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"Jenny!"
Jenny looked up, startled
Lisa’s ar across the kitchen
Beyond the butcher’s-block counter, set in the long wall on the far side of the rooe, with a pair of solid, over-and-under, stainless-steel doors The other two ovens were ser than the conventional models used in most homes; there was one door in each of these two, and each door had a glass portal in the center of it None of the ovens was turned on at the moment, which was fortunate, for if the smaller ones had been in operation, the kitchen would have been filled with a sickening stench
Each one contained a severed head
Jesus
Ghastly, dead faces gazed out into the roolass
Jakob Liebermann White hair spattered with blood One eye half shut, the other glaring Lips pressed together in a gri as if her jaws had coed
For a moment Jenny couldn’t believe the heads were real
Too ht of expensive, lifelike Halloweenout of the cellophane s in costurisly novelties sold in joke shops-those wax heads with nylon hair and glass eyes, those grueso (and surely that’s what these were-and, crazily, she thought of a line from a TV commercial for cake mixes Nothin’ says lovin’ like somethin’ from the oven!
Her heart thudded
She was feverish, dizzy
On the butcher’s-block counter, the severed hands were still poised on the rolling pin She half-expected them to skitter suddenly across the counter as if they were two crabs
Where were the Lieber oven, behind steel doors that had no s? Lying stiff and frosted in the walk-in refrigerator?
Bitterness rose in her throat, but she choked it back
The45 revolver now seeainst this incredibly violent, unknown ene watched, and the druer snare but tiet out of here"
The girl headed for the storeroom door
"Not that way!" Jenny said sharply
Lisa turned, blinking, confused
"Not the alley," Jenny said sharply
Lisa turned, blinking, confused
"Not the alley," Jenny said "And not that dark passage again"
"God, no," Lisa agreed
They hurried across the kitchen and through the other door, into the sales room Past the empty pastry cases Past the cafe tables and chairs
Jenny had some trouble with the deadbolt lock on the front door It was stiff She thought they ht have to leave by way of the alley, after all Then she realized she was trying to turn the thu way Twisted the proper direction, the bolt slipped back with a clack, and Jenny yanked the door open
They rushed out into the cool, night air
Lisa crossed the sidewalk to a tall pine tree She see
Jenny joined her sister, glancing back apprehensively at the bakery She wouldn’t have been surprised to see two decapitated bodies sha e of the blue-and-white-striped awning, which undulated in the inconstant breeze
The night reher in the sky since Jenny and Lisa had entered the covered passageway
After a while the girl said, "Radiation, disease, poison, toxic gas-boy, we sure were on the wrong walk Only other people, sick people, do that kind of weird stuff Right? Some weird psycho did all of this"
Jenny shook her head "One man can’t have done it all To overwhelm a town of nearly five hundred people, it would take an army of psychopathic killers"
"Then that’s what it was," Lisa said, shivering
Jenny looked nervously up and down the deserted street It see here, in plain sight, but she couldn’t think of anywhere else that would be safer
She said, "Psychopaths don’t join clubs and plana charity dance They al her eyes from shadow to shadow as if she expected one of them to have substance and malevolent intentions, Lisa said, "What about the Charles Manson commune, back in the sixties, those people who killed the movie star-as her naroup of nuts like that?"
"At most, there were half a dozen people in the core of the Manson family, and that was a very rare deviation from the lone-wolf pattern Anyway, half a dozen couldn’t do this to Snowfield It would take fifty, a hundred, ether"