He went for an eye. Grabbing the skull with his fingers, he gouged his thumb into it and found there a softness that made him snarl with pleasure. Beat the devil, Wylie, why do you think you’ve got that name?
Behind him, WHAMWHAM, WHAMWHAM. Nick had had the presence of mind to reload the magnum, and he knew how to use it, too, holding it in both hands to compensate for his size and its power.
Wylie routinely cleared him on all the guns. If they were going to be in the house, the kids were going to know their proper use and safety. Kelsey, too, when the time came.
Whatever he was doing, though, it wasn’t helping, because something had just jumped on Wylie’s back. Shot up though he might be, Al had one hell of a lot of staying power.
Then Wylie had an eye under his thumb. He damn well had an eye! Jennifer Mazle reeled back, hissing like the most enraged possible cobra, HRRSSTT! SSTT! Her mouth opened wide, the teeth glittering, the interior as white as a snake’s. The tongue gleamed black, was as thick as a finger and as long as a rope, and it came up slowly out of the throat.
He’d never seen anything so menacing. Never imagined menace like this being possible.
Then the thing on his back let go, and he turned and saw Nick and Brooke standing over it. Nick had one of Wylie’s superb Abba Teq hunting knives, and was thrusting and pulling expertly, and deep purple guts were spilling, and North’s mouth gaped wide.
The general’s whole body shimmered, then began flickering like a light turning on and off, and there came great thunder, and outside and inside blue flashing light, and then they were both gone, him and Jennifer Mazle.
“They’re here,” Wylie shouted, “still here!”
Nick thrust his knife at the air. Wylie picked up the 12-gauge and delivered a random blast into the ceiling, which rained down like the ceiling of Third Street Methodist had when Ron Biggs had emptied his 12-gauge into it, in the two-moon world.
Outside, there was long thunder. Then he heard shouts, voices crying out in an unknown tongue, voices and the clatter of machinery.
“What is it?” Brooke hissed.
“Sh!”
They could see shadows cast on the floor, on the walls, big shadows, but not the people and machines making them. The physical people were in the version of the house that belonged to the Winters family, but as the twenty-first approached, the fabric that separated the universes, in this very unusual corner of the world, was becoming thin indeed.
Wylie listened, he watched the shadows—one in particular as it crossed the wall, something low being moved by two hunched figures. Then the figures bent over even further, and lifted something that looked like a long sack and merged its shadow with the shadow of the object, then moved off.
“What is it, Dad?” Nick asked. “What’s going on?”
“I believe that seraph medics are carrying them out on gurneys.”
“Oh, Christ, you’re right,” Brooke said. “That’s what that is, all right. My God, what we’re seeing here—I mean… just, my God.”
The shadows were gone now. The house was quiet. The family came together, the children and the parents, struggling each in his own way with a trauma almost too intense to be borne.
“Mommy, can Bearish have a drink? Because Bearish would like an absinthe.”
“Absinthe?” She gave Wylie a careful look.
“Be it far from me.”
“Daddy has a bottle of it in his liquor drawer in his office.”
“Wylie?”
“There is no liquor drawer. There is no absinthe. I mean, it’s illegal.”
“Come on, baby, show Momma the absinthe.”
“Excuse me, we just nearly got killed here!”
As if this return to their old life was the most welcome thing she could know—which it probably was—Brooke marched off to his office, followed by her little girl.
“Oh, come on,” Wylie muttered, hurrying after them.
“Dad, don’t lose focus now. This is not over.”
“Brooke, there is no absinthe!”
“Dad, come back!”
“Watch our backs,” he yelled to Nick.
He entered his office behind Brooke, who was opening the desk drawers.
“It’s behind the fake back in the file drawer,” Kelsey said.
Wylie saw the empty desk. Saw that there was no laptop there. Saw that his old typewriter was melted like the Winters’ toaster had been melted, his beloved old Corona oozing down the side of the desk like molten plastic.
“The computer is gone,” Brooke said. She looked at him. Her eyes were practically bulging out of her head, tears were flowing.
“Dad, get down here, please,” Nick called.
“What do you mean, gone?” Wylie said. “It can’t be gone.”
But it was, and with it their window into the other world.
He felt suddenly numb. As if lobotomized. As if soul-robbed. “Do you have that copy?” he asked.
She thrust her hand into the pocket of her jeans. She shook her head. “They got it.”
“They have blinded me…”
Brooke said, “Which is what they probably came here to do.”
“Dad, you better get to the front window right now.”
Coming from outside, from the front, he heard it, a deep rumbling sound, regular, the unmistakable noise of a big engine.
He went to the window, looked down. Initially, he saw only blackness. Then he understood.
What stood at their doorway was the most ominous thing he had ever seen.
“It’s just sitting there, Dad,” Nick said.
The huge Humvee gleamed black. Its windows were as dark as a cave, its engine growled on idle.
They had gotten one of their vehicles through the gateway.
The engine stopped. There was movement behind the black windows. The doors began to open, and what they saw coming out was not human, not even remotely.
NINETEEN
DECEMBER 20
GATEWAYS
ALL NIGHT THE LIGHT HAD worked the town and the outriders had patrolled the woods and the rain had come in endless sheets, and the drums had muttered on. The kids were in a trance, Martin thought at first, then later that they were beyond trance, they were in a space that despite all that had happened to him he could never reach. From time to time, though, Trevor’s hand would come through the dimness and touch his own, and he would know that there are things that never will change no matter how much we change, that a child needs his parents, that there is love in families that is beyond understanding.
In the late hours he found himself under a pile of little ones, all of whom were trying to be close to the largest male in the place. Mike and George and the other older kids tried to control them, but eventually everybody gave up and he contented himself with holding the little beings in his arms as best he could.
The beauty of mankind touched him as they did, softly with their little hands, and looked at him with their great, admiring eyes. One of them, a little girl called Tillie, who reminded him so much of Winnie that it made his blood ache, said to him, “You have to be our soldier. We need one and we ain’t got one.” Her eyes had studied his, and he had felt her mind enter his mind, and it felt like smelling flowers feels, or lying in grass. She’d tossed her
