fly. Howling in terror, Falstaff flew across the room, slammed into
the wall beside the window, and dropped to the floor with a squeal of
pain.
The .38 Korth was in Heather's hand though she didn't remember having
drawn it.
Before she could squeeze the trigger, the new Given-or the new aspect
of the only Giver, depending on whether there was one entity with many
bodies or, instead, many individuals--snared Toby in three oily black
tentacles. It lifted him off the floor and drew him toward the leering
grin of the long-dead woman, as if it wanted him to plant a kiss on
her.
With a cry of outrage, furious and terrified in equal measure, Heather
rushed the thing, unable to shoot from even a few steps away because
she might hit Toby. Threw herself against it. Felt one of its
serpentine arms--cold even through her ski suit--curling around her
waist. The stench of the corpse.
Jesus. The internal organs were long gone, and extrusions of the alien
were squirming within the body cavity. The head turned toward her,
face-to-face, red-stipled black tendrils with spatulate tips flickering
like multiple tongues in the open mouth, bristling from the bony
nostrils, the eye sockets.
Cold slithered all the way around her waist now. She jammed the .38
under the bony chin, bearded with graveyard moss. She was going for
the head as if the head still mattered, as if a brain still packed the
cadaver's cranium, she could think of nothing else to do. Toby
screaming, the Giver hissing, the gun booming, booming, booming, old
bones shattering to dust, the grinning skull cracking off the knobby
spine and lolling to one side, the gun booming again-she lost
count--then clicking, the maddening clicking of the hammer on empty
chambers.
When the creature let go of her, Heather almost fell on her ass because
she was already straining so hard to pull loose. She dropped the gun,
and it bounced across the carpet.
The Giver collapsed in front of her, not because it was dead but
because its puppet, damaged by gunfire, had broken apart in a couple of
key places and now provided too little support to keep its soft, heavy
master erect.
Toby was free too. For the moment.
He was white-faced, wide-eyed. He'd bitten his lip. It was
bleeding.
But otherwise he seemed all right.
Smoke was beginning to roil into the room, not much, but she knew how
abruptly it could become blindingly dense.
'Go!' she said, shoving Toby toward the back stairs. 'Go, go, go!'
He scrambled across the floor on his hands and knees, and so did she,
both of them reduced by terror and expediency to the locomotion of
infancy. Got to the door. Pulled herself up against it. Toby at her
side.
Behind them was a scene out of a madman's nightmare: The Giver sprawled
on the floor, resembling nothing so much as an immensely complicated
