Then wham, from the front of the house, like a bomb going off.

The big station wagon shot past Paige's hiding place so fast she knew she wasn't going to have a chance to wait for the son of a bitch to park, then creep up on him stealthily from tree to tree and shadow to shadow in the manner of the good adventure heroine that she envisioned herself. He was playing by his own rules, which meant no rules at all, and his every action would be unpredictable.

By the time she scrambled to her feet, the Jeep was within seventy or eighty feet of the cabin. Still accelerating.

Praying her cold-stiffened legs wouldn't cramp, she clambered over the low rock formation. She raced toward the cabin, parallel to the driveway, staying in the gloom of the woods, weaving between tree trunks.

Because the BMW was not parked squarely in front of the cabin but to the left, the Jeep had a clear shot at the porch steps. Less than an inch of snow was insufficient to slow it down. The ground under that white blanket wasn't frozen rock-solid as it would be later in the winter, so the tires cut into bare earth, finding all the traction they needed.

The driver seemed to be standing on the accelerator. He was suicidal.

Or convinced of his invulnerability. The engine screamed.

Paige was still a hundred feet from the cabin when the left front tire of the Jeep hit the low concrete porch steps and climbed them as if they were a ramp. The right front tire spun through empty air for an instant, then grabbed the porch floor as the bumper tore through the wall of screen.

She expected the porch to give way under the weight. But the Jeep seemed airborne as the rear left tire launched it off the top of the three steps. ,., Flying. Taking out panels of screen and the frames that hold them in place, as if they're spider webs, gossamer.

Straight at the door. Like an incoming round of mortar fire. A two-ton shell.

Closes his eyes. Windshield might implode.

Bone-jarring impact. Thrown forward. Safety harness jerks him back, he exhales explosively, currents of pain briefly scintillate through his chest.

A percussive symphony of boards splintering, jack studs cracking in half, door jamb disintegrating, lintel fracturing. Then forward motion ceases, the Jeep crashes down.

He opens his eyes.

The windshield is still intact.

The Jeep is in the living room of the cabin, facing a sofa and an overturned armchair. It's tipped forward because the front wheels broke through the flooring into the air space below.

The Jeep doors are above the cabin floor and unobstructed. He disengages the seatbelt and gets out of the station wagon with one of the.38 pistols in his right hand.

Move, move, confront, challenge, grapple, and prevail.

He hears creaking overhead and looks up. The ceiling is broken and sagging but will probably hold together. Powdery snow and dead brown pine needles sift down through the cracks.

The floor is littered with broken glass. The windows flanking the cabin door have shattered.

He is thrilled by the destruction. It inflames his fury.

The living room is deserted. Through the archway he can see most of the kitchen, and no one's in there, either.

Two closed doors are featured in the wide pass-through between living room and kitchen, one to the left and one to the right. He moves to the right.

If the false father is waiting on the other side, the very act of opening the door will trigger a fusillade.

He wants to avoid being shot if at all possible because he does not want to have to crawl away to heal again. He wants to finish this now, here, today.

If his wife and children have not already been replicated and replaced by alien forms, they will surely not be permitted to remain human much longer. Night is coming. Less than an hour away. From movies, he knows these things always happen at night-alien assault, parasite injection, attacks by shape-changers and soul-stealers and things that drink blood, all at night, either when the moon is full or there is no moon at all, but at night.

Instead of throwing the door open even from a safe position to one side, he steps in front of it, raises the.38, and opens fire.

The door is not solid wood but a Masonite model with a foam core, and the hollow-point rounds punch big holes at point-blank range.

Jolting through his arms, the recoil of the Chief's Special is enormously satisfying, almost a sexual experience, bringing a small me sure of relief from his intense frustration and anger. He keeps squeezing the trigger until the hammer clicks on empty chambers.

No screams from the room beyond. No sounds at all as the roar of the last gunshot fades.

He throws the gun on the floor and draws the second.38 from the shoulder holster under his varsity jacket.

He kicks open the door and goes inside fast, the gun thrust out in front of him.

It's a bedroom. Deserted.

Soaring frustration fans the flames of rage.

Returning to the pass-through, he faces the other closed door.

For a moment the sight of the Jeep flying across the porch and slamming through the front wall of the cabin brought Paige to a halt.

Although it was happening in front of her and though she had no doubt that it was real, the crash had the unreal quality of a dream. The station wagon seemed to hang in the air an impossibly long time, virtually floating across the porch, wheels spinning. It appeared almost to dissolve through the wall into the cabin, vanishing as if it had never been. The destruction was accompanied by a great deal of noise, yet somehow it was not cacophonous enough, not half as loud as it would have been if the crash had taken place in a movie.

Immediately in the wake of it, the comparative quiet of the storm reclaimed the day, with only the moaning of the wind, snow fell in a soundless deluge.

The kids.

In her mind's eye, she saw the wall bursting in on them, the hurtling Jeep right behind it.

She was running again before she realized it. Straight toward the cabin.

She held the shotgun with both hands-left hand on the fore end slide handle, right hand around the grip and finger on the trigger guard.

All she would have to do was halt, swing the bore toward the target, slip her finger to the trigger, and fire. Earlier, loading the Mossberg, she had pumped a round into the breech, so she could fit an extra shell into the magazine tube.

As she sprinted out of the woods and into the driveway, when she was no more than thirty feet from the porch steps, gunfire erupted in the house. Five rounds in quick succession. Instead of giving her pause, the shots spurred her across the driveway and shallow front yard as fast as she could move.

She slipped in the snow and fell to one knee just as she reached the foot of the porch steps. The pain wrung a soft, involuntary curse from her.

If she hadn't stumbled, however, she would have been on the porch or all the way into the living room when Charlotte rounded the corner of the cabin. Marty and Emily appeared close behind Charlotte, running hand in hand.

He fires three times into the door on the left side of the pass-through, kicks it open, scuttles across the threshold fast and low, and finds another deserted bedroom.

Outside, a car door slams.

Marty left the driver's door open while he got in behind the steering wheel, fumbling under the seat with one hand in search of the keys, and he didn't even think to warn Charlotte and Emily not to slam their door until the act was done and the echo of it reverberated through the surrounding trees.

Paige hadn't gotten into the BMW yet. She was standing at her open door, watching the house, the Mossberg raised and ready.

Where were the damn keys?

He leaned forward, crunching down, trying to feel farther back under the seat.

As Marty's fingers closed over the keys, the Mossberg boomed.

He snapped his head up as an answering shot missed Paige, passed through the open car door, and smashed into the dashboard inches from his face.

A gauge shattered, showering him with shards of plas "Down!" he shouted to the girls in the back seat.

Paige fired the shotgun and again drew return fire.

The Other stood in the gaping hole where the front door of the cabin had been, framed by jagged ruins, his right arm extended as he squeezed off the shot. Then he ducked back into the living room, perhaps to reload.

Though the shotgun would keep him from coming any closer, he was too far away to be greatly hurt by it, especially considering his unusual recuperative abilities. His handgun, however, packed a solid punch at that distance.

Marty jammed the key in the ignition. The engine turned over without a protest. He released the hand brake, put the BMW in gear.

Paige got in the car, pulled her door shut.

He looked over his shoulder through the rear window, reversed past the front of the cabin, and then turned into the tire tracks left by the Jeep on its kamikaze run.

"Here he comes!" Paige cried.

Still backing up, Marty glanced through the windshield and saw The Other bounding off the porch, down the steps, across the yard, a wine bottle in each hand, rag wicks in the necks, flames leaping off both.

Jesus. They were burning furiously, might explode in his hands at any second, but he seemed to have no concern for his own safety, a savage and almost gleeful look on his face, as if he was born for this, nothing but this. He skidded to a stop and cocked his right arm like a quarterback ready to pass the ball to his receiver.

"Go!" Paige shouted.

Marty was already going, and he didn't need encouragement to go faster.

Instead of turning to look through the back window, he used the rearview mirror to be sure he stayed on the driveway and didn't angle off into any trees or ditches or jutting rocks, so he was aware of the first bottle arcing through the snow and shattering against the BMW's front bumper. Most of the contents splashed harmlessly onto the driveway, where a patch of snow seemed to burst into flames.

The second bottle slammed into the hood, six inches from the windshield, directly in front of Paige. It shattered, the contents exploded, burning fluid washed the glass, and for a moment the only forward view they had was of seething fire.

In the back, seatbelts engaged, staying down, holding tightly to each other, the girls shrieked in terror.

Marty couldn't do anything to reassure them except to keep backing up, as fast as he dared, hoping the fire on the hood would burn out and the heat wouldn't cause the windshield to implode.

Halfway to the county road. Two-thirds. Accelerating. A hundred yards to go.

The blaze on the windshield was extinguished almost at once, as the thin film of gasoline on the glass was consumed, but flames continued to leap off the hood and off the fender on the passenger side. The paint had ignited.

Through fire and billowing black smoke, Marty saw The Other running toward them again, not as fast as the car but not a whole lot slower, either.

Paige fished two shotgun shells out of a pocket of her ski jacket and stuffed them into the magazine tube, replacing the rounds she had expended.

Sixty yards to the county road.

Fifty.

Forty.

Because of intervening trees and vegetation, Marty could not see downhill, and he was afraid he'd reverse into the path of an oncoming vehicle. Yet he didn't dare slow down.

The roar of the BMW prevented him from hearing the shot. A bullet hole appeared, with a sharp snap, in the windshield below the rearview mirror, between him and Paige. An instant later a second round drilled the windshield, three inches to the right of the first, so close to Paige it was a miracle she wasn't hit. With the second violation, a chain-reaction of millions of tiny cracks webbed across the tempered glass, rendering it milky-opaque.

The transition between the end of the dirt lane and the pavement wasn't smooth. They slammed backward onto the county road hard enough to make them bounce in their seats, and the crazed safety glass collapsed inward in gummy chunks.

Marty pulled the wheel to the right, reversing uphill, and braked to a full stop when they were facing straight down the road. He could feel the heat of the flames that were eating the paint off the hood, but they didn't lick into the car.

A bullet ricocheted off metal.

He shifted out of reverse.

Through his side window, he could see The Other standing spread-legged fifteen yards from the end of the driveway, gun in both hands.

As Marty tramped on the accelerator, another round thudded into his door, below the window, but didn't penetrate to the interior of the car.

The Other broke into a run again as the BMW shot downhill and away from him.

Although the wind carried most of the smoke off to the right, there was suddenly a lot more of it, blacker than ever, and enough churned into the car to make them miserable. Paige started coughing, the girls were wheezing in the back seat, and Marty couldn't clearly see the road ahead.

"Tire's burning!" Paige shouted above the howling wind.

Two hundred yards farther downhill, the burning tire blew, and the BMW spun out of control on the snow-skinned blacktop. Marty turned the wheel into the slide, but applied physics didn't prove reliable this time. The car swung around a hundred and eighty degrees, simultaneously moving sideways, and they only stopped when they careened off the road and fetched up against the chain-link fence that marked the perimeter of the property owned by the defunct Prophetic Church of the Rapture.

Marty climbed out of the car. He yanked open the back door, leaned in, and helped the frightened girls disentangle themselves from their seatbelts.

He didn't even look to see if The Other was still coming because he knew the bastard was coming. This guy would never stop, never, not until they killed him, maybe not even then.

As Marty extracted Emily from the back seat, Paige scrambled out of the driver's door because her side of the car was jammed into the chain-link. Having withdrawn the manila envelopes of cash from under her seat, she stuffed them inside her ski jacket. As she zipped shut, she looked uphill.

"Shit," she said, and the shotgun boomed.

Marty helped Charlotte out of the car as the Mossberg thundered again.

He thought he heard the hard crack of small-arms fire, too, but the bullet must have gone wide of them.

Shielding the girls, pushing them behind him and away from the burning car, he glanced uphill.

The Other stood arrogantly in the center of the road, about a hundred yards away, convinced he was protected from the shotgun fire by distance, the deflecting power of the wailing wind, and perhaps his own supernatural ability to bounce back from serious damage. He was exactly Marty's size, yet even at a distance he seemed to tower over them, a dark and ominous figure. Maybe it was the perspective.

Almost nonchalantly, he broke open the cylinder of his revolver and tipped expended cartridges into the snow.

"He's reloading," Paige said, taking the opportunity to jam additional shells into the magazine of her shotgun, "let's get out of here."

"Where?" Marty wondered, looking around frantically at the snow-whipped landscape.