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the abdomen would be a matter of two seconds. It was going to take the creature about the same amount of time to drop on him. Its body would create more wind resistance, though, so maybe there would be a second of play in there.
    He touched the cyanide capsule with his tongue. The secret to making a move like this work was to want it and let it happen, not to do it.
    The spider dropped as he rolled, grabbed the pistol, and fired into its abdomen just as it enveloped him.
    An instant later, he was on his feet, and the crumpled remains of the third alien were on the floor.
    He went into the kitchen, got himself a glass of water, and drank it. For a time he stood over the sink, his head down. He did not want to look at the remains, much less touch them. He had to, though. Killing was intimate work, and there was only one thing more naked than a victim’s body, and that was the killer’s soul.
    He went to the remains splayed across the floor and looked down at them. How could such ferocity and such danger be associated with something so insignificant as this little, shriveled mass of flesh and limbs as thin as pipes?
    This alien was not going to be doing any more damage. None of them were. He knew the power of his weapons and the efficiency of his delivery. These creatures were dead.
    He shifted his gaze to the darkness at the top of the stairs. The door to the bedroom hung open. The room itself was dark. What he might find up there made him uneasy. They’d been in there long enough to kill.
    He mounted the stairs one by one, moving silently to the top.
    The interior of the bedroom was still dark. He heard no breathing, but neither did he smell any odor of blood.
    He drew down the blanket that covered them, and at that moment beheld a sight so appalling that he shrank back from it as if it were poison or a charge of fatal electricity. The man was on top. Eve was on the bottom. But their skin was like candle wax that had cooled and frozen. They were melted together in a grotesque, faceless whole, their two bodies somehow made into one.
    He could see blue veins in the areas where they were joined. With a shaking hand, he touched the skin, which was soft and felt as new as a baby’s. They looked like a bag made of human flesh. Even the faces were melted together.
    Choking back a fear that told him to just run, to get out of there, to give up this quest, he reached out to one arm, thick and misshapen, that ended in two hands with ten fingers, and tried to find a pulse. Two hearts, a complication of signals, but there was no doubt—they were still alive.
    He reached out, his own heart breaking. What unearthly, monstrous, mad power could do this? How could such evil even exist?
    They lurched, and muffled inside the flesh that now lay as a living curtain that linked their faces, he heard a gagging female cry. Then the lower voice of the man, stifled, “Jesus!”
    The body began to writhe, then to shake. The flesh that sealed their faces together bulged and warped as they fought for breath.
    Their confusion changed to panic. Choked screams filled the room and filled Flynn with a dread as terrible as any he had ever known.
    Helpless, he watched them roll on the bed, heard their sphincters release, smelled the rise of urine, saw the skin turn red, then purple, and listened as the screams died into suffocated gasps and they died encased in an impossible mutual flesh.
    Like a father whose child has died in his arms, he bowed over them, touched them with gentle hands. His face was rigid with loathing, his eyes swimming, his lips set in a line that spoke of the rage within.
    In its slow way, the night came back, the hurried burr of the last crickets of summer, the sighing of the wind.
    He lifted the purpling corpse and staggered with it across the room, then put it down at the top of the stairs.
    When Diana and her friends saw this, maybe they would face the truth that he had known from the moment the presence of the