Winter Moon

one another.
        Its silence was almost the worst thing about it. No screams of pain when it was shot. No shrieks of rage. , Its patient and silent recovery, its deliberate continuation of the assault, mocked her hopes of triumph.
        At the foot of the stairs, the apparition had pulled itself erect. The Giver, still hideously bonded to the corpse, started up the steps again.
        Heather's spell of madness shattered. She fled to the landing, grabbed.the can of gasoline, and scrambled to the second floor, where Toby and Falstaff were waiting.
        The retriever was shuddering. Whining rather than barking, he looked as if he'd sensed the same thing Heather had seen for herself: effective defense was impossible. This was an enemy that couldn't be brought down with teeth or claws any more than with guns.
        Toby said, "Do I have to do it? I don't want to."
        She didn't know what he meant, didn't have time to ask. "We'll be okay, honey, we'll make it."
        From the first flight of steps, out of sight beyond the landing, came the sound of heavy footsteps ascending. A hiss. It was like the sibilant escape of steam from a pinhole in a pipe-but a cold sound.
        She put the Uzi aside and fumbled with the cap on the spout of the gasoline can.
        Fire might work. She had to believe it might. If the thing burned, nothing would be left to remake itself. Bodies are. But bodies reduced to ashes could not reclaim their form and function, regardless of how alien their flesh and metabolism. Damn it, fire had to work.
        "It's never afraid," Toby said in a voice that revealed the profound depths of his own fear.
        "Get away from here, baby! Go! Go to the bedroom! Hurry!"
        The boy ran, and the dog went with him.
        At times Jack felt that he was a swimmer in a white sea under a white sky on a world every bit as strange as the planet from which the intruder at Quartermass Ranch had traveled. Though he could feel the ground beneath his feet as he slogged the half mile to the county road, he never got a glimpse of it under the enduring white torrents cast down by the storm, and it seemed as unreal to him as the bottom of the Pacific might seem to a swimmer a thousand fathoms above it. The snow rounded all forms, and the landscape rolled like the swells of a mid-ocean passage, although in some places the wind had sculpted drifts into scalloped ridges like cresting waves frozen in the act of breaking on a beach. The woods, which could have offered contrast to the whiteness that flooded his vision, were mostly concealed by falling and blowing snow as obscuring as fog at sea.
        Disorientation was an unremitting threat in that bleached land. He got off course twice while still on his own property, recognizing his error only because the flattened meadow grass underneath the snow provided a spongier surface than the hard-packed driveway.
        Step by hard-fought step, Jack expected something to come out of the curtains of snow or rise from a drift in which it had been lying, the Giver itself or one of the surrogates that it had mined from the graveyard. He continually scanned left and right, ready to pump out every round in the shotgun to bring down anything that rushed him..He was glad that he had worn sunglasses. Even with shades, he found the unrelieved brightness inhibiting. He strained to see through the wintry sameness to guard against attack and to make out familiar details of the terrain that would keep him on the right track.
        He dared not think about Heather and Toby. When he did so, his pace slowed and he was nearly overcome by the temptation to go back to them and forget about Ponderosa Pines. For their sake and his own, he blocked them from his thoughts, concentrated solely on covering ground, and virtually became a hiking machine.
        The baleful wind shrieked without surcease, blew snow in his face, and forced him to bow his head. It shoved him off his feet twice-on one occasion causing him to drop the shotgun in a drift, where he had to scramble frantically to find it-and became almost as real an adversary as any man against whom he'd ever been pitted. By the time he reached the end of the private lane and paused for breath between the tall stone posts and under the arched wooden sign that marked the entrance to Quartermass Ranch, he was cursing the wind as if it could hear him.
        He wiped one gloved hand across the sunglasses