Sole Survivor

by Dean Koontz

  “Mahalia’s trying to figure a way to slip us past them after closing time.”

  “She doesn’t understand. We’ve got to get out of here now.”

  “She’s having boxes stacked in the receiving room to cover the entrance of the elevator—”

  “I don’t care about those men or their damn guns,” Rose said, rounding the end of the table. “If they come down here after us, I can face that, handle that. I don’t care about dying that way, Joe. But they don’t really need to come after us. If they know we’re somewhere in this building right now, they can remote us.”

  “What?”

  “Remote us,” she said fearfully, heading toward one of the doors that served the deck and the beach.

  Following her, exasperated, Joe said, “What does that mean—remote us?”

  The door was secured by a pair of thumb-turn dead-bolts. She disengaged the upper one.

  He clamped his hand over the lower lock, preventing her from opening it. “Where’s Nina?”

  “Get out of the way,” she demanded.

  “Where’s Nina?”

  “Joe, for God’s sake—”

  This was the first time that Rose Tucker had seemed vulnerable, and Joe was going to take advantage of the moment to get what he most wanted. “Where’s Nina?”

  “Later. I promise.”

  “Now.”

  From upstairs came a loud clatter.

  Rose gasped, turned from the door, and pressed her gaze upon the ceiling again as if it might crash down on them.

  Joe heard voices raised in argument, filtered through the elevator shaft—Mahalia’s and those of at least two or three men. He was sure that the clatter was the sound of empty packing crates and pallets being dragged and tossed away from the cab door.

  When the men in the leather jackets discovered the elevator and knew there was a lower floor to the building, they might realize that they had left an escape gate open by not covering the beach. Indeed, others might even now be looking for a way down the sheer forty-foot bluff, with the hope of cutting off that route.

  Nevertheless, face-to-face with Rose, recklessly determined to have an answer at any cost, fiercely insistent, Joe pressed his question: “Where’s Nina?”

  “Dead,” she said, seeming to wrench the word from herself.

  “Like hell she is.”

  “Please, Joe—”

  He was furious with her for lying to him, as so many others had lied to him during the past year. “Like hell she is. No way. No damn way. I’ve talked to Mercy Ealing. Nina was alive that night and she’s alive now, somewhere.”

  “If they know we’re in this building,” Rose repeated in a voice that now shook with urgency, “they can remote us. Like the Delmanns. Like Lisa. Like Captain Blane!”

  “Where is Nina?”

  The elevator motor rumbled to life, and the cab began to hum upward through the shaft.

  “Where is Nina?”

  Overhead, the banquet room lights dimmed, probably because the elevator drew power from their circuit.

  At the dimming of the lights, Rose cried out in terror, threw her body against Joe, trying to knock him off his feet, and clawed frenziedly at the hand that he had clamped over the lower deadbolt.

  Her nails gouged his flesh, and he hissed in pain and let go of the lock, and she pulled open the door. In came a breeze that smelled of the ocean, and out went Rose into the night.

  Joe rushed after her, onto a twenty-foot-wide, eighty-foot-long, elevated wood deck overhung by the restaurant. It reverberated like a kettledrum with each footfall.

  The scarlet sun had bled into a grave on the far side of Japan. The sky and the sea to the west were raven meeting crow, as feathery smooth and sensuous and inviting as death.

  Rose was already at the head of the stairs.

  Following her, Joe found two flights that led down fourteen or sixteen feet to the beach.

  As dark as Rose was, and darkly dressed, she all but vanished in the black geometry of the steps below him. When she reached the pale sand, however, she regained some definition.

  The strand was more than a hundred feet across at this point, and the phosphorescent tumble of surf churned out a low white noise that washed like a ghost sea around him. This was not a swimming or surfing beach, and there were no bonfires or even Coleman lanterns in sight in either direction.

  To the east, the sky was a pustulant yellow overlaid on black, full of the glow of the city, as insistent as it was meaningless. Cast from high above, the pale-yellow rectangles of light from the restaurant windows quilted part of the beach.

  Joe did not try to stop Rose or to slow her. Instead, when he caught up with her, he ran at her side, shortening his stride to avoid pulling ahead of her.

  She was his only link to Nina. He was confused by her apparent mysticism, by her sudden transit from beatific calm to superstitious terror, and he was furious that she would lie to him about Nina now, after she had led him to believe, at the cemetery, that she would ultimately tell him the full truth. Yet his fate and hers were inextricably linked, because only she could ever lead him to his younger daughter.

  As they ran north through the soft sand and passed the corner of the restaurant, someone rushed at them from ahead and to the right, from the bluff, a shadow in the night, quick and big, like the featureless beast that seeks us in nightmares, pursuer through corridors of dreams.

  “Look out,” Joe warned Rose, but she also saw the oncoming assailant and was already taking evasive action.

  Joe attempted to intervene when the hurtling dark shape moved to cut Rose off—but he was blindsided by a second man, who came at him from the direction of the sea. This guy was as big as a professional football linebacker, and they both went down so hard that the breath should have been knocked out of Joe, but it wasn’t, not entirely—he was wheezing but breathing—because the sand in which they landed was deep and soft, far above the highest lapping line of the compacting tide.

  He kicked, flailed, ruthlessly used knees and elbows and feet, and rolled out from under his attacker, scrambling to his feet as he heard someone shout at Rose farther along the strand—“Freeze, bitch!”—after which he heard a shot, hard and flat. He didn’t want to think about that shot, a whip of sound snapping across the beach to the growling sea, didn’t want to think about Rose with a bullet in her head and his Nina lost again forever, but he couldn’t avoid thinking about it, the possibility like a lash burn branded forever across the surface of his brain. His own assailant was cursing him and pushing up now from the sand, and as Joe spun around to deal with the threat, he was full of the meanness and fury that had gotten him thrown out of the youth boxing league twenty years ago, seething with church-vandalizing rage—he was an animal now, a heartless predator, cat-quick and savage—and he reacted as though this stranger were personally responsible for poor Frank’s being crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, as if this son of a bitch had worked some hoodoo to make Frank’s joints swell and deform, as if this wretched thug were the sole perpetrator who had somehow put a funnel in Captain Blane’s ear and poured an elixir of madness into his head, so Joe kicked him in the crotch, and when the guy grunted and began to double over, Joe grabbed the bastard’s head and at the same time drove a knee upward, shoving the face down into the knee and jamming the knee up hard into the face, a ballet of violence, and he actually heard the crunch of the man’s nose disintegrating and felt the bite of teeth breaking against his kneecap. The guy collapsed backward on the beach, all at once choking and spitting blood and gasping for breath and crying like a small child, but this wasn’t enough for Joe, because he was wild now, wilder than any animal, as wild as weather, a cyclone of anger and grief and frustration, and he kicked where he thought ribs would be, which hurt him almost as much as it hurt the broken man who received the blow, because Joe was only wearing Nikes, not hard-toed shoes, so he tried to stomp the guy’s throat and crush his windpipe, but stomped his chest instead—and would have tried agai
n, would have killed him, not quite realizing that he was doing so, but then he was rammed from behind by a third attacker.

  Joe slammed facedown onto the beach, with the weight of this new assailant atop him, at least two hundred pounds pinning him down. Head to one side, spitting sand, he tried to heave the man off, but this time his breath was knocked out of him; he exhaled all of his strength with it, and he lay helpless.

  Besides, as he gasped desperately for air, he felt his attacker thrust something cold and blunt against the side of his face, and he knew what it must be even before he heard the threat.

  “You want me to blow your head off, I’ll do it,” the stranger said, and his reverberant voice had a ragged homicidal edge. “I’ll do it, you asshole.”

  Joe believed him and stopped resisting. He struggled only for his breath.

  Silent surrender wasn’t good enough for the angry man atop him. “Answer me, you bastard. You want me to blow your damn head off? Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Going to behave?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m out of patience here.”

  “All right.”

  “Son of a bitch,” the stranger said bitterly.

  Joe said nothing more, just spit out sand and breathed deeply, getting his strength back with his wind, though trying to stave off the return of the brief madness that had seized him.

  Where is Rose?

  The man atop Joe was breathing hard too, expelling foul clouds of garlic breath, not only giving Joe time to calm down but getting his own strength back. He smelled of a lime-scented cologne and cigarette smoke.

  What’s happened to Rose?

  “We’re going to get up now,” the guy said. “Me first. Getting up, I got this piece aimed at your head. You stay flat, dug right into the sand the way you are, just the way you are, until I step back and tell you it’s okay to get up.” For emphasis, he pressed the muzzle of the gun more deeply into Joe’s face, twisting it back and forth; the inside of Joe’s cheek pressed painfully against his teeth. “You understand, Carpenter?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can waste you and walk away.”

  “I’m cool.”

  “Nobody can touch me.”

  “Not me anyway.”

  “I mean, I got a badge.”

  “Sure.”

  “You want to see it? I’ll pin it to your damn lip.”

  Joe said nothing more.

  They hadn’t shouted Police, which didn’t prove that they were phony cops, only that they didn’t want to advertise. They hoped to do their business quickly, cleanly—and get out before they were required to explain their presence to the local authorities, which would at least tangle them in inter-jurisdictional paperwork and might result in troubling questions about what legitimate laws they were enforcing. If they weren’t strictly employees of Teknologik, they had some measure of federal power behind them, but they hadn’t shouted FBI or DEA or ATF when they had burst out of the night, so they were probably operatives with a clandestine agency paid for out of those many billions of dollars that the government dispensed off the accounting books, from the infamous Black Budget.

  Finally the stranger eased off Joe, onto one knee, then stood and backed away a couple of steps. “Get up.”

  Rising from the sand, Joe was relieved to discover that his eyes were rapidly adapting to the darkness. When he had first come out of the banquet room and run north along the beach, hardly two minutes ago, the gloom had seemed deeper than it was now. The longer he remained night blind to any degree, the less likely he would be to see an advantage and to be able to seize it.

  Although his rakish Panama hat was gone, and in spite of the darkness, the gunman was clearly recognizable: the storyteller. In his white slacks and white shirt, with his long white hair, he seemed to draw the meager ambient light to himself, glowing softly like an entity at a séance.

  Joe glanced back and up at Santa-Fe-by-the-Sea. He saw the silhouettes of diners at their tables, but they probably couldn’t see the action on the dark beach.

  Crotch-kicked, face-slammed, the disabled agent still sprawled nearby on the sand, no longer choking but gagging, in pain, and still spitting blood. He was striving to squeeze off his flow of tears by wheezing out obscenities instead of sobs.

  Joe shouted, “Rose!”

  The white-clad gunman said, “Shut up.”

  “Rose!”

  “Shut up and turn around.”

  Silent in the sand, a new man loomed behind the storyteller and, instead of proving to be another Teknologik drone, said, “I have a Desert Eagle .44 magnum just one inch from the back of your skull.”

  The storyteller seemed as surprised as Joe was, and Joe was dizzied by this turn of events.

  The man with the Desert Eagle said, “You know how powerful this weapon is? You know what it’ll do to your head?”

  Still softly radiant but now also as powerless as a ghost, the astonished storyteller said, “Shit.”

  “Pulverize your skull, take your fat head right off your neck, is what it’ll do,” said the new arrival. “It’s a doorbuster. Now toss your gun in the sand in front of Joe.”

  The storyteller hesitated.

  “Now.”

  Managing to surrender with arrogance, the storyteller threw the gun as if disdaining it, and the weapon thudded into the sand at Joe’s feet.

  The savior with the .44 said, “Pick it up, Joe.”

  As Joe retrieved the pistol, he saw the new arrival use the Desert Eagle as a club. The storyteller dropped to his knees, then to his hands and knees, but did not go all the way out until struck with the pistol a second time, whereupon he plowed the sand with his face, planting his nose like a tuber. The stranger with the .44—a black man dressed entirely in black—stooped to turn the white-maned head gently to one side to ensure that the unconscious thug would not suffocate.

  The agent with the knee-smashed face stopped cursing. Now that no witnesses of his own kind were able to hear, he sobbed miserably again.

  The black man said, “Come on, Joe.”

  More impressed than ever with Mahalia and her odd collection of amateurs, Joe said, “Where’s Rose?”

  “This way. We’ve got her.”

  With the disabled agent’s sobs purling eerily across the strand behind them, Joe hurried with the black man north, in the direction that he and Rose had been heading when they were assaulted.

  He almost stumbled over another unconscious man lying in the sand. This was evidently the first one who had rushed them, the one who had fired a gun.

  Rose was on the beach but in the inky shadow of the bluff. Joe could barely see her in the murk, but she seemed to be hugging herself as though she were shivering and cold on this mild summer night.

  He was half surprised by the wave of relief that washed through him at the sight of her, not because she was his only link to Nina but because he was genuinely glad that she was alive and safe. For all that she had frustrated and angered and sorely confused him, she was still special, for he recalled, as well, the kindness in her eyes when she had encountered him in the cemetery, the tenderness and pity. Even in the darkness, small as she was, she had an imposing presence, an aura of mystery but also of consequence and prodigious wisdom, probably the same power with which great generals and holy women alike elicited sacrifice from their followers. And here, now, on the shore of the night sea, it was almost possible to believe that she had walked out of the deeps to the west, having breathed water as easily as she now breathed air, come to land with the wonderful secrets of another realm.

  With her was a tall man in dark clothes. He was little more than a spectral form—except for masses of curly blond hair that shone faintly like sinuous strands of phosphorate seaweed.

  Joe said, “Rose, are you all right?”

  “Just got… battered around a little,” she said in a voice taut with pain.

  “I heard a sho
t,” he worried. He wanted to touch her, but he wasn’t sure that he should. Then he found himself with his arms around her, holding her.

  She groaned in pain, and Joe started to let go of her, but she put one arm around him for a moment, embracing him to let him know that in spite of her injuries she was grateful for his expression of concern. “I’m fine, Joe. I’ll be okay.”

  Shouting rose in the distance, from the bluff top beside the restaurant. And from the beach to the south, the disabled agent replied, calling feebly for help.

  “Gotta get out of here,” said the blond guy. “They’re coming.”

  “Who are you people?” Rose asked.

  Surprised, Joe said, “Aren’t they Mahalia’s crew?”

  “No,” Rose said. “Never saw them before.”

  “I’m Mark,” said the man with the curly blond hair, “and he’s Joshua.”

  The black man—Joshua—said something that sounded like: “We’re both in finna face.”

  Rose said, “I’ll be damned.”

  “Who, what? You’re in what?” Joe asked.

  “It’s all right, Joe,” Rose said. “I’m surprised, but I probably shouldn’t be.”

  Joshua said, “We believe we’re fighting on the same side, Dr. Tucker. Anyway, we have the same enemies.”

  Out of the distance, at first as soft as the murmur of a heart, but then like the approaching hooves of a headless horseman’s steed, came the whump-whump-whump of helicopter rotors.

  15

  Having stolen nothing but their own freedom, they raced like fleeing thieves alongside the bluffs, which soared and then declined and then soared high again, almost as if mirroring Joe’s adrenaline levels.

  While they were on the move, with Mark in the lead and Rose at his heels, Joe heard Joshua talking urgently to someone. He glanced back and saw the black man with a cell phone. Hearing the word car, he realized that their escape was being planned and coordinated even as it was unfolding.

  Just when they seemed to have gotten away, the thumping promise of the helicopter became a bright reality to the south. Like a beam from the jewel eye of a stone-temple god angered by desecration, a searchlight pierced the night and swept the beach. Its burning gaze arced from the sandy cliffs to the foaming surf and back again, moving relentlessly toward them.

  Because the sand was soft near the base of the palisades, they left shapeless impressions in it. Their aerial pursuers, however, wouldn’t be able to follow them by their footprints. Because this sand was never raked, as it might have been on a well-used public beach, it was disturbed by the tracks of many others who had come before them. If they had walked nearer the surf, in the area where higher tides had compacted the sand and left it smooth, their route would have been as clearly marked as if they’d left flares.

  They passed several sets of switchback stairs leading to great houses on the bluffs above, some of masonry pinned to the cliff face with steel, some of wood bolted to deep pylons and vertical concrete beams. Joe glanced back once and saw the helicopter hovering by one staircase, the searchlight shimmering up the treads and across the railings.

  He figured that a team of hunters might already have driven north from the restaurant and gone by foot to the beach to work methodically southward. Ultimately, if Mark kept them on the strand like this, they would be trapped between the northbound chopper and the southbound searchers.

  Evidently the same thought occurred to Mark, because he suddenly led them to an unusual set of redwood stairs rising through a tall box frame. The structure was reminiscent of an early rocket gantry as built back when Cape Kennedy had been called Cape Canaveral, the spacecraft gone now and the architecture surrounding a curious void.

  While they ascended, they were putting no additional distance between themselves and the chopper, but it continued to approach. Two, four, six, eight flights of steep stairs brought them to a landing where they seemed horribly exposed. The helicopter, after all, was hovering no more than a hundred feet above the beach—which put it perhaps forty feet above them as they stood atop the bluff—and hardly a hundred and fifty yards to the south. The house next door had no stairs to the shore, which made this platform even more prominent. If either