Gradually his heart stopped pounding so fearfully. With the glowing green numerals on the digital clock, the red cable-box light on top of the television, and the ambient light at the windows, the bedroom was not nearly as black as the plain in his dream.

But he could not lie down. The nightmare had been more vivid and unnerving than any he'd ever known. Sleep was beyond his reach.

Slipping out from under the covers, he padded barefoot to the nearest window. He studied the sky above the rooftops of the houses across the street, as if something in that dark vault would calm him.

Instead, when he noticed the black sky was brightening to a deep gray-blue along the eastern horizon, the approach of dawn filled him with the same irrational dread he had felt in his office on Saturday afternoon. As color crept into the heavens, Marty began to tremble.

He tried to control himself, but his shivering grew more violent. It was not daylight that he feared, but something the day was bringing with it, an unnameable threat. He could feel it reaching for him, seeking him-which was crazy, damn it-and he shuddered so viol windowsill to steady himself.

"What's wrong with me?" he whispered desperately. "What's happening, what's wrong?"

Hour after hour, the speedometer needle quivers between 90 and 100 on the gauge. The steering wheel vibrates under his palms until his hands ache. The Honda shimmies, rattles. The engine issues a thin unwavering shriek, unaccustomed to being pushed so hard.

Rust-red, bone-white, sulfur-yellow, the purple of desiccated veins, as dry as ashes, as barren as Mars, pale sand with reptilian spines of mottled rock, speckled with withered clumps of mesquite, the cruel fastness of the Mojave Desert has a majestic barrenness.

Inevitably, the killer thinks of old movies about settlers moving west in wagon trains. He realizes for the first time how much courage was required to make their journey in those rickety vehicles, trusting their lives to the health and stamina of dray horses.

Movies. California. He is in California, home of the movies.

Move, move, move.

From time to time, an involuntary mewling escapes him. The sound is like that of an animal dying of dehydration but within sight of a watering hole, dragging itself toward the pool that offers salvation but afraid it will perish before it can slake its burning thirst.

Paige and Charlotte were already in the garage, getting in the car, when they both cried, "Emily, hurry up!"

As Emily turned away from the breakfast table and started toward the open door that connected the kitchen to the garage, Marty caught her by the shoulder and turned her to face him. "Wait, wait, wait."

"Oh," she said, "I forgot," and puckered up for a smooch.

"That comes second," he said.

"What's first?"

"This." He dropped to one knee, bringing himself to her level, and with a paper towel he blotted away her milk mustache.

"Oh, gross," she said.

"It was cute."

"More like Charlotte."

He raised his eyebrows. "Oh?"

"She's the messy one."

"Don't be unkind."

"She knows it, Daddy."

"Nevertheless."

From the garage, Paige called again.

Emily kissed him, and he said, "Don't give your teacher any trouble."

"No more than she gives me," Emily answered.

Impulsively he pulled her against him, hugged her fiercely, reluctant to let her go. The clean fragrance of Ivory soap and baby shampoo breath.

He had never smelled anything sweeter, better. Her back was frightfully small under the flat of his hand. She was so delicate, he could feel the beat of her young heart both through her chest-which pressed against him-and through her scapula and spine, against which his hand lay. He was overcome with the feeling that something terrible was going to happen and that he would never see her again if he allowed her to leave the house.

He had to let her go, of course-or explain his reluctance, which he could not do.

Honey, see, the problem is, something's wrong in Daddy's head, and I keep getting these scary thoughts, like I'm going to lose you and Charlotte and Mommy. Now, I know nothing's going to happen, not really, because the problem is all in my head, like a big tumor or something.

Can you spell "tumor"? Do you know what it is? Well, I'm going to see a doctor and have it cut out, just cut out that bad old tumor, and then I won't be so frightened for no reason*

He dared say nothing of the sort. He would only scare her.

He kissed her soft, warm cheek and let her go.

At the door to the garage, she paused and looked back at him.

"More poem tonight?"

"You bet."

She said, "Reindeer salad*"

"* reindeer soup*"

"* all sorts of tasty*"

"* reindeer goop," Marty finished.

"You know what, Daddy?"

"What?"

"You're soooo silly."

Giggling, Emily went into the garage. The ca-chunk of the door closing behind her was the most final sound Marty had ever heard.

He stared at the door, willing himself not to rush to it and jerk it open and shout at them to get back into the house.

He heard the big garage door rolling up.

The car engine turned over, chugged, caught, raced a little as Paige pumped the accelerator before shifting into reverse.

Marty hurried out of the kitchen, through the dining room, into the living room. He went to one of the front windows from which he could see the driveway. The plantation shutters were folded away from the window, so he stayed a couple of steps from the glass.

The white BMW backed down the driveway, out of the shadow of the house and into the late-November sunshine. Emily was riding up front with her mother, and Charlotte was in the rear seat.

As the car receded along the tree-lined street, Marty stepped so close to the living-room window that his forehead pressed against the cool glass. He tried to keep his family in view as long as possible, as if they were certain to survive anything-even falling airplanes and nuclear blasts-if he just did not let them out of his sight.

His last glimpse of the BMW was through a sudden veil of hot tears that he barely managed to repress.

Disturbed by the intensity of his emotional reaction to his family's departure, he turned away from the window and said savagely, "What the hell's the matter with me?"

After all, the girls were merely going to school and Paige to her office, where they went more days than not. They were following a routine that had never been dangerous before, and he had no logical reason to believe it was going to be dangerous today-or ever.

He looked at his wristwatch. 7,48.

His appointment with Dr. Guthridge was only slightly more than five hours away, but that seemed an interminable length of time.

Anything could happen in five hours.

Needles to Ludlow to Daggett.

Move, move, move. 9,04 Pacific Standard Time.

Barstow. Dry bleached town in a hard dry land. Stagecoaches stopped here long ago. Railroad yards. Waterless rivers. Cracked stucco, peeling paint. Green of trees faded by a perpetual layer of dust on the leaves. Motels, fast-food restaurants, more motels.

A service station. Gasoline. Men's room. Candy bars. Two cans of cold Coke.

Attendant too friendly. Chatty. Slow to make change. Little pig eyes.

Fat cheeks. Hate him. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

Should shoot him. Should blow his head off. Satisfying. Can't risk it. Too many people around.

On the road again. Interstate 15. West. Candy bars and Coke at eighty miles an hour. Desolate plains. Hills of sand, shale.

Volcanic rock. Many-armed Joshua trees standing sentinel.

As a pilgrim to a holy place, as a lemming to the sea, as a comet on its eternal course, westward, westward, trying to out-race the ocean-seeking sun.

Marty owned five guns.

He was not a hunter or collector. He didn't shoot skeet or take target practice for the fun of it. Unlike several people he knew, he hadn't armed himself out of fear of social collapse though sometimes he saw signs of it everywhere. He could not even say that he liked guns, but he recognized the need for them in a troubled world.

He had purchased the weapons one by one for research purposes. As a mystery novelist, writing about cops and killers, he believed he had a was not a gun hobbyist and had a finite amount of time to research all of the many backgrounds and subjects upon which each novel touched, minor mistakes were inevitable now and then, but he felt more comfortable writing about a weapon if he had fired it.

In his nightstand he kept an unloaded Korth.38 revolver and a box of cartridges. The Korth was a handmade weapon of the highest quality, produced in Germany. After learning to use it for a novel titled The Deadly Twilight, he had kept it for home defense.

Several times, he and Paige had taken the girls to an indoor shooting range to witness target practice, instilling in them a deep respect for the revolver. When Charlotte and Emily were old enough, he would teach them to use a gun, though one less powerful and with less recoil than the Korth. Firearm accidents virtually always resulted from ignorance.

In Switzerland, where every male citizen was required to own a firearm to defend the country in times of trouble, gun instruction was universal and tragic accidents extremely rare.

He removed the.38 from the nightstand, loaded it, and took it to the garage, where he tucked it in the glove compartment of their second car, a green Ford Taurus. He wanted it for protection to and from his one-o'clock appointment with Dr. Guthridge.

A Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, a Colt M16 A2 rifle, and two pistols-a Beretta Model 92 and a Smith & Wesson 5904-were stored in their original boxes inside a locked metal cabinet in one corner of the garage. There were also boxes of ammunition in every caliber required.

He unpacked each weapon, which had been cleaned and oiled before being put away, and loaded it.

He put the Beretta in the kitchen, in an upper cabinet beside the stove, in front of a pair of ceramic casserole dishes. The girls would not happen upon it there before he called a family conference to explain the reasons for his extraordinary precautions-if he could explain.

The M16 went on an upper shelf in the foyer closet just inside the front door. He put the Smith & Wesson in his office desk, in the second drawer of the right-hand drawer bank, and slipped the Mossberg under the bed in the master bedroom.

Throughout his preparations, he worried that he was deranged, arming himself against a threat that did not exist. Considering the seven-minute fugue he had experienced on Saturday, messing around with weapons was the last thing he should be doing.

He had no proof of impending danger. He was operating sheerly on instinct, a soldier ant mindlessly constructing fortifications.

Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. By nature he was a thinker, a planner, a brooder, and only last of all a man of action.

But this was a good of instinctual response, and he was swept away by it.

Then, just as he finished hiding the shotgun in the master bedroom, worries about his mental condition were abruptly outweighed by another consideration. The oppressive atmosphere of his recent dream was with him again, the feeling that some terrible weight was bearing down on him at a murderous speed. The air seemed to thicken. It was almost as bad as in the nightmare. And getting worse.

God help me, he thought-and was not sure if he was asking for protection from some unknown enemy or from dark impulses in himself.

"I need*"

Dust devils. Dancing on the high desert.

Sunlight sparkling in broken bottles along the highway.

Fastest thing on the road. Passing cars, trucks. The landscape a blur.

Scattered towns, all blurs.

Faster. Faster. As if being sucked into a black hole.

Past Victorville.

Past Apple Valley.

Through the Cajon Pass at forty-two hundred feet above sea level.

Then descending. Past San Bernardino. Onto the Riverside Free Riverside. Carona.

Through the Santa Ana Mountains.

"I need to be*"

South. The Costa Mesa Freeway.