appendages had begun to seek each other.
Bodies are.
Those words were, according to Jack, part of what the Giver had said
through Toby in the cemetery.
Bodies are.
A cryptic statement then. All too clear now. Bodies are–now and
forever, flesh without end. Bodies are– expendable if necessary,
fiercely adaptable, severable without loss of intellect or memory and
therefore in infinite supply.
The bleakness of her sudden insight, the perception that they could not
win regardless of how valiantly they struggled or how much courage they
possessed, kicked her across the borderline of sanity for a moment,
into madness no less total for its brevity. Instead of recoiling from
the monstrously alien creature stilting determinedly down the steps to
rejoin its mothermass, as any sane person would have done, she plunged
after it, off the landing with a strangled scream that sounded like the
thin and bitter grievance of a dying animal in a sawtooth trap, the
Micro Uzi thrust in front of her.
Although she knew she was putting herself in terrible jeopardy,
unconscionably abandoning Toby at the top of the stairs, Heather was
unable to stop. She went down one, two, three, four, five steps in the
time that the crablike thing descended two. They were four steps apart
when the thing abruptly reversed direction without bothering to turn
around, as if front and back and sideways were all the same to it. She
stopped so fast she almost lost her balance, and the crab ascended
toward her a lot faster than it had descended.
Three steps between them.
Two.
She squeezed the trigger, emptied the Uzi’s last rounds into the
scuttling form, chopping it into four-five-six bloodless pieces that
tumbled and flopped down a few steps, where they lay squirming.
Squirming ceaselessly. Supple and snakelike again. Eagerly and
silently questing toward one another.
Its silence was almost the worst thing about it. No screams of pain
when it was shot. No shrieks of rage.
, Its patient and silent recovery, its deliberate continuation of the
assault, mocked her hopes of triumph.
At the foot of the stairs, the apparition had pulled itself erect. The
Giver, still hideously bonded to the corpse, started up the steps
again.
Heather’s spell of madness shattered. She fled to the landing, grabbed
the can of gasoline, and scrambled to the second floor, where Toby and
Falstaff were waiting.
The retriever was shuddering. Whining rather than barking, he looked
as if he’d sensed the same thing Heather had seen for herself:
effective defense was impossible. This was an enemy that couldn’t be
brought down with teeth or claws any more than with guns.
Toby said, “Do I have to do it? I don’t want to.”
She didn’t know what he meant, didn’t have time to ask. “We’ll be
okay, honey, we’ll make it.”
From the first flight of steps, out of sight beyond the landing, came
the sound of heavy footsteps ascending. A hiss. It was like the
sibilant escape of steam from a pinhole in a pipe–but a cold sound.
She put the Uzi aside and fumbled with the cap on the spout of the
gasoline can.
Fire might work. She had to believe it might. If the thing burned,
nothing would be left to remake itself. Bodies are. But bodies
reduced to ashes could not reclaim their form and function, regardless
of how alien their flesh and metabolism. Damn it, fire had to work.
“It’s never afraid,” Toby said in a voice that revealed the profound
depths of his own fear.
“Get away from here, baby! Go! Go to the bedroom! Hurry!”
The boy ran, and the dog went with him.
At times Jack felt that he was a swimmer in a white sea under a white
sky on a world every bit as strange as the planet from which the
intruder at Quartermass Ranch had traveled. Though he could feel the
ground beneath his feet as he slogged the half mile to the county road,
he never got a glimpse of it under the enduring white torrents cast
down by the storm, and it seemed as unreal to him as the bottom of the
Pacific might seem to a swimmer a thousand fathoms above it. The snow