Mr. Murder

Even in the early hours of a blizzard, steady traffic would be passing between the lakes and Mammoth Lakes itself. If there were a lot of witnesses, The Other couldn't kill them all. He'd have to retreat.
        But the bottom of the county road was too distant. They'd never make it before they ran out of shotgun shells to keep their enemy at bay-or before the greater accuracy and range of the revolver allowed him to pick them off one by one.
        They came to a gap in the battered chain-link fence.
        "Here, come on," Marty said.
        "Isn't that place abandoned?" Paige objected.
        "There's nowhere else," he said, taking Charlotte and Emily by the hand and leading them onto the church property.
        His hope was that someone would come along soon, see the half-burned BMW, and report it to the sheriff's department. Instead of fanning the fire that had been feeding on the paint, the wind had snuffed it, but the tire was still burning, and the battered car was hard to ignore.
        If a couple of well-armed deputies showed up to check out the area and could be enlisted in the struggle, they wouldn't under stand how formidable The Other was, but they wouldn't be as naive and helpless as ordinary citizens, either.
        After a brief hesitation, during which she glanced worriedly uphill at their nemesis, Paige followed him and the girls through the hole in the fence.
        The speedloader slips from his fingers and drops into the snow as he removes it from the pouch on his belt. It is the last of the two he took from the dead man in the surveillance van.
        He stoops, plucks it out of the snow, and brushes it off against the cranberry-red sweater under his varsity jacket. He brings it to the open revolver, slips it in, twists it, drops it, and snaps the cylinder shut.
        He will have to use his last rounds carefully. The replicants are not going to be easy to kill.
        He now knows that the woman is a replicant just like the false father.
        Alien flesh. Inhuman. She cannot be his Paige, for she is too aggressive. His Paige would be submissive, eager for domination, like the women in the Senator's film collection. His Paige is surely dead.
        He must accept that, difficult as it is. This thing is only masquerading as Paige, and not well. Worse, if Paige is gone forever, so are his loving daughters. The girls, cute and convincingly human, are also replicants-demonic, extraterrestrial, and dangerous.
        His former life is irretrievable.
        His family is gone forever.
        A black abyss of despair yawns under him, but he must not fall into it.
        He must find the strength to go on and fight either until he achieves victory in the name of all humankind-or is destroyed. He must be as courageous as Kurt Russell and Donald Sutherland were when they found themselves in similar dire straits, for he is a hero, and a hero must persevere.
        Downhill, the four creatures disappear through a hole in the chain-link fence. All he wants now is to see them dead, scramble their brains, dismember and decapitate them, eviscerate them, set them afire, take every precaution against their resurrection, for they are not merely the killers of his real family but a threat to the world.
        The thought occurs to him that, if he survives, these terrifying experiences will provide him with material for a novel. He surely will be able to get past the opening sentence, an accomplishment of which he was incapable yesterday. Though his wife and children are lost to him forever, he might be able to salvage his career from the ruins of his life.
        Slipping and sliding, he hurries toward the gap in the fence.
        The windshield wipers were caked with snow that was hardening into ice.
        They stuttered and thumped across the glass.
        Oslett consulted the computer-generated map, then pointed to a turn-off ahead. "There, on the right."
        Clocker put on the turn signal.
        Like the ghost ship Mary Celeste silently materializing from a strange fog with tattered sails unfurled and decks empty of crew, the abandoned church loomed out of the driving snow.
        At first, in the obscuring storm and fading gray light of late afternoon, Marty thought the building was in good repair, but that impression was transient. As they drew nearer, he saw that a lot of roof tiles were missing. Sections of the copper rain gutter were gone,