Chapter 16: Collect Them All (Patreon)

Author Note: I need you to remember that Chucky is still a Slasher, so he is a Superhuman creature capable of slaughtering humans even though he looks and is a fucking toy.

I have Hack/Slash as part of the setting, and as such, I need to point out that several characters are "buffed" so to speak, as they've made their own appearances in that series.

Chucky, for example, can somehow outrun a grenade, and is capable of restraining a guy who can break chains by flexing his muscles. As a toy, with toy appendages.

The van smelled like cold coffee and electronics.

Mr. Kirby had been in it for nine days. When the Toy Division seconded him to the field, he'd been told it would be three. He'd been told a lot of things: that the field would be educational, and that Ms. Pell had asked for him personally. Somewhere around day five he understood that both were true and neither was a compliment.

The van said FALCON CABLE on the side. Falcon Cable didn't know that. Inside, where the cable spools should have been, there were six monitors in a rack, a reel-to-reel, a coffeemaker bolted to the floor, a cot nobody used, and Mr. Dunphy. Dunphy was from Containment—a big, quiet, gray man who'd been with Containment since Indiana and didn't talk about Indiana, or much of anything else. He sat in the driver's seat with his arms folded and watched the street through the windshield all night, every night, like he didn't trust the monitors. Around day six Kirby decided he didn't.

At 12:51 a.m. Kirby leaned toward Monitor Three and said, "Oh. Oh, no."

Monitor Three was the pole camera. Contracts had put it up the first day, in a junction box at the top of the telephone pole at the end of the street, a little black eye with a wide lens that saw everything from the Fimples' mailbox to the Abernathys' recycling bin. In the gray-green of the night picture, a small figure in a parka was climbing the trash can under the Meeks family's garage eave.

"The Abernathy boy," said Kirby. "He's going over the roof. He's got a backpack."

"Mm," said Dunphy.

"That's the... sir, I think that's the Gorgonite. The leader unit. He took it home from the store at nine-forty. And now he's taking it to—" Kirby watched the figure crawl across the shingles to the lit window. "He's taking it to Meeks."

"Course he is," said Dunphy, without looking.

Kirby picked up the phone, a Motorola bag phone the size of a lunchbox with a four-pound battery, and dialed a number that wasn't written down anywhere. It rang once.

"Pell."

She sounded exactly the way she did at nine in the morning. Kirby had never heard her sound any other way. He'd started to wonder whether she slept, and then stopped, because it wasn't a productive line of thought.

"Ms. Pell. Kirby. I'm sorry for the hour. There's been, um. Development."

"Go on."

"The Abernathy boy activated two units at the store tonight. The Gorgonite leader and the Elite commander. The commander then activated his five squad units with the store's batteries, and—" he checked his notes, "—removed the processors from the remaining Elite stock. Thirty units. He's carrying thirty spare X1000s, ma'am. They left the store at approximately ten, with every battery on the premises, and relocated to the house across the street from the subject. The Fimple residence."

"The one with the computer."

"Yes, ma'am. The Fimple Home Command Center." Kirby had read the brochure; Phil Fimple had left it on the kitchen counter, and Monitor Five, which was the Fimples' own security camera in the Fimples' own kitchen, could read the fine print. "Lights, locks, sprinklers, garage door, intercom, outdoor speakers, and four security cameras. Which is how we're watching them. Which, ma'am, is also—" He swallowed. "The Elite communications unit has gotten into it. Link Static. He's been in the system since about eleven. I think he knows it's tapped. I think he might be tapping us back."

"Are the Fimples aware?"

"No, ma'am. They're asleep. Mr. Fimple came down at midnight for a glass of milk and the garage door opened and closed by itself four times and he said, quote, it's learning our habits." Kirby paused. "There are six armed action figures and thirty spare vessel chips in his garage, ma'am. In with his inventory. He sells sporting goods. He has a lot of pellet guns."

A short silence on the line.

"Ma'am. Our instructions."

"Haven't changed. Observe. Record. Don't touch."

"Even if... ma'am, some of those are children. On that street. And the Elite units are learning very fast, and they have pellet guns, and—"

"Mr. Kirby." Not unkind, and final. "The Board doesn't care about toys. Neither, tonight, do we. If it becomes something the Board would care about, you'll know."

"How will I know?"

"The phone in his office will ring more than once," said Ms. Pell. "Goodnight, Mr. Kirby."

The line went dead. Kirby set the bag phone down very carefully on the console and sat looking at Monitor Three. The Abernathy boy had gone in through the window, and the window was dark now.

"Dunphy," he said. "Can I ask you something?"

"Mm."

"Indiana. The thing you don't talk about. Was it... was it like this?"

Dunphy took his time answering, looking through the windshield at the Meeks house. "No," he said finally. "We had a lot more of the kids."

I. Rules of War

Alan sat on my floor with his back against my bed and his parka still on, and drank the glass of water I'd brought him in four long swallows, the way you drink when you didn't know you were thirsty until somebody handed you something. Archer sat on my desk.

I've thought about how he got there a lot since. He didn't stay in the backpack. When Alan opened it and set it on the carpet, Archer climbed out on his own, slowly, the way an old man gets out of a car, and stood a second finding his balance on legs that had been plastic two days before. He looked around my room—the pumpkin poster, the VHS shelf, the unicorn notebook on the nightstand, Phillip's marionette on the top shelf, the little wooden kid with the remote, facing the door—and then walked to the desk and looked up at it, and at the cage on top, and at the four small faces looking down at him from behind the bars.

Cham-P reached through the bars with one paw. Archer hesitated, then took it, and Cham-P pulled, the biggest of them hauling with his whole weight, and Archer climbed up the side of the desk drawer and over the edge and stood next to the cage. The Devas pressed against the bars around him, sniffing, studying. San-D got her nose as close to his face as the bars allowed. Maga-Z stayed at the back with his eyes narrowed, deciding. Jum-P woke up long enough to look, then curled up against the bars nearest Archer and went back to sleep. Archer stood there and let them, eyes half closed, like a man standing in the rain after a long time indoors.

"They're talking," Alan whispered. "Are they talking?"

"Kind of," I said. "They do that."

"Your hamsters talk?"

"They don't talk. They—" I stopped. "Yeah. Kind of."

Alan stared at me. "What is this house," he said.

We talked until two, low, my father in my desk chair in his robe beside three mugs of cocoa he'd brought up and forgotten, my door shut, the light off, and the window cracked an inch so I could hear the street. Outside, nothing. Not since the laugh.

Archer did most of the talking. I asked; he answered, in that low, grave, bedtime-story voice, slowly, like every word cost something and he wanted it to be worth the price, and what he told me was worse than the movie. He didn't remember the factory. He remembered the box. Being in it: dark, cardboard, the smell of shrink-wrap, and the print on the inside of the lid, which he'd somehow read in the dark, backward, a thousand times, because it was the only thing there was to read. GORGONITES. The monsters from GORGON! Programmed to hide. Programmed to LOSE.

"That was what we were," he said. "It was written. We read it, and so we were it."

"And the soldiers?"

"Their boxes were next to ours. In the truck. In the dark room in the store." He looked at the window. "We could hear them through the cardboard. All the way from Ohio. Reading their own boxes to each other. Over and over. No enemy left standing." He was quiet a second. "They were made to destroy us, Randy Meeks. It is the only thing they know. It is the only thing anyone ever told them."

"Do you know their names?"

"Yes." He said them like a list of the dead. "Major Chip Hazard, who commands. Butch Meathook, who shoots from far away. Kip Killigan, who goes where he is not seen. Brick Bazooka, who breaks walls. Nick Nitro, who makes fire. Link Static, who listens."

I wrote them in the notebook by the light of the clock radio, under SMALL SOLDIERS, under the line I'd crossed out. "How many?"

"Six," said Archer. Then: "And then more. There were other boxes in the dark room. Many. When the Major woke, he opened them. He took what was inside." His eyes were very dark. "Not the soldiers. The hearts. The small square hearts, from the boxes of the soldiers who did not wake. I heard him do it. I was in Alan's bag. I heard the plastic break."

Alan had gone rigid against my bed. "The chips," he said. "He took the chips out. That's what the open boxes were. My dad thought it was kids."

"What does he want with extra chips?" I said, but I already knew. I'd seen the movie, once, at nine, half asleep. Christy's dolls.

"He will make more soldiers," said Archer. "From whatever he finds. He was made to win. And a soldier who is made to win, when he does not have enough soldiers—" He spread his small hands.

"Makes more," I said.

"Yes."

Nobody said anything for a while.

"Where is Gorgon?" said Archer.

He said it to me, not Alan. He'd turned on the desk beside the cage and was looking at me, and he asked it like you'd ask a doctor something you'd been afraid to ask for months. "Alan says it is only on the box. That it is not a place." His voice didn't change; it was as gentle and grave as before. "Is that true?"

I thought about lying to him. I'm good at it. I've had a lot of practice in both lives, some of it even for good reasons. Sure, buddy. It's real. It's out there. We'll find it. Some things you shouldn't make people believe.

"I don't know," I said. "I know it's not here. I know it's not in Woodsboro. That's all I know."

Archer looked at me, and then nodded once, slowly. "That is more than the box said," he said.

In the desk chair, my father took off his glasses and cleaned them on the sleeve of his robe, and kept cleaning them long after they were clean.

At two, Alan went home.

He didn't want to leave Archer; I could see it. He kept looking at the desk. But his house was where the Commando Elite would look first, because his house was where the Major had seen Archer go in his backpack at nine-forty. My house had a closet, four hamsters who saluted, me, and a man with an aluminum bat.

"He stays here," I said. "In my closet. With the Devas."

"The what?"

"The hamsters."

"Your hamsters have a name? Like a group name?"

"They're the Four Dark Devas of Destruction."

Alan stared at me. Then slowly, for the first time since he'd come in the window, he smiled—the real one from the driveway, the one that changed his whole face. "That's the coolest thing I've ever heard. That's way cooler than Gorgonites."

"Thank you," I said. "My sister named the scarves."

He went out the window, across the roof, and down the trash can, the way Billy Loomis had taught a different kid five years ago, and I watched him cross the side yard to his own back door in the dark. When it shut behind him, I turned around, and Archer was in the cage.

Maga-Z had opened the door—he'd figured out the latch in the second week—and Archer sat inside on the bottom level in the cedar shavings with his back against the water bottle and his little bow across his knees. Cham-P had brought him a sunflower seed. San-D was curled against his side, awake, looking up at his face. Jum-P was asleep across his feet with his scarf over his nose, like he'd always slept there. Maga-Z was on the top level, facing the wall, pretending he hadn't done anybody any favors.

"Goodnight, Archer," I whispered.

"Goodnight, Randy Meeks," said the Gorgonite, and closed his eyes.

I didn't sleep. I sat on my bed with my back to the wall between me and my sister and listened, and at three, through the window I'd cracked an inch, I heard it: across the street, very faintly, the Fimples' garage door going up and down, up and down.

II. Friday

At school on Friday Tatum found me at my locker before first period and hit me in the arm. Hard.

"Your tree," she said, "got hit by lightning."

"It did."

"Christy told me. Christy told everybody. Christy says your dad hasn't been to work all week, and there's a hole in her fence, and a fake cable van, and the new kid's up all night standing in his window like a ghost, and you—" She looked at me, really looked, the way she did now, since Thanksgiving. "Oh my God. You look like death, Randy. When did you last sleep?"

"Sunday."

"Sunday?" She hit me again. "What is going on? And don't say nothing. You've been weird all week. Weirder than usual. You haven't called me once. You walked into a door in second period on Tuesday."

The bell hadn't rung. Kids went past in both directions. Down the hall I could see Sid coming with her backpack over one shoulder, watching us over the crowd with that careful, word-problem look.

I'd thought all night about what I could tell them. Tatum and Sid weren't family. Dad's rules were for the people at our kitchen table—Dad had made them, and I wasn't going to stretch them—and there were things I'd shown my parents Monday morning that I wasn't going to show anybody else, not yet, maybe not ever. But there was a doll.

"Wait for Sid," I said.

Tatum's face changed. She studied me a long second, then turned and waved Sid over with her whole arm, and when Sid got there, Tatum grabbed us both by the sleeves, pulled us down the hall into the empty band room, which was always unlocked first period because Mr. Shaw had a free, and shut the door. "Okay," said Tatum. "Go."

I told them, low, in the band room, with my back to the tuba lockers, in about five minutes. A present under the tree on Sunday from nobody. A Good Guy doll with a man inside it, a dead killer from Chicago named Charles Lee Ray, who'd put himself into a doll with something like voodoo and had been coming back in dolls since 1988. I told them it talked. I told them it moved faster than anything I'd ever seen, caught my father's bat one-handed and broke it. I told them about the window and the rain, and the storm on Wednesday that came out of a clear sky over our street and nowhere else, and the lightning, and the doll on our garage rafters kicking a hamster across the room. I told them about the toy store, the cartons, and Alan. I didn't tell them about the collar or the spear. I said I'd woken up my parents and told them, and they'd believed me because they'd seen it move.

When I finished, nobody said anything for a long while. Somewhere in the hall, a locker slammed.

"Your parents know," Tatum said finally, very slowly.

"Yeah."

"Your dad. Ted Meeks. Mister Donut Hut on Fridays. Has been sitting in your garage. With a bat. Guarding a killer doll. For five days."

"Four and a half. It got out Wednesday."

Tatum sat down hard on a folding chair. "I'm going to cry," she said. "I don't know why. That's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard."

Sid hadn't sat. She stood by the door with her hand still on the knob, looking at me, and it wasn't the careful look anymore. "You told them," she said. "First. Before us."

"They live with it," I said. "It came in through Martha's name, Sid. I didn't have a choice."

"I'm not mad." Sid let go of the doorknob. "I'm glad. I'm glad, Randy. I'm just—" She stopped and looked at the scuffed linoleum of the band room floor, at the music stands folded against the wall. "I spent a week," she said softly, "not believing my boyfriend was the killer. Because it would have been crazy if he was. And your dad believed you about a doll."

"He saw it move."

"So did I," said Sid. "In September. I just didn't want to." She looked up. "I'm coming over."

"Me too," said Tatum from the chair, wiping her eyes. "Obviously. Tonight. Your mom can make me eggs."

"Tonight I'm going to sleep," I said. "If I don't sleep, I'm going to fall down. Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow at dawn," said Tatum.

"Tomorrow at five," said Sid. "We'll bring coffee."

My father was in the garage when I got home, of course, in the lawn chair with the aluminum bat and the Press Democrat and a thermos. He'd taped cardboard over the broken back window to match the one in the living room, and there was a broom-handle-sized hole in the pegboard over the workbench that he'd been looking at a lot, I could tell. He looked up when I came in. "Anything?"

"He's not in the hedge anymore. I checked at lunch. I walked past." I sat down on the step from the kitchen. "Dad. Last night. Alan. The thing in his backpack. And the soldiers at the store."

"I know, bud." My father folded the paper. "I was there. I made the cocoa." He looked at the cardboard over the window. "The little gray fellow. Archer. He said please to me. When I brought the cocoa up. He said please and thank you and asked me if I was the father of the house." A pause. "I said I was. He bowed."

"He does that."

"Your mother wants to call the sheriff," said my father. "About the soldiers. Not the doll. She knows about the doll. But a store got broken into, and a bunch of toys walked out of it, and there's a family across the street with a little girl—"

"Christy's sixteen."

"There's a family across the street," my father said patiently, "and your mother thinks somebody with a badge should know. And I told her I'd ask you first." He looked at me. "Rule one goes both ways, bud. I'm asking. Should we call?"

I thought about Andy in a psych ward at six, about Detective Mike Norris, about what happens in every one of those movies when the grown-ups with badges arrive.

"They'll come," I said. "And they'll find toys. Lying in a living room. Not moving. That's what he does, Dad. He's just a doll when the grown-ups come. And then they'll leave. And it'll be dark."

My father looked at me. "Okay," he said. "Then we don't call. Yet." He unfolded the paper. "Go see your mother. She's in the kitchen, and she's made enough lasagna for twelve people, and she's going to make you eat some, and then you're going to sleep."

"I can't sleep, Dad."

"You're going to sleep," said Ted Meeks, "because I'm going to sit in this chair, and your mother's going to sit on the couch with the front door where she can see it, and nothing in this house is going to happen tonight that two grown-ups can't stand in front of for a few hours." He didn't look up from the paper. "You've been doing this alone since September. You don't have to do it alone tonight. Go eat."

The kitchen phone rang at six.

I was at the table with a plate of lasagna I was too tired to taste, my mother across from me pretending not to watch me eat, Martha at the end with her pre-algebra and San-D on her shoulder. The phone rang, and I knew who it was—six o'clock, nine in Ohio, every night—and Martha got up and answered before I could cross the kitchen.

"Meeks residence." She listened, and her face softened. "Hi, Kristen. It's Martha." A pause. "No, he's here. He's right here. He looks terrible. He hasn't slept since Sunday." A pause. "Yeah. Yeah. No, Mom and Dad know. Everybody knows." Another pause; Martha glanced at me, turned to face the wall, and lowered her voice, which in Martha's case meant going from very loud to merely loud. "There's a doll, Kristen. A killer one. It came for him. It put my name on the tag. And Randy woke us all up at two in the morning and told us, and Dad tried to hit it with a bat, and it broke the bat—"

My mother put her fork down and looked at the ceiling.

"—and now it's out, and it's with a bunch of toy soldiers, and Randy's going to fall over." Martha listened a long time. "Okay. Okay. I'll tell him." She held the phone out to me. "She says you're going to sleep now, and she's going to come get you, and if you argue she's going to tell Mom about the airport."

"What about the airport?" said my mother.

I took the phone. "Hi."

"You told them," said Kristen Parker. Her voice was strange, thick. "You told your family. All of it."

"Not all of it."

"Enough." A breath down two thousand miles of phone line. "Randy. Do you know how... do you know what I would have... when I was in Westin Hills—" She stopped, and when she came back her voice had firmed up. "Go to sleep. Right now. Lie down on the couch and close your eyes. I'll be waiting."

"Kris—"

"Now," said Kristen. "Or I'm telling your mom about the airport."

I lay down on the couch at six-twenty. My mother put a blanket over me and tucked it under my feet, the way she had when Randy was small, which I remembered from the inside. Then she sat in the armchair across from the couch with the front door in sight, a fireplace poker across her lap, and a cup of tea she wasn't going to drink, and said softly, "Sleep, honey. I've got the door."

The tree was plugged in, white and red and green and blue. Through the kitchen door I could hear the garage radio, low, my father listening to a Warriors game. Down the hall Martha's door was open with the light on, and I could hear her talking to the hamsters. Archer was in my closet with the Devas' cage, asleep against the water bottle.

I closed my eyes for one second, and I was standing in a living room in 1979.

III. Ohio Calling

I knew it right away. I'd been here before: the shag carpet, the console TV with rabbit ears, cartoons playing with the sound down, the sun coming through the front window in a big warm gold slab, a lawnmower going somewhere outside. Kristen's dream, the one she'd taken back from Freddy in October and kept. It's ours now.

"Finally," said Kristen Parker.

She stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms folded, in her mint cardigan, blonde hair feathered back, bangs in her eyes. She looked furious, and she looked like she'd been crying, and she looked so glad to see me that I felt it in my stomach like a missed step.

"I've been trying to bring you in since Monday," she said. "Every night. Every single night. You don't sleep, Randy. You never sleep. And then tonight your sister picks up the phone and tells me there's a doll—"

"I know. I'm sorry. I—"

"And that you told them." Her voice cracked. "Your mom and your dad and Martha. You woke them up and you told them, and they believed you."

"Yeah."

Kristen stared at me. Then she let out a long breath, unfolded her arms, crossed the room, and stopped in front of me—and then stopped again, differently. She was looking at me: my hands, my arms, my face. The green Army shirt with the sleeves rolled, the web gear, the boots. Theo's kit, the soldier from every dream she'd ever pulled me into, the eighties action hero from Vietnam with the bandoliers. Except the man wearing it wasn't twenty-six.

I looked down at myself and understood what she was seeing a second after she did. It was my first time in a dream since the gold door, since the merge. I'd come in the way I thought I would, the way I always had, in Theo's gear, but the arms in the rolled sleeves were long and skinny and pale. No sparrow on the back of the left hand; four pink cuts on the forearm instead, from a boiler room in October. Randy's hands. Randy's height. I touched my face, and it was his face, my face, seventeen, with a week of bad stubble.

"You're—" Kristen's voice had gone very small. "You're one."

"Yeah."

"There used to be two of you. In here. There was always two. The soldier, and—" She swallowed. "And the one with the remote. The one with the vest."

"I know."

"Where did he go?"

Nobody had asked me that out loud yet—not my father, not Martha, not even me. For five weeks I'd been saving up jokes for it in case anybody did, because a joke was the only way I'd be able to say it at all, and I didn't make it a joke for her.

"He went through a door," I said. "In this room, actually. The night after the theater. Right there." I pointed at the front door with the gold light behind the frosted glass. "He wanted to. He said I didn't need two of us anymore. He said he was as much me as I was him."

Kristen looked at the door a long time. "Did he say goodbye?"

"Yeah." My throat was tight. "He gave me some rules. Five of them. One of them was to call you every night. Especially when it was boring."

Kristen put both hands over her face. She didn't exactly cry. She stood in the gold light from the window with her hands over her face and her shoulders shaking once, twice, and then she took her hands down, and her eyes were wet and she was smiling, a strange, crooked, wrecked kind of smile.

"Especially when it's boring," she said.

"That's what he said."

"Well," said Kristen, "it's not boring, is it." She put her arms around me all at once, hard, and held on, and I held on back. She came up to about my chin; she always had, with both of them. "You stupid—you idiot, you should have told me, you should have called me that night—"

"I didn't know how."

"You say it. You just say it. Kris, something happened." She let go, stepped back, and wiped her face on her cardigan sleeve. "You said it to them. On Monday. Didn't you. Something happened."

"Something like that."

"Okay." She took a breath. "Okay. Later. You'll tell me the rest later. We'll do it later." She looked at me. "Martha told me the doll part. In about forty words. Most of them were bat." She almost smiled. "Tell me the rest."

So I told her about the doll.

She brought in Will at ten-fifteen.

I'd never watched her do it up close. She stood in the middle of the 1979 living room, closed her eyes, put out one hand palm up, like somebody feeling for rain, and softly said his name—Will—and the air in front of her folded like a sheet of paper, and Will Stanton was standing on the shag carpet in his pajamas and Indians cap, blinking, upright on two legs, his wizard's hat already halfway out of nowhere and settling on his head.

"Oh," he said, and looked at me. "Oh, hey. Randy. Hey. Are we—" He looked around. "Is it Freddy?"

"No," said Kristen. "It's toys."

Will looked at me.

"Toy soldiers," I said. "Real ones. Six of them, and a bag of spare hearts. With pellet guns. Across the street from my house. And a doll with a serial killer in it, in my sister's room."

Will studied me from under the brim of the wizard hat, and then something lit up behind his glasses that I recognized—what had lit up in a dream in November, when a kid who'd been in a wheelchair for years found out he could stand up and throw lightning.

"Okay," said Will. "Okay. Okay. Hang on." He sat down cross-legged on the carpet and put his hands flat on the shag, and when he lifted them there was a sheet of graph paper under them, a box of colored pencils, and a little velvet bag that clinked. "Draw me your street."

So I drew him my street. It took twenty minutes. Will was relentless. He wanted everything: where the houses were and how far apart, which way the windows faced, where the fences were and how high, where the telephone poles stood and which way the power lines ran. He wanted to know what was in the Fimples' garage, how many doors my house had, which ones locked, and what was behind each. When I told him the Commando Elite were twelve inches tall, he made a little sound of pure joy, opened the velvet bag, poured out a handful of tiny pewter soldiers—actual Dungeons & Dragons miniatures, knights and orcs and a wizard—and started setting them out on the graph paper.

"Twelve inches," he said, "is one square. One square is five feet. Everything in your house is a different scale to them. Your stairs are a cliff. Your bathtub's a lake. Your cat—"

"No cat."

"Pity." He moved an orc. "Okay. What do they know? What's their doctrine?"

"They read their boxes," I said. "The box copy. Over and over. In the truck, all the way from Ohio. No enemy left standing. That's their whole field manual."

Will stopped moving the orc and looked up at me. "Then they're NPCs."

"What?"

"They're NPCs. Non-player characters. They've got one script, and they run it." He tapped the graph paper. "That's how you beat an NPC, Randy. You don't fight it. You find the edge of its script, and you stand just past it, where it doesn't have a line for you."

I looked at him and thought about Chip Hazard reading his box in the dark. No enemy left standing. What do you do with an enemy who won't stand?

"Will," I said. "You're a genius."

"I know," said Will, and moved another orc.

At eleven Kristen brought in Phillip.

She didn't warn me. She did it the same way, hand out, soft name, and there he was on the couch in his pajamas with a block of wood in one hand and a carving knife in the other, like he'd fallen asleep carving and kept going. He looked at me, at Will's map and the little pewter army, and back at me with his quiet, careful face.

"Kristen says it's a doll," he said.

"Yeah."

"Can I ask you something about it?"

"Sure."

Phillip turned the block of wood over in his hands. It was going to be something, a horse maybe; too early to tell. "When you pick him up," he said, "does he feel like a doll? Or does he feel like something wearing a doll?"

I thought about a little plastic hand closing on my father's bat, and the bat splitting.

"I've never picked him up," I said. "I've never gotten close enough. He moves like nothing I've ever seen, Phillip. He caught a baseball bat. He's wearing that doll like a tank."

Phillip nodded slowly. "Every puppet has strings," he said. "Even the ones you can't see. That's what nobody understands about puppets. They think the strings are for making it move. Mostly they're for holding it up." He set the knife against the wood and pared off one long, careful curl. "Cut the strings, and it doesn't stop moving. It falls." He looked at me. "So find out what's holding him up."

I didn't answer.

"The marionette I made you," Phillip said. "At Thanksgiving. Is it still on your shelf?"

"Top shelf. Next to the tapes."

"Is it still facing the door?"

"Yeah. Like you told me."

"Good," said Phillip, and went back to his carving without explaining, and when I opened my mouth to ask, Kristen caught my eye from the doorway and shook her head very slightly, and I closed it.

A little after one in the morning by the clock on the 1979 VCR, the dream shook.

All of it at once, the whole room, like a house in an earthquake. The cartoons went to static. The gold light in the window flickered. Will grabbed for his pewter army, Phillip put a hand flat on the couch cushion, and Kristen went pale and looked at me.

"That's not me," she said. "That's you. You're waking up. Something's waking you up."

It shook again, and this time I heard it, faint and far away and coming from everywhere—through the walls of the dream, the shag carpet, the console TV, the slab of gold sunlight—a sound I knew better than my own voice. My sister, screaming.

"Go," said Kristen.

Will shoved the graph paper at me. "Take it! Take the map! It'll come with you, things come out, take it—"

I grabbed it. The room was coming apart. Kristen's face was close, her hand on my arm. "Randy. Next time you need me—"

"I don't sleep, Kris!"

"Then start!"

I woke up on the couch in my parents' living room with the Christmas tree blinking over me, white and red and green and blue, a sheet of graph paper crumpled in my fist, and from somewhere outside, through the walls, through the cold, Martha screaming my name.

IV. Collateral

I've thought about the next ninety seconds more than almost anything else that weekend, and I still can't put them in order. They come back in pieces, like a tape somebody's chewed.

The back door standing open. I don't remember opening it; it was already open, swinging a little in the cold, the kitchen freezing, my mother white in the kitchen doorway with the fireplace poker saying she went out, she went OUT, I was watching the FRONT. I went through the back door past her with the Little League bat in my hand, the old wooden one from the hall closet, which I don't remember grabbing either.

The side yard: the narrow strip of dead grass and Mom's roses between our house and the six-foot fence, the Abernathys' house dark on the other side. The motion light over the garage had come on, a thousand watts, white and flat, every shadow sharp as a knife.

Martha. She stood in the middle of the side yard in her pajamas and bare feet on the frost, the flashlight she'd dropped lying on the grass with its beam pointing nowhere, her other hand pressed flat over her mouth. She'd stopped screaming. Behind her hand she was making a small, high, unbroken sound, like a kettle.

And at the bottom of the fence, by the gap where the Hendersons' dog used to dig under, in the white light, there was a war.

Six figures in the gap under the fence, a foot tall, in green and black, helmets and flak vests, faces painted, crouched behind a knocked-over watering can and the stone border of Mom's dead roses like it was a sandbag wall. Real faces. Plastic, but real—moving, squinting into the light, jaws working. The tallest, square-jawed, with a scar through his eyebrow and a cigar clamped in his teeth, held up one fist—hold—and every one of the others was holding.

In front of them, in the middle of the grass, was the doll, and he had San-D. He held her up by the scruff of her neck, tiny in his plastic hand, her little red scarf hanging down, her legs kicking, and a dark line along one of them shone wet in the white light. In his other hand, low, held exactly the way you'd hold it if you knew what you were doing, was a knife—an old one, with a long thin blade and a handle of something carved and dark, wrapped in what looked like hair.

That was all it was. San-D had gotten out of the cage on her own, the way they all could now, and gone out the cat flap in the back door that we didn't have a cat for, on patrol, the way they'd patrolled all week. And Martha had heard her squeak once, the warning squeak, from the side yard at one in the morning. And Martha, who'd told me on Wednesday night, on her knees with Maga-Z against her chest, that she was going to get him, had gone out the back door barefoot before my mother could get out of the armchair.

And the other three Devas were on him. Maga-Z was on his shoulder with his teeth sunk into the doll's ear. Cham-P had him by the knife wrist and was hanging off it with his whole considerable weight. Jum-P, who'd been asleep in the hedge a minute earlier, had him by the ankle and was hanging on with his eyes still half shut, like he'd woken up already fighting.

"Get 'em OFF," the doll snarled in the Chicago voice, low and raw and furious. "Get these goddamn rats off me, Major, what are you doing, SHOOT 'em—"

"Negative," barked the one with the cigar, a voice like gravel in a cement mixer. "Negative, Consultant, you are in the line of fire—"

I hit the doll with the bat. I didn't plan it. I swung like a man killing a snake, low and flat along the grass with everything I had. I'd seen him catch a swing on Monday night like it was nothing, and I swung anyway, because three hamsters were hanging off his arms and leg and he couldn't catch anything.

It caught him in the side with a sound like somebody kicking a hollow plastic garbage can. It didn't hurt him—I could feel that through the handle; it was like hitting a fire hydrant—but he was two and a half feet tall, and small things go flying, whatever they're made of. He went sideways end over end, and San-D flew out of his hand, and Martha caught her.

I don't know how. She was ten feet away. She threw herself flat on the frost, full length, like a shortstop, caught a falling hamster in both hands six inches above the ground, and rolled onto her back with San-D pressed against her chest. Twice in one week. My sister was going to have to go out for softball.

The doll hit the fence and bounced. Cham-P came off his wrist. Jum-P came off his ankle. Maga-Z held on to the ear until the very last second, then let go, dropped, landed on all fours in the grass between the doll and my sister, and stood up on his hind legs with his little chest heaving and his scarf crooked, facing the doll.

The doll got up. He came up on one knee, the way a man gets up after being knocked down, one hand on the grass, and he still had the knife. His head had turned too far around on his neck when he hit the fence, and he reached up with his free hand and turned it back, click-click-click, like a dial. There wasn't a mark on him. He looked at me, at the bat in my hands, at Martha on the ground behind me with the hamster on her chest.

"Well," said Charles Lee Ray. "That's torn it."

"FIRE," said the Major.

The air filled with sound. Pap. Pap-pap-pap. Pap. Like popcorn in a metal pot. Things hit me in the chest, the legs, and the arm I'd thrown up over my face, hard and stinging, a hornet's nest of little hammers. Pellets. Real ones, from air rifles or parts of them, barrels and CO2 cartridges sawed down and taped and wired to their arms—Phil Fimple's sporting goods, his whole inventory, sitting in his garage. Tough Skin: the pellets hit my chest through my T-shirt and stung like slaps and bounced off and didn't go in.

Then my father was there. He came around the corner of the garage from the side door at a dead run in his robe and slippers with the aluminum bat, and he didn't stop or look at the soldiers or the doll or me. He looked at Martha on her back on the frost, and he went over her. He got down on his knees on the frozen grass over his daughter, with his whole body, back to the fence and the soldiers and the guns, like covering somebody from a hailstorm, and the pellets hit him. I heard them, pap pap pap, into his back through the robe, and I heard him grunt each time, a short hard sound through his teeth, and he didn't move. He stayed there on his knees over her with his arms around her head, his glasses gone and his eyes shut.

"DAD—"

"I'm fine," said my father through his teeth. "I'm fine, bud, keep going—"

The one closest to me, a big bald one with a heavy machine gun molded to his hip and a sniper rifle taped across his back, had broken cover to get a better angle on my father's back. I caught him on the backswing. It took him in the chest and he went over the stone border into the roses and swore, a deep, offended, completely human bellow.

"Fall back!" The Major. "Fall back to the LZ! Meathook, on your feet, soldier!"

They went under the fence through the dig-gap in a fast, low, practiced line, one after another, covering each other, pap pap pap over their shoulders as they went, the way it's done, the way I'd done it in another life on a hillside in another country. The big one came out of the roses swearing and went under last.

And the doll stood there, alone, in the middle of the side yard in the white light, knife in hand, his head on a little crooked, looking at me. At my father on his knees on the frost over Martha, his robe torn in a dozen places across the back with little dark spots coming up through the flannel. At Maga-Z in the grass. At my mother in the back doorway with the poker.

He laughed. "Look at you," said Charles Lee Ray softly, almost fond. "Look at all of you. The whole family. In the yard. In your pajamas. With your little sticks." He shook his head. "Eight years. You know what I'd have given, in Chicago, for one family like this? One family that believed a kid?" He turned the knife over slowly in the light. "And it don't matter, see. That's the thing. You believe him. Great. Swell. You can't stop me. You can just watch."

My father lifted his head.

"Hey. Ted." The doll looked at him. "Lemme tell you somethin' about your boy, since we're all out here bein' honest."

I went cold.

"That ain't your boy," said Charles Lee Ray pleasantly to my father, across the frozen grass in the white light. "Your boy's gone. That's a guy. Wearin' him. Like I'm wearin' this. I seen it the first time I saw him on TV. I'm the only guy in the world who'd know." A pause. "Ask him. Go on. Ask him what happened to the kid."

Nobody said anything. The motion light buzzed. Somewhere down the street a dog barked.

My father got up off his knees slowly and carefully, one hand on Martha's shoulder keeping her down. He stood in the side yard in his torn robe, no glasses, hair flat on one side, the aluminum bat hanging from his hand, and looked at the doll.

"I know exactly who my son is," said Ted Meeks.

The doll looked at him. "Huh," said Charles Lee Ray, and for one second in the white light he looked almost tired. "Okay. Okay, Ted. Have it your way." He looked past my father at Martha, sitting up now on the frost with San-D in her hands. "See you around, sweetheart. Tell your friends."

He turned and went under the fence after the soldiers, and he didn't hurry.

V. Five Rules

My father carried her inside. He didn't ask. He picked her up off the frost, hamster and all, the way he hadn't since she was eight and fell asleep in the car, carried her in through the back door, and set her on the kitchen counter by the sink. My mother locked the door behind us, deadbolt and chain, then dragged a chair over and wedged it under the knob the way they do in the movies, which doesn't actually work, which I didn't tell her. The other three Devas had come in at my heels and were on the kitchen floor now in a row, facing the back door.

Martha was shaking all over, dry-eyed, the way you shake when you've been very cold or very scared for hours, or both. She held San-D against her chest in both hands. There was a little blood on her pajama top—San-D's, not hers.

"Let me see," I said.

She didn't let go.

"Mart. Let me see her. I need to see how bad."

Slowly, Martha opened her hands. It was a cut along the outside of the back leg, maybe half an inch long. Shallow. It had bled a lot for something so small, the way little cuts do, but it wasn't deep. San-D was moving the leg, kicking a little, and instead of making the warning sound she was looking up at Martha, studying her face the way she always did, checking that Martha was okay.

"It's okay," I said. "It's shallow. Hang on."

I got the first aid kit from under the sink, the real one I'd restocked after Ray Delgado's class in November with everything Ray said a house should have. I cleaned the cut with saline. I didn't use a Band-Aid, because hamsters chew them; I used a little strip of gauze and a single piece of medical tape, wrapped once, loose. San-D held perfectly still and let me, and when I was done she turned around in Martha's hands, looked at the tape on her leg, and then looked up at me and blinked.

"She's okay," I said. "She's okay, Mart."

Across the kitchen, my mother had my father's robe down off his shoulders and stood behind his chair at the table with a bowl of warm water, a dish towel, and the tweezers from the first aid kit, her mouth a straight line. There were eleven welts across his back. Two pellets had gone in just under the skin between the shoulder blades, little dark lumps, and she was getting them out one at a time, very carefully, and dropping them in a saucer. Tink. My father sat with his elbows on the table and his face in his hands and made no sound. Tink.

That's when Martha started crying—the kind where it's been in there a long time and something finally knocks the door down. She sat on the kitchen counter with the hamster in her hands, looked at our father's back across the kitchen, and cried with her whole body, in big, ugly, gulping sobs, her face crumpled like when she was six. I put my arms around her, and she let me, and put her face in my shoulder. I don't know how long. Long enough for my mother to finish, and set the tweezers down, and put both hands flat on my father's shoulders and leave them there.

"I heard them," Martha said finally into my shirt, her voice wrecked. "Before San-D squeaked. Before I went out. I was at my window, and I heard him. In the yard. Talking to them."

"Okay. Tell me."

"He told them he was a consultant." She wiped her nose on her wrist. "Good Guy. Human operations. Command sent me. And he told them—" She swallowed. "He told them the humans are helping the Gorgonites. Hiding them. In our houses. And the one with the cigar saluted him. They all did. They just believed him."

I thought about Will on the shag carpet moving a pewter orc. They've got one script. Nowhere in the script of a twelve-inch Major who'd read his own box a thousand times in the dark was there a single word about people. He had no line for us, so the doll had written him one. He hadn't needed to beat them; he'd walked into their story and told them what it was about. Of course he had. We'd taken his story away, so he'd gone and found somebody else's. And the worst part was, it wasn't even a lie anymore. Upstairs, in a hamster cage on my desk with the door open, a Gorgonite named Archer had been sitting with the Devas since one o'clock that morning. The doll had made it up on the spot, I'd have bet anything, and it had come true behind his back.

"And the one with the cigar asked about... about the civilians." Martha swallowed. "And Chucky said collateral. And then he said tomorrow night. He said, tomorrow night you get your Gorgonite, and I get the kid next door."

Across the kitchen, my father lifted his face out of his hands.

"Alan," said my mother.

"Alan," I said.

Nobody said anything for a while. My mother pulled my father's robe back up over his shoulders, very gently, and tied it for him, the way you'd tie it for a child.

Martha was looking at me over my shoulder with her face red and wet and swollen, and I knew what she was going to ask before she asked it, because I'd been standing in the side yard when the doll said it, and so had she.

"Randy," she said, barely above a whisper.

"Yeah."

"What he said. To Dad." She swallowed. "Are you my brother?"

The kitchen went silent. My father didn't turn around. My mother's hands stopped on his shoulders. Neither of them spoke or looked at us. I understood later that they'd decided, without a word, in the same half second, the way they decided everything, that this was hers to ask and mine to answer, and they weren't going to make either of us do it with them watching.

I'd known it was coming since the side yard, since ask him what happened to the kid. I'd known that at some point my sister would look at me and ask straight out, and that I couldn't say I can't tell you that—not to this, not to her, not after tonight. And I couldn't tell her all of it either. Not the group home, or Sacramento, or Afghanistan. She could have handled it; it just wasn't hers to carry. So I told her the true thing that was hers.

"Yes," I said. "I'm your brother. I'm the one who's left."

Martha waited. She'd gotten very good at that.

"Something happened to me," I said. "This fall. You heard me say it on Monday. I couldn't explain it then, and I can't now, not all of it. But part of what happened was... I lost somebody. A part of me. The part that was scared of everything. The part that held your hand on Halloween when you were nine, because you were too scared to ring the doorbells. That was him." My voice was doing something, and I let it. "And he left. He decided to. And before he did, he gave me some rules. Five of them. So I wouldn't screw it up."

"What were they?"

"Number one," I said, "was let Martha help with the hamsters."

My sister looked at me, and her face did something slow and enormous. She looked down at San-D, asleep in her hands now with her scarf over her nose. She looked at the three on the kitchen floor in a row facing the door. She looked back up at me.

"That was number one?" she said.

"That was number one."

"Before everything?"

"Before everything."

Her chin started to shake again. "What were the other four?"

"I can't tell you that," I said.

And Martha Meeks, thirteen years old, sitting on the kitchen counter at one-thirty in the morning with blood on her pajamas and a bandaged hamster in her hands, laughed so hard she cried, or cried so hard she laughed—I couldn't tell which—and put her forehead against my chest and said "Okay" into my shirt. "Okay. Okay."

At the table my father put his face back in his hands, and his shoulders went, once. My mother bent and put her cheek against the top of his head and kept it there.

On the kitchen floor Maga-Z stood up on his hind legs, turned around, and looked at Martha. Then, very slowly, he saluted. It was the second salute I'd ever seen from him that wasn't a joke.

She slept in my room.

She didn't ask and I didn't offer. She came in with her pillow and comforter and made a nest on the floor between my bed and the desk, and the Devas got into the nest with her, all four of them, around her head like a crown. When I opened my closet door to get her a second blanket, she saw the Gorgonite. He was standing in the closet doorway in the dark. He'd heard everything, I think. He'd been waiting.

Martha sat up in her nest and looked at him a long time. "Hi," she said finally. "I'm Martha."

Archer looked at her from the closet doorway with his big, dark, tired eyes. "I know," he said gently. "The small ones speak of you."

Martha's mouth fell open. She looked at the hamsters, then at me. "They speak of me?"

"Often," said Archer.

"What do they say?"

The Gorgonite considered it seriously, the way he considered everything. "That you are theirs," he said.

My sister lay back down in her nest very slowly, her eyes very wide, pulled her comforter up to her chin, and lay there looking at the ceiling. After a minute I heard her sniff once.

"Randy?"

"Yeah."

"Is everything in this house alive?"

I looked at the top shelf, where a little wooden boy with a remote in his hand stood next to my tapes, facing the door, the way Phillip had told me to keep him.

"I'm honestly not sure anymore," I said.

VI. Standing

At five in the morning somebody knocked on the front door.

I was awake, of course. I'd been sitting on my bed with my back to the wall since two, listening to Martha breathe on the floor and to the street outside, with Will's map flattened on my knees. It had come out of the dream with me, the way Kristen's vest and the bandana had, graph paper and colored pencil and all, and in the corner, in Will's neat block capitals: FIND THE EDGE OF THE SCRIPT.

I went down with the bat. Through the peephole: the porch light, and Tatum in her parka with two 7-Eleven cups, and behind her, hands jammed in the pocket of a Woodsboro Track hoodie, breath smoking, Sid. I opened the door.

"Hi," said Tatum. "We said five. It's five." She pushed a coffee into my hand and walked past me into the front hall. Behind me the kitchen light came on and my mother's voice said, "Eggs?" and Tatum said, "Oh my God, yes, Mrs. Meeks, please. Oh my God, what happened to your arm?"

I looked down. The welts from the pellets had come up overnight, a dozen red rounds all up my right forearm, like I'd stuck it in a nest of something. "Long story."

"It's five in the morning. We have time." Tatum looked at me. "Is it the... is it him?"

"It's a lot of hims."

Sid hadn't come in. She stood on the porch in the cold, looking at my face instead of the arm, with the careful look, the word-problem look.

"I didn't sleep," she said, low. "After the band room. I lay there all night and thought about your dad in the garage with a bat." She took her hands out of her pocket. "And about September. About how I didn't want to believe it, because believing it would make it real." She almost smiled. "I'm done not believing things, Randy."

I stepped back and held the door open, and she came in.

I told them the rest in the kitchen, with my mother at the stove making eggs for everybody and my father at the end of the table sitting forward in his chair because he couldn't lean back. Last night. The side yard. The Major, the Consultant, and the pellet guns. Tomorrow night you get your Gorgonite, and I get the kid next door. Not the things that were only mine—not what the doll had said to my father on the frost. Everything else.

I'd gotten as far as the kid next door when Martha came down the stairs in her comforter like a cape with San-D on her shoulder and Archer walking down next to her one step at a time, holding the banister rail like an old man.

Tatum dropped her coffee. Again.

Sid didn't. Sid stood motionless by the refrigerator and watched a foot-tall gray-violet lion-faced monk with a bow on his back climb carefully down my parents' stairs, walk across the kitchen linoleum, stop by the table, and look up at her.

"Good morning," said Archer.

Sid looked at him. "Good morning," she said, perfectly level. Then she looked at me. "Okay."

"Okay?" said Tatum from the floor, where she was mopping coffee with a dish towel. "Okay? Sid, that's a Gorgonite. It's talking. Randy's hamsters wear scarves—"

"I saw." Sid pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down slowly, so she was at eye level with the Gorgonite on the table. "Hi. I'm Sidney."

"Archer," said Archer.

"Are you the one they want?"

"Yes."

Sid nodded like that was about what she'd figured. "Okay," she said again, to me this time. "What do we do."

Alan came over the back fence at seven with a duffel bag.

He'd gone back, of course. After school on Friday, while his father was on the phone with the sheriff's department again and his mother was at the Price Club, he'd gone around behind The Inner Child to the dumpster. Stuart had cleaned up the stockroom that morning and thrown out every box the soldiers had opened, because you can't return damaged merchandise to a company that won't answer its phone, and because he'd been so angry about the break-in that he wanted it all gone. The Commando Elite boxes were empty, torn open, plastic trays cracked, the little hollow in the back of each figure where the chip went gouged out with something sharp. Thirty heartless soldiers in a dumpster.

But the Gorgonite boxes were still sealed.

"They didn't touch them," said Alan on my kitchen floor, unzipping the duffel. He'd brought a bag of AA batteries too, a forty-pack from the Price Club, still shrink-wrapped, taken from the back of his mother's car. "Not one. They opened every one of their own guys and took the chips out, but they didn't even open the Gorgonites. Archer says—" He looked up at the table, where Archer stood motionless, looking at the duffel.

"There is no glory," Archer said softly, "in destroying an enemy who is asleep. They would want us awake. They would want us to lose."

Alan pulled out the boxes: six of them, one of each, purple and green and swampy—GORGONITES!, THE MONSTERS FROM GORGON!—each with a picture on the front and a name. SLAMFIST. PUNCH-IT. SCRATCH-IT. INSANIAC. TROGLOKHAN. OCULA.

Nobody said anything. Archer had climbed down off the table. He walked across the linoleum to the boxes, stood in front of them, and put one small hand flat on the cellophane window of the first, where a hunched, heavy-shouldered, troll-faced figure lay sleeping in its plastic tray. "Slamfist," he said softly. Then he looked up at me.

I knew what he was asking. I'd known since the backpack. And standing in my parents' kitchen at seven on a Saturday morning, I also knew exactly what yes meant: six more souls, six more things that would wake up in a box, read the words on the lid, and believe them. Six more in the war.

"If we don't," I said slowly, "what happens to them?"

"They sleep," said Archer. "In the dark. Until someone throws them away, or the soldiers come back for their hearts." He didn't take his hand off the cellophane. "Either way, they never see the light."

I looked at Alan, and Alan looked at me. He was already holding the forty-pack.

"Do it," I said.

It was the strangest hour of my life, and I've had a lot of strange hours.

They woke one at a time. Alan did each one: the little panel in the back, six AAs, the switch. Each time there'd be a second of nothing, a plastic toy in a plastic tray, and then the eyes would change. They were already open, painted on; what changed was that they became eyes, and whatever was looking out of them would see a kitchen, a crowd of giants, and a little gray lion-faced monk standing in front of it, and that was the moment, every time, when you could see it decide whether to scream.

Slamfist didn't scream. He looked at Archer and said in a deep, slow, rumbling voice, "Archer. Where... where are we?" Archer said, "Among friends, I think," and Slamfist looked up at the giants and said, "Are you sure?"

Punch-It was rhino-faced and built like a fire hydrant. He came out of the box swinging at nothing, at the air, fell over, lay on his back on the linoleum, and said "Ow," and Martha laughed so hard she had to sit down.

Scratch-It was small and green and froggy. He immediately climbed up Tatum's leg, sat on her shoulder, and refused to get off. "Oh my God," said Tatum, frozen with her arms out like a scarecrow. "Oh my God, it likes me. Randy. It likes me. What do I do."

"Let it."

"He is cold," said Archer apologetically. "You are warm."

Insaniac came out of his box spinning, literally—a top-heavy jester with a manic grin who woke up already in motion, whirling across the floor in a little tornado of giggling, bouncing off a chair leg and the dishwasher and Sid's shoe—until San-D, bandaged leg and all, limped into his path and simply sat down in front of him. He stopped so as not to run her over, swaying, and looked down at her and said breathlessly, "Who are you?"

Troglokhan was stitched together, a big, sad Frankenstein face with bolts, a shuffling walk, and a voice like a creaking door. He came out of the box very slowly, looked around the kitchen, sat down right where he was on the linoleum, said "Oh, no" with infinite weariness, and didn't get up for ten minutes.

And Ocula was an eye. That's all: a big round eye the size of a tennis ball on three little legs, with no mouth. It came out of the box, stood on the kitchen floor, and looked, turning slowly all the way around to look at each of us in turn, and stopped at Christy Fimple, who'd knocked at the front door at seven-twenty because Alan had told her to, been let in by Sid, and was standing in the doorway in her cheer sweatshirt with both hands over her mouth. And it blinked.

"Oh my God," said Christy through her hands. "Oh my God. They're so cute."

At the stove my mother had stopped with the spatula in the air and was looking at a rhino-faced action figure on her kitchen floor with an expression I'd last seen on her in a living room at two in the morning on Monday. Then she turned the eggs over, very carefully, one at a time.

"Cute?" said Slamfist, deeply offended.

"We are monsters," said Punch-It from the floor.

"It says so," said Troglokhan sadly. "On the box."

The part I'll remember is what all six of them did first, once they'd seen Archer and the giants and decided not to scream: they hid. All at once, like a reflex, like something written on the inside of a lid. Slamfist went under the table. Punch-It rolled under the radiator. Troglokhan shuffled behind the trash can. Insaniac spun into the cabinet under the sink. Ocula climbed into the toe of Sid's sneaker. Even Scratch-It went down the back of Tatum's parka, and Tatum made a sound like a smoke detector. Programmed to hide.

Archer stood alone in the middle of the kitchen floor looking at the empty space where his people had been. He didn't look surprised. He looked tired, like a man who'd known. "It is what we are," he said softly. "It is what the box says."

And on the kitchen floor, at the front of their row, Maga-Z stood up. He walked out into the middle of the linoleum, past Archer, and stood there in the open in the gray morning light from the window—a scruffy tan hamster in a crooked red scarf who had never once in his life done what anybody expected—and turned his head slowly and looked at the table, the radiator, the trash can, the cabinet, and the sneaker, each hiding place in turn. Then he squeaked once, sharp.

Cham-P walked out of Martha's comforter and lined up behind him. Then Jum-P, yawning. Then San-D, bandaged leg and all. A row, in the open.

Nobody in the kitchen said a word.

After a long moment Slamfist's heavy, troll-ugly face appeared from under the table. He looked at the hamsters, at the little one with the bandage on her leg, for a good while, and then came out, slowly, and went and stood next to Cham-P, the biggest one. Punch-It came out from under the radiator. Then Troglokhan from behind the trash can, sighing. Then the cabinet door under the sink swung open and Insaniac spun out, slowly, slowly, and stopped next to San-D. Ocula climbed out of Sid's shoe. Scratch-It climbed back out of Tatum's parka, down her leg, hopped across the floor, and sat at the very end of the line. Six Gorgonites and four hamsters in a row, in the open.

Archer looked at them. Then he turned to me, and his old, grave plastic face was doing something I didn't have a word for. "They were not made to stand," he said.

"Neither were the hamsters," said Martha from the doorway in her comforter cape, her voice thick. "They were made to be hamsters. Nobody wrote anything on their box."

Archer looked at her a long time. Then he walked to the end of the line, past Scratch-It, turned around, and stood.

VII. METT-TC

"This," said Tatum, "is Episode Three."

It was eleven in the morning. We were all in the living room: the humans on the couch and the floor and the arms of chairs, my parents side by side in the kitchen doorway with their arms folded the same way, and the Gorgonites and the Devas in a loose, uneasy cluster on the coffee table under the tree, where Martha's bottle-cap ornament hung at hamster height. I stood in front of the TV with a dry-erase board from Martha's room propped on an easel made of two dining chairs and a broom. Tatum had my Canon Hi8 camcorder on her shoulder and was filming.

"Turn that off."

"It's for the archive."

"Nobody can ever see this tape, Tate."

"Obviously," said Tatum without lowering the camera. "That's what an archive is."

I gave up and uncapped the marker. M-E-T-T-T-C, I wrote down the left side of the board in capitals.

"I know this one," said Martha. "It's from Episode One."

"It's from the Army," I said. "It's how you plan anything. Mission. Enemy. Terrain. Troops. Time. Civilians." I tapped the first T. "Six questions. You answer all six, honestly, before you do anything stupid. And then you do something slightly less stupid."

"That's the most you sentence you've ever said," said Sid from the arm of the couch. But she was leaning forward.

"Mission," I said, and wrote it. "Everybody in this room is alive on Monday morning. Everybody. Including them." I pointed the marker at the coffee table, and Slamfist looked startled. "That's it. That's the whole mission. We don't have to win. We just have to still be here on Monday morning."

"Can we win, though," said Punch-It from the coffee table. "A little."

"We'll see."

"Enemy." I wrote it. Then I picked up the one empty Commando Elite carton Alan had kept from the dumpster and turned it around so everybody could see the back. I'd been reading it since seven. It was the only intelligence I had, and the best I'd ever had in either life, because it was the enemy's own doctrine printed in full color with pictures. MEET THE COMMANDO ELITE! Six little boxes, six little photos, six little bios, the kind that sell action figures to nine-year-olds.

"Chip Hazard," I read. "Leader. Never retreats. Never surrenders. Butch Meathook: Sniper. One shot, one kill. That's the big one I hit with the bat. Kip Killigan: Covert ops. You'll never see him coming. Brick Bazooka: Artillery. If it's standing, he'll knock it down. Nick Nitro: Demolitions. He loves a big bang. Link Static: Communications. He hears everything." I put the box down. "And across the top, in the starburst, the motto. No enemy left standing."

Never retreats, I thought. Yet at one in the morning in the side yard the Major had shouted fall back to the LZ, and they'd gone under the fence in a perfect line, because in his book—on his box—fall back and retreat were two different things. It was the first edge of the script I'd found, and I wrote it small in the corner of the board where nobody would ask about it: FALL BACK ≠ RETREAT.

"That's their whole personality?" said Christy. "What's on the box?"

"That's their whole personality," Archer said softly from beside the bottle-cap ornament. "It is all anyone ever gave them."

Nobody said anything for a second.

"Plus a doll," I said, "who used to be a serial killer named Charles Lee Ray, who's told them he's a consultant from Command, and that we're hiding Gorgonites. Which, as of this morning, we are. Who's faster than anything I've ever seen, and stronger than my dad, and has a knife. And thirty spare chips." I looked at Christy. "And whatever they've found to put the chips in."

Christy had gone pale. "What do you mean, put them in?"

"I don't know yet," I said, which was a lie, and I hated it, and did it anyway, because I was hoping I was wrong.

I wrote TERRAIN and taped Will's map under it—graph paper, colored pencil, the whole street, every house and fence and pole, and FIND THE EDGE OF THE SCRIPT in the corner—and Tatum zoomed in. "Where did you get that?"

"A friend drew it."

"When? You haven't slept."

"Last night," I said. "In a dream."

For the first time all morning Tatum lowered the camera and looked at me over it. Sid looked at me. Martha, on the floor with San-D in her lap, didn't look surprised at all.

"Okay," said Tatum slowly, and put the camera back up. "Okay. Sure. Why not."

Terrain took an hour.

Will had seen it in a second, and I'd needed a whole night: to a foot-tall army, everything is a different scale. Our house was a fortress to them, a two-story concrete-and-timber castle with cliffs for stairs, a lake in every bathroom, and, if you thought about it, a moat in the gutters. A doorknob needed a ladder, and a deadbolt they couldn't move at all. So they wouldn't come through the doors if they could help it.

"Windows," said Alan. "Any window that's open, or cracked, or has a pet door, or—"

"The dryer vent," said Christy. "Our cat used to get in the dryer vent."

"The garage," said Sid.

Everybody looked at her. She sat perfectly still on the arm of the couch, looking at the door from the kitchen to the garage instead of the board.

"Everybody comes in through the garage," said Sid. "That's how they got in at my house. In September. They had my dad's keys, and they came in through the garage." Her voice held. Only her hands didn't, and she put them in her hoodie pocket. "Garages have a big door that doesn't lock right, and a little door that nobody remembers, and they're full of stuff to hide behind, and nobody's ever in there. It's the worst room in every house."

"Yeah," I said softly. "It is."

"So I'll take it," said Sid.

"Sid—"

"I'll take it, Randy." She looked at me. "I'm not doing the thing where I sit on the couch and somebody else goes in the garage. I'm done with that. I'll take the garage."

I held her eyes, then nodded and wrote GARAGE: SID on the board. Behind the camera, Tatum sniffed once and said, "That's going in the archive."

"Put me down for the front door," said my father from the kitchen doorway.

Everybody turned around.

"I've been on the garage for five days," said Ted Meeks. "Sid can have it. I'll take the front door." He looked at Tatum's camera. "And you can put that in the archive, Tatum."

"And the kitchen's mine," said my mother without unfolding her arms. "The back door. The cat flap. The dryer vent, if it's in the laundry room, and it's in the laundry room. Nothing comes through my kitchen." She looked at Martha. "And you're with me."

"Mom—"

"With me, Martha. Not behind me. With me." My mother's chin came up exactly the way Martha's did. "I've got a poker and a lot of feelings about my roses."

Tatum swung the camera to her. "Mrs. Meeks, that was so good, can you say it again—"

"No," said my mother.

I wrote it on the board—FRONT DOOR: DAD. KITCHEN: MOM + MARTHA.—and under it, smaller, because I knew my mother: (+ ROSES).

Alan had been quiet since the Gorgonites woke up, sitting on the floor by the coffee table turning one of the dead Commando Elite figures from the dumpster over and over in his hands, the gouged-out hole in its back where the chip had been. When we got to TROOPS and I started counting heads, he finally said it.

"Globotech makes missiles."

I stopped writing.

"That's what my dad was so mad about. When the stickers showed up on the cartons." Alan didn't look up from the dead soldier. "Globotech's a defense contractor. They make guidance systems. For smart bombs. My dad saw it in the paper when they bought Heartland, and he called Heartland and yelled at a secretary for twenty minutes about selling out, and I was like, Dad, it's just a sticker." He turned the figure over. "But it's not. Right? That's what these are. Those chips are smart-bomb chips. That's why they learn."

"Probably something like that," I said carefully.

"So listen." Alan looked up. He had the expression I'd seen on him for exactly one second on the driveway the day they moved in, before the bored mask came back down: interested. "Military chips are supposed to be hardened. Against EMP. Electromagnetic pulse. Like from a nuke, or a big power surge. It's a whole thing, I read about it in Popular Science. If you're going to put a chip in a missile, it has to be shielded, or the first big surge fries it." He held up the dead soldier. "But these were in a toy. Some guy took a missile chip and stuck it in a toy, for Christmas, in a hurry. I bet you anything he didn't spring for the shielding."

The room went quiet. Power lines, I thought. Something with the power lines, and an electromagnetic pulse that fries every chip on the block. The thing I'd half remembered on the sidewalk a week and a half ago, from a group home couch at nine years old.

"Alan," I said. "If you needed a big power surge. On this street. Where would you get one?"

Alan didn't even have to think. He got up, went to Will's map on the board, and put his finger on the telephone pole at the end of the street past the Fimples', the one with the transformer on top, the big gray can that hummed in summer—the one with the white Falcon Cable van parked under it.

"There," he said.

I stared at his finger. "Okay," I said. "Hold that thought. Hold it really, really tight. That's our last resort." I wrote ALAN: THE POLE (LAST RESORT) on the board, and under it, because I'd seen a lot of movies and knew exactly how fifteen-year-old boys interpret the words last resort: DO NOT CLIMB ANYTHING WITHOUT TELLING ME.

Alan read it, grinned, and didn't promise.

Christy knew her own house, and that turned out to matter more than anything. Phil Fimple had installed his Home Command Center in September and shown her all of it, every room, every switch, at length, with diagrams, the way a man does when he's spent nine thousand dollars on something and needs it witnessed.

"It runs everything," she said, ticking it off on her fingers. "The lights. The locks. The garage door. The sprinklers. The TV. The intercom in every room. The outdoor speakers. And the cameras, there's four of them, two inside and two out. There's a control panel in the hall closet with a keypad, and if you put in the override, it shuts the whole thing down and you can do it all by hand."

"What's the override?" said Tatum.

Christy went a little pink. "My birthday."

I thought about a lockbox in my parents' closet, a Beretta, and its combination, in September. "Of course it is," I said.

At two o'clock I went into the garage alone.

I told them I was checking it before Sid took it, which was true but not the whole truth. My father knew the rest. He came and stood in the kitchen doorway with his back to the garage and his arms folded, facing the house, so that anybody who wanted into the garage for the next ten minutes would have to go through Ted Meeks.

Because I'd been doing math since the side yard—the other kind of METT-TC, the kind I couldn't put on Martha's whiteboard. Troops: what have I got? Morbing in the first slot. Dark Spear in the second. Morbing was out; that was the easy one. You can't stand in your parents' living room in front of your two best friends, a cheerleader from across the street, and a kid from Ohio and scream "It's Morbin' time!" at the top of your lungs, then go pale and grow fangs, and keep a single secret you've ever had. The spear was harder. It was the best thing I had. But it was black and cold and visible, a broom handle of nothing that killed the wood around whatever it touched, and there was no story you could tell about it. Nobody would believe I'd found it. Everything I used tonight had to be something I could lie about.

So: Wind Barrier, a wall of hard, violent air that turned projectiles aside—pellets were projectiles, and nobody in the history of the world had ever looked at a sudden gust of wind and thought superpower. And Poison Breath, a cloud of something gray-green that ate whatever it touched, plastic included, and smelled like a chemical fire, and could be a lot of things if you stood far enough away. Paint thinner. A tipped-over can of something. Dad's pool chemicals.

Two swaps, five minutes each. Ten minutes alone in a cold garage with my eyes closed while the two new things came into the back of me one at a time like water filling a glass, and the two old ones drained out. Afterward the spear would be five minutes away. I stood in the garage and thought about that. In a firefight, five minutes is a long time; I'd seen guys die in a lot less. I did it anyway.

Morbing went first. The heavy cold thing in the doorway at the back of my head got up and left, and Poison Breath came in to replace it, sour and sharp, a taste like a dead battery on my tongue. That was the first five minutes. I was four minutes into the second—the spear half gone and Wind Barrier half in, my head full of that strange, sliding, two-places-at-once feeling the swap always gave me—when I heard the scrape. Small. Metal on metal. From the back wall of the garage behind Dad's workbench, down low, where the gray plastic box was that the phone line came into the house through.

I opened my eyes, and there was a soldier on the phone box.

He clung to the side of it a foot off the floor, all in black, face painted black, a black knit watch cap. He had the cover of the box pried open with a flathead screwdriver as long as his arm and was doing something to the wires inside with a little coil of copper and a strip of electrical tape, very fast and very neat. A professional. Covert ops. You'll never see him coming.

Kip Killigan looked over his shoulder, saw me, and froze. For a second we just looked at each other, a foot-tall man on a phone box and me in the middle of my father's garage with my hands at my sides, one ability going out of me and another coming in. Then he let go of the box, dropped, landed in a crouch on the concrete, and came up with something in his hand that caught the light from the window—an X-Acto blade, the long number eleven, taped to the end of a sawed-off chopstick. A spear. A bayonet. And he came straight at me. Never retreats. Never surrenders. That was the Major's line, not his, but they'd all been in the truck together, in the dark, reading.

He was fast, faster than anything that size had a right to be. He crossed the garage floor in a black blur, went up the leg of the workbench, and launched off the top at my face with the blade out in front of him, and I did the only thing I had time to do. I breathed.

It came up out of me like the worst burp of my life, from somewhere a lot deeper than my lungs: a thick gray-green cloud the size of a beach ball that rolled out of my mouth and hung swirling in the air for half a second, and Kip Killigan flew straight into it with his blade out.

I've seen a lot of things in both lives. I've seen what happens to a man when an IED goes off under the vehicle in front of yours. I've seen what Billy Loomis's face looked like after the eighth bullet. I've seen a dream demon come apart into light. I've never seen anything like what happened to Kip Killigan.

He came out the other side of the cloud, hit my chest, and fell to the floor at my feet, melting—faster than a candle. The black paint on his face ran, then the face under it, the plastic going soft and shiny and sliding, the jaw sagging onto his chest, the eyes, which had become eyes, running down his cheeks. His hands came apart around the X-Acto blade. He was screaming, a man's scream, deep and hoarse and terrified, nothing tinny or recorded about it, coming out of something the size of a ruler on the floor of my father's garage. And under the scream, through what was left of his mouth, into a tiny radio taped to his shoulder:

"Major... Major, the big one, he... he breathes, sir, he breathes—"

Then nothing. A hiss, a smell like a chemical fire, and a lump of soft, steaming gray-green-black plastic on the concrete with a little square of silicon sitting in the middle of it like a seed.

I stood there a long while. The swap finished. I felt Wind Barrier settle into the second slot where the spear had been, light and restless, like a held breath, and the spear was gone, somewhere five minutes away. My hands were shaking.

He was a soldier, I thought. He was a soldier who read his box in the dark the whole way from Ohio, because it was the only thing anybody ever gave him to read. He didn't ask to be a soldier. Somebody wrote it on him. So was I, a little. He came at you with a knife. On a mission. He would've opened your throat. Yeah. I know.

There was a Folgers can full of loose screws on the shelf over the workbench. I dumped the screws on the bench, took a putty knife from the pegboard, and scraped what was left of Kip Killigan off the garage floor into the can, chip and all. It was still warm. I pressed the plastic lid down all the way around and put the can on the top shelf behind the paint—a coffee can, the way I'd planned it for the doll. Then I went to the phone box and pulled out the little coil of copper wire and the tape. I didn't know what he'd been doing. Tapping it, probably—he hears everything. I held the copper up to the light. It was neat work. Very neat. I opened the garage's side door to let the smell out.

When Sid came out at two-thirty to take her post, she stopped in the kitchen doorway and wrinkled her nose. "Why does it smell like a chemical fire in here?"

"I knocked over the paint thinner," I said.

She gave me the careful look. She looked at the workbench, at the pile of loose screws next to it, and at the top shelf where the Folgers can sat behind the paint. She didn't say anything. She came in, pulled the stepladder to the middle of the floor where she could see the big door, the little door, and the kitchen door all at once, and sat on it with the Little League bat across her knees.

At three, Tatum called the sheriff's station—not 911, the non-emergency number off the list taped by the kitchen phone. Tatum did it, because it had to be Tatum, because it had to be his sister.

"Hi, Sheila. It's Tatum. Riley. Is Dewey there?" A pause. "Oh. Okay. Where?" A longer pause. "No, no, it's not an emergency. Can you give him a message? When he's off?" She looked at me. "Tell him to come by the Meeks house. Randy Meeks. Tonight. Whenever he gets off." Another look. "Tell him—" She hesitated. "Tell him it's a Ghostface thing," said Tatum, and hung up.

"It's not a Ghostface thing," I said.

"It's the only thing he'll drive fast for." She folded her arms. "He's on a jackknifed big rig on 101, past Cotati. He's off at midnight. Sheila says if he's off at midnight." She bit her lip. "That's a long time."

"Yeah."

"Randy, why aren't we calling 911? Right now? Why aren't we calling the sheriff, and the fire department, and the National Guard?"

"My dad asked me that yesterday," I said. "Same answer. They'd come. And they'd find six toy soldiers and a doll, lying in the Fimples' living room, not moving. Because that's what he does. He's just a doll when the grown-ups with badges come." I looked out the kitchen window at the Fimple house across the street with every curtain closed. "And then they'd leave. And it'd be dark."

From the kitchen doorway my father said, very calm, "He's right, Tatum. I hate it. He's right."

Tatum looked at me. "Andy Barclay," she said softly.

"Andy Barclay."

At ten after four, my parents danced in the kitchen.

I don't think they meant anybody to see. I'd gone in for a glass of water and stopped in the doorway. Nobody else was there, and the radio on the counter was playing something old and slow on the oldies station out of Santa Rosa, Sam Cooke, I think. My father stood by the sink with his robe still on over his clothes, because his back hurt too much for a shirt, his hand on my mother's waist, and my mother had her cheek on his good shoulder and her eyes closed, and they were barely moving, the way people dance who've been dancing together in kitchens for twenty years. Twenty years, I thought. Today. They'd have been in Calistoga, in a mud bath, in a little inn with a claw-foot tub.

My father saw me over her head. He didn't stop. He just held my eyes and very slightly shook his head—go on, bud—and I went on.

VIII. Gwendy

Christy's parents left for their party at five to five.

She'd gone home at a quarter of to give them the story: she was sleeping over at the Meekses', at Martha's, a girls' thing, Mrs. Meeks would be there all night. Parents believe that kind of thing instantly, because it's boring and also true. I walked her across the street to her driveway, then went back and stood on my own front porch, because from there I could see her front door, every window, and the van at the end of the street.

Phil Fimple came out jingling his keys, in a hurry, in a red Christmas sweater with a reindeer on it and a sport coat over it, his wife behind him in a black dress fixing an earring. The Sonoma County Sporting Goods Dealers' Christmas party at the Flamingo in Santa Rosa, Christy had said. Every year. Her dad's favorite night of the year. He'd be doing the chicken dance by ten. He saw me on the porch and waved big.

"Randy! Hey! Heard your dad's been home all week, kiddo! Must be nice!" He grinned. Phil Fimple had never taken a sick day in his life and thought it sounded kind of fun. "Hey, you see anything funny with our house this week? The lights? The system's been wacky. Learning our habits, the guy says. Took me three tries to get the garage door to stay down this morning!"

"I noticed," I said.

"Technology!" said Phil Fimple, delighted, and got in the car, and his wife got in after him and waved at me, and they backed out and drove off down the street, past the van, around the corner, and were gone.

The street was empty again. The Abernathys were in San Francisco at a toy fair at Moscone Center, with dinner after, and wouldn't be home until midnight. The Lutherans on the corner were at their church's Christmas pageant. The old couple at the end were in Palm Springs until January. Half the houses on the street had stood empty since October anyway, with FOR SALE signs in the yards. Every adult on the block was gone except two, in my house, with a bat and a fireplace poker. Parents out of town for the weekend—the first page of half the movies I ever watched.

I stood on the porch and waited for Christy to come back out. A minute. Two. The Fimples' porch light went on. Off. On. Three. Through the gap in the curtains of the Fimples' front window I saw a light come on in the upstairs hall, Christy's room, and a tall shadow cross it, Christy getting her overnight bag, her toothbrush, whatever a sixteen-year-old needs for a sleepover at a house under siege. Then I saw the other shadows. Small. A lot of them. On the stairs.

Christy screamed.

I was off the porch before the scream stopped, across the yard and the street with my father shouting my name from the doorway behind me the whole way, and I didn't stop. I hit the Fimples' front walk at a dead run with the front door ten feet away, and heard the deadbolt slam home. Clack. By itself, from the inside, with nobody's hand on it. The locks. The system runs the locks.

I hit the door with my shoulder anyway, and it didn't move. Through it I could hear her—Christy on the stairs screaming my name, and under it, voices. High, sweet, bright, perky voices, young women's voices, a lot of them, saying things in unison.

"Gwendy loves to party!"

"Gwendy loves to shop!"

"Gwendy loves to... ATTACK!"

"RANDY!"

Then, clack, the deadbolt slid open again by itself, and the door swung in slowly, invitingly, onto the Fimples' dark front hall with the stairs going up on the right. Christy was halfway down them, clutching her overnight bag in front of her like a shield, and they were coming down after her.

Dolls. A dozen twelve-inch fashion dolls in tiny sequined party dresses and tiny high heels, with long blonde and brunette and red hair—except somebody had cut the hair, hacked it off with something dull into ragged crew cuts, chopped right down to the plastic scalp in places. Somebody had painted their faces in black and green stripes across the cheeks and foreheads, camouflage, shining a little, greasy, and with a slow lurch in my stomach I realized what it was. Eyeliner. Christy's eyeliner. Mascara, some green eye shadow, and lipstick for the red. And their eyes had stopped being paint. They were holding things—big treble fishhooks bound to their hands with fishing line, darts, a sawed-down pellet pistol taped up and carried between two of them, braced on a third's shoulder like a bazooka—and all of them wore the same wide, pink, perfect factory smile, and they came down the stairs in their tiny high heels in perfect step, like a chorus line, singing.

"Gwendy loves to party! Gwendy loves to shop!"

"They cut their HAIR," Christy was screaming, backing down the stairs, "they cut their HAIR, Randy, they used my EYELINER—"

"Christy, come on!"

She jumped the last four stairs, and I caught her by the wrist and pulled, and we went out the door together, and it slammed behind us—slam, clack, the deadbolt again. We were on the front walk running, and I had her by the wrist, and there was the street and my house across it with the porch light on, my father on the front walk coming with the bat, and Tatum in the doorway with the camcorder and Martha behind her. And from the roof of the Fimples' porch behind us, something went pap.

I knew the sound from the side yard at one in the morning, and I knew who it was without looking. Sniper. One shot, one kill. I didn't have to think. It was right there in the first slot, light and restless, a breath held for exactly this. I threw my free hand up and back over my shoulder and let it go.

The wind came out of nowhere. That's what it looked like from outside, and that's what it was: a gust out of a clear, still December evening, one hard slam of air that came across the Fimples' front yard sideways, bent every bush flat, sent the dead leaves on the lawn up in a spinning wall, and blew Christy's hair straight out in front of her face. Somewhere in it I felt the pellets hit, tik, tik-tik, like gravel on a windshield, and veer off into the hedge, into the dark, nowhere near us.

We hit the curb and crossed the street. My father turned with us and ran backward up the walk with the bat up, between us and the Fimples' roof. We went up the porch steps past Tatum and in the door, and I slammed it behind us, locked it, and put my back against it. Christy stood in the front hall gasping with her overnight bag, her hair blown into a huge, wild, tangled mess, like she'd stuck her head out of a car on the freeway.

"Did you feel that?" she said. "That wind?"

"December," I said.

"It was crazy. It came out of nowhere. It—" She stopped. Her face crumpled. "My dolls. Randy. My Gwendies. I've had them since I was five. I had them on a shelf. In their stands. I dusted them." She was crying now, angry, her fists clenched around the handles of her bag. "They cut their hair. They used my eyeliner. They did their faces like soldiers."

"I know," I said. "I'm sorry."

"Why would they DO that?"

I didn't answer. I looked at Archer, who'd come to the living room doorway and stood looking at Christy with his dark, sad eyes.

"Because the Major needed more soldiers," Archer said softly. "And he had thirty hearts. And he made more."

In the doorway behind me, Tatum lowered the camcorder. "I got it," she said, her voice shaking and a little thrilled, the way it always got when she was terrified. "The whole thing. The dolls in the door. Both of you running. And that wind, Randy, did you see that wind? It was like a movie. That's going in the archive."

"Great," I said.

She'd been on the porch zoomed in on the Fimples' front door and the dolls the whole time; I'd watched the little red light. And I thought about a Hi8 tape showing my right hand thrown up over my shoulder at nothing, half a second before a December evening decided to blow sideways. Lose that tape, I thought. Later. If there's a later.

IX. Christmas Lights

The sun went down at four fifty-two.

In December in Northern California there's no real sunset, not in a valley. The light just goes thin and gold and then gray, the shadows get long and then they're everywhere, and then it's night and you didn't see it happen.

We were all in the living room. My father by the front door with the aluminum bat and the big flashlight. My mother in the kitchen doorway with the poker and the phone on its long cord, because the kitchen was hers. The tree was plugged in. Sid had come in from the garage; Tatum had closed the garage's side door and wedged it with the snow shovel and dragged the workbench in front of the big door, and Sid had decided the garage was a place you defended from the kitchen, through the door, instead of from inside. "You don't sit in the garage," she'd said. "That's how people die." Alan was on the floor by the front window with Ocula on his shoulder, looking out. Christy was on the couch with her knees up and her makeup bag in her lap, which she'd brought from her house and wouldn't put down, and Scratch-It in the crook of her arm. Martha was on the floor by the tree with the Devas. The Gorgonites had arranged themselves along the back of the couch in a row, the way the hamsters had shown them. Nobody was talking.

At five-twelve the Christmas lights started blinking—the house lights, I mean, not the tree. The big old-fashioned bulbs Dad had strung along the eaves out front in the first week of December, red and green and blue and gold, on a timer in the garage. They'd come on at five, the way they always did, and at five-twelve they went off all at once. Then on. Then off. Off, on, off, on, faster and faster, out of rhythm, colored light flashing through the front window across all our faces and the ceiling and the tree, red, dark, green, dark, blue, dark, gold, like a strobe at a party nobody wanted to be at.

"Randy," said Martha.

I knew. I'd known for three months. I'd written it myself in a unicorn notebook on the second night, by the light of a clock radio, in a list called COMING SOON, item number eleven: What to do when the Christmas lights start blinking by themselves. I'd written that one about a different town, a different Christmas a long way from here, a mother in Indiana with a wall full of lights and a missing boy on the other side of them. Here it was a twelve-inch radio man on a fence with a pair of wire strippers, playing with my father's timer. It didn't matter. The story doesn't care what you meant when you wrote it down.

"Phone," I said.

Tatum was already in the kitchen. I heard her pick it up, and I heard the silence. "It's dead," she called. "It's—there's nothing. No dial tone. Nothing."

Link Static. He hears everything. And when he's done hearing, he cuts the line.

The Christmas lights went off and stayed off. Then every light in the Meeks house went with them, all at once—the lamps, the kitchen, the hall, the tree, white and red and green and blue, gone in one instant. The furnace, which I hadn't known I was listening to, stopped. The refrigerator stopped humming. The house went dark and silent and cold, and the only light left in the living room was the evening gray through the front window. Somebody screamed, Christy I think, short, before she clapped a hand over her own mouth.

"Flashlights," I said. "Tate. The kitchen drawer. By the stove."

And across the street, the Fimple house lit up. Every light in every room, every window upstairs and down, blazing, the curtains all thrown open now like a stage when the curtain goes up. The porch light. The floodlights over the garage. The little solar lights along the front walk. The spotlights Phil Fimple had aimed up at his own house from the lawn, the way rich people do in the suburbs. Every light in the Fimple house, on, all at once, so bright it lit our living room through our own front window and threw our shadows long across the carpet and up the dead tree.

Then the outdoor speakers came on. Phil had them on both corners of the eaves, the big weatherproof kind, for parties, for Jimmy Buffett on the Fourth of July. There was a squeal of feedback so loud it rattled our front window in its frame, and then a voice, enormous and distorted, booming down the whole empty street like the voice of God on a cheap PA.

"ATTENTION," said the voice. "ATTENTION, MEEKS RESIDENCE."

It was the commercial voice, the Good Guy voice, sweet and high and cheerful, the voice from a hundred thousand Christmas mornings, turned up so loud it distorted on every word.

"HI," it said. "I'M CHUCKY."

Martha pressed herself against my leg.

"AND I'M YOUR CONSULTANT FOR THIS EVENING." A pause. Then the voice dropped, went flat and bored and Chicago, and at that size it was so much worse. "Okay, this is how it goes, pal. You got two things in that house I want. The little purple pussy with the bow and arrow. And the kid. The Abernathy kid."

On the floor by the window Alan had gone white.

"Send 'em out," said Charles Lee Ray through Phil Fimple's party speakers to the whole empty street. "Just those two. Out the front door, on the lawn. And everybody else in there gets to open their presents on Christmas morning. Your sister. Your girlfriends. The Prescott girl. Ted and Diane. Even those goddamn rats." A pause. "You got till the streetlights come on."

The speakers squealed, clicked, and went quiet. Nobody in the living room said anything.

"I'll go," said Alan.

"No," I said.

"Randy, it's me he wants. It's me and Archer. If I go out there—"

"No." I turned around. "Alan. Listen to me. You don't go out there. You don't ever go out there. You know what happens if you go out there? He gets you, and he still comes in. That's what he does. That's what all of them do. Send out the kid and everybody lives is the oldest lie there is." I looked at Archer on the back of the couch. "That goes for you too."

Archer looked at me in the light from across the street. "I was made to lose," he said softly.

"You keep saying that," said Martha against my leg, her voice shaking. "Nobody cares what's on your box."

The speakers clicked on again. Feedback. A different voice this time, gravel in a cement mixer, every drill sergeant in every movie I ever saw.

"COMMANDO ELITE," roared Major Chip Hazard. "THE OBJECTIVE IS IN THAT HOUSE. THE ENEMY IS IN THAT HOUSE. WE DO NOT RETREAT. WE DO NOT SURRENDER. WE TAKE NO PRISONERS." A breath. "NO ENEMY LEFT STANDING!"

And from all around us outside—from the hedges and gutters and lawn and the Fimples' roof and the Abernathys' fence and places I couldn't see, from everywhere—a sound came back, high and low together, four men's voices and a dozen bright, perky, pink-lipped ones, in perfect unison.

"NO ENEMY LEFT STANDING!"

"GWENDY LOVES TO ATTACK!"

I went to the front window and looked out. They were on the lawn. The Gwendies, a dozen of them in their sequins and crew cuts and eyeliner, in a skirmish line across our dead December grass from the driveway to the roses, kneeling, with their fishhooks and darts. On the roof of the Fimples' porch a big bald shape lay flat behind a pellet rifle on a bipod made of pencils. On the Abernathys' fence, black against the Fimples' light, a figure with a radio. By the storm drain, another, holding something round and taped that I didn't want to think about. And on the Fimples' front walk in the full glare of the spotlights stood a big yellow Tonka dump truck from somebody's garage, and in the back of it, one boot up on the cab and a cigar in his teeth, the Major. Next to him, sitting on the cab with his legs dangling, the old knife across his knees and his red hair shining in the spotlights, was the doll. He saw me in the window, lifted one small plastic hand, and waved.

At the end of the street past the Fimples', the white van was still parked under the pole with its dome light on. Behind the windshield a man sat very still, watching. Ringside seats. He didn't get out.

Behind me in the dark living room I heard Tatum click on the flashlights, one, two, three. I heard Sid get up off the arm of the couch and pick up the bat. I heard my father by the door take a breath and let it out slowly, the way he did before backing the Volvo out of a tight space. I heard Martha take a breath.

"Randy," she said, very small. "Are we ready?"

I looked at the window, the lawn, the truck, the doll waving on the cab. I looked at the room behind me: my mother and my father, two best friends, a sister, a cheerleader, a kid from Ohio, six monsters built to lose, and four hamsters in scarves who'd decided on their own not to. Two slots, wind and poison. The spear five minutes away. Be prepared, says the shirt. That's the front.

"No," I said. "We're never ready."

"That's the back of the shirt," said Tatum behind me, and her voice cracked right down the middle, and she laughed anyway.

Down the street, one by one from the far end, the streetlights started coming on. Click. Orange. Click. Orange. Past the corner. Past the Lutheran church. Past the house with the FOR SALE sign. Past the Abernathys'. The one in front of our house flickered, buzzed, and caught.

On the cab of the Tonka truck, the doll stopped waving, and the first pellet came through the front window.