as if they had been members of different species.
Marty pushed the END button.
His hands were shaking so badly that he dropped the phone.
When he turned from the window, he saw the girls were standing together,
holding hands. They were staring, pale and frightened.
His shouting into the telephone had brought Paige out of one of the
bedrooms where she had been adjusting the electric heater.
Images of his parents’ faces and treasured memories of a life of love
crowded into his mind, but he resolutely repressed them. If he gave in
to grief now, wasted precious time in tears, he would be condemning
Paige and the girls to certain death.
“He’s here,” Marty said, “he’s coming, and we don’t have much time.”
New Maps of Hell Those who would banish the sin of greed embrace the sin
of envy as their creed.
Those who seek to banish envy as well, only draw elaborate new maps of
hell.
Those with passion to change the world, look on themselves as saints, as
pearls, and by the launching of noble endeavor, flee dreaded
introspection forever.
–The Book of Counted Sorrows
Laugh at tyrants and the tragedy they
inflict. Such men welcome our tears as evidence of subservience, but
our laughter condemns them to ignominy.
–Endless River, Laura Shane S X 1.
He stands in his parents’ kitchen, watching the falling snow through the
window above the sink, shaking with hunger, and wolfing down leftover
meatloaf.
This is one of those decisive moments that separate real heroes from
pretenders. When all is darkest, when tragedy piles on tragedy, when
hope seems to be a game only for idiots and fools, does Harrison Ford or
Kevin Costner or Tom Cruise or Wesley Snipes or Kurt Russell quit?
No. Never. Unthinkable. They are heroes. They persevere. Rise to
the occasion. They not only deal with adversity but thrive on it.
From sharing the worst moments of those great men’s lives, he knows how
to cope with emotional devastation, mental depression, physical abuse in
enormous quantities, and even the threat of alien domination of the
earth.
Move, move, confront, challenge, grapple, and prevail.
He must not dwell on the tragedy of his parents’ deaths. The creatures
he destroyed were surely not his mother and father, any way, but mimics
like the one that has stolen his own life. He might never learn when
his real parents were murdered and replaced, and in any event he must
delay grieving for them.
Thinking too much about his parents–or about anything–is * not
merely a waste of precious time but anti-heroic. Heroes don’t think.
Heroes act.
Move, move, confront, challenge, grapple, and prevail.
Finished eating, he goes to the garage by way of a laundry room off the
kitchen. Switching on fluorescent lights as he crosses the threshold,
he discovers two vehicles are available for his use an old blue Dodge
and an apparently new Jeep Wagoneer. He will use the Jeep because of
its four-wheel drive.
The keys to the vehicle hang on a pegboard in the laundry room.
In a cabinet, he also finds a large box of detergent. He reads the list
of chemicals on the box, satisfied with what he discovers.
He returns to the kitchen.
The end of one row of lower cabinets is finished with a wine rack.
After locating a corkscrew in a drawer, he opens four bottles and
empties the wine into the sink.
In another kitchen drawer he finds a plastic funnel among other odds and
ends of cooking implements. A third drawer is filled with clean white
dish towels, and a fourth is the source for a pair of scissors and a
book of matches.
He carries the bottles and the other items into the laundry room and
puts them on the tiled counter beside the deep sink.
In the garage again, he takes a red five-gallon gasoline can from a
shelf to the left of the workbench. When he unscrews the cap,
high-octane fumes waft out of the container. Spring through autumn, Dad
probably keeps gasoline in the can to use in the lawn mower, but it is
empty now.
Rummaging through the drawers and cabinets around the work bench, he