by Dean Koontz
For the first two miles on 191, neither he nor Jilly spoke, and as the third mile began to clock up on the odometer, Dylan started to shake. Now that his adrenaline levels were declining toward normal and now that the primitive survivalist within him had returned to his genetic subcellar, the enormity of what had happened belatedly hit him. Dylan strove to conceal the shaking from Jilly, knew that he was unsuccessful when he heard his teeth chatter, and then realized that she was trembling, too, and hugging herself, and rocking in her seat.
'D-d-d-damn,' she said.
'Yeah.'
'I'm not W-w-wonder Woman,' she said.
'No.'
'For one thing, I don't have big enough hooters for the job.'
He said, 'Me neither.'
'Oh, man, those knives.'
'They were honking big knives,' he agreed.
'You with your baseball bat. What – were you out of your mind, O'Conner?'
'Must've been out of my mind. You with your ant spray – that didn't strike me as the epitome of rationality, Jackson.'
'Worked, didn't it?'
'Nice shot.'
'Thanks. Where we lived when I was a kid, I got lots of practice with roaches. They move faster than Miss Becky. You must've been good at baseball.'
'Not bad for an effete artist. Listen, Jackson, it took guts to come upstairs after you knew about the knives.'
'It took stupidity, is what it took. We could've been killed.'
'We could've been,' he acknowledged, 'but we weren't.'
'But we could've been. No more of that run-jump-chase-fight crap. No more, O'Conner.'
'I hope not,' he said.
'I mean it. I'm serious. I'm tellin' you, no more.'
'I don't think that's our choice to make.'
'It's sure my choice.'
'I mean, I don't think we control the situation.'
'I always control my situation,' she insisted.
'Not this situation.'
'You're scaring me.'
'I'm scaring me, too,' he said.
These admissions led to a contemplative silence.
The high moon, lustrous silver at its pinnacle, grew tarnished as it became a low moon in the west, and the romantic desert table it once brightened became a somber setting suitable for a last supper.
Brown bristling balls of tumbleweed trembled at the verge of the road, dead yet eager to roam, but the night breeze didn't have enough power to send them traveling.
Moths traveled, however, small white ghost moths and larger gray specimens like scraps of soiled shroud cloth, eerily illumined by the headlights, swooping over and around the SUV but seldom striking the windshield.
In classic painting, butterflies were symbols of life, joy, and hope. Moths – of the same order as butterflies, Lepidoptera – were in all cases symbols of despair, deterioration, destruction, and death. Entomologists estimate the world is home to thirty thousand species of butterflies, and four times that many moths.
In part, a mothy mood gripped Dylan. He remained edgy, twitchy, as if the insulation on every nerve in his body were as eaten away as the fibers of a wool sweater infested with larvae. As he relived what had happened on Eucalyptus Avenue and as he wondered what might be coming next, spectral moths fluttered the length of his spine.
Yet anxiety didn't own him entirely. Contemplation of their uncertain future flooded Dylan with a choking disquiet, but each time the disquiet ebbed, exhilaration flowed in to take its place, and a wild joy that nearly made him laugh out loud. He was simultaneously sobered by anxiety that threatened to become apprehension – and also intoxicated with the possibilities of this glorious new power that he understood only imperfectly.
This singular state of mind was so fresh to his experience that he wasn't capable of crafting the words – or the images, for that matter – to explain it adequately to Jilly. Then he glanced away from the empty highway, from trembling tumbleweeds and kiting moths, and knew at once, by her expression, that her state of mind precisely matched his.
Not only weren't they in Kansas anymore, Toto, they weren't in predictable Oz, either, but adrift in a land where there were sure to be greater wonders than yellow-brick roads and emerald cities, more to fear than wicked witches and flying monkeys.
A moth snapped hard against the windshield, leaving a gray dusty substance on the glass, a little kiss of Death.
18
Earth's magnetic pole might shift in a twink, as some scientists theorized it had done in the past, resulting in an entirely new angle of rotation, causing catastrophic changes in the surface of the planet. Current tropical zones could in an instant be plunged into an arctic freeze, leaving startled soft-body Miami retirees clawing for survival in 100-degree-below-zero cold, in blizzards so bitter that the snow came not in the form of flakes, but as spicules, needlelike crystals as hard as glass. Colossal tectonic pressures would cause continents to buckle, fracture, fold. Rising up in massive tides, oceans would slop over coastlines, crash across the Rockies and the Andes and the Alps alike. New inland oceans would form, new mountain ranges. Volcanoes would vomit forth great burning seas of Earth's essence. With civilization gone and billions dead, small scattered bands of survivors would face the daunting task of forming tribes of hunters and gatherers.
In the final hour of his program, Parish Lantern and call-ins from his nationwide radio audience discussed the likelihood of a pole-shift striking within the next fifty years. Because Dylan and Jilly were for the moment still too busy digesting their recent experiences to talk anymore about them, they listened to Lantern as they drove north on this lonely desert highway, where it was possible to believe simultaneously that civilization had already vanished in a planetary cataclysm and that the earth was timeless, unchanging.
'You listen to this guy all the time?' he asked Jilly.
'Not every night, but a lot.'
'It's a miracle you're not suicidal.'
'His show isn't usually about doom. Mostly it's time travel, alternate realities, whether we have souls, life after death....'
In the backseat, Shep continued reading Dickens, granting the novelist a form of life after death. On the radio, the planet crushed and burned and drowned and blew away human civilization and most of the animal kingdom, as though all life were pestilence.
When they reached the town of Safford, about forty minutes after they exited the interstate, Shepherd said, 'Fries not flies, fries not flies, fries not flies....'
Maybe it was time to stop and devise a plan of action, or maybe they had not yet analyzed their situation to a degree that allowed for planning, but in either case, Dylan and Shep were in want of the dinner they had missed. And Jilly expressed the need for a drink.
'First we need new license plates,' Dylan said. 'When they trace that Cadillac to you, they'll go unit to unit in the motel, looking for you. When they find you've lit out and that Shep and I didn't stay the night we'd paid for, they might link us.'
'No might about it. They will,' she said.
'The motel records have the make, model, license-plate number. At least we can change the plate number and not be so easily made.'
On a quiet residential street, Dylan parked, took screwdrivers and pliers from the Expedition tool kit, and went looking for Arizona plates. He found an easily detached pair on a pickup in the driveway of a weather-silvered cedar ranch house with a dead front lawn.
Throughout the theft, his heart pounded. The guilt he felt was out of proportion to such a minor crime, but his face burned with shame at the prospect of being caught in the act.
After he had purloined the plates, he drove around town until he found a school. The parking lot was deserted at this hour. In those shadows, he replaced his California plates with the Arizona pair.
'With luck,' he said as he got behind the wheel once more, 'the owner of that pickup won't notice the plates missing until tomorrow.'
'I hate trusting in luck,' Jilly said. 'I've never had much.'
'Fries not
flies,' Shepherd reminded them.
A few minutes later, when Dylan parked in front of a restaurant adjacent to a motel, he said, 'Let me see the pin. Your toad button.'
She unpinned the smiling amphibian from her blouse but withheld it. 'What do you want it for?'
'Don't worry. It's not going to set me off like the other one did. That's over. That business is finished.'
'Yeah, but what if?' she worried.
He handed the car keys to her.
Reluctantly, she exchanged the pin for the keys.
Thumb on the toad face, forefinger against the back of the pin, Dylan felt a quiver of psychic spoor, the impression of more than one individual, perhaps Grandma Marjorie overlaid by Jillian Jackson, but neither invoked in him the compulsion to hurry-move-find-do that had harried him to the house on Eucalyptus Avenue.
Dropping the button in the little trash basket in the console, he said, 'Nothing. Or next to nothing. It wasn't the pin itself that set me off. It was... Marjorie's impending death that somehow I sensed on the first pin. Does that make sense?'
'Only here in Nutburg, USA, where we seem to live now.'
'Let's get you that drink,' he said.
'Two.'
Crossing the parking lot to the front door of the restaurant, Shep walked between them. He carried Great Expectations with the little battery-powered light attached, reading intently as he walked.
Dylan had considered taking the book away from him, but Shepherd had been through a lot this evening. His routines had been disrupted, which usually filled him with anxiety. Worse, he had endured more excitement in a couple hours than he had experienced in the previous ten years, and Shepherd O'Conner usually had no ability to cope with excitement.
Being directly addressed by too many strangers at an art show could tax his tolerance for conversational stimulation even though he never replied to any of them. Too much lightning in a thunderstorm or too much thunder, or too much roaring rain, for that matter, could fill his capacity for commotion to overflowing, whereupon he would succumb to a panic attack.
Indeed, that Shep had not panicked at the motel, that he had not curled up like a defensive pill bug and had not shaken with spasms of apprehension when he'd seen the burning Coupe DeVille, that he hadn't squealed and pulled his hair at some point during Dylan's reckless drive to Marjorie's house – these were great wonders if not miracles of self-control compared to his customary behavior when confronted by the more mundane agitations of daily life.
Right now, Great Expectations was his life raft in an evening swamped by turmoil. Clinging to the book, he was able to convince himself that he was safe, and he could push from his awareness all the violations of comforting routine, also blind and deafen himself to the otherwise drowning tides of stimulation.
Awkward movements and poor physical coordination were symptoms of Shep's condition, but walking while reading didn't lead to either a stiffer gait or a more pronounced shuffle. Dylan had the feeling that if confronted by a flight of steps, his brother might negotiate every riser without putting Mr. Dickens on hold for a moment.
No steps awaited them at the restaurant entrance, but when Dylan touched the door, a fizz of latent psychic energy effervesced against his palm, the pads of his fingers, and he almost released the handle.
'What?' Jilly asked, always alert.
'Something I'm going to have to get used to.' Vaguely he sensed numerous personalities expressed by the preternatural residue on the door handle, like layers of dried sweat from many hands.
The restaurant presented a split personality, as though against the laws of physics, a diner and a steakhouse had occupied the same place at the same time without triggering a catastrophic explosion. Plastic-looking red leatherette booths and red-leatherette chairs with chrome legs were mismatched with real mahogany tables. Expensive cut-glass ceiling fixtures cast rich prismatic light not on carpet, but on an easy-to-clean, wood-pattern vinyl floor. Waiters and waitresses wore black suits, crisp white shirts, and natty black string ties; but the busboys shambled among the tables in their street clothes, coordinated only by the same stupid-looking pointy paper hats and by similar surly expressions.
With the dinner rush far behind, only a third of the restaurant tables were occupied. Customers lingering over dessert, liqueurs, and coffee were engaged in low, pleasantly boozy conversations. Only a few took notice of Shep as – preceded by Jilly, followed by Dylan – he allowed the hostess to lead him to a booth, remaining absorbed in his book every step of the way.
Shep would rarely sit next to a window in a restaurant because he didn't want 'to be looked at by people inside and people out.' Dylan requested a booth distant from the windows, and he sat on one side of the table with his brother, across from Jilly.
She looked uncommonly fresh, considering what she'd been through – and remarkably calm for a woman whose life had been upended and whose future was as difficult to read as a wad of tea leaves in a dark room. Hers was not a cheap beauty, but one that would wear well with time, that would take many hard washings and keep its color in more than one sense.
When he picked up the menu that the hostess had placed on the table before him, Dylan shuddered as if he'd touched ice, and he put it down at once. Deposited by previous patrons, a lively patina of emotions, wants, needs, hungers squirmed on the plastic menu cover and seemed to crackle against his skin, like a charge of static electricity, much stronger than what he'd felt on the door handle.
During their drive north from the interstate, he'd told Jilly about the psychic spoor. Now she understood at once why he had put down the menu. 'I'll read mine to you,' she said.
He found that he liked looking at her while she read, liked it so much that repeatedly he had to remind himself to listen to her recitation of salads, soups, sandwiches, and entrees. Her face soothed him perhaps as much as Great Expectations soothed Shep.
While he watched Jilly read aloud, Dylan placed his hands flat on his menu again. As he expected based on his experience at the restaurant door, the initial boiling rush of strange impressions quickly subsided to a quiet simmer. And now he learned that with a conscious effort, he could entirely quell these uncanny sensations.
As she informed him of the last of the dinner selections, Jilly looked up, saw Dylan's hands on his menu, and clearly realized that he had allowed her to read to him only to have an excuse to gaze at her openly, without the challenge of a direct return stare. Judging by her complex expression, she had mixed feelings about the various implications of his scrutiny, but at least part of her response was a lovely, even though uncertain, smile.
Before either of them could speak, the waitress returned. Jilly asked for a bottle of Sierra Nevada. Dylan ordered dinner for Shep and for himself, and requested that Shep's plate be served five minutes before his own.
Shepherd continued to read: Great Expectations flat on the table in front of him, the book light switched off. Hunching forward, he lowered his face within eight or ten inches of the page, although he had no vision problems. While the waitress was present, Shep moved his lips as he scanned the lines of type, which was his way of subtly establishing that he was occupied and that she would be rude if she was to address him.
Because no other diners were near them, Dylan felt comfortable discussing their situation. 'Jilly, words are your business, right?'
'I guess maybe you could say that.'
'What's this one mean – psychotropic?'
'Why's it important?' she asked.
'Frankenstein used it. He said the stuff, the stuff in the syringe, was psychotropic.'
Without looking up from his book, Shep said, 'Psychotropic. Affecting mental activity, behavior, or perception. Psychotropic.'
'Thank you, Shep.'
'Psychotropic drugs. Tranquilizers, sedatives, antidepressants. Psychotropic drugs.'
Jilly shook her head. 'I don't think that weird juice was any of those things.'
'Psychotropic drugs,' Shep elucidated. 'Opium, morphine,
heroin, methadone. Barbiturates, meprobamate. Amphetamines, cocaine. Peyote, marijuana, LSD, Sierra Nevada beer. Pscyhotropic drugs.'
'Beer isn't a drug,' Jilly corrected. 'Is it?'
Eyes still tracking Dickens's words back and forth across the page, Shep seemed to be reading aloud: 'Psychotropic intoxicants and stimulants. Beer, wine, whiskey. Caffeine. Nicotine. Psychotropic intoxicants and stimulants.'
She stared at Shep, not sure what to make of his contributions.
'Forgot,' Shepherd said in a chagrined tone. 'Psychotropic inhalable-fume intoxicants. Glue, solvents, transmission fluid. Psychotropic inhalable-fume intoxicants. Forgot. Sorry.'
'If it had been a drug in any traditional sense,' Dylan said, 'I think Frankenstein would have used that word. He wouldn't have called it stuff so consistently, as if there wasn't an existing word for it. Besides, drugs have a limited effect. They wear off. He sure gave me the impression that whatever this crap does to you is permanent.'
The waitress arrived with bottles of Sierra Nevada for Jilly and Dylan, and with a glass of Coca-Cola, no ice. Dylan unwrapped the straw and put it in the soda for his brother.
Shepherd would drink only through a straw, though he didn't care if it was paper or plastic. He liked cola cold, but wouldn't tolerate ice with it. Cola, a straw, and ice in a glass at the same time offended him for reasons unknown to everyone except Shepherd himself.
Raising a frosty glass of Sierra Nevada, Dylan said, 'Here's to psychotropic intoxicants.'
'But not to the inhalable-fume variety,' Jilly qualified.
He detected faint quivering energy signatures on the cold glass: perhaps the psychic trace of a member of the kitchen staff, certainly the trace of their waitress. When he willed himself not to feel these imprints, the sensation passed. He was gaining control.
Jilly clinked her bottle against his glass, and drank thirstily. Then: 'There's nowhere to go from here, is there?'
'Of course there is.'
'Yeah? Where?'
'Well, not to Phoenix. That wouldn't be smart. You have that gig in Phoenix, so they're sure to go looking for you there, wanting to know why Frankenstein had your Cadillac, wanting to test your blood.'
'The guys in the Suburbans.'
'They might be different guys in different vehicles, but they'll be related.'
'Who were those phony duffers, anyway? Cloak-and-dagger types, you think? Or some secret police agency? Aggressive door-to-door magazine salesmen?'
'Any of that, I guess. But not necessarily bad guys.'
'They blew up my car.'
'As if I could forget. But they blew it up only because Frankenstein was in it. We can be pretty sure he was a bad guy.'
'Just because they blew up a bad guy doesn't mean they're good guys,' she noted. 'Bad guys blow up bad guys sometimes.'
'Lots of times,' he agreed. 'But to avoid all the blowing up, we'll go around Phoenix.'
'Around Phoenix to what?'
'Maybe stay on secondary highways, go north somewhere big and empty where they wouldn't think to look first, maybe up near the Petrified Forest National Park. We could be there in a few hours.'
'You make this sound like a vacation. I'm talking about – where do I go with my life.'
'You're focusing on the big picture. Don't do that,' he advised. 'Until we know more about this situation, it's pointless to focus on the big picture – and it's depressing.'
'Then what should I focus on? The little picture?'
'Exactly.'
She drank some beer. 'And what is the little picture?'
'Getting through the night alive.'
'The little picture sounds as depressing as the big picture.'