One Door From Heaven

just one furter from an unpleasant flowback. The sausages are cold but delicious. He would eat more if he had them. Being Curtis Hammond requires a remarkable amount of energy.
        He can only imagine the daunting quantity of energy required to be Donella, the waitress whose magnificent dimensions are matched by the size of her good heart.
        Reminded of Donella, he worries about her welfare. What might have happened to her among all the flying bullets? On the other hand, although she provides a convenient target, her fantastic bulk no doubt makes her more difficult to kill than are ordinary mortals.
        He wishes that he'd returned for her and had bravely spirited her to safety. This is a ridiculously romantic and perhaps irrational notion. He's just a boy of comparatively little experience, and she's a grand person of great age and immeasurable wisdom. Nevertheless, he wishes he had been brave for her.
        Helicopter rotors rattle the night again. Curtis tenses, half expecting gunfire to riddle the motor home, to hear the booted feet of winch-lowered SWAT officers thumping on the roof and demands for his surrender blasted on a loudspeaker. The chudda-chudda-chudda of air-slicing steel grows thunderous… but then diminishes and fades entirely away.
        Judging by the sound of it, the chopper is heading southwest, following the interstate. This is not good.
        Finished with the hot dogs, Curtis drinks orange juice from the container-and realizes that Old Yeller is thirsty, too.
        Drawing upon the messy experience of giving the dog a drink from a bottle of water in the Explorer, he decides to search for a bowl or for something that can serve as one.
        The motor home is rolling along at the speed limit or faster, and he assumes that the owners-the man and woman whose voices he heard earlier-are still in the cockpit, hashing over the excitement at the truck stop. If they're sitting at the far end of the vehicle, facing away from the bedroom, they aren't in a position to see any light that might leak under or around the door.
        Curtis eases off the bed. He feels the wall beside the jamb, finds the switch.
        His dark-adapted eyes sting briefly from the glare.
        Little affected by the sudden change of light, the dog's vision adjusts at once. Previously lying on the bed, she now stands upon it, following Curtis's movements with curiosity, her tail wagging in expectation of either adventure or a share of the juice.
        The bedroom is too small and too utilitarian for decorative bowls or for knickknacks that might be of use.
        Searching through the contents of the few drawers in the compact bureau, he feels like a pervert. He's not exactly sure what perverts do, or why they do whatever it is they do, but he knows that secretly poking through other people's underwear is definitely a sign that you are a pervert, and there seems to be as much underwear in this bureau as anything else.
        Flushed with embarrassment, unable to look at Old Yeller, the boy turns from the bureau and tries the top drawer on the nearest nightstand. Inside, among articles of no use to him, are a pair of white plastic jars, each four inches in diameter and three inches tall. Though small, either of these will be suitable as a dish for the dog; he will simply refill it with juice as often as the pooch requires.
        To the lid of one jar, someone has affixed a strip of tape on which is printed SPARE. Curtis interprets this to mean that of the two jars, this is the one of less importance to the owners of the motor home, and so he decides to appropriate this spare in order to cause them as little inconvenience as possible.
        The jar features a screw-top. When he twists off the lid, he is horrified to discover a full set of teeth inside. They grin at him, complete with pink gums, but purged of blood.
        Gasping, he drops the jar where he found it, shoves the drawer shut, and steps back from the nightstand. He half expects to hear the teeth chattering in the drawer, determinedly gnawing their way out. He has seen movies about serial killers. These human monsters collect souvenirs of their kills. Some keep severed heads in the refrigerator or preserve their victims' eyes in jars of formaldehyde. Others make garments from the skin of those they murder, or they create mobiles with weird arrangements of dangling bones.
        None of those movies or books has