they could get from the door, but Marty felt too wobbly to traverse even
that short distance without support. As he circled the platform to join
them, leaning with his right hand against the waist-high parapet, the
floor tiles seemed slippery though they were textured to be less
treacherous when wet.
He made the mistake of glancing over the edge of the parapet at the
phosphorescent mantle of snow on the ground six or seven stories below.
The view prompted an attack of vertigo so strong that he almost passed
out before averting his eyes from the long fall.
When he reached his daughters, Marty was more nauseous than ever and
shivering so badly that any attempt to speak would have resulted in
shuddery chains of sounds only vaguely resembling words. As frigid as
he was, perspiration nonetheless trickled the length of his spine.
Wind howled, snow whirled, night descended, and the bell tower seemed to
be turning like a carrousel.
The pain from the wound in his shoulder had spread through his upper
body, until the fiery point of injury was only the center of a more
generalized ache that throbbed with every thud of his rapidly pounding
heart. He felt helpless, ineffective, and cursed himself for being so
useless at that very moment when his family needed him most.
Paige hadn’t joined Marty and the girls on the platform. She stood on
the far side of the open door, on the enclosed landing, peering down the
curved stairs.
Flames spouted from the bore of the gun, making shadows dance. The boom
of the shot–and echoes of it–tolled across the bell-tower platform,
and from the stairwell came a shriek of pain and rage that was less than
human, followed immediately by a second shot and an even more shrill and
alien screech.
Marty’s hopes soared–and collapsed an instant later when the agonized
cry of The Other was followed by Paige’s scream.
Along the curved wall, step by step, burning with hunger, filled with
fire, the body’s furnace stoked to a white-hot blaze, tortured by need,
alert for a sound, higher, higher, higher in the darkness, churning
within, seething, desperate and driven, driven by need, then the looming
thing, the Paige-thing on the landing above, a silhouette wrapped in
shadows but recognizably the Paige-thing, repulsive and deadly, an alien
seed. He crosses his arms over his face, protecting his eyes, absorbing
the first hard blast, a thousand spikes of pain, hammered deep, almost
knocked backward down the stairs, rocking on his heels, arms paralyzed
for an instant, bleeding and torn, afire with need, need, inner pain
worse than the outer, move-move-confront challenge-grapple-and-prevail,
lunging forward, upward, screaming involuntarily, the second blast a
sledgehammer to the chest, heart stutters, stutters, blackness swoops,
heart stutters, left lung pops like a balloon, no breath, blood in his
mouth. Flesh rips, blood spurts, flesh knits, blood seeps. He inhales,
inhales and is still moving up ward, upward into the woman, never having
endured such agony, a world of pain, cauldron of fire, lava in his
veins, a nightmare of all-consuming hunger, testing his miraculous
body’s limits, teetering on the edge of death, smashes into her, drives
her backward, claws at the weapon, tears it away from her, pitches it
aside, going for her throat, her face, snapping at her face, biting at
her face, she’s holding him back, but he needs her face, face, her
smooth pale face, alien meat, sustenance to slake the need, the need,
the terrible burning endless need.
The Other tore the shotgun out of Paige’s grasp, threw it aside, slammed
into her, and knocked her backward through the doorway.
The area under the belfry seemed to be illuminated more by the natural
phosphorescence of the falling snow than by the fast-fading light of the
dying day. Marty saw The Other had been gruesomely wounded and had
undergone strange changes–was still undergoing them–although the ashen
twilight shrouded details of its metamorphosis.
Paige fell onto the bell-tower platform. The Other dropped atop her
like a predator upon its prey, tearing at her ski jacket, issuing a dry
hiss of excitement, gnashing its teeth with the ferocity of a wild
creature from out of the mountain woods.