I followed her lead and got a grip on the hidden Glock.
We looked at each other. A tide of fear washed through her eyes, and I was sure that she saw the same dark currents in mine.
I tried to smile reassuringly, but my face felt as though it would crack like hard plaster. “Gonna be fine. A deejay, a surf rebel, and the Elephant Man — the perfect team to save the world.”
“If possible,” Bobby said, “don’t immediately waste the first one or two that come in. Let a few inside. Delay as long as you can. Let them feel confident. Sucker the little geeks. Then let me open on them first, teach them respect. With the shotgun, I don’t even have to aim.”
“Yes, sir, General Bob,” I said.
Two, three, four stones — about as hefty as peach pits — struck the windows. The second large pane cracked, and a subsidiary fissure opened off that line, like lightning branching.
I was experiencing a physiological rearrangement that would have fascinated any physician. My stomach had squeezed up through my chest and was pressing insistently at the base of my throat, while my pounding heart had dropped down into the space formerly occupied by my stomach.
Half a dozen more substantial stones, whaled harder than before, battered the two large windows, and both panes shattered inward. With a burst of brittle music, glass rained into the stainless-steel sink, across the granite counters, onto the floor. A few shards sprayed as far as the dinette, and I shut my eyes briefly as sharp fragments clinked onto the tabletop and plopped into the remaining slices of cold pizza..
When I opened my eyes an instant later, two shrieking monkeys, each as large as the one that Angela had described, were already at the window again. Wary of the broken glass and of us, the pair swung inside, onto the granite counter. Wind churned in around them, plucking at their rain-matted fur.
One of them looked toward the broom closet, where the shotgun was usually locked away. Since their arrival, they hadn’t seen any of us approach that cupboard, and they couldn’t possibly spot the 12-gauge balanced on Bobby’s knees, under the table.
Bobby glanced at them but was more interested in the window opposite him, across the table.
Hunched and agile, the two creatures already in the room moved along the counter in opposite directions from the sink. In the dimly lighted kitchen, their malevolent yellow eyes were as bright as the flames leaping on the points of the candle wicks.
The intruder to the left encountered a toaster and angrily swept it to the floor. Sparks spurted from the wall receptacle when the plug tore out of the socket.
I remembered Angela’s account of the rhesus bombarding her with apples hard enough to split her lip. Bobby maintained an uncluttered kitchen, but if these beasts opened cabinet doors and started firing glasses and dishes at us, they could do serious damage even if we did enjoy an advantage in firepower. A dinner plate, spinning like a Frisbee, catching you across the bridge of the nose, might be nearly as effective as a bullet.
Two more dire-eyed creatures sprang up from the porch floor into the frame of the shattered window. They bared their teeth at us and hissed.
The paper napkin over Sasha’s gun hand trembled visibly — and not because it was caught by a draft from the window.
In spite of the shrieking-chattering-hissing of the intruders, in spite of the bluster of the March wind at the broken windows and the rolling thunder and the drumming rain, I thought I heard Bobby singing under his breath. He was largely ignoring the monkeys on the far side of the kitchen, focusing intently on the window that remained intact, across the table from him — and his lips were moving.
Perhaps emboldened by our lack of response, perhaps believing us to be immobilized by fear, the two increasingly agitated creatures in the broken-out windows now swung inside and moved in opposite directions along the counter, forming pairs with each of the first two intruders.
Either Bobby began to sing louder or stark terror sharpened my hearing, because suddenly I could recognize the song that he was singing. “Daydream Believer.” It was golden-oldie teen pop, first recorded by the Monkees.
Sasha must have heard it, too, because she said, “A blast from the past.”
Two more members of the troop climbed into the windows above the sink, clinging to the frames, hellfire in their eyes, squealing monkey-hate at us.
The four already in the room were shrieking louder than ever, bouncing up and down on the counters, shaking their fists in the air, baring their teeth and spitting at us.
They were smart but not smart enough. Their rage was rapidly clouding their judgment.
“Wipeout,” Bobby said.
Here we go.
Instead of scooting backward in his chair to clear the table, he swung sideways in it, rose fluidly to his feet, and brought up the shotgun as if he’d had both military training and ballet lessons. Flame spouted from the muzzle, and the first deafening blast caught the two latest arrivals at the windows, blowing them backward onto the porch, as though they were only a child’s stuffed toys, and the second round chopped down the pair on the counter to the left of the sink.
My ears were ringing as though I were inside a tolling cathedral bell, and although the roar of the gunfire in this confined space was loud enough to be disorienting, I was on my feet before the 12-gauge boomed the second time, as was Sasha, who turned away from the table and squeezed off a round toward the remaining pair of intruders just as Bobby dealt with numbers three and four.
As they fired and the kitchen shook with the blasts, the nearest window exploded at me. Air-surfing on a cascade of glass, a screaming rhesus landed on the table in our midst, knocking over two of the three candles and extinguishing one of them, spraying rain off its coat, sending a pan of pizza spinning to the floor.
I brought up the Glock, but the latest arrival flung itself onto Sasha’s back. If I shot it, the slug would pass straight through the damn thing and probably kill her, too.
By the time I kicked a chair out of the way and got around the table, Sasha was screaming, and the squealing monkey on her back was trying to tear out handfuls of her hair. Reflexively, she’d dropped her.38 to reach blindly behind herself for the rhesus. It snapped at her hands, teeth audibly cracking together on empty air. Her body was bent backward over the table, and her assailant was trying to pull her head back farther still, to expose her throat.
I dropped the Glock on the table and seized the creature from behind, getting my right hand around its neck, using my left to clutch the fur and skin between its shoulder blades. I twisted that handful of fur and skin so fiercely that the beast screamed in pain. It wouldn’t let go of Sasha, however, and as I struggled to tear it away from her, it tried to pull her hair out by the roots.
Bobby pumped another round into the chamber and squeezed off a third shot, the cottage walls seemed to shake as if an earthquake had rumbled under us, and I figured that was the end of the final pair of intruders, but I heard Bobby cursing and knew more trouble had come our way.
Revealed more by their blazing yellow eyes than by the guttering flames of the remaining two candles, another pair of monkeys, total kamikazes, had sprung into the windows above the sink.
And Bobby was reloading.
In another part of the cottage, Orson barked loudly. I didn’t know if he was racing toward us to join the fray or whether he was calling for help.
I heard myself cursing with uncharacteristic vividness and snarling with animal ferocity as I shifted my grip on the rhesus, getting both hands around its neck. I choked it, choked it until finally it had no choice but to let go of Sasha.
The monkey weighed only about twenty-five pounds, less than one-sixth of my weight, but it was all bone and muscle and seething hatred. Screaming thinly and spitting even as it struggled for breath, the thing tried to tuck its head down to bite at the hands encircling its throat. It wrenched, wriggled, kicked, flailed, and I can’t imagine that an eel could have been harder to hold on to, but my fury at what the little fucker had tried to do to Sasha was so great that my hands were like iron, and at last I felt its neck snap. Then it was just a limp, dead thing, and I dropped it on the floor.
Gagging with disgust, gasping for breath, I picked up my Glock as Sasha, having recovered her Chiefs Special, stepped to the broken window near the table and opened fire at the night beyond.
While reloading, apparently having lost track of the last two monkeys in spite of their glowing eyes, Bobby
