Koontz, Dean- (2003) - Odd Thomas

by Odd Thomas(Lit)

  I didn't expect to see another gunman here. Eckles and Varner would have chosen widely separated killing fields, the better to sow terror and chaos. Besides, they would want to avoid accidentally stray­ing into each other's fire patterns.

  Ten steps short of the promenade exit, I saw Viola Peabody, who was supposed to be at her sister's house on Maricopa Lane.

  SIXTY

  THE BIRTHDAY GIRL, LEVANNA, AND HER PINK-INFATUATED little sister, Nicolina, were not at their mother's side. I scanned the crowd of shoppers, but didn't see the girls.

  When I hurried to Viola and seized her by the shoulder from be­hind, she reacted with a start and dropped her shopping bag.

  "What're you doing here?" I demanded.

  "Odd! You scared the salt off my crackers."

  "Where are the girls?"

  "With Sharlene."

  "Why aren't you with them?"

  Picking up the shopping bag, she said, "Hadn't done birthday shop­ping yet. Got to have a gift. Came here just quick for these Roller-blades."

  "Your dream," I reminded her urgently. "This is your dream."

  Her eyes widened. "But I'm just in and out quick, and I'm not at the movies."

  "It's not going to be at the theater. It's happening here."

  For an instant her breath caught in her throat as terror cocked the hammers of her heart.

  "Get out of here," I said. "Get out of here now."

  She exhaled explosively, looked wildly around as if any shopper might be a killer, or all of them, and she started toward the exit to the promenade.

  "No!" I pulled her close to me. People were looking at us. What did it matter? "It's not safe that way."

  "Where?" she asked.

  I turned her around. "Go to the back of this floor, through the ath­letic shoes, through sporting goods. There's a stockroom not far from where you bought Rollerblades. Go to the stockroom. Hide there."

  She started away, stopped, looked at me. 'Aren't you coming?"

  "No."

  "Where are you going?"

  "Into it."

  "Don't," she pleaded.

  "Go now!"

  As she moved toward the back of the department store, I hurried out into the mall promenade.

  Here at the north end of the Green Moon Mall, the forty-foot wa­terfall tumbled over a cliff of man-made rocks, feeding the stream that ran the length of the public concourse. As I passed the base of the falls, the rumble and splash sounded uncannily like the roar of a crowd.

  Patterns of darkness and light. Darkness and light as in Viola's dream. The shadows were cast by palm trees that rose alongside the stream.

  Looking up into the queen palms, up toward the second floor of the promenade, I saw hundreds upon hundreds of bodachs gathered along the balustrade above, peering down into the open atrium.

  Pressed one against the other, excited, eager, twitching and swaying, squirming like agitated spiders.

  A throng of bargain-hunting shoppers filled the first floor of the promenade, browsing from store to store, unaware of the audience of malevolent spirits that was watching them with such anticipation.

  My wonderful gift, my hateful gift, my terrifying gift led me along the promenade, farther south, faster, following the splash and tumble of the stream, in a frantic search for Simon Varner.

  Not hundreds of bodachs. Thousands. I'd never seen such a horde as this, never imagined I ever would. They were like a celebratory Roman mob in the Colosseum, watching with delight as the Christians made unanswered prayers, waiting for the lions, for blood on the sand.

  I had wondered why they had vanished from the streets. Here was the answer. Their hour had come.

  As I passed a bed-and-bath store, the hard chatter of automatic gun­fire erupted from the promenade ahead of me.

  The first burst proved brief. For two seconds, three, after it ended, an impossible hush fell across the mall.

  Hundreds of shoppers appeared to freeze as one. Although surely the water in the stream continued to move, it seemed to spill along its course without sound. I would not have been surprised if my watch had confirmed a miraculous stoppage of time.

  One scream tore the silence, and at once a multitude answered it. The gun replied to the screamers with a longer death rattle than the first.

  Recklessly, I pushed southward along the promenade. Progress wasn't easy because the panicked shoppers were running north away from the gunfire. People ricocheted off me, but I stayed on my feet, pressing toward a third burst of gunfire.

  SIXTY-ONE

  I WILL NOT TELL EVERYTHING I SAW. I WILL NOT. CANNOT. The dead deserve their dignity. The wounded, their privacy. Their loved ones, a little peace.

  More to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we've witnessed of man's inhumanity to man, we simply can't go on. Perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.

  The panicked throng surged past me, and I found myself among a scattering of victims, all on the ground, dead and wounded, fewer than I expected, but too many. I saw the blond bartender from Green Moon Lanes in her work uniform... and three others. Maybe they had come to the mall for lunch before work.

  Whatever I am, I am not superhuman. I bleed. I suffer. This was more than I could handle. This was Malo Suerte Lake times ten.

  Cruelty has a human heart... terror the human form divine.

  Not Shakespeare. William Blake. Himself a piece of work.

  Scores of bodachs had descended from the upper level of the mall. They were crawling among the dead and wounded.

  Whether I could handle this or not, I had no choice but to make the effort. If I walked away, I might as well kill myself right here.

  The koi pond lay not far ahead. The man-made jungle surrounded it. I saw the bench on which Stormy and I had sat to eat cones of co­conut cherry chocolate chunk.

  A man in a black jumpsuit, black ski mask. Big enough to be Simon Varner. Holding an assault rifle apparently modified for full - and ille­gal - automatic fire.

  A few people were hiding among the palm trees, huddled in the koi pond; but most had fled the open promenade for the specialty shops, desperately taking cover there, perhaps hoping to escape by the back doors. Through the windows - -jewelry store, gift shop, art gallery, culinary shop - I could see them crowding after one another, still too visible.

  In this blood-jaded age that is as violent as video games, the cruel machine language increasingly in common use would refer to this as a target-rich environment.

  His back to me, Varner sprayed the fronts of those businesses with bullets. The windows of Burke & Bailey's dissolved, cascaded into the shop in a glittering deluge.

  We are destined to be together forever. We have a card that says so. We have matching birthmarks.

  Sixty feet from the crazy bastard, then fifty feet and closing, I dis­covered that I was gripping the pistol. I didn't recall drawing it from my waistband.

  My gun hand was shaking, so I held it with both hands.

  I'd never used a firearm. I hated guns.

  You might as well pull the trigger yourself, you little shit.

  I'm trying, Mother. I'm trying.

  Varner exhausted the assault rifle's extended magazine. Maybe it was already the second magazine. Like Eckles, he carried spares on a utility belt.

  From forty feet, I fired a round. Missed.

  Alerted by the crack of the shot, he turned toward me and ejected the depleted magazine.

  I fired again, missed again. In the movies they never miss from this distance. Unless it's the hero being shot at, in which case they miss from five feet. Simon Varner was no hero. I didn't know what I was doing.

  He did. He plucked a fresh magazine from the utility belt. He was practiced, swift, and calm.

  With the pistol I had taken from him, Eckles had used six r
ounds on the security guards. I had expended two. Only two left.

  From about thirty feet, I squeezed off a third shot.

  Varner took the hit in his left shoulder, but it didn't drop him. He rocked, he recovered, he jammed the fresh magazine into the rifle.

  Jittering, thrashing with excitement, scores of bodachs swarmed around me, around Varner. They were solid to me, invisible to him; they obstructed my view of him but not his view of me.

  Earlier in the day, I had wondered if maybe I might be crazy. Issue settled. I am totally bugshit.

  Running straight at him, through bodachs as opaque as black satin but as insubstantial as shadows, pistol held out stiff-armed in front of me, determined not to waste my final round, I saw the muzzle of the assault rifle coming up, and I knew that he would cut me down, but I waited one more step, and then one more, before I squeezed the trig­ger point-blank.

  Whatever grotesque transformation occurred in his face, the ski mask concealed it, but the mask couldn't entirely contain the spray.

  He went down as hard as the Prince of Darkness himself had been cast out of Heaven, into Hell. The weapon clattered out of his hand.

  I kicked the assault rifle a few feet away from him, out of his reach. When I stooped to examine him, there was no question that he was carrion. POD was DOA.

  Nevertheless, I returned to the rifle and kicked it even farther from him. Then I followed it and kicked it farther still, and again.

  The pistol in my hand was useless. I threw it aside.

  As if I were suddenly standing on high ground, as if they were black water, the bodachs flowed away from me, seeking the spectacle of dead and dying victims.

  I felt as if I might throw up. I went to the edge of the koi pond and dropped to my knees.

  Although the motion of the colorful fish ought to have turned me inside out, the nausea passed in a moment. I didn't purge, but as I got to my feet, I started to cry

  Inside the stores, beyond the shot-out windows, people dared to raise their heads.

  We are destined to be together forever. We have a card that says so. Gypsy Mummy is never wrong.

  Trembling, sweating, wiping tears from my eyes with the backs of my hands, half sick with an expectation of unbearable loss, I started toward Burke &Bailey's.

  People had risen to their feet from the ruination in the ice-cream shop. Some began to make their way cautiously across the broken glass, returning to the promenade.

  I didn't see Stormy among them. She might have fled back to the storeroom, to her office, when the shooting started.

  Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the need to move, move, move. I turned away from Burke & Bailey's and took several steps toward the

  department store at the south end of the mall. I stopped, confused. For a moment, I thought I must be in denial, that I was trying to run from what I might find in the ice-cream shop.

  No. I felt the subtle but unmistakable pull. Psychic magnetism. Drawing me. I'd assumed that I had finished the job. Evidently not.

  SIXTY-TWO

  THIS DEPARTMENT STORE STYLED ITSELF MORE UPSCALE than the one in which Viola had bought the Rollerblades. The crap they sold here was of a more refined quality than the crap they sold in the store at the north end of the mall

  I passed through a perfume and makeup department with beveled-glass cabinets and glamorous displays that not so subtly implied the merchandise was as valuable as diamonds.

  The jewelry department dazzled with black granite, stainless steel, and Starfire glass, as if it offered not common diamonds but baubles from God's own collection.

  Although the gunfire had fallen silent, shoppers and employees still sheltered behind counters, behind marble-clad columns. They dared to peek at me as I strode among them, but many flinched and ducked out of sight again.

  Even though I didn't have a gun, I must have appeared to be dan­gerous. Or maybe I only seemed to be in a state of shock. They weren't taking any chances. I didn't blame them for hiding from me.

  Still crying, blotting my eyes with my hands, I was also talking

  aloud to myself. I couldn't stop talking to myself, and I wasn't even say­ing anything coherent.

  I didn't know where psychic magnetism might be taking me next, didn't know if Stormy was alive or dead in Burke &Bailey's. I wanted to go back to find her, but I continued to be drawn urgently forward by my demanding gift. My body language was marked by tics, twitches, hesitations, and sudden rushes of new purpose. I must have looked not just spastic but psychotic.

  Sweet-faced, sleepy-eyed Simon Varner didn't have such a sweet face anymore, or sleepy eyes. Dead in front of Burke & Bailey's.

  So maybe I was tracking something related to Varner. I couldn't guess what that might be. This compulsion to keep moving without a dearly defined quarry was new to me.

  Among racks of cocktail dresses, silk blouses, silk jackets, hand­bags, I hurried at last to a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Beyond lay a storeroom. Directly across from the door by which I entered, another led to a concrete stairwell.

  The layout was familiar from the department store at the north end of the mall. The stairs led down to a corridor where I passed employee-only elevators and came to oversize swinging doors marked RECEIVING.

  This room reflected a thriving enterprise, though it didn't quite equal the size of the one at the north-end store. Merchandise on racks and carts awaited processing, prepping, and transfer to stockrooms and sales floors.

  Numerous employees were present, but work appeared to have come to a halt. Most had gathered around a sobbing woman, and oth­ers were crossing the room toward her. Down here where no shots could have been heard, news of the horror in the mall had now ar­rived.

  Only one truck stood in the receiving room: not a full semi, about

  an eighteen-footer, with no company name on the cab doors or the sides of the trailer. I moved toward it.

  A burly guy with a shaved head and a handlebar mustache braced me as I reached the vehicle. 'Are you with this truck?"

  Without responding, I pulled open the driver's door and climbed into the cab. The keys weren't in the ignition.

  "Where's your driver," he asked.

  When I popped open the glove box, I found it empty. Not even the registration or proof of insurance required by California law.

  "I'm the shift foreman here," the burly guy said. 'Are you deaf or just difficult?"

  Nothing on the seats. No trash container on the floor. No scrap of discarded candy wrapper. No air freshener or decorative geegaw hanging from the mirror.

  This didn't have the feel of a truck that anyone drove for a living or in which anyone spent a significant amount of his day.

  When I got out from behind the steering wheel, the foreman said, "Where's your driver? He didn't leave me a manifest, and the box is locked."

  I went around to the back of the truck, which featured a roll-up door on the cargo trailer. A key lock in the base bar of the door se­cured it to a channel in the truck bed.

  "I've got other shipments due," he said. "I can't let this just sit here."

  "Do you have a power drill?" I asked.

  "What're you going to do?"

  "Drill out the lock."

  "You're not the guy drove this in here. Are you his crew?"

  "Police," I lied. "Off duty."

  He was dubious.

  Pointing to the sobbing woman around whom so many workers had now gathered, I said, "You hear what she's been saying?"

  "I was on my way over there when I saw you."

  "Two maniacs with machine guns shot up the mall."

  His face drained of color so dramatically that even his blond mus­tache seemed to whiten.

  "You hear they shot Chief Porter last night?" I asked. "That was prep for this."

  With rapidly growing dread, I studied the ceiling of the immense receiving room. Three floors of the department store were stacked on top of it, supported by its massive columns.

  Scared people were hidi
ng from the gunmen up there. Hundreds and hundreds of people.

  "Maybe," I said, "the bastards came here with something even worse than machine guns."

  "Oh, shit. I'll get a drill." He sprinted for it.

  After placing both hands flat against the roll-up door on the cargo box for a moment, I then leaned my forehead against it.

  I don't know what I expected to feel. In fact, I felt nothing unusual. Psychic magnetism still pulled me, however. What I wanted wasn't the truck but what was in the truck.

  The foreman returned with the drill and tossed me a pair of safety goggles. Electrical outlets were recessed in the concrete floor at con­venient intervals across the receiving room. He plugged the drill into the nearest of these, and the cord provided more than sufficient play.

  The tool had heft. I liked the industrial look of the bit. The motor shrieked with satisfying power.

  When I bored into the key channel, shavings of metal clicked off my goggles, stung my face. The bit itself deteriorated, but punched through the lock in mere seconds.

  As I dropped the drill and stripped off the goggles, someone shouted from a distance. "Hey! Leave that alone!"

  Along the elevated loading dock - no one. Then I saw him. Outside the receiving room, twenty feet beyond the foot of the long truck ramp.

  "That's the driver," the foreman told me.

  He was a stranger. He must have been watching, perhaps through binoculars, from out in the employee garage, past the three lanes that served the loading docks.

  Seizing the two grips, I shoved up the door. Well-oiled and effi­ciently counterweighted, the panel rose smoothly and quickly out of the way.

  The truck was packed with what appeared to be hundreds of kilos of plastic explosive.

  A gun cracked twice, one slug cried off the truck frame, people in the receiving room screamed, and the foreman ran.

  I glanced back. The driver hadn't come any closer to the foot of the ramp. He had a pistol, maybe not the best weapon for such a long shot.

  On the truck bed in front of the explosives were a mechanical kitchen timer, two copper-top batteries, curious bits and pieces that I didn't recognize, and a nest of wires. Two of the wires ended in cop­per jacks that were plugged into that gray wall of death.