“I’m not scared,” Martin said.
“Yes, you are. We’re weird and you’re scared!”
“He doesn’t scare easy,” Trevor snapped. “My dad has courage.”
“He’s gonna need it if we do this.”
Martin was aware that this conversation was happening on two levels, one he could hear and another that he couldn’t. “I think I need to know what’s going on.”
“What’s going on is we need you to try to become like us.”
How would he do that? It seemed like some sort of side effect of a failed attempt by the aliens to strip away a soul.
“That’s it,” Trevor said.
“I thought you couldn’t read minds.”
He looked down at the smashed grass that made up the floor of the tiny chamber. “Um, you’re easy, Dad. ’Cause I know you…”
George said, “It’s getting dark.”
Trevor looked at him sharply, shook his head.
“Trevor, no. NO!”
“What is this?”
Trevor threw his arms around him. “Dad, they want you to leave!”
“Leave? I can’t leave!”
A boy of perhaps ten or eleven produced a pistol. He handed it to one of the older kids. Martin saw that it was a .45 automatic. He didn’t exactly point it at Martin, so much as leave it visible.
Martin stared at it. He looked from the barrel to the young face. Those eyes again, all shadowy. These kids had changed. He gentled his voice. “Look, I need a break here.”
The boy thrust the gun toward him.
“Trevor! Trevor, tell them, I’m a good father, I’m—I’m—kids, listen. I’m needed. You need me. Yes. Oh, yes. I can be—can replace—replace…”
The boy racked the slide.
“You helped me, Pammy! Hey, you just helped me escape, now you want to do this? This is crazy!”
“Dad, if you don’t go—” Trevor pulled in his words. He was choking with tears, Martin could see it.
“Trevor, tell them, I can’t survive out there. Nobody can!”
The boy got to his feet. He had a dusting of beard, barely visible in the gathering dark. He held the gun in Martin’s face. “Doctor Winters,” he said quietly, “you get out of here.”
“Oh, God, listen, please—I’ve been running and running, I can’t run anymore. Trevor, please help me! Help your dad!”
Trevor looked at him out of his strange new eyes, and Martin saw the truth of it: the horror they had seen had made them monsters, all of them, and Trevor was a monster, too.
But then Trevor reached out a hand and touched his father’s cheek. It was not the gesture of a boy, but of a man of maturity. “Dad, it’s survival of the fittest. The reptilians are going to find you. You can’t hide from them, not anywhere, not like we can. If you stay here, you’ll lead them right to us.”
Martin backed away from the gun. “Get that thing out of my face!”
“Dad, you have to do this.” Trevor threw his arms around his father. Martin held him, felt his body shaking.
He looked to Pammy. “Why did you save me? How could you be so cruel?”
“She’s a damn asshole,” the boy with the gun spat.
“Ride the storm,” a voice said from the back. “Same as we did.”
“Doctor Winters—”
“Pammy, call me Martin, please.”
“Doctor Winters—”
She pulled back the flap of the tent. Outside, Martin saw rain sweeping in almost continuous lightning, and shadows in the nearby clearing that did not look like any shadows he cared to see. “This is crazy. I can’t.”
“Dad, do it!”
“Trev, no, absolutely not!”
His son was standing before him, looking up at him, his face stained with tears. “Get out,” he said. He turned to the boy with the gun. “Give it to me,” he said.
“Why?” the boy asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Because I’m the only one who can handle this!” He took the gun and held it to his father’s face. “Decide,” he said.
Martin looked straight down the barrel. He could see muscles working in Trevor’s hand, could see his finger tightening. “Trevor?”
Trevor screwed his eyes shut. “Now, Daddy!”
Martin tried to think—some argument, some appeal, but there were no more arguments, there were no more appeals. That weapon was going to go off in another second, and Trevor was going to have to spend the rest of his life an orphan like all these other orphans, but knowing, unlike them, that he had taken the life of his own father.
Martin raised his hand. “I’m going,” he said softly. “I’m going, son, and I want you to know that I don’t understand, but I don’t blame you.”
“Just go.”
“I know you have to look out for each other, that you can’t risk the group—”
“Damn you, GO!”
Trevor’s voice was not the same now. He’d been so gentle a boy that he couldn’t shoot a pheasant. Now here he was ready to kill his father, and his voice was low and hard, scorched with the pain of somebody who could.
Martin went out into the lightning.
THIRTEEN
DECEMBER 18, MIDNIGHT
A FAMILY AFFAIR
WYLIE STOOD BY THE QUIET waters of the Saunders, trying to get the courage up to try and cross into the other world. If Trevor could come here, then surely he could go in the other direction, and that was urgently necessary, obviously.
He paced, he looked for some sign of the gateway. Martin was out there right now in those deadly woods, and somebody had to save the guy, and Wylie thought it might as well be him.
He could bring Martin across. If nobody over there wanted him, he could live here. Impractical though he was, professorial in a way that Wylie found infuriating, nevertheless the guy didn’t deserve this to happen. His own son, doing that to him? Good God.
Why would they save him, then just discard him? And how could Trevor—too gentle to hunt birds, for the love of Pete—ever be that hard on his dad?
Over there, it was storming. Over here, the sky was clear. The moon near the half rode high. It was close on to midnight, and from the house he could hear Brooke singing. She’d once had vocal ambitions, but life and children and a certain lack of volume had kept her away from an operatic career. Her voice was too delicate for the stage, but on a quiet night like this one, it was an angelic wonder.
He knew that she was sitting in a window looking at the moon, waiting for her man to return. She never protested his midnight walks, but they made her uneasy. It was as if her voice was meant as a kind of lifeline, reaching out to him in case he strayed too far from home.
She sang an old lullaby, one that she had sung to Nick and still sang to Kelsey, a song from her deep past, his woman of the tribe of the Celts. It was called “Dereen Day,” the little song, and it floated across the softly
