A werewolf among us

him, pocketed the key. He stumbled through the workshop and across the garage to the elevator doors without encountering Teddy. Perhaps he had reached the programming board in time to keep the master unit locked out. Perhaps they were safe in their fortress.
    He stepped into the pink mouth when the lips opened hungrily.
    He was swallowed.
    Spit up. Still too sour.
    In the sitting room, he saw that the others had finished their desperate barricade of chairs, sofas, lamps, draperies, bookshelves and cocktail tables. They had wedged the debris into the frame of the broken window so tightly that a certain force would be required to smash through—thereby providing them with some kind of warning.
    Only Alicia was awake, fighting off the second phase of the drug's influence. She sat on a sofa, the only piece not worked into the window frame, watching over her family.
    "It's done," he said.
    Without feeling, as if she had to expend enormous energy to shape each word, Alicia said, "I thought you were dead."
    "Not yet."
    "Where would we be without you?"
    "Happier?"
    She shook her head back and forth, almost forgot to stop. "What you said needed to be said."
    "Sleepy…" he protested.
    "Lie down."
    He lay down next to Tina and draped one arm across her narrow shoulders. She was warm. She was like a catalyst that brought the green-black nothingness sweeping over him.
     

SIXTEEN:
Advice
     
    Baker St. Cyr woke at two o'clock in the morning, sticky with perspiration, his heart pounding loudly in his ears, having just and barely escaped the cold embrace of the stalker on the broken road. The icy white fingers had actually brushed his cheek this time, the nails like polished stones as they raked gently through his hair. The touch had carried from sleep into the waking world, causing him to shiver uncontrollably.
    "What's the matter?" Tina Alderban asked.
    He opened his eyes and, for a moment, as he looked into her face, was terrified that the stalker had come out of the dream with him, had assumed a husk of flesh and blood. Then he realized that they were still lying on the floor, faces turned toward each other, and that his arm was still draped across her shoulder where he had put it before sinking into the drugged sleep. She was Tina, no one else.
    "Nightmares," he said.
    "Have them often?"
    "All the time."
    "The same one?"
    Surprised at the question, he said, "Yes."
    He removed his arm from her shoulders, for he felt that the price of that familiarity was going to be too steep for him to pay in terms of candidness and truth.
    "What happened to the others?"
    "See for yourself."
    He sat up, wished that he had not, waited until the banging inside his skull settled into a more tolerable thumping, like a padded drumstick against a gong. He wiped at his cottony eyes and saw that the rest of the family was in much the same state as he was—except for Alicia and Hirschel, who appeared to be more fully recovered than anyone else.
    "You were slow when the shooting started," Hirschel said. In his book, obviously, that was one of the worst things a man could be.
    "I know," he said. "I guess it was the drug."
    "No one else was so affected by it that they couldn't get off at least one burst," Hirschel insisted. He was not exactly angry—more
concerned
than anything.
    "I was the first hit," St. Cyr reminded the hunter.
    Hirschel shrugged and did not push the subject any more.
    "What now?" Jubal asked. His words were slurred. He sat with Alicia on the couch, beside Dane, massaging his own temples in slow, circular movements of his fingertips. Dane looked thinner, darker, and more confused than ever. The superstitious folderol had been proved false, suddenly and violently. He had not yet gotten used to facing reality.
    "Now," St. Cyr said, "we find another room on this level, one that doesn't have any windows large enough for Teddy to break through."
    "You think he's still outside the house?" Hirschel asked. Clearly, he did not think so.
    St. Cyr explained the trek he had made down to the manual programming chamber and what he had accomplished there.
    "I underestimated you again," the hunter said, smiling.
    "But don't get your hopes up," St. Cyr said. 'Teddy may have gotten back into the house before I issued those orders to the house computer."
    "We'd have seen him before this," Jubal said.
    "I doubt it. He knows that we have the vibra-guns. He's not going to attack straight-on unless he has absolutely no other choice. That's why I want to