he understood. The car was for him, for him and Amy. “Phil—”
Doyle held up his hands. “That’s how it has to be.”
Wolgast looked at Lacey, who nodded. Then she stepped toward him. She kissed Amy, touching her hair, and then she kissed him, too, once, on the cheek. A deep calm and a feeling of certainty seemed to radiate through his entire body from the place where she had kissed him. He’d never felt anything like it.
They stepped from the door, Doyle leading them. Together they moved quickly under the cover of the building. Wolgast could barely keep up. He heard more gunfire from somewhere, but it didn’t seem aimed at them. The shots seemed to be going up and away, into the trees, at the rooftops; random shots, like some kind of sinister celebration. Each time it happened he’d hear a scream, a moment of silence, and then the shooting would start up again.
They reached the corner of the building. Wolgast could see the woods beyond it. In the other direction, toward the lights of the compound, lay the parking area. The Lexus waited at the end, facing away, no other cars around it for cover.
“We’ll just have to make a run for it,” Doyle said. “Ready?”
Wolgast, panting, did his best to nod.
Then they were up and racing toward the car.
Richards felt him before he saw him. He turned, swinging the RPG like a vaulter’s pole.
It wasn’t Babcock.
It wasn’t Zero.
It was Anthony Carter.
He was in a kind of crouch, twenty feet away. He lifted his face and twisted his head, looking at Richards appraisingly. There was something doglike about it. Blood glistened on Carter’s face, his clawlike hands, his sworded teeth, row upon row. A kind of clicking sound was coming from his throat. Slowly, in a gesture of languid pleasure, he began to rise. Richards put Carter’s mouth in his sights.
“Open up,” Richards said, and fired.
He knew, even as the grenade shot from the tube, the force of its ejection pushing Richards backward, that he’d missed. The place where Carter had stood was empty. Carter was in the air. Carter was flying. Then he was falling, down upon Richards. The grenade went off, taking out the front of the Chalet, but Richards heard this only vaguely—the noise receding, fading to some impossible distance—as he experienced the sensation, utterly new to him, of being torn in half.
The explosion hit Wolgast as a white sheen, a wall of heat and light that slapped the left side of his face like a punch; he was lifted from the ground and felt Amy fall away. He hit the pavement and rolled and rolled again before coming to rest on his back.
His ears were ringing; his breath felt like it was stuck in a tube, far down in his chest. Above him he saw the deep, velvety blackness of the night sky, and stars, hundreds and hundreds of stars, and some of them were falling.
He thought: Falling stars. He thought: Amy. He thought: Keys.
He lifted his head. Amy was lying on the ground a few yards away. The air was full of smoke. In the flickering light of the burning Chalet, she looked as if she might be sleeping—a character in a fairy tale, the princess who had fallen asleep and couldn’t wake. Wolgast rolled himself onto all fours and frantically patted the ground for the keys. He could tell one of his ears was messed up; it was like a curtain had fallen over the left side of his face, absorbing all sound. The keys. The keys. Then he realized they were still in his hand; he’d never let them go to begin with.
Where were Doyle and Lacey?
He went to where Amy lay. The fall didn’t seem to have hurt her any, or the explosion, as far as he could tell. He put his hands under her arms and hoisted her over his shoulder, then made for the Lexus as fast as he could.
He bent to ease Amy in, laying her across the backseat. He got in himself and turned the key. The headlights blazed across the compound.
Something hit the hood.
Some kind of animal. No: some kind of monstrous thing, throbbing with a pale green light. But when he saw its eyes, and what was inside them, he knew that this strange new being on the hood was Anthony Carter.
Carter rose as Wolgast found the gearshift and plunged it into reverse and gunned the engine. Carter fell away. Wolgast could see him