He hears a door slam shut.
He waits.
Listens.
Hunger. Hot pain fades quickly to a low heat. Bleeding slows to a trickle, an ooze. Now hunger overwhelms him as his body demands enormous amounts of fuel to facilitate the reconstruction of damaged tissues.
Already he’s metabolizing body fat and protein to make urgent repairs to torn and severed blood vessels. His metabolism accelerates unmercifully, an entirely autonomic function over which he has no power.
This gift that makes him so much less vulnerable than other men will soon begin to exact a toll. His weight will decline. Hunger will intensify until it is nearly as excruciating as the agony of mortal wounds. The hunger will become a craving. The craving will become a desperate need.
He considers retreating, but he is so close. So close. They are on the run. Increasingly isolated. They cannot hold out against him. If he perseveres, in minutes they will all be dead.
Besides, his hatred and rage are as great as his hunger. He is frantic for the sweet satisfaction that only extreme violence can assure.
On the movie screen of his mind, homicidal images flicker enticingly: bullet-shattered skulls, brutally hammered faces, gouged eyes, torn throats, slashed torsos, flashing knives, hatchets, axes, severed limbs, women on fire, screaming children, the bruised throats of young prostitutes, flesh dissolving under a spray of acid. . . .
He crawls out from among the pews, into the center aisle, rising into a crouch.
The walls swarm with glowing extraterrestrial hieroglyphics.
He is in the nest of the enemy.
Alien and strange. Hostile and inhuman.
His fear is great. But it only feeds his rage.
He hurries to the front of the room, through a gap in a railing, toward the door beyond which they retreated.
Light as thin as fish broth seeped down from unseen windows above and around the turns in the spiral staircase.
The buildings to which the church was attached were two stories high. There might be a connecting passage between these stairs and another structure, but Marty had no idea where they were headed. For that reason he almost wished they had taken the door that led outside.
However, the numbness in his arm hampered him severely, and the pain in his shoulder, which grew worse by the minute, was a serious drain on his energy. The building was unheated, as cold as the world outside, but at least it offered shelter from the wind. Between his wound and the storm, he didn’t think he would last long beyond the walls of the church.
The girls climbed ahead of him.
Paige came last, worrying aloud because the door at the foot of the stairs, like the sacristy door, did not have a lock. She edged up backward, step by step, covering the territory behind them.
They soon reached a deep-set multifoil window in the outer wall, which had been the source of the meager illumination below. Most of the clear glass was intact. The light on the twisting stairs above was of an equally dreary quality and most likely came from another window of the same size and style.
Marty moved slower and his breathing grew more labored the higher they ascended, as if they were reaching altitudes at which the oxygen content of the air was drastically declining. The pain in his left shoulder intensified, and his nausea thickened.
The stained plaster walls, gray wooden steps, and dishwater light reminded him of depressing Swedish movies from the fifties and sixties, films about hopelessness, despair, and grim fate.
Initially, the handrail along the outer wall was not essential to his progress. However, it swiftly became a necessary crutch. In dismayingly short order, he found that he could not rely entirely on the strength of his increasingly shaky legs and also needed to pull himself upward with his good right arm.
By the time they came to the second multifoil window, with still more steps and gray luminosity ahead, he knew where they were. In a bell tower.
The stairwell was not going to lead to a passageway that would connect them to the second floor of another building, because they were already higher than two floors. Each additional step upward was an irreversible commitment to this single option.
Gripping the rail with his good right hand, beginning to feel lightheaded and afraid of losing his balance, Marty stopped to warn Paige that they better consider going back. Perhaps her reverse perspective on the stairwell had prevented her from realizing the nature of the trap.
Before he could speak, the door clattered open below, out of sight beyond the first few turns.
His last clear thought is the sudden realization that he does not have the .38 Chief’s Special any longer, must have lost it after being shot at the front entrance to the church, dropped it in the snow, and has not noticed the loss until this moment. He has no time to retrieve it, even if he knew where to search. Now his primary weapon is his body, his hands, his murderous skills, and his exceptional strength. His ferocious hatred is a weapon, as well, because it motivates him to take any risk, confront extreme danger, and endure cruel suffering that would incapacitate an ordinary man. But he is not ordinary, he is a hero, he is judgment and vengeance, he is the rending fury of justice, avenger of his murdered family, nemesis of all creatures that are not of this earth but would try to claim it as their own, savior of humanity. That is his reason for existence. His life has meaning and purpose at last: to save the world from this inhuman scourge.
Just before the door opened below Paige, the narrow winding stairs called to mind lighthouses she had seen in movies. From the image of a lighthouse, she leapt to the realization that they were in the church bell tower. Then the lower door opened, out of sight beyond the curving walls of the spiral stairwell, and they had no choice but to continue to the top.
She briefly considered charging downward, opening fire when she was about to come upon him. But hearing her descend, he might retreat into the sacristy, where already the heavy yarn of dusk was knitting into darkness, where he could stalk her in the gloom and attack when her attention was diverted to the wrong skein of shadows.
She could also wait where she was, let him come to her, and blow his head off as soon as he rose into sight. If he sensed her waiting, however, and if he opened fire as he rounded the bend, he couldn’t miss her in those tight confines. She might be dead before she could pull the trigger, or might at best get off a shot into the ceiling of the stairwell as she fell, harming nothing but plaster.
Remembering the black silhouette on the sill of the nave window and the uncanny fluidity with which it had moved, she suspected that The Other’s senses were sharper than her own. Lying in wait with the hope of surprising it was probably a fool’s game.
She continued upward, trying to convince herself that they were in the best of all possible positions: defending high ground against an enemy that was allowed only one narrow approach. It seemed as if the bell-tower platform ought to be an unassailable redoubt.
Awash in agonies of hunger, sweating with need and rage, lead pellets popping from his flesh, he heals step by rising step but at a cost. Body fat dwindles and even some muscle tissue and bone mass are sacrificed to the wildly accelerated mending of buckshot wounds. He gnashes his teeth with the compulsive need to chew, chew and swallow, rend and tear, feed, feed, even though there is no food to satisfy the terrible pangs that rack him.
At the top of the tower, one half of the space was completely walled, providing a landing for the stairs. An ordinary door gave access from that vestibule to another portion of the platform that was exposed to the elements on three sides. Charlotte and Emily opened the door without difficulty and hurried out of the stairwell.
Marty followed them. He was dismayingly weak but even dizzier than feeble. He gripped the door jamb and then the cast-concrete cap of the waist-high wall—the parapet—that enclosed the other three sides of the outer bell-tower platform.
With the wind-chill factor, the temperature must have been five or ten degrees below zero. He winced as the bitter gale lashed his face—and didn’t dare think about how much colder it would seem ten minutes or an hour later.
Though Paige might have enough shotgun shells to prevent The Other from reaching them, they wouldn’t all survive the night.
If the weather reports proved correct and the storm lasted until well past dawn, they wouldn’t be able to use
