Through her rolled waves of nausea. Saliva flooded her mouth. She could still taste blood, so she spat instead of swallowing, and spat again.
Turning from the door, probing with the flashlight, the first thing she saw was a hatchet embedded in the side of a tall wooden cabinet. Blood on the blade, on the handle.
Sickened, she didn't want to look further, but she had to, and did.
She was in a home office, unrevealed by two windows looking out on moss-strangled trees in the purple noon. A door stood open to an adjacent bathroom.
She shared the room with two chopped bodies-a man on the floor, a woman tumbled in an armchair. She had become inured to horror, yet she didn't look at them too closely or too long.
Family photos on the wall behind the desk revealed that these were the parents of the children locked in the room near the head of the stairs. The kids in the pictures were a dimpled boy and an older sister with black hair and Cleopatra bangs.
Appearing in none of the photos, the scarred man must be an intruder. She had known that Michael Render would not be the only sociopath to embrace the chaos of a crumbling civilization.
Sacrifices.
Hurriedly, she searched the desk drawers, seeking a weapon. She hoped to find a handgun. The best she could come up with was a pair of scissors.
Behind her, the scarred man said, 'Drop them,' and pressed the muzzle of a gun, probably her own 9-mm pistol, against the nape of her neck.
56
THE NEEDLEPOINT CHAIR REMAINED BRACED UNDER the knob; but the killer had not phased through that barrier or any other.
The adjacent bath was shared between this study and a bedroom. He had been in the house long enough to know it well, and he had come into the study by way of the bath and the neighboring room.
Molly didn't at once drop the scissors, as commanded. Her vivid imagination painted a tableau of rape and torture that made it worth the risk of twisting around on him, trying to put the scissors in his guts, hoping to dodge the shot.
But she didn't know the future and could not act on a fear of what it might be. The past and future are equally unredeemable, and the only time of consequence is this moment, now, where life occurs, where choices are made for reasons practical and philosophical.
Dropped, the scissors clattered on the desk top.
He shifted the muzzle of the pistol to her throat, encircled her with one arm, pawed her breasts through her sweater, motivated not by lust but by the desire to hurt her, which he did, squeezing hard.
'You like to bite, huh?' His voice was strangely affected by his punctured cheek, his breath reeking as before but now also redolent of blood. 'You eat lamb?'
If she screamed, Neil would come, but he would leave the six children in the street, protected only by the dogs, which were now under suspicion.
'You eat lamb?' he repeated, squeezing her with such cruelty that she almost gave him the satisfaction of crying out in pain.
'No. I don't like it.'
'You're gonna acquire a taste for it,' he said. 'I'm gonna take you down the hall, see my two lambs, gonna watch while you bite those tender babies.'
In the walls, in the ceiling, the unknown presences churned with greater frenzy.
'The harder you bite them, the more fun places you think to bite them, the better your chances I'll let you live.'
Vamping for time, expecting his answer to be one kind of crazy or another with no enlightening content, Molly said, 'Sacrifices, you called them. To what, why?'
'They want the kids, kids more than anything, but they can't touch them.'
'Who?'
'Them that rule the world now.'
'Why can't they touch the kids?'
'Don't you know nothing? Kids ain't for sifting,' he said. 'But ain't no rules apply to me. If I do the kids, them with the power will be good to me.'
Molly felt like a blind woman reading lines of Braille in which random dots had been omitted. Some vital understanding loomed just beyond the limits of her vision.
He withdrew his arm from around her, but he dug the muzzle of the pistol harder against her throat, just under the hinge of the jawbone. 'You pick up the flashlight on the desk and move slow and easy with me. Don't try nothin' or I'll blow your pretty head off.'
The bleak afternoon brightened beyond the windows. Cold white radiance streamed down, rinsing the purple out of the air.
She recognized the quality of light. One of the silent, glowing craft must be hovering over the house.
As before, she felt closely observed, examined, but more than merely examined: She felt known in heart and mind and body, known in terrifying completeness.
Her assailant apparently felt the same thing, because his body stiffened and he shrank a step back from the windows, pulling her with him. 'What's this shit?'
Fear distracted him, and when the pressure of the muzzle eased at Molly's throat, she knew this was the time to act, for she was in the moment as seldom before, clear-eyed and quick of mind, all the experience of her past and all the hopes of her future focused here at the still point that was now.
From the desk she snatched the scissors. Simultaneously she pulled away from him and heard the double click of the trigger but not the boom of a shot.
She swung toward him. The pistol a foot from her face. Muzzle so huge, so dark. He pulled the trigger again. The gun didn't fire.
As ruthless as any Fate snipping a lifeline, she slashed at his gun hand with the scissors. He cried out and dropped the weapon.
She threw the scissors at him, stooped, and snatched the pistol off the floor.
Rising to full height, she saw him reach for her. She squeezed the trigger, and the gun bucked in her hand.
He served as the sacrifice that he had intended to make of the children. The bullet found his heart with such accuracy that he was dead before he could look surprised, a cooling corpse before he hit the floor.
His two misfires followed by her point-blank shot were not a series of coincidences, and the gun was not defective. Some power was at work on her behalf, some agency uncanny.
Behind the plaster, the teeming hive had fallen silent.
57
THE BRILLIANCE OF THE HOVERING UFO, POURING through the windows, brought too much revealing light to this body-strewn abattoir. Molly retrieved her flashlight from the desk and departed by way of the bath that connected this study to another room.
A high window in the shower stall admitted light, which revealed her moving figure in the mirror-and the figure of another who was not present. She saw the other in a glance, halted in shock to look again, but only she herself was now reflected.
She didn't know if her mother, Thalia, glimpsed in the mirror, had actually been there or whether this vision had been merely the ephemeral expression of her fondest wish, hallucination, even perhaps a flicker of
