Midnight

the first thing Sam noticed was that the night had fallen silent. The shrill cries of the shape-changers no longer echoed across the fogbound town.
    The keys were in the van's ignition.
    "You drive," he told Tessa.
    His wrist was swollen worse than ever. It was throbbing so hard that each pulse of pain reverberated through every fiber of him.
    He settled in the passenger seat.
    Chrissie curled in his lap, and he wrapped his arms around her. She was uncharacteristically silent. She was exhausted, on the verge of collapse, but Sam knew the cause of her silence was more profound than weariness.
    Tessa slammed her door and started the engine. She didn't have to be told where to go.
    On the drive to Harry's place, they discovered that the streets were littered with the dead, not the corpses of ordinary men and women but—as their headlights revealed beyond a doubt—of creatures out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, twisted and phantasmagorical forms. She drove slowly, maneuvering around them, and a couple of times she had to pull up on the sidewalk to get past a pack of them that had gone down together, apparently felled by the same unseen force that had dropped the policeman back at Central.
    Shaddock's dead. His heartbeat isn't being broadcast any more, so Sun is even now putting the final program into effect… .
    After a while Chrissie lowered her head against Sam's chest and would not look out the windshield.
    Sam kept telling himself that the fallen creatures were phantoms, that no such things could have actually come into existence, either by the application of the highest of high technology or by sorcery. He expected them to vanish every time a shroud of fog briefly obscured them, but when the fog moved off again, they were still huddled on the pavement, sidewalks, and lawns.
    Immersed in all that horror and ugliness, he could not believe that he had been so foolish as to pass years of precious life in gloom, unwilling to see the beauty of the world. He'd been a singular fool. When the dawn came he would never thereafter fail to look upon a flower and appreciate the wonder of it, the beauty that was beyond man's abilities of creation.
    "Tell me now?" Tessa asked as they pulled within a block of Harry's redwood house.
    "Tell you what?"
    "What you saw. Your near-death experience. What did you see on the Other Side that scared you so?"
    He laughed shakily. "I was an idiot."
    "Probably," she said. "Tell me and let me judge."
    "Well, I can't tell you exactly. It was more an understanding than a seeing, a spiritual rather than visual perception."
    "So what did you understand?"
    "That we go on from this world," he said. "That there's either life for us on another plane, one life after another on an endless series of planes … or that we live again on this plane, reincarnate. I'm not sure which, but I felt it deeply, knew it when I reached the end of that tunnel and saw the light, that brilliant light."
    She glanced at him. "And that's what terrified you?"
    "Yes."
    "That we live again?"
    "Yes. Because I found life so bleak, you see, just a series of tragedies, just pain. I'd lost the ability to appreciate the beauty of life, the joy, so I didn't want to die and have to start in all over again, not any sooner than absolutely necessary. At least in this life I'd become hardened, inured to the pain, which gave me an advantage over starting out as a child again in some new incarnation."
    "So your fourth reason for living wasn't technically a fear of death," she said.
    "I guess not."
    "It was a fear of having to live again."
    "Yes."
    "And now?"
    He thought a moment. Chrissie stirred in his lap. He stroked her damp hair. At last he said, "Now, I'm eager to live again."

35
    Harry heard noises downstairs—the elevator, then someone in the third-floor bedroom. He tensed, figuring two miracles were one too many to hope for, but then he heard Sam calling to him from the bottom of the ladder.
    "Here, Sam! Safe! I'm okay."
    A moment later Sam climbed into the attic.
    "Tessa? Chrissie?" Harry asked anxiously.
    "They're downstairs. They're both all right."
    "Thank God." Harry let out a long breath, as if it had been pent up in him for hours. "Look at these brutes, Sam."
    "Rather not."
    "Maybe Chrissie was right about alien invaders after all."
    "Something stranger," Sam said.
    "What?" Harry said as Sam knelt beside him and gingerly pushed Worthy's mutated body off his legs.
    "Damned if I know," Sam said. "Not even sure I want to