One Door From Heaven

all.
        With one killer attending to his bodily functions and the other in the driver's seat of the Windchaser, this is an opportunity that only a disobedient, mother-ignoring boy would fail to take.
        Curtis pushes open the bedroom door. You first, girl.
        Tail wagging, the pooch pads into the bathroom-and straight toward the toilet cubicle.
        No, pup, no, no! Out, pup, out!
        Maybe the power of Curtis's panic is transmitted to Old Yeller
        along the psychic wire that links every boy in his dog, but that's unlikely because the two of them have so recently met and therefore are still in the process of becoming a fully simpatico boy-dog unit. More likely, she's gotten a better smell of the cunningly deceptive grandfatherly stranger in the toilet cubicle and now recognizes him for the monster that he is. Whether the psychic wire or a good nose is responsible, she changes direction and pads out of the bathroom into the galley.
        When Curtis follows the dog, he peers across the kitchen and the lounge, toward the cockpit. The woman occupies the driver's seat, her attention devoted to the stalled traffic blocking the highway.
        Curtis is relieved to see that this co-killer is encumbered by a safety harness that secures her to the command chair. She won't be able to release those restraints and clamber out of the seat in time to block the exit.
        Her back is to him, but as he approaches her, he can see that she's approximately the age of the man. Her short-cropped hair glows supernaturally white.
        Chastened by her near-disastrous misreading of the grandfatherly man's character, Old Yeller proceeds waglessly and with caution, past the dining nook, paw by stealthy paw, pussyfooting as silently as any creeping cat.
        As the dog arrives at the exit and as Curtis reaches over the dog toward the door handle, the woman senses them. She's snacking on something, and she looks up, chewing, expecting the man, startled to discover a boy and his dog. Surprise freezes her in mid-chew, with her hand halfway to her mouth, and in that hand is a human ear.
        Curtis screams, and even when he realizes that the snack in her hand isn't a human ear, after all, but merely a large potato chip, he isn't able to stop screaming. For all he knows, she eats potato chips with human ears, the way other people eat them with pretzels on the side, or with peanuts, or with sour-cream dip.
        Door won't open. Handle won't move. He presses, presses harder. No good. Locked, it must be locked. He rattles it up and down, up and down, insistently, to no effect.
        In the driver's seat, the startled woman comes unstartled enough to speak, but the boy can't make out what she's saying because the loud rapping of his jackhammer heart renders meaningless those few words that penetrate his screaming.
        Curtis and the door, willpower against matter, on the micro scale where will should win: Yet the lock holds, and still the door doesn't open for him. Magic lock, bolt fused to the striker plate by a sorcerer's spell, it resists his muscle and his mind.
        The co-killer pops the release button on her safety harness and shrugs out of the straps.
        Oh, Lord, there's just one door, the sucker's magically locked, all his tricks are thwarted, and he's trapped in this claustrophobic rolling slaughterhouse with psychotic retirees who'll eat him with chips and keep his teeth in their nightstand drawer.
        Fierce as she has never been before, Old Yeller lunges toward the woman. Snarling, snapping, foaming, spitting, the dog seems to be saying, Teeth? You want teeth? Take a look at THESE teeth, go fang-to-fang with ME, you psychotic bitch, and see how much you still like teeth when I’M done with you!
        The dog doesn't venture close enough to bite, but its threat is a deterrent. The woman at once abandons the idea of getting up from the driver's seat. She shrinks away from them, and terror twists her face into an ugly knot that is no doubt the same expression she has seen on the faces of the many victims to whom she herself has shown no mercy.
        Jerked up and jammed down, the lever handle doesn't release the latch, but pulled inward, it works, revealing that it wasn't locked. No spell had been cast on the mechanism, after all. Curtis's failure to open it sooner wasn't a failure of mind or muscle, but a collapse of reason, the result of runaway