Winter Moon

into the TV. The picture tube exploded, thin white vapor or smoke from the ruined electronics spurted into the air, and the darkly beguiling siren song was hammered into silence by the clatter of the Uzi.
        A strong, cold draft swept through the hallway, and Heather spun toward the rear of the house. The back door was no longer ajar. It stood wide open. She could see the snow-covered porch and, beyond the porch, the churning white day.
        The Giver had first walked out of a dream. Now it had walked out of the storm, into the house. It was somewhere in the kitchen, to the.left or right of the hall door, and she had missed the chance to cut it down as it entered.
        If it was just on the other side of the threshold between the hall and the kitchen, it had closed to a maximum striking distance of about twenty-five feet. Getting dangerously close again.
        Toby was standing on the first step of the staircase, clear-eyed once more but shivering and pale with terror. The dog was beside him, alert, sniffing the air.
        Behind her, another pot-pan-bowl-flatware-dish alarm went off with a loud clanging of metal and shattering of glass. Toby screamed, Falstaff erupted into ferocious barking again, and Heather swung around, heart slamming so hard it shook her arms, made the gun jump up and down. The front door was arcing inward. A forest of long red-speckled black tentacles burst through the gap between door and jamb, glossy and writhing. So there were two of them, one at the front of the house, one at the back. The Uzi chattered. Six rounds, maybe eight. The door shut. But a mysterious dark figure was hunched against it, a small part of it visible in the beveled-glass window in the top of the door.
        Without pausing to see if she'd actually hit the son of a bitch or scored only the door and wall, she spun toward the kitchen yet again, punching three or four rounds through the empty hallway behind her even as she turned.
        Nothing there.
        She had been sure the first one would be striking at her back.
        Wrong.
        Maybe twenty rounds left in the Uzi's double magazine. Maybe only fifteen.
        They couldn't stay in the hall. Not with one of the damned things in the kitchen, another on the front porch.
        Why had she thought there'd be only one of them? Because in the dream there was only one? Because Toby had spoken of just a single seducer?
        Might be more than two. Hundreds.
        The living room was on one side of her. Dining room on the other.
        Ultimately, either place seemed likely to become a trap.
        In different rooms all over the ground floor, windows imploded simultaneously.
        The clinkjangle-tink of cascading glass and the shrieking of the wind at every breach decided her. Up. She and Toby would go up. Easier to defend high ground..She grabbed the can of gasoline.
        The front door came open behind her again, banging against the scattered items with which they had built the alarm tower. She assumed that something other than the wind had shoved it, but she didn't glance back. The Giver hissed. As in the dream.
        She leaped for the stairs, gasoline sloshing in the can, and shouted at Toby, "Go, go!"
        The boy and the dog raced to the second floor ahead of her.
        "Wait at the top!" she called as they scrambled upward and out of sight.
        At the top of the first flight, Heather halted on the landing, looked back and down into the front hall, and saw a dead man walking. Eduardo Fernandez. She recognized him from the pictures they had found while sorting through his belongings. Dead and buried more than four months, he nevertheless moved in a shambling and stiffjointed manner, kicking through the dishes and pans and flatware, heading for the foot of the stairs, accompanied by swirling flakes of snow like ashes from the fires of hell.
        There could be no self-awareness in the corpse, no slightest wisp of Ed Fernandez's consciousness remaining in it, for the old man's mind and soul had gone on to a better place before the Giver had requisitioned his body.
        The soiled cadaver was evidently being controlled with the same power that had switched on the radio and the TV at long distance, had opened the dead-bolt locks without a key, and had caused the windows to implode. Call it telekinesis, mind over matter. Alien mind over earthly matter. In this case, it was decomposing