Mr. Murder

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 me sure 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.
        As she sprinted out of the woods and into the driveway, when she was no more than thirty feet from the porch steps, gunfire erupted in the house. Five rounds in quick succession. Instead of giving her pause, the shots spurred her across the driveway and shallow front yard as fast as she could move.
        She slipped in the snow and fell to one knee just as she reached the foot of the porch steps. The pain wrung a soft, involuntary curse from her.
        If she hadn't stumbled, however, she would have been on the porch or all the way into the living room when Charlotte rounded the corner of the cabin. Marty and Emily appeared close behind Charlotte, running hand in hand.
        He fires three times into the door on the left side of the pass-through, kicks it open, scuttles across the threshold fast and low, and finds another deserted bedroom.
        Outside, a car door slams.
        Marty left the driver's door open while he got in behind the steering wheel, fumbling under the seat with one hand in search of the keys, and he didn't even think to warn