of the house, one at the back. The Uzi chattered. Six rounds, maybe
eight. The door shut. But a mysterious dark figure was hunched
against it, a small part of it visible in the beveled-glass window in
the top of the door.
Without pausing to see if she'd actually hit the son of a bitch or
scored only the door and wall, she spun toward the kitchen yet again,
punching three or four rounds through the empty hallway behind her even
as she turned.
Nothing there.
She had been sure the first one would be striking at her back.
Wrong.
Maybe twenty rounds left in the Uzi's double magazine. Maybe only
fifteen.
They couldn't stay in the hall. Not with one of the damned things in
the kitchen, another on the front porch.
Why had she thought there'd be only one of them? Because in the dream
there was only one? Because Toby had spoken of just a single
seducer?
Might be more than two. Hundreds.
The living room was on one side of her. Dining room on the other.
Ultimately, either place seemed likely to become a trap.
In different rooms all over the ground floor, windows imploded
simultaneously.
The clinkjangle-tink of cascading glass and the shrieking of the wind
at every breach decided her. Up. She and Toby would go up. Easier to
defend high ground.
She grabbed the can of gasoline.
The front door came open behind her again, banging against the
scattered items with which they had built the alarm tower. She assumed
that something other than the wind had shoved it, but she didn't glance
back. The Giver hissed. As in the dream.
She leaped for the stairs, gasoline sloshing in the can, and shouted at
Toby, 'Go, go!'
The boy and the dog raced to the second floor ahead of her.
'Wait at the top!' she called as they scrambled upward and out of
sight.
At the top of the first flight, Heather halted on the landing, looked
back and down into the front hall, and saw a dead man walking. Eduardo
Fernandez. She recognized him from the pictures they had found while
sorting through his belongings. Dead and buried more than four months,
he nevertheless moved in a shambling and stiffjointed manner, kicking
through the dishes and pans and flatware, heading for the foot of the
stairs, accompanied by swirling flakes of snow like ashes from the
fires of hell.
There could be no self-awareness in the corpse, no slightest wisp of Ed
Fernandez's consciousness remaining in it, for the old man's mind and
soul had gone on to a better place before the Giver had requisitioned
his body.
The soiled cadaver was evidently being controlled with the same power
