rounded all forms, and the landscape rolled like the swells of a
mid-ocean passage, although in some places the wind had sculpted drifts
into scalloped ridges like cresting waves frozen in the act of breaking
on a beach. The woods, which could have offered contrast to the
whiteness that flooded his vision, were mostly concealed by falling and
blowing snow as obscuring as fog at sea.
Disorientation was an unremitting threat in that bleached land. He got
off course twice while still on his own property, recognizing his error
only because the flattened meadow grass underneath the snow provided a
spongier surface than the hard-packed driveway.
Step by hard-fought step, Jack expected something to come out of the
curtains of snow or rise from a drift in which it had been lying, the
Giver itself or one of the surrogates that it had mined from the
graveyard. He continually scanned left and right, ready to pump out
every round in the shotgun to bring down anything that rushed him.
He was glad that he had worn sunglasses. Even with shades, he found
the unrelieved brightness inhibiting. He strained to see through the
wintry sameness to guard against attack and to make out familiar
details of the terrain that would keep him on the right track.
He dared not think about Heather and Toby. When he did so, his pace
slowed and he was nearly overcome by the temptation to go back to them
and forget about Ponderosa Pines. For their sake and his own, he
blocked them from his thoughts, concentrated solely on covering ground,
and virtually became a hiking machine.
The baleful wind shrieked without surcease, blew snow in his face, and
forced him to bow his head. It shoved him off his feet twice–on one
occasion causing him to drop the shotgun in a drift, where he had to
scramble frantically to find it–and became almost as real an adversary
as any man against whom he’d ever been pitted. By the time he reached
the end of the private lane and paused for breath between the tall
stone posts and under the arched wooden sign that marked the entrance
to Quartermass Ranch, he was cursing the wind as if it could hear
him.
He wiped one gloved hand across the sunglasses to scrape off the snow
that had stuck to the lenses. His eyes stung as they sometimes did
when an opthalmologist put drops in them to dilate the pupils prior to
an examination.
Without the shades, he might already have been snowblind.
He was sick of the taste and smell of wet wool, which flavored the air
he drew through his mouth and scented every inhalation when he breathed
through his nose. The vapor he exhaled had thoroughly saturated the
fabric, and the condensation had frozen. With one hand he massaged the
makeshift muffler, cracking the thin, brittle ice and crumbling the
thicker layer of compacted snow, he sloughed it all away so he could
breathe more easily than he’d been able to breathe for the past two or
three hundred yards.
Though he found it difficult to believe that the Giver didn’t know he
had left the house, he had reached the edge of the ranch without being
assaulted. A considerable trek remained ahead, but the greatest danger
of attack would have been in the territory he had already covered
without incident.
Maybe the puppetmaster was not as omniscient as it either pretended or
seemed to be.
A distended and ominous shadow, as tortured as that of a fright figure
in a fun house, rose along the landing wall: the puppetmaster and its
decomposing marionette laboring stiffly but doggedly toward the top of
the first flight of stairs. As the thing ascended, it no doubt
absorbed the fragments of strange flesh that bullets had torn from it,
but it didn’t pause to do so.
Although the thing was not fast, it was too fast for Heather’s taste,
too fast by half. It seemed to be racing up the damned stairs.
In spite of her shaky hands, she finally unscrewed the stubborn cap on
the spout of the fuel can. Held the container by its handle. Used her