Winter Moon

leather pantsuit and red-pepper Mace and maybe an unlicensed handgun in her purse. If only they were here now, at her side. But they were down there in the City of Angels, waiting for the end of the world, ready for it, when all the time the end of the world was starting here in Montana.
        Billowing smoke suddenly gushed out of the flames, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, dark and churning. The Giver vanished. In seconds Heather was going to be completely blinded.
        Holding her breath, she stumbled along the wall toward Toby's room.
        She found his door and crossed the threshold, out of the worst of the smoke, just as he screamed.
        

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
        
        With the Mossberg twelve-gauge gripped in both hands, Jack moved eastward at an easy trot, in the manner of an infantryman in a war zone. He hadn't expected the county road to be half as clear as it was, so he was able to make better time than planned.
        He kept flexing his toes with each step. In spite of -two pairs of heavy socks and insulated boots, his feet were cold and getting colder.
        He needed to keep full circulation in them.
        The scar tissue and recently knitted bones in his left leg ached dully from exertion, however, the slight pain didn't hamper him. In fact, he.was in better shape than he had realized.
        Although the whiteout continued to limit visibility to less than a hundred feet, sometimes dramatically less, he was no longer at risk of becoming disoriented and lost. The walls of snow from the plow defined a well-marked path. The tall poles along one side of the road carried telephone and power lines, and served as another set of route markers.
        He figured he had covered nearly half the distance to Ponderosa Pines, but his pace was flagging. He cursed himself, pushed harder, and picked up speed.
        Because he was trotting with his shoulders hunched against the battering wind and his head tucked down to spare himself the sting of the hard-driven snow, looking only at the roadway immediately in front of him, he did not at first see the golden light but saw only the reflection of it in the fine, sheeting flakes. There was just a hint of yellow at first, then suddenly he might have been running through a storm of gold dust rather than a blizzard.
        When he raised his head, he saw a bright glow ahead, intensely yellow at its core. It throbbed mysteriously in the cloaking veils of the storm, the source obscured, but he remembered the light in the trees of which Eduardo had written in the tablet. It had pulsed like this, an eerie radiance that heralded the opening of the doorway and the arrival of the traveler.
        As he skidded to a halt and almost fell, the pulses of light grew rapidly brighter, and he wondered if he could hide in the drifts to one side of the road or the other. There were no throbbing bass sounds like those Eduardo had heard and felt, only the shrill keening of the wind. However, the uncanny light was everywhere, dazzling in the sunless day: Jack standing in ankle-deep gold dust, molten gold streaming through the air, the steel of the Mossberg glimmering as if about to be transmuted into bullion. He saw multiple sources now, not one light but several, pulsing out of sync, continuous yellow flashes overlaying one another. A sound above the wind. A low rumble.
        Building swiftly to a roar. A heavy engine. Through the whiteout, tearing apart the obscuring veils of snow, came an enormous machine.
        He found himself standing before an oncoming road grader adapted for snow removal, a brawny skeleton of steel with a small cab high in the center of it, pushing a curved steel blade taller than he was.
        Entering the cleaner air of Toby's room, blinking away tears wrung from her by the caustic smoke, Heather saw two blurry figures, one small and one not. She desperately wiped at her eyes with her free hand, squinted, and understood why the boy was screaming.
        Towering over Toby was a grotesquely decomposed corpse, draped in fragments of a rotted blue garment, bearing another Giver, aswarm with agitated black appendages.
        Falstaff sprang at the nightmare, but the writhing tentacles were quicker than they had been before, almost faster than the eye. They.whipped out, snared the dog in mid-leap, and flicked him away as casually and efficiently as a cow's tail might deal with an annoying fly. Howling in terror,