He ran after them.
All in a second, spinning through his mind, an alternate strategy: stay in the living room, hope the Jeep got hung up in the porch and never made it to the front wall of the cabin, then rush outside, after the impact, and shoot the bastard before he climbed out from behind the steering wheel.
And in another second, the dark potential of that strategy: maybe the Jeep would make it all the way—cedar siding, shattered two-by-fours, electrical wiring, chunks of plaster, broken glass exploding into the living room with it, rafters buckling, ceiling collapsing, murderous slate roof tiles thundering down on him—and he would be killed by flying debris, or survive but be trapped in the rubble, legs pinned.
The kids would be on their own. Couldn’t risk it.
Outside, the roar of the engine swelled nearer.
He caught up with the girls as Charlotte grasped the thumb-turn of the dead-bolt lock on the kitchen door. He reached over her head, slapped open the latch-bolt as she disengaged the lower lock.
The scream of the engine filled the world, curiously less like the sound of a machine than like the savage cry of something huge and Jurassic.
The Beretta. Rattled by the telepathic contact and the hurtling Jeep, he had forgotten the Beretta. It was on the living-room coffee table.
No time to go back for it.
Charlotte twisted the knob. The howling wind tore the door out of her hand and shoved it into her. She was knocked off her feet.
Then wham, from the front of the house, like a bomb going off.
The big station wagon shot past Paige’s hiding place so fast she knew she wasn’t going to have a chance to wait for the son of a bitch to park, then creep up on him stealthily from tree to tree and shadow to shadow in the manner of the good adventure heroine that she envisioned herself. He was playing by his own rules, which meant no rules at all, and his every action would be unpredictable.
By the time she scrambled to her feet, the Jeep was within seventy or eighty feet of the cabin. Still accelerating.
Praying her cold-stiffened legs wouldn’t cramp, she clambered over the low rock formation. She raced toward the cabin, parallel to the driveway, staying in the gloom of the woods, weaving between tree trunks.
Because the BMW was not parked squarely in front of the cabin but to the left, the Jeep had a clear shot at the porch steps. Less than an inch of snow was insufficient to slow it down. The ground under that white blanket wasn’t frozen rock-solid as it would be later in the winter, so the tires cut into bare earth, finding all the traction they needed.
The driver seemed to be standing on the accelerator. He was suicidal. Or convinced of his invulnerability. The engine screamed.
Paige was still a hundred feet from the cabin when the left front tire of the Jeep hit the low concrete porch steps and climbed them as if they were a ramp. The right front tire spun through empty air for an instant, then grabbed the porch floor as the bumper tore through the wall of screen.
She expected the porch to give way under the weight. But the Jeep seemed airborne as the rear left tire launched it off the top of the three steps.
Flying. Taking out panels of screen and the frames that hold them in place, as if they’re spider webs, gossamer.
Straight at the door. Like an incoming round of mortar fire. A two-ton shell.
Closes his eyes. Windshield might implode.
Bone-jarring impact. Thrown forward. Safety harness jerks him back, he exhales explosively, currents of pain briefly scintillate through his chest.
A percussive symphony of boards splintering, jack studs cracking in half, door jamb disintegrating, lintel fracturing. Then forward motion ceases, the Jeep crashes down.
He opens his eyes.
The windshield is still intact.
The Jeep is in the living room of the cabin, facing a sofa and an overturned armchair. It’s tipped forward because the front wheels broke through the flooring into the air space below.
The Jeep doors are above the cabin floor and unobstructed. He disengages the seatbelt and gets out of the station wagon with one of the .38 pistols in his right hand.
Move, move, confront, challenge, grapple, and prevail.
He hears creaking overhead and looks up. The ceiling is broken and sagging but will probably hold together. Powdery snow and dead brown pine needles sift down through the cracks.
The floor is littered with broken glass. The windows flanking the cabin door have shattered.
He is thrilled by the destruction. It inflames his fury.
The living room is deserted. Through the archway he can see most of the kitchen, and no one’s in there, either.
Two closed doors are featured in the wide pass-through between living room and kitchen, one to the left and one to the right. He moves to the right.
If the false father is waiting on the other side, the very act of opening the door will trigger a fusillade.
He wants to avoid being shot if at all possible because he does not want to have to crawl away to heal again. He wants to finish this now, here, today.
If his wife and children have not already been replicated and replaced by alien forms, they will surely not be permitted to remain human much longer. Night is coming. Less than an hour away. From movies, he knows these things always happen at night—alien assault, parasite injection, attacks by shape-changers and soul-stealers and things that drink blood, all at night, either when the moon is full or there is no moon at all, but at night.
Instead of throwing the door open even from a safe position to one side, he steps in front of it, raises the .38, and opens fire. The door is not solid wood but a Masonite model with a foam core, and the hollow-point rounds punch big holes at point-blank range.
Jolting through his arms, the recoil of the Chief’s Special is enormously satisfying, almost a sexual experience, bringing a small measure of relief from his intense frustration and anger. He keeps squeezing the trigger until the hammer clicks on empty chambers.
No screams from the room beyond. No sounds at all as the roar of the last gunshot fades.
He throws the gun on the floor and draws the second .38 from the shoulder holster under his varsity jacket.
He kicks open the door and goes inside fast, the gun thrust out in front of him.
It’s a bedroom. Deserted.
Soaring frustration fans the flames of rage.
Returning to the pass-through, he faces the other closed door.
For a moment the sight of the Jeep flying across the porch and slamming through the front wall of the cabin brought Paige to a halt.
Although it was happening in front of her and though she had no doubt that it was real, the crash had the unreal quality of a dream. The station wagon seemed to hang in the air an impossibly long time, virtually floating across the porch, wheels spinning. It appeared almost to dissolve through the wall into the cabin, vanishing as if it had never been. The destruction was accompanied by a great deal of noise, yet somehow it was not cacophonous enough, not half as loud as it would have been if the crash had taken place in a movie. Immediately in the wake of it, the comparative quiet of the storm reclaimed the day, with only the moaning of the wind; snow fell in a soundless deluge.
The kids.
In her mind’s eye, she saw the wall bursting in on them, the hurtling Jeep right behind it.
She was running again before she realized it. Straight toward the cabin.
She held the shotgun with both hands—left hand on the fore-end slide handle, right hand around the grip and finger on the trigger guard. All she would have to do was halt, swing the bore toward the target, slip her finger to the trigger, and fire. Earlier, loading the Mossberg, she had pumped a round into the breech, so she could fit an extra shell into the magazine tube.