“He’s only a few miles away,” Spicer said. “You take the Explorer.” He started the engine, pulled the door shut, and drove off into the storm.
Clocker was already behind the wheel of the Explorer. Clouds of exhaust billowed from its tailpipe.
Oslett hurried to the passenger side, got in, slammed the door, and fished the computer map out of his jacket. “Let’s go. We’re running out of time.”
“Only on the human scale,” Clocker said. Pulling away from the curb and switching on the wipers to deal with the wind-driven snow, he added, “From a cosmic point of view, time may be the one thing of which there’s an inexhaustible supply.”
Paige kissed the girls and made them promise to be brave and to do exactly what their father told them to do. Leaving them for the uncertainty of what lay ahead was one of the hardest things she had ever done. Pretending not to be afraid, in order to help them with their own quest for courage, was even harder.
When Paige stepped out the front door, Marty went with her onto the porch. Blustery wind hissed through the screen walls and rattled the porch door at the head of the steps.
“There’s one other way,” he said, leaning close to her to be heard above the storm without shouting. “If it’s me that he’s drawn to, maybe I should get the hell out of here, on my own, lead him as far away from you as I can.”
“Forget it.”
“But without you and the girls to worry about, maybe I can deal with him.”
“And if he kills you instead?”
“At least we wouldn’t all go down.”
“You think he won’t come looking for us again? He wants your life, remember. Your life, your wife, your children.”
“So if he finishes me off and comes after you, you’d still have a chance to blow his brains out.”
“Oh, yeah? And when he shows up, during that little window of opportunity I’ll have before he gets close to me, how would I know whether it was him or you?”
“You wouldn’t,” he admitted.
“So we’ll play it this way.”
“You’re so damned strong,” he said.
He couldn’t know that her bowels were like jelly, her heart was knocking violently, and the faint metallic taste of terror filled her dry mouth.
They hugged but briefly.
Carrying the Mossberg, she went through the porch door, down the steps, across the shallow yard, past the BMW, and into the woods without looking back, worried that he would become aware of the depth of her fear and insist on dragging her back into the cabin.
Under the Quonset curve of sheltering evergreen boughs, the wind sounded hollow and distant except when she passed beneath a couple of flue-like openings that soared all the way up to the blind sky. Pummeling drafts shrieked down those passages, as cold as ectoplasm and as shrill as banshees.
Although the property sloped, the ground beneath the trees was easy to traverse. Underbrush was sparse due to a lack of direct sunlight. Many trees were so old that the lowest branches were above her head, and the view between the thick trunks was unobstructed all the way out to the county road.
The soil was stony. Tables and formations of granite broke the surface here and there, all ancient and smooth.
The formation she had pointed out to Marty was halfway between the cabin and the county road, only twenty feet upslope from the driveway. It resembled a crescent of teeth, blunt molars two to three feet high, like the fossilized dental structure of a gentle herbivorous dinosaur much larger than any ever before suspected or imagined.
Approaching the granite outcropping, in which shadows as dark as condensed pine tar pooled behind the “molars,” Paige suddenly had the feeling that the look-alike was already there, watching the cabin from that hiding place. Ten feet from her destination, she halted, skidding slightly on the carpet of loose pine needles.
If he was actually there, he would have seen her coming and could have killed her any time he wished. The fact that she was still alive argued against his presence. Nevertheless, as she tried to get moving again, she felt as if she had plunged to the bottom of a deep ocean trench and was struggling to make progress against the resisting mass of an entire sea.
Heart pounding, she circled the crescent formation and slipped into its shadowed convexity from behind. The look-alike wasn’t waiting for her.
She stretched out on her stomach. In her dark-blue ski jacket with the hood covering her blond hair, she knew that she was as good as invisible among the shadows and against the dark stone.
Through gaps in the stone, she could monitor the entire length of the driveway without raising her head high enough to be seen.
Beyond the shelter of the trees, the storm swiftly escalated into a full-scale blizzard. The volume of snow coming down into the driveway between flanking stands of trees was so great that it almost seemed as if she was looking into the foaming face of a waterfall.
Her ski jacket kept her upper body warm, but her jeans couldn’t ward off the penetrating cold of the stone on which she lay. As body heat leached away, her hip and knee joints began to ache. She wished she were wearing insulated ski pants, and she realized she should have at least brought a blanket to put between herself and the granite.
Under the influence of the building gale, the highest branches of the firs and pines creaked like scores of doors easing open on rusty hinges. Not even the muffling boughs of the evergreens could soften the rising voice of the wind.
The gradually dimming light of the day’s last hour was the steely shade of ice on a winter pond.
Every sight and sound was cold and seemed to exacerbate the chill that pressed into her from the granite. She began to worry about how long she could hold out before she would need to return to the cabin to get warm.
Then a deep-blue Jeep station wagon came uphill on the county road and made a hard, sharp turn into the driveway. It looked like the Jeep that belonged to Marty’s parents.
Rheostat at seven degrees. South from Mammoth Lakes, through billowing curtains of snow, through whirling snowdevils, through torrents and lashes and blasts and cataracts and airborne walls of snow, along a highway barely defined beneath the deepening mantle, passing slow-moving traffic at high speed, flashing his headlights to encourage obstructionists to pull over and let him go by, even passing a county snowplow and a cinder-spreading truck crowned with yellow and red emergency beacons that briefly transform the millions of white flakes into glowing embers. A left turn. Narrower road. Uphill. Into forested slopes. Long chain-link fence on the right, capped with spiral razor wire, broken down in places. Not there yet. A little farther. Close. Soon.
The four gasoline bombs stand in a cardboard box on the floor in front of the passenger seat, wedged into the knee space. The gaps between them are packed with folded newspapers, so the bottles will not clatter against one another.
Pungent fumes arise from the saturated cloth wicks. The perfume of destruction.
Guided by the magnetic attraction of the false father, he makes an abrupt right turn into a single-lane driveway already half hidden by snow. He brakes as little as possible, cornering in a slide, and moving his foot to the accelerator again even as the Jeep is still finding purchase and both rear tires are spinning-squealing fiercely.
Directly ahead, at least a hundred yards into the woods, stands a cabin. Soft light at the windows. Roof capped with snow.
Even if the BMW was not parked to the left of the place, he’d know he’d found his quarry. The imposter’s hateful magnetic presence pulls him forward.
At first sight of the cabin, he decides to make a full frontal assault, regardless of the wisdom or consequences. His mother and father are dead, wife and children probably long dead, too, forms and faces mockingly imitated by the vicious alien species that has stolen his own name and memories. He seethes with rage,
