leached away, her hip and knee joints began to ache. She wished she
were wearing insulated ski pants, and she realized she should have at
least brought a blanket to put between herself and the granite.
Under the influence of the building gale, the highest branches of the
firs and pines creaked like scores of doors easing open on rusty hinges.
Not even the muffling boughs of the evergreens could soften the rising
voice of the wind.
The gradually dimming light of the day’s last hour was the steely shade
of ice on a winter pond.
Every sight and sound was cold and seemed to exacerbate the chill that
pressed into her from the granite. She began to worry about how long
she could hold out before she would need to return to the cabin to get
warm.
Then a deep-blue Jeep station wagon came uphill on the county road and
made a hard, sharp turn into the driveway. It looked like the Jeep that
belonged to Marty’s parents.
Rheostat at seven degrees. South from Mammoth Lakes, through billowing
curtains of snow, through whirling snowdevils, through torrents and
lashes and blasts and cataracts and airborne walls of snow, along a
highway barely defined beneath the deepening mantle, passing slow-moving
traffic at high speed, flashing his headlights to encourage
obstructionists to pull over and let him go by, even passing a county
snowplow and a cinder-spreading truck crowned with yellow and red
emergency beacons that briefly transform the millions of white flakes
into glowing embers. A left turn. Narrower road.
Uphill.
Into forested slopes. Long chain-link fence on the right, capped with
spiral razor wire, broken down in places. Not there yet. A little
farther.
Close. Soon.
The four gasoline bombs stand in a cardboard box on the floor in front
of the passenger seat, wedged into the knee space. The gaps between
them are packed with folded newspapers, so the bottles will not clatter
against one another.
Pungent fumes arise from the saturated cloth wicks. The perfume of
destruction.
Guided by the magnetic attraction of the false father, he makes an
abrupt right turn into a single-lane driveway already half hidden by
snow. He brakes as little as possible, cornering in a slide, and moving
his foot to the accelerator again even as the Jeep is still finding
purchase and both rear tires are spinning-squealing fiercely.
Directly ahead, at least a hundred yards into the woods, stands a cabin.
Soft light at the windows. Roof capped with snow.
Even if the BMW was not parked to the left of the place, he’d know he’d
found his quarry. The imposter’s hateful magnetic presence pulls him
forward.
At first sight of the cabin, he decides to make a full frontal assault,
regardless of the wisdom or consequences. His mother and father are
dead, wife and children probably long dead, too, forms and faces
mockingly imitated by the vicious alien species that has stolen his own
name and memories. He seethes with rage, hatred so intense it’s
physically painful, anguish like a fire in his heart, and only swift
justice will bring desperately needed relief.
The churning tires bite through the snow into dirt.
He rams his foot down on the accelerator.
The Jeep bolts forward.
A cry of savage fury and vengeance escapes him, and the mental rheostat
spins from seven degrees to three hundred and sixty.
Marty was at the front window when headlight beams pierced the
falling snow out on the county road, but at first he couldn’t see the
source. Coming uphill, the vehicle was hidden by trees and roadside
brush. Then it burst into sight–a Jeep–turning hard into the drive
way at high speed, the back end fishtailing, plumes of snow and slush
erupting behind its spinning rear tires.
An instant later, as he was still reacting to the arrival of the Jeep,
he was stricken by a brutal psychic tidal wave as strong as anything he
had previously experienced but of a different quality. This was not
merely the urgent, questing power that had hammered him on other
occasions, but a blast of black and bitter emotion, raw and uncensored ,
which put him inside the mind of his enemy as no human being ever before