perhaps by the stark fear he sensed in her, but then she saw that his
attention was on the window above the sink. He rapped out hard,
vicious, warning barks meant to scare off an adversary.
She spun around in time to see something on the porch slip away to the
left of the window. It was dark and tall. She glimpsed it out of the
corner of her eye, but it was too quick for her to see what it was.
The doorknob rattled.
The radio had been a diversion.
As Heather snatched the Micro Uzi off the counter, the retriever
charged past her and positioned himself in front of the pots and pans
and dishes stacked against the back door. He barked ferociously at the
brass knob, which turned back and forth, back and forth.
Heather grabbed Toby by the shoulder, pushed him toward the hall
door.
“Into the hall, but stay close behind me quick!”
The matches were already in her jacket pocket. She snared the nearest
of the five-gallon cans of gasoline by its handle. She could take only
one because she wasn’t about to put down the Uzi.
Falstaff was like a mad dog, snarling so savagely that spittle flew
from his chops, hair standing up straight on the back of his neck, his
tail flat across his butt, crouched and tense, as if he might spring at
the door even before the thing outside could come through it.
The lock opened with a hard clack.
The intruder had a key. Or maybe it didn’t need one. Heather
remembered how the radio had snapped on by itself.
She backed onto the threshold between the kitchen and ground-floor
hall.
Reflections of the overhead light trickled scintillantly along the
brass doorknob as it turned.
She put the can of gasoline on the floor and held the Uzi with both
hands.
“Falstaff, get away from there! Falstaff!”
As the door eased inward, the tower of housewares tottered.
The dog backed off as she continued to call to him.
The security assemblage teetered, tipped over, crashed. Pots, pans,
and dishes bounced-slid-spun across the kitchen floor, forks and knives
rang against one another like bells, and drinking glasses shattered.
The dog scrambled to Heather’s side but kept barking fiercely, teeth
bared, eyes wild.
She had a sure grip on the Uzi, the safeties off, her finger curled
lightly on the trigger. What if it jammed? Forget that, it wouldn’t
jam. It had worked like a dream when she’d tried it out against a
canyon wall in a remote area above Malibu several months earlier:
automatic gunfire echoing along the walls of that narrow defile, spent
shell casings spewing into the air, scrub brush torn to pieces, the
smell of hot brass and burned gunpowder, bullets banging out in a
punishing stream, as smooth and easy as water from a hose. It wouldn’t
jam, not in a million years. But, Jesus, what if it does?
The door eased inward. A narrow crack. An inch. Then wider.
Something snaked through the gap a few inches above the knob. In that
instant the nightmare was confirmed, the unreal made real, the
impossible suddenly incarnate, for what intruded was a tentacle, mostly
black but irregularly speckled with red, as shiny and smooth as wet
silk, perhaps two inches in diameter at the thickest point that she
could see, tapering as thin as an earthworm at the tip. It quested
into the warm air of the kitchen, fluidly curling, flexing obscenely.
That was enough. She didn’t need to see more, didn’t want to see more,
so she opened fire. Chuda-chudachuda-chuda. The briefest squeeze of
the trigger spewed six or seven rounds, punching holes in the oak door,
gouging and splintering the edge of it. The deafening explosions
slammed back and forth from wall to wall of the kitchen, sharp echoes
overlaying echoes.
The tentacle slipped away with the alacrity of a retracted whip.
She heard no cry, no unearthly scream. She didn’t know if she had hurt
the thing or not.
She wasn’t going to go and look on the porch, no way, and she wasn’t
going to wait to see if it would storm into the room more aggressively