by Dean Koontz
“Go!” she said, shoving Toby toward the back stairs. “Go, go, go!”
He scrambled across the floor on his hands and knees, and so did she, both of them reduced by terror and expediency to the locomotion of infancy. Got to the door. Pulled herself up against it. Toby at her side.
Behind them was a scene out of a madman’s nightmare: The Giver sprawled on the floor, resembling nothing so much as an immensely complicated octopus, although stranger and more evil than anything that had ever lived in the seas of Earth, a tangle of wriggling ropy arms. Instead of trying to reach for her and Toby, it was struggling with the disconnected bones, attempting to pull the moldering corpse together and lever itself erect on the damaged skeleton.
She wrenched the doorknob, yanked.
The stairhead door didn’t open.
Locked.
On the shelf behind the alcove bed, Toby’s clock radio came on all by itself, and rap music hammered them at full volume for a second or two. Then that other music. Tuneless, strange, but hypnotic.
“No!” she told Toby as she struggled with the deadbolt turn. It was maddeningly stiff. “No! Tell it no!” The lock hadn’t been stiff before, damn it.
At the other door, the first Giver lurched out of the burning hall and through the smoke, into the room. It was still wrapped around and through what was left of Eduardo’s charred corpse. Still afire. Its dark bulk was diminished. Fire had consumed part of it.
The thumb-turn twisted slowly, as if the lock mechanism was rusted. Slowly. Slowly. Then: clack.
But the bolt snapped into the jamb again before she could pull open the door.
Toby was murmuring something. Talking. But not to her.
“No!” she shouted. “No, no! Tell it no!”
Grunting with the effort, Heather twisted the bolt open again and held tightly to the thumb-turn. But she felt the lock being reengaged against her will, the shiny brass slipping inexorably between her thumb and forefinger. The Giver. This was the same power that could switch on the radio. Or animate a corpse. She tried to turn the knob with her other hand, before the bolt slammed into the striker plate again, but now the knob was frozen. She gave up.
Pushing Toby behind her, putting her back to the door, she faced the two creatures. Weaponless.
The road grader was painted yellow from end to end. Most of the massive steel frame was exposed, with only the powerful diesel engine and the operator’s cab enclosed. This no-frills worker drone looked like a big exotic insect.
The grader slowed when the driver realized that a man was standing in the middle of the road, but Jack figured the guy might speed up again at first sight of the shotgun. He was prepared to run alongside the machine and board it while it was on the move.
But the driver brought it to a full stop in spite of the gun. Jack ran around to the side where he could see a door on the cab about ten feet off the ground.
The grader sat high on five-foot-tall tires with rubber that looked heavier and tougher than tank tread, and the guy up there was not likely to open his door and come down for a chat. He would probably just roll down his window, keep some distance between them, have a shouted conversation above the shrieking wind—and if he heard something he didn’t like, he’d tramp the accelerator and haul ass out of there. In the event that the driver wouldn’t listen to reason, or wanted to waste too much time with questions, Jack was ready to climb up to the door and do whatever he had to do to get control of the grader, short of killing someone.
To his surprise, the driver opened his door all the way, leaned out, and looked down. He was a chubby guy with a full beard and longish hair sprouting under a John Deere cap. He shouted over the combined roar of the engine and the storm: “You got trouble?”
“My family needs help!”
“What kind of help?”
Jack wasn’t even going to try to explain an extraterrestrial encounter in ten words or less. “They could die, for God’s sake!”
“Die? Where?”
“Quartermass Ranch!”
“You the new fella?”
“Yeah!”
“Climb on up!”
The guy hadn’t even asked him why he was carrying a shotgun, as if everyone in Montana went nearly everywhere with a pistol-grip, pump-action twelve-gauge. Hell, maybe everyone did.
Holding the shotgun in one hand, Jack hauled himself up to the cab, careful where he placed his feet, not foolish enough to try to leap up like a monkey. Dirty ice was crusted on parts of the frame. He slipped a couple of times but didn’t fall.
When Jack arrived at the open door, the driver reached for the shotgun to stow it inside. He gave it to the guy, even though for a moment he worried that, relieved of the Mossberg, he would get a boot in the chest and be knocked back to the roadway.
The driver was a good Samaritan to the end. He stowed the gun and said, “This isn’t a limousine, only one seat, kinda cramped. You’ll have to swing in here behind me.”
The niche between the driver’s seat and the back wall of the cab was less than two feet deep and five feet wide. The ceiling was low. A couple of rectangular toolboxes were on the floor, and he had to share the space with them. While the driver leaned forward, Jack squirmed headfirst into that narrow storage area and pulled his legs in after himself, sort of half lying on his side and half sitting.
The driver shut the door. The rumble of the engine was still loud, and so was the whistling wind.
Jack’s bent knees were behind the driver, and his body was in line with 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 quivering scrap of flesh.
Madness. Chaos.
The Giver was chaos, the very embodiment of meaninglessness, hopelessness, malignancy, 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 but existence. It lived only to live. No aspirat
ions. 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 over 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 on vacation a couple of years ago and seen Disneyland, Universal Studios, and an old broken-down 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 to Quartermass Ranch, as if he felt obliged to make Jack feel among friends and neighbors in his time of trouble, regardless of what that 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 accumulated in the past sixteen hours.
Harlan raised the angled plow a few inches to allow the speed. “We don’t need to scoop off everything down to bare dirt and maybe risk jamming up on a big bump in the road.” The top three quarters of the snow cover plumed to the side.
“How can you tell where the lane is?” Jack worried, because the rolling mantle of white blurred definitions.
“Been here before. Then there’s instinct.”
“Instinct?”
“Plowman’s instinct.”
“We won’t get stuck?”
“These tires? This engine?” Harlan was proud of his machine, and it really was churning along, rumbling through the untouched snow as if carving its way through little more than air. “Never get stuck, not with me driving. Take this baby through hell if I had to, plow away the melting brimstone and thumb my nose at the devil himself. So what’s wrong up there with your family?”
“Trapped,” Jack said cryptically.
“In snow, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing steep enough around here for an avalanche.”
“Not an avalanche,” Jack confirmed.
They reached the hill and headed for the turn past the lower woods. The house should be in view any second.
“Trapped in the snow?” Harlan said, worrying at it. He didn’t look away from his work, but he frowned as if he would have liked to meet Jack’s eyes.
The house came into view. Almost hidden by sheeting snow but vaguely visible. Their new house. New life. New future. On fire.
Earlier, at the computer, when he’d been mentally linked to the Giver but not completely in its power, Toby had gotten to know it, feeling around in its mind, being nosy, letting its thoughts slide into him while he kept saying “no” to it, and little by little he had learned about it. One of the things he learned was that it had never encountered any species that could get inside its mind the way it could force itself into the minds of other creatures, so it wasn’t even aware of Toby in there, didn’t feel him, thought it was all one-way communication. Hard to explain. That was the best he could do. Just sliding around in its mind, looking at things, terrible things, not a good place but dark and frightening. He hadn’t thought of it as a brave thing to do, only what must be done, what Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock or Luke Skywalker or any of those guys would have done in his place or when meeting a new and hostile intelligent species out on the galactic rim. They’d have taken any advantage, added to their knowledge in any way they could.
So did he.
No big deal.
Now, when the noise coming out of the radio urged him to open the door—just open the door and let it in, let it in, accept the pleasure and the peace, let it in—he did as it wanted, though he didn’t let it enter all the way, not half as far as he entered into it. As at the computer this morning, he was now between complete freedom and enslavement, walking the brink of a chasm, careful not to let his presence be known until he was ready to strike. While the Giver was rushing into his mind, confident of overwhelming it, Toby turned the tables. He imagined that his own mind was a colossal weight, a billion trillion tons, even heavier than that, more than the weight of all the planets in the solar system combined, and even a zillion times heavier than that, pressing down on the mind of the Giver, so much weight, crushing it, flattening it into a thin pancake and holding it there, so it could think fast and furiously but could not act on its thoughts.
The thing let go of Heather’s ankle. All of its sinuous and agitated appendages retracted and curled into one another, and it went still, like a massive ball of glistening intestines, four feet in diameter.
The other one lost control of the burning corpse with which it was entwined. Parasite and dead host collapsed in a heap and were also motionless.
Heather stood in stunned disbelief, unable to understand what had happened.
Smoke churned into the room.
Toby had opened the dead bolt and the stairhead door. Tugging at her, he said, “Quick, Mom.”
Beyond confusion, in a state of utter bafflement, she followed her son and the dog into the back stairwell and pulled the door shut, cutting off the smoke before it reached them.
Toby hurried down the stairs, the dog at his heels, and Heather plunged after him as he followed the curving wall out of sight.
“Honey, wait!”
“No time,” he called back to her.
“Toby!”
She was terrified about descending the stairs so recklessly, not knowing what might be ahead, assuming another of those things had to be somewhere near at hand. Three graves had been disturbed at the cemetery.
In the vestibule at the bottom, the door to the back porch was still nailed shut. The door in the kitchen was wide open, and Toby was waiting for her with the dog.
She would have thought her heart couldn’t have beat any faster or slammed any harder than it did on the way down those stairs; but when she saw Toby’s face, her pulse quickened and each lub-dub was so forceful that it sent a throb of dull pain across her breast.
If he had been pale with fear, he was now a far whiter shade of pale. His face didn’t look like that of a living boy so much as like a death mask of a face, rendered now in cold hard plaster as colorless as powdered lime. The whites of his eyes were gray, one pupil large and the other just a pinpoint, and his lips were bluish. He was in the grip of terror, but it wasn’t terror alone that drove him. He seemed strange, haunted—and then she recognized the same fey quality that he’d exhibited when he’d been in front of the computer this morning, not in the grip of the Giver but not entirely free. Between, he had called it.
“We can get it,” he said.
Now that she recognized his condition, she could hear the same flatness in his voice that she had heard this morning when he’d been in the thrall of that storm of colors on the IBM monitor.
“Toby, what’s wrong?”
“I’ve got it.”
“Got what?”
“It.”
“Got it where?”
“Under.”
Her heart was exploding. “Under?”
“Under me.”
Then she remembered, blinked. Amazed.
“It’s under you?”
He nodded. So pale.
“You’re controlling it?”
&n
bsp; “For now.”
“How can that be?” she wondered.
“No time. It wants loose. Very strong. Pushing hard.”
A glistening beadwork of sweat had appeared on his brow. He chewed his lower lip, drawing more blood.
Heather raised a hand to touch him, stop him, hesitated, not sure if touching him would shatter his control.
“We can get it,” he repeated.
Harlan damn near drove the grader into the house, halting the plow inches from the railing, casting a great crashing wave of snow onto the front porch.
He leaned forward in his seat to let Jack squeeze out of the storage area behind him. “You go, take care of your people. I’ll call the depot, get a fire company out here.”
Even as Jack went through the high door and dismounted from the grader, he heard Harlan Moffit on the cellular system, talking to his dispatcher.
He had never known fear like this before, not even when Anson Oliver had opened fire at Arkadian’s service station, not even when he’d realized something was speaking through Toby in the graveyard yesterday, never a fear half this intense, with his stomach knotted so tightly it hurt, a surge of bitter bile in the back of his throat, no sound in the world but the pile-driving thunder of his own heart. Because this wasn’t just his life on the line. More important lives were involved here. His wife, in whom his past and future resided, the keeper of all his hopes. His son, born of his own heart, whom he loved more than he loved himself, immeasurably more.
From outside, at least, the fire appeared to be confined to the second floor. He prayed that Heather and Toby weren’t up there, that they were on the lower floor or out of the house altogether.
He vaulted the porch railing and kicked through the snow that had been thrown up against the front wall by the plow. The door was standing open in the wind. When he crossed the threshold, he found tiny drifts beginning to form among the pots and pans and dishes that were scattered along the front hall.
No gun. He had no gun. He’d left it in the grader. Didn’t matter. If they were dead, so was he.
Fire totally engulfed the stairs from the first landing upward, and it was swiftly spreading down from tread to tread toward the hallway, flowing almost like a radiant liquid. He could see well because drafts were sucking nearly all the smoke up and out the roof: no flames in the study, none beyond the living-room or dining-room archways.