by Dean Koontz
Perhaps because they are baffled and frightened by the behavior of the naked, bloody Minette, the two deputies acquiesce to Radley Dubose’s assumption of authority. As directed, Deputy Utley goes to the northeast corner of the house, from which he can see two sides of the residence, and Deputy Parkwood goes to the southwest corner to maintain surveillance of the other two sides. They will sound an alarm if the woman attempts to flee the house by door or window.
A de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter passes overhead, ceaselessly netting transmissions from those carrier waves that are assigned to disposable cellphones, hoping Jane Hawk will make a call, allowing them to get a fix on her. In this debilitating heat, the airplane’s turboprop engines sound like the lazy droning of a giant bumblebee.
Dubose intends to go into the house through the front door. He expects Jergen to go with him.
“We should wait for backup,” Jergen counsels as he proceeds across the yard with the big man.
“There is no backup, my friend. Backup is busy manning those roadblocks and tracking zombies.”
“Zombies? What’re you talking about zombies?”
“Zombies like Minette Butterworth.”
As Dubose reaches the porch steps, Jergen halts short of them. The sun is a torch. The air is as dry as that in a blast furnace. Each inhalation sears his throat. “She’s not a zombie. She’s fallen through the forbidden door. Psychological retrogression, like you said. Reptile consciousness.”
Turning to Jergen, Dubose speaks with a degree of impatience meant to shame Jergen for being thickheaded. “If she has any memory of her life to date, it’s minimal. If there’s a natural law that tells us right from wrong, she’s no longer aware of it. She has no Tao, no conscience, no inhibitions, maybe not even any fear. She lives entirely for pleasure, and one of her greatest pleasures is the thrill of violence. She is fearless of consequences because she no longer has the intellectual capacity to imagine what they might be or even that there are such things as consequences. To her, the world is a rats’ warren, and she’s a serpent with no other purpose than to hunt. Like a snake, she’ll kill to eat and defend herself, but unlike a snake, she’ll also kill in an orgasmic frenzy, just for the excitement of it, for the rush of emotion, because it makes her clitoris throb like nothing else can. In that viperous brain of hers, in that black hole of collapsed psychology, there’s no longer a taboo of any kind, certainly not one against cannibalism. From her perspective, meat is meat, and you’re no more sacred than a rat. Now do you want to debate whether the term zombie applies, as if we’re having tea in Cambridge?”
Jergen’s mouth has filled with saliva, as if he is about to vomit. He swallows hard and swallows again. “You saw what Ramsey Corrigan did to his parents, his brother, that Homeland agent who was a martial-arts specialist—what he did in seconds.”
“He’s seventeen, bigger than an NFL linebacker. Minette is thirty-four, seventeen years older, less than half his weight, just a damn girl, a gash, and she doesn’t have the advantage of surprise like Ramsey Corrigan did. Are you gonna help me get this done, or are you gonna wimp out on me?”
While Dubose turns away and climbs the porch steps, Carter Jergen doesn’t bother to catalogue the advantages of wimping out, which are countless, but tries unsuccessfully to think of a single convincing benefit to manning up and accompanying his partner.
Dubose reaches the porch.
Dismayed but not entirely surprised, Jergen ascends the steps in his partner’s wake. He is loath to admit to the truth of his own psychology, which is not reptilian but which is certainly screwed up. As much as Radley Dubose frustrates, appalls, and disgusts him, Jergen wants the big man’s approval. Maybe that is because Jergen’s mother loves only her political and charitable causes, and because his father is remote, incapable of affection, and disapproving of everything short of perfection. Self-analysis was a key fascination of the perpetual juveniles with whom he matriculated at Harvard; but Jergen, who found that practice puerile then, finds it no less so now. He doesn’t know why anyone does anything, least of all himself.
Dubose is an inbred backwoods rustic from a squalid family, poorly educated at Princeton, crude, often mannerless. But he is also an indomitable force free of self-doubt, ruthless, brutal, in love with power and its many privileges, a confirmed elitist in spite of his origins, a rapist and murderer without any capacity for guilt or even regret, because he knows that the only “natural law” is the law of the blade and the gun, that conscience and virtue are fictions, merely inventions of those who wish to rule others by self-righteous moral intimidation; so there is much about him to admire. Perhaps Dubose is not an ideal surrogate big brother, but Jergen follows him across the porch and, warily, into the house.
15
NONE OF THE OFFICERS AT the roadblock wore a uniform, but a Homeland Security photo ID hung on a lanyard around the neck of the one seeking Bernie’s attention.
The Tiffin Allegro was equipped with a driver’s door, optional on that model. Bernie put down the window and looked as solemn as his aging, Muppet face would allow. “Wow. Homeland Security must mean big trouble.”
The agent had to peer up at him in the high driver’s seat. The man had a gurnisht face, an unfortunate nothing from brow to chin that you would remember for maybe thirty seconds after he turned away.
He said, “We’re just seeking a fugitive, sir. No crisis. May I see your license?”
“Got it ready. Thought you’d need it,” Bernie said, passing the license through the open window.
The agent scanned it with a device that resembled a small flashlight and returned it to him.
Jane’s document source in Reseda had digitally massaged the photo that Bernie emailed them, so that it still resembled him as much as the average DMV portrait resembled anyone, while altering certain features enough to ensure that photo-recognition software would never match the picture on Albert Rudolph Neary’s license with any photograph of Bernie Riggowitz.
Returning the license to Bernie, the agent said, “Mr. Neary, I am respectfully requesting your permission to have Homeland Security agents board your motor home in order to search it. You have the right to refuse this request, whereupon I will ask you please to pull off the highway and wait while we seek a search warrant.”
“No need for any of that, sir. Rudy Neary is as damn proud to be an American as anyone, maybe more proud than most these days. Have a look, have a look.”
Two agents came aboard through the starboard-side passenger door, the first one young and lean with buzz-cut hair and eyes like wet slate. He wasn’t wearing a sport coat, and a pistol was ready in his belt holster. “Is anyone traveling with you, Mr. Neary?”
“Nope. Just lonesome me.”
“This will only take a couple minutes,” he said as he moved into the living space behind the cockpit.
Bernie thought, Adoshem, Adoshem, make these men stupid and blind and careless. He felt reasonably confident they wouldn’t find Jane or Luther, or the weapons and other gear that were secreted in the hollow bases of the dinette booth benches.
The second agent was older, his brown hair threaded with white, pure snow at the temples. He was about twenty pounds overweight, with a pleasant rubbery face and an avuncular manner. No coat. Another belt holster. He sighed wearily as he sat in the copilot’s chair and smiled warmly enough to toast a slice of challah. The ID on his lanyard said he was Walter Hackett.
“Quite a vehicle you have here, Mr. Neary, a real beauty. I dream about getting one of these when I finally hang up the shield.”
“My son-in-law says it’s too big for me. I guess he thinks the only thing just my size is either a La-Z-Boy recliner or a coffin.”
“My daughter married one of those,” Hackett commiserated. “What brings you to Borrego Springs, aside from escaping the son-in-law?”
“I hope you won’t arrest me when I tell
you, but my wife’s last wish was to have her ashes spread on the desert here, where all the wildflowers bloom in the spring. I’m pretty damn sure it breaks one crazy damn environmental law or another.”
“Sorry to hear about your loss. But no reason to worry. I don’t work for the EPA.” Hackett’s eyes were the gray of iron with specks of rust. “You have them with you now—her ashes?”
“Oh, no. That was four years ago. I just come back to visit on every wedding anniversary.”
“She was a lucky woman, married to such a romantic. What was your wife’s name?”
Bernie made no effort to summon tears. They welled in him naturally at the thought of Miriam, even though he’d never spread her ashes here or anywhere. “Penelope. But nobody ever called her anything but Penny.”
“I lost my wife nine years ago,” said Hackett, “but a divorce doesn’t hurt as much, even when you never saw it coming.”
“Either way, it’s hard, I think,” said Bernie. “It’s a lonely world, either way.”
“True enough. How long do you intend to stay here in the valley?”
“I’m booked three days at the RV park. But with all this here commotion, I’m nervous about staying. Grim reaper’s gonna get to me soon enough. Don’t want some damn terrorist doing his job for him.”
“Relax, Mr. Neary. There’s no terrorist threat here. Just a man on the run we need to find.”
16
JANE HAWK CASKETED IN THE stifling dark, listening to muffled voices, footfalls on thinly carpeted floorboards, doors being opened and closed…
The motor home was convincingly staged. Bernie had brought two suitcases of clothes and had hung them in the closet, folded them in dresser drawers. He had laid out his toiletries in the bathroom. A couple of magazines and a book lay on his nightstand, another book and half a cup of cold coffee were on a side table next to the sofa in which Jane hid. He was an old man traveling alone, and no detail had been overlooked that might betray her and Luther’s presence.
Yet the search seemed to be taking too long.
Her arms were resting full-length at her sides. When something crawled onto the back of her left hand, she twitched involuntarily to fling it off, and her hand bumped against the inner face of the front board of the sofa platform.
The sound was soft, a muffled thump, that surely couldn’t be heard above the grumble of the idling engine. But the voices fell silent, as if in reaction to the noise she’d made.
The crawling thing found her again. Its feelers, legs, and busy questing suggested that it must be a sizable cockroach that had come all the way from Nogales. She allowed it to explore her fingers, the back of her hand, her wrist.
17
ROOM BY ROOM, HERE IS an urgent prophecy of a post-Armageddon landscape, a future of mindless destruction and inescapable ruin, condensed into symbolic wreckage and presented like an elaborate installation by an artist driven mad by his vision. Ripped and tangled draperies torn down from bent rods. Lovely paintings gouged and slashed in broken frames, as though beauty itself so offended the destroyers that they could not abide it. Upholstery slashed, entrails of stuffing spilling out of gutted furniture, deconstructed chairs. A large-screen LED television unracked from the wall and cast down and hammered with a brass lamp, its electronic window to a world of wonders now crazed like the blinded eye of a beaten corpse. Porcelain figurines beheaded and dismembered, likewise a collection of antique dolls violated with such apparent ferocity that Jergen could only assume that those who rampaged here found the human form, in civilized depiction, an intolerable affront. Damp yellowish arcs of urine sprayed across panels of wallpaper. Books thrown down from shelves and urinated on, and in one open volume a deposit of feces. Glassware reduced to sparkling splinters, shattered plates and cups. In the demolished dining room, the half-naked remains of a ravaged man, the husband, hideously disfigured, his mouth gaping in a silent cry of havoc, genitals missing. Room by room, here is a vision of an apocalypse without revelation, without meaning, a scorched-earth war of all against all, when time past will be obliterated and neither will there be time future, only the perpetual storm of time present, the nights long and cold, the horror unremitting.
Each with his pistol drawn and in a firm two-hand grip, arms extended, Jergen and Dubose proceed with utmost caution, without comment, quick and low through archways and doorways, every closet door a potential lid to a lethal jack-in-the-box. Jergen is aware that the front sight of his weapon jumps on target, while Dubose’s remains steady, but he can’t settle his hands without stilling his heart, which booms as it never has from mere physical exertion. Failing to find Minette on the first floor, they ascend the stairs.
The upper floor is untouched. No one has come here in thrall to a destructive fury. Although downstairs there were bloody prints of a woman’s bare feet, there are none here. Nevertheless, they clear the rooms and attendant spaces one by one, until they can say with certainty that she is gone.
Lowering his pistol, Dubose says, “She must have run straight through the house and out the back door before we even posted the deputies to watch for her.”
“Gone where?”
“There’s that resort and golf course not far from here, a lot of houses around it, but mostly just the desert.”
Dubose uses his smartphone to call the Desert Flora Study Group and order the Airbus H120 helicopter into the air. He wants it to conduct an ultra-low-altitude search—to hell with whether it puzzles and annoys the locals—not just for a naked woman on foot but also for signs of any outbreak of chaos related to the other forty-five people who were brain-screwed the previous night. It’s forty-five, rather than forty-nine, because the four members of the Corrigan family are already dead.
The term should be adjusted rather than brain-screwed. But in these circumstances, Jergen would feel like an idiot if he corrected Dubose.
Outside in the yard again, Radley Dubose conferences with Deputies Utley and Parkwood, whose uniform shirts are stained with sweat. He explains that the woman escaped, that he and Jergen will be searching for her, and that they should return to the sheriff’s substation in Borrego Springs to await a visit by Homeland Security personnel who will explain to them and their brethren the nature of the threat that has arisen on their turf.
“All I can tell you now,” Dubose lies, “is maybe terrorists contaminated some local wells with a drug similar to—but far more powerful than—phencyclidine, which is called ‘angel dust’ on the street, an animal tranquilizer. If you ever tried to subdue a PCP user, you know they’re as crazy as shithouse rats, with the strength of ten. The crap these terrorists have brewed up makes angel dust seem as harmless as a packet of Splenda.”
Not for the first time, Carter Jergen is amazed that Dubose can sell bullshit as if it were candy. His intimidating size, practiced solemnity, and Olympian confidence seem to mesmerize people, like these deputies, who should be able to see through his claptrap as easily as through a recently squeegeed window.
Faces pale, eyes haunted, Utley and Parkwood buy the fake news and head back toward the black-and-white Dodge Charger parked along the county highway.
The day is hotter than ever and bright enough to give Jergen a headache, as if he’s perpetually staring into a spotlight no matter where he looks. He needs a cold drink and two aspirin and a month at a fine southern resort hotel shaded by ancient magnolias, but he’s only going to get two of the three.
He says, “You better get some of our crew over to the sheriff’s substation before the local cops start acting on your crazy story.”
Dubose holds up the smartphone in his hand. “The line’s been open to the Desert Flora guys.” He puts the phone to his face. “You heard all that? Good. Corral the locals before they bring media down on us.” He terminates the call.
“I’m a little surprised,” says Jergen, “that instead you didn’t just shoot them,
drag them in the house, and set the place on fire.”
“It was an option, my friend. But Mrs. Atlee, sitting there in her Buick with the engine running, might have peeled out as Utley and Parkwood were going down before either of us could get to her.”
En route to the Charger, Deputy Utley detours to have a word with Mrs. Atlee. When Utley gets in the patrol car and they head back toward Borrego Springs, Mrs. Atlee follows them.
“Good thing the VelociRaptor has six-wheel drive,” Dubose says as he moves toward the vehicle. “We’ll probably have to go off-road to find our zombie hottie.”
There’s a cooler behind the front seats, from which they take two cold cans of Red Bull. Without complaint, Jergen climbs into the front passenger seat and shakes two aspirin from a bottle stowed in the console box. Dubose gets behind the steering wheel with the air of a king for whom the vehicle was expressly designed and built.
As the big man puts on his sunglasses and starts the engine, Jergen says, “I half think you’d do her if you had the chance.”
“Do who?”
“The zombie hottie. Minette Butterworth.”
“The former Minette Butterworth,” Dubose corrects. “If I was sure I wouldn’t have my package torn off like Lucky Bob, damn right I’d do her.”
“No offense, but that’s insane.”
“It’s not insane, my friend. I just have a more adventurous spirit than you have. As feral and fierce as the bitch is now, she’d be a unique experience, unforgettable, like every boy’s best-ever wet dream.”
“Not every boy’s,” Jergen demurs.
As he drives slowly past the house, between the palm trees and toward the open land beyond, Dubose says, “You know what I wish for you, Cubby?”