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"But if they can’t hurt me"
"No sense uess so"
"We’ll lay low for like a few days Worst of the heat will be off by then"
"Then we do the five like he wants And after that?"
"Head on out, man Move on Make tracks"
"Where?"
"Somewhere He’ll show us the way" Teer was silent for a while Then he said, "Tell me about it About killin’ your wife and kid"
"What do you want to know?"
"Everythin’ there is to know, man Tell me what it felt like What was it like to off your old lady Mostly, tell me about the kid What’d it feel like, wastin’ a kid? Huh? I never did one that young,it out? Did it feel different than killin’ her? What exactly did you do to the kid?"
"Only what I had to do They were in in’ you down, huh?"
"Both of them"
"Sure I see hoas But what did you do?"
"Shot her"
"Shoot the kid, too?"
"No I chopped him With a meat cleaver"
"No shit?"
They smoked more joints, and the lantern hissed, and the whisper-chuckle of the underground river cah the hole in the floor, and Kale talked about killing Joanna, Danny, and the county deputies
Every once in a while, punctuating his words with a little onna have soether, you and onna have some fun?"
Chapter 44 – Victory?
Bryce stood on the sidewalk, studying the town Listening Waiting There was no sign of the shape-changer, but he was reluctant to believe it was dead He was afraid it would spring at hiuard
Tal Whitman was stretched out on the pavement Jenny and Lisa cleaned the acid burns, dusted thees
And Snowfield remained as silent as if it were at the botto to Tal Jenny said, "We should get hiht away The wounds aren’t deep, but there er’s toxins Herespiratory difficulties or blood pressure problems The hospital is equipped for the worst possibilities; I’th of the street with his eyes, Bryce said, "What if we get in the car, trap ourselves in acar, and then it comes back?"
"We’ll take a couple of sprayers with us"
"There ht not be time to use them It could come up out of a manhole, overturn the car, and kill us that ithout ever touching us, without giving us a chance to use the sprayers"
They listened to the town Nothing Just the breeze
Lisa finally said, "It’s dead"
"We can’t be sure," Bryce said
"Don’t you feel it?" Lisa insisted, "Feel the difference It’s gone! It’s dead You can feel the change in the air"
Bryce realized the girl was right The shape-changer had not been merely a physical presence, but a spiritual one as well; he had been able to sense the evil of it, an alible malevolence Apparently, the ancient enemy had emitted subtle emanations-Vibrations? Psychic waves?-that couldn’t be seen or heard but which were registered on an instinctual level They left a stain on the soul And now those vibrations were gone There was no menace in the air
Bryce took a deep breath The air was clean, fresh, sweet
Tal said, "If you don’t want to get in a car just yet, don’t worry about it We can wait awhile I’edto stop us Lisa’s right It’s dead"
In the patrol car, as Bryce started the engine, Jenny said, "You reence? When he was speaking to it, through the coence and self-awareness only after it had begun consuent creatures"
"I remember," Tal said from the back seat, where, he sat with Lisa, "It didn’t like hearing that"
"And so?" Bryce asked, "What’s your point, Doc?"
"Well, if it acquired its intelligence by absorbing our knowledge and cognitive mechanisms… then did it also acquire its cruelty and viciousness from us, from mankind?" She saw that the question ht down to it, s; not all of us; not the species as a whole; just the ones whore twisted, the ones who soer was the Satan of s isn’t a reflection of the Devil; perhaps the Devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our own kind Maybe e’ve done is… create the Devil in our own iht I suspect you are There’s no use wasting energy being afraid-of devils, deht… because, ulti than theus Hell is where we make it"
They drove down Skyline Road
Snowfield looked serene and beautiful
Nothing tried to stop the, one week after Jenny and Lisa found Snowfield in its graveyard silence, five days after the death of the shape-changer, they were at the hospital in Santa Mira, visiting Tal Whitman He had, after all, suffered a toxin reaction to soer and had also developed a er Noas alo home
When Lisa and Jenny stepped into Tal’s rooazine He was dressed in his unifor on a sed hi’ good," she told hi’ fine," he told her
"Like a million bucks"
"Like two million"
"You’ll turn the ladies’ heads"
"And you’ll make the boys do back-flips"
It was a ritual they went through every day, a small ceremony of affection that always elicited a smile from Lisa Jenny loved to see it; Lisa didn’t shed not once
Tal stood up, and Jenny hugged him, too She said, "Bryce is with Timmy He’ll be up in a little while"
"You know," Tal said "he see that situation a whole lot better All this past year, you could see how Ti him Now he seeotten it in his head that Timmy would be better off dead But up in Snowfield, he had a change of heart I think he decided that, after all, there wasn’t a fate worse than death Where there life, there’s hope"