Sole Survivor

Behind the cabin was a small yard of dirt and natural bunch-grass. The air was full of wind-torn leaves, pine needles, grit. Beyond a redwood picnic table and four redwood chairs, the forest rose again.

Nina was already running for the trees, short legs pumping, sneakers slapping on the hard-packed earth. She thrashed through tall weeds at the perimeter of the woods and vanished in the gloom among the pines and birches.

Nearly as terrified of losing the girl in the wilds as he was frightened of the boy in the burning man, Joe sprinted between the trees, shouting the girl’s name, one arm raised to ward off any pine boughs that might be drooping low enough to lash his eyes.

From the night behind him came Louis Tucker’s voice, slurred by the damage that the spreading flames had already done to his lips but nevertheless recognizable, the chanted words of a childish challenge: “Here I come, here I come, here I come, ready or not, here I come, ready or not!”

A narrow break in the trees admitted a cascade of moonbeams, and Joe spotted the girl’s cap of wind- whipped blond hair glowing with pale fire, the reflection of reflected light, to his right and only six or eight yards ahead. He stumbled over a rotting log, slipped on something slimy, kept his balance, flailed through prickly waist- high brush, and discovered that Nina had found the beaten-clear path of a deer trail.

As he caught up with the girl, the darkness around them abruptly brightened. Salamanders of orange light slithered up the trunks of the trees and whipped their tails across the glossy boughs of pines and spruces.

Joe turned and saw the possessed hulk of Louis Tucker thirty feet away, ablaze from head to foot but still standing, hitching and jerking through the woods, caroming from tree to tree, twenty feet away, barely alive, setting fire to the carpet of dry pine needles over which he shambled and to the bristling weeds and to the trees as he passed them. Now fifteen feet away. The stench of burning flesh on the wind. The boy-thing shouted gleefully, but the words were garbled and unintelligible.

Even in a two-hand grip, the pistol shook, but Joe squeezed off one, two, four, six rounds, and at least four of them hit the seething specter. It pitched backward and fell and didn’t move, didn’t even twitch, dead from fire and gunfire.

Louis Tucker was not a person now but a burning corpse. The body no longer harbored a mind that the boy could saddle and ride and torment.

Where?

Joe turned to Nina — and felt a familiar icy pressure at the back of his neck, an insistent probing, not as sharp as it had been when he was almost caught on the threshold of the Delmann house, perhaps blunted now because the boy’s power was indeed diminishing here in the open. But the psychic syringe was not yet blunt enough to be ineffective. It still stung. It pierced.

Joe screamed.

The girl seized his hand.

The iciness tore out its fangs and flew from him, as though it were a bat taking wing.

Reeling, Joe clamped a hand to the nape of his neck, certain that he would find his flesh ripped and bleeding, but he was not wounded. And his mind had not been violated, either.

Nina’s touch had saved him from possession.

With a banshee shriek, a hawk exploded out of the high branches of a tree and dive-bombed the girl, striking at her head, pecking at her scalp, wings flapping, beak click-click-clicking. She screamed and covered her face with her hands, and Joe batted at the assailant with one arm. The crazed bird swooped up and away, but it wasn’t an ordinary bird, of course, and it wasn’t merely crazed by the wind and the churning fire that swelled rapidly through the woods behind them.

Here it came again, with a fierce skreeeek, the latest host for the visitant from Virginia, arrowing down through the moonlight, its rapier beak as deadly as a stiletto, too fast to be a target for the gun.

Joe let go of the pistol and dropped to his knees on the deer trail and pulled the girl protectively against him. Pressed her face against his chest. The bird would want to get at her eyes. Peck at her eyes. Jab-jab-jab through the vulnerable sockets at the precious brain beyond. Damage the brain, and her power cannot save her. Tear her specialness right out of her gray matter and leave her in spasms on the ground.

The hawk struck, sank one set of talons into the sleeve of Joe’s coat, through the corduroy, piercing the skin of his forearm, planting the other set of talons in Nina’s blond hair, wings drumming as it pecked her scalp, pecked, angry because her face was concealed. Pecking now at Joe’s hand as he tried to knock it away, holding fast to sleeve and hair, determined not to be dislodged. Pecking, pecking at his face now, going for his eyes, Jesus, a flash of pain as it tore open his cheek. Seize it. Stop it. Crush it quickly. Peck, the darting head, the bloody beak, peck, and it got his brow this time, above his right eye, sure to blind him with the next thrust. He clenched his hand around it, and its talons tore at the cuff of his coat sleeve now, tore at his wrist, wings beating against his face, and it bobbed its head, the wicked beak darting at him, but he held it off, the hooked yellow point snapping an inch short of a blinding wound, the beady eyes glaring fiercely and blood-red with reflections of fire. Squeeze it, squeeze the life out of it, with its racing heart stuttering against his relentless palm. Its bones were thin and hollow, which made it light enough to fly with grace — but which also made it easier to break. Joe felt its breast crumple, and he threw it away from the girl, watched it tumble along the deer trail, disabled but still alive, wings flapping weakly but unable to lift into the night.

Joe pushed Nina’s tangled hair away from her face. She was all right. Her eyes had not been hit. In fact, she was unmarked, and he was overcome by a rush of pride that he had prevented the hawk from getting at her.

Blood oozed from his slashed brow, around the curve of the socket, and into the corner of his eye, blurring his vision. Blood streamed from the wound in his cheek, dripped from his pecked and stinging hand, from his gouged wrist.

He retrieved the pistol, engaged the safety, and jammed the weapon under his waistband again.

From out of the surrounding woods issued a bleat of animal terror, which abruptly cut off, and then across the mountainside, over the howling of the wind, a sharp shriek sliced through the night. Something was coming.

Maybe the boy had gained more control of his talent during the year that Rose had been on the run, and maybe now he was more capable of remoting someone in the outdoors. Or perhaps the coalesced power of his psychogeist was radiating away like the heat from a rock, as Rose had explained, but just wasn’t dispersing fast enough to bring a quick end to this assault.

Because of the blustery wind and the express-train roar of the wildfire, Joe couldn’t be certain from which direction the cry had arisen, and now the boy, clothed in the flesh of his host, was coming silently.

Joe scooped the girl off the deer trail, cradling her in his arms. They needed to keep moving, and until his energy faded, he could move faster through the woods if he carried her than if he led her by the hand.

She was so small. He was scared by how small she was, nearly as breakable as the avian bones of the hawk.

She clung to him, and he tried to smile at her. In the hellish leaping light, his flaring eyes and strained grin were probably more frightening than reassuring.

The mad boy in his new incarnation was not the only threat they faced. The explosive Santa Ana wind threw bright rags, threw sheets, threw great billowing sails of fire across the flank of the mountain. The pines were dry from the hot rainless summer, their bark rich with turpentine, and they burst into flame as though they were made of gasoline-soaked rags.

Ramparts of fire at least three hundred feet across blocked the way back to the cabin. They could not get around the blaze and behind it, because it was spreading laterally faster than they could hike through the underbrush and across the rugged terrain.

At the same time, the fire was coming toward them. Fast.

Joe stood with Nina in his arms, riveted and dismayed by the sight of the towering wall of fire, and he realized that they had no choice but to abandon the car. They would have to make the trip out of the mountains entirely on foot.

With a hot whoosh, roiling gouts of wind-harried flames spewed through the treetops immediately overhead, like a deadly blast from a futuristic plasma weapon. The pine boughs exploded, and burning masses of needles and cones tumbled down through lower branches, igniting everything as they descended,