The Eyes of Darkness

by Dean Koontz

  “Done,” she said.

  The man at the computer suddenly turned to the keyboard and started typing.

  “Stop that,” Elliot advised.

  But the guy wasn’t going to stop until he had instructed the computer to trigger the alarms.

  Maybe Danny could prevent the alarms from sounding, and maybe he could not, so Elliot fired once, and the display screen dissolved into thousands of splinters of glass.

  The man cried out, pushed his wheeled chair away from the keyboard, and thrust to his feet. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m the one who has the gun,” Elliot said sharply. “If that’s not good enough for you, I can shut you down the same way I did that damn machine. Now park your ass in that chair before I blow your fuckin’ head off.”

  Tina had never heard Elliot speak in this tone of voice, and his furious expression was sufficient to chill even her. He seemed to be utterly vicious and capable of anything.

  The young man in white was impressed too. He sat down, pale.

  “All right,” Elliot said, addressing the two men. “If you cooperate, you won’t get hurt.” He waved the barrel of the gun at the older man. “What’s your name?”

  “Carl Dombey.”

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “I work here,” Dombey said, puzzled by the question.

  “I mean, what’s your job?”

  “I’m a research scientist.”

  “What science?”

  “My degrees are in biology and biochemistry.”

  Elliot pointed at the younger man. “What about you?”

  “What about me?” the younger one said sullenly.

  Elliot extended his arm, lining up the muzzle of the pistol with the bridge of the guy’s nose.

  “I’m Dr. Zachariah,” the younger man said.

  “Biology?”

  “Yes. Specializing in bacteriology and virology.”

  Elliot lowered the gun but still kept it pointed in their general direction. “We have some questions, and you two better have the answers.”

  Dombey, who clearly did not share his associate’s compulsion to play hero, remained docile in his chair. “Questions about what?”

  Tina moved to Elliot’s side. To Dombey, she said, “We want to know what you’ve done to him, where he is.”

  “Who?”

  “My boy. Danny Evans.”

  She could not have said anything else that would have had a fraction as much impact on them as the words she’d spoken. Dombey’s eyes bulged. Zachariah regarded her as he might have done if she had been dead on the floor and then miraculously risen.

  “My God,” Dombey said.

  “How can you be here?” Zachariah asked. “You can’t. You can’t possibly be here.”

  “It seems possible to me,” Dombey said. “In fact, all of a sudden, it seems inevitable. I knew this whole business was too dirty to end any way but disaster.” He sighed, as if a great weight had been lifted from him. “I’ll answer all of your questions, Mrs. Evans.”

  Zachariah swung toward him. “You can’t do that!”

  “Oh, no?” Dombey said. “Well, if you don’t think I can, just sit back and listen. You’re in for a surprise.”

  “You took a loyalty oath,” Zachariah said. “A secrecy oath. If you tell them anything about this . . . the scandal . . . the public outrage . . . the release of military secrets . . .” He was sputtering. “You’ll be a traitor to your country.”

  “No,” Dombey said. “I’ll be a traitor to this installation. I’ll be a traitor to my colleagues, maybe. But not to my country. My country’s far from perfect, but what’s been done to Danny Evans isn’t something that my country would approve of. The whole Danny Evans project is the work of a few megalomaniacs.”

  “Dr. Tamaguchi isn’t a megalomaniac,” Dr. Zachariah said, as if genuinely offended.

  “Of course he is,” Dombey said. “He thinks he’s a great man of science, destined for immortality, a man of great works. And a lot of people around him, a lot of people protecting him, people in research and people in charge of project security—they’re also megalomaniacs. The things done to Danny Evans don’t constitute ‘great work.’ They won’t earn anyone immortality. It’s sick, and I’m washing my hands of it.” He looked at Tina again. “Ask your questions.”

  “No,” Zachariah said. “You damn fool.”

  Elliot took the remaining rope from Tina, and he gave her the pistol. “I’ll have to tie and gag Dr. Zachariah, so we can listen to Dr. Dombey’s story in peace. If either one of them makes a wrong move, blow him away.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t hesitate.”

  “You’re not going to tie me,” Zachariah said.

  Smiling, Elliot advanced on him with the rope.

  A wall of frigid air fell on the chopper and drove it down. Jack Morgan fought the wind, stabilized the aircraft, and pulled it up only a few feet short of the treetops.

  “Whoooooooeeeee!” the pilot said. “It’s like breaking in a wild horse.”

  In the chopper’s brilliant floodlights, there was little to see but driving snow. Morgan had removed his night-vision goggles.

  “This is crazy,” Hensen said. “We’re not flying into an ordinary storm. It’s a blizzard.”

  Ignoring Hensen, Alexander said, “Morgan, goddamn you, I know you can do it.”

  “Maybe,” Morgan said. “I wish I was as sure as you. But I think maybe I can. What I’m going to do is make an indirect approach to the plateau, moving with the wind instead of across it. I’m going to cut up this next valley and then swing back around toward the installation and try to avoid some of these crosscurrents. They’re murder. It’ll take us a little longer that way, but at least we’ll have a fighting chance. If the rotors don’t ice up and cut out.”

  A particularly fierce blast of wind drove snow into the windscreen with such force that, to Kurt Hensen, it sounded like shotgun pellets.

  chapter thirty-eight

  Zachariah was on the floor, bound and gagged, glaring up at them with hate and rage.

  “You’ll want to see your boy first,” Dombey said. “Then I can tell you how he came to be here.”

  “Where is he?” Tina asked shakily.

  “In the isolation chamber.” Dombey indicated the window in the back wall of the room. “Come on.” He went to the big pane of glass, where only a few small spots of frost remained.

  For a moment Tina couldn’t move, afraid to see what they had done to Danny. Fear spread tendrils through her and rooted her feet to the floor.

  Elliot touched her shoulder. “Don’t keep Danny waiting. He’s been waiting a long time. He’s been calling you for a long time.”

  She took a step, then another, and before she knew it, she was at the window, beside Dombey.

  A standard hospital bed stood in the center of the isolation chamber. It was ringed by ordinary medical equipment as well as by several mysterious electronic monitors.

  Danny was in the bed, on his back. Most of him was covered, but his head, raised on a pillow, was turned toward the window. He stared at her through the side rails of the bed.

  “Danny,” she said softly. She had the irrational fear that, if she said his name loudly, the spell would be broken and he would vanish forever.

  His face was thin and sallow. He appeared to be older than twelve. Indeed, he looked like a little old man.

  Dombey, sensing her shock, said, “He’s emaciated. For the past six or seven weeks, he hasn’t been able to keep anything but liquids in his stomach. And not a lot of those.”

  Danny’s eyes were strange. Dark, as always. Big and round, as always. But they were sunken, ringed by unhealthy dark skin, which was not the way they had always been. She couldn’t pinpoint what else about his eyes made him so different from any eyes she had ever seen, but as she met Danny’s gaze, a shiver passed through her, and she felt a profound and terrible pity for him.

  The boy blinked, and wi
th what appeared to be great effort, at the cost of more than a little pain, he withdrew one arm from under the covers and reached out toward her. His arm was skin and bones, a pathetic stick. He thrust it between two of the side rails, and he opened his small weak hand beseechingly, reaching for love, trying desperately to touch her.

  Her voice quivering, she said to Dombey, “I want to be with my boy. I want to hold him.”

  As the three of them moved to the airtight steel door that led into the room beyond the window, Elliot said, “Why is he in an isolation chamber? Is he ill?”

  “Not now,” Dombey said, stopping at the door, turning to them, evidently disturbed by what he had to tell them. “Right now he’s on the verge of starving to death because it’s been so long since he’s been able to keep any food in his stomach. But he’s not infectious. He has been very infectious, off and on, but not at the moment. He’s had a unique disease, a man-made disease created in the laboratory. He’s the only person who’s ever survived it. He has a natural antibody in his blood that helps him fight off this particular virus, even though it’s an artificial bug. That’s what fascinated Dr. Tamaguchi. He’s the head of this installation. Dr. Tamaguchi drove us very hard until we isolated the antibody and figured out why it was so effective against the disease. Of course, when that was accomplished, Danny was of no more scientific value. To Tamaguchi, that meant he was of no value at all . . . except in the crudest way. Tamaguchi decided to test Danny to destruction. For almost two months they’ve been reinfecting his body over and over again, letting the virus wear him down, trying to discover how many times he can lick it before it finally licks him. You see, there’s no permanent immunity to this disease. It’s like strep throat or the common cold or like cancer, because you can get it again and again . . . if you’re lucky enough to beat it the first time. Today, Danny just beat it for the fourteenth time.”

  Tina gasped in horror.

  Dombey said, “Although he gets weaker every day, for some reason he wins out over the virus faster each time. But each victory drains him. The disease is killing him, even if indirectly. It’s killing him by sapping his strength. Right now he’s clean and uninfected. Tomorrow they intend to stick another dirty needle in him.”

  “My God,” Elliot said softly. “My God.”

  Gripped by rage and revulsion, Tina stared at Dombey. “I can’t believe what I just heard.”

  “Brace yourself,” Dombey said grimly. “You haven’t heard half of it yet.”

  He turned away from them, spun the wheel on the steel door, and swung that barrier inward.

  Minutes ago, when Tina had first peered through the observation window, when she had seen the frighteningly thin child, she had told herself that she would not cry. Danny didn’t need to see her cry. He needed love and attention and protection. Her tears might upset him. And judging from his appearance, she was concerned that any serious emotional disturbance would literally destroy him.

  Now, as she approached his bed, she bit her lower lip so hard that she tasted blood. She struggled to contain her tears, but she needed all her willpower to keep her eyes dry.

  Danny became excited when he saw her drawing near, and in spite of his terrible condition, he shakily thrust himself into a sitting position, clutching at the bed rails with one frail, trembling hand, eagerly extending his other hand toward her.

  She took the last few steps haltingly, her heart pounding, her throat constricted. She was overwhelmed with the joy of seeing him again but also with fear when she realized how hideously wasted he was.

  When their hands touched, his small fingers curled tightly around hers. He held on with a fierce, desperate strength.

  “Danny,” she said wonderingly. “Danny, Danny.”

  From somewhere deep inside of him, from far down beneath all the pain and fear and anguish, Danny found a smile for her. It wasn’t much of a smile; it quivered on his lips as if sustaining it required more energy than lifting a hundred-pound weight. It was such a tentative smile, such a vague ghost of all the broad warm smiles she remembered, that it broke her heart.

  “Mom.”

  Tina could hardly recognize his weary, cracking voice.

  “Mom.”

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  He shuddered.

  “It’s all over, Danny. It’s all right now.”

  “Mom . . . Mom . . .” His face spasmed, and his brave smile dissolved, and an agonized groan escaped him. “Oooohhhhh, Mommy . . .”

  Tina pushed down the railing and sat on the edge of the bed and carefully pulled Danny into her arms. He was a rag doll with only meager scraps of stuffing, a fragile and timorous creature, nothing whatsoever like the happy, vibrant, active boy that he had once been. At first she was afraid to hug him, for fear he would shatter in her embrace. But he hugged her very hard, and again she was surprised by how much strength he could still summon from his devastated body. Shaking violently, snuffling, he put his face against her neck, and she felt his scalding tears on her skin. She couldn’t control herself any longer, so she allowed her own tears to come, rivers of tears, a flood. Putting one hand on the boy’s back to press him against her, she discovered how shockingly spindly he was: each rib and vertebra so prominent that she seemed to be holding a skeleton. When she pulled him into her lap, he trailed wires that led from electrodes on his skin to the monitoring machines around the bed, like an abandoned marionette. As his legs came out from under the covers, the hospital gown slipped off them, and Tina saw that his poor limbs were too bony and fleshless to safely support him. Weeping, she cradled him, rocked him, crooned to him, and told him that she loved him.

  Danny was alive.

  chapter thirty-nine

  Jack Morgan’s strategy of flying with the land instead of over it was a smashing success. Alexander was increasingly confident that they would reach the installation unscathed, and he was aware that even Kurt Hensen, who hated flying with Morgan, was calmer now than he had been ten minutes ago.

  The chopper hugged the valley floor, streaking northward, ten feet above an ice-blocked river, still forced to make its way through a snowfall that nearly blinded them, but sheltered from the worst of the storm’s turbulence by the walls of mammoth evergreens that flanked the river. Silvery, almost luminous, the frozen river was an easy trail to follow. Occasionally wind found the aircraft and pummeled it, but the chopper bobbed and weaved like a good boxer, and it no longer seemed in danger of being dealt a knockout punch.

  “How long?” Alexander asked.

  “Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen,” Morgan said. “Unless.”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless the blades cake up with ice. Unless the drive shaft and the rotor joints freeze.”

  “Is that likely?” Alexander asked.

  “It’s certainly something to think about,” Morgan said. “And there’s always the possibility I’ll misjudge the terrain in the dark and ram us right into the side of a hill.”

  “You won’t,” Alexander said. “You’re too good.”

  “Well,” Morgan said, “there’s always the chance I’ll screw up. That’s what keeps it from getting boring.”

  Tina prepared Danny for the journey out of his prison. One by one, she removed the eighteen electrodes that were fixed to his head and body. When she gingerly pulled off the adhesive tape, he whimpered, and she winced when she saw the rawness of his skin under the bandage. No effort had been made to keep him from chafing.

  While Tina worked on Danny, Elliot questioned Carl Dombey. “What goes on in this place? Military research?”

  “Yes,” Dombey said.

  “Strictly biological weapons?”

  “Biological and chemical. Recombinant DNA experiments. At any one time, we have thirty to forty projects underway.”

  “I thought the U.S. got out of the chemical and biological weapons race a long time ago.”

  “For the public record, we did,” Dombey said. “It made the politicians look good. But in rea
lity the work goes on. It has to. This is the only facility of its kind we have. The Chinese have three like it. The Russians . . . they’re now supposed to be our new friends, but they keep developing bacteriological weapons, new and more virulent strains of viruses, because they’re broke, and this is a lot cheaper than other weapons systems. Iraq has a big bio-chem warfare project, and Libya, and God knows who else. Lots of people out there in the rest of the world—they believe in chemical and biological warfare. They don’t see anything immoral about it. If they felt they had some terrific new bug that we didn’t know about, something against which we couldn’t retaliate in kind, they’d use it on us.”

  Elliot said, “But if racing to keep up with the Chinese—or the Russians or the Iraqis—can create situations like the one we’ve got here, where an innocent child gets ground up in the machine, then aren’t we just becoming monsters too? Aren’t we letting our fears of the enemy turn us into them? And isn’t that just another way of losing the war?”

  Dombey nodded. As he spoke, he smoothed the spikes of his mustache. “That’s the same question I’ve been wrestling with ever since Danny got caught in the gears. The problem is that some flaky people are attracted to this kind of work because of the secrecy and because you really do get a sense of power from designing weapons that can kill millions of people. So megalomaniacs like Tamaguchi get involved. Men like Aaron Zachariah here. They abuse their power, pervert their duties. There’s no way to screen them out ahead of time. But if we closed up shop, if we stopped doing this sort of research just because we were afraid of men like Tamaguchi winding up in charge of it, we’d be conceding so much ground to our enemies that we wouldn’t survive for long. I suppose we have to learn to live with the lesser of the evils.”

  Tina removed an electrode from Danny’s neck, carefully peeling the tape off his skin.

  The child still clung to her, but his deeply sunken eyes were riveted on Dombey.

  “I’m not interested in the philosophy or morality of biological warfare,” Tina said. “Right now I just want to know how the hell Danny wound up in this place.”