Strange Highways

by Dean Koontz

  enormous hat, striving to pass for a big bearded human being, he put his head down and plodded forward. I followed him, bent against the brisk wind and the driving snow.

  The alley led into a street lined with auto yards, industrial-equipment companies, warehouses, and a few other businesses that didn’t look so obviously like mafia front operations. One of the warehouses was an abandoned heap of cinder block and corrugated aluminum; its two windows, high above the street, were shattered.

  Bruno checked his disc and looked at the warehouse. “There,” he said. The wafer was glowing soft red.

  We crossed the street, leaving black tracks in the undisturbed skiff of white. There were two ground-floor entrances: one a man-size door, the other a roll-up large enough to admit trucks. Both were firmly locked.

  “I could blast the sucker open,” I said, indicating the lock on the smaller door.

  “He’s upstairs anyway,” Bruno said, checking the wafer again. “Let’s try the second-story door.”

  We climbed the fire escape, gripping the icy iron railing because the stairs were treacherous. The door at the top had been forced open and was bowed outward on flimsy hinges. We went inside and stood in the quiet darkness, listening.

  Finally I switched on a flashlight when I realized that Bruno could probably see in the dark and I definitely couldn’t. We were standing in a wide gallery that encircled an open well to the ground floor of the warehouse.

  A hundred feet to the left, a rattling sound arose, like a sack of bones being shaken. When we tracked it down it was only a wooden ladder, still vibrating after someone had descended it.

  I peered over the edge, but Stone was gone. We had not heard either of the lower doors open, so we went down after him.

  Ten minutes later, we had checked out all the empty crates and broken pieces of machinery, all the blind spots in the row of empty offices along the rear wall. We hadn’t found a trace of this Stone joker. The front doors were still locked from the inside.

  Neither of us put away his gun. I had replaced the expended shell in the Smith & Wesson and now had a full clip.

  Bruno’s weapon wasn’t anything like I’d seen before, but he assured me it was deadly. “It’s a Disney .780 Death Hose.”

  “Disney?”

  “Walt Disney. Best armament manufacturers in the world.”

  “Really?”

  “You don’t have them here?”

  “Mine’s a Smith and Wesson,” I said.

  “The hamburger people?”

  I frowned. “What?”

  “You know—the Smith and Wesson golden arches?”

  I dropped the subject. There are some pretty weird alternate realities out there.

  I heard faint strains of heavy-metal music that seemed to emanate from the thin air around us, but when I looked carefully along the walls, I found an old door that we had missed, painted to match the walls. I opened it cautiously and stared into black depths. Thrashing guitars, a keyboard synthesizer, drums. I went down the steps, and Bruno followed.

  “Where’s the music coming from?” my bruin friend asked.

  I didn’t like his hot breath storming down my neck, but I didn’t complain. As long as he was behind me, nobody was going to sneak up on me unawares. “Looks like maybe there’s a cellar in this place or in some connecting building where they’re playing.”

  “Who?”

  “The band.”

  “What band?”

  “How should I know what band?”

  He said, “I like bands.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I like to dance,” said the bear.

  “In the circus?” I asked.

  “Where?”

  Then I realized that maybe I was on the verge of insulting him. After all, he was an intelligent mutant, a probability cop, not one of our bears. He was no more likely to have performed a dance routine in a circus than he was to have worn a tutu and ridden a unicycle.

  “We’re getting closer,” Bruno informed me as we continued down the stairs, “but Stone isn’t here.”

  The wafer still was not a bright crimson.

  “This way,” I said as we reached the bottom of the stairs and arrived at the damp, fetid, trash-heaped basement of the abandoned warehouse. The place smelled of urine and dead meat, and it was most likely the breeding ground of the virus that will eventually wipe out humanity.

  I followed the siren strains of the head-banger music from one cold stone room to another, scaring rats and spiders and God knows what else. Even Jimmy Hoffa might have been down there. Or Elvis—but a strange, walking-dead Elvis with lots of sharp teeth, red eyes, and an uncharacteristically bad attitude.

  In the dankest, most stench-filled room of all, I came to an old timbered door with iron hinges. It was locked.

  “Stand back,” I said.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Renovation,” I said, and blew the lock out of the door.

  When that hellacious roar finished bouncing around the cellar, Bruno said, “I have subtler devices that accomplish the same thing.”

  “To hell with them,” I said.

  I opened the door—only to discover another door behind it. Steel. Relatively new. There was no handle or lock on our side. The double-door arrangement was meant to seal off this building from the next, so it was impossible to get from one to the other without people acting in concert on both sides.

  Stepping forward into the beam of my flashlight, Bruno said, “Allow me.”

  From a pocket of his voluminous coat, he produced a four-inch-long rod of green crystal and shook it as if it were a thermometer.

  I could hear the instrument begin to ring, way up on the scale where it would soon become inaudible to human beings but bother the hell out of dogs. Weirdly, I could feel the vibrations of the damn thing in my tongue.

  “My tongue’s vibrating,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  He touched the crystal rod to the steel door, and the locks—more than one—popped open with a hard clack-clack-clack.

  My tongue stopped vibrating, Bruno returned the crystal rod to his pocket, and I pushed open the steel door.

  We were in a washroom, alone. Two stalls with the doors half open, two urinals that some of the stoned customers evidently found too stationary to hit with any regularity, a sink so filthy that it looked as if Bobo the Dog Boy regularly took baths in it, and a stained mirror that showed us grimacing like a pair of old maids in a bordello.

  “What’s that music?” Bruno shouted. It was necessary to shout, because the heavy-metal band was nearby now.

  “Metallica!”

  “Not very danceable,” he complained.

  “Depends on how old you are.”

  “I’m not that old.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a bear.”

  I sort of like heavy metal. It clears out my sinuses and makes me feel immortal. If I listened to too much of it, I’d start eating live cats and shooting people whose names annoyed me. I needed my jazz and blues. But a little was always good, and the band at this club wasn’t half bad.

  “Now what?” Bruno shouted.

  “Sounds like a bar or club or something,” I said. “We’ll go out and look for him.”

  “Not me. I mean, it’s okay to be out on the streets, especially at night, at a distance from people where they can’t quite get a look at me unless I let them, but this would be close quarters. Stone shouldn’t be mingling either. He looks human mostly—but someone might get suspicious. He should never have tried jaunting into an unexplored time line in the first place. It was desperation when he knew I almost had him.”

  “What then?” I asked.

  “I’ll stay here, in one of the stalls. You check the place out. If he isn’t there, we’ll go back into the warehouse and up into the street where we can pick up the trail.”

  “Earning my money, eh?” I asked.

  While I adjusted my tie in the mirror, Bruno went into a toilet stall
and closed the door.

  From in there, he said, “Lord Almighty.”

  “What’s wrong.”

  “Do people on this world have any respect for cleanliness?”

  “Some of us have standards.”

  “This is disgusting.”

  “Try the other stall,” I advised.

  “What might be in there?” he grumbled.

  “I won’t be long,” I promised, and I left the reeking washroom in search of Graham Stone.

  3

  I HAD TO BULL MY WAY OUT OF THE WASHROOM, BECAUSE THERE WERE so many people in the place that they were stacked like cordwood on end, wall to wall. I had seen Graham Stone’s picture on that changing badge of Bruno’s, and I knew what to look for: six feet tall, pale face, jet-black hair, eyes that were crystal blue and looked as empty as a tax collector’s heart, thin lips—an image of cruelty. I checked out those around me, rejected them, and worked my way deeper into the mob of head-bangers who were swilling beer, smoking medicinal herbs, feeling up their girls, feeling up their guys, jumping to the music, and looking me over as if I might hand them copies of Watchtower magazine and try to convince them that Jesus was their savior.

  It wasn’t easy finding one face out of that crowd. Things kept distracting me. There were strobe lights winking every few minutes, and when they were on, I had to stop and wait before moving on again. When the strobes were off, there were shimmering film clips from horror movies projected on the walls and ceiling, and on the patrons as well. About ten minutes after I had started across the floor, through the scattered dancers, past the bar and bandstand, I spotted Graham Stone working his way to the lighted doorway in the far right corner.

  A sign above the door claimed OFFICE, and another on the door itself insisted EMPLOYEES ONLY. It was half open, and I walked through as though I belonged there, keeping a hand in my jacket pocket where I had the pistol.

  There were several rooms back here, all leading off a short hall, all the doors closed. I rapped on the first one, and when a woman said, “Yes?” I opened it and checked out the room.

  She was a stacked redhead in a leotard, doing ballet steps in front of a mirror to the sounds—now—of Megadeth. Ten chairs were lined up against the walls around the room, and in each chair sat a different ventriloquist dummy. Some held bananas in their wooden hands.

  I didn’t want to know any more about it.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Wrong room.”

  I closed the door and went to the one across the hall.

  Graham Stone was there. He stood by the desk, watching me with those cold eyes. I stepped inside, closed the door, and took the Smith & Wesson out of my pocket to be certain that he understood the situation. “Stand real still,” I said.

  He didn’t move, and he didn’t answer me. When I started toward him, however, he sidestepped. I cocked the .38, but it didn’t grab his attention like it should have. He watched disinterestedly.

  I walked forward again, and he moved again. I’d had the word from Bruno that a bring-him-back-alive clause was not a condition of my employment contract. In fact, the bear had implied that any display of mercy on my part would be met with all the savagery of a Hare Krishna panhandler on a megadose of PCP. Well, he hadn’t put it quite that way, but I got the message. So I shot Graham Stone in the chest, pointblank, because I had no way of knowing what he might be able to do to me.

  The bullet ripped through him, and he sagged, folded onto the desk, fell to the floor, and deflated. Inside of six seconds, he was nothing more than a pile of tissue paper painted to look like a man. A three-dimensional snakeskin that, shed, was still convincingly real. I examined the remains. No blood. No bones. Just ashes.

  I looked at the Smith & Wesson. It was my familiar gun. Not a Disney .780 Death Hose. Which meant that this hadn’t been the real Graham Stone but—something else, an amazing construct of some kind that was every bit as convincing as it was flimsy. Before I had too much time to think about that, I beat it back into the corridor. No one had heard the shot. The thrashmasters on the bandstand were doing a fair imitation of Megadeth—a bitchin’ number from Youthanasia—and providing perfect cover.

  Now what?

  I cautiously checked the other two rooms that opened off the hallway, and I found Graham Stone in both. He crumpled between my fingers in the first room, as solid in appearance as any face on Mount Rushmore but was, in actuality, as insubstantial as any current politician’s image. In the second room, I shredded him with a well-placed kick to the crotch.

  By the time I reached the dance floor again, I was furious. When you blew a guy away, you expected him to go down like bricks and stay down. That was how the game was played. I didn’t like this cheap trick.

  In the washroom, I rapped on Bruno’s stall door, and he came out with his hat still pulled way down and his collar still turned up. Face wrinkled in disgust, he said, “If you people don’t bother flushing, why even put the lever on the toilet to begin with?”

  “There’s trouble,” I said. I told him about the three extra Graham Stones and demanded some explanation.

  “I didn’t want to have to tell you this.” He looked sheepish. “I was afraid it would scare you, affect your efficiency.”

  “What? Tell me what?” I asked.

  He shrugged his burly shoulders. “Well, Graham Stone isn’t a human being.”

  I almost laughed. “Neither are you.”

  He looked hurt, and I felt like a blockhead.

  “I am a little bit human,” he said. “Certain borrowed genetic material … But forget that. What I should have said is that Graham Stone doesn’t really come from any alternate Earth. He’s an alien. From another star system.”

  I went to the sink and splashed a lot of cold water on my face. It didn’t do much good.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Not the whole story,” he said. “That would take too much time. Stone is an alien. Humanoid except when you’re close enough to see that he doesn’t have any pores. And if you look closely at his hands, you’ll see where he’s had his sixth fingers amputated to pass for human.”

  “Sixth-finger-amputation scar—always a sure indicator of the alien among us,” I said sarcastically.

  “Yes, exactly. There was a shipload of these creatures that crashed on one of the probability lines seven months ago. We’ve never been able to communicate with them. They’re extremely hostile and very strange. The general feeling is that we’ve met a species of megalomaniacs. All have been terminated except Graham Stone. He’s escaped us thus far.”

  “If he’s an alien, why the British-sounding name?”

  “That’s the first name he went by when he started to pass for human. There have been others since. Apparently even aliens seem to feel that being British has a certain connotation of class and style. It’s also a constant on eighty percent of the time lines. Although there are a couple of realities wherein being from the island-nation of Tonga is the epitome of class.”

  “And what the hell has this alien done to deserve death?” I asked. “Maybe if a greater attempt was made to understand him-“

  “An attempt was made. One morning, when the doctors arrived at the labs for a continuation of the study, they found the entire night crew dead. A spiderweb fungus was growing out of their mouths, nostrils, eye sockets …. You get the picture? He hasn’t done it since. But we don’t think he has lost the capacity.”

  I went back to the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. Someone came in to use the urinal, and Bruno leaped backward into the toilet stall and slammed the door. “Oh, yuck!” he growled, but the newcomer didn’t seem to find anything strange about the bearish voice.

  I had three minutes to study my precious kisser in the mirror until the head-banger left. Then Bruno came out again, grimacing worse than ever.

  “Listen,” I said, “suppose Stone was within twenty feet of me, back there in the offices while I was playing around with those paper decoys or whatever the hell they were.
He could have tripped right out of this probability by now.”

  “No,” Bruno said. “You’re a receiver, not a transmitter. He’ll have to locate someone with the reverse talent of yours before he can get out of this time line.”

  “Are there others?”

  “I detect two within the city,” Bruno said.

  “We could just stake those two out and wait for him!”

  “Hardly,” the bruin said. “He would just as soon settle down here and take over a world line for himself. That would give him a better base with which to strike out against the other continuums.”

  “He has that kind of power?”

  “I said he was dangerous.”

  “Let’s move it,” I said, turning to the steel door from the adjacent warehouse basement.

  “You’re marvelous,” Bruno said.

  I turned and looked at him, trying to find sarcasm in that crazy face of his. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “Marvelous? I’m marvelous? Listen, one guy doesn’t tell another guy he’s marvelous—especially not when the two of them are in a bathroom.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind why,” I said, starting to burn.

  “Anyway, I’m not a guy. I’m a bear.”

  “You’re a guy bear, aren’t you?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “So can it with this ‘marvelous’ crap.”

  “All I meant was, in the space of a few short hours, you have accepted the existence of probability worlds, an intelligent bear, and an alien from another world. And you don’t seem shaken at all.”

  I set him straight: “Yesterday, I got good and drunk. I spent six active hours in bed with a great blonde named Sylvia. I ate two steaks, half a dozen eggs, and piles of fried potatoes. I sweated out every drop of tension from the last job I took on. I’m a purged man. I can take anything tonight. Nobody has ever thrown anything at me that I can’t take, and it isn’t going to start with this. Besides, I have three thousand bucks at stake—to say nothing about a little thing called `pride.’ Now, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  We went through the steel door and the wood door beyond it, into the basement of the abandoned warehouse.

  4

  WHEN WE GOT BACK ON THE STREET AGAIN, WE DISCOVERED THAT AN inch of snow had fallen since we’d gone into the warehouse and the storm had cranked up two notches. Hard snow whipped about us, pasted our clothes, stung our faces. I cursed but Bruno just accepted it and said nothing.

  What seemed like a millennium later and some ten million miles from the metal bar where I had almost cornered Stone, using the color-changing disc as our guide, we found some of the shifty alien’s handiwork. Five teenage boys were lying in an alleyway, all with a white, gossamer fungus growing out of their