their nemesis, Paige followed him and the girls through the
hole in the fence.
The speedloader slips from his fingers and drops into the snow as he
removes it from the pouch on his belt. It is the last of the two he
took from the dead man in the surveillance van.
He stoops, plucks it out of the snow, and brushes it off against the
cranberry-red sweater under his varsity jacket. He brings it to the
open revolver, slips it in, twists it, drops it, and snaps the cylinder
shut.
He will have to use his last rounds carefully. The replicants are not
going to be easy to kill.
He now knows that the woman is a replicant just like the false father.
Alien flesh. Inhuman. She cannot be his Paige, for she is too
aggressive. His Paige would be submissive, eager for domination, like
the women in the Senator’s film collection. His Paige is surely dead.
He must accept that, difficult as it is. This thing is only
masquerading as Paige, and not well. Worse, if Paige is gone forever,
so are his loving daughters. The girls, cute and convincingly human,
are also replicants–demonic, extraterrestrial, and dangerous.
His former life is irretrievable.
His family is gone forever.
A black abyss of despair yawns under him, but he must not fall into it.
He must find the strength to go on and fight either until he achieves
victory in the name of all humankind–or is destroyed. He must be as
courageous as Kurt Russell and Donald Sutherland were when they found
themselves in similar dire straits, for he is a hero, and a hero must
persevere.
Downhill, the four creatures disappear through a hole in the chain-link
fence. All he wants now is to see them dead, scramble their brains,
dismember and decapitate them, eviscerate them, set them afire, take
every precaution against their resurrection, for they are not merely the
killers of his real family but a threat to the world.
The thought occurs to him that, if he survives, these terrifying
experiences will provide him with material for a novel. He surely will
be able to get past the opening sentence, an accomplishment of which he
was incapable yesterday. Though his wife and children are lost to him
forever, he might be able to salvage his career from the ruins of his
life.
Slipping and sliding, he hurries toward the gap in the fence.
The windshield wipers were caked with snow that was hardening into ice.
They stuttered and thumped across the glass.
Oslett consulted the computer-generated map, then pointed to a turn-off
ahead. “There, on the right.”
Clocker put on the turn signal.
Like the ghost ship Mary Celeste silently materializing from a strange
fog with tattered sails unfurled and decks empty of crew, the abandoned
church loomed out of the driving snow.
At first, in the obscuring storm and fading gray light of late
afternoon, Marty thought the building was in good repair, but that
impression was transient. As they drew nearer, he saw that a lot of
roof tiles were missing. Sections of the copper rain gutter were gone,
while other pieces dangled precariously, swaying and creaking in the
wind. Most of the windows were broken out, and vandals had spray
painted obscenities on the once-handsome brick walls.
Rambling complexes of buildings–offices, workshops, a nursery,
dormitories, a dining hall–stood immediately behind and to both sides
of the steepled main structure. The Prophetic Church of the Rapture had
been a cult that required its members to contribute all of their worldly
belongings upon admittance and to live in a tightly governed commune.
They raced through the inch-deep snow, as fast as the girls could
manage, toward the entrance to the church, rather than to one of the
other buildings, because the church was closest. They needed to get out
of sight as quickly as possible. Though The Other could track them
through his connection with Marty no matter where they went, at least he
couldn’t shoot at them if he couldn’t see them.
Twelve broad steps led up to a double set of ten-foot-high oak doors
with six-foot-high fanlights above each pair. All but a few ruby and