When Vanner was only three feet from him, leaning in to bite, Harry pulled the gun out of his own mouth, said, “Hell, no,” and shot the damn thing in the head. It toppled back, landed with a crash, and stayed down.
Go for the data-processor.
Elation swept through Harry, but it was short-lived. Worthy had completed his transformation and seemed to have been thrown into a frenzy by the carnage in the room and the escalating shrieks that came through the attic vents from the world beyond. He turned his lantern eyes on Harry, and in them was a look of unhuman hunger.
No more bullets.
33
Sam was squarely under the cop’s gun, with no room to maneuver. He had to drop the Remington that he’d taken off Shaddack.
“I’m on your side,” the cop repeated.
“No one’s on our side,” Sam said.
Shaddack was gasping for breath and trying to stand up straight. He regarded the officer with abject terror.
With the coldest premeditation Sam had ever seen, with no hint of emotion whatsoever, not even anger, the cop turned his 20-gauge shotgun on Shaddack, who was no longer a threat to anyone, and fired four rounds. As if punched by a giant, Shaddack flew backward over two stools and into the wall.
The cop threw the gun aside and moved quickly to the dead man. He tore open the sweat-suit jacket that Shaddack wore under his coat and ripped lose a strange object, a largish rectangular medallion, that had hung from a gold chain around the man’s neck.
Holding up that curious artifact, he said, “Shaddack’s dead. His heartbeat isn’t being broadcast any more, so Sun is even now putting the final program into effect. In half a minute or so we’ll all know peace. Peace at last.”
At first Sam thought the cop was saying they were all going to die, that the thing in his hand was going to kill them, that it was a bomb or something. He backed quickly toward the door and saw that Tessa evidently had the same expectation. She had pulled Chrissie up from where they’d been crouching, and had opened the door.
But if there was a bomb, it was a silent one, and the radius of its small explosion remained within the police officer. Suddenly his face contorted. Between clenched teeth, he said, “God.” It was not an exclamation but a plea or perhaps an inadequate description of something he had just seen, for in that moment he fell down dead from no cause that Sam could see.
34
When they stepped out through the back door by which they had entered, the first thing Sam noticed was that the night had fallen silent. The shrill cries of the shape-changers no longer echoed across the fogbound town.
The keys were in the van’s ignition.
“You drive,” he told Tessa.
His wrist was swollen worse than ever. It was throbbing so hard that each pulse of pain reverberated through every fiber of him.
He settled in the passenger seat.
Chrissie curled in his lap, and he wrapped his arms around her. She was uncharacteristically silent. She was exhausted, on the verge of collapse, but Sam knew the cause of her silence was more profound than weariness.
Tessa slammed her door and started the engine. She didn’t have to be told where to go.
On the drive to Harry’s place, they discovered that the streets were littered with the dead, not the corpses of ordinary men and women but—as their headlights revealed beyond a doubt—of creatures out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, twisted and phantasmagorical forms. She drove slowly, maneuvering around them, and a couple of times she had to pull up on the sidewalk to get past a pack of them that had gone down together, apparently felled by the same unseen force that had dropped the policeman back at Central.
Shaddock’s dead. His heartbeat isn’t being broadcast any more, so Sun is even now putting the final program into effect… .
After a while Chrissie lowered her head against Sam’s chest and would not look out the windshield.
Sam kept telling himself that the fallen creatures were phantoms, that no such things could have actually come into existence, either by the application of the highest of high technology or by sorcery. He expected them to vanish every time a shroud of fog briefly obscured them, but when the fog moved off again, they were still huddled on the pavement, sidewalks, and lawns.
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