Winter Moon

through the floor, and deep into Jack's bones.
        Weaponless. Her back to the stairhead door..Fire was visible through the smoke at the hall doorway.
        Snow at the windows. Cool snow. A way out. Safety. Crash through the window, no time to open it, straight, through, onto the porch roof, roll to the lawn. Dangerous. Might work.
        Except they wouldn't make it that far without being dragged down.
        The volcanic eruption of sound from the radio was deafening. Heather couldn't think.
        The retriever shivered at her side, snarling and snapping at the demonic figures that threatened them, though he knew as well as she did that he couldn't save them.
        When she'd seen the Giver snare the dog, pitch him away, and then grab Toby, Heather had found the.38 in her hand with no memory of having drawn it.
        At the same time, also without realizing it, she had dropped the can of gasoline; now it stood across the room, out of reach.
        Gasoline might not have mattered, anyway. One of the creatures was already on fire, and that wasn't stopping it.
        Bodies are.
        Eduardo's burning corpse was reduced to charred bone, bubbling fat.
        All the clothes and hair had gone to ashes. And there was barely enough of the Giver left to hold the bones together, yet the macabre assemblage lurched toward her.
        Apparently, as long as any fragment of the alien body remained alive, its entire consciousness could be exerted through that last quiverring scrap of flesh.
        Madness. Chaos.
        The Giver was chaos, the very embodiment of meaninglessness, hopelessness, and malignancy, and madness. Chaos in the flesh, demented and strange beyond understanding. Because there was nothing to understand. That was what she believed of it now. It had no explicable purpose of existence. It lived only to live. No aspirations. No meaning except to hate. Driven by a compulsion to Become and destroy, leaving chaos behind it.
        A draft pulled more smoke into the room.
        The dog hacked, and Heather heard Toby coughing behind her.
        "Pull your jacket ovel your nose, breathe through your jacket!"
        But why did it matter whether they died by fire-or in less clean ways?
        Maybe fire was preferable..The other Giver, slithering on the bedroom floor among the ruins of the dead woman, suddenly shot a sinuous tentacle at Heather, snaring her ankle.
        She screamed.
        The Eduardo-thing tottered nearer, hissing.
        Behind her, sheltered between her and the door, Toby shouted, "Yes!
        All right, yes!"
        "Too late," she warned him; "No!"
        The driver of the grader was Harlan Moffit, and he lived in Eagle's Roost with his wife, Cindi - with an i - and his daughters, Luci and Nanci -each of those with an i as well- and Cindi worked for the Livestock cooperative, whatever that was. They were lifelong residents of Montana and wouldn't live anywhere else. However, they'd had a lot of fun when they'd gone to Los Angeles a couple of years ago and seen Disneyland, Universal Studios and an old brokendown homeless guy being mugged by two teenagers on a corner while they were stopped at a traffic light. Visit, yes; live there, no. All this he somehow imparted by the time they had reached the turnoff at Quartermas Ranch, as he felt obliged to make Jack feel among friends and neighbors in his time of trouble, regardless of what the trouble might be.
        They entered the private lane at a higher speed than Jack would have thought possible, considering the depth of the snow that had accumulated in the past sixteen hours.
        Harlan raised the angled plow a few inches to allow the speed. "We don't need to scoop off everything down to bare dirt and maybe risk jamming up on a big bump in the road." The top three quarters of the snow cover plumed to the side.
        "How can you tell where the lane is?" Jack worried, because the rolling mantle of white blurred definitions.
        "Been here before. Then there's instinct."
        "Instinct?"
        "Plowman's instinct."
        "We won't get stuck?"
        "These tires? This engine?"
        Harlan was proud of his machine, and it really was churning along, rumbling through the untouched snow as if carving its way through little more than air.
        "Never get stuck, not with me driving. Take this baby through hell if I had to, plow away the melting brimstone and