wheel into the slide, but applied physics didn’t prove reliable this
time. The car swung around a hundred and eighty degrees, simultaneously
moving sideways, and they only stopped when they careened off the road
and fetched up against the chain-link fence that marked the perimeter of
the property owned by the defunct Prophetic Church of the Rapture.
Marty climbed out of the car. He yanked open the back door, leaned in,
and helped the frightened girls disentangle themselves from their
seatbelts.
He didn’t even look to see if The Other was still coming because he knew
the bastard was coming. This guy would never stop, never, not until
they killed him, maybe not even then.
As Marty extracted Emily from the back seat, Paige scrambled out of the
driver’s door because her side of the car was jammed into the
chain-link. Having withdrawn the manila envelopes of cash from under
her seat, she stuffed them inside her ski jacket. As she zipped shut,
she looked uphill.
“Shit,” she said, and the shotgun boomed.
Marty helped Charlotte out of the car as the Mossberg thundered again.
He thought he heard the hard crack of small-arms fire, too, but the
bullet must have gone wide of them.
Shielding the girls, pushing them behind him and away from the burning
car, he glanced uphill.
The Other stood arrogantly in the center of the road, about a hundred
yards away, convinced he was protected from the shotgun fire by
distance, the deflecting power of the wailing wind, and perhaps his own
supernatural ability to bounce back from serious damage. He was
exactly Marty’s size, yet even at a distance he seemed to tower over
them, a dark and ominous figure. Maybe it was the perspective.
Almost nonchalantly, he broke open the cylinder of his revolver and
tipped expended cartridges into the snow.
“He’s reloading,” Paige said, taking the opportunity to jam additional
shells into the magazine of her shotgun, “let’s get out of here.”
“Where?” Marty wondered, looking around frantically at the snow-whipped
landscape.
He wished a car would appear from one direction or another.
Then he canceled his own wish because he knew The Other would kill any
passersby who tried to interfere.
They moved downhill, into the biting wind, using the time to put some
distance between themselves and their pursuer while they figured what to
do next.
He ruled out trying to reach one of the other cabins scattered through
the high woods. Most were vacation homes. No one would be in residence
on a Tuesday in December unless, by morning, the new snow brought them
in for the skiing. And if they stumbled into a cabin where someone was
at home, with The Other trailing after them, Marty didn’t want the
deaths of innocent strangers on his conscience.
Route 203 lay at the bottom of the county road. Even in the early hours
of a blizzard, steady traffic would be passing between the lakes and
Mammoth Lakes itself. If there were a lot of witnesses, The Other
couldn’t kill them all. He’d have to retreat.
But the bottom of the county road was too distant. They’d never make it
before they ran out of shotgun shells to keep their enemy at bay–or
before the greater accuracy and range of the revolver allowed him to
pick them off one by one.
They came to a gap in the battered chain-link fence.
“Here, come on,” Marty said.
“Isn’t that place abandoned?” Paige objected.
“There’s nowhere else,” he said, taking Charlotte and Emily by the hand
and leading them onto the church property.
His hope was that someone would come along soon, see the half-burned
BMW, and report it to the sheriff’s department. Instead of fanning the
fire that had been feeding on the paint, the wind had snuffed it, but
the tire was still burning, and the battered car was hard to ignore.
If a couple of well-armed deputies showed up to check out the area and
could be enlisted in the struggle, they wouldn’t under stand how
formidable The Other was, but they wouldn’t be as naive and helpless as
ordinary citizens, either.
After a brief hesitation, during which she glanced worriedly uphill at