the gearshift and other controls to the right of the man. If he leaned
forward only inches, he could speak directly into his rescuer’s ear.
“You okay?” the driver asked.
“Yeah.”
They didn’t have to shout inside the cab, but they did have to raise
their voices.
“So tight in here,” the driver said, “we may be strangers now, but by
the time we get there, we’ll be ready for marriage.” He put the grader
in gear.
“Quartermass Ranch, all the way up at the main house?”
“That’s right.”
The grader lurched, then rolled smoothly forward. The plow made a cold
scraping sound as it skimmed the blacktop. The vibrations passed
through the frame of the grader, up through the floor, and deep into
Jack’s bones.
Weaponless. Her back to the stairhead door.
Fire was visible through the smoke at the hall doorway.
Snow at the windows. Cool snow. A way out. Safety. Crash through
the window, no time to open it, straight , through, onto the porch
roof, roll to the lawn. Dangerous. Might work.
Except they wouldn’t make it that far without being dragged down.
The volcanic eruption of sound from the radio was deafening. Heather
couldn’t think.
The retriever shivered at her side, snarling and snapping at the
demonic figures that threatened them, though he knew as well as she did
that he couldn’t save them.
When she’d seen the Giver snare the dog, pitch him away, and then grab
Toby, Heather had found the .38 in her hand with no memory of having
drawn it.
At the same time, also without realizing it, she had dropped the can of
gasoline; now it stood across the room, out of reach.
Gasoline might not have mattered, anyway. One of the creatures was
already on fire, and that wasn’t stopping it.
Bodies are.
Eduardo’s burning corpse was reduced to charred bone, bubbling fat.
All the clothes and hair had gone to ashes. And there was barely
enough of the Giver left to hold the bones together, yet the macabre
assemblage lurched toward her.
Apparently, as long as any fragment of the alien body remained alive,
its entire consciousness could be exerted through that last quiverring
scrap of flesh.
Madness. Chaos.
The Giver was chaos, the very embodiment of meaninglessness,
hopelessness, and malignancy, and madness. Chaos in the flesh,
demented and strange beyond understanding. Because there was nothing
to understand. That was what she believed of it now. It had no
explicable purpose of existence. It lived only to live. No
aspirations. No meaning except to hate. Driven by a compulsion to
Become and destroy, leaving chaos behind it.
A draft pulled more smoke into the room.
The dog hacked, and Heather heard Toby coughing behind her.
“Pull your jacket ovel your nose, breathe through your jacket!”
But why did it matter whether they died by fire–or in less clean
ways?
Maybe fire was preferable.
The other Giver, slithering on the bedroom floor among the ruins of the
dead woman, suddenly shot a sinuous tentacle at Heather, snaring her
ankle.
She screamed.
The Eduardo-thing tottered nearer, hissing.
Behind her, sheltered between her and the door, Toby shouted, “Yes!
All right, yes!”
“Too late,” she warned him; “No!”
The driver of the grader was Harlan Moffit, and he lived in Eagle’s
Roost with his wife, Cindi — with an i — and his daughters, Luci and
Nanci -each of those with an i as well– and Cindi worked for the
Livestock cooperative, whatever that was. They were lifelong residents
of Montana and wouldn’t live anywhere else. However, they’d had a lot
of fun when they’d gone to Los Angeles a couple of years ago and seen
Disneyland, Universal Studios and an old brokendown homeless guy being
mugged by two teenagers on a corner while they were stopped at a
traffic light. Visit, yes; live there, no. All this he somehow
imparted by the time they had reached the turnoff at Quartermas Ranch,
as he felt obliged to make Jack feel among friends and neighbors in his
time of trouble, regardless of what the trouble might be.
They entered the private lane at a higher speed than Jack would have
thought possible, considering the depth of the snow that had