One Door From Heaven

getting up to power while the troops reboard.
        Whether already airborne or not, it will be coming. Soon. And if the craft itself doesn't possess the latest electronic search-and-locate gear, the troops will. Darkness won't thwart them. They have special ways of seeing that make the night as penetrable as daylight.
        Trust. Curtis has no choice now but to put his full faith in the dog. If they are to be free, they will be free only together. Whether they live or die, they will live or die as one. His destiny is hers, and her fate is inseparably twined with his. If she leads him out of this danger or if she leads him off the edge of a high cliff, so be it; even in his dying fall, he will love her, his sister-becoming.
        A little moonlight nevertheless would be welcome. Rising out of the distant mountains, great wings of black clouds span the western sky, and continue to unfurl in this direction, as though a vault deep in the earth has cracked open to release a terrible presence that is spreading its dominion over all the world. A generous seasoning of stars salts the clear pant of the sky, but still the desert steadily darkles, minute by minute, deeper than mere night.
        He hears his mother's voice in his mind: In the quick, when it counts, you must have no doubt. Spit out all your doubt, breathe it out, pluck it from your heart, tear it loose from your mind, throw it away, be rid of it. We weren't born into this universe to doubt. We were born to hope, to love, to live, to learn, to know joy, to have faith that our lives have meaning… and to find The Way.
        Banishing doubt, seizing hope with a desperation grip, Curtis swallows hard and prepares himself for an exhilarating journey.
        Go, pup, he says or only thinks.
        She goes.
        With no hesitation, determined to make his mother proud, to be daring and courageous, the boy sprints after the dog. Being Curtis Hammond, he isn't designed for speed as well as Old Yeller is, but she matches her pace to meet his fastest sprint, leading him north into the barrens.
        Through darkness he flees, all but blind, not without fear but purged of doubt, across sandstone but also sand, across loose shale, between masses of sage and weather-sculpted thrusts of rock, zigging and zagging, legs reaching for the land ahead, sneakered feet landing with assurance on terrain that had previously been treacherous, arms pump-pump-pumping like the connecting rods on the driving wheels of a locomotive, the dog often visible in front of him, but sometimes seen less than sensed, sometimes seen not at all, but always reappearing, the two of them bonding more intimately the farther they travel, spirit sewn to spirit with the strong thread of Curtis's reckless trust.
        Running with this strange blind exuberance, he loses all sense of distance and time, so he doesn't know how far they have gone when the quality of the night abruptly changes, one moment marked by a worrisome air of danger and the next moment thick with a terrifying sense of peril. Curtis's heart, furiously drumming from the physical demands of flight, now booms also with fear. Into the night has entered a threat more ominous than that represented by the officers in the SUVs and the troops in the helicopter. Dog and therefore boy together recognize that they are no longer merely the objects of a feverish search, but again the game in n hunt, the prey of predators, for in the August gloom arise new scents-sounds-pressures-energies that raise the hackles on Old Yeller and pebble-texture the nape of Curtis's neck. Death is in the desert, striding the sand and sage, stealthy under the stars.
        Drawing on reserves that he didn't know he possessed, the boy runs faster. And the dog. In harmony.

Chapter 27
        
        SNAKE KILLED, mother patched, prayers said, Leilani retired to bed in the blessed dark.
        Since the age of three or four, she hadn't wanted a night-light. As a little little girl, she'd thought that a luminous Donald Duck or a radiant plastic Tweetie Bird would ward off hungry demons and spare her from all sorts of supernatural unpleasantness, but she had soon learned that night-lights were more likely to draw the demon than repel it.
        Old Sinsemilla sometimes rambled in the most wee of the wee hours, restless because she craved drugs or because she had stuffed herself with too many drugs, or maybe just because she was a haunted