Hurrying out of the stairwell, Jilly saw a spill of soft light coming from an open door on the left, brighter light issuing from a door farther along on the right – and doves erupting through a closed window at the end of the hallway, a vision of doves that left the panes intact in their wake.
The birds made no sounds – no coos or cries, nor the faintest thrum of wings. When they exploded around and over her, cataracts of white feathers, a thousand piercing gazes, a thousand yawning beaks, she didn’t expect to feel them, but she did. The breeze stirred by their passage was spicy with incense. Their wing tips brushed her body, arms, and face.
Staying close to the left wall, she moved quickly forward into a storm of white wings as dense as the feathery blizzard that earlier had swept across the Expedition. She feared for her sanity, but she didn’t fear the birds, which meant her no harm. Even if they had been real, they would not have pecked or blinded her. She sensed that they were in fact proof of augmented vision, although even as this thought occurred to her, she had no idea what augmented vision might be; for the moment it was a thing she understood instinctively, emotionally, rather than intellectually.
Although she could not be harmed by these phenomena, the timing of the birds’ appearance couldn’t have been worse. She needed to find Dylan, and real or not, the birds were a hindrance to the search.
‘Ha!’ exclaimed someone close at hand, and an instant later, Jilly felt on her left the open doorway that the seething flock had hidden from her view.
She stepped across the threshold, and the birds vanished. Before her lay a bedroom revealed by a single lamp. And here was Dylan, too, armed with a baseball bat, bracketed by a young man – Kenny? – and a teenage girl, both brandishing knives.
The bat cut the air with a whoosh, the young man screamed, and the wickedly sharp knife, tumbling free, clattered against a walnut highboy.
When Dylan swung the bat, the teenage girl behind him tensed, for an instant tightening down in her crouch. As Kenny shrieked in pain, the girl drew her knife back in striking position, certain to spring forward and bury it in Dylan before he could turn to deal with her.
On the move even as the girl uncoiled out of her crouch, Jilly shouted, ‘Police!’
Monkey-agile, the girl whipped around but also sidestepped to avoid turning her back on Dylan, to keep him in sight.
Her eyes were as blue as any sky adorned with cherubim on any chapel ceiling, but also radiant with dementia surely spawned by psychosis-inducing drugs.
A Southwest Amazon at last, but too squeamish to risk destroying the girl’s eyes, Jilly aimed lower with the instant ant death. The nozzle on the can that she’d found in the pantry had two settings: SPRAY and STREAM. She had set it on STREAM, which would reach ten feet, according to the label.
Perhaps because of her excitement, her homicidal exhilaration the girl was breathing through her mouth. The stream of insecticide went straight in, like an arc of water from a drinking fountain, moistening lips, bathing tongue.
Although instant ant death had a notably less severe effect on a teenage girl than it would have on an ant, it wasn’t received with lip-smacking delight. Less refreshing than cool water, this drink at once took all the fight out of the girl. She flung the knife aside. Gagging, wheezing, spitting, she staggered to a door, yanked it open, slapped at the wall switch until the lights came on, revealing a bathroom. At the sink, the girl cranked on the cold water, cupped her hands, and repeatedly flushed out her mouth, sputtering and choking.
On the floor, groaning, crying with a particularly annoying note of self-pity, Kenny had curled up like a shrimp.
Jilly looked at Dylan and shook the can of insecticide. ‘From now on, I’m going to use this on hecklers.’
‘What did you do with Shep?’
‘The grandmother told me about Kenny, the knives. Aren’t you going to say “Thanks for saving my butt, Jilly”?’