his wrist that he would have used to toss a playing card at a hat.
The loid sailed low across the floor, toward the windows, until it clattered through the rungs of a stool and clinked off the base of a marble lab bench.
The madman swung the Remington toward the sound.
With a shout of rage and determination, Sam came up fast and threw himself at Shaddack.
31
Tessa grabbed Chrissie and hustled her away from the struggling men, to the wall beside the hall door. They crouched there, where she hoped they would be out of the line of fire.
Sam had come up under the shotgun before Shaddack could swing back from the distraction. He grabbed the barrel with his left hand and Shaddack's wrist with his weakened right hand, and pressed him backward, pushing him off balance, slamming him against another lab bench.
When Shaddack cried out, Sam snarled with satisfaction, as if
Tessa saw him ram a knee up between Shaddack's legs, hard into his crotch. The tall man screamed.
'All
As Shaddack gagged and spluttered and tried to double over in an involuntary reaction to the pain in his damaged privates, Sam tore the shotgun out of his hands and stepped back—
— and a man in a police uniform came into the room from the chemistry storage closet, carrying a shotgun of his own. 'No! Drop your weapon. Shaddack is
32
The thing that had been Vanner moved toward Harry, growling low in its throat, drooling yellowish saliva. Harry fired twice, struck it both times, but failed to kill it. The gaping wounds seemed to close up before his eyes.
One round left.
'…
Harry put the barrel of the.45 in his mouth, pressed the muzzle against his palate, gagging on the hot steel.
The hideous, wolfish thing loomed over him. The swollen head was three times as big as it ought to have been, out of proportion to its body. Most of the head was mouth, and most of the mouth was teeth, not even the teeth of a wolf but the inward-curving teeth of a shark. Vanner had not been satisfied to model himself entirely after just one of nature's predators, but wanted to make himself something more murderous and efficiently destructive than anything nature had contemplated.
When Vanner was only three feet from him, leaning in to bite, Harry pulled the gun out of his own mouth, said, 'Hell, no,' and shot the damn thing in the head. It toppled back, landed with a crash, and stayed down.
Go for the data-processor.
Elation swept through Harry, but it was short-lived. Worthy had completed his transformation and seemed to have been thrown into a frenzy by the carnage in the room and the escalating shrieks that came through the attic vents from the world beyond. He turned his lantern eyes on Harry, and in them was a look of unhuman hunger.
No more bullets.
33
Sam was squarely under the cop's gun, with no room to maneuver. He had to drop the Remington that he'd taken off Shaddack.
'I'm on your side,' the cop repeated.
'No one's on our side,' Sam said.
Shaddack was gasping for breath and trying to stand up straight. He regarded the officer with abject terror.
With the coldest premeditation Sam had ever seen, with no hint of emotion whatsoever, not even anger, the cop turned his 20-gauge shotgun on Shaddack, who was no longer a threat to anyone, and fired four rounds. As if punched by a giant, Shaddack flew backward over two stools and into the wall.
The cop threw the gun aside and moved quickly to the dead man. He tore open the sweat-suit jacket that Shaddack wore under his coat and ripped lose a strange object, a largish rectangular medallion, that had hung from a gold chain around the man's neck.
Holding up that curious artifact, he said, 'Shaddack's dead. His heartbeat isn't being broadcast any more, so Sun is even now putting the final program into effect. In half a minute or so we'll all know peace. Peace at last.'
At first Sam thought the cop was saying they were all going to die, that the thing in his hand was going to kill them, that it was a bomb or something. He backed quickly toward the door and saw that Tessa evidently had the same expectation. She had pulled Chrissie up from where they'd been crouching, and had opened the door.
But if there was a bomb, it was a silent one, and the radius of its small explosion remained within the police officer. Suddenly his face contorted. Between clenched teeth, he said, 'God.' It was not an exclamation but a plea or perhaps an inadequate description of something he had just seen, for in that moment he fell down dead from no cause that Sam could see.
34
When they stepped out through the back door by which they had entered, the first thing Sam noticed was that the night had fallen silent. The shrill cries of the shape-changers no longer echoed across the fogbound town.
The keys were in the van's ignition.
'You drive,' he told Tessa.
His wrist was swollen worse than ever. It was throbbing so hard that each pulse of pain reverberated through every fiber of him.
He settled in the passenger seat.
Chrissie curled in his lap, and he wrapped his arms around her. She was uncharacteristically silent. She was exhausted, on the verge of collapse, but Sam knew the cause of her silence was more profound than weariness.
Tessa slammed her door and started the engine. She didn't have to be told where to go.
On the drive to Harry's place, they discovered that the streets were littered with the dead, not the corpses of ordinary men and women but — as their headlights revealed beyond a doubt — of creatures out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, twisted and phantasmagorical forms. She drove slowly, maneuvering around them, and a couple of times she had to pull up on the sidewalk to get past a pack of them that had gone down together, apparently felled by the same unseen force that had dropped the policeman back at Central.
After a while Chrissie lowered her head against Sam's chest and would not look out the windshield.
