Mr. Murder

briefly transform the millions of white flakes into glowing embers. A left turn. Narrower road.
        Uphill.
        Into forested slopes. Long chain-link fence on the right, capped with spiral razor wire, broken down in places. Not there yet. A little farther.
        Close. Soon.
        The four gasoline bombs stand in a cardboard box on the floor in front of the passenger seat, wedged into the knee space. The gaps between them are packed with folded newspapers, so the bottles will not clatter against one another.
        Pungent fumes arise from the saturated cloth wicks. The perfume of destruction.
        Guided by the magnetic attraction of the false father, he makes an abrupt right turn into a single-lane driveway already half hidden by snow. He brakes as little as possible, cornering in a slide, and moving his foot to the accelerator again even as the Jeep is still finding purchase and both rear tires are spinning-squealing fiercely.
        Directly ahead, at least a hundred yards into the woods, stands a cabin.
        Soft light at the windows. Roof capped with snow.
        Even if the BMW was not parked to the left of the place, he'd know he'd found his quarry. The imposter's hateful magnetic presence pulls him forward.
        At first sight of the cabin, he decides to make a full frontal assault, regardless of the wisdom or consequences. His mother and father are dead, wife and children probably long dead, too, forms and faces mockingly imitated by the vicious alien species that has stolen his own name and memories. He seethes with rage, hatred so intense it's physically painful, anguish like a fire in his heart, and only swift justice will bring desperately needed relief.
        The churning tires bite through the snow into dirt.
        He rams his foot down on the accelerator.
        The Jeep bolts forward.
        A cry of savage fury and vengeance escapes him, and the mental rheostat spins from seven degrees to three hundred and sixty.
        Marty was at the front window when headlight beams pierced the falling snow out on the county road, but at first he couldn't see the source. Coming uphill, the vehicle was hidden by trees and roadside brush. Then it burst into sight-a Jeep-turning hard into the drive way at high speed, the back end fishtailing, plumes of snow and slush erupting behind its spinning rear tires.
        An instant later, as he was still reacting to the arrival of the Jeep, he was stricken by a brutal psychic tidal wave as strong as anything he had previously experienced but of a different quality. This was not merely the urgent, questing power that had hammered him on other occasions, but a blast of black and bitter emotion, raw and uncensored, which put him inside the mind of his enemy as no human being ever before could have been inside the mind of another. It was a surrealistic realm of psychotic rage, desperation, infantile self-absorption, terror, confusion, envy, lust, and urgent hungers so vile that a flood of sewage and rotting corpses could not have been as repulsive For the duration of that telepathic contact, Marty felt as if he had been pitched into one of the deeper regions of Hell. Though the connection lasted no more than three or four seconds, it seemed interminable. When it was broken, he found himself standing with his hands clamped against his temples, mouth open in a silent scream.
        He gasped for breath and shuddered violently.
        The roar of an engine brought his eyes back into focus and drew his attention to the day beyond the window. The Jeep station wagon was accelerating up the driveway, toward the cabin.
        Maybe he was misjudging the degree of The Other's recklessness and insanity, but he had been in that mind, and he thought he knew what was coming. He spun away from the window, toward the girls.
        "Run, get out the back, go!"
        Having already scrambled up from the living-room floor and the two-hand card game in which they'd been pretending to been grossed, Charlotte and Emily were sprinting toward the kitchen before Marty had finished shouting the warning.
        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