the balustrade, trying to strangle him. Hands of iron.
Fingers like hydraulic pincers driven by a powerful motor. Compressing
the carotid arteries.
Marty rammed a knee into his assailant’s crotch, but it was blocked.
The attempt left him unbalanced, with just one foot on the floor, and he
was shoved farther across the balustrade, until he was both pinned
against and balanced on the handrail.
Choking, unable to breathe, aware that the worst danger was the
diminution of blood to his brain, Marty clasped his hands in a wedge and
drove them upward between The Other’s arms, trying to spread them wider
and break the strangulating grip. The assailant redoubled his efforts,
determined to hold tight. Marty strained harder, too, and his
overworked heart pounded painfully against his breastbone.
They should have been equally matched, damn it, they were the same
height, same weight, same build, in the same physical condition, to all
appearances the same man.
Yet The Other, though suffering two potentially mortal bullet wounds,
was the stronger, and not merely because he had the advantage of a
superior position, better leverage. He seemed to possess inhuman power.
Face to face with his duplicate, washed by each hot explosive breath,
Marty might have been gazing into a mirror, though the savage reflection
before him was contorted by expressions he’d never seen on his own face.
Bestial rage. Hatred as purely toxic as cyanide.
Spasms of maniacal pleasure twisted the familiar features as the
strangler thrilled to the act of murder.
With lips peeled back from his teeth, spittle flying as he spoke,
impossibly but repeatedly tightening his stranglehold to emphasize his
words, The Other said, “Need my life now, my life, mine, mine, now.
Need my family, now, mine, now, now, now, need it, NEED IT!”
Negative fireflies swooped and darted across Marty’s field of vision,
negative because they were the photo-opposite of the lanternbearing
fireflies on a warm summer night, not pulses of light in the darkness
but pulses of darkness in the light. Five, ten, twenty, a hundred, a
teeming swarm. The looming face of The Other vanished in sections under
the blinking black swarm.
Despairing of breaking the assailant’s grip, Marty clawed at the
hate-filled face. But he couldn’t quite reach it. His every effort
seemed feeble, hopeless.
So many negative fireflies.
Glimpsed between them, the vicious and wrathful face of his wife’s
demanding new husband, the domineering face of his daughters’ stern new
father.
Fireflies. Everywhere, everywhere. Spreading their wings of
obliteration.
Bang. Loud as a rifle shot. Second, third, fourth explosions-one right
after another. Balusters breaking.
The handrail cracked. Sagged backward. It no longer received support
from the balusters that had gone to splinters under it.
Marty stopped resisting the attacker and frantically tried to wrap his
legs and arms around the railing in the hope of clinging to the anchored
remains instead of hurtling out through the opening gap.
But the center section of the balustrade disintegrated so completely, so
swiftly, he couldn’t find purchase in its crumbling elements, and the
weight of his clutching assailant lent gravity more assistance than it
required. As they teetered on the brink, however, Marty’s actions
altered the dynamics of their struggle just enough so The Other rolled
past him and fell first. The assailant let go of Marty’s throat but
dragged him along in the top position. They dropped into the stairwell,
crashed through the outer railing, instantly making kindling of it, and
slammed into the Mexican-tile floor of the foyer.
The drop had been sixteen feet, not a tremendous distance, probably not
even a lethal distance, and their momentum had been broken by the lower
railing. Yet the impact knocked out what little breath Marty had drawn
on the way down, even though he was cushioned by The Other, who hit the
Mexican tiles back-first with the resounding thwack of a sledgehammer.
Gasping, coughing, Marty pushed away from his double and tried to
scramble out of reach. He was breathless, lightheaded, and not sure if
he had broken any bones. When he gasped, the air stung his raw throat,
and when he coughed, the pain might not have been worse if he’d tried to
swallow a tangled wad of barbed wire and bent nails. Scrambling