Dean Koontz - (1984)

by The Servants Of Twilight(Lit)

  He ought to go back for it. But maybe it had slipped off the trail, into some underbrush or into a jumble of rocks. It might not be easy to find. He still had his revolver. And Christine had the shotgun. Those weapons would have to be sufficient.

  He crawled farther down the trail and came to a fallen tree that barred his way. He didn't remember that it had been here earlier, though it might have been, and he wondered if he had taken a wrong turn somewhere. But on the first two trips, he hadn't noticed any branches in the trail, so how could he have gone wrong? He leaned against the log -and he was in a dentist's office, strapped into a chair. He had grown a hundred teeth in his left shoulder and arm, and as luck would have it all of them were in need of root canal work .

  The dentist opened the door and came in, and it was Grace Spivey. She had the biggest, nastiest drill he had ever seen, and she wasn't even going to use it on the teeth in his shoulder; she was going to bore a hole straight through his heart -and his heart was pounding furiously when he woke and found himself slumped against the fallen log.

  Christine.

  Joey.

  Mustn't fail them.

  He climbed over the log, sat on it, wondered if he dared to try walking, decided against it, and slipped down to his knees again. He crawled.

  In a while his arm felt better.

  It felt dead. That was better.

  The pain subsided.

  He crawled.

  If he stopped for a moment and curled up and closed his eyes, the pain would go away altogether. He knew it would.

  But he crawled.

  He was thirsty and hot in spite of the frigid air. He paused and scooped up some snow and put it in his mouth. It tasted coppery, foul. He swallowed anyway because his throat felt as if it were afire, and the wretched-tasting snow was at least cool.

  Now all he needed before moving on again was a moment's rest. The day wasn't bright; nevertheless, the gray light striking down between the trees hurt his eyes. If he could just close them for a moment, shut out the gray glare for a few seconds ...

  Christine didn't want to leave Joey and Chewbacca alone under the overhang, but she had no choice because she knew Charlie was in trouble. It wasn't just the extended gunfire that had worried her. It was partly the screaming, which had stopped some time ago, and partly the fact that he was taking so long. But mainly it was just a hunch. Call it woman's intuition: she knew Charlie needed her.

  She told Joey she wouldn't go far, just up the trail a hundred yards or so, to see if there was any sign of Charlie. She hugged the boy, asked him if he would be all right, thought he nodded in response, but couldn't get any other reaction from him.

  "Don't go anywhere while I'm gone," she said.

  He didn't answer.

  "Don't you leave here. Understand?"

  The boy blinked. He still wasn't focusing on her.

  "I love you, honey."

  The boy blinked again.

  "You watch over him," she told Chewbacca.

  The dog snorted.

  She took the shotgun and went out onto the trail, past the dying fire. She glanced back. Joey wasn't even looking at her.

  He was leaning against the rock wall, shoulders hunched, head

  bowed, hands in his lap, staring at the ground in front of him .

  Afraid to leave him, but also afraid that Charlie needed her, she turned away and headed up the deer path.

  The heat from the fire had done her some good. Her bones and muscles didn't feel as stiff as they had awhile ago; there wasn't so much soreness when she walked.

  The trees protected her from most of the wind, but she knew it was blowing furiously, for it made a wild and ghoulish sound as it raged through the highest branches. In those places where the forest parted to reveal patches of leaden sky, the snow came down so thick and fast that it almost seemed like rain.

  She had gone no more than eighty yards, around two bends in the trail, when she saw Charlie. He was lying face-down in the middle of the path, head turned to one side.

  No.

  She stopped a few feet from him. She dreaded going closer because she knew what she would find.

  He was motionless.

  Dead.

  Oh, Jesus, he was dead. They had killed him. She had loved him, and he had loved her, and now he had died for her, and she was sick with the thought of it. The somber, sullen colors of the day seeped into her, and she was filled with a cold grayness, a numbing despair.

  But grief had to allow room for fear, as well, because now she and Joey were on their own, and without Charlie she didn't think they would make it out of the mountains. At least not alive .

  His death was an omen of their own fate.

  She studied the woods around her, decided that she was alone with the body. Evidently, Charlie had been hurt up on the ridge top and had managed to come this far under his own steam .

  Spivey's fanatics were apparently still on the other side of the ridge.

  Or maybe he had killed them all.

  Slipping the shotgun strap over her shoulder, she went to him, reluctant to examine him more closely, not certain she had the strength to look upon his cold dead face. She knelt beside himand realized that he was breathing.

  Her own breath caught in her throat, and her heart seemed to miss a beat or two.

  He was alive.

  Unconscious but alive.

  Miracles did happen.

  She wanted to laugh but repressed the urge, superstitiously afraid that the gods would be displeased by her joy and would take Charlie from her, after all. She touched him. He murmured but didn't come around. She turned him onto his back, and he grumbled at her without opening his eyes. She saw the torn shoulder of his jacket and realized he had been shot. Around the wound, lumps of dark and frozen blood adhered to the shredded fabric. It was bad, but at least he wasn't dead.

  "Charlie?"

  When he didn't reply, she touched his face and spoke his name again, and finally his eyes opened. For a moment they were out of focus, but then he fixed on her and blinked, and she saw that he was aware, sluggish and perhaps fuzzy-headed but not delirious.

  "Lost it," he said.

  "What? "

  "The rifle."

  "Don't worry about it," she said.

  "Killed three of them," he said thickly.

  "Good."

  "Where are they?" he asked worriedly.

  "I don't know."

  "Must be near."

  "I don't think so."

  He tried to sit up.

  Apparently, a dark current of pain crackled through him, for he winced and held his breath, and for a moment she thought he was going to pass out again.

  He was too pale, corpse-white.

  He squeezed her hand until the pain subsided a bit.

  He said, "Still others coming," and this time he managed to sit up when he tried.

  "Can you move?"

  "Weak . . ."

  "We've got to get out of here."

  "Was ... crawling.

  "Can you walk?"

  "Not by myself."

  "If you lean on me?" "Maybe."

  She helped him to his feet, gave him support, and encouraged him to descend the path. They made slow, halting progress at first, then went a bit faster, and a couple of times they slipped and almost fell, but eventually they reached the overhang.

  Joey didn't react to their arrival. But as Christine helped Charlie ease to the ground, Chewbacca came over, wagging his tail, and licked Charlie's face.

  The rock walls had absorbed a lot of heat from the fire, which was now little more than embers, and warmth radiated from the stone on all sides.

  "Nice," Charlie said.

  His voice was too dreamy to suit Christine.

  "Light-headed?" she asked.

  I 'A little."

  "Dizzy?"

  "Was. Not now."

  "Blurred vision?"

  "Nothing like that."

  She said, "I want to see that wound," and sh
e began taking off his jacket.

  "No time," he said, putting a hand on hers, stopping her from tending to him.

  "I'll be quick about it."

  "No time!" he insisted.

  "Listen," she said, "right now, with all the pain you're in, you can't move fast."

  "A damned turtle."

  "And you're losing your strength."

  "Feel like . . . a little kid."

  "But we have a pretty extensive first-aid kit, so maybe we can patch you up and alleviate some of the pain. Then maybe you can get on your feet and get moving faster. If so, we'll be damned glad we took the time."

  He thought about it, nodded ." Okay. But ... keep your ears open. They might not be ... far away ."

  She removed his quilted jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, slipped it off his injured shoulder, then unsnapped and pulled back the top of his insulated underwear, which was sticky with blood and sweat. There was an ugly hole in him, high in the left side of his chest, just below the shoulder bones. The sight of it gave her the feeling that live snakes were writhing in her stomach .

  The worst of the bleeding had stopped, but the flesh immediately around the wound was swollen, an angry shade of red. The skin color faded to purple farther away from the hole, then to a deadpale white.

  "Lot of blood?" he asked.

  "There was."

  "Now? "

  "Still bleeding a little."

  "Spurting?"

  "No. If an artery had been hit, you'd be dead by now."

  "Lucky," he said.

  ,'Very."

  An exit wound scarred his back. The flesh looked just as bad on that side, and she thought she saw splinters of bone in the torn and bloody meat of him.

  "Bullet's not in you," she said.

  "That's a plus."

  The first-aid kit was in his backpack. She got it out, opened a small bottle of boric acid solution and poured it into the wound .

  It foamed furiously for a moment, but it didn't sting as iodine or Merthiolate would have; with a slightly dreamy, detached air, Charlie watched it bubble.

  She hastily packed some snow into a tin cup and set it to melt on the hot coals of the burnt-out fire.

  He overcame his dreaminess, shook his head as if to clear it, and said "Hurry."

  "Doing the best I can," she said.

  When the boric acid had finished working, she quickly dusted both the entry and exit wounds with a yellowish antibiotic powder, then with a mild, white anesthetizing powder. Now there was almost no bleeding at all. Taking off her gloves so she could

  work faster and better, she used cotton pads, gauze pads, and a two-inch-wide roll of gauze to fashion an unsatisfactory and somewhat amateurish bandage, but she fixed it in place with so much white adhesive tape that she knew it would stay put.

  "Listen!" he said.

  She was very still.

  They listened, but there was only the wind in the trees .

  "Not them," she said.

  "Not yet."

  "Chewbacca will warn us if anyone's coming."

  The dog was lying beside Joey, at ease.

  The icy air had already leeched the stored-up warmth in the stone. Beneath the rocky overhang, the sheltered niche was growing cold again. Charlie was shivering violently.

  She hurriedly dressed him, pulled up the zipper on his jacket, tugged his hood in place and tied it under his chin, then fetched the cupful of melted snow from the embers. The first-aid kit contained Tylenol, which was not nearly a strong enough painsuppressant for his needs, but it was all they had. She gave him two tablets, hesitated, then a third. At first he had a bit of trouble swallowing, and that worried her, but he said it was just that hi s mouth and throat were so dry, and by the time he took the third tablet he seemed better.

  He wouldn't be able to carry his backpack; they would have to abandon it.

  She shook a few items out of her own bag in order to get the first-aid kit into it, secured all the flaps. She slipped her arms through the loops, buckled the last strap across her chest.

  She was frantic to get moving. She didn't need a wrist watch to know they were running out of time.

  Kyle Barlowe was a big man but not graceless. He could move stealthily and sure-footedly when he put his mind to it. Tep minutes after Harrison killed Denny Rogers and threw his body down

  from the crest of the ridge, Barlowe moved cautiously from the tangle of dead brush where he had been hiding, and slipped across the face of the slope to a spot where shadows lay like frozen pools of night. From the shadows he dashed catlike to a huge fallen tree, from there to a jagged snout of rock poking up from the hillside. He neither climbed nor descended the slope, moved only laterally, away from the area over which Harrison held dominion, leaving the others pinned down but, with luck, not for long.

  After another ten minutes, when he was certain that he was well out of Harrison's sight, Barlowe became less circumspect, rushed boldly up the slope to the crest, crawled over it. He moved through a gap between two rock formations and stood up on the flat, wind-abraded top of the ridge.

  He had a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum in a shoulder holster .

  He unzipped his jacket long enough to get the revolver.

  The snow was coming down so hard that he couldn't see more than twenty feet, sometimes not even that far. The limited visibility didn't worry him. In fact, he figured it was a gift from God. He already knew the spot from which Harrison had been firing on them; he wouldn't have any difficulty finding it. But in the meantime the snow would screen him from Harrison-if the detective was still on the ridge, which was doubtful.

  He moved southward, directly into the raging wind. It stung and numbed his face, made him squint. His eyes watered and his nose dripped. But it couldn't stagger him or knock him down; it would have more easily felled one of the massive trees along the ridge line.

  In fifty yards he found Morgan Pierce's body. The staring but unseeing eyes did not look human, for they were sheathed by milky cataracts that were actually thin films of crazed ice. The eyebrows and lashes and mustache were frosted. The wind was industriously packing snow in the angles formed by the dead man's arms, legs, and bent neck.

  Barlowe was surprised to see that Harrison had not taken Pierce's Uzi, a compact Israeli-made gun. He picked it up, hoping it hadn't been damaged by the snow. He decided he'd better not rely on the Uzi until he had a chance to test it, so he slung it over his shoulder and kept the .357 in his right hand.

  Staying close to the granite outcroppings along the eastern crest of the ridge, he crept toward the place from which Harrison had shot at them, from which he had pitched Denny Rogers down the slope. The .357 thrust out in front of him, Barlowe eased around the boulder that formed the northern wall of Harrison's roost-and was not surprised to discover the detective was gone.

  The nook between rock formations was somewhat protected from the wind; therefore, some snow had settled and remained within the niche. Brass glinted in the snow: several expended cartridges.

  Barlowe also noticed blood on the rocks that formed the walls of that sheltered space: dark, frozen stains on the grayish granite.

  He stooped, stared at the cartridges poking out of the whitemantled floor. He brushed away the soft, dry layer of new flakes that had fallen in the past half an hour or so, pushing the expended cartridges aside as well, and he found a lot more blood on the older layer of snow underneath. Denny Rogers' blood?

  Or was some of it Harrison's? Maybe Rogers had wounded the bastard.

  He turned away from the eastern crest, stepped across the narrow ridge top, and began searching for the place at which the deer path continued into the next valley. Because the Antichrist and his guardians had followed the trail this far, it was logical to assume they'd continue to follow it down the far side of the ridge. The new snow didn't cling to the wind-blasted plateau, but it was piling up just over the edge of the crest, where the wind didn't hit as hard and where brush and rocks gave it drift points against which it
could build, and it obscured the entrance to the deer path. He almost missed the trail, had to kick through a drift, but then saw both deer tracks and human footprints in the more meager carpet of snow under the trees.

  He went down the slope a few yards, until he found what he had hoped for: spots of blood. There was no way this could be Denny Rogers' blood. No doubt about it now: Harrison was hurt.

  Charlie was impressed but not surprised by how quickly and surely Christine took charge. She got them out on the trail and moving down toward the valley again.

  Joey and Chewbacca followed them. The boy said nothing, shuffled along as if he felt they were wasting their time trying to escape. But he didn't stop, didn't fall back, stayed close. The dog took his cue from his master, padding along in silence, his head drooping, his eyes downcast.

  Charlie expected to hear shouting on the trail behind them .

  Minute by minute, he was increasingly sure that gunfire would break out.

  But the snow fell, the wind whooped, the trees creaked and rustled, and Spivey's people did not appear. He must have put a damned good scare into them with that last ambush. They must have stayed where he'd left them for at least half an hour, afraid to crawl out of hiding, and when they had begun to move, they must have proceeded to the ridge top with extreme caution.

  It was too much to hope they had given up and turned back .

  They would never give up. He had learned that much about them, anyway. Denton Boothe, his fat psychologist friend, had been right: Only death would stop this breed of fanatic.

  As it wound down the lower half of the valley wall, the deer trail took a more wandering route than before. They were not going to reach the bottom as fast as they had anticipated.

  During the first twenty minutes, Charlie didn't need much help. For the most part the path was gentle and undemanding .

  A few times he had to grab a tree or put one hand against a pillar of rock to keep his balance, and twice, when the land sloped too steeply, he leaned on Christine, but he didn't hang on her constantly. In fact he got along considerably better than he had thought possible when they'd started out.

  Although the Tylenol and the antibiotic powder had taken the edge off the pain in his shoulder and arm, it was still bad. In