seen all of the Giver, only the tangle of tentacles squirming around
the edge of the front door, but he knew it was more than she could
handle.
It was more than he could handle too, so he had to forget about doing
anything, didn't dare think about it. He knew what had to be done, but
he was too scared to do it, which was all right, because even heroes
were afraid, because only insane people were never ever scared. And
right now he knew he sure wasn't insane, not even a little bit, because
he was scared bad, so bad he felt like he had to pee. This thing was
like the Terminator and the Predator and the alien from Alien and the
shark from Jaws and the velociraptors from Jurassic Park and a bunch of
other monsters rolled into one-- but he was just a kid. Maybe he was a
hero too, like his dad said, even if he didn't feel like a hero, which
he didn't, not one bit, but if he was a hero, he couldn't do what he
knew he should do.
He reached the end of the hall, where Falstaff stood trembling and
whining.
'Come on, fella,' Toby said.
He pushed past the dog into his bedroom, where the lamps were already
bright because he and Mom had turned on just about every lamp in the
house before Dad left, though it was daytime.
'Get out of the hall, Falstaff. Mom wants us out of the hall. Come
on!'
The first thing he noticed, when he turned away from the dog, was that
the door to the back stairs stood open. It should have been locked.
They were making a fortress here. Dad had nailed shut the lower door,
but this one should also be locked. Toby ran to it, pushed it shut,
engaged the dead bolt, and felt better.
At the doorway, Falstaff had still not entered the room. He had
stopped whining.
He was growling.
Jack at the ranch entrance. Pausing only a moment to recover from the
first and most arduous leg of the journey.
Instead of soft flakes, the snow was coming down in sharp-edged
crystals, almost like grains of salt. The wind drove it hard enough to
sting his exposed forehead.
A road crew had been by at least once, because a four-foot-high wall of
plowed snow blocked the end of the driveway. He clambered over it,
onto the two-lane.
Flame flared off the match head.
For an instant Heather expected the fumes to explode, but they weren't
sufficiently concentrated to be combustible.
The parasite and its dead host climbed another step, apparently
oblivious of the danger--or certain that there was none.
Heather stepped back, out of the flash zone, tossed the match.
Continuing to back up until she bumped into the hallway wall, watching
the flame flutter in an arc toward the stairwell, she had a seizure of
manic thoughts that elicited an almost compulsive bark of mad laughter,
a single dark bray that came dangerously close to ending in a thick
sob: Burning down my own house, welcome to Montana, beautiful scenery
