Mr. Murder

while other pieces dangled precariously, swaying and creaking in the wind. Most of the windows were broken out, and vandals had spray painted obscenities on the once-handsome brick walls.
        Rambling complexes of buildings-offices, workshops, a nursery, dormitories, a dining hall-stood immediately behind and to both sides of the steepled main structure. The Prophetic Church of the Rapture had been a cult that required its members to contribute all of their worldly belongings upon admittance and to live in a tightly governed commune.
        They raced through the inch-deep snow, as fast as the girls could manage, toward the entrance to the church, rather than to one of the other buildings, because the church was closest. They needed to get out of sight as quickly as possible. Though The Other could track them through his connection with Marty no matter where they went, at least he couldn't shoot at them if he couldn't see them.
        Twelve broad steps led up to a double set of ten-foot-high oak doors with six-foot-high fanlights above each pair. All but a few ruby and yellow shards of glass had been broken out of the fanlights, leaving dark gaps between the thick ribs of leading. The doors were recessed in a twenty-foot-high cinquefoil arch, above which was an enormous and elaborately patterned wheel window that still contained twenty percent of its original glass, most likely because it was a harder target for stones.
        The four carved-oak doors were weather-beaten, scarred, cracked, and spray-painted with more obscenities that glowed softly in the ashen light of the premature dusk. On one, a vandal had crudely drawn the white hourglass shape of a female form complete with breasts and a crotch defined by the letter Y, and beside it was a representation of a phallus as large as a man. Beveled letters, cut by a master stone carver, made the same promise in the granite lintel above each set of doors, HE LIFTETH US UNTO HEAVEN, however, over those words, the spoilers had sprayed BULLSHIT in red paint.
        The cult had been creepy, and its founder-Jonathan Cainc had been a fraud and pederast, but Marty was more chilled by the vandals than by the misguided people who had followed Caine. At least the faithful cultists had believed in something, no matter how misguided, had yearned to be worthy of God's grace, and had sacrificed for their beliefs, even if the sacrifices ultimately proved to be stupid, they had dared to dream even if their dreams had ended in tragedy. The mindless hatred that informed the scrawlings of the graffitists was the work of empty people who believed in nothing, were incapable of dreaming, and thrived on the pain of others.
        One of the doors stood ajar six inches. Marty grabbed the edge of it and pulled. The hinges were corroded, the oak was warped, but the door grated outward another twelve or fourteen inches.
        Paige went inside first. Charlotte and Emily trailed close behind Marty never heard the shot that hit him.
        As he started to follow the girls, a lance of ice impaled him, entering the upper-left quadrant of his back, exiting through the muscles and tendons below the collar bone on the same side. The piercing chill was so cold that the blizzard hammering the church seemed like a tropical disturbance by comparison, and he shuddered violently.
        The next thing he knew, he was lying on the snow-covered brick stoop in front of the door, wondering how he had gotten there. He was half convinced he had just stretched out for a nap, but the pain in his bones indicated he'd dropped hard onto his unlikely bed.
        He stared up through the descending snow and wintry light at letters in granite, letters on granite.
        HE LIFTETH US UNTO HEAVEN.
        BULLSHIT.
        He only realized he'd been shot when Paige rushed out of the church and dropped to one knee at his side, shouting, "Marty, oh God, my God, you've been shot, the son of a bitch shot you," and he thought, Oh, yes, of course, that's it, I've been shot, not stabbed by a lance of ice.
        Paige rose from beside him, raised the Mossberg. He heard two shots.
        They were exceedingly loud, unlike the stealthy bullet that had knocked him to the bricks.
        Curious, he turned his head to see how close their indefatigable enemy had come. He expected to discover the look-alike charging at him, only a few yards away, unfazed by shotgun pellets.
        Instead, The