ammo. Let him go for now. Help me up.”
With her assistance, he was able to get to his feet.
“How bad?” she asked worriedly.
“I’m not dying. Let’s get inside before he decides to take another shot
at us.”
He followed her through the door into the narthex, where the darkness
was relieved only by faint rays penetrating the partly open door and
glassless fanlights.
The girls were crying, Charlotte louder than Emily, and Marty tried to
reassure them. “It’s okay, I’m all right, just a little nick. All I
need is a Band-Aid, one with a picture of Snoopy on it, and I’ll feel
all better.”
In truth, his left arm was half numb. He only had partial use of it.
When he flexed his hand, he couldn’t curl it into a tight fist.
Paige eased to the eighteen-inch gap between the big door and the jamb,
where the wind whistled and gibbered. She peered out at The Other.
Trying to get a better sense of the damage the bullet had done, Marty
slipped his right hand inside his ski jacket and gingerly explored the
front of his left shoulder. Even a light touch ignited a flare of pain
that made him grit his teeth. His wool sweater was saturated with
blood.
“Take the girls farther back into the church,” Paige whispered urgently,
though their enemy could not possibly have heard her out there in the
storm. “All the way to the other end.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I’ll wait here for him.”
The girls protested. “Mommy, don’t.”
“Mom, come with us, you gotta.”
“Mommy, please.”
“I’ll be fine,” Paige said, “I’ll be safe. Really. It’ll be perfect.
Don’t you see? Marty, when the creep senses you moving away, he’ll come
into the church. He’ll expect us to be together.” As she talked, she
put two more shells into the Mossberg magazine to replace the most
recent rounds she’d expended. “He won’t expect me to be waiting right
here for him.”
Marty remembered having this same discussion before, back at the cabin,
when she wanted to go outside and hide in the rocks. Her plan hadn’t
worked then, although not because it was flawed. The Other had driven
past her in the Jeep, evidently unaware that she was lying in wait. If
he hadn’t pulled such an unpredictable stunt, ramming the station wagon
right into the house, she might have slipped up on him and dropped him
from behind.
Nevertheless, Marty didn’t want to leave her alone by the door.
But there was no time for debate because he suspected his wound was soon
going to begin sapping what strength he still had.
Besides, he didn’t have a better plan to suggest.
In the gloom, he could barely recognize Paige’s face.
He hoped this wouldn’t be the last time he saw it.
He shepherded Charlotte and Emily out of the narthex and into the nave.
It smelled of dust and dampness and the wild things that nested there in
the years since the cultists had left to resume their shattered lives
instead of rising to sit at the right hand of the Lord.
On the north side, the restless wind hartied snow through the broken
windows. If winter had a heart, inanimate and carved of ice, it would
have been no more frigid than that place, nor could death have been more
arctic.
“My feet are cold,” Emily said.
He said, “Sssshhh. I know.”
“Mine too,” Charlotte said in a whisper.
“I know.”
Having something so ordinary to complain about helped to make their
situation seem less bizarre, less frightening.
“Really cold,” Charlotte elaborated.
“Keep going. All the way to the front.”
None of them had boots, only athletic shoes. Snow had saturated the
fabric, caked in every crease, and turned to ice. Marty figured they
didn’t need to worry about frostbite just yet. That took a while to
develop. They might not live long enough to suffer from it.
Shadows hung like bunting throughout the nave, but that large chamber
was brighter than the narthex. Arched double-lancet windows, long ago
relieved of the burden of glass, were featured along both side walls and
soared two-thirds of the distance to the vaulted ceiling. They admitted