the overhang.

Joey didn't react to their arrival. But as Christine helped Charlie ease to the ground, Chewbacca came over, wagging his tail, and licked Charlie's face.

The rock walls had absorbed a lot of heat from the fire, which was now little more than embers, and warmth radiated from the stone on all sides.

"Nice," Charlie said.

His voice was too dreamy to suit Christine.

"Light-headed?" she asked.

"A little."

"Dizzy?"

"Was. Not now."

"Blurred vision?"

"Nothing like that."

She said, "I want to see that wound," and she began taking off his jacket.

"No time," he said, putting a hand on hers, stopping her from tending to him.

"I'll be quick about it."

"No time!" he insisted.

"Listen," she said, "right now, with all the pain you're in, you can't move fast."

"A damned turtle."

"And you're losing your strength."

"Feel like. a little kid."

"But we have a pretty extensive first-aid kit, so maybe we can patch you up and alleviate some of the pain. Then maybe you can get on your feet and get moving faster. If so, we'll be damned glad we took the time."

He thought about it, nodded." Okay. But… keep your ears open. They might not be… far away."

She removed his quilted jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, slipped it off his injured shoulder, then unsnapped and pulled back the top of his insulated underwear, which was sticky with blood and sweat. There was an ugly hole in him, high in the left side of his chest, just below the shoulder bones. The sight of it gave her the feeling that live snakes were writhing in her stomach.

The worst of the bleeding had stopped, but the flesh immediately around the wound was swollen, an angry shade of red. The skin color faded to purple farther away from the hole, then to a deadpale white.

"Lot of blood?" he asked.

"There was."

"Now? "

"Still bleeding a little."

"Spurting?"

"No. If an artery had been hit, you'd be dead by now."

"Lucky," he said.

"Very."

An exit wound scarred his back. The flesh looked just as bad on that side, and she thought she saw splinters of bone in the torn and bloody meat of him.

"Bullet's not in you," she said.

"That's a plus."

The first-aid kit was in his backpack. She got it out, opened a small bottle of boric acid solution and poured it into the wound.

It foamed furiously for a moment, but it didn't sting as iodine or Merthiolate would have; with a slightly dreamy, detached air, Charlie watched it bubble.

She hastily packed some snow into a tin cup and set it to melt on the hot coals of the burnt-out fire.

He overcame his dreaminess, shook his head as if to clear it, and said "Hurry."

"Doing the best I can," she said.

When the boric acid had finished working, she quickly dusted both the entry and exit wounds with a yellowish antibiotic powder, then with a mild, white anesthetizing powder. Now there was almost no bleeding at all. Taking off her gloves so she could work faster and better, she used cotton pads, gauze pads, and a two-inch-wide roll of gauze to fashion an unsatisfactory and somewhat amateurish bandage, but she fixed it in place with so much white adhesive tape that she knew it would stay put.

"Listen!" he said.

She was very still.

They listened, but there was only the wind in the trees.

"Not them," she said.

"Not yet."

"Chewbacca will warn us if anyone's coming."

The dog was lying beside Joey, at ease.

The icy air had already leeched the stored-up warmth in the stone.

Beneath the rocky overhang, the sheltered niche was growing cold again.

Charlie was shivering violently.

She hurriedly dressed him, pulled up the zipper on his jacket, tugged his hood in place and tied it under his chin, then fetched the cupful of melted snow from the embers. The first-aid kit contained Tylenol, which was not nearly a strong enough painsuppressant for his needs, but it was all they had. She gave him two tablets, hesitated, then a third. At first he had a bit of trouble swallowing, and that worried her, but he said it was just that his mouth and throat were so dry, and by the time he took the third tablet he seemed better.

He wouldn't be able to carry his backpack; they would have to abandon it.

She shook a few items out of her own bag in order to get the first-aid kit into it, secured all the flaps. She slipped her arms through the loops, buckled the last strap across her chest.

She was frantic to get moving. She didn't need a wrist watch to know they were running out of time.

Kyle Barlowe was a big man but not graceless. He could move stealthily and sure-footedly when he put his mind to it. Tep minutes after Harrison killed Denny Rogers and threw his body down from the crest of the ridge, Barlowe moved cautiously from the tangle of dead brush where he had been hiding, and slipped across the face of the slope to a spot where shadows lay like frozen pools of night. From the shadows he dashed catlike to a huge fallen tree, from there to a jagged snout of rock poking up from the hillside. He neither climbed nor descended the slope, moved only laterally, away from the area over which Harrison held dominion, leaving the others pinned down but, with luck, not for long.

After another ten minutes, when he was certain that he was well out of Harrison's sight, Barlowe became less circumspect, rushed boldly up the slope to the crest, crawled over it. He moved through a gap between two rock formations and stood up on the flat, wind-abraded top of the ridge.

He had a Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum in a shoulder holster.

He unzipped his jacket long enough to get the revolver.

The snow was coming down so hard that he couldn't see more than twenty feet, sometimes not even that far. The limited visibility didn't worry him. In fact, he figured it was a gift from God. He already knew the spot from which Harrison had been firing on them; he wouldn't have any difficulty finding it. But in the meantime the snow would screen him from Harrison-if the detective was still on the ridge, which was doubtful.

He moved southward, directly into the raging wind. It stung and numbed his face, made him squint. His eyes watered and his nose dripped. But it couldn't stagger him or knock him down; it would have more easily felled one of the massive trees along the ridge line.

In fifty yards he found Morgan Pierce's body. The staring but unseeing eyes did not look human, for they were sheathed by milky cataracts that were actually thin films of crazed ice. The eyebrows and lashes and mustache were frosted. The wind was industriously packing snow in the angles formed by the dead man's arms, legs, and bent neck.

Barlowe was surprised to see that Harrison had not taken Pierce's Uzi, a compact Israeli-made gun. He picked it up, hoping it hadn't been damaged by the snow. He decided he'd better not rely on the Uzi until he had a chance to test it, so he slung it over his shoulder and kept the.357 in his right hand.

Staying close to the granite outcroppings along the eastern crest of the ridge, he crept toward the place from which Harrison had shot at them, from which he had pitched Denny Rogers down the slope. The.357 thrust out in front of him, Barlowe eased around the boulder that formed the northern wall of Harrison's roost-and was not surprised to discover the detective was gone.

The nook between rock formations was somewhat protected from the wind; therefore, some snow had settled and remained within the niche. Brass glinted in the snow: several expended cartridges.

Barlowe also noticed blood on the rocks that formed the walls of that sheltered space: dark, frozen stains on the grayish granite.

He stooped, stared at the cartridges poking out of the whitemantled floor. He brushed away the soft, dry layer of new flakes that had fallen in the past half an hour or so, pushing the expended cartridges aside as well, and he found a lot more blood on the older layer of snow underneath. Denny Rogers' blood?

Or was some of it Harrison's? Maybe Rogers had wounded the bastard.

He turned away from the eastern crest, stepped across the narrow ridge top, and began searching for the place at which the deer path continued into the next valley. Because the Antichrist and his guardians had followed the trail this far, it was logical to assume they'd continue to follow it down the far side of the ridge. The new snow didn't cling to the wind-blasted plateau, but it was piling up just over the edge of the crest, where the wind didn't hit as hard and where brush and rocks gave it drift points against which it could build, and it obscured the entrance to the deer path. He almost missed the trail, had to kick through a drift, but then saw both deer tracks and human footprints in the more meager carpet of snow under the trees.

He went down the slope a few yards, until he found what he had hoped for: spots of blood. There was no way this could be Denny Rogers' blood. No doubt about it now: Harrison was hurt.

Charlie was impressed but not surprised by how quickly and surely Christine took charge. She got them out on the trail and moving down toward the valley again.

Joey and Chewbacca followed them. The boy said nothing, shuffled along as if he felt they were wasting their time trying to escape. But he didn't stop, didn't fall back, stayed close. The dog took his cue from his master, padding along in silence, his head drooping, his eyes downcast.

Charlie expected to hear shouting on the trail behind them.

Minute by minute, he was increasingly sure that gunfire would break out.

But the snow fell, the wind whooped, the trees creaked and rustled, and Spivey's people did not appear. He must have put a damned good scare into them with that last ambush. They must have stayed where he'd left them for at least half an hour, afraid to crawl out of hiding, and when they had begun to move, they must have proceeded to the ridge top with extreme caution.

It was too much to hope they had given up and turned back.

They would never give up. He had learned that much about them, anyway.

Denton Boothe, his fat psychologist friend, had been right: Only death would stop this breed of fanatic.

As it wound down the lower half of the valley wall, the deer trail took a more wandering route than before. They were not going to reach the bottom as fast as they had anticipated.

During the first twenty minutes, Charlie didn't need much help. For the most part the path was gentle and undemanding.

A few times he had to grab a tree or put one hand against a pillar of rock to keep his balance, and twice, when the land sloped too steeply, he leaned on Christine, but he didn't hang on her constantly. In fact he got along considerably better than he had thought possible when they'd started out.

Although the Tylenol and the antibiotic powder had taken the edge off the pain in his shoulder and arm, it was still bad. In fact, even softened by the drugs, it was so intense that he would have expected to be incapacitated by it, but he discovered he had more tolerance for pain than he had thought; he was adapting to it, grinding his teeth into calcium sand and cutting permanent lines of agony in his face, but adapting.

After twenty minutes, however, his strength began to ebb, and he needed Christine's help more often. They reached the valley floor in twenty-five minutes, by which time he was beginning to get slightly dizzy again. Five minutes later, when they came to the edge of a broad meadow, where twin hammers of snow and wind pounded the land, he had to stop and rest while still in the shelter of the woods. He sat under a pine and leaned against the trunk.

Joey sat beside him but said nothing, didn't even acknowledge his presence. Charlie was too weary to attempt to elicit a word or a smile from the boy.

Chewbacca licked his paws. They were bleeding a little.

Christine sat, too, and took out the map that Charlie had spread on the table at the cabin, yesterday, when he'd insisted on showing her how they would get out of the mountains if Spivey's people arrived and tried to corner them. Christ, how unlikely such a situation had seemed then, and how terribly inevitable it seemed now!

Christine had to fold and refold the map, keeping it small while she studied it, because the wind occasionally broke out of the meadow and lashed between the trees, reaching some distance into the dense forest to slap and poke and grab at everything in its path.

Beyond the perimeter of the woods, a fierce blizzard raged across the valley floor. The wind was from the southwest, roaring like an express train from one end of the valley to the other, harrying sheets of snow in front of it. The snow was so thick that, most of the time, you could see only about a third of the way across the meadow, where the world appeared to end in a blank white wall. But occasionally the wind subsided for a few seconds or briefly changed directions, and the hundreds of opaque curtains of snow fluttered and parted at the same instant, and in the distance you could see more trees crowding the other side of the meadow, and then the far wall of the somewhat narrow valley, and beyond that another faraway ridge crest where ice and rock shone like chrome even in the sunless gloom.

According to the map, a little creek cut through the middle of the meadow and ran the length of the valley. She looked up, squinted at the white maelstrom beyond the forest, but she couldn't see the creek out there, not even when the snow parted.

She figured it was frozen over and covered with snow. If they followed the creek (instead of crossing the meadow into the next arm of the woods), they would eventually come to the upper end of a narrow draw that sloped down toward the lake, for this was a high valley that funneled southwest, and they were still far above Tahoe. Yesterday, when he had first brought out the map, Charlie had said they would follow this route if they had to leave the cabin and take to the wilds, but that had been before he was shot. It was a three- or four-mile hike to civilization from here, not a discouragingly long way-if you were in good physical condition. However, now that he was wounded and weak, and with a full-scale blizzard moving in, there was absolutely no hope of getting down to the lake by that route. In their circumstances, three or four miles was a journey every bit as epic as a trek across China.

She desperately searched the map for some other way out or for some indication of shelter, and after consulting the key several times to interpret the cartographer's symbols, she discovered the caves. They were along this same side of the valley, half a mile northeast of here.

Judging by the map, the caves were a point of interest for those hardy hikers who were curious about ancient Indian wall paintings and who had a mania for collecting arrowheads. Christine could not determine whether it was just one or two small caves or an extensive network of them, but; she figured they would be at least large enough to serve as a place to hide from both Spivey's fanatics and the murderous weather.

She moved closer to Charlie, put her head to his in order to be heard above the cacophonous wind, and told him what she had in mind. He was in complete agreement, and his confidence in her plan gave her more faith in it. She stopped worrying about whether going to the caves was a wise decision, and she started worrying about whether they would be able to make it there through the storm.

"We could walk northeast through the woods, following the base of the valley wall," she told Charlie, "but that would leave a trail."

"Whereas, if we went out into the meadow before heading up the valley, if we traveled out there in the open, the storm would obliterate our tracks in no time."

"Yes."

"Spivey's people would lose us right here," he said.

"Exactly. Of course, to reach the caves, we'd have to re-enter the woods farther north, but there's not a chance in a million that they'd pick up our trail again. For one thing, they'll be expecting us to head down the valley, southwest, toward the lake, cause civilization is that direction. ' '

"Right." He licked his cracked lips." There's nothing at all northeast of us but. more wilderness."

"They won't look for us in that neighborhood-will they?"

Christine asked.

"I doubt it," he said." Let's get moving."

"Walking out there in the open, in the wind and snow.

isn't going to be easy," she said.

" I'm all right. I can make it."

He didn't look as if he could make it. He didn't look as if he could even get up. His eyes were watery and bloodshot. His face was gaunt and shockingly pale, and his lips were bloodless.

"But you've got to. look out for Joey," Charlie said.

"Better cut a piece of line. put him on a tether."

That was a good suggestion. Out in the open field, visibility was only a dozen yards in the best moments, declining to less than four yards when the wind whipped up and the snow squalled. It would be easy for Joey to wander a few steps off course, and once they were separated, they would find it difficult if not impossible to locate each other again. She cut a length of rope from the coil that hung on her backpack and made a tether that allowed the boy six feet of play; she linked them, waist to waist.

Charlie repeatedly, nervously looked back the way they had come.

Christine was more disturbed by the fact that Chewbacca, too, was watching the trail along which they'd come. He was still lying down, still relatively calm, but his ears had perked up, and he was growling softly in the back of his throat.

She helped Charlie and Joey put on their ski masks because they would need them now, whether or not the eye holes restricted their vision. She put on her own mask, replaced her hood, pulled the drawstring tight under her chin.

Joey rose without being told. She decided that was a good sign. He still seemed lost, detached, uninterested in what was happening around him, but at least on a subconscious level he knew it was time to go, which meant he wasn't completely beyond reach.

Christine helped Charlie get to his feet.

He looked bad.

This last half mile to the caves was going to be sheer torture for him.

But there was nothing else they could do.

Keeping one hand on Charlie's good arm, ready to provide support if he needed it, tethered to Joey, she led them into the meadow. The wind was a raging beast. The air temperature was at least twenty below zero. The snowflakes were not really flakes any more; they had shrunk to tiny, crystal pellets that bounced off Christine's insulated clothing with a sharp ticking sound. If Hell was cold instead of hot, this was what it must be like.

Ashes and half-burned black branehes were all that remained of the fire that had recently flourished in the middle of the deer path. Kyle Barlowe kicked at the charred detritus, scattering it.

He stepped under the rocky overhang and looked at the abandoned backpack. There were scraps of paper in one corner of the rocky niche, wrappers from prepackaged gauze bandages.

"You were right," Burt Tully said." The man's been hurt."

"Bad enough so he can't carry his pack any more," Barlowe said, turning away from the abandoned gear.

"But I'm still not sure we should go after him, just the four of us," Thlly said." We need reinforcements."

"There's no time to go for them," Kyle Barlowe said.

"But he. he's killed so many of us."

"Are you turning yellow on us?"

"No, no," Tully said, but he looked scared.

"You're a soldier now," Barlowe said." With God's protection."

"I know. It's just. this guy. Harrison. he's damned good." "Not as good as he was before Denny shot him."

"But he shot Denny! He must still have a lot on the ball."

Impatiently, Kyle said, "You saw the place farther back on the trail, where he fell. There was more blood there, where she came and helped him."

"But reinforcements-"

"Forget it," Kyle said, pushing past him.

He had his doubts, too, and he wondered if he was being sharp with Burt only to push his own second-thoughts out of his mind.

Edna Vanoff and Mother Grace were waiting on the trail.

The old woman didn't look well. Her eyes were bloodshot, deeply sunken, pinched half shut by the sooty flesh that ringed them. She stood round-shouldered, bent at the waist, the very image of exhaustion.

Barlowe was amazed that she had come this far. He had wanted her to stay back at the cabin, with guards, but she had insisted on going farther into the mountains with them. He knew she was a vital woman, possessed of considerable strength and stamina for her age, but he was surprised by her unflagging progress through the woods. Occasionally they had to help her over a rough spot, and once he had even carried her for thirty yards or so, but for the most part she had made it on her own.

"How long ago did they leave this place?" Grace asked him, her voice as cracked and bloodless as her lips.

"Hard to say. Fire's cold, but in this weather the embers would cool off real fast."

Burt Thlly said, "If Harrison is as badly wounded as we think, they can't be making good time. We must be closing on them.

We can afford to go slowly, be careful, and make sure we don't walk into another ambush."

Grace said, "No, if they're close, let's hurry, get it over with."

She turned, took one step, stumbled, fell.

Barlowe lifted her to her feet." I'm worried about you, Mother." She said, "I'm fine."

But Edna Vanoff said, "Mother, you look… wrung out."

"Maybe we should rest here a few minutes," Burt said.

"No!" Mother Grace said. Her bloodshot eyes transfixed them, each in turn." Not a few minutes. Not even one minute.

We don't dare give the boy a second more than we have to. I've told you each second he lives, his power increases. I've told you a thousand times!"

Barlowe said, "But Mother, if anything happens to you, the rest of us won't be able to go on."

He flinched from the penetrating power of her eyes. And now her voice had a special quality that entered it only when she was having a vision, a piercing resonance that vibrated in his bones: "If I fail, you must go on. You will go on. It's blasphemy to say your allegiance is to me rather than to God. You will go on until your own legs fail, until you can't crawl another foot. And then you will still go on, or God will have no pity on you. No pity and no mercy. If you fail Him in this, He will let your souls be conscripted into the armies of Hell."

Some people were not swayed when Mother Grace spoke to them in this manner. Some heard nothing but the ranting of an old fool. Some fled as if she were threatening them. Some laughed. But Kyle Barlowe had always been humbled. He was still enthralled by her voice.

But will I be enthralled and obedient when she finally tells me to kill the boy? Or will I resist the violence that I used to thrive upon?

Wrong-thought.

They left the rocky overhang, headed down the deer trail, Barlowe leading, Edna Vanoff second, Mother Grace third, and Burt Tully bringing up the rear. The howling of the wind seemed like a great demonic voice, and to Barlowe it was a constant reminder of the malignant forces that were even now conspiring to take control of the earth.

Christine was beginning to think they would never get out of the meadow alive.

This was worse than a blizzard. It was a white-out, with the wind so strong it would have been a hurricane in a tropical climate, and with the snow coming down so hard and so fast that she couldn't see more than two or three feet ahead. The world had vanished; she was moving through a nightmare landscape without detail, a world composed solely of snow and gray light; she could not see the forest on any side. She couldn't always see Joey when he ranged to the end of the tether. It was terrifying. And although the light was gray and diffuse, there was an all-pervading glare that made her eyes burn, and she realized that the threat of snow-blindness was very real. What would they do if they had to feel their way through the meadow, sightless, seeking the northeast end of the valley by instinct alone? She knew the answer: They would die. She paused every thirty steps to look at the compass, sheltering it in her gloved hands, and although she tried to move always in a straight line, she found, on several occasions, that they were heading in the wrong direction, and she had to correct their course.

Even if they didn't get disoriented and lost, they could die out here if they didn't move fast enough, for it was colder than she had ever thought it could be, so cold that she wouldn't have been surprised if she had suddenly frozen solid, upright, in mid-stride.

She was worried sick about Joey, but he stayed on his feet and plodded along at her side long after she expected him to drop.

His quasi-catatonic withdrawal was, ironically, of benefit to him in these circumstances; having tuned out the real world, he was less affected by the cold and wind than he otherwise might have been. Even so, the elements would take their toll of him in time.

She would soon have to get him off the meadow, into the comparative shelter of the forest, whether or not they reached the area in which the caves were situated.

Charlie fared worse than the boy. He stumbled frequently, went to his knees a couple of times. After five minutes, he occasionally leaned on Christine for support. After ten minutes, he needed her more than occasionally. After fifteen, he required her support constantly, and they were slowed to little more than a shuffle.

She couldn't tell either him or Joey that she was soon going to head toward the woods, for the wind made conversation impossible. When she faced into the wind, her words were driven back into her throat even as she spoke them, and when she faced away from it, her words were torn like fragile cloth and scattered in meaningless syllables.

For long minutes she lost sight of Chewbacca, and several times she was certain she'd never see the dog again, but he always reappeared, bedraggled and obviously weak, but alive.

His fur was crusted with ice, and when he appeared out of the surging rivers of snow, he seemed like a revenant journeying back from the far side of the grave.

The wind swept broad areas of the meadow almost clean of snow, leaving just a few well-packed inches in some places, but drifts piled up against even the smallest windbreaks and filled in gullies and depressions, creating traps that could not be seen or avoided. They had abandoned Charlie's snowshoes with his backpack, partly because his wounded shoulder prevented him from carrying them any longer and partly because he was no longer sufficiently sure-footed to use them. As a result, she and Joey couldn't use their snowshoes to go across the drifts because they had to follow a route Charlie could negotiate with them. At times she found herself suddenly wading in snow up to her knees, then up to mid-thigh and getting deeper, and she had to backtrack and find a way around the drift, which wasn't easy when she couldn't see where the hell she was going. At other times, she stepped into holes that the snow had filled in; with no warning at all, from one step to the other, she was waist-deep.

She was afraid there might be an abrupt drop-off or a really deep sinkhole somewhere in the meadow. Sinkholes were not uncommon in mountain country like this; they had passed a few earlier in the day, seemingly bottomless holes, some ancient and ringed with water-smoothed limestone. If she took one misplaced step and plunged down into snow over her head, Charlie might not be able to get her out again, even if she didn't break a leg in the process. By the same token, she wasn't sure she could extricate them from a similar trap if they fell into it.

She became so concerned about this danger that she stopped and untied the tether from her waist. She was afraid of dragging Joey into a chasm with her. She coiled the line around her right hand; she could always let go, let it unravel, if she actually did sink into a trap.

She told herself that the things we fear most never happen to us, that it's always something else that brings us down, something totally unexpected-like Grace Spivey's chance encounter with them in the South Coast Plaza parking lot last Sunday afternoon. But when they were well into the meadow, when she was almost ready to lead them back toward the eastern forest again, the worst happened, after all.

Charlie had just found new reserves of strength and had let go of her arm when she put her foot down into suddenly deep snow and realized she had found the very thing she feared. She tried to throw herself backward, but she had been leaning forward to begin with, bent by the wind, and her momentum was all forward, and she couldn't change her balance in time. Unleashing a loud scream that the wind softened to a quiet cry, she dropped into snow over her head, struck bottom eight feet down, crumpling, with her left leg twisted painfully under her.

She looked up, saw the snow caving in above her. It was filling the hole she'd made when she'd fallen through it.

She was going to be buried alive.

She had read newspaper stories about workmen buried alive, suffocated or crushed to death, in caved-in ditches, no deeper than this. Of course, snow wasn't as heavy as dirt or sand, so she wouldn't be crushed, and she would be able to claw her way through it, and even if she couldn't get all the way out, she would still be able to breathe under the snow, for it wasn't as compact and suffocating as earth, but that realization did not alleviate her panic.

She jackknifed onto her feet an instant after hitting bottom, in spite of the pain in her leg, and she clawed for firm handholds, for the hidden side of the gully or pit into which she had stepped.

But she couldn't find it. Just snow. Soft, yielding snow, infuriatingly insubstantial.

She was still screaming. A clump of snow fell into her open mouth, choking her. The pit was caving in above her, on all sides, pouring down around her, up to her shoulders, then up to her chin, Jesus, and she kept pushing the snow away from her head, desperate to keep her face and arms free, but it closed over her faster than she could dig it away.

Above, Charlie's face appeared. He was lying on the ground, leaning over the edge of the drop, looking down at her. He was shouting something. She couldn't understand what he was saying.

She flailed at the snow, but it weighed down on her, an ever increasing cascade, pouring in from the drift all around, until at last her aching arms were virtually pinned at her sides. No! And still the snow collapsed inward, up to her chin again, up to her mouth. She sealed her lips, closed her eyes, sure that she was going under altogether, that it would cover her head, that Charlie would never be able to get her out, that this would be her grave.

But then the cave-in ceased before her nose was buried.

She opened her eyes, looked up from the bottom of a white funnel, toward Charlie. The walls of snow were still, but at any moment they might tremble and continue to collapse on top of her.

She was rigid, afraid to move, breathing hard.

Joey. What about Joey?

She had released the tether (and Joey) as soon as she'd felt herself going into the pit. She hoped Charlie had stopped Joey before he, too, had plunged over the edge. In his trancelike state, the boy would not necessarily have halted just because she had gone under. If he had fallen into the drift, they would probably never find him. The snow would have closed over him, and they wouldn't be able to locate him by listening to his screams, not in this howling wind, not when his cries would be muffled by a few feet of snow.

She wouldn't have believed her heart could beat this fast or hard without bursting.

Above, Charlie reached down with his good arm, his hand open, making a come-tome gesture with his fingers.

If she dug her arms free of the snow that now pinned them, she could grab hold of him, and together they could try to work her up and out of the hole. But in freeing her arms, she might trigger another avalanche that would cover her head with a couple of feet of snow. She had to be careful, move slowly and deliberately.

She twisted her right arm back and forth under the snow, packing the snow away from it, making a hollow space, then turned her palm up and clawed at the stuff with her fingers, loosening it, letting it slide back into the hollow by her arm, and in seconds she had made a tunnel up to the surface. She snaked her arm through the tunnel, and it came into sight, unhampered from fingertips to above the elbow. She reached straight up, gripped Charlie's extended hand. Maybe she would make it, after all. She clawed her other arm free, grabbed Charlie's wrist.

The snow around her shifted. Just a little.

Charlie began to pull, and she heaved herself up.

The white walls started falling in again. The snow sucked at her as if it were quicksand. Her feet left the ground as Charlie hauled her up, and she kicked out, frantically searching for the wall of the gully, struck it, tried to dig her feet in against it and use it to shove herself toward the top. He eased backwards, pulling her farther up.

This must be agony for him, as the strain passed through his good arm and shoulder into his wounded shoulder, sapping whatever strength he had left. But it was working. Thank God. The sucking snow was letting go of her. She was now high enough to risk holding on to Charlie's arm with only one hand, while she grabbed at the brink of the gully with the other. Ice and frozen earth gave way under her clutching fingers, but she grabbed again, and this time she gripped something solid. With both Charlie and solid earth to cling to, she was able to lever herself up and out and onto her back, gasping, whimpering, with the unnerving feeling that she was escaping the cold maw of a living creature and had nearly been devoured by a beast composed of ice and snow.

Suddenly she realized that the shotgun, which had been stung from her shoulder when she'd fallen into the trap, had slipped off, or the strap had broken. It must still be in the pit. But the hole had closed up behind her when Charlie had pulled her out.

It was lost.

It didn't matter. Spivey's people wouldn't be following them through the blizzard.

She got onto her hands and knees and crawled away from the snow trap, looking for Joey. He was there, on the ground, curled on his side, in a fetal position, knees drawn up, head tucked down.

Chewbacca was with him, as if he knew the boy needed his warmth, though the animal seemed to have no warmth to give.

His coat was crusted with snow and ice, and there was ice on his ears.

He looked at her with soulful brown eyes full of confusion, suffering, and fear.

She was ashamed she had blamed him, in part, for Joey's withdrawal and that she had wished she'd never seen him. She put one hand on his large head, and, even as weak as he was, he nuzzled her affectionately.

Joey was alive, conscious, but hurting bad. Impacted snow clogged his ski mask. If she didn't get him out of this wind soon, he would be frost-bitten. His eyes were even more distant than before.

She tried to get him to stand, but he couldn't. Although she was exhausted and shaky, although her left leg still hurt from the fall she had taken, she would have to carry him.

She dug the compass out of her pocket, studied it, and turned to face east-northeast, toward the section of woodland where the caves ought to be. She could see only five or six feet, and then the storm fell like a heavy drapery.

Surprised by the extent of her own stamina, she scooped Joey up, held him in both arms. A mother's instinct was to save her child, regardless of the cost to herself, and her maternal desperation had loosed some last meager store of adrenaline.

Charlie moved in beside her. He was on his feet, but he looked bad, almost as terrible as Joey.

"Got to get into the forest!" she shouted." Out of this wind!"

She didn't think he could have heard her, not with the banshee storm shrieking across the meadow, but he nodded as if he understood her intention, and they moved into the white-out, trusting in the compass to lead them to the comparative shelter of the mammoth trees, shuffling with exaggerated caution to avoid falling into another snow trap.

Christine looked back at Chewbacca. The dog was getting up to follow, but creakily. Even if he could regain his feet, there was almost no chance that he would make it to the trees with them. This would probably be the last glimpse she ever had of him; the storm would swallow him just as the snow-filled pit had tried to swallow her.

Each step was an ordeal.

Wind. Snow. Cruel cold.

Dying would be easier than going on.

That thought scared her and gave her the will to take a few more steps.

One good thing: There was no doubt that their trail would be completely erased. The raging wind and arctic-fierce snowfall would make it impossible for Spivey's fanatics to follow them.

Snow dropped from the sky as if it were being dumped out of huge bins, came hurtling down in sheets and clumps.

Another step. Another.

As if plating them with suits of armor, the wind welded the snow to their arms and legs and backs and chests, until their clothes were the same color as the landscape around them.

Something ahead. A dark shape. It materialized in the storm, then was blotted out by an even more furious squall of snow. It appeared again.

Didn't fade away this time. And another one.

Huge blobs of darkness, shadowy formations rising up beyond snowy curtains. Gradually they became clearer, better defined.

Yes. A tree. Several trees.

They trudged at least fifty yards into the forest before they found a place where the interlacing branches of the evergreens were so thick overhead that a significant amount of snow was shut out. Visibility improved. They were free of the wind's brutal fists, as well.

Christine stopped, put Joey down, peeled off his snow-caked ski mask.

Her heart twisted when she saw his face.

Kyle Baflowe, Burt Tully, and Edna Vanoff gathered around Grace at the edge of the forest, under the last of the evergreens.

The wind licked at them from the meadow, as if hungry for their warmth.

With her gloves off, Grace held her arms out, palms spread toward the meadow beyond the trees, receiving psychic impressions. The others waited silently for her to decide what to do next.

Out on the open floor of the valley, the fulminating blizzard was like an endless chain of dynamite detonations, a continuous roar, the violent waves of wind like concussions, the snow as thick as smoke. It was appropriate weather for the end of the world.

" They went this way," Mother Grace said.

Barlowe already knew their quarry had left the forest here, for their tracks told him as much. Which direction they had gone after heading into the open was another question; although they had left here only a short while ago, their footprints had not survived much past the perimeter of the woods. He waited for Mother Grace to tell him something he could not discern for himself.

Worriedly studying the snow-lashed field in front of them, Burt Tully said, "We can't go out there. We'd die out there."

Suddenly Grace lowered her hands and backed away from the meadow, farther into the trees.

They moved with her, alarmed by the look of terror on her face.

"Demons, " she said hoarsely.

"Where?" Edna asked.

Grace was shaking." Out there

"In the storm?" Barlowe asked.

"Hundreds. thousands. waiting for us. hiding in the drifts. waiting to rise up….. and destroy us. "

Barlowe looked out at the open fields. He could see nothing but snow. He wished he had Mother Grace's Gift. There were malevolent spirits near, and he could not detect them, and that made him feel frighteningly vulnerable.

"We must wait here," Grace said, "until the storm passes."

Burt Tully was clearly relieved.

Barlowe said, "But the boy-"

"Grows stronger," Grace admitted.

"And Twilight?"

"Grows near."

"It we wait-"

"We might be too late," she said.

Barlowe said, "Won't God protect us if we go into the meadow? Aren't we armored with His might and mercy?"

"We must wait," was the only answer she gave him." And pray. "

Then Kyle Barlowe knew how late it really was. So late that they must be more vigilant than they had ever been before. So late that they could no longer be bold. Satan was now as strong and real a presence in this world as God Himself. Maybe the scales had not yet tipped in the devil's direction, but the balance was delicate.

Christine peeled off the boy's ice-crusted ski mask, and Charlie had to look away from the child's face when it was revealed.

I've failed them, he thought.

Despair flooded into him and brought tears to his eyes.

He was sitting on the ground, with his back to a tree. He rested his head against the trunk, too, closed his eyes. took several deep breaths, trying to stop shaking, trying to think positively, trying to convince himself that everything would turn out all right, failing. He had been an optimist all his life, and this recent acquaintance with soul-shaking doubt was devastating.

The Tylenol and the anaesthetic powder had only slight effect on his pain, but even that minimal relief was fading. The pain in his shoulder was gaining strength again, and it was beginning to creep outward, as before, across his chest and up his neck and into his head.

Christine was talking softly and encouragingly to Joey, though she must have wanted to weep at the sight of him, as Charlie had done.

He steeled himself and looked at the boy again.

The child's face was red, lumpy, and badly misshapen from hives caused by the fierce cold. His eyes were nearly swollen shut; the edges of them were caked with a gummy, mucous-like substance, and the lashes were matted with the same stuff. His nostrils were mostly swollen shut, so he was breathing through his mouth, and his lips were cracked, puffy, bleeding. Most of his face was flushed an angry red, but two spots on his cheeks and one on the tip of his nose were gray-white, which might indicate frostbite, though Charlie hoped to God it wasn't.

Christine looked at Charlie, and her own despondency was evident in her troubled eyes if not in her voice." Okay. We've got to move on. Got to get Joey out of this cold. We've got to find those caves."

"I don't see any sign of them," Charlie said.

"They must be near," she said." Do you need help getting up? "

"I can make it," he said.

She lifted Joey. The boy didn't hold on to her. His arms hung down, limp. She glanced at Charlie.

Charlie sighed, gripped the tree, and got laboriously to his feet, quite surprised when he made it all the way up.

But he was even more surprised when, a second later, Chewbacca appeared, cloaked in snow and ice, head hung low, a walking definition of misery.

When he had last seen the dog, out in the meadow, Charlie had been sure the animal would collapse and die in the storm.

"My God," Christine said when she saw the dog, and she looked as startled as Charlie was.

It's important, Charlie thought. The dog pulling through-that means we're all going to survive.

He wanted very much to believe it. He tried hard to convince himself.

But they were a long way from home.

The way things had been going for them, Christine figured they would be unable to find the caves and would simply wander through the forest until they dropped from exhaustion and exposure to the cold. But fate finally had a bit of luck in store for them, and they found what they were looking for in less than ten minutes.

The trees thinned out in the neighborhood of the caves because the land became extremely rocky. It sloped up in uneven steps of stone, in humps and knobs and ledges and set-backs.

Because there were fewer trees, more snow found its way in here, and there were some formidable drifts at the base of the slope and at many points higher up, where a set-back or a narrower ledge provided accommodation. But there was more wind, too, whistling down from the tops of the surrounding trees, and large areas of rock were swept bare of snow. She could see the dark mouths of three caves in the lower formations, where she and Charlie might be able to climb, and there were half a dozen others visible in the upper formations, but those were out of reach. There might be more openings, now drifted shut and hidden, because this portion of the valley wall appeared to be a honeycomb of tunnels, caves, and caverns.

She carried Joey to a jumble of boulders at the bottom of the slope and put him down, out of the wind.

Chewbacca limped after them and slumped wearily beside his master. It was astonishing that the dog had made it all this way, but it was clear he would not be able to go much farther.

With a grateful sigh and a gasp of pain, Charlie lowered himself to the ground beside Joey and the dog.

The look of him scared Christine as much as Joey's tortured face. His bloodshot eyes were fevered, two hot coals in his bumtout face. She was afraid she was going to wind up alone out here with the bodies of the only two people she loved, caretaker of a wilderness graveyard that would eventually become her own final resting place.

"I'll look in these caves," she told Charlie, shouting to be heard now that they were more or less in the open again." I'll see which is the best for us."

He nodded, and Joey didn't react, and she turned away from them, clambered over the rocky terrain toward the first dark gap in the face of the slope.

She wasn't sure if this part of the valley wall was limestone or granite, but it didn't matter because, not being a spelunker, she didn't know which kind of rock made for the safest caves, anyway. Besides, even if these were unsafe, she would have to make use of them; she had nowhere else to go.

The first cave had a low, narrow entrance. She took the flashlight out of her backpack and went into that hole in the ground.

She was forced to crawl on her hands and knees, and in some places the passage was tight enough to require some agile squirming. After ten or twelve feet, the tunnel opened into a room about fifteen feet on a side, with a low ceiling barely high enough to allow her to stand up. It was big enough to house them, but far from ideal. Other passages led off the room, deeper into the hillside, perhaps to larger chambers, but none of them was of sufficient diameter to let her through. She went out into the wind and snow again.

The second cave wasn't suitable, either, but the third was as close to ideal as she could expect to find. The initial passageway was high enough so she didn't have to crawl to enter, wide enough so she didn't have to squeeze. There was a small drift at the opening, but she stamped through it with no difficulty.

Five feet into the hillside, the passage turned sharply to the right, and in another six feet it turned just as sharply back to the left, a double battle that kept the wind out. The first chamber was about twenty feet wide and thirty or thirty-five feet long, as much as twelve to fifteen feet high at the near end, with a smooth floor, walls that were fractured and jagged in some places and water-smoothed in others.

To her right, another chamber opened off this one. It was smaller, with a lower ceiling. There were several stalactites and stalagmites that looked as if they had been formed from melted gray wax, and in a few places they met at the middle of the room to form wasp-wasted pillars.

She shone the flashlight beam around, saw a passage at the far end of the second room and guessed it led to yet a third cavern, but that was all she needed to know.

The first room had everything they required. Toward the back, the floor rose and the ceiling dropped down, and in the last five feet the floor shelved up abruptly, forming a ledge five feet deep and twenty feet wide, only four feet below the ceiling. Exploring this raised niche with her flashlight, Christine discovered a twofoot-wide hole in the rock above it, boring up into darkness, and she realized she had found a huge, natural fireplace with its own flue. The hole must lead into another cave farther up the hillside, and either that chamber or another beyond it would eventually vent to the outside; smoke would rise naturally toward the distant promise of open air.

Having a fire was important. They hadn't brought their sleeping bags with them because such bulky items would have slowed them down and because they had expected to reach the lake before nightfall, in which case they wouldn't have required bedrolls. The blizzard and the bullet hole in Charlie's shoulder had changed their plans drastically, and now without sleeping bags to ward off the night chill and help conserve body heat, a fire was essential.

She wasn't worried about the smoke giving away their position. The forest would conceal it, and once it rose above the trees, it would be lost in the white whirling skirts of the storm.

Besides, Spivey's fanatics would almost certainly be searching southwest, toward the end of the valley that led to civilization.

The chamber boasted one other feature that, at first, added to its appeal. One wall was decorated with a seven-foot-tall drawing, an Indian totem of a bear, perhaps a grizzly. It had been etched into the rock with a corrosive yellow dye of some sort.

It was either crude or highly stylized; Christine didn't know enough about Indian totems to make the fine distinction. All she knew for sure was that drawings like this were usually meant to bring good luck to the occupants of the cave; the image of the bear supposedly embodied a real spirit that would provide protection. Initially, that seemed like a good thing. She and Charlie and Joey needed all the protection they could get. But as she paused a moment to study the sulfur-yellow bear, she got the feeling there was something threatening about it. That was ridiculous, of course, an indication of her shaky state of mind, for it was nothing but a drawing on stone. Nevertheless, on reappraisal, she decided she would have preferred another drab gray wall in place of the totem.

But she wasn't going to look for another cave just because she didn't like the decor of this one. The natural fireplace more than outweighed the previous occupants' taste in art. With a fire for heat and light, the cave would provide almost as much shelter as the cabin they had left behind. It would not be as comfortable, of course, but at the moment, she wasn't as concerned about comfort as she was worried about keeping her son, Charlie, and herself alive.

In spite of the stone floor that served as chair and bed, Charlie was delighted with the cave, and at the moment it seemed as luxurious as any hotel suite he'd ever occupied. Just being out of the wind and snow was an incomparable blessing.

For more than an hour, Christine gathered dead wood and crisp dry evergreen branches with which to make a fire and keep it going until morning. She returned to the cave again and again with armloads of fuel, making one stack for the logs and larger pieces of wood, another for the small stuff that would serve as tinder.

Charlie marveled at her energy. Could such stamina spring entirely from a mother's instinct to preserve her offspring's life?

There seemed no other explanation. She should have collapsed long ago.

He knew he should switch the flashlight off each time she went outside, turn it on again only so she would be able to see when she came in with more wood, for he was concerned the batteries would go dead. But he left it burning, anyway, because he was afraid Joey would react badly to being plunged into total darkness.

The boy was in bad shape. His breathing was labored. He lay motionless, silent, beside the equally depleted dog.

As he listened to Joey's ragged breathing, Charlie told himself that finding the cave was another good sign, an indication their luck was improving, that they would recover their strength in a day or two and then head down toward the lake. But another, grimmer voice within him wondered if the cave was, instead, a tomb, and although he didn't want to consider that depressing possibility, he couldn't tune it out.

He listened, as well, to the drip-drip-drip of water in an adjacent chamber. The cold stone walls and hollow spaces amplified the humble sound and made it seem both portentous and strange, like a mechanical heartbeat or, perhaps, the tapping of one clawed finger on a sheet of glass.

The fire cast flickering orange light on the yellow bear totem, making it shimmer, and on drab stone walls. Welcome heat poured from the blazing pile of wood. The natural flue worked as Christine had hoped, drawing the smoke up into higher cavems, leaving their air untainted. In fact, the drying action of the fire took some of the dampness out of the air and eliminated most of the vaguely unpleasant, musty odor that had been in the dank chamber since she had first entered.

For a while they just basked in the warmth, doing nothing, saying nothing, even trying not to think.

In time Christine took off her gloves, lowered the hood of her jacket, then finally took off the jacket itself. The cave wasn't exactly toasty, and drafts circulated through it from adjacent caverns, but her flannel shirt and long insulated underwear were now sufficient. She helped Charlie and Joey out of their jackets, too.

She gave Charlie more lylenol. She lifted his bandage, dusted in more powdered antibiotics and more of the anaesthetic as well.

He said he wasn't in much pain.

She knew he was lying.

The hives that afflicted Joey began, at last, to recede. The swelling subsided, and his misshapen face slowly regained its proper proportions.

His nostrils opened, and he no longer needed to breathe through his mouth, although he continued to wheeze slightly, as if there was some congestion in his lungs.

Please, God, not pneumonia, Christine thought.

His eyes opened wider, but they were still frighteningly empty.

She smiled at him, made a couple of funny faces, trying to get a reaction out of him, all to no avail. As far as she could tell he didn't even see her.

Charlie didn't think he was hungry until Christine began to heat beans and Vienna sausages in the aluminum pot that was part of their compact mess kit. The aroma made his mouth water and his stomach growl, and suddenly be was shaking with hunger.

Once he began to eat, however, he filled up fast. His stomach bloated, and he found it increasingly difficult to swallow. The very act of chewing exacerbated the pain in his head, which doubled back along the lines of pain in his neck and all the way into the shoulder wound, making that ache worse, too. Finally the food lost its flavor, then seemed bitter. He ate about a fourth of what he first thought he could put away, and even the meager meal didn't rest well in his belly.

"You can't get more of it down?" Christine asked.

"I'll have more later."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Do you feel nauseous?"

"No, no. I'm okay. Just tired."

She studied him in silence for a moment, and he forced a smile for her sake, and she said, "Well whenever you're ready for more, I'll reheat it."

As the fluttering fire made shadows leap and cavort on the walls, Charlie watched her feed Joey. The boy was willing to eat and able to swallow, but she had to mash up the sausages and beans, and spoon the stuff into his mouth as if she were feeding an infant instead of a six-year-old.

A grim sense of failure settled over Charlie once more.

The boy had fled from an intolerable situation, from a world of pure hostility, into a fantasy that he found more congenial.

How far had he retreated into that inner world of his? Too far ever to come back?

Joey would take no more food. His mother was unhappy about how little he had eaten, but she couldn't force him to swallow even one more mouthful.

She fed the dog, too, and he had a better appetite than his master.

Charlie wanted to tell her that they couldn't waste food on Chewbacca.

If this storm was followed by another, if the weather didn't clear for a few days, they would have to ration what little provisions they had left, and they would regret every morsel that had been given to the dog. But he knew she admired the animal's courage and perseverance, and she felt its presence helped prevent Joey from slipping all the way down into deep catatonia. He didn't have the heart to tell her to stop feeding it.

Not now. Not yet. Wait until morning. Maybe the weather would have changed by then, and maybe they would head southwest to the lake.

Joey's breathing worsened for a moment; his wheezing grew alarmingly loud and ragged.

Christine quickly changed the child's position, used her folded jacket to prop up his head. It worked. The wheezing softened.

Watching the boy, Charlie thought: Are you hurting as bad as I am, little one? God, I hope not. You don't deserve this. What you do deserve is a better bodyguard than I've been, and that's for damned sure.

Charlie's own pain was far worse than he let Christine know.

The new dose of Tylenol and powdered anesthetic helped, but not quite as much as the first dose. The pain in his shoulder and arm no longer felt like a live thing trying to chew its way out of him. Now it felt as if little men from another planet were inside him, breaking his bones into smaller and smaller splinters, popping open his tendons, slicing his muscles, and pouring sulfuric acid over everything. What they wanted to do was gradually hollow him out, use acid to burn away everything inside him, until only his skin remained, and then they would inflate the limp and empty sack of skin and put him on exhibit in a museum back on their own world. That's how it felt, anyway. Not good.

Not good at all.

Later, Christine went out to the mouth of the cave to get some snow to melt for drinking water, and discovered that night had fallen. They hadn't been able to hear the wind from within the cave, but it was still raging. Snow slanted down from the darkness, and the frigid, turbulent air hammered the valley wall with arctic fury.

She returned to the cave, put the pan of snow by the fire to melt, and talked with Charlie for a while. His voice was weak.

He was in more pain than he wanted her to know, but she allowed him to think he was deceiving her because there wasn't anything she could do to make him more comfortable. In less than an hour, in spite of his pain, he was asleep, as were Joey and Chewbacca.

She sat between her son and the man she loved, with her back to the fire, looking toward the front of the cave, watching the shadows and the reflections of the flames as they danced a frantic gavotte upon the walls. With one part of her mind she listened for unusual sounds, and with another part she monitored the respiration of the man and the boy, afraid that one of them might suddenly cease breathing.

The loaded revolver was at her side. To her dismay, she had learned that Charlie had no more spare cartridges in his jacket pockets. The box of ammo was in his backpack, which they had abandoned at the rocky overhang where she had patched his shoulder. She was furious with herself for having forgotten it.

The rifle and shotgun were gone. The handgun was their only protection, and she had only the six shells that were in it.

The totem bear glowed on the wall.

At 8:10, as Christine finished adding fuel to the fire, Charlie began to groan in his sleep and toss his head on the pillow she had made from his folded jacket. He had broken out in a greasy sweat.

A hand against his forehead was enough to tell her that he had a fever.

She watched him for a while, hoping he would quiet down, but he only got worse. His groans became soft cries, then less soft. He began to babble. Sometimes it was wordless nonsense. Sometimes he spat out words and disjointed, meaningless sentences.

At last he became so agitated that she got two more Tylenol tablets from the bottle, poured a cupful of water, and attempted to wake him.

Although sleep seemed to be providing no comfort for him, he wouldn't come around at first, and when he finally did open his eyes they were bleary and unfocused. He was delirious and didn't seem to know who she was.

She made him take the pills, and he greedily swallowed the water, washing them down. He was asleep again even as she took the cup from his lips.

He continued to groan and mutter for a while, and although he was sweating heavily, he also began to shiver. His teeth chattered.

She wished they had some blankets. She piled more wood on the fire. The cave was relatively warm, but she figured it couldn't be too warm right now.

Around 10:00, Charlie grew quiet again. He stopped tossing his head, stopped sweating, slept peacefully.

At least, she told herself it was sleep that had him. But she was afraid it might be a coma.

Something squeaked.

Christine grabbed the revolver and bolted to her feet as if the squeak had been a scream.

Joey and Charlie slept undisturbed.

She listened closely, and the squeak came again, more than one short sound this time, a whole series of squeaks, a shrill though distant chittering.

It wasn't a sound of stone or earth or water, not a dead sound.

Something else, something alive.

She picked up the flashlight. Heart pumping furiously, holding the revolver out in front of her, she edged toward the sound. It seemed to be coming from the cavern that adjoined this one.

Soft as they were, the shrill cries nevertheless lifted the hairs on the back of her neck because they were so eerie, alien.

At the entrance of the next chamber, she stopped, probing ahead with the beam of the flashlight. She saw the waxy-looking stalactites and stalagmites, the damp rock walls, but nothing out of the ordinary. The noises now seemed to be coming from farther away, from a third cavern or even a fourth.

As she cocked her head and listened more intently, Christine suddenly understood what she was hearing. Bats. A lot of them, judging by their cries.

Evidently, they always nested in another chamber, elsewhere in the mountain, always entered and exited by another route, for there was no sign of them here, no bat corpses or droppings.

Okay. She didn't mind sharing the caves with them, just as long as they kept to their own neighborhood.

She returned to Charlie and Joey and sat down between them, put the gun aside, switched off the flashlight.

Then she wondered what would happen if Spivey's people showed up, blocked off the entrance to this cave, and left them no option but to head deeper into the mountain in search of another way out, a back door to safety. What if she and Charlie and Joey were forced to flee from cave to cave and eventually had to pass through that chamber in which the bats nested? It would probably be knee-deep in bat shit, and there would be hundreds-maybe thousands-of them hanging overhead, and a few of them or even all of them might have rabies, because bats were excellent carriers of rabiesStop it! she told herself angrily.

She had enough to worry about already. Spivey's lunatics. Joey.

Charlie's wound. The weather. The long journey back to civilization.

She couldn't add bats to the list. That was crazy. There was only a chance in a million that they would ever have to go nearer the bats.

She tried to relax.

She put more wood on the fire.

The squeaking faded.

The caves became silent again except for Joey's labored breathing and the crackle of the fire.

She was getting drowsy.

She tried every trick she could think of to keep herself awake, but sleep continued to close in on her.

She was afraid to let herself go under. Joey might take a turn for the worse while she was dozing. Or Charlie might need her, and she wouldn't know.

Besides, someone ought to stand guard.

Spivey's people might come in the night.

No. The storm. Witches weren't allowed to fly on their brooms in storms like this.

She smiled, remembering the way Charlie had joked with Joey.

The flickering firelight was mesmerizing.

Someone ought to stand guard, anyway.

Just a quick nap.

Witches…..

Someone….. ought to.

It was one of those nightmares in which she knew she was asleep, knew that what was happening was not real, but that didn't make it any less frightening. She dreamed that all the caves in the valley wall were connected in an elaborate maze, and that Grace Spivey and her religious terrorists had entered this particular cave from other chambers farther along the hillside. She dreamed they were preparing a human sacrifice, and the sacrifice was Joey. She was trying to kill them, but each time she shot one of them, the corpse divided into two new fanatics, so by murdering them she was only adding to their numbers.

She became increasingly frantic and terrified, increasingly outnumbered, until all the caves within the valley wall were swarming with Spivey's people, like a horde of rats or cockroaches.

And then, aware that she was dreaming, she began to suspect that Grace Spivey's followers were not only in the caves of the dream but in the real caves in the real world beyond sleep, and they were conducting a human sacrifice in both the nightmare and in reality, and if she didn't wake up and stop them, they were going to kill Joey for real, kill him while she slept. She struggled to free herself of sleep's iron grip, but she could not do it, could not wake up, and now in the dream they were going to cut the boy's throat. And in reality, beyond the dream'?

When Christine woke in the morning, Joey was eating a chocolate bar and petting Chewbacca.

She watched him for a moment, and she realized tears were streaming down her cheeks. This time, however, she was crying because she was happy.

He seemed to be returning from his self-imposed psychological exile. He was in better physical shape, too. Maybe he was going to be all right.

Thank God.

The swelling was gone from his face, replaced by a better though not really healthy-color, and he was no longer having difficulty breathing.

His eyes were still blank, and he continued to be withdrawn, but not nearly as far-off and pathetic as he had been yesterday.

The fact that he had gone to the supplies, had rummaged through them, and had found the candy for himself was encouraging. And he had apparently added wood to the fire, for it was burning brightly, though after being untended during the night it should have cooled down to just a bank of hot coals.

She crawled to him and hugged him, and he hugged her, too, though weakly. He didn't speak, wouldn't be bribed or teased or encouraged into uttering a single word. And he still wouldn't meet her eyes directly, as if he were not entirely aware that she was here with him; however, she had the feeling that, when she looked away from him, his intense blue eyes turned toward her and lost their slightly glazed and dreamy quality. She wasn't positive. She couldn't catch him at it. But she dared to hope that he was returning to her, slowly feeling his way back from the edge of autism, and she knew she must not rush him or push him too hard.

Chewbacca had not perked up as much as his young master, though he was a bit less weak and stringy looking than he had been last night. The pooch seemed to grow healthier and more energetic even as Christine watched the boy pet him, responding to each pat and scratch and stroke as if Joey's small hands had healing power. There was sometimes a wonderful, mysterious, deep sharing, an instant bonding in the relationships between children and their animals.

Joey held his candy bar out in front of him, turned it back and forth, and seemed to be staring at it. He smiled vaguely.

Christine had never wanted anything more than she had wanted to see him smile, and a smile came to her own face in sympathy with his.

Behind her, Charlie woke with a start, and she went to him.

She saw at once that, unlike Joey and the dog, he had not improved. The delirium had left him, but in all other ways his condition had grown worse. His face was the color and texture of bread dough, greasy with sweat. His eyes appeared to have collapsed back into his skull, as if the supporting bones and tissues beneath them had crumpled under the weight of things he had seen. Forceful shivers shook him, and at times they grew into violent tremors only one step removed from convulsions.

He was partially dehydrated from the fever. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth when he tried to speak.

She helped him sit up and take more Tylenol with a cup of water."

Better?"

"A little," he said, speaking only slightly louder than a whisper.

"How's the pain?"

"Everywhere," he said.

Thinking he was confused, she said, "I mean the pain in your shoulder."

"Yeah. That's what….. I mean. It's no longer….. just in my shoulder. It feels like….. it's everywhere now…..all through me.

head to foot….. everywhere. What time is it?"

She checked her watch." Good heavens! Seven-thirty. I must've slept hours without stirring an inch, and on this hard floor."

"How's Joey?"

"See for yourself."

He turned his head and looked just as Joey fed a last morsel of chocolate to Chewbacca.

Christine said, "He's mending, I think."

"Thank God."

With her fingers, she combed Charlie's damp hair back from his forehead.

When they'd made love at the cabin, she had thought him by far the most beautiful man she had ever known. She had been thrilled by the contour of each masculine muscle and bone. And even now, when he was shrunken and pale and weak, he seemed beautiful to her: His face was so sensitive, his eyes so caring.

She wanted to lie beside him, put her arms around him, hold him close, but she was afraid of hurting him.

"Can you eat something?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"You should," she said." You've got to build up your strength." He blinked his rheumy eyes as if trying to clear his vision.

"Maybe later. Is it. still snowing?"

"I haven't been outside yet this morning."

"If it's cleared up… you've got to leave at once… without me."

" Nonsense."

"This time of year… the weather might clear for only…

a day… or even just… a few hours. You've got to… take advantage of good weather… the moment it comes… get out of the mountains… before the next storm."

"Not without you."

"Can't walk," he said.

"You haven't tried."

"Can't. Hardly… can talk."

Even the effort at conversation weakened him. His breathing grew more labored word by word.

His condition frightened her, and the notion of leaving him alone seemed heartless.

"You couldn't tend the fire here, all by yourself," she protested.

"Sure. Move me… closer to it. Within arm's reach. And pile up…

enough wood… to last a couple of days. I'll be… okay."

"You won't be able to prepare and heat your food-"

"Leave me a couple… candy bars."

" That's not enough."

He scowled at her and, for a moment, managed to put more volume in his voice, forced a steely tone: "You've got to go without me. It's the only way, dammit. It's best for you and Joey… and it's best for me, too, because I'm… not going to get out of here… without the help of a medical evacuation team."

" All right," she said." Okay."

He sagged, exhausted by that short speech. When he spoke again, his voice was not only a whisper but a quavering whisper that sometimes faded out altogether on the ends of words." When you get down… to the lake… you can send help back… for me."

"Well, it's all moot until I find out whether the storm has let up or not," she said." I better go have a look."

As she began to get up, a man's voice called to them from the mouth of the cave, beyond the double battle of the entrance passage: "We know you're in there! You can't hide from us! We know! "

Spivey's hounds had found them.

Acting instinctively, not hesitating to consider the danger of her actions, Christine snatched up the loaded revolver and sprinted across the cave toward the Z-shaped passage that led outside.

"No!" Charlie said.

She ignored him, came to the first bend in the passage, turned right without checking to see if anyone was there, saw only the close rock walls and a vague spot of gray light at the next turn, beyond which lay the last straight stretch of tunnel and then the open hillside. She rushed forth with reckless abandon because that was probably the last thing Spivey's people would expect of her, but also because she couldn't possibly proceed in any other fashion; she was not entirely in control of herself. The crazy, vicious, stupid bastards had driven her out of her home, and put her on the run, had cornered her here in a hole in the ground, and now they were going to kill her baby.

The unseen man shouted again: "We know you're in there!"

She had never before in her life been hysterical, but she was hysterical now, and she knew it, couldn't help it. In fact, she didn't care that she was hysterical because it felt good, damned good, just to let go, to give in to blind rage and a savage desire to spill their blood, to make them feel some pain and fear.

With the same irrational disregard for danger that she had shown when turning the first blind corner in the passageway, she now turned the second, and ahead of her was the last stretch of the tunnel, then open air, and a figure silhouetted in the gray morning light, a man in a parka with a hood pulled up on his head. He was holding a rifle-no, a machine gun-but he was pointing it more or less at the ground, not directly ahead into the tunnel, because he wasn't expecting her to rush straight out at him and make such an easy target of herself, not in a million years, but that was just what she was doing, like a crazy kamikaze, and to hell with the consequences. She took him by surprise, and as he started to raise the muzzle of the machine gun to cover her, she fired once, twice, three times, hitting him every time, because he was so close that it was almost impossible to miss him.

The first shot jolted him, seemed to lift him off his feet, and the second shot flung him backwards, and the third shot knocked him down.

The machine gun flew out of his hands, and for a moment Christine had a hope of getting hold of it, but by the time she stepped out of the cave, that immensely desirable weapon was clattering down the rocky slope.

She saw that the snow had stopped falling, that the wind was no longer blowing, and that there were three people on the slope behind the man she had killed. One of the three, an incredibly big man, off to her left, was already diving for cover, reacting to the shots that had wasted his buddy, though that first body had just hit the ground and bounced and was not yet still. The other two Twilighters weren't as quick as the giant. A short stocky woman stood directly in front of Christine, no more than ten or twelve feet away, a perfect target, and Christine reflexively pulled off a shot, and that woman went down, too, her face exploding like a punctured balloon full of red water.

Although Christine had plunged along the passageway and out of the cave in silence, she began to scream now, uncontrollably, shouting invectives at them, yelling so loud that her throat hurt and her voice cracked, then screaming louder still. She was using words she had never used before, and she was shocked by what she heard spewing from her own lips, yet was unable to stop, because her rage had reduced her to inarticulate noises and mindless obscenities.

And as she screamed her lungs out, even as she saw the stocky woman's face exploding, Christine turned on the third Twilighter, the one to her right, twenty feet away, and she saw at once that it was Grace Spivey.

"You!" she shouted, her hysteria stoked by the sight of the crone."

You! You crazy old bitch!"

How could a woman of her age have the stamina to climb these ridges and battle the life-sapping weather of the high Sierras? Did her madness give her strength? Yes, probably. Her madness blocked all doubt, all weariness, just as it had shielded her from pain when she had punctured her hands and feet to fake crucifixion stigmata.

God help us, Christine thought.

The hag stood unmoving, unbent, arrogant, defiant, as if daring Christine to pull the trigger, and even from this distance, Christine felt the strange and riveting power of the old woman's eyes. Immune to the hypnotic effect of that mad gaze, she fired a shot, the revolver bucking in her hands. She missed even though the distance was not great, squeezed the trigger again, was surprised when she missed a second time at such close range, tried a third shot but discovered she was out of ammunition.

Oh, Jesus.

No more bullets. No other weapons. Jesus. Nothing but her bare hands.

Okay, I can do it, I can do it, bare hands, all right, I 71 strangle the bitch, 171 tear her goddamned head off.

Sobbing, cursing, shrieking, carried forward on a crashing wave of terror, she started toward Spivey. But the other Twilighter, the giant, began shooting at her from behind some boulders, where he had taken cover. Shots exploded and then ricocheted off the rocks around her with a piercing whine. She sensed bullets cutting the air near her head. She realized she couldn't help Joey if she was dead, so she stopped, turned back toward the cave.

Another shot. Sharp chips of stone sprayed up from the point of impact.

She was stift hysterical, but all that manic energy was suddenly redirected, away from rage and blood just, toward the survival instinct.

With the sound of gunfire behind her, she stumbled back to the cave. The giant left his hiding place and came after her. Slugs whacked into the stone beside her, and she expected to take one in the back. Then she was through the entrance to the caves, into the first stretch of the Z-shaped passageway, out of sight of the gunman, and she thought she was safe. But one last shot ricocheted around the corner from the first length of the tunnel and slammed into her right thigh, kicking her off her feet. She went down, landing hard on her shoulder, and saw darkness reach up for her.

Refusing to succumb to the numbing effect of the shock that followed being hit, gasping for breath, desperately fending off the welling darkness that pooled up behind her eyes, Christine dragged herself along the passageway.

She didn't think they would come straight in after her. They couldn't know that she possessed only one gun or that she was out of ammunition.

They would be wary.

But they would come. Cautiously. Slowly.

Not slowly enough.

They were relentless, like a posse in a Western movie.

Sweating in spite of the cold air, heaving and pulling her leg along as if it were a hunk of concrete, she hitched herself into the cave, where Charlie and Joey waited in the capering light of the fire.

" Oh, Christ, you've been shot," Charlie said.

Joey said nothing. He was standing by the ledge on which the fire was burning, and the pulsing light gave his face a bloody cast. He was sucking on one thumb, watching her with enormous eyes.

"Not bad," she said, trying not to let them see how scared she was. She pulled herself up against the wall, standing on one leg.

She put one hand on her thigh, felt sticky blood. She refused to look at it. If it was bleeding heavily, she'd need a tourniquet.

But there wasn't time for first aid. If she paused to apply a tourniquet, Spivey or the giant might just walk in and blow her brains out.

She wasn't dizzy yet, and she was no longer in imminent danger of passing out, but she was beginning to feel weak.

She was still holding the empty, useless gun. She dropped it.

"Pain?" Charlie asked.

"No." That much was true; she felt little or no pain at the moment, but she knew it would come soon.

Outside, the giant was yelling: "Give us the boy! We'll let you live if you'll just give us the boy."

Christine ignored him." I got two of the bastards," she told Charlie.

"How many are left?" he asked.

"Two more," she said, giving no additional details, not wanting Joey to know that Grace Spivey was one of the two.

Chewbacca had gotten io his feet and was growling in the back of his throat. Christine was surprised the dog could stand up, but he was far from recovered; he looked sick and wobbly. He wouldn't be able to do much fighting or protect Joey.

She spotted the knife from the mess kit, which lay between Joey and Charlie, at the far end of the room. She asked Joey to bring it to her, but he only stared, unmoving, and would not be coaxed into helping.

"No more ammo?" Charlie asked.

"None. " From outside: "Give us the boy!"

Charlie tried to inch toward the knife, but he was too weak and too tortured by pain to accomplish the task. The effort made him wheeze, and the wheezing developed into a wracking cough, and the cough left him limp with exhaustion-and with bloody saliva on his lips.

Christine had a frantic sense of time running out like sand pouring from the bottom of a funnel.

"Give us the Antichrist!"

Although Christine couldn't move fast, she began to make her way to the other end of the room, following the wall and bracing herself against it, hopping on her uninjured leg. If she could get to the knife, then return to this end of the chamber, she could wait just this side of the passageway, around the corner, and when they came in she might be able to lurch forward and stab one of them.

She finally reached the supplies and bent down and picked up the knife-and realized how short the blade was. She turned it over and over in her hand, trying to convince herself that it was just the weapon she needed. But it would have to penetrate a parka and the clothes underneath before doing any damage, and it wasn't long enough. If she had a chance to stab at their faces. but they would have guns, and she didn't have much hope of carrying out a successful frontal assault.

Damn.

She threw the knife down in disgust.

"Fire," Charlie said.

At first she didn't understand.

He raised one hand to his mouth and wiped at the bloody saliva that he continued to cough up." Fire. It's… a good… weapon."

Of course. Fire. Better than a knife with a stubby little blade.

Suddenly she thought of something that, used in conjunction with a burning brand, would be almost as effective as a gun.

In her wounded leg, a dull pain had begun to throb in time with her rapid pulse, but she gritted her teeth and stooped down beside the pile of supplies. Stooping was not easy, an involved and painful maneuver, and she dreaded having to stand up again, even though she had the wall against which to support herself.

She poked through the items she had emptied out of the backpack yesterday, and in a few seconds she turned up the squeezecan of lighter fluid, which they had bought in case they had trouble starting a fire in the fireplace at the cabin. She stashed the can in the right-hand pocket of her pants.

When she stood, the stone floor rolled under her. She grabbed the edge of the raised hearth and waited until the dizziness passed.

She turned to the fire, snatched a burning branch from between two larger logs, afraid it would sputter out when she removed it from the blaze, but the branch continued to burn, a bright torch.

Joey did not move or speak, but he watched with interest. He was depending on her. His life was entirely in her hands now.

She hadn't heard any shouting from outside in quite some time. That silence wasn't welcome. It might mean Spivey and the giant were on their way inside, already in the Z-shaped passage.

She embarked upon a return trip around the room, past Charlie, toward the passageway through which the Tmight come at any moment, taking the long route because in her condition it was safest. She was agonizingly aware of the precious seconds she was wasting, but she couldn't risk going straight across the room because if she fell she might pass out or extinguish the torch. She held the burning brand in her left hand, using the other to steady herself against the wall, limping instead of hopping because limping was faster, daring to use the injured leg a little, though pain shot all through her when she put much weight on her right foot. And although the pain still throbbed in sympathy with her pounding pulse, it was no longer dull; it was a burning-stinging-stabbing-pinching-twisting pain that was getting worse with each punishing beat of her heart.

She briefly wondered how much blood she was losing, but she told herself it didn't matter. If she wasn't losing a lot, she might be able to take one last stand against the Twilighters. If she was losing too much, if it was pouring from a major vein or spurting from a nicked artery, there was no use checking on it, anyway, because a tourniquet would not save her, not out here, miles from the nearest medical assistance.

By the time she made her way to the far end of the chamber and stopped next to the mouth of the entrance tunnel, she was light-headed and nauseated. She gagged and tasted vomit at the back of her throat, but she managed to choke it down. The rippling light of the fire, lapping at the walls, imparted an amorphous feeling to the cave, as if the chamber's dimensions and contours were in a constant state of flux, as if the stone were not stone at all but some strange plastic that continuously melted and reformed: the walls receded, now drew closer, too close, now receded again; a convexity of rock suddenly appeared where there had been a concavity; the ceiling bulged downward until it almost touched her head, then snapped back to its former height; the floor churned and rose and then slid down until it seemed it would drop out from under her completely.

In desperation she closed her eyes, squeezed them tight, bit her lip, and breathed deeply until she felt less faint. When she opened her eyes again, the chamber was solid, unchanging. She felt relatively stable, but she knew it was a fragile stability.

She pressed against the wall, into a shallow depression to one side of the passageway. Holding the torch in her left hand, she fumbled in her pocket with her right hand and withdrew the squeeze-can of lighter fluid. Gripping it with three fingers and her palm, she used her thumb and forefinger to screw off the cap, uncovering the rigid plastic nozzle. She was ready. She had a plan. A good plan. It had to be good because it was the only plan she could come up with.

The big man would probably be the first into the cave. He would have a gun, probably the same semi-automatic rifle he had been using outside.

The weapon would be thrust out in front of him, pointed straight ahead, waist-high. That was the problem: dousing him before he could turn the muzzle on her and pull the triger. Which was something he could do in-what?maybe two seconds. Maybe one. The element of surprise was her best and only hope. He might be expecting gunfire, knives but not this.

If she squirted him with lighter fluid the instant he appeared, he might be sufficiently startled to lose a full second of reaction time, might lose another second or so in shock as he smelled the fluid and realized he had been sprayed with something highly flammable. That was all the time she would need to set him afire.

She held her breath, listened.

Nothing.

Even if she didn't get any fuel on the giant's skin, only managed to douse his parka, he would almost certainly drop the rifle in horror and panic, and slap at the fire.

She took a deep breath, held it, listened again.

Still nothing.

If she was able to squirt his face, it wouldn't be panic alone that caused him to drop the gun. He would be rocked by intense pain as his skin blistered and peeled off, and as fire ate into his eyes.

Smoke roiled up from her torch and fanned out along the ceiling, seeking escape from the confining rock.

At the other end of the room, Charlie, Joey, and Chewbacca waited in silence. The weary dog had slumped back on his hindquarters.

Come on, Spivey! Come on, damn you.

Christine did not have unqualified faith in her ability to use the lighter fluid and the torch effectively. She figured, at best, there was only one chance in ten that she could pull it off, but she wanted them to come anyway, right now, so she could get it over with. The waiting was worse than the inevitable confrontation.

Something cracked, snapped, and Christine jumped, but it was only the fire at the other end of the room, a branch crumbling in the flames.

Come on.

She wanted to peek around the corner, into the passageway, and end this suspense. She didn't dare. She'd lose the advantage of surprise.

She thought she could hear the soft ticking of her watch. It must have been imagination, but the sound counted off the seconds, anyway: tick, tick, tick.

If she doused the big man and set him afire without getting herself shot, she would then have to handle Spivey. The old woman was sure to have a gun of her own.

Tick, tick.

If the bag was right behind the giant, maybe the flash of fire and all the screaming would disconcert her. The old woman might be confused enough for Christine to be able to strike again with more lighter fluid.

Tick, tick.

The natural flue sucked away the smoke from the main fire, but the smoke from Christine's torch rose to the ceiling and formed a noxious cloud.

Now the cloud was slowly settling down into the room, fouling the air they had to breathe, hitching a ride on every vagrant current but not moving away fast enough.

The stink wasn't bad yet, but in a few minutes they would start choking.

The caverns were so drafty that there was little chance of suffocation, though an ordeal by smoke would only further weaken them. Yet she couldn't extinguish the torch; it was her only weapon.

Something better happen soon, she thought. Damned soon.

Tick, tick, tick.

Distracted by the problem of the smoke and by the imaginary but nonetheless maddening sound of time slipping away, Christine almost didn't react to the important sound when it came. A single click, a scraping noise. It passed before Christine realized it had to be Spivey or the big man.

She waited, tense, torch raised high, the can of lighter fluid extended in front of her, fingers poised to depress and pump the sides of the container.

More scraping noises.

A soft metallic sound.

Christine leaned forward from the shallow depression in which she had taken refuge, praying her bad leg would hold up-and abruptly realized the noises hadn't come from the Z-shaped passageway but from the chamber that adjoined this one, from deeper'in the hillside.

She glimpsed a hooded flashlight in the next cave, the beam spearing past a stalactite. Then it winked out.

No. This wasn't possible!

She saw movement at the brink of darkness where the other cavern joined this one. An incredibly tall, broad-shouldered, hideously ugly man stepped from the gloom, into the edge of the wavering firelight, twelve or fourteen feet from Christine.

Too late, she understood that Spivey was coming at them through the network of caverns rather than through the more easily defended entrance tunnel. But how? How could they know which caves led toward this one?

Did they have maps of the caves? Or did they trust to luck? How could they be that lucky?

It was crazy.

It wasn't fair.

Christine lurched forward, one step, two, out of the shadows in which she had been hiding.

The giant saw her. He brought up his rifle.

She squirted the lighter fluid at him.

He was too far away. The flammable liquid arced out seven or eight feet, but then curved down and spattered onto the stone floor, two or three feet short of him.

It must have been instantly clear to him that she wouldn't be attacking with such a crude weapon unless she had no more ammunition for the gun.

"Drop it," he said coldly.

Her great plan suddenly seemed pathetic, foolish.

Joey. He was depending on her. She was his last defense. She tottered one step closer.

"Drop it! " Before he could shoot, her bad leg gave out. She collapsed.

With despair and anguish hanging heavily on the single word, Charlie said, "Christine!"

The can of lighter fluid spun across the floor, away from her and Charlie and Joey, coming to rest in an inaccessible corner.

She landed on her wounded thigh and screamed as a hand grenade of pain went off in her leg.

Even as she was collapsing, the torch fell from her hand and landed on the trail of fluid that she had squirted at the huge, ugly man. A line of fire whooshed up, briefly filling the cave with dazzling light, then fluttered and went out, causing no harm to anyone.

Snarling, teeth bared, Chewbacca charged the big man, but the dog was too weak to be effective. He got jawsful of parka, but the giant raised the semiautomatic rifle in both hands and brought it down butt-first into the dog's skull. Chewbacca emitted a short, sharp yelp and slumped at the giant's feet, either unconscious or dead.

Christine clung to consciousness, though tides of blackness lapped at her.

Grinning like a creature out of an old Frankenstein movie, the big man advanced into the room.

Christine saw Joey backing into the corner at the far end of the cave.

She had failed him.

No! There must be something she could do, Jesus, some decisive action she could still take, something that would dramatically turn the tables, something that would save them. There must be something. But she couldn't think of anything.

The huge man stepped farther into the cave. It was the monster Charlie had met at Spivey's rectory, the giant with the twisted face. The one the hag had called Kyle.

As he watched Kyle swagger into the chamber, and as he watched Christine cower from the grotesque intruder, Charlie was filled with equal measures of fear and self-loathing. He was afraid because he knew he was going to die in this dank and lonely hole, and he loathed himself for his weakness and incompetence and ineffectual performance. His parents had been weak and ineffectual, had retreated into a haze of alcohol to console themselves for their inability to cope with life, and from the time he was very young Charlie had promised himself that he would never be like them. He had spent a lifetime learning to be strong, always strong. He never backed away from a challenge, largely because his parents had always backed away.

And he seldom lost a battle. He hated losing, his parents were losers, not him, not Charlie Harrison of Klemet-Harrison. Losers were weak in body and mind and spirit, and weakness was the greatest sin.

But he couldn't deny his current circumstances; there was no escaping the fact that he was now half paralyzed with pain, weak as a kitten, and struggling to retain consciousness. There was no dodging the truth, which was that he had brought Christine and Joey to this place and this condition with the promise that he would help them, and his promise had been empty. They needed him, and he couldn't do anything for them, and now he was going to end his life by failing those he loved, which didn't make him a lot different from his alky father and his hate-riddled, drunken mother.

A part of him knew that he was being too hard on himself.

He had done his best. No one could have done more. But he was always too hard on himself, and he wouldn't relent now.

What mattered was not what he had meant to do but what he had, in fact, done. And what he had done was bring them face to face with Death.

Behind Kyle, another figure moved out of the archway between this chamber and the next. A woman. For a moment she was in shadows, then revealed in the Halloween-orange light of the fire. Grace Spivey.

With effort, Charlie turned his stiff neck, blinked to clear his blurry vision, and looked at Joey. The boy was in the corner, back to the wall, hands down at his sides with his palms pressing hard against the stone behind him, as if he could will his way into the rock and out of this room. His eyes seemed to bulge.

Tears glistened on his face. There was no question that he had been pulled back from the fantasy into which he had tried to escape, no doubt that his attention was now fully commanded by this world, by the chilling reality of Grace Spivey's hateful presence.

Charlie tried to raise his arms because if he could raise his arms he might be able to sit up, and if he could sit up he might be able to stand, and if he could stand he could fight. But he couldn't raise his arms, neither of them, not an inch.

Spivey paused to look down at Christine.

"Don't hurt him," Christine said, reduced to begging." For God's sake, don't hurt my little boy."

Spivey didn't reply. Instead, she turned toward Charlie and shuffled slowly across the room. In her eyes was a look of maniacal hatred and triumph.

Charlie was terrifed and repelled by what he saw in those eyes, and he looked away from her. He searched frantically for something that could save them, for a weapon or a course of action they had overlooked.

He was suddenly certain that there was still a way out, that they were not doomed, after all. It wasn't just wishful thinking, and it wasn't just a fever dream. He knew his own feelings better than that; he trusted his hunches, and this one was as real and as reliable as any he'd ever had before. There was still a way out. But where, how, what?

When Christine stared into Grace Spivey's eyes, she felt as if an ice-cold hand had plunged through her chest and had seized her heart in an arctic grip. For a moment she couldn't blink her eyes, couldn't swallow, couldn't breathe, couldn't think. The old woman was mad, yes, a raving lunatic, but there was power in her eyes, a perverse strength, and now Christine saw how Spivey might be able to make and hold converts to her insane crusade.

Then the hag turned away from her, and Christine could breathe again, and she became aware, once more, of the scaring pain in her leg.

Spivey stopped in front of Charlie and stared down at him.

She's purposefully ignoring Joey, Christine thought. He's the reason she has come all this way and has risked being shot, the reason she has struggled into these mountains through two blizzards, and now she's ignoring him just to savor the moment, relish the triumph.

Christine had nurtured a black hatred for Spivey; but now it was blacker than black. It pushed everything else out of her heart; for just a few seconds it drove out even her love for Joey and became all-fulfilling, consuming.

Then the madwoman turned toward Joey, and the hatred in Christine receded as conflicting waves of love, terror, remorse.

and horror swept through her.

Something else swept through her, as well: the resurging feeling that there was still something that could be done to bring Spivey and the giant to their knees, if only she could think clearly.

At last Grace came face to face with the boy.

She became aware of the dark aura that surrounded him and radiated from him, and she was much afraid, for she might be too late. Perhaps the power of the Antichrist had grown too strong, and perhaps the child was now invulnerable.

There were tears on his face. He was still pretending to be only an ordinary six-year-old, small and scared and defenseless.

Did he really think that she would be deceived by his act, that he had any chance at all of instilling doubt in her at this late hour? She had had moments of doubt before, as in that motel in Soleded, but those periods of weakness had been short-lived and were all behind her now.

She took a few steps toward him.

He tried to squeeze farther back into the corner, but he was already jammed so tightly into the junction of the rock walls that he almost seemed to be a boy-shaped extrusion of them.

She stopped when she was only six or eight feet from him, and she said,

"You will not inherit the earth. Not for a thousand years and not even for one minute. I have come to stop you."

The child didn't answer.

She sensed that his powers had not yet grown too strong for her, and her confidence soared. He was still afraid of her. She had reached him in time.

She smiled." Did you really think you could run away from me?"

His gaze strayed past her, and she knew he was looking at the battered dog.

"Your heilhound won't help you now," she said.

He began to shake, and he worked his mouth in an effort to speak, and she could see him form the word "Mommy," but he was unable to make even the slightest sound.

From a sheath attached to her belt, she withdrew a long-bladed hunting knife. It was sharply pointed and had been stropped until it was as keen as a razor.

Christine saw the knife and tried to bolt up from the floor, but the savage pain in her leg thwarted her, and she collapsed back onto the stone even as the giant was bringing the muzzle of the rifle around to cover her.

Speaking to Joey, Spivey said, "I was chosen for this task because of the way I dedicated myself to Albert all those years, because I knew how to give myself completely, unstintingly.

That's how I've dedicated myself to this holy mission-without reservation or hesitation, with every ounce of my strength and will power. There was never any chance you would escape from me.,$

Desperately trying to reach Spivey, trying to touch her on an emotional level, Christine said, "Please, listen, please, you're wrong, all wrong.

He's just a little boy, my little boy, and I love him, and he loves me."

She was babbling, suddenly inarticulate, and she was furious with herself for being unable to find words that would convince." Oh God, if you could only see how sweet and loving he is, you'd know you're all confused about him. You can't take him away from me. It would be so. wrong. "

Ignoring Christine, talking to Joey, Spivey held the knife out and said,

"I've spent many hours praying over this blade. And one night I saw the spirit of one of Almighty God's angels come down from the heavens and through the window of my bedroom, and that spirit still resides here, within this consecrated instrumepit, and when it cuts into you, it will be not just the blade rending your flesh but the angelic spirit, as well."

The woman was stark raving mad, and Christine knew that an appeal to logic and reason would be as hopeless as an appeal to the emotions had been, but she had to try it, anyway. With growing desperation, she said, "Wait! Listen. You're wrong.

Don't you see? Even if Joey was what you say-which he isn't, that's just crazy-but even if he was, even if God wanted him dead, then why wouldn't God destroy him? If He wanted my little boy dead, why wouldn't He strike him with lightning or cancer or let him be hit by a car? God wouldn't need you to deal with the Antichrist."

Spivey answered Christine this time but didn't turn to face her; the old woman's gaze remained on Joey. She spoke with a fervency that was scary, her voice rising and falling like that of a tent revivalist, but with more energy than any Elmer Gantry, with a rabid excitement that turned some words into animalistic growls, and with a soaring exaltation that gave other phrases a lilting songlike quality. The effect was terrifying and hypnotic, and Christine imagined that this was the same mysterious, powerful effect that Hitler and Stalin had had on crowds:

"When evil appears to us, when we see it at work in this troubled, troubled world, we can't merely fall to our knees and beg God to deliver us from it. Evil and vile temptation are a test of our faith and virtue, a challenge that we must face every day of our lives, in order to prove ourselves worthy of salvation and ascendance into Heaven. We cannot expect God to remove the yoke from us, for it is a yoke that we put upon ourselves in the first place. It is our sacred responsibility to confront evil and triumph over it, on our own, with those resources that Almighty God has given us. That is how we earna place at His right hand, in the company of angels."

At last the old woman turned away from Joey and faced Christine, and her eyes were more disturbing than ever. She continued her harangue:

"And you reveal your own ignorance and your damning lack of faith when you attribute cancer and death and other afflictions to our Lord, God of Heaven and earth. It was not He who brought evil to the earth and afflicted mankind with ten thousand scourges. It was Satan, the abominable serpent, and it was Eve, in the blessed garden of peace, who brought the knowledge of sin and death and despair to the thousand generations that followed. We brought evil upon ourselves, and now that the ultimate evil walks the earth in this child's body, it is our responsibility to deal with it ourselves. It is the test of tests, and the hope of all mankind rests with our ability to meet it!"

The old woman's fury had left Christine speechless, devoid of hope.

Spivey turned to Joey again and said, "I smell your putrescent heart. I feel your radiant evil. It's a coldness that cuts right into my bones and vibrates there. Oh, I know you, all right. I know you. " Fighting off panic that threatened to leave her as emotionally and mentally incapacitated as she was physically helpless, Christine wracked her mind for a plan, an idea. She was willing to try anything, no matter how pointless it seemed, anything, but she could think of nothing.

She saw that, in spite of his condition, Charlie had pulled himself into a sitting position. Weak as he was, overwhelmed by pain, any movement must have been an ordeal for him. He wouldn't have pulled himself up without reason-would he?

Maybe he had thought of the course of action which continued to elude Christine. That's what she wanted to believe. That's what she hoped with all her heart.

Spivey reversed her grip on the knife, held the handle toward the ugly giant." It's time, Kyle. The boy's appearance is deceptive. He looks small and weak, but he'll be strong, he'll resist, and although I am Chosen, I'm not physically strong, not any more. It's up to you."

An odd expression took possession of Kyle's face. Christine expected a look of triumph, eagerness, maniacal hatred, but instead he appeared. not worried, not confused, but a little of both. and hesitant.

Spivey said, "Kyle, it's time for you to be the hammer of God."

Christine shuddered. She scrambled across the floor toward the giant, so frightened that she could ignore the pain in her leg.

She grabbed for the hem of his parka, hoping to unbalance him, topple him, and get the gun away from him, a hopeless plan considering his size and strength, but she didn't even have a chance to try it because he swung the butt of his rifle at her, just as he'd swung it at the dog. It slammed into her shoulder, knocking her back, onto her side, and all the air was driven from her lungs. She gasped for breath and put one hand to her damaged shoulder and began to cry.

With tremendous effort, nearly blacking out from the pain, Charlie sat up because he thought he might see the situation differently from a new position and might, finally, spot a solution they had overlooked.

However, he still could not think of anything that would save them.

Kyle took the knife from Grace and gave her the rifle.

The old woman stepped out of the giant's way.

Kyle turned the knife over and over in his hand, staring at it with a slightly baffled expression. The blade glinted in the goblin light of the fire.

Charlie tried to pull himself up the five-foot-high face of the ledge that formed the hearth, with the notion of grabbing a buming log and throwing it. From the corner of her eye, Spivey saw him struggling with the dead weight of his own shattered body, and she pointed the rifle at him. She might as well have saved herself the trouble; he didn't have sufficient strength to reach the fire, anyway.

Kyle Barlowe looked at the knife in his hand, then at the boy, and he wasn't sure which scared him more.

He had used knives before. He'd cut people before, even killed them. It had been easy, and he had vented some of the rage that periodically built in him like a head of steam in a boiler. But he was not the same man that he had been then. He could control his emotions now. He understood himself at last. The old Kyle had hated everyone he met, whether he knew them or not, because inevitably they rejected him. But the new Kyle realized that his hatred did more harm to him than to anyone else. In fact, he now knew that he had not always been rejected because of his ugliness, but often because of his surliness and anger.

Grace had given him purpose and acceptance, and in time he had discovered affection, and after affection had come the first indications of an ability to love and be loved. And now, if he used the knife, if he killed the boy, he might be launching himself on an inevitable slide back down to the depths from which he'd climbed. He feared the knife.

But he was afraid of the boy, too. He knew Grace had psychic power, for he had seen her do things that no ordinary person could have done. Therefore, she must be right when she said the boy was the Antichrist. If he failed to kill the demonic child, he would be failing God, Grace, and all mankind.

But wasn't he being asked to throw away his soul in order to gain salvation? Kill in order to be blessed? Did that make sense?

"Please don't hurt my little boy. Please," Christine Scavello said.

Kyle looked down at her, and his quandary deepened. She didn't look like the dark Madonna, with the power of Satan behind her. She was hurt, scared, begging for mercy. He had hurt her, and he felt a pang of guilt at the injury he'd caused.

Sensing that something was wrong, Mother Grace said, "Kyle?"

lbrning to the boy, Kyle drew his knife hand back, so he would have all the power of his muscles behind the first blow.

If he took the last few steps in a crouch, swung the knife in low, rammed the blade into the boy's guts, it would all be over in a few seconds.

The child was still crying, and his bright blue eyes were transfixed by the point of the knife in Kyle's hand. His face was twisted into a wretched mask of terror, and sweat had broken out all over his pasty skin. His small body was slightly bent as if in anticipation of the pain to come.

" Strike him!" Mother Grace urged.

Questions raced through Kyles mind. How can God be merciful and still make me bear the burden of my monstrous face?

What kind of god would let me be saved from a meaningless life of violence and pain and hatred-just to force me to kill again?

If God rules the world, why does He allow so much suffering and pain and misery? And how could it be any worse if Satan ruled?

"The devil is putting doubt in your mind!" Grace said.

"That's where it's coming from, Kyle. Not from within you!

From the devil!"

"No," he told her." You taught me to always think about doing the right thing, to care about doing the right thing, and now I'm going to take a minute here, just a minute to think!"

"Don't think, just do!" she said." Or get out of my way and let me use this gun. How can you fail me now? After all I've done, how can you fail?"

She was right. He owed her everything. He would still be peddling dope, living in the gutter, consumed by hatred, if not for her. If he failed her now, where was his honor, his gratitude?

In failing her, wouldn't he be sliding back into his old life almost as surely as if he used the knife as she demanded?

"Please," Christine Scavello said." Oh, God, please don't hurt my baby."

"Send him back to Hell forever!" Grace shouted.

Kyle felt as if he were being torn apart. He had been making moral judgments and value decisions for only a few years, not long enough for it to be an unconscious habit, not long enough to deal easily with a dilemma like this. He realized that tears were spilling down his cheeks.

The boy's gaze rose from the point of the blade.

Kyle met the child's eyes and was jolted by them.

"Kill him!" Grace said.

Kyle was shaking violently.

The boy was shaking, too.

Their gazes had not merely locked but. fused. so it seemed to Kyle that he could see not only through his own eyes but through the eyes of the boy, as well. It was an almost magical empathy, as if he were both himself and the child, both assailant and victim. He felt large and dangerous. yet small and helpless at the same time. He was suddenly dizzy and increasingly confused. His vision swam out of focus for a moment.

Then he saw-or imagined that he saw-himself looming over the child, literally saw himself from the boy's point of view, as if he were Joey Scavello. It was a stunning moment of insight, strange and disorienting, almost a clairvoyant experience. Looking up at himself from the boy's eyes, he was shocked by his appearance, by the savagery in his own face, by the madness of this attack. A chill swept up his spine, and he could not get his breath. This unflattering vision of himself was the psychic equivalent of a blow to the head with a ball-peen hammer, psychologically concussive. He blinked, and the moment of insight passed, and he was just himself again, though with a terrible headache and a lingering dizziness. Finally, he knew what he must do.

To Christine's surprise, the giant turned away from Joey and threw the knife into the flames beyond Charlie. Sparks and embers flew up like a swarm of fireflies.

"No!" Grace Spivey shouted.

"I'm through killing," the big man said, tears pouring copiously down his cheeks, softening the hard and dangerous look of him much as rain on a windowpane blurs and softens the view beyond.

"No," Spivey repeated.

"It's wrong," he said." Even if I'm doing it for you. it's wrong."

"The devil put this thought in your mind," the old woman warned.

"No, Mother Grace. You put it there."

"The devil!" she insisted frantically." The devil put it there!"

The giant hesitated, blotting his face with his big hands.

Christine held her breath and watched the confrontation with both hope and dread. If this Frankensteinian creature actually turned against his master, he might be a formidable ally, but at the moment he did not seem sufficiently stable to deliver them from their crisis. Though he had thrown the knife away, he appeared confused, in a mental and emotional turmoil, and even slightly unsteady on his feet. When he put his hands to his head and squinted through his tears, he seemed in pain, almost as if he had been blackjacked. He might, at any moment, turn on Joey and kill him, after all.

"The devil put this doubt in your mind," Grace Spivey insisted, advancing on the giant, shouting at him." The devil, the devil, the devil!"

He took his tear-wet hands from his face and blinked at the old woman."

If it was the devil, then he's not all bad. Not all bad if he wants me never to kill again." He staggered toward the passageway that led out of the caves, stopped just his side of it, and leaned wearily against the wall, as if he needed a moment to recover from some exhausting task.

"Then I'll do it," Spivey said furiously. She had been clutching the semiautomatic rifle by its shoulder strap. Now she took it in both hands." You're my Judas, Kyle Barlows. Judas. You've failed me. But God won't fail me. And I won't fail God the way you have, no, not me, not the Chosen, not me!"

Christine looked at Joey. He still stood in the corner, with his back against the stone, his arms raised now, his small pale palms flattened and turned outward, as if warding off the bullets that Grace Spivey would fire at him. His eyes were huge and frightened and fixed on the old woman as though she had hypnotized him. Christine wanted to shout at him to run, but it was pointless because Spivey was in his way and would surely stop him. Besides, where could he go? Outside, in the subzero air, where he would quickly succumb to exposure? Deeper in the caves, where Spivey would easily follow and soon find him? He was trapped, small and defenseless, with nowhere to hide.

Christine looked at Charlie, who was weeping with frustration at his own inability to help, and she tried to launch herself up at Grace Spivey, but she was defeated by her wounded leg and damaged shoulder, and finally, in desperation, she looked back at Kyle and said, "Don't let her do it! For God's sake, don't let her hurt him!"

The giant only blinked stupidly at Christine. He seemed shellshocked, in no condition to wrest the rifle out of Spivey's hands.

"Please, please, stop her," Christine begged him.

"You shut up!" Grace warned, taking one threatening step toward Christine. Then, to Joey, she said, "And don't you try using those eyes on me. It won't work with me. You can't get at me that way, not any way, not me. I can resist."

The old woman was having some difficulty figuring how to fire the gun, and when she finally got a round off, it went high, smashed into the wall above Joey's head, almost striking the ceiling, the explosive report crashing back and forth in that confined area, one deafening echo laminated atop another. The thunderous noise and the recoil surprised Spivey, jolting her frail body. She stumbled backwards two steps, fired again without meaning to, and that second bullet &d strike the ceiling and ricocheted around the room.

Joey was screaming.

Christine was shouting, looking for something to throw, a weapon no matter how crude, but she could find nothing. The pain in her wounded leg was like a bolt fastening her to the stone, and she could only beat her hand on the floor in frustration.

The old woman moved in on Joey, holding the rifle awkwardly though with evident determination to finish the job this time.

But something was wrong. She was either out of ammunition or the gun had jammed, for she began to struggle with the weapon angrily.

As the echoes of the second shot faded, a mysterious sound arose from deeper in the mountain, adding to the confusion, rising up from other caverns, a strange and frightening racket that Christine could almost but not quite identify.

The gun had janimed. Spivey managed to eject an expended cartridge that had been wedged in the chamber. The brass cylinder popped into the air, reflecting the firelight, and hit the floor with a faint clink and ping.

Wicka-wicka-wicka-wicka: The strange, leathery, flapping sound drew nearer, approaching from deeper in the mountain.

The cool air vibrated with it.

Spivey half turned away from Joey to look at the entrance to the adjoining cave, through which she and the giant had entered a few minutes ago." No!" she said, and she seemed to know what was coming.

And in that instant Christine knew, too.

Bats.

A thunderous, flapping, whirling tornado of bats.

An instant later they swarmed out of the adjoining caverns and into this room, a hundred of them, two hundred, more, rising to the vaulted ceiling, screeching, industriously working their leathery wings, darting back and forth, a seething multitude of frenziedly whirling shadows at the upper reaches of the firelight.

The old woman stared at them. She was speaking, but her words were lost in the drumlike roar of the swarm.

As one, the bats stopped shrieking. Only the rustlingfluttering-hissing of wings sounded now. Their silence was so unnatural that it seemed worse than their screams.

No, Christine thought. Oh, no!

In the pall of this frightening assemblage, Spivey's maniacal self-confidence shattered. She fired two rounds at the nightmare flock, a senseless and, in fact, dangerous assault.

Whether provoked by the gunfire or otherwise motivated, the bats swooped down as if they were a single creature, a cloud of tiny black killing machines, all claws and teeth, and fell upon Grace Spivey. They slashed at her insulated ski suit, got tangled in her hair, sank their claws into her and hung on. She staggered across the cavern, flailing her arms and whirling about, as if performing a macabre dance, or as if she thought she could take flight with them. Squealing, gagging, retching, she collided with one wall, rebounded from it, and still the beasts clung to her, darted, nipped.

Kyle Barlowe took two tentative steps toward her, halted, looking not so much afraid as bewildered.

Christine did not want to look, but she could not help it. She was transfixed by the horrible battle.

Spivey appeared to be wearing a garment composed of hundreds of flapping black rags. Her face vanished entirely beneath that tattered cloth. But for the flutter and scrape and tick of their wings, the bats maintained their eerie silence, though they moved even more frantically now, with malign intent. They tore her to pieces.

At last the bats were still.

Spivey was motionless, too.

For perhaps a minute, the bats were a living, black funeral shroud covering the body, quivering slightly like wind-rustled cloth. By the second, their unnatural silence grew more remarkable and unnerving. They did not quite look, behave, or seem like ordinary bats. Besides the astonishing timeliness of their appearance and the purposefulness of their attack, they had a quality-an air-that was indefinably strange.

Christine saw some of the small, dark, evil heads lift up, turn left and right and left again, crimson eyes blinking, and it seemed as if they were awaiting an order from the leader of their flock. Then, as if the order came in a voice only they could hear, they rose as one, in a sudden fluttering cloud, and flew back into other cavems.

Kyle Barlowe and Charlie were silent, stunned.

Christine would not look at the dead woman.

And she could not look away from her son. He was aliveunbelievably, amazingly, miraculously alive. After all the terror and pain they had been through, after death had seemed inevitable, she had difficulty believing this last-minute reprieve was real. Irrationally, she felt that if she looked away from Joey, even for a moment, he would be dead when she looked back again, and their extraordinary salvation would prove to be a delusion, a dream.

More than anything, she wanted to hold him, touch his hair, his face, hug him tight, feel the beat of his heart and the warmth of his breath on her neck. But her injuries prevented her from going to him, and he appeared to be in a state of shock that rendered him temporarily oblivious of her.

Far away in other caves, the bats must have begun to resume their familiar perches, for they squeaked again as if contesting with one another for favored positions. The eerie sound of them, which soon faded into silence once more, sent a chill through Christine, a chill that intensified when she saw her halfmesmerized son cock his head as if in understanding of the shrill language of those nightmare creatures. He was disturbingly pale.

His mouth curved into what appeared to be a vague smile, but then Christine decided it was actually a grimace of disgust or horror engendered by the scene that he had just witnessed and that had left him in this semiparalytic stupor.

As the renewed cries of the bats gradually faded, fear uncoiled in Christine, though not because of what had happened to Grace Spivey. And she was not afraid that the bats would return and kill again. In fact, somehow, she knew they would not, and it was precisely that impossible knowledge that frightened her. She did not want to consider where it came from, to ponderjust how she knew. She did not want to think about what it mi lit mean.

Joey was alive. Nothing else mattered. The sound of the gun had drawn the bats, and by a stroke of luck-or through God's mercy-they had limited their attack to Grace Spivey. Joey was alive.

Alive. She felt tears of joy suddenly burning in her eyes.

Joey was alive. She must concentrate on that wonderful twist of fate, for it was from here that their future began, and she was determined that it would be a bright future full of love and happiness, with no sadness, no fear, and above all no doubts.

Doubt could eat at you, destroy happiness, turn love to bitremess. Doubt could even come between a mother and her much-loved son, producing an unbridgeable chasm, and she simply could not allow that to happen.

Nevertheless, unbidden and unwanted, a memory came to her.

Tiaesday, Laguna Beach, the Arco station service bay where they had waited for Charlie after barely escaping the bomb that destroyed Miriam Rankin's house; she and Joey and the two bodyguards standing by the stacks of tires, with the world outside caught in a fierce electrical storm so powerful that it seemed to signal the end of the world; Joey moving to the open garage doors, fascinated by the lightning, one devastating bolt after another, unlike anything Christine had seen before, especially in southern California where lightning was uncommon; Joey regarding it without fear, as if it were only fireworks, as if… as if he knew it could not harm him. As if it were a sign? As if the pretematural ferocity of the storm was somehow a message that he understood and took hope from?

No. Nonsense.

She had to push such stupid thoughts out of her mind. That was just the kind of craziness that could infect you merely from association with the likes of Grace Spivey. My God, the old woman had been like a plague carrier, spreading irrationality, infecting everyone with her paranoid fantasies.

But what about the bats? Why had they come at exactly the right moment?

Why had they attacked only Grace Spivey?

Stop it, she told herself. You're just. making something out of nothing. The bats came because they were frightened by the first two shots that the old woman fired. The sound was so loud it scared them, brought them out. And then. when they got here. well, she shot at them and made them angry. Yes.

Of course. That was it.

Except. If the first pair of shots scared the bats, why didn't the third and fourth shots scare them again? Why didn't they fly away?

Why did they attack her and dispose of her so. conveniently?

No.

Nonsense.

Joey was staring at the floor, still anemically pale, but he was beginning to emerge from his semi-catatonic state. He was nervously chewing on one finger, very much like a little boy who knew he had done something that would upset his mother. After a few seconds, he raised his head, and his eyes met Christine's.

He tried to smile through his tears, but his mouth was still soft and loose with shock, with fear. He had never looked sweeter or more in need of a mother's love, and his weakness and vulnerability gave her heart a twist.

His vision clouded by pain, weak from infection and loss of blood, Charlie wondered if everything that had happened in the cave had actually transpired only in his fevered imagination.

But the bats were real. Their bloody handiwork lay only a few feet away, undeniable.

He assured himself that the bizarre attack on Grace Spivey had a rational, natural explanation, but he was not entirely convinced by his own assurances. Maybe the bats were rabid; that might explain why they had not fled from the sound of the gun but had, instead, been drawn to it, for all rabid animals were especially sensitive to-and easily angered by-bright lights and loud noises. But why had they bitten and clawed only Grace, leaving Joey, Christine, Barlowe, and Charlie himself untouched?

He looked at Joey.

The boy had come out of his quasi-autistic trance. He had moved to Chewbacca. He was kneeling by the dog, sobbing, wanting to touch the motionless animal, but afraid, making little gestures of helplessness with his hands.

Charlie remembered when, last Monday in his office, he had looked at Joey and had seen a fleshless skull instead of a face.

It had been a brief vision, lasting only the blink of an eye, and he had shoved the memory of it to the back of his mind. If he had worried about it at all, it was because he had thought it might mean Joey was going to die; but he hadn't really believed in visions or clairvoyant revelations, so he hadn't worried much.

Now he wondered if the vision had been real. Maybe it had not meant that Joey would die; maybe it had meant that Joey was death.

Surely such thoughts were proof only of the seriousness of his fever.

Joey was Joey-nothing more, nothing worse, nothing strange.

But Charlie remembered the rat in the battery cellar, too, and the dream he had later that same night, in which rats-messengers of death-had poured forth from the boy's chest.

This is nuts, he told himself. I've been a detective too long.

I don't trust anyone any more. Now I'm looking for deception and corruption in even the most innocent hearts.

Petting the dog, Joey began to speak, the words coming in groups, in breathless rushes, between sobs: "Mom, is he dead?

Is Chewbacca dead? Did. that bad man. did he kill Chewbacca? "

Charlie looked at Christine. Her face was wet with tears, and her eyes brimmed with a new flood. She seemed temporarily speechless.

Contrasting emotions fought for possession of her lovely face: horror over the bloodiness of Spivey's death, surprise at their own survival, and joy at the sight of her unharmed child.

Seeing her joy, Charlie was ashamed that he had regarded the boy with suspicion. Yet. he was a detective, and it was a detective's job to be suspicious.

He watched Joey closely, but he didn't detect the radiant evil of which Spivey spoke, didn't feel that he was in the presence of something monstrous. Joey was still a six-year-old boy. Still a good-looking kid with a sweet smile. Still able to laugh and cry and worry and hope.

Charlie had seen what had happened to Grace Spivey, yet he was not in the least afraid of Joey because, dammit, he could not just suddenly start believing in devils, demons, and the Antichrist. He'd always had a layman's interest in science, and he'd been an advocate of the space program from the time he was a kid himself; he always had believed that logic, reason, and science-the secular equivalent of Christianity's Holy Trinity-would one day solve all of mankind's problems and all the mysteries of existence, including the source and meaning of life. And science could probably explain what had happened here, too; a biologist or zoologist, with special knowledge of bats, would most likely find their behavior well within the range of normality.

As Joey continued to crouch over Chewbacca, petting him, weeping, the dog's tail stirred, then swished across the floor.

Joey cried, "Mom, look! He's alive!"

Christine saw Chewbacca roll off his side, get to his feet, shake himself. He had appeared to be dead. Now he was not even dizzy. He pranced up onto his hind feet, put his forepaws up on his young master's shoulders, and began licking Joey's face.

The boy giggled, ruffled the dog's fur." How ya doin', Chewbacca? Good dog. Good old Chewbacca."

Chewbacca? Christine wondered. Or Brandy?

Brandy had been decapitated by Spivey's people, had been buried with honors in a nice pet cemetery in Anaheim. But if they went back to that cemetery now and opened the grave, what would they find? Nothing? An empty wooden box? Had Brandy been resurrected and had he found his way to the pound just in time for Charlie and Joey to adopt him again?

Garbage, Christine told herself angrily. Junk thought. Stupid.

But she could not get those sick thoughts out of her head, and they led to other irrational considerations.

Seven years ago. the man on the cruise ship. Lucius Under. Luke.

Who had he really been?

What had he been?

No, no, no. Impossible.

She squeezed her eyes shut and put one hand to her head. She was so tired. Exhausted. She did not have the strength to resist those fevered speculations. She felt contaminated by Spivey's craziness, dizzy, disconnected, sort of the way victims of malaria must feel.

Luke. For years she had tried to forget him; now she tried to remember.

He'd been about thirty, lean, well muscled. Blond hair streak-bleached by the sun. Clear blue eyes. A bronze tan.

White, perfectly even teeth. An ingratiating smile, an easy manner. He had been a charming but not particularly original mix of sophistication and simplicity, worldiness and innocence, a smooth-talker who knew how to get what he wanted from women. She'd thought of him as a surfer, for God's sake; that's what he had seemed like, the epitome of the young California surfer.

Even with her strength draining away through her wound and leaving her increasingly light-headed, even though her exhaustion and loss of blood had put her in a feeble state of mind that left her highly susceptible to Spivey's insane accusations, she could not believe that Luke had been Satan. The devil in the guise of a surfer boy? It was too banal to be believable. If Satan were real, if he wanted a son, if he wanted her to bear that son, why wouldn't he simply have come to her in the night in his real form? She could not have resisted him. Why wouldn't he have taken her forthrightly, with much flapping of his wings and lashing of his tail?

Luke had drunk beer, and he'd had a passion for potato chips.

He had urinated and showered and brushed his teeth like any other human being. Sometimes his conversation had been downright tedious, dumb.

Wouldn't the devil at least have been unfailingly witty?

Surely, Luke had been Luke, nothing more, nothing less.

She opened her eyes.

Joey was giggling and hugging Chewbacca, so happy. So ordinary.

Of course, she thought, the devil might take a perverse pleasure in using me, particularly me, to carry his child.

After all, she was a former nun. Her brother had been a priest-and a martyr. She had fallen away from her faith. She had been a virgin when she'd given herself to the man on the cruise ship. Wasn't she a perfect means by which the devil could make a mockery of the first virgin birth?

Madness. She hated herself for doubting her child, for giving any credence whatsoever to Spivey's babbling.

And yet. hadn't her whole life changed for the better as soon as she had become pregnant with the boy? She had been uncommonly healthy-no colds, no headaches-and happy and successful in business. As if she were. blessed.

Finally satisfied that his dog was all right, Joey disentangled himself from Chewbacca and came to Christine. Rubbing at his red eyes, sniffling, he said, "Mom, is it over? Are we going to be okay? I'm still scared."

She didn't want to look into his eyes, but to her surprise she found nothing frightening in them, nothing to make her blood run cold.

Brandy. no, Chewbacca came to her and nuzzled her hand.

"Mommy," Joey said, kneeling beside her, "I'm scared.

What'd they do to you? Whatd they do? Are you going to die?

Don't die, please, don't die, Mommy, please."

She put a hand to his face.

He was afraid, trembling. But that was better than an autistic trance.

He slid against her, and after only a moment's hesitation, she held him with her good arm. Her Joey. Her son. Her child. The feel of him, snuggling against her, was marvelous, indescribably wonderful. The contact was better than any medicine could have been, for it revitalized her, cleared her head, and dissipated the sick images and insane fears that were Grace Spivey's perverse legacy. Hugging her child, feeling him cling to her in need of love and reassurance, she was cured of Spivey's mad contagion.

This boy was the fruit of her womb, a life she had given to the world, and nothing was more precious to her than he was-and always would be.

Kyle Barlowe had slid down to the floor, his back against the wall, and had buried his face in his hands to avoid staring at Mother Grace's hideous remains. But the dog came to Kyle, nuzzled him, and Kyle looked up. The mutt licked his face; its tongue was warm, its nose cold, like the tongue and nose of any dog. It had a clownish face. How could he ever have imagined that such a dog was a hound from Hell?

"I loved her like a mother, and she changed my life, so I stayed with her even when she went wrong, went bad, even when she started. to do really crazy things," Kyle said, startled by the sound of his own voice, surprised to hear himself explaining his actions to Christine Scavello and Charlie Harrison." She had. this power. No denying that. She was. like in the movies… clairvoyant. You know? Psychic. That's how she could follow you and the boy… not because God was guiding her. and not because the boy was the son of Satan… but because she was just

… clairvoyant." This was not something he had known until he heard himself speaking it. In fact, even now, he did not seem to know what he was going to say until the words came from him." She had visions. I guess they weren't religious like I thought. Not from God. Not really.

Maybe she knew that all along. Or maybe she misunderstood.

Maybe she actually believed she was talking with God. I don't think she meant to do bad, you know. She could've misinterpreted her visions, couldn't she? But there's a big difference between being psychic and being Joan of Are, huh? A big difference."

Charlie listened to Kyle Barlowe wrestle with his conscience, and he was curiously soothed by the ugly giant's deep, remorseful voice. The soothing effect was partly due to the fact that Barlowe was helping them understand these recent events in a light less fantastic than that shed by Armageddon; he was showing them how it might be paranormal without being supernatural or cataclysmic. But Charlie was also affected and relaxed by the odd, soft, rumbling tones and cadences of the big man's voice, by a slight smokiness in the air, and by some indefinable quality of light or heat that made him receptive to this message, as a hypnotist's subject is receptive to suggestions of all kinds.

Kyle said, "Mother Grace meant well. She just got confused there toward the end. Confused. And, God help me, I went along with her even though I had my doubts. Almost went too far. Almost. God help me. almost used the knife on that little boy. See, what it is. I think maybe your Joey. maybe he has a little psychic ability of his own. You know? Have you ever noticed it? Any indications? I think he must be a little like Mother Grace herself, a little bit clairvoyant or something, even if he doesn't know it, even if the power hasn't become obvious yet. and that was what she sensed in him. but she misunderstood it. That must be it. That must explain it. Poor Grace. Poor, sweet Grace. She meant well. Can you believe that? She meant well, and so did I, and so did everyone in the church. She meant well."

Chewbacca left Kyle and came to Charlie, and he let the dog nuzzle him affectionately. He noticed blood in its ears, and blood matting the fur on its ears, which meant Barlowe had hit it very hard with the butt of the rifle, terribly hard indeed, and yet it seemed completely recovered.

Surely it had suffered a severe concussion. Yet it was not dizzy or disoriented.

The dog looked into his eyes.

Charlie frowned.

"She meant well. She meant well," Kyle said, and he put his face in his hands and began to cry.

Cuddling with his mother, Joey said, "Mommy, he scares me.

What's he talkin' about? He scares me."

"It's all right," Christine said.

"He scares me."

"It's okay, Skipper."

To Charlie's surprise, Christine found the strength to sit up and hitch backward a couple of feet, until she was leaning agenst the wall. She had seemed too exhausted to move, even to speak.

Her face looked better, too, not quite so pale.

Still sniffling, wiping at his nose with his sleeve, wiping his eyes with one small fist, Joey said, "Charlie? You okay?"

Although Spivey and her people no longer posed any threat, Charlie was still quite certain that he would die in this cave. He was in bad shape, and it would be hours yet before help could be summoned and could reach them. He would not last that long. Yet he tried to smile at Joey, and in a voice so weak it frightened him, he said, "I'm okay."

The boy left his mother and came to Charlie. He said, "Magnum couldn't've done better than you did."

Joey sat down beside Charlie and put a hand on him. Charlie flinched, but it was all right, perfectly all right, and then for a couple of minutes he lost consciousness, or perhaps he merely dropped off to sleep. When Charlie came to, Joey was with his mother again, and Kyle Barlowe seemed to be getting ready to leave." What's wrong?" Charlie asked." What's happening now?"

Christine was obviously relieved to see him conscious once more. She said, "There's no way you and I can make it out of here on our feet. We'll have to be carried in litters. Mr. Barlowe is going for help."

Barlowe smiled reassuringly. It was a ghastly expression on his cruelly formed face." The snow's stopped falling, and there's no wind. If I stay to the forest trails, I should be able to make it down to civilization in a few hours. Maybe I can get a mountain rescue team back here before nightfall. I'm sure I can."

"Are you taking Joey with you?" Charlie asked. He noticed that his voice was stronger than before; speaking did not require as much effort as it had done a few minutes ago." Are you getting him out?"

"No," Christine said." Joey's staying with us."

"I'll move faster without him," Barlowe said." Besides, the two of you need him to put wood on the fire every now and then."

Joey said, "I'll take care of them, Mr. Barlowe. You can count on me.

Chewbacca and me."

The dog barked softly, once, as if in affirmation of the boy's pledge.

Barlowe favored the boy with another malformed smile, and Joey grinned at him in return. Joey had accepted the giant's conversion with considerably greater alacrity than Charlie had, and his trust seemed to be reciprocated and well placed.

Barlowe left them.

They sat in silence for a moment.

They did not even glance at Grace Spivey's corpse, as if it were only another formation of stone.

Clenching his teeth, preparing for an agonizing and most likely fruitless ordeal, Charlie tried pulling himself up into a sitting position. Although he had possessed insufficient strength to do it before, he now found the task remarkably easy. The pain from the bullet wound in his shoulder had dramatically subsided, much to his surprise, and was now only a dull ache which he could endure with little trouble.

His other injuries provided a measure of discomfort, but they were not as bothersome or as sapping of his energy as they had been. He felt somewhat. revitalized. and he knew that he would be able to hold onto life until the rescue team had arrived and had gotten them off the mountain, to a hospital.

He wondered if he felt better because of Joey. The boy had come to him, had laid a hand on him, and he had slept for a couple of minutes, and when he had regained consciousness he was… partially healed. Was that one of the child's powers? If so, it was an imperfect power, for Charlie had not been entirely or even mostly healed; the bullet wound had not knitted up; his bruises and lacerations had not faded; he felt only a little bit better. The very imperfection of the healing power-if it existed at all-seemed to argue for the psychic explanation that Barlowe had offered them. The inadequacy of it indicated that it was a power of which Joey was unaware, a paranormal ability expressed in an entirely unconscious manner. Which meant he was just a little boy with a special gift. Because if he was the Antichrist, he would possess unlimited and miraculous power, and he would quickly and entirely heal both his mother and Charlie.

Wouldn't he? Sure. Sure he would.

Chewbacca returned to Charlie.

There was still blood crusted in the dog's ears.

Charlie stared into its eyes.

He petted it.

The bullet wound in Christine's leg had stopped bleeding, and the pain had drained out of it. She felt clear-headed. With each passing minute she developed a greater appreciation of their survival, which was (she now saw) a tribute-not to the intervention of supernatural forces, but-to their incredible determination and endurance. Confidence returned to her, and she began to believe, once more, in the future.

For a few minutes, when she had been bleeding and helpless, when Spivey had been looming over Joey, Christine had surrendered to an uncharacteristic despair. She had been in such a bleak mood that, when the angry bats had responded to the gunfire and had attacked Spivey, Christine had even briefly wondered if Joey was, after all, what Spivey had accused him of being. Good heavens! Now, with Barlowe on his way for help, with the worst of her pain gone, with a growing belief in the likelihood of her and Charlie's survival, watching Joey as he fumblingly added a few branches to the fire, she could not imagine how such dark and foolish fears could have seized her. She had been so exhausted and so weak and so despondent that she had been susceptible to Spivey's insane message. Though that moment of hysteria was past and equilibrium restored, she was chilled by the realization that even she had been, however briefly, fertile ground for Spivey's lunacy.

How easily it could happen: one lunatic spreads her delusions to the gullible, and soon there is a hysterical mob, or in this case a cult, believing itself to be driven by the best intentions and, therefore, armored against doubt by steely selfrighteousness. There was evil, she realized: not in her little boy but in mankind's fatal attraction to easy, even if irrational, answers.

From across the room, Charlie said, "You trust Barlowe?"

"I think so," Christine said.

"He could have another change of heart on the way down."

"I think he'll send help," she said.

"If he changes his mind about Joey, he wouldn't even have to come back.

He could just leave us here, let cold and hunger do the job for him."

"He'll come back, I bet," Joey said, dusting his small hands together after adding the branches to the fire." I think he's one of the good guys, after all. Don't you, Mom? Don't you think he's one of the good guys?"

"Yeah," Christine said. She smiled." He's one of the good guys, honey."

"Like us," Joey said.

"Like us," she said.

Hours later, but well before nightfall, they heard the helicopter.

"The chopper will have skis on it," Charlie said." They'll land in the meadow, and the rescue team will walk in from there."

"We're going home?" Joey asked.

Christine was crying with relief and happiness." We're going home, honey. You better get your jacket and gloves, start getting dressed."

The boy ran to the pile of insulated sportswear in the corner.

To Charlie, Christine said, "Thank you."

"I failed you," he said.

"No. We had a bit of luck there at the end… Barlowe's indecision, and then the bats. But we wouldn't have gotten that far if it hadn't been for you. You were great. I love you, Charlie."

He hesitated to reply in kind, for any embrace of her was also an embrace of the boy; there was no escaping that. And he was not entirely comfortable with the boy, even though he was trying hard to believe that Barlowe's explanation was the right one.

Joey went to Christine, frowning. The drawstring on his hood was too loose, and he could not undo the clumsy knot he had put it in." Mommy, why'd they have to put a shoelace under my chin like this?"

Smiling, Christine helped him." I thought you were getting really good at tying shoelaces."

"I am," the boy said proudly." But they gotta be on my feet."

"Well, I'm afraid we can't think of you as a big boy until you're able to tie a shoelace no matter where they put it."

"Jeez. Then I guess I'll never be a big boy."

Christine finished retying the hood string." Oh, you'll get there one day, honey."

Charlie watched as she hugged her son. He sighed. He shook his head.

He cleared his throat. He said, "I love you, too, Christine. I really do."

Two days later, in the hospital in Reno, after enduring the attention of uncountable doctors and nurses, after several interviews with the police and one with a representative of the press, after long phone conversations with Henry Rankin, after two nights of much-needed drug-induced sleep, Charlie was left to find unassisted rest on the third night. He had no difficulty getting to sleep, but he dreamed.

He dreamed of making love to Christine, and it was not a fantasy of sex but more a memory of their lovemaking at the cabin. He had never given himself so completely as he had to her that night, and the next day she had gone out of her way to tell him that she had done thins with him that she had never contemplated doing with another man. Now, in the dream, they coupled with that same startling fervor and energy, casting aside all inhibitions. But in the dream, as it had been in reality, there was also something… savage about it, something fierce and animalistic, as if the sex they shared were more than an expression of love or lust, as if it were a. ceremony, a bonding, which was somehow committing him totally to Christine and, therefore, to Joey as well. As Christine straddled him, as he thrust like a bull deep within her, the floor under them began to split open-and here the dream departed from reality-and the couch began to slip into a widening aperture, and although both he and Christine recognized the danger, they could not do anything about it, could not cease their rutting even to save themselves, but continued to press flesh to flesh as the crack in the floor grew ever wider, as they became aware of something in the darkness below, something that was hungry for them, and Charlie wanted to pull away from her, flee, wanted to scream, but could not, could only cling to her and thrust within her, as the couch collapsed through the yawning hole, the cabin floor vanishing above them. And they fell away intoHe sat up in the hospital bed, gasping.

The patient in the other bed grunted softly but did not rouse from his deep sleep.

The room was dark except for a small light at the foot of each bed and vague moonglow at the window.

Charlie leaned back against the headboard.

Gradually, his rapid heartbeat and frantic breathing subsided.

He was damp with sweat.

The dream had brought back all his doubts about Joey. Val Gardner had flown up from Orange County and had taken Joey home with her this afternoon, and Charlie had been genuinely sorry to see the kid go. The boy had been so cute, so full of good humor and unconsciously amusing banter, that the hospital staff had taken him to their hearts, and his frequent visits had made the time pass more quickly and agreeably for Charlie. But now, courtesy of his nightmare, which was courtesy of his subconscious, he was in an emotional turmoil again.

Charlie had always thought of himself as a good man, a man who always did the right thing, who tried to help the innocent and punish the guilty. That was why he had wanted to spend his life playing Mr. Private Investigator. Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, Charlie Harrison: moral men, admirable men, maybe even heroes.

So. So what if? What if Joey had called forth those bats? What if Chewbacca was Brandy, dead twice and resurrected by his master both times? What if Joey was less the unaware psychic that Barlowe believed and more the… more the demon that Spivey claimed? Crazy. But what if? What was a good man supposed to do in such a case? What was the right course of action?

Weeks later, on a Sunday evening in April, Charlie went to the pet cemetery where Brandy had been buried. He arrived after closing time, well after dark, and he took a pick and shovel with him.

The small grave with its little marker was right at the top of a knoll, where Christine had said it was, between two Indian laurels, where the grass looked silver in the light of a three-quarter moon.

BRANDY

BELOVED DOG

PET AND FRIEND

Charlie stood beside the plot, staring down at it, not really wanting to proceed, but aware that he had no choice. He would not be at peace until he knew the truth.

The night-mantled graveyard full of eternally slumbering cats, dogs, hamsters, parrots, rabbits, and guinea pigs was preternaturally silent.

The mild breeze was cool. The branches of the trees stirred slightly, but with only an infrequent rustle.

Reluctantly, he stripped off his lightweight jacket, put his flashlight aside, and set to work. The bullet wound in his shoulder had healed well, more quickly than the doctors had expected, but he was not yet back in shape, and his muscles began to ache from his labors. Suddenly his spade produced a hollow thunk-clonk when it struck the lid of a solidly made though unfinished and unadorned pine box, a little more than two feet below ground. A few minutes later he had bared the entire coffin; in the moonlight it was visible as a pale, undetailed rectangle surrounded by black earth.

Charlie knew that the cemetery offered two basic methods of burial: with or without coffin. In either case, the animal was wrapped in cloth and tucked into a zippered canvas bag. Evidently, Christine and Joey had opted for the full treatment, and one of those zippered bags now lay within this box.

But did the bag contain Brandy's remains-or was it empty?

He perceived no stench of decomposition, but that was to be expected if the canvas sack was moisture-proof and tightly sealed.

He sat at the edge of the grave for a moment, pretending that he needed to catch his breath. Actually, he was just delaying. He dreaded opening the dog's casket, not because he was sickened by the thought of uncovering a maggot-riddled golden retriever but because he was sickened by the thought of not uncovering one.

Maybe he should stop right now, refill the grave, and go away.

Maybe it did not matter what Joey Scavello was.

After all, there were those theologians who argued that the devil, being a fallen angel and therefore inherently good, was not evil in any degree but merely different from God.

He suddenly remembered something that he had read in college, a line from Samuel Butler, a favorite of his: An apology for the devil-it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case. God has written all the books.

The night smelled of damp earth.

The moon watched.

At last he pried the lid off the small casket.

Inside was a zippered sack. Hesitantly, he stretched out on the ground beside the grave, reached down into it, and put his hands on the bag. He played a macabre game of blindman's buff, exploring the contours of the thing within, and gradually convinced himself that it was the corpse of a dog about the size of a fullgrown golden retriever.

All right. This was enough. Here was the proof he had needed.

God knows why he had thought he needed it, but here it was.

He had felt that he was being. commanded to discover the truth; he had not been driven only by curiosity, but by an oh sessive compulsion that seemed to come from outside of him, a motivating urge that some might have said was the hand of God pushing him along, but which he preferred not to analyze or define. The past few weeks had been shaped by that urge, by an inner voice compelling him to make a journey to the pet cemetery. At last he had succumbed, had committed himself to this silly scheme, and what he had found was not proof of a hellborn plot but, instead, merely evidence of his own foolishness.

Although there was no one in the pet cemetery to see him, he flushed with embarrassment. Brandy had not come back from the grave. Chewbacca was an altogether different dog. It had been stupid to suspect otherwise. This was sufficient evidence of Joey's innocence; there was no point in opening the bag and forcing himself to confront the disgusting remains.

He wondered what he would have done if the grave had been empty. Would he then have had to kill the boy, destroy the Antichrist, save the world from Armageddon? What utter balderdash. He could not have done any such thing, not even if God had appeared to him in flowing white robes, with a beard of fire, and with the death order written on tablets of stone. His own parents had been child-beaters, child-abusers, and he the victim.

That was the one crime that most outraged him-a crime against a child.

Even if the grave had been empty, even if that emptiness had convinced him that Spivey was right about Joey, Charlie could not have gone after the boy. He could not outdo his own sick parents by killing a child.

For a while, maybe, he would be able to live with the deed because he would feel sure that Joey was more than just a little boy, was in fact an evil being. But as time went on, doubts would arise. He would begin to think that he had imagined the inexplicable behavior of the bats, and the empty grave would have less significance, and all the other signs and portents would seem to have been self-delusion. He would begin to tell himself that Joey wasn't demonic, only gifted, not possessed of supernatural powers but merely psychic abilities.

He would inevitably determine that he had killed nothing evil, that he had destroyed a special but altogether innocent child.

And then, at least for him, Hell on earth would be reality, anyway.

He lay face-down on the cool, damp ground.

He stared into the dog's grave.

The canvas-wrapped lump was framed by the pale pine boards.

It was a perfectly black bundle that might have contained anything, but which his hands told him contained a dog, so there was no need to open it, no need whatsoever.

The tab of the bag's zipper was caught in a moonbeam. Its silvery glint was like a single, cold, staring eye.

Even if he opened the bag and found only rocks, or even if he found something worse, something unimaginably horrible that was proof positive of Joey's sulphurous origins, he could not act as God's avenger. What allegiance did he owe to a god who allowed so much suffering in the world to begin with? What of his own suffering as a child, the terrible loneliness and the beatings and the constant fear he had endured? Where had God been then? Could life be all that much worse just because there had been a change in the divine monarchy?

He remembered Denton Boothes mechanical coin bank: There is No Justice in a Jackass Universe,

Maybe a change would bring justice.

But, of course, he did not believe the world was ruled by either God or the devil, anyway. He did not believe in divine monarchies.

Which made his presence here even more ridiculous.

The zipper tab glinted.

He rolled onto his back so he'd be unable to see the zipper shine.

He got to his feet, picked up the coffin lid. He would put it in place and fill in the grave and go home and be sensible about this situation.

He hesitated.

Damn.

Cursing his own compulsion, he put the lid down. He reached into the grave, instead, and heaved out the bag. He ran the zipper the length of the sack, and it made an insectlike sound.

He was shaking.

He peeled back the burial cloth.

He switched on his flashlight, gasped.

What the hell-?

With a trembling hand, he directed the flashlight beam at the small headstone and, in the quaverous light, read the inscription again, then threw the light on the contents of the bag once more.

For a moment he did not know what to make of his discovery, but gradually the mists of confusion cleared, and he turned away from the grave, away from the decomposing corpse that produced a vile stench, and he stifled the urge to be thoroughly sick.

When the nausea subsided, he began to shake, but with laughter rather than fear. He stood there in the still of the night, on a knoll in a pet cemetery, a grown man who had been in the fanciful grip of a childish superstition, feeling like the butt of a cosmic joke, a good joke, one that tickled the hell out of him even though it made him feel like a prime jackass. The dog in Brandy's grave was an Irish setter, not a golden retriever, not Brandy at all, which meant the people in charge of this place had screwed up royally, had buried Brandy in the wrong grave and had unknowingly planted the setter in this hole. One canvaswrapped dog is like another, and the undertaker's mix-up seemed not only understandable but inevitable. If the mortician was careless or if, more likely, he nipped at the bottle now and then, the odds were high that a lot of dogs in the graveyard were buried under the wrong markers. After all, burying the family dog was not exactly as serious a matter as burying Grandma or Aunt Emma; the precautions were not quite as meticulous. Not quite!

To locate Brandy's true resting place, he would have to track down the identity of the setter and rob a second grave, and as he looked out at the hundreds upon hundreds of low markers, he knew it was an impossible task. Besides, it did not matter.

The pet mortician's screw-up was like a dash of cold water in the face; it brought Charlie to his senses. He suddenly saw himself as a parody of the hero in one of those old E.C. Horror Comics, haunting a cemetery in pursuit of. Of what? Dracula Dog? He laughed so hard that he had to sit down before he fell down.

They said the Lord worked in mysterious ways, so maybe the devil worked in mysterious ways, too, but Charlie simply could not believe that the devil was so mysterious, so subtle, so elaborately devious, so downright silly as to muddy the trail to Brandy's grave by causing a mixup in a pet cemetery's mortuary. A devil like that might try to buy a man's soul by offering him a fortune in baseball trading cards, and such a demon was not to be taken seriously.

How and why had he taken this so seriously. Had Grace Spivey's religious mania been like a contagion? Had he picked up a mild case of end-of-the-world fever?

His laughter had a purging effect, and by the time it had run its course, he felt better than he had in weeks.

He used the blade of the shovel to push the dead dog and the canvas bag back into the grave. He threw the lid of the coffin on top of it, shoveled the hole full of dirt, tamped it down, wiped the shovel blade clean in the grass, and returned to his car.

He had not found what he expected, and perhaps he had not even found the truth, but he had more or less found what he had hoped to find-a way out, an acceptable answer, something he could live with, absolution.

Early May in Las Vegas was a pleasant time, with the fierce heat of summer still to come, but with the chill winter nights gone for another year. The warm dry air blew away whatever memories still lingered of the nightmare chase in the High Sierras.

On the first Wednesday morning of the month, Charlie and Christine were to be married in a gloriously gaudy, hilariously tasteless nonsectarian wedding chapel next door to a casino, which vastly amused both of them.

They did not see their wedding as a solemn occasion, but as the beginning of a joyous adventure that was best begun with laughter, rather than with pomp and circumstance. Besides, once they made up their minds to marry, they were suddenly in a frenzy to get it done, and no place but Vegas, with its liberal marriage laws, could meet their timetable.

They came into Vegas the night before and took a small suite at Bally's Grand, and within a few hours the city seemed to be sending them omens that indicated a happy future together. On their way to dinner, Christine put four quarters into a slot machine, and although it was the first time she had ever played one, she pulled off a thousand-dollar jackpot. Later, they played a little blackjack, and they won nearly another thousand apiece.

In the morning, exiting the coffee shop after a superb breakfast, Joey found a silver dollar that someone had dropped, and as far as he was concerned his good fortune far exceeded that of his mother and Charlie: "A whole dollar!"

They had brought Joey with them because Christine could not bear to leave him. Their recent ordeal, the near loss of the boy, still weighed heavily on her, and when he was out of her sight for more than a couple of hours, she grew nervous." In time," she told Charlie, "I'll be able to relax a bit more. But not yet.

In time, we'll be able to go away together by ourselves, just the two of us, and leave Joey with Val. I promise. But not yet. Not quite yet.

So if you want to marry me, you're going to have to take my son along on the honeymoon. How's that for romance?"

Charlie didn't mind. He liked the boy. Joey was a good companion, well-behaved, inquisitive, bright, and affectionate.

Joey served as best man at the ceremony and was delighted with his role.

He guarded the ring with stern-faced solemnity and, at the proper moment, gave it to Charlie with a grin so wide and warm it threatened to melt the gold in which the diamond was set.

When it was official, when they had left the chapel to the recorded strains of Wayne Newton singing "Joy to the World," they decided to forgo the complimentary limousine and walk back to the hotel. The day was warm, blue, clear (but for a few scattered white clouds), and beautiful, even with the honky-tonk of Las Vegas Boulevard crowding close on both sides.

"What about the wedding lunch?" Joey demanded as they walked.

I 'You just had breakfast two hours ago," Charlie said.

"I'm a growin' boy."

"True.”

"What sounds like a good wedding lunch to you?" Christine asked.

Joey thought about that for a few steps, then said, "Big Macs and Baskin-Robbins!"

"You know what happens to you when you eat too many Big Macs?" Christine said.

"What?" the boy asked.

"You grow up to look like Ronald McDonald."

"That's right," Charlie said." Big red nose, funny orange hair, and big red lips."

Joey giggled." Gee, I wish Chewbacca was here."

"I'm sure Val's taking good care of him, honey."

"Yeah, but he's missing all the jokes."

They strolled along the sidewalk, Joey between them, and even at this hour a few of the big signs and marquees were flashing.

"Will I grow up with big funny clown's feet, too?" Joey asked.

"Absolutely," Charlie said." Size twenty-eight."

"Which will make it impossible to drive a car," Christine said.

" Or dance," Charlie said.

"I don't want to dance," Joey said." I don't like girls."

"Oh, in a few years, you'll like them," Christine said.

Joey frowned." That's what Chewbacca says, but I just don't believe it."

"Oh, so Chewbacca talks, does he?" Christine teased.

"Well. "

"And he's an authority on girls, yet!"

"Well, okay, if you want to make a big deal of it," Joey said, "I gotta admit I just pretend he talks."

Charlie laughed and winked at his new wife over their son's head.

Joey said, "Hey, if I eat too many Big Macs, will I grow up with big funny clown hands, too?"

"Yep," Charlie said." So you won't be able to tie your own shoes." "Or pick your nose," Christine said.

"I don't pick my nose anyway," the boy said indignantly.

"You know what Val told me about picking my nose?"

"No. What did Val tell you?" Christine asked, and Charlie could see she was a little afraid of the answer because the boy was always learning the wrong kind of language from Val.

Joey squinted in the desert sun, as if struggling to remember exactly what Val had said. Then: "She told me the only people who pick their noses are bums, Looney Tunes, IRS agents, and her ex-husband."

Charlie and Christine glanced at each other and laughed. It was so good to laugh.

Joey said, "Hey, if you guys wanta be, you know. ummm. alone. then you can leave me in the hotel playroom. I don't mind. It looks great in there. They got all kinds of neat games and stuff. Hey, maybe you guys want to play some more cards or them slot machines where Mom made money last night."

"I think we'll probably quit gambling while we're ahead, honey."

"Oh," the boy said, "I think you should play, Mom! You'll win, I bet.

You'll win a lot more. Really. I know you will. I just know you will."

The sun came out from behind one of the scattered white clouds, and its light fell full-strength across the pavement, sparkied on the chrome and glass of the passing cars, made the plush hotels and casinos look brighter and cleaner than they really were, and made the air itself shimmer fantastically.

It ended in sunshine, not on a dark and stormy night.