Strange Highways

by Dean Koontz

  bow tie. After the history lesson, which had been about life in medieval times, Mr. Enright wanted to question the kids to see how much they grasped of what they had been taught. Jamie and the others were eager to answer, and Enright was impressed. “But, Mrs. Caswell,” he said, “you’re not exactly teaching them the six-grade level, are you? This seems more like about eighth-grade material to me.”

  Ordinarily, the class would have reacted positively to Enright’s statement, seizing on the implied compliment. They would have sat` up straight at their desks, puffed our their chests, and smiled smugly. = But they had been coached to react differently if this situation arose, so they slumped in their chairs and tried to look exhausted.

  Mrs. Caswell said, “Class, what Mr. Enright means is that he’s afraid I’m pushing you too fast, too hard. You don’t think that I demand too much of you?”

  The entire class answered with one voice: “Yes!”

  Mrs. Caswell pretended to look startled. “Oh, now, I don’t overwork you.”

  Melissa Fedder, who had the enviable ability to cry on cue, burst into tears, as if the strain of being one of Mrs. Caswell’s students were just too much to bear.

  Jamie stood, shaking in make-believe terror, and delivered his one speech with practiced emotion: “Mr. En-Enright, we can’t t-t-take it any more. She never lets up on us. N-n-never. We c-c-call her Miss Attila the Hun.”

  Other kids began to voice rehearsed complaints to Mr. Enright:

  “—never gives us a recess-“

  “—four hours of homework every night-“

  “—too much-“

  “—only sixth-graders-“

  Mr. Enright was genuinely appalled.

  Mrs. Caswell stepped toward the class, scowling, and made a short chopping motion with her hand.

  Everyone instantly fell silent, as if afraid of her. Melissa Fedder was still crying, and Jamie worked hard at making his lower lip tremble.

  “Mrs. Caswell,” Mr. Enright said uneasily, “uh, well, perhaps you should consider sticking closer to the sixth-grade texts. The stress created by-“

  “Oh!” Mrs. Caswell said, feigning horror. “I’m afraid it’s too late, Mr. Enright. Look at the poor dears! I’m afraid I’ve worked them to death.”

  At this cue, all the kids in the class fell forward on their desks, as if they had collapsed and died.

  Mr. Enright stood in startled silence for a moment, then broke into laughter, and all the kids laughed too, and Mr. Enright said, “Mrs. Caswell, you set me up! This was staged.”

  “I confess,” she said, and the kids laughed harder.

  “But how did you know I’d be concerned about your pushing them past sixth-grade material?”

  “Because everyone always underestimates kids,” Mrs. Caswell said. “The approved curriculum never challenges them. Everyone worries so much about psychological stress, the problems associated with being an overachiever, and the result is that kids are actually encouraged to be underachievers. But I know kids, Mr. Enright, and I tell you they’re a much tougher, smarter bunch than anyone gives them credit for being. Am I right?”

  The class loudly assured her that she was right.

  Mr. Enright surveyed the class, pausing to study each child’s face, and it was the first time all morning that he had really looked at them. At last he smiled. “Mrs. Caswell, this is a wonderful thing you’ve got going here.”

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Caswell.

  Mr. Enright shook his head, smiled more broadly, and winked. “Miss Attila the Hun indeed.”

  At that moment Jamie was so proud of Mrs. Caswell and so in love with her that he had to struggle valiantly to repress tears far more genuine than those of Melissa Fedder.

  Now, on the last Monday morning in October, Jamie listened to Miss Attila the Hun as she told them what medical science was like in the Middle Ages (crude) and what alchemy was (lead into gold and all sorts of crazy-fascinating stuff), and in a while he could no longer smell the chalk dust and child scents of the classroom but could almost smell the terrible, reeking, sewage-spattered streets of medieval Europe.

  8

  IN HIS TEN-FOOT-SQUARE OFFICE AT THE FRONT OF THE HOUSE, JACK Caswell sat at an ancient pine desk, sipping coffee and rereading the chapter he’d written the previous day. He made a lot of pencil corrections and then switched on his computer to enter the changes.

  In the three years since his accident, unable to return to work as a game warden for the department of forestry, he had struggled to fulfill his lifelong desire to be a writer. (Sometimes, in his dreams, he could still see the big truck starting to slide on the ice-covered road, and he felt his own car entering a sickening spin too, and the bright headlights were bearing down on him, and he pumped the brake pedal, turned the wheel into the slide, but he was always too late. Even in the dreams, he was always too late.) He had written four fast-paced detective novels in the last three years, two of which had sold to New York publishers, and he had also placed eight short stories in magazines.

  Until Laura came along, his two great loves had been the outdoors and books. Before the accident, he had often hiked miles up into the mountains, to places remote and serene, with his backpack half filled with food, half with paperbacks. Augmenting his supplies with berries and nuts and edible roots, he had remained for days in the wilderness, alternately studying the wildlife and reading. He was equally a man of nature and civilization; though it was difficult to bring nature into town, it was easy to carry civilization—in the form of books—into the wild heart of the forest, allowing him to satisfy both halves of his cleft soul.

  These days, cursed with legs that would never again support him on a journey into the hills, he had to be content with the pleasures of civilization—and, damn it, he soon had to make a better living with his writing than he had managed thus far. From the sales of eight stories and two well-reviewed novels spread over three years, he had not earned a third as much as Laura’s modest teaching salary. He was a long way from reaching the best-seller lists, and life at the lower end of the publishing business was far from glamorous. Without his small disability pension from the department of forestry, he and Laura would have had serious difficulty keeping themselves housed, clothed, and fed.

  When he remembered the worn brown cloth coat in which Laura had gone off to school that morning, he grew sad. But the thought of her in that drab coat also made him more determined than ever to write a breakthrough book, earn a fortune, and buy her the luxuries that she deserved.

  The strange thing was that if he had not been in the accident, he would not have met Laura, would not have married her. She’d been at the hospital visiting a sick student, and on the way out she had seen Jack in the hall. He was in a wheelchair, sullenly roaming the corridors. Laura was incapable of passing an obviously depressed man in a wheelchair without attempting to cheer him. Filled with self-pity and anger, he rebuffed her; however, rejection only made Laura try harder. He didn’t know what a bulldog she was, but he learned. Two days later, when she returned to visit her student, she paid a call on Jack as well, and soon she was coming every day just to see him. When he resigned himself to life in a wheelchair, Laura insisted that he work longer and harder with a therapist every day and that he at least try to learn to walk with braces and a cane. After some time, when the therapist had only moderate success with him, Laura wheeled him, protesting, into the therapy room every day and put him through the exercises a second time. Before long, her indomitable spirit and optimism infected Jack. He became determined to walk again, and then he did walk, and somehow learning to walk led to love and marriage. So the worst thing that had ever happened to him—the leg-crushing collision—had brought him to Laura, and she was far and away the best thing that had ever happened to him.

  Screwy. Life sure was screwy.

  In the new novel on which he was working, he was trying to write about that screwiness: the bizarre way that bad things could lead to blessings while blessings sometimes
ended in tragedy. If he could thread that observation through a detective story in such a way as to explore the more profound aspects of it, he might be able to write not only a big-money book but also a book of which he could be proud.

  He poured another cup of coffee and was about to start a new chapter when he looked out the window to the left of his desk and saw a dirty, dented jeep station wagon pull off the county road into his driveway.

  Wondering who could be calling, he immediately levered himself up from the chair and grabbed his cane. He needed time to get to the front door, and he hated to keep people waiting.

  He saw the jeep stop in front of the house. Both doors flew open, and a man and a woman got out.

  Jack recognized the man, Teel Pleever, whom he knew slightly. Just about everyone in Pine County knew Pleever, but Jack figured that, like him, most folks didn’t really know the man well.

  The woman was vaguely familiar to him. She was about thirty, attractive, and he thought perhaps she had a child in Laura’s class and that he had seen her at a school function. In only a housedress and an apron, she was not properly clothed for the chilly October morning.

  By the time Jack caned halfway across the office, his visitors had begun to knock on the front door.

  9

  SEED PULLED OFF THE HIGHWAY AS SOON AS IT SAW THE NEXT DWELLING. After centuries of dreamy half-life, it was eager to expand into more hosts. From Pleever, it knew that five thousand people lived in the town of Pineridge, in which Seed intended to arrive by noon. Within two days, three at most, it would assume control of every one of the town’s citizens and then would spread throughout Pine County, until it seized the bodies and imprisoned the minds of all twenty thousand residents in that entire rural area.

  Although spread among many hosts, Seed remained a single entity with a single consciousness. It could live simultaneously in tens of millions or even billions of hosts, absorbing sensory input from billions of eyes and billions of ears and billions of noses, mouths, and hands, without risking confusion or information overload. In its countless millions of years of drifting through the galaxies, on the more than one hundred planets where it had thrived, Seed had never encountered another creature with its unique talent for physical schizophrenia.

  Now it took its two captives out of the jeep and marched them across the lawn to the front-porch steps of the small white house.

  From Pine County it would send its hosts outward, fanning across this continent, then to others, until every human being on the face of the earth had been claimed. Throughout this period, it would destroy neither the mind nor the individual personality of any host but would imprison each while it used the host’s body and store of knowledge to facilitate its conquest of the world. Teel Pleever, Jane Halliwell, and all the others would be horribly aware during their months of total enslavement: aware of the world around them, aware of the monstrous acts they were committing, and aware of Seed nesting within them.

  It walked its two hosts up the porch steps and used Pleever to knock loudly on the front door.

  When no man, woman, or child on earth remained free, Seed would advance to the next stage, the Day of Release, abruptly allowing its hosts to resume control of their bodies, though in each of them would remain an aspect of the puppetmaster, always gazing out through their eyes and monitoring their thoughts. By the Day of Release, of course, at least half of the hosts would be insane. Others, having held on to sanity in hope of eventual release from torment, would be rocked by the realization that even after regaining control of themselves, they must endure the cold, parasitic presence of the intruder forever; they too would then go slowly mad. That was what always happened. A smaller group would inevitably seek solace in religion, forming a socially disruptive cult that would worship Seed. And the smallest group of all, the tough ones, would remain sane and either adapt to Seed’s presence or seek ways to evict it, a crusade that would not prove successful.

  Seed rapped on the door again. Perhaps no one was at home.

  “Coming, coming,” a man called from inside.

  Ah, good.

  Following the Day of Release, the fate of this sorry world would conform to the usual pattern: mass suicides, millions of homicides committed by psychopaths, complete and bloody social collapse, and an irreversible slide into anarchy, barbarism.

  Chaos.

  Creating chaos, spreading chaos, nurturing chaos, observing and relishing chaos were Seed’s only purposes. The thing had been born in the genesis explosion at the start of time. Before that, it had been part of the supreme chaos of supercondensed matter in the time before time began. When that great undifferentiated ball of genesis matter exploded, the universe was formed; unprecedented order arose in the void, but Seed was not part of that order. It was a remnant of precreation chaos; protected by an invincible shell, it drifted forth into the blossoming galaxies, in the service of entropy.

  A man opened the door. He was leaning on a cane.

  “Mr. Pleever, isn’t it?” he said.

  From Jane Halliwell, Seed extruded black tendrils.

  The man with the cane cried out as he was seized.

  A blue-spotted black stalk burst from Jane Halliwell’s mouth, pierced the crippled man’s chest, and in seconds Seed had its third host: Jack Caswell.

  The man’s legs had been so badly damaged in an accident that he wore metal braces. Because Seed did not want to be slowed down by a crippled host, it healed Caswell’s body and shucked off the braces.

  Drawing upon Caswell’s knowledge, Seed discovered that no one else was at home. It also learned that Caswell’s wife taught at an elementary school and that this school, containing at least a hundred and sixty children and their teachers, was only three miles away. Rather than stop at every dwelling on the road into Pineridge, Seed could more effectively go to the school, seize control of everyone, and then spread out with all those hosts in every direction.

  Jack Caswell, though imprisoned by Seed, was privy to his alien master’s thoughts, because they shared the same cerebral tissue and neural pathways. Upon realizing that the school was to be attacked, Caswell’s trapped mind squirmed violently, trying to slip free of its shackles.

  Seed was surprised by the vigor and persistence with which the man resisted. With Pleever and the Halliwell woman, it had noticed that human beings—as they called themselves—possessed a far more powerful will than any species with which it had previously enjoyed contact. Now Caswell proved to have a considerably stronger will than either Pleever or Halliwell. Here was a species that obviously struggled relentlessly to create order out of chaos, that tried to make sense of existence, and that was determined to impose order on the natural world by the sheer power of its will. Seed was going to take special pleasure in leading humanity into chaos, degeneration, and ultimately into devolution.

  Seed shoved the man’s mind into an even darker, tighter corner than that to which it first confined him, chained him more securely. Then, in the form of its three hosts, it set out for the elementary school.

  10

  JAMIE WATLEY WAS EMBARRASSED TO ASK MRS. CASWELL FOR PERMISSION to go to the bathroom. He wanted her to think that he was special, wanted her to notice him in a way that she did not notice the other kids, wanted her to love him as much as he loved her—but how could she think that he was special if she knew that he had to pee like any other boy? He was being silly, of course. Having to go to the bathroom was nothing to be ashamed about. Everyone peed. Even Mrs. Caswell

  No! He wouldn’t think about that. Impossible.

  But all through the history lesson he did keep thinking about his own need to pee, and by the time they were finished with history and halfway through math, he could no longer contain himself.

  “Yes, Jamie?”

  “May I have a lavatory pass, Mrs. Caswell?”

  “Certainly.”

  The lavatory passes were on a corner of her desk, and he had to walk by her to reach them. He hung his head and refused to look at her
because he didn’t want her to see that he was blushing brightly. He snatched the pass off the desk and hurried into the hall.

  Unlike other boys, he did not dawdle in the restroom. He was eager to get back to class so he could listen to Mrs. Caswell’s musical voice and watch her move back and forth through the room.

  When he came out of the lav, three people were entering the end of the corridor through the outside door to the parking lot: a man dressed in hunting clothes, a woman in a housedress, and a guy in khaki pants and a maroon sweatshirt. They were an odd trio.

  Jamie waited for them to pass because they looked as if they were in a hurry about something and might knock him down if he got in their way. Besides, he suspected that they might ask where to find the principal or the school nurse or somebody important, and Jamie enjoyed being helpful. As they drew abreast of him, they turned toward him, as one.

  He was snared.

  11

  SEED WAS NOW FOUR.

  By nightfall it would be thousands.

  In its four parts, it walked down the hall toward the classroom to which Jamie Watley had been returning.

  A year or two hence, after the entire population of the world had become part of Seed, when bloodshed and chaos were then initiated with the Day of Release, the entity would remain entirely on—planet only a few weeks to witness firsthand the beginning of the human decline. Then it would form a new shell, fill that vessel with part of itself, and break free of the earth’s gravity. Returning to the void, it would drift for tens of thousands or even millions of years until it found another likely world, where it would descend and await contact with a member of the dominant species.

  During its long cosmic journeying, Seed would remain in contact with the billions of parts of itself that it left behind on earth, although only as long as those fragments had hosts to inhabit. In a way, therefore, it would never really leave this planet until the last human being was destroyed centuries hence in one terminal act of chaotic violence, whereupon the remaining bit of earthbound Seed would die with that final host.

  Seed reached the door of Laura Caswell’s classroom.

  The minds of Jack Caswell and Jamie Watley, hot with anger and fear, tried to melt through the shackles in which Seed bound them, and it paused briefly to cool them down and establish full control. Their bodies twitched, and they made gurgling sounds as they strove to scream a warning. Seed was shocked by the rebellion; while having no slightest chance of success, their resistance was nevertheless greater than any it had ever before encountered.

  Exploring the minds of Jack and Jamie, Seed discovered that their impressive, stubborn exercise of will had been powered not by fear for themselves but by fear for Laura Caswell, teacher of one and wife of the other. They were angry about their own enslavement, yes, but they were even angrier about the possibility of Laura being possessed. They were both in love with her, and the purity of that love gave them the strength to resist the horror that had engulfed them.

  Interesting..

  Seed had encountered the concept of love among half of the species that it had destroyed on other worlds, but nowhere had it perceived the force of love as strongly as in these human beings. Now it realized for the first time that the will of an intelligent creature wasn’t the only important power in the employ of universal order; love also fulfilled that function. And in a species that had both a strong will and an unusually well-developed ability to love, Seed had found the most formidable enemy of chaos.

  Not formidable enough, of course. Seed was unstoppable, and within twenty-four hours all of Pineridge would be absorbed.

  Seed opened the classroom door. The four of it went inside.

  12

  LAURA CASWELL WAS SURPRISED TO SEE HER HUSBAND ENTER THE ROOM with Richie Halliwell’s mother, that old scoundrel Teel Pleever, and Jamie. She couldn’t imagine what any of them, other than Jamie, was doing there. Then she realized that Jack was walking, actually walking, not shuffling, not dragging himself along stiff legged but walking easily like any man.

  Before the wonder of Jack’s recovery could sink in, before Laura could ask him what was happening, even as her students were turning in their seats, terror struck. Jamie Watley held his hands toward a classmate, Tommy Albertson, and hideous, black, wormlike tendrils erupted from his fingertips. They lashed around Tommy, and as the snared boy cried out, a repulsive snakelike thing burst from Jamie’s breastbone and pierced Tommy’s chest, linking them obscenely.

  The children screamed and pushed up from their desks to flee, but with astonishing speed they were attacked and silenced. Hateful, glossy worms and thicker snakes spewed forth from Mrs. Halliwell, Pleever, and Jack. Three more of Laura’s nineteen students were seized. Suddenly Tommy Albertson and the other contaminated children joined in the attack; worms and snakes erupted from them toward new victims only seconds after they themselves had first been pierced.

  Miss Garner, the teacher in the next room, stepped through the door to see what the shouting was about. She was taken before she could cry out.

  In a single minute all but four thoroughly terrorized children had been taken firmly under the control of some nightmare organism. The four survivors—including Jane Halliwell’s son, Richie—gathered around Laura; two were stunned into silence