was in better shape than he had realized.
Although the whiteout continued to limit visibility to less than a
hundred feet, sometimes dramatically less, he was no longer at risk of
becoming disoriented and lost. The walls of snow from the plow defined
a well-marked path. The tall poles along one side of the road carried
telephone and power lines, and served as another set of route
markers.
He figured he had covered nearly half the distance to Ponderosa Pines,
but his pace was flagging. He cursed himself, pushed harder, and
picked up speed.
Because he was trotting with his shoulders hunched against the
battering wind and his head tucked down to spare himself the sting of
the hard-driven snow, looking only at the roadway immediately in front
of him, he did not at first see the golden light but saw only the
reflection of it in the fine, sheeting flakes. There was just a hint
of yellow at first, then suddenly he might have been running through a
storm of gold dust rather than a blizzard.
When he raised his head, he saw a bright glow ahead, intensely yellow
at its core. It throbbed mysteriously in the cloaking veils of the
storm, the source obscured, but he remembered the light in the trees of
which Eduardo had written in the tablet. It had pulsed like this, an
eerie radiance that heralded the opening of the doorway and the arrival
of the traveler.
As he skidded to a halt and almost fell, the pulses of light grew
rapidly brighter, and he wondered if he could hide in the drifts to one
side of the road or the other. There were no throbbing bass sounds
like those Eduardo had heard and felt, only the shrill keening of the
wind. However, the uncanny light was everywhere, dazzling in the
sunless day: Jack standing in ankle-deep gold dust, molten gold
streaming through the air, the steel of the Mossberg glimmering as if
about to be transmuted into bullion. He saw multiple sources now, not
one light but several, pulsing out of sync, continuous yellow flashes
overlaying one another. A sound above the wind. A low rumble.
Building swiftly to a roar. A heavy engine. Through the whiteout,
tearing apart the obscuring veils of snow, came an enormous machine.
He found himself standing before an oncoming road grader adapted for
snow removal, a brawny skeleton of steel with a small cab high in the
center of it, pushing a curved steel blade taller than he was.
Entering the cleaner air of Toby's room, blinking away tears wrung from
her by the caustic smoke, Heather saw two blurry figures, one small and
one not. She desperately wiped at her eyes with her free hand,
squinted, and understood why the boy was screaming.
Towering over Toby was a grotesquely decomposed corpse, draped in
fragments of a rotted blue garment, bearing another Giver, aswarm with
agitated black appendages.
Falstaff sprang at the nightmare, but the writhing tentacles were
quicker than they had been before, almost faster than the eye. They
whipped out, snared the dog in mid-leap, and flicked him away as
casually and efficiently as a cow's tail might deal with an annoying
