'You okay?' the driver asked.
'Yeah.'
They didn't have to shout inside the cab, but they did have to raise
their voices.
'So tight in here,' the driver said, 'we may be strangers now, but by
the time we get there, we'll be ready for marriage.' He put the grader
in gear.
'Quartermass Ranch, all the way up at the main house?'
'That's right.'
The grader lurched, then rolled smoothly forward. The plow made a cold
scraping sound as it skimmed the blacktop. The vibrations passed
through the frame of the grader, up through the floor, and deep into
Jack's bones.
Weaponless. Her back to the stairhead door.
Fire was visible through the smoke at the hall doorway.
Snow at the windows. Cool snow. A way out. Safety. Crash through
the window, no time to open it, straight , through, onto the porch
roof, roll to the lawn. Dangerous. Might work.
Except they wouldn't make it that far without being dragged down.
The volcanic eruption of sound from the radio was deafening. Heather
couldn't think.
The retriever shivered at her side, snarling and snapping at the
demonic figures that threatened them, though he knew as well as she did
that he couldn't save them.
When she'd seen the Giver snare the dog, pitch him away, and then grab
Toby, Heather had found the .38 in her hand with no memory of having
drawn it.
At the same time, also without realizing it, she had dropped the can of
gasoline; now it stood across the room, out of reach.
Gasoline might not have mattered, anyway. One of the creatures was
already on fire, and that wasn't stopping it.
Bodies are.
Eduardo's burning corpse was reduced to charred bone, bubbling fat.
All the clothes and hair had gone to ashes. And there was barely
enough of the Giver left to hold the bones together, yet the macabre
assemblage lurched toward her.
Apparently, as long as any fragment of the alien body remained alive,
its entire consciousness could be exerted through that last quiverring
scrap of flesh.
Madness. Chaos.
The Giver was chaos, the very embodiment of meaninglessness,
hopelessness, and malignancy, and madness. Chaos in the flesh,
demented and strange beyond understanding. Because there was nothing
to understand. That was what she believed of it now. It had no
explicable purpose of existence. It lived only to live. No
aspirations. No meaning except to hate. Driven by a compulsion to
Become and destroy, leaving chaos behind it.
A draft pulled more smoke into the room.
The dog hacked, and Heather heard Toby coughing behind her.
