say no to it. No, no, no to it.”
The tuneless music, alternately irritating and soothing, pushed her
with what seemed like real physical force when the volume rose, pulled
on her when the volume ebbed, pushed and pulled, until she realized
that she was swaying as Toby had swayed in the kitchen when under the
spell of the radio.
In one of the quieter passages, she heard a murmur Toby’s voice. She
couldn’t catch the words.
She looked at him. He had that dazed expression. Transported. He was
moving his lips. He might have been saying “yes, yes,” but she
couldn’t tell for sure.
Kitchen door. Still ajar two inches, no more, as it had been.
Something still waiting out there on the porch.
She knew it.
The boy whispered to his unseen seducer, soft urgent words that might
have been the first faltering steps of acquiescence or total
surrender.
“Shit!” she said.
She backed up two steps, turned toward the livingroom arch on her left,
and opened fire on the television. A brief burst, six or eight rounds,
tore into the TV. The picture tube exploded, thin white vapor or smoke
from the ruined electronics spurted into the air, and the darkly
beguiling siren song was hammered into silence by the clatter of the
Uzi.
A strong, cold draft swept through the hallway, and Heather spun toward
the rear of the house. The back door was no longer ajar. It stood
wide open. She could see the snow-covered porch and, beyond the porch,
the churning white day.
The Giver had first walked out of a dream. Now it had walked out of
the storm, into the house. It was somewhere in the kitchen, to the
left or right of the hall door, and she had missed the chance to cut it
down as it entered.
If it was just on the other side of the threshold between the hall and
the kitchen, it had closed to a maximum striking distance of about
twenty-five feet. Getting dangerously close again.
Toby was standing on the first step of the staircase, clear-eyed once
more but shivering and pale with terror. The dog was beside him,
alert, sniffing the air.
Behind her, another pot-pan-bowl-flatware-dish alarm went off with a
loud clanging of metal and shattering of glass. Toby screamed,
Falstaff erupted into ferocious barking again, and Heather swung
around, heart slamming so hard it shook her arms, made the gun jump up
and down. The front door was arcing inward. A forest of long
red-speckled black tentacles burst through the gap between door and
jamb, glossy and writhing. So there were two of them, one at the front
of the house, one at the back. The Uzi chattered. Six rounds, maybe
eight. The door shut. But a mysterious dark figure was hunched
against it, a small part of it visible in the beveled-glass window in
the top of the door.
Without pausing to see if she’d actually hit the son of a bitch or
scored only the door and wall, she spun toward the kitchen yet again,
punching three or four rounds through the empty hallway behind her even
as she turned.
Nothing there.
She had been sure the first one would be striking at her back.
Wrong.
Maybe twenty rounds left in the Uzi’s double magazine. Maybe only
fifteen.
They couldn’t stay in the hall. Not with one of the damned things in
the kitchen, another on the front porch.
Why had she thought there’d be only one of them? Because in the dream
there was only one? Because Toby had spoken of just a single
seducer?
Might be more than two. Hundreds.
The living room was on one side of her. Dining room on the other.
Ultimately, either place seemed likely to become a trap.
In different rooms all over the ground floor, windows imploded
simultaneously.
The clinkjangle-tink of cascading glass and the shrieking of the wind
at every breach decided her. Up. She and Toby would go up. Easier to
defend high ground.
She grabbed the can of gasoline.
The front door came open behind her again, banging against the
scattered items with which they had built the alarm tower. She assumed