Shep stopped chanting ice. His eyes popped open. Terror had found him.
Dylan's heart double-clutched, shifting first into neutral when it skipped a beat or two, then shifting into higher gear, because he thought Shep would fold them, right here and now, without Jilly, who had reached the front hall.
Instead, Shepherd decided to make like a snake. He polished the floor with his belly as he squirmed from the dining room doorway into the downstairs hall, angling across the northeast quadrant of the living room.
Raised on his forearms, locomoting on his elbows and on the toes of his shoes, the kid moved so fast that Dylan had trouble keeping up with him.
Chips of plaster, splinters of wood, chunks of foam padding, and other debris rained on them as they crawled. Between them and the south wall, a reassuring bulk of furniture absorbed or deflected the lower incoming rounds, while the rest passed over them.
Bullets whistled overhead, the sound of fate sucking air through its teeth, but Dylan didn't yet hear any shrieking shards of whirling shrapnel, neither cyanide nor any other flavor.
A thin haze of plaster dust cast a dream pall over the room, and pillow feathers floated in the air, as thick as in a henhouse roiled by a fox.
Shep snaked into the hallway and might have kept going into the study if Jilly had not been lying prone at the foot of the stairs. She wriggled backward, blocked him, grabbed him by the loose seat of his jeans, and redirected him to the steps.
When not stopped by furniture or otherwise deflected, bullets penetrated the front hall through the open door to the living room. They also slammed into the south wall of the hallway, which was also the north wall of the living room. Impact with this second mass of wood and plaster stopped some rounds, but others punched through with plenty of killing force left.
Wheezing with fear more than with exertion, grimacing at the alkaline taste of plaster dust, gazing up from the floor, Dylan saw scores of holes in that wall. Some were no larger than a quarter, but a few were as big as his fist.
Bullets had hacked chips and chunks out of the handrail. They hacked another and another as he watched.
Several balusters had been notched. Two were shattered.
Those rounds that made it through the wall and past the stair railing were finally stopped by the north wall of hallway, which became the stairwell wall. Therein, the powerful rounds had spent the last of their energy, leaving the plaster as pocked and drilled as the backstop to a firing squad.
Even if Jilly and the brothers O'Conner, like a family of snake-imitating sideshow freaks, ascended the steps with a profile as low as that of a descending Slinky toy, they weren't going to be able to reach the first landing unscathed. Maybe one of them would make it alive and whole. Maybe even two, which would be irrefutable proof of guardian angels. If miracles came in threes, however, they wouldn't be miracles anymore; they would be common experience. Jilly or Shep, or Dylan himself, would be killed or gravely wounded in the attempt. They were trapped here, flat on the floor, inhaling plaster dust with a gasp, exhaling it with a wheeze, without options, without hope.
Then the gunfire abated and, within just three or four seconds, stopped altogether.
With the first phase of the assault completed in no more than two minutes, the assassins to the east and south of the house were falling back. Taking cover to avoid being wounded by crossfire.
Simultaneously, to the west and north of the house, other gunmen would be approaching at a run. Phase two.
The front door, in the west wall of the house, lay immediately behind Dylan, flanked by stained-glass sidelights. The study was to their left as they faced the first landing, just beyond the stairwell wall, and the study had three windows.
In phase two, the hallway would be riddled with such a storm of bullets that everything heretofore would seem, by comparison, like a mere tantrum thrown by belligerent children.
Taunting Death had granted them a mere handful of seconds in which to save themselves, and his skeletal fingers were spread wide to facilitate the sifting of time.
These same lightning calculations must have flashed through Jilly's mind, for even as the echo of the last barrage still boomed through the house, she bolted to her feet in concert with Dylan. Without pause for even one word of strategic planning, they both reached down, grabbed Shep by his belt, and hauled him to his feet between them.
With the superhuman strength of adrenaline-flushed mothers lifting overturned automobiles off their trapped babies, they pulled Shep onto tiptoe and muscled him up the steps, against which his feet rapped, tapped, scraped, and occasionally even landed on a tread in such a way as to modestly advance the cause and assist them with a little upward thrust.
'Where's all the ice?' Shep asked.
'Upstairs,' Jilly gasped.
'Where's all the ice?'
'Damn it, buddy!'
'We're almost there,' Jilly encouraged them.
'Where's all the ice?'
The first landing loomed.
Shep hooked the toe of one foot under a tread.
They maneuvered him over it, onward, up.
'Where's all the ice?'
The stained-glass sidelights dissolved in a roar of gunfire, and many sharp bony knuckles knocked fiercely against the front door, as if a score of determined demons with death warrants were demanding admission, splitting the wood, punching holes, and vibrations passed through the staircase underfoot as round after round smashed into the risers between the lower treads.
39
Once they reached the landing and started to climb the second flight, Dylan felt safer, but his relief immediately proved to be premature. A bullet cracked up through a tread three steps
He realized that the underside of this second flight of stairs faced the front door. Essentially, beneath their feet lay the back wall of a shooting gallery.
Proceeding was dangerous, retreating made no sense whatsoever, and halting in midflight meant certain death later if not sooner. So they hauled more aggressively on Shepherd's belt, Jilly with both hands, Dylan with one, dragged-heaved-bounced him up the second set of stairs, and this time 'Where's all the ice?' squeaked from him in a semifalsetto.
Dylan expected to be shot through the soles of his feet, in an arm, through the bottom of his chin, or all of the above. When they arrived in the upper hall without any of them yet resembling a morgue photo in a forensic- pathology textbook, he let go of his brother and leaned with one hand on the newel post to catch his breath.
Evidently, Vonetta Beesley, their housekeeper, had put her hand on the newel cap earlier in the day, for when Dylan made contact with her psychic trace, images of the woman flared through his mind. He felt compelled to seek her out at once.
If this had occurred the previous evening, if he hadn't learned to control his response to such stimuli, he might have plunged down the stairs, into the maelstrom below, as he had raced recklessly to Marjorie's house on Eucalyptus Avenue. Instead, he snatched his hand off the post and dialed down his sensitivity to the spoor.
Already Jilly had pulled Shepherd farther into the hall, away from the head of the stairs. Raising her voice to compete with the explosive tumult below, she pleaded with him to fold them out of here.
Joining them, Dylan saw that his brother remained icebound. The issue of ice continued to bounce around inside Shep's head to the exclusion of virtually everything else.
