Relentless

by Dean Koontz

  Once more, Zazu collapsed onto the black-granite floor. She blinked at us in disbelief, as if we had done the impossible and killed an immortal.

  Her last words were: “You can’t escape. Twelve thousand of us … in the agency. The work … goes on … without me.”

  We, too, went on without her.

  Penny and I spent a while just staring at Milo, until he became embarrassed, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “See why it would have been so hard to explain when you don’t know the science? It’s a thing you just have to experience.”

  Penny and I spent a while longer staring at each other.

  Finally, she said, “You know, suddenly a teleporting dog doesn’t seem like such a big deal. She’s as cute as ever, and she’s too smart to teleport into the middle of a forest fire or something.”

  My disposable cell phone rang. Only Vivian Norby had the number.

  “Hello?” I said shakily.

  Hud Jacklight rammed back into my world with his trademark insistence: “I’ve been trying all day. To reach you. Big news.”

  “Hud, how did you get this number?”

  “Milo’s baby-sitter. Had to twist her arm. Tough lady.”

  “Hud, I really can’t talk now.”

  “Made a deal. For you, Cubbo.”

  “I’m going to hang up now, Hud.”

  “Wait, wait. Not The Great Gatsby.”

  “This again?”

  “The Old Man and the Sea. The sequel.”

  Although she could not hear Hud’s side of the conversation, Penny put her gun to my head and said, “Fire him.”

  “That one doesn’t need a sequel, either.”

  “There’s a shark in it.”

  “So what?”

  “Not the old man. He doesn’t come back. The shark. The shark comes back.”

  “Fire him,” Penny warned me.

  I started to laugh.

  “It’ll be the first. A series. Listen to you. You’re so happy. I love happy clients.”

  “I mean it,” Penny told me, her gun still to my head. “Fire him now, Cubby.”

  Hud said, “Cullen Greenwich Presents. Sequels to Classics. Big literary thing. You don’t write them. Someone else does. You just put your name on ’em.”

  I was laughing so hard tears streamed down my face.

  “Listen. Ben-Hur. The gladiator guy? Reincarnated. As a pro wrestler.”

  I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. I was convulsed.

  “The Call of the Wild. Jack London piece. This time an alien spaceship. Under the ice. Aliens possess the wolves.”

  Between gales of laughter, I said to Penny, “You … you do it.”

  “Tarzan. Not raised by apes. Not Africa. Alaska. Raised by polar bears.”

  Nearly hysterical, I passed the phone to Penny.

  She took her gun away from my head, spared my life, and said, “Hud, you’re fired,” and turned off the phone.

  “This place is creepy,” Milo said. “Can we get out of here?”

  I holstered my pistol, lifted him into my arms, and held him tight. The smell of his hair. The smoothness of his boyish cheeks. The fierceness with which he hugged me. I was alive.

  In the garage, we didn’t look in the cargo space of the Hummer. We took our things from the vehicle and walked away from the house.

  “Should we maybe wipe our prints off the steering wheel and stuff?”

  “No point,” I said, the laughter having passed. “Police will never have a chance to investigate. The agency will clean it up.”

  Beyond the house, the sea broke on a beach with a sound like war machines or like the laughter of a crowd, depending on how you chose to hear it.

  The night was cool, the moon was bright, and the stars went on forever.

  The scenery is stunning where we live now, but I will not describe it.

  We reside in a modest house, but beneath it is a secret haven that the Boom family came together to construct.

  On the same property, Vivian Norby has a cottage of her own.

  I am no longer bald, but I do not look much like the writer whose photos were on my book jackets. Penny styles her hair in a different fashion, has made some other changes, and is lovelier than ever.

  Penny, Milo, Lassie, and I use our real names when we are alone with one another, but the rest of the world knows us by names that we chose after much discussion.

  Through a series of clever maneuvers involving foreign banks, Grimbald was able to spirit all of our savings out of the country before the people-of-the-red-arms realized we had escaped Shearman and Zazu. Because I’d enjoyed six bestsellers and because the Purple Bunny books had been earning well for eight years, and because we live simply now, we are set for a long, long time.

  Grim and Clo have retired from the building-demolition business and now live incognito in their canyon.

  I write novels and put them away in a chest of drawers rather than send them to a publisher. I no longer must suffer the shame of excessive self-promotion.

  This story of our encounters with Shearman Waxx and his fellow booklovers may be published by a foundation, staffed by courageous people who believe in the beauty of tradition, in the necessity of truth, in the need for reason in a world of irrational ideologies.

  Penny writes books, illustrates them, and puts them away as well. We hope the world will want her work and mine one day—and will not require of us that we be executed for it.

  We follow the news as much as we can tolerate it. We see the signs, the gathering clouds, the horror that could come upon the whole world.

  In spite of all that we have seen and now know, we have not lost hope, neither has our hope been diminished. We have a dog that teleports. We know what matters in life and what does not. We have a son who will one day provide the means for the sane to reclaim civilization from those who value theories more than truth and utopian dreams more than people.

  Shearman Waxx was not relentless. Evil itself may be relentless, I will grant you that, but love is relentless, too. Friendship is a relentless force. Family is a relentless force. Faith is a relentless force. The human spirit is relentless, and the human heart outlasts—and can defeat—even the most relentless force of all, which is time.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DEAN KOONTZ is the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Anna, and the enduring spirit of their golden, Trixie.

  Correspondence for the author should be addressed to:

  Dean Koontz

  P.O. Box 9529

  Newport Beach, California 92658

  WATCH FOR

  FRANKENSTEIN:

  LOST SOULS

  BY

  DEAN KOONTZ

  #1 New York Times Bestselling Author

  On Sale in Hardcover

  June 15, 2010

  The work of creation has begun again … and with it, a terrifying new invitation to apocalypse. Only now, things will be different. Victor Leben, once Frankenstein, has not only seen the future—he’s ready to populate it. Using stem cells, “organic” silicon circuitry, and nano-technology, he will engender a race of superhumans—the perfect melding of flesh and machine. With an enigmatic backer eager to see his dream come to fruition and a secret location where the enemies of progress can’t find him, Victor is certain that this time nothing and no one can stop him.

  It is up to five people to prove him wrong. In their hands rests nothing less than the survival of humanity itself….

  Please turn the page for an exciting excerpt….

  Chapter 1

  The October wind came down from the stars. With the hiss of an artist’s airbrush, it seemed to blow the pale moonlight like a mist of paint across the slate roofs of the church and abbey, across the higher windows, and down the limestone walls. Where patches of lawn were bleached by recent cold, the dead grass resembled ice in the lunar chill.

  At two o’clock in the morning, Deucalion walk
ed the perimeter of the seven-acre property, following the edge of the encircling forest. He needed no lamplight to guide him; and he would have needed none even deep in the blackness of the mountain woods.

  From time to time, he heard sounds of unknown origin issuing from among the towering pines, but they inspired no anxiety. He carried no weapon because he feared nothing in the forest, nothing in the night, nothing on Earth.

  Although he was unusually tall, muscled, and powerful, his physical strength was not the source of his confidence and fortitude.

  He went downhill, past St. Bartholomew’s School, where orphans with physical and developmental disabilities flew in their sleep, while Benedictine nuns watched over them. According to Sister Angela, the Mother Superior, the most commonly reported dream of her young charges was of flying under their own power, high above the school, the abbey, the church, the forest.

  Most of the windows were dark, although lights glowed in Sister Angela’s office on the ground floor. Deucalion considered consulting her, but she didn’t know the full truth of him, which she would need to know in order to understand his problem.

  Centuries old but young in spirit, born not of man and woman, but instead constructed from the bodies of dead felons and animated by strange lightning, Deucalion was most at home in monasteries. As the first—and sole surviving—creation of Victor Frankenstein, he belonged nowhere in this world, yet he did not feel like an outsider at St. Bartholomew’s Abbey. Previously, he had been comfortable as a visitor in French, Italian, Spanish, Peruvian, and Tibetan monasteries.

  He’d left his quarters in the guest wing because he was plagued by a suspicion that seemed irrational but that he couldn’t shake. He hoped that a walk in the cool mountain air would clear his troubled mind.

  By the time Deucalion circled the property and arrived at the entrance to the abbey church, he understood that his suspicion arose not from deductive reasoning but instead from intuition. He was wise enough and sufficiently experienced to know that intuition was the highest form of knowledge and should never be ignored.

  Without passing through the door, he stepped out of the night and into the narthex of the church.

  At the entrance to the nave, he dared to dip two fingers in the font, make the sign of the cross, and invoke the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. His existence was a blasphemy, a challenge to sacred order, because his maker—a mere mortal—had been in rebellion against the divine and against all natural law. Yet Deucalion had reason to hope that he was not just a thing of meat and bone, that his ultimate fate might not be oblivion.

  Without walking the length of the center aisle, he went from the threshold of the nave to the distant sanctuary railing.

  The church lay mostly in shadows, brightened only by a sanctuary light focused on the crucifix towering over the altar and by votive candles flickering in crimson-glass cups.

  As Deucalion appeared at the railing, he realized that another shared the church with him. Glimpsing movement from the corner of his eye, he turned to see a monk rising from the first pew.

  At five feet seven and two hundred pounds, Brother Salvatore was less fat than solid, as an automobile compacted into a cube by a hydraulic press was solid. He looked as if bullets would ricochet off him.

  The hard angles and blunt edges of Salvatore’s face might have given him a threatening aspect in his youth, when he lived outside the law. But fourteen years in the monastery, years of remorse and contrition, softened his once-cold gray gaze with kindness and reshaped his smile from brutish to beatific.

  At the abbey, he was Deucalion’s closest friend.

  His large hands, holding a rosary, seemed to be all knuckles, which is what his associates had called him in his former life. Here at St. Bartholomew’s, he was affectionately known as Brother Knuckles.

  “Who was it they said murdered sleep?” Knuckles asked.

  “Macbeth.”

  “I figured you’d know.”

  Perhaps because he was born from the dead, Deucalion lacked the daily need for sleep that was a trait of those born from the living. On the rare nights when he slept, he always dreamed.

  Brother Knuckles knew the truth of Deucalion: his origin in a laboratory, his animation by lightning, his early crimes, and his quest for redemption. The monk knew, as well, that during Deucalion’s sleepless nights, he usually occupied himself with books. In his two centuries, he had read and reread more volumes than were contained in all but the largest of the world’s libraries.

  “With me it ain’t Macbeth. It’s memory,” said the monk. “Memory is pure caffeine.”

  “You’ve received absolution for your past.”

  “That don’t mean the past didn’t happen.”

  “Memories aren’t rags that come clean with enough wringing.”

  “Guess I’ll spend the rest of my life wringing them anyway. What brings you here?”

  Raising one hand to trace the contours of the ruined half of his once handsome face, Deucalion murmured, “He is risen.”

  Looking at the crucifix, the monk said, “That ain’t exactly news, my friend.”

  “I refer to my maker, not yours.”

  “Victor Frankenstein?”

  That name seemed to echo across the vaulted ceiling as no other words had echoed.

  “Victor Helios, as he most recently called himself. I saw him die. But he lives again. Somehow … he lives.”

  “How do you know?”

  Deucalion said, “How do you know the most important thing you know?”

  Glancing again at the crucifix, the monk said, “By the light of revelation.”

  “There is no light in my revelation. It’s a dark tide in my blood—dark, cold, thick, and insistent, telling me He’s alive.”

  Chapter 2

  Erskine Potter, the future mayor of Rainbow Falls, Montana, walked slowly around the dark kitchen, navigating by the green glow of the digital clocks in the two ovens.

  The clock in the upper oven read 2:14, and the clock in the lower oven displayed 2:11, as if time flowed more languidly nearer the floor than nearer the ceiling.

  Being a perfectionist, Potter wanted to reset both clocks to 2:16, which was the correct time. Time must be treated with respect. Time was the lubricant that allowed the mechanism of the universe to function smoothly.

  As soon as he finished his current task, he would synchronize every clock in the residence. He must ensure that the house remained in harmony with the universe.

  Henceforth, he would monitor the clocks twice daily to determine if they were losing time. If the problem wasn’t human error, Potter would disassemble the clocks and rebuild them.

  As he circled the kitchen, he slid his hands across the cool granite countertops—and frowned when he encountered a scattering of crisp crumbs. They stuck to his palm.

  He brought his palm to his nose and smelled the crumbs. Wheat flour, soybean oil, palm oil, skim-milk cheese, salt, paprika, yeast, soy lecithin.

  When he licked the tasty debris from his palm, he confirmed his analysis: Cheez-It crumbs.

  He liked Cheez-Its. But he didn’t like crumbs being left on kitchen counters. This was unacceptable.

  At the gas cooktop, he lifted one of the burner grates, set it aside, hesitated, and wiped his fingertips over the stainless-steel drip pan. Grease.

  Erskine Potter believed in cleaning a cooktop after each use, not just once or twice a week. A tool or a machine, or a system, would function better and last longer if it was clean and properly maintained.

  In the sink, he found dishes waiting to be washed: plates, bowls, flatware standing in drinking glasses. At least everything seemed to have been rinsed.

  He hesitated to look in the refrigerator, concerned that what he found might make him angry. Anger would make him less focused and less efficient.

  Focus and efficiency were important principles. Few people in the world were focused and efficient. For the good of the planet, the unfocused and inefficient needed to be k
illed.

  As the mayor of Rainbow Falls, Montana, he would never be in a position of sufficient power to exterminate millions of people, but he would do his small part. Regardless of the scope of his authority and the size of his assignment, each member of the Community—with a capital C—was as valuable as any other.

  Absolute equality was an important principle.

  The embrace of cold reason and the rejection of sentimentality was another important principle.

  Unfailing cooperation with others of the Community was an important principle, too, as was keeping their existence secret from ordinary men and women.

  There were other important principles, as well, but none was more important than any other. When no hierarchy of values existed, making decisions became easy. Confronted with any problem, snared in any difficult situation, Erskine Potter—like any member of the Community—just did the most efficient thing, took the most direct action, and was confident that what he had done was right.

  The only morality was efficiency. The only immorality was inefficiency.

  Testing his self-control, risking anger, Mayor Potter opened the refrigerator. What a mess.

  Jars of olives and pickles stood on the same door shelf as a squeeze-bottle of chocolate syrup. Capers, mustard, ketchup, and salsa—which logically should have been with the olives and pickles—rested instead on a shelf with a pressurized can of whipped cream and a jar of maraschino cherries, which obviously belonged with the chocolate syrup. The items on the primary shelves were stored in an unspeakably disordered fashion.

  Appalled, Potter hissed between clenched teeth. Although displeased, even indignant, he would not allow himself to be angry.

  Determined to proceed briskly with the task at hand, he closed the refrigerator door.

  Faint footsteps crossed the room above. Potter heard someone descending the front stairs.

  Beyond the kitchen, the hallway brightened. A cut-crystal fixture on the ceiling cast geometric patterns of light across the walls and floor, as if reality were fracturing.

  Erskine Potter did not flee. He did not hide. He remained by the refrigerator, waiting.