by Dean Koontz
She’d wanted to remain in the fire watch until Mr. Linwood Haney arrived with other firefighters and the threat posed by the Federal Bureau of Evil Idiots had come to an end. But when the six agents from Austin arrived first, she was kind of spooked. And when she realized that she didn’t have the scissors with which to defend herself, a sense of helplessness overcame her. All the windows in the fire watch made her feel naked and vulnerable, though as long as she stayed low, no one on the ground below could see her. Then she realized where she must have put down the scissors: on her mother’s dresser, just before moving to the walk-in closet. She decided to go back and get them and return to the fire watch.
Feeling her way in the dark, she’d been almost to the trapdoor when someone pulled it open from below. Closet light rose into the attic, and the ladder unfolded to accommodate whoever might be coming up.
Laurie had hurried back toward the spiral staircase but then realized the fire watch would be a trap. So she came to the end of this row of boxes and knelt there, a narrow aisle to either side of her, but hidden from anyone in the main passageway.
No sooner had she gotten out of sight than the lights had come on. She strained to hear footsteps, detected none. Then the voice of the Janis beast broke the silence—“Oh, shit, a phone!”—and the woman was so close that Laurie almost cried out, for an instant certain that Janis saw her and was speaking directly to her.
Then there were hurried footsteps, and it seemed as though the sulfur-eyed queen of Hell must be climbing the spiral stairs into the fire watch.
Laurie considered easing out of her refuge and hurrying to the trapdoor and down the ladder, to hide somewhere below, where they had already searched. Just as she was about to get off her knees, however, the very skeleton of the big attic—roof sheeting, rafters, collar beams, outriggers, studs—vibrated as hard rhythmic blasts of sound slammed through it. Gusts of wind hissed as they strained through the fine-wire screens over the ventilation cutouts in the eaves, blowing dust off the boxes, tearing the raggedy webs of long-dead spiders from their moorings and billowing them past her like eerie sea anemones. Pinching her nose shut against the tickling dust, breathing through her mouth to avoid sneezing, she stayed on her knees half a minute until she realized that the source of the uproar must be a helicopter, first passing over the house and now hovering near it, whereupon she sprang to her feet in excitement.
Mr. Glenn Alekirk, a local volunteer fireman and once a helo jockey in the navy, owned a four-seat Robinson R44 Raven, with which he surveyed field conditions on his large ranch, made day trips to Austin and San Antonio, and visited in-laws in Uvalde. If this was Mr. Alekirk, the firemen and firewomen were coming with a dramatic display of force, and Laurie was no longer at risk of becoming the puppet and pet of crazy Janis.
She almost stepped into the aisle to her left, but then she realized that her tormentor, having found the fire watch deserted and probably startled by the arrival of the helicopter, would head back to the trapdoor and the ladder. With all the racket, Laurie couldn’t be sure where the woman might be. Better to hunker down and wait a few minutes. She sat on the floor with her back to the boxes. The helo kept chugging nearby. She knew that everything would be all right soon. Very soon. Yet her stomach still fluttered. Her heart knocked hard like a fist on a door. The sound of the rotary wing chopping the night air, which had at first been scary and then had been reassuring, began to seem scary again.
14
FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA, the chopper noise like the sound made all those years ago when, time and again, Francine had knocked Janis down and knelt on her chest and boxed both her ears with the flat palms of the hands, fudda-fudda-fudda-fudda-fudda, until Janis couldn’t think straight and the headache came and then tinnitus that continued for hours after the assault concluded…
The spiral staircase is like some churning drill bit, so that Janis feels less like she’s descending than like she’s caught up in the bore and being pulled down, each step like a cutting nub on the shank of a bit, her feet skidding from step to step in spite of the rubber treads, the cold railing vibrating under her hand, the whole construction seeming to turn around her with carnival-ride frenzy.
Fudda-fudda-fudda…
At the bottom, feet on the attic floor, she stands for a moment, swaying, dizzy, the chopper noise drilling fear into her, although she had thought herself long past fear.
The unceasing clatter isn’t just the sound of this operation at Longrin Stables falling apart, but seems also to be the crack and clatter of her future collapsing. She has screwed up with the little bitch tomboy, let her get away, gave her a chance to call for help, and a mistake of this magnitude does not result in just a slap on the wrist or a boxing of the ears.
Arcadian discipline is swift and severe, which it must be to keep a secret like the nanoimplants from being leaked. If a failure is judged damaging enough to the revolution, then her future will be sealed with a needle, a catheter, and the infusion of three ampules of cloudy amber fluid. Thereafter she will do what she’s told to do, be what she is told to be, ever submissive. Perhaps she’ll be given to some disgusting Arcadian techno geek to be sexually used and humiliated and physically abused until she ages ten years in one, then strangled and bagged like garbage and thrown away.
Her dizziness doesn’t entirely pass, but she begins to move anyway. She’s got to find the devious little shit, find her and bind her. There is a way to use the brat to fix this situation. There must be a way.
The problem is locating the mocking midget bitch in time. Whatever chaos the helicopter brings with it, if a mob is here in the numbers that came out of Juan Saba’s house, the girl can’t be allowed to escape among them.
Halfway between the spiral stairs and the trapdoor, several inches within one of the side aisles, lies a spider. Once fat and juicy, it is now deformed in a wet blot of what once had been its internal substance. Recently tramped on.
Janis has never stepped foot in any of the side aisles. She has proceeded to and from the spiral stairs using the main aisle.
It can’t be Janis who stepped on the spider.
And the glistening ichor in which it lies attests to the truth that it hasn’t been dead for days.
Her attention seems to have been drawn to the squashed spider by some supernatural power, for it is but a dark blot on the light plywood and could be so easily overlooked. She stands transfixed, trembling as the structure around her is trembled by the fudda-fudda-fudda-fudda-fudda…
15
THE CONFRONTATION AT THE CADILLAC Escalade, where Sally Jones and three of the agents from Austin face a crowd of maybe thirty people, is not good. Chris Roberts judges the situation to have a low flashpoint.
The helicopter moves off a little, hovering over the fenced exercise yard, but it is still loud enough to require those engaged in this tense dialogue to raise their voices. They are shouting back and forth. The volume of the conversation only fuels an expectation of violence. The helo’s searchlight is trained on the four agents, a crisp white beam that pales them and carves their faces with stark shadows, giving them an ominous aspect that only further unnerves the mob.
Sally and two men from Austin are flashing FBI credentials, making a case for their authority. But the locals—men and women—are not impressed and are in no mood to back down. They want to see arrest warrants, search warrants, which they have no right to see, because this doesn’t have anything to do with them.
The most troubling thing is the name they keep citing—Jane, Jane Hawk, Jane, Jane, Jane Hawk—because they understand this has something to do with her, with her in-laws, and with the fact that Chase Longrin and the late Nick Hawk were once best friends. They don’t speak of Jane Hawk as though she’s a traitor to her country and a threat to national security, not as if she’s a murderer, but as if she’s a victim of slander and libel.
Indeed, more concerning to C
hris is that some of these people speak of her not just with the affection that she might earn merely by being one of their own, but with admiration and even veneration. It’s as if, by foiling the entire apparatus of the all-powerful state that’s been pursuing her for months, she has ascended to the mystical status of a folk hero.
They demand to see Chase and Alexis and the children. They want to know why the employees are being held. They have no right to see anyone or have any questions answered, and they surely know as much. They are intruders here. They are being told they’re engaged in the obstruction of justice, but they aren’t going to go away. This is quickly becoming a standoff that may go on for days…unless it becomes something worse.
The youngest of the Austin agents doesn’t bother to shake his badge at the angry crowd. He draws his pistol, holding it against his chest, as if pledging allegiance to it, which is foolish and likely to inflame passions. Some of the people in the crowd are openly armed, but their weapons are in their holsters. Those who don’t obviously carry firearms might have them concealed. In this atmosphere, brandishing a gun is like striking a match in the dark to find the source of a gas leak.
Chris Roberts works his way around the mob, toward the wet-behind-the-ears agent to tell him to get a grip and put the gun away. After all, they are operating far beyond the limits of the law, by the rules of a thugocracy, the Constitution be damned—and there are risks to that approach. They have friends in high places, yes, and judges who will protect them, yes, and friends in the media who will do their best to bury an embarrassing story, but maybe not if a shootout results in a lot of people dead and others wounded.
16
LAURIE LONGRIN THOUGHT MAYBE IT was safe to move. If the Janis monster had not by now gone downstairs and outside to meet whatever contingent of firemen and firewomen had arrived, then surely she’d gone back to the Black Lagoon or Transylvania, or to whatever hole in the ground she called home.
Rising once more to her feet, her back pressed to the stacked cartons at row’s end, she took a deep breath, held it, listened. The helicopter moved off a little way, and the attic no longer trembled under it, but the noise from its engine and rotary wing remained loud enough to mask most other sounds.
She didn’t want to hide like this. She felt childish and weak. She hadn’t been born to hide from trouble. Daddy said you couldn’t hide from trouble anyway, that the trouble you were hiding from would find you sooner or later, and while you were hiding from it, the trouble was getting bigger, so that when it finally found you, it was harder to deal with than if you’d just faced up to it in the first place.
So she turned to her left and leaned forward and peered into the aisle. From a distance of less than two feet, she met the eyes of Janis Dern. Even beneath a veil of shadow, something about the woman’s face was different from what it had been, distorted by terror or hatred or both, like an early version of the human face before it was refined and the species was put into production. A faint trace of the amber attic light found its way into those fierce eyes, coloring them more yellow than usual, so that they appeared electrified and incandescent.
Her voice was a vicious whisper: “My little pet.”
Before Laurie could respond, the yellow-eyed freak jabbed her with something. Even through her T-shirt, she felt the two cold points of pressure. Buzzing, both sound and sensation, filled her from muscle to marrow, and disabling pain crackled across the soles of her feet and across her scalp and everywhere in between. She lost all control of her body and went to the floor as if her bones had melted in an instant. She heard herself making wordless sounds of distress as she spasmed like some fish hooked and reeled in and lying on a riverbank, forever beyond hope of water.
17
FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA. THE SOUND softer now, though still bringing vividly to mind the torture of hands clapping her ears, the pressure of Francine’s knees on her chest, her heart compressed as the breast bone bends under the weight…
While the little whore is paralyzed, Janis sets aside the handheld Taser and takes a bundle of zip-ties from an inner pocket of her sport coat. She uses one tie to cuff the slut’s hands.
“You’re gonna get what you deserve,” she declares. “You’re done, you’re finished, you’re gonna get just what you’ve always deserved.”
The girl recovers enough to kick out at her, trying for her face, landing a feeble blow on her shoulder.
Infuriated, Janis snatches up the Taser and jolts the little tart again, puts it right on her throat and watches her face convulse and her eyes roll back in her head.
She uses three more zip-ties to fetter the girl’s ankles to each other, allowing just enough play in those shackles for the brat to shuffle along but not run.
18
MOTHS ABANDONING THE BORING GLOW of house windows and driveway lampposts, drawn to the bright shaft, swirling up toward the source as if the searchlight is a tractor beam that levitates them through the night and into some extraterrestrial vessel…
As the crowd grows noisier and more insistent, Sally Jones is unable to placate them with reassurances of legal process, and the young agent from Austin doesn’t want to put away his gun.
“Hell, look at them,” he tells Chris Roberts, “they’re not just a bunch of hick farmers. They’re roughscuff, rabble with an entire freakin’ gun store inventory among them, and they’re photographing us with their phones.”
“All the more reason not to be photographed breaking Bureau protocol and brandishing a gun.”
“If the shit hits the fan and bullets fly, you want your face all over the Internet?”
“The Internet isn’t the Wild West anymore,” Chris says. “We’ve got laws, we’ve got a boot on it.”
“Yeah, maybe, but we don’t have a chokehold on it.”
“We’ve also got high-placed friends on the private side,” Chris insists. “Anything gets posted from this tonight, it’ll be taken down within the hour, even quicker. They can make it so you google Longrin Stables and it’s like the place never existed.”
The young agent shakes his head, scanning the crowd for the first indication that the worst is about to happen. “I don’t like being photographed, not here, not like this, don’t like it at all.”
19
THE OBNOXIOUS LITTLE SLUT DOESN’T want to get to her feet. She isn’t cool with the way the tables have turned. She acts as though she’s still disoriented, too loose-limbed to stand and walk, but it’s just an act, pretense, deceit. She lives to deceive. She’s the bitch queen of deception. Everything she ever says is a lie, and Janis doesn’t buy a word of it.
“Get your ass in gear, get on your feet,” Janis orders, looming over her. “Get up or I’ll Taser your hateful face. I’ll make you bite on it, and I’ll Taser your lying tongue. You want to take a jolt through that dirty little tongue of yours?”
The threat works. The girl struggles to her feet and stands swaying. There’s such contempt graven on her face. But when hasn’t there been? That’s among the primary identifying qualities of her type: conceit, vanity, arrogance, and the never-ending contempt of one who sees herself above all others.
The shuffling girl weaves along the central aisle, across oval pools of light and bridges of shadow, toward the trapdoor and the ladder, bumping against the walls of boxes, pretending still to be suffering residual effects of the Taserings. By clambering to her feet after claiming that she could not, the little slut has proved her weakness is mere pretense, and yet she can’t stop pretending, because guile and trickery are no less components of her blood than is plasma.
“Move, move, damn you,” Janis orders, prodding the treacherous little whore.
Backing down the ladder, clutching the side rails, the girl hesitates to place each foot, as though her spatial awareness remains disrupted by the shocks she has taken.
When the cunning little sleaze is halfway down, Ja
nis follows, but she doesn’t turn her back on her captive. She knows too well the danger of letting the bitch get behind her. Instead, she faces forward, perches on the trapdoor frame, and then sits from one step of the ladder to the next.
Below Janis, three steps from the bottom, the girl looks up, hair hanging across her face, one eye revealed and bright with calculation.
Before the hateful little weasel can try whatever trick she has conceived, Janis kicks out, booting her in the chest, knocking her backward onto the closet floor.
Off the ladder, Janis grabs a fistful of the brat’s T-shirt and yanks on it. “Come on, come on, you little shit, you’ll never win an Oscar with a performance like this.”
She harries the girl to her feet, out of the closet door, into the master bedroom, and shoves her toward the door to the upstairs hallway.
A girl such as this has a bottomless capacity for treachery, which she proves again when, shuffling past her mother’s dresser, she grabs for the scissors that she left there earlier.
Janis anticipates this rebellion. As her captive reaches for the weapon, she boots her in the backside.
The foolish girl staggers forward and, trammeled by the zip-ties, trips herself and falls to her knees.
Janis sweeps the silver brush-and-comb set off the dresser, onto the floor, and then the silver tray with the three small Lalique perfume bottles. She picks up one of the porcelain geishas with its colorful kimono and throws it at the girl. Then the second. The third. She snatches up the scissors.
“Get up, you little sleaze. Get up, get up! I’m not going to be injected because of you. I won’t be made a slave. Get up or I’ll Taser you until you swallow your tongue and choke to death on it.”
20
HAVING LOCKED THE EMPLOYEES IN Stable 2 with only Alejandro Lobo to look after them, the other three Austin agents step out of the darkness into the searchlight, bringing the number at the front line of the confrontation to eight, making a show of force that might dissuade the armed posse from pushing this too far.