Move, move, confront, challenge, grapple, and prevail.
He must not dwell on the tragedy of his parents’ deaths. The creatures he destroyed were surely not his mother and father, anyway, but mimics like the one that has stolen his own life. He might never learn when his real parents were murdered and replaced, and in any event he must delay grieving for them.
Thinking too much about his parents—or about anything—is not merely a waste of precious time but anti-heroic. Heroes don’t think. Heroes
act.
Move, move, confront, challenge, grapple, and prevail.
Finished eating, he goes to the garage by way of a laundry room off the kitchen. Switching on fluorescent lights as he crosses the threshold, he discovers two vehicles are available for his use—an old blue Dodge and an apparently new Jeep Wagoneer. He will use the Jeep because of its four-wheel drive.
The keys to the vehicle hang on a pegboard in the laundry room. In a cabinet, he also finds a large box of detergent. He reads the list of chemicals on the box, satisfied with what he discovers.
He returns to the kitchen.
The end of one row of lower cabinets is finished with a wine rack. After locating a corkscrew in a drawer, he opens four bottles and empties the wine into the sink.
In another kitchen drawer he finds a plastic funnel among other odds and ends of cooking implements. A third drawer is filled with clean white dish towels, and a fourth is the source for a pair of scissors and a book of matches.
He carries the bottles and the other items into the laundry room and puts them on the tiled counter beside the deep sink.
In the garage again, he takes a red five-gallon gasoline can from a shelf to the left of the workbench. When he unscrews the cap, high-octane fumes waft out of the container. Spring through autumn, Dad probably keeps gasoline in the can to use in the lawn mower, but it is empty now.
Rummaging through the drawers and cabinets around the workbench, he finds a coil of flexible plastic tubing in a box of repair parts for the drinking-water filtration system in the kitchen. With this he siphons gasoline out of the Dodge into the five-gallon can.
At the sink in the laundry room, he uses the funnel to pour an inch of detergent into the bottom of each empty wine bottle. He adds gasoline. He cuts the dishcloths into useable strips.
Although he has two revolvers and twenty rounds of ammunition, he wants to add gasoline bombs to his arsenal. His experiences of the past twenty-four hours, since first confronting the false father, have taught him not to underestimate his adversary.
He still hopes to save Paige, Charlotte, and little Emily. He continues to desire reunion and the renewal of their life together.
However, he must face reality and prepare for the possibility that his wife and children are no longer who they once were. They may simply have been mentally enslaved. On the other hand, they might also have been infected by parasites not of this world, their brains now hollow and filled with writhing monstrosities. Or they might not be themselves at all, merely replicants of the real Paige, Charlotte, and Emily, just as the false father is a replicant of him, arising out of a seed pod from some distant star.
The varieties of alien infestation are limitless and strange, but one weapon has saved the world more often than any other: fire. Kurt Russell, when he was a member of an Antarctic scientific-research outpost, had been confronted by an extraterrestrial shape-changer of infinite forms and great cunning, perhaps the most frightening and powerful alien ever to attempt colonization of the earth, and fire had been by far the most effective weapon against that formidable enemy.
He wonders if four incendiary devices are enough. He probably won’t have time to use more of them, anyway.
If something bursts out of the false father, Paige, or the girls, and if it’s as hostile as the things that had burst out of people in Kurt Russell’s research station, he would no doubt be overwhelmed before he could use more than four gasoline bombs, considering that he must take the time to light each one separately. He wishes he had a flame-thrower.
2
Standing by one of the front windows, watching heavy snow filter through the trees and onto the lane that led out to the county route, Marty plucked handfuls of 9mm ammunition out of the boxes of ammo they’d brought from Mission Viejo. He distributed cartridges in the numerous zippered pockets of his red-and-black ski jacket and in the pockets of his jeans as well.
Paige loaded the magazine of the Mossberg. She’d had less time than Marty to practice with the pistol on the firing range, and she felt more comfortable with the 12-gauge.
They had eighty shells for the shotgun and approximately two hundred 9mm rounds for the Beretta.
Marty felt defenseless.
No amount of weaponry would have made him feel better.
After hanging up on The Other, he had considered getting out of the cabin, going on the run. But if they had been followed this far so easily, they would be followed anywhere they went. It was better to make a stand in a defendable location than to be accosted on a lonely highway or be taken by surprise in a place more vulnerable than the cabin.
He almost called the local police to send them to his parents’ house. But The Other would surely be gone before they got there, and the evidence they collected—fingerprints and God knew what else—would only make it appear that he had murdered his own mother and father. The media had already painted him as an unstable character. The scene at the house in Mammoth Lakes would play into the fantasy they were selling. If he were arrested today or tomorrow or next week—or even just detained for a few hours without being booked—Paige and the girls would be left on their own, a situation that he found intolerable.
They had no choice but to dig in and fight. Which wasn’t a choice so much as a death sentence.
Side by side on the sofa, Charlotte and Emily were still wearing their jackets and gloves. They held hands, taking strength from each other. Although they were scared, they weren’t crying or demanding reassurance as many kids might have been doing in the same situation. They had always been real troupers, each in her own way.
Marty was not sure how to counsel his daughters. Usually, like Paige, he was not at a loss for the guidance they needed to get them through the problems of life. Paige joked that they were the Fabulous Stillwater Parenting Machine, a phrase that contained as much self-mockery as genuine pride. But he was at a loss for words this time because he tried never to lie to them, did not intend to start lying now, yet dared not share with them his own bleak assessment of their chances.
“Kids, come here, do something for me,” he said.
Eager for distraction, they scrambled off the sofa and joined him at the window.
“Stand here,” he said, “watch the paved road out there. If a car turns into the driveway or even goes by too slow, does anything suspicious, you holler. Got that?”
They nodded solemnly.
To Paige, Marty said, “Let’s check all the other windows, make sure they’re locked, and close the drapes over them.”
If The Other managed to creep up on the cabin without alerting them, Marty didn’t want the bastard to be able to watch them—or shoot at them—through a window.
Every window he checked was locked.
In the kitchen, as he covered a window that looked out onto the deep woods behind the cabin, he remembered that his mother had made the drapes on her sewing machine in the spare bedroom of the house in Mammoth Lakes. He had a mental image of her, sitting at the Singer, her foot on the treadle, intently watching the needle as it chattered up and down.
His chest clogged with pain. He took a deep breath, let it shudder out of him, then again, trying not only to expel the pain but also the memory that engendered it.
There would be time for grief later, if they survived.
Right now he had to think only about Paige and the kids. His mother was dead. They were alive. The cold truth: mourning was a luxury.
He caught up with Paige in the second of the two small bedrooms just as she finished adjusting the draperies. She had switched on a nightstand lamp, so she wouldn’t be in darkness when she closed off the windows, and now she moved to extinguish it.
“Leave it on,” Marty said. “With the storm, it’ll be a long and early twilight. From outside, he’ll probably be able to tell which rooms are lit, which aren’t. No sense making it easier for him to figure exactly where we are.”
She was quiet. Staring at the amber cloth of the lampshade. As if their future could be prophesied from the vague patterns in that illuminated fabric.
At last she looked at him. “How long have we got?”
“Maybe ten minutes, maybe two hours. It’s up to him.”
“What’s going to happen, Marty?”
It was his turn to be silent a moment. He didn’t want to lie to her, either.
When he finally spoke, Marty was surprised to hear what he told her, because it sprang from subconscious depths, was genuine, and indicated greater optimism than he was aware of on a conscious level. “We’re going to kill the fucker.” Optimism or fatal self-delusion.
She came to him around the foot of the bed, and they held each other. She felt so right in his arms. For a moment, the world didn’t seem crazy any more.
“We still don’t even know who he is, what he is, where he comes from,” she said.
“And maybe we’ll never find out. Maybe, even after we kill the son of a bitch, we’ll never know what this was all about.”
“If we never find out, then we can’t pick up the pieces.”
“No.”
She put her head on his shoulder and gently kissed the exposed penumbra of the bruises on his throat. “We can never feel safe.”
“Not in our old life. But as long as we’re together, the four of us,” he said, “I can leave everything behind.”
“The house, everything in it, my career, yours—”
“None of that’s what really matters.”
“A new life, new names . . . What future will the girls have?”
“The best we can give them. There were never any guarantees. There never are in this life.”
She raised her head from his shoulder and looked into his eyes. “Can I really handle it when he shows up here?”
“Of course you can.”
“I’m just a family counselor specializing in the behavioral problems of children, parent-child relations. I’m not the heroine of an adventure story.”
“And I’m just a mystery novelist. But we can do it.”
“I’m scared.”
“So am I.”
“But if I’m so scared now, where am I going to find the courage to pick up a shotgun and defend my kids from something . . . something like this?”
“Imagine you
are
the heroine of an adventure story. ”
“If only it were that easy.”
“In some ways . . . maybe it is,” he said. “You know I’m not much for Freudian explanations. More often than not, I think we decide to be what we are. You’re a living example, after what you went through as a kid.”
She closed her eyes. “Somehow, it’s easier to imagine myself as a family counselor than as Kathleen Turner in
Romancing the Stone.”
“When we first met,” he said, “you couldn’t imagine yourself as a wife and mother, either. A family was nothing but a prison to you, prison and torture chamber. You never wanted to be part of a family again.”
She opened her eyes. “You taught me how.”
“I didn’t teach you anything. I only showed you how to imagine a good family, a healthy family. Once you were able to imagine it, you could learn to believe in the possibility. From there on, you taught yourself.”
She said, “So life’s a form of fiction, huh?”
“Every life’s a story. We make it up as we go along.”
“Okay. I’ll try to be Kathleen Turner.”
“Even better.”
“What?”
“Sigourney Weaver.”
She smiled. “Wish I had one of those big damned futuristic guns like she got to use when she played Ripley.”
“Come on, we better go see if our sentries are still at their post.”
In the living room, he relieved the girls of their duty at the only undraped window and suggested they heat some water to make mugs of hot chocolate. The cabin was always stocked with basic canned goods, including a tin of cocoa-flavored milk powder. The electric heaters still hadn’t taken the chill off the air, so they could all use a little internal warming. Besides, making hot chocolate was such a
normal
task that it might defuse some of the tension and calm their nerves.
He looked through the window, across the screened porch, past the back end of the BMW. So many trees stood between the cabin and the county road that the hundred-yard-long driveway was pooled with deep shadows, but he could still see that no one was approaching either in a vehicle or on foot.
Marty was reasonably confident that The Other would come at them directly rather than from behind the cabin. For one thing, their property backed up to the hundred acres of church land downhill and to a larger parcel uphill, which made an indirect approach relatively arduous and time-consuming.
Judging by his past behavior, The Other always favored headlong action and blunt approaches. He seemed to lack the knack or patience for strategy. He was a doer more than a thinker, which almost ensured a furious—rather than sneak—attack.
That trait might be the enemy’s fatal weakness. It was a hope worth nurturing, anyway.
Snow fell. The shadows deepened.
3
From the motel room, Spicer called the surveillance van for an update. He let the phone ring a dozen times, hung up, and tried again, but still the call went unanswered.
“Something’s happened,” he said. “They wouldn’t have left the van.”
“Maybe something’s wrong with their phone,” Oslett suggested.