The transition between the end of the dirt lane and the pavement wasn’t smooth. They slammed backward onto the county road hard enough to make them bounce in their seats, and the crazed safety glass collapsed inward in gummy chunks.
Marty pulled the wheel to the right, reversing uphill, and braked to a full stop when they were facing straight down the road. He could feel the heat of the flames that were eating the paint off the hood, but they didn’t lick into the car.
A bullet ricocheted off metal.
He shifted out of reverse.
Through his side window, he could see The Other standing spread-legged fifteen yards from the end of the driveway, gun in both hands.
As Marty tramped on the accelerator, another round thudded into his door, below the window, but didn’t penetrate to the interior of the car.
The Other broke into a run again as the BMW shot downhill and away from him.
Although the wind carried most of the smoke off to the right, there was suddenly a lot more of it, blacker than ever, and enough churned into the car to make them miserable. Paige started coughing, the girls were wheezing in the back seat, and Marty couldn’t clearly see the road ahead.
“Tire’s burning!” Paige shouted above the howling wind.
Two hundred yards farther downhill, the burning tire blew, and the BMW spun out of control on the snow- skinned blacktop. Marty turned the wheel into the slide, but applied physics didn’t prove reliable this time. The car swung around a hundred and eighty degrees, simultaneously moving sideways, and they only stopped when they careened off the road and fetched up against the chain-link fence that marked the perimeter of the property owned by the defunct Prophetic Church of the Rapture.
Marty climbed out of the car. He yanked open the back door, leaned in, and helped the frightened girls disentangle themselves from their seatbelts.
He didn’t even look to see if The Other was still coming because he
As Marty extracted Emily from the back seat, Paige scrambled out of the driver’s door because her side of the car was jammed into the chain-link. Having withdrawn the manila envelopes of cash from under her seat, she stuffed them inside her ski jacket. As she zipped shut, she looked uphill.
“Shit,” she said, and the shotgun boomed.
Marty helped Charlotte out of the car as the Mossberg thundered again. He thought he heard the hard crack of small-arms fire, too, but the bullet must have gone wide of them.
Shielding the girls, pushing them behind him and away from the burning car, he glanced uphill.
The Other stood arrogantly in the center of the road, about a hundred yards away, convinced he was protected from the shotgun fire by distance, the deflecting power of the wailing wind, and perhaps his own supernatural ability to bounce back from serious damage. He was
“He’s reloading,” Paige said, taking the opportunity to jam additional shells into the magazine of her shotgun, “let’s get out of here.”
“Where?” Marty wondered, looking around frantically at the snow-whipped landscape.
He wished a car would appear from one direction or another.
Then he canceled his own wish because he knew The Other would kill any passersby who tried to interfere.
They moved downhill, into the biting wind, using the time to put some distance between themselves and their pursuer while they figured what to do next.
He ruled out trying to reach one of the other cabins scattered through the high woods. Most were vacation homes. No one would be in residence on a Tuesday in December unless, by morning, the new snow brought them in for the skiing. And if they stumbled into a cabin where someone was at home, with The Other trailing after them, Marty didn’t want the deaths of innocent strangers on his conscience.
Route 203 lay at the bottom of the county road. Even in the early hours of a blizzard, steady traffic would be passing between the lakes and Mammoth Lakes itself. If there were a lot of witnesses, The Other couldn’t kill them all. He’d have to retreat.
But the bottom of the county road was too distant. They’d never make it before they ran out of shotgun shells to keep their enemy at bay—or before the greater accuracy and range of the revolver allowed him to pick them off one by one.
They came to a gap in the battered chain-link fence.
“Here, come on,” Marty said.
“Isn’t that place abandoned?” Paige objected.
“There’s nowhere else,” he said, taking Charlotte and Emily by the hand and leading them onto the church property.
His hope was that someone would come along soon, see the half-burned BMW, and report it to the sheriff’s department. Instead of fanning the fire that had been feeding on the paint, the wind had snuffed it, but the tire was still burning, and the battered car was hard to ignore. If a couple of well-armed deputies showed up to check out the area and could be enlisted in the struggle, they wouldn’t understand how formidable The Other was, but they wouldn’t be as naive and helpless as ordinary citizens, either.
After a brief hesitation, during which she glanced worriedly uphill at their nemesis, Paige followed him and the girls through the hole in the fence.
The speedloader slips from his fingers and drops into the snow as he removes it from the pouch on his belt. It is the last of the two he took from the dead man in the surveillance van.
He stoops, plucks it out of the snow, and brushes it off against the cranberry-red sweater under his varsity jacket. He brings it to the open revolver, slips it in, twists it, drops it, and snaps the cylinder shut.
He will have to use his last rounds carefully. The replicants are not going to be easy to kill.
He now knows that the woman is a replicant just like the false father. Alien flesh. Inhuman. She cannot be his Paige, for she is too aggressive. His Paige would be submissive, eager for domination, like the women in the Senator’s film collection. His Paige is surely dead. He must accept that, difficult as it is. This thing is only masquerading as Paige, and not well. Worse, if Paige is gone forever, so are his loving daughters. The girls, cute and convincingly human, are also replicants—demonic, extraterrestrial, and dangerous.
His former life is irretrievable.
His family is gone forever.
A black abyss of despair yawns under him, but he must not fall into it. He must find the strength to go on and fight either until he achieves victory in the name of all humankind—or is destroyed. He must be as courageous as Kurt Russell and Donald Sutherland were when they found themselves in similar dire straits, for he is a hero, and a hero must persevere.
Downhill, the four creatures disappear through a hole in the chain-link fence. All he wants now is to see them dead, scramble their brains, dismember and decapitate them, eviscerate them, set them afire, take every precaution against their resurrection, for they are not merely the killers of his real family but a threat to the world.
The thought occurs to him that, if he survives, these terrifying experiences will provide him with material for a novel. He surely will be able to get past the opening sentence, an accomplishment of which he was incapable yesterday. Though his wife and children are lost to him forever, he might be able to salvage his career from the ruins of his life.
Slipping and sliding, he hurries toward the gap in the fence.
The windshield wipers were caked with snow that was hardening into ice. They stuttered and thumped across the glass.
Oslett consulted the computer-generated map, then pointed to a turn-off ahead. “There, on the right.”
Clocker put on the turn signal.
Like the ghost ship
