by Dean Koontz
He and his men have drawn close to the buildings and now better understand their nature. The house is old, weathered, offering more bare wood than paint. Swaybacked steps. Some porch-railing balusters broken, others missing. Most windows are shattered, and the few that remain intact stare blindly from behind cataracts of dust. The yard is weeds and crawling vines that climb the rotting walls of the abandoned residence. The darkest of the structures is a sun-scorched barn with a rusted-metal roof and concave walls. What appears to be a small stable is in no better condition.
Jane’s in-laws are not likely to have hidden away in such ruins. Yet the lane ends here, and no other dwellings are in sight. Maybe the scene is not only what it appears to be.
Guns drawn, Gottfrey, Rupert, and Vince begin the search.
11
THE HUMBLE DESERT HOME NOW seeming almost to groan under the weight of an incidental, terrible grandeur bestowed by horror and tragedy, its rooms given a new dimension by a threat to the future of humanity that is here made manifest…
Carter Jergen is in the presence of the beast. The smell of blood and urine. The study window covered by draperies. Only the desk lamp aglow. Ordinary shadows seem to pulse with threat.
The master bedroom and Rooney Corrigan’s home office are served by a different hallway from the one that connects the living room to the kitchen. In the office, DHS agents Solomon and Taratucci keep guard over seventeen-year-old Ramsey, who is in the desk chair.
The teenager’s wrists are zip-tied to the arms of the chair, his ankles to the center post from which radiate five legs with wheels. In light of what the kid has done, the zip-ties have been deemed insufficient restraint. A length of rope twice encircles his chest and is knotted tightly behind the back of the chair. Likewise, rope crosses his thighs twice and secures him to the seat.
Ramsey slumps in his bonds, eyes closed, chin on his chest. He appears to be sleeping, as if four savage murders have exhausted him. He’s a sizable specimen, football-linebacker material.
His blond hair is discolored by the spilled life of others, stiff and matted and spiked. Spattered face. Streaked clothes. Resting on the chair arms, his strong hands are gore-mottled, the creases of the knuckles dark with encrusted blood.
Taratucci, who looks as though he changed careers from Mafia muscle, sits in a chair about five feet from Ramsey. His pistol rests on his thigh and ready in his hand.
Solomon wears a better suit than Taratucci’s, a tailored white shirt, and a club tie. His receding hair is white at the temples, his features patrician, his posture ramrod when he rises from a chair, his manner like that of a cultured attorney for a mainline law firm in business since the 1800s.
“Why is this haywire piece of meat still alive?” Radley Dubose asks. “Why didn’t you make him as dead as the four in the kitchen?”
Solomon does his best to present the facts in a dispassionate, lawyerly recitation.
“For injection, we strapped the Corrigan family in the kitchen chairs. The newest iteration of the nanoweb was established in Mrs. Corrigan in three hours forty minutes. The final implant established in about four hours ten minutes. That last one was Ramsey Corrigan.” Solomon glances at the young man in the office chair. “They all responded to the phrase—‘Do you see the red queen?’ We ran the usual control tests. They were fully adjusted people.”
Originally, the sentence that accessed the mind of an adjusted person and compelled him to follow commands was “Play Manchurian with me,” a reference to the classic novel of mind control, The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon, published in 1959. After Jane Hawk learned the power of those four words and could make an adjusted person obey her, the sentence was changed to “Uncle Ira is not Uncle Ira,” a line from Jack Finney’s 1955 novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Hawk, the troublesome bitch, learned that one, too, necessitating the reprogramming of sixteen thousand adjusted people with yet another sentence: Do you see the red queen? This one, like the first, was from the Richard Condon novel, in which a brainwashed assassin, Raymond Shaw, was activated by the sight of the queen of diamonds whenever told to play a game of solitaire.
“We removed the restraints from all four,” Solomon continued. “We instructed them how to search for Travis Hawk, what their role was. We’re almost finished when—” He looks at the teenager, this time with obvious dread. “Ramsey puts his fists to his head and screams. I never heard such a scream, as if he was slammed by pain, rage, and terror all at once. He began to shake violently and scream louder. Something was wrong with the brain implant.”
Solomon isn’t able to maintain his detachment. A slight tremor comes and goes in his voice. Sometimes he pauses before he can continue.
“Kirk Granger, one of ours…the one dead in the kitchen. He rushes to restrain Ramsey before the kid hurts himself, bends over him with fresh zip-ties. Ramsey shrieks a long stream of obscenities worse than you’d hear in the most-violent ward of a prison for the criminally insane, not coherent, just vicious, rank. He comes out of his chair. He bites…bites Kirk’s face…bites it hard. So damn fast, snake-quick. He tears into Kirk’s face, his throat. He rips a carotid, maybe a jugular. Didn’t see how he took the eyes. Kirk is a martial-arts guy…but he’s blinded then dead, taken down in five seconds. Ramsey scrambles across the table, knocks his dad out of a chair, tramps his throat, snatches a cleaver from a rack, swings it. Such power. It’s just ten seconds after he first went nuts.”
Dubose returns to his unanswered question. “Why doesn’t the sonofabitch have five bullets in his head?”
From his chair, without taking his eyes off Ramsey, Taratucci says, “Don’t be a jerk. You notice all the bullet holes in the kitchen cabinets, the walls? He’s like some bat out of Hell, how fast he moves. You can’t hit what won’t be a target.”
Solomon says, “Brother’s dead, mother runs for it. He wants her more than us, maybe to rape before he kills her. His own mother. It’s chaos. But when we inject an entire household, we bring a Taser XREP twelve-gauge, in case there’s effective resistance. So I put a round in his back while he’s on the porch tearing at her clothes.”
“He was so gone,” Taratucci says, “he didn’t know who she was.”
Solomon says, “She was already dead. When he caught her and dragged her down, she broke her neck.”
Staring at Ramsey Corrigan, Dubose speculates. “He knew—he could feel—something was deep inside his head, enslaving him. The control program tried to repress his fear, maybe applied too much pressure, burnt out some neurons, maybe the nanoweb itself badly malfunctioned, whatever, and just kicked his terror into hyperdrive, triggered a rapid-fire psychological meltdown. His psyche came apart like sugar lace. Personality dissolved. Shenneck said this might rarely happen, but he hoped a collapse would end in a catatonic state or in a condition of feeble physical and mental incoherence. He didn’t think an adjusted person, damaged like this, would instead plunge all the way down through the forbidden door.”
“Well,” Jergen says, “damn if that’s not another thing you never shared. What door? Why forbidden?”
“Shenneck said Nature is all about change, progressive change, always refining its creatures. Of course it’s impossible for one of us to revert, through some genetic cataclysm, to an earlier physical form in the evolutionary chain. You can’t go to bed human and wake up an ape. Shenneck said the same is true about our psychological state. If the history of all life from the first lizard onward is like a series of ghosts in our genome, Nature won’t allow us to be haunted backward to a primitive consciousness because of any trauma. Nature will have built into our psyche a forbidden door forever locked against the past of the species, and no event can open it.”
“Or Shenneck was wrong,” Jergen says. “So then…hello, reptile consciousness.”
“I needed all five rounds in the Taser XREP,” Solomon reveals, “just to keep Ramsey disabled
long enough for Taratucci and Damon Ainsley to restrain him again.”
Dubose shakes his head. “You should have killed him. Let’s roll the freak outside and do some target practice.”
“Can’t,” Solomon declares. “The main lab in Menlo Park wants to study him, see if they can understand why the breakdown.”
“Bring the monster in for a chat,” Jergen says. “What could possibly go wrong?”
Solomon says, “They’re sending in a Medevac helicopter and a team of CIA black-ops tough guys to load him and get him there.”
“Sedated?”
“They don’t want a sedative used in case it causes further disintegration. They want to study him just as he is.”
“How many black-ops guys?”
“They said four. I want six. They think even four is too many.”
If Ramsey Corrigan has been asleep, now he wakes. He raises his head, which turns slowly left to right, right to left, like a turret on a tank as the gunner seeks a target. He focuses on Jergen.
Although there is nothing inhuman about the man’s eyes, the ferocity of his attention makes his stare more intense than any Jergen has previously encountered. Perhaps because of the horrific carnage in the kitchen, because Ramsey sits here in the blood of others and in his own urine, appearing eerily unconcerned and even confident in spite of being securely bound, his gaze imparts a chill to Jergen. Although his shackles constrain him, he projects an impression of being tightly coiled and ready to strike.
“Kill him now,” Jergen warns.
“I agree,” Solomon says. “I wish I had. But now…the order transferring him to Menlo Park comes from the central committee, through the regional commander, from our cell leader. Anyone who pulls the trigger on Ramsey will be considered a traitor to the revolution. The consequences…well, you know the consequences.”
12
THE ABANDONED HOUSE IS A sanctuary for things that crawl and skitter and squirm, that produce a chrysalis in which to transform from something that creeps to something that flies, that find in wood both a home and a meal. Mold thrives and rot has its way and mushrooms sprout in the darker corners. There are the bones of dead rats, the feathers of birds that came in through broken windows and found their way out again, but no sign of Jane Hawk’s in-laws.
What was thought to have been a stable is in fact a chicken coop with ramps to elevated laying boxes for the hens, a crumbling structure where the muck-soil floor is thatched with wet and moldy feathers that stick in clumps to Egon Gottfrey’s shoes. Nothing lives here now but a fat and hideous pale-faced possum that hisses at him and sends him scurrying out of the building, to the barely suppressed amusement of Rupert Baldwin and Vince Penn.
The spavined barn, its rib studs cracked and termite riddled, its wall slats warped and its doors sagging, has lost two panels of the metal roof, perhaps to a high wind. On a bright day, rectangles of sunshine would slowly lengthen and then shrink across its floor, and shadows would relent. But on this occasion, with a pending storm curdling the sky, the light is gray and diffuse and in league with shadows to conceal the loft and every corner.
The poor light doesn’t matter. The loft ladder might once have had twenty rungs, but just four haven’t rotted away. Ancel and Clare can’t have climbed there to hide.
Anyway, Gottfrey has no need of more light to know that no one has taken refuge in the barn. From crumbling concrete footings to splintering walls to the metal roof rattling now in the stiffening wind, the structure is as devoid of human habitation as any crater on Mars.
Wandering in search of clues, Vince Penn studies the floor that Gottfrey has already studied. “Nope. No recent tire tracks. None at all. No oil or grease. Not a drop. Doesn’t seem like anyone kept a vehicle here recently or even back in the day.”
Worstead to Hawk Ranch, Hawk Ranch to Longrin Stables, Longrin to Killeen, Killeen to Houston, Houston to Beaumont, Beaumont to this ass-end of nowhere…
“Dust on the floor,” says Vince Penn. “Dust and like a million teeny-tiny pieces of straw. We’re leaving prints. Leaving prints and disturbing all the chaff. But no tire tracks. Zero, zip, nada.”
Judge Sheila Draper-Cruxton has given Gottfrey a disturbing ultimatum. And the Unknown Playwright is evidently displeased with how he has been intuiting the author’s intent.
While Rupert watches Vince much as he might watch, with pity and contempt, the hopeless progress of a crippled frog dragging itself laboriously toward its pond, the inimitable Agent Penn says, “Looks like Ancel and Clare never came here. Not to the barn or coop or house. They walked to the end of the lane and kept walking. Went off through the field. Went somewhere else. Hard to say where.”
None of this is real, nothing but Gottfrey’s mind, the rest illusion. Only radical philosophical nihilism makes sense of this otherwise chaotic world. None of it matters. Go with the flow.
“Yeah, it’s a dead end,” says Vince. “Blind alley. Blank wall. Dead end.” He looks at Gottfrey’s feet. “Hey, Egon, your shoes look funny. Rupert, don’t his shoes look funny?”
Gottfrey’s shoes are caked in muck-soil from the chicken coop.
Stuck in that gluey mass are hundreds of feathers. The feathers were initially wet; but they have been drying out since he acquired them. Now, in spite of being deteriorated, they are rather fluffy.
With sudden enlightenment, Vince says, “Hey, bunny slippers. Egon, looks like you’re wearing dirty bunny slippers. Don’t they look like bunny slippers, Rupert?”
“Bunny slippers from Hell,” says Rupert.
Gottfrey pulls his pistol, kills Vince with one round, and expends two on Rupert Baldwin, who was never a fast draw.
He does not intuit any disapproval on the part of the Unknown Playwright. Violence is wanted. The script requires bloodshed. A more aggressive Egon Gottfrey now comes onstage.
“The bolo tie is stupid,” he says to Rupert’s corpse.
After holstering his weapon, he wipes his shoes on the dead men’s clothes as best he can.
When he steps out of the barn, the lowering gray sky reminds him of the cerebral cortex of the human brain, fissured and softly folded. In the fissures, the clouds are blackening, as though the sky is the brain of the world and contemplating darker intentions.
He follows the hardpan lane between the fields of weeds that have had significant influence on the changes in his character, to the vehicles parked alongside the highway.
From the customized Jeep Wrangler, he removes Rupert Baldwin’s laptop and transfers it to the Rhino GX.
As he is getting behind the wheel of his luxury SUV, the first thunder rolls through the clotted sky, not a hard crash but instead a soft, protracted rumble that isn’t preceded by visible lightning. The storm hasn’t yet begun, but it is imminent.
Gottfrey starts the engine. He hangs a U-turn and heads back toward distant Beaumont.
There are still ways to find Jane Hawk’s in-laws. After all, they are not ghosts, though he would like to make them so.
A new understanding comes to him, a realization that he was never meant to plod through his scenes with an entourage consisting of the likes of Janis Dern and Chris Roberts and the Lobo brothers and Rupert Baldwin, and certainly not with a ludicrous specimen like Vince Penn. He is meant to be an iconic loner, which makes sense when he is the only real person in this story, and which therefore puts him at the center of it. He is expected to be a hero who stands tall and strong like Dirty Harry or Shane, a resolute champion of the revolution, who takes no shit and no prisoners. For the first time in a while, he feels in sync with the author of the play.
He suspects that in the frantic chase from Worstead to Beaumont and beyond, distracted more than assisted by his so-called team, he overlooked some clue. Now that he is a loner, he will be able to see events clearly, blow away the fog of war, so to speak, and convert Jane’s arrogant in-l
aws into either adjusted people or dead people.
13
EARLY TUESDAY MORNING, MINETTE BUTTERWORTH, an English teacher, called her principal to say that she was taking a sick day and that her husband, Robert, who taught history, was also under the weather. Neither Minette nor Bob had missed work due to illness in six years.
Neither of them was in the habit of lying to their employer, either. Minette felt guilty about this deception, but Bob insisted it was for a good cause. They had been asked to assist in the search for the kidnapped boy, and the right thing to do was cooperate with the desperate authorities.
As Bob reassured Minette, a still, small voice within her confirmed that this was the right thing to do.
The deputies in the sheriff’s department dared not go looking for the boy wearing their uniforms, in their police cars, because the kidnappers had said they would kill the poor child at the first sign of law enforcement closing in on them. Besides, there weren’t enough deputies to do the job. They needed to deputize trustworthy locals and send them out into Borrego Valley to conduct the search without alarming the people who had snatched the precious child.
The kidnappers were dangerous and surely armed. Minette was surprised that she didn’t fear joining the hunt and was excited by the task ahead. The nice African American, Deputy Kingman, had told her there was nothing to fear, because she and Bob didn’t have to confront the bad guys, only find them and then call in the deputies.
She loved children. She’d not yet been able to have her own. A child being harmed…the thought sickened and outraged her.
After a shower, when she stepped out of the stall and saw Bob naked and ready for his turn under the hot water, she was overcome by a sudden desire for him. Sex was best in the morning, before the day wore them down. She put her arms around him and kissed him.
But then she realized how inappropriate it was to be making love when a five-year-old child’s life depended on them. She thought of herself as a flawed but basically good person whose experience of tragedy had fine-tuned her conscience. Until this morning, however, her conscience hadn’t actually spoken to her, as it did now in a faint voice to confirm Bob’s insistence that participating in the search was the right thing: You know what you need to do. Get on with what you need to do, and you will be useful and happy.