hallway with more doors on both sides. People were coming out, alerted by the noise. As Mary half ran, half limped and Drummer wailed in her grip she rummaged in her shoulder bag until her hand found the.38 revolver. The sight of the gun cleared the hallway of human obstruction, and Mary kept going with tears of torment clouding her eyes.
In the lobby, Didi was helping Laura to her feet and some of the others were going to the aid of Sam and Rachel Jiles. 'Call the troopers, call the troopers,' Jiles was saying as he clutched his broken collarbone, but the CB radio was way past saving. 'This way!' Didi pulled at Laura, and Laura followed her into the corridor Mary had taken.
'She's bleeding!' Didi said, pointing to drops of scarlet on the floor. She and Laura were about halfway down the corridor, a few people nervously peering from their doorways, when both heard David crying. The sound stalled them, and suddenly Mary Terror leaned out from around a curve in the hallway and an overhead light glinted off the revolver in her hand. Two bullets fired, one hitting the wall to Laura's left and the second putting a hole through a door next to Didi and spraying the side of her face with splinters. Didi fired back, the slug smashing the glass of a fire alarm at the hallway's curve and setting off the siren. Then Mary was gone, and Didi saw a green sign overhead: EXIT.
'Don't shoot at her!' Laura shouted. 'You might hit David!'
'I hit what I was aiming at! If we don't shoot back, she'll just stay in one place and take us to pieces!'
Didi crouched along the wall, watching for Mary to reappear around the curve. But on the other side the corridor was empty, and there was a safety door with a glass inset and snow whirling beyond in the exterior floodlights. Blood spattered the floor.
Mary was out in the storm.
Didi went out first, expecting a bullet and throwing herself on her stomach into the snow. No bullet came. Laura emerged cautiously through the door into the freezing wind, the automatic clenched in her fist. The snow aged them within seconds, turning their hair white as grannies.
Didi's eyes narrowed. 'There,' she said, and she pointed straight ahead.
Laura saw the figure, just at the edge of the light, limping frantically through the blowing snow toward the monsters of the Dinosaur Gardens.
Amid the prehistoric beasts, in the swamp of snow, Mary trudged on. She had left her gloves and the warm, fleece-lined coat behind. Drummer was zipped up in his parka, but the wind was tearing through her sweater. Her hair was white, her face tight with cold. Her thigh wound had split open, and she could feel the hot rivulets of blood oozing down her leg and into her boot. The crust of her forearm wound had also opened again, the bandage wet and red drops falling from her fingertips. But the cold had chilled her fever and frozen the beads of sweat on her face, and she felt that God was somewhere very close, watching her with his lizard eyes. She was not afraid. She had lived through worse injuries, both to the body and the spirit, and she would live through this. Drummer's crying came to her, a high note tattered by the wind. She zipped up his face as best she could without smothering him, and she concentrated on keeping her balance because it seemed that all the world was in tumultuous motion. It seemed the dinosaurs were roaring – the cries of the doomed – and Mary lifted her head toward the iron sky and roared with them.
But she had to keep going. Had to. Jack was waiting for her. Ahead, at the end of the road. In sunny, warm California. Jack, with his face a blaze of beauty and his hair more golden than the sun.
She could not cry. Oh no. The cold would freeze her eyelids shut if she did. So she blocked out the pain and thought of the distance between herself and the Cherokee on the mountain road. Two hundred yards? Three hundred? The monsters towered over her, grinning. They knew the secrets of life and death, she thought. They were crazy, just like her.
She looked back, could make out the two figures advancing on her against the lights from the Silver Cloud Inn. Laura Clayhead and Benedict Bedelia. They wanted to play some more. They wanted to be taught a lesson in the survival of the fittest.
Mary crouched down against a dinosaur's curved tail, the beast twelve feet tall, and she positioned herself so she was shielded from most of the wind and she could watch them coming. They would be on her in a couple of minutes. They were walking fast, those two, on healthy legs. Come on, she thought. Come to Mama. She cocked the revolver, propping her arm up on the monster's tail, and she took careful aim. Her damned hand was jittering again, the nerves all screwed up. But the figures were good targets against the lights. Let them get closer, she decided. She wanted to be able to tell Clayhead from Benedict. Let them get real close.
'Where'd she go?' Laura shouted to Didi, but Didi shook her head. They went on twenty more yards, the cold gnawing at them and the wind shrieking around the dinosaurs. Mary was lost from sight, but her ragged trail through the snow was clear enough. Didi leaned her head close to Laura's and shouted, 'Her car's got to be parked on the road down there! That's where she's going!' She thought of the blood in the corridor. 'She could be hurt pretty badly, though! She could have fallen and passed out!'
'Okay! Let's go!'
Didi caught her arm. 'One other thing! She could be waiting for us in there!' She nodded toward the monsters of the Dinosaur Gardens. 'Watch your ass!'
They went on, following Mary Terror's tracks through mounds of snow as high as their knees. The brutal wind howled into their faces and stung them with bits of ice. They passed between dinosaurs, snow caught on the curves of the mountainous spines and foot-long icicles hanging from the jaws like vampire fangs. It had occurred to Didi that she didn't know how many bullets remained in the Magnum automatic. Two had been fired in the inn; the gun probably held four or five if the magazine had been full. But shooting at Mary would be playing Russian roulette with David, a fact that Laura already feared. Even a shot at Mary's legs might go wild and hit him. If I were Mary, Didi thought, I'd find a place to set up an ambush. We've got the inn's lights behind us and the wind in our faces. But there was no choice but to follow the trail, and both Didi and Laura saw black spots of blood on the snow.
The furrow Mary had left behind her curved toward a tableau of dinosaurs frozen in an attitude of combat, fangs bared and claws swiping the air. The road wasn't too far beyond it. There was no sign of Mary but the trail, and snow was already blowing over it. Didi didn't like the looks of the dinosaur tableau; Mary could be hiding behind any one of the statues. She stopped, and grabbed Laura's shoulder to stop her, too. 'I don't want to go through here!' she said. 'Go around it!'
Laura nodded and started walking to the right of the monsters, heading for the road. Didi was two paces behind, her shoulders hunched against the wind and her body starting to shiver uncontrollably. Ice chips struck her cheeks, and she turned her head slightly to the left to protect her eyes.
That was when she saw the figure stand up from behind the tail of one of the thunder lizards, about a dozen feet away.
The big woman's face was ghastly white, snowflakes snagged in her hair. Didi could see the shine of the Silver Cloud Inn's lights in her eyes, a glint of light leaping like an electric spark from the yellow Smiley Face button on her sweater. Mary held a bundle in the crook of her left arm, her right arm outstretched and the revolver at the end of it. The gun was pointed at Laura, who hadn't yet seen the danger.
Didi had an instant of gut-wrenching terror, and she realized exactly how Mary had earned her name. Mary's expression was a white blank, without triumph or anger just the sure knowledge of who held the upper hand.
Didi's shout would be lost in the wind. There was no time for anything else. She threw herself at Laura, hitting her with a solid shoulderblock, and at the same instant she heard Mary's gun go off: crackcrack.
Laura went down on her stomach into the snow. Didi felt the bite of a bullet at her throat, and something hit her in the chest like the kick of a mule. The pain choked her, her finger spasming on the Magnum's trigger and the bullet going up into the sky. Then Laura had twisted her body, and as Mary fired again, snow kicked up where she'd been a second before. Laura saw the woman standing there, behind the dinosaur's tail, and she had an instant to make her decision. She took aim and pulled the automatic's trigger.
The bullet hit its mark: not Mary Terror, but the larger target of the dinosaur's gray-scaled hip. Chips of concrete flew up, and Mary dodged behind the monster's body. Laura got up and threw herself against the shelter of a stegosaurus's concrete-plated back. She looked at Didi, who lay on her side. Darkness was spreading around her. Laura started to crawl back to her friend, but she was stopped short when a bullet hit one of the dinosaur's spine plates next to her head and ricocheted off with a scream.
On her knees, Mary fumbled in her shoulder bag for the box of.38 shells she'd taken from the dead man's gun cabinet. Her fingers were stiffening up and slick with icy blood. She got two more bullets into the revolver and lost
