She screamed, and the spider-thing pulled away from Helen for one quick second. Then suddenly it was as if the very earth had exploded beneath Amanda’s feet. Gun. She threw herself to the snow.

The gun roared again, and Amanda looked up in time to see the second bullet hit Jonathan Newman in the temple. The back of his skull burst outward in a tattered mass of red and gray matter, spattering the snow behind him as he fell with a thump into the soft powder, all but disappearing into its depths.

Helen Pierce slumped to the ground. Everything was silent. Amanda began to cry.

After what seemed like forever, someone helped Amanda to her feet. It was Dan Flint.

Flint glanced back at the fallen man again, half expecting him to rise and pull himself up through the snow like a demon from hell and extend a bloody, goresmeared hand out for the knife.

But he didn’t do that, of course. He was dead.

At that thought, relief flooded through him, and suddenly his arms felt weak and shaky and he realized he had been holding the gun out all this time (All this time? How long—two, three seconds?) He let it drop to the ground. Little wisps of smoke escaped the barrel and were lost in the wind. Funny the things you notice when you’ve just shot a man, he thought. The world didn’t seem quite right, not at all the way he had expected it. He thought he would feel relieved, vindicated, but he didn’t feel any of that. He felt empty, dead inside.

He stood up from the cold ground where he had been kneeling and went to help Amanda. After a minute, they both went down to the woman.

She lay against the runners of the Cherokee, crumpled in an awkward position, and for a moment, he thought she was dead. But then he saw her chest move. He managed to pick her up and get her onto the porch, all the while keeping an eye on the figure half-buried in the snow.

He’s done, he can’t get up, not anymore.

A minute later, he left the two women on the couch and went back to look for Bobby. He found the man lying in the snow around the far corner of the house. His throat had been brutally cut ear to ear, the skin hanging down like peeling wallpaper.

Flint went back inside and found some blankets upstairs, wrapping the two women in them. He didn’t know how badly Mrs. Pierce was injured, but she was alive.

I should get us out of here; I should start that Jeep and drive…

But he didn’t.