by Dean Koontz
Nearer is a large white object that stirs in you a memory of moving effortlessly fast—fast, faster—through varied landscapes.
These memories are confusing, disturbing, but fragile. They dissolve in a fog of forgetfulness.
What remains is a certainty that this white object is the source of the sound that drew you from the corner where you coiled.
A male Other is busy at this source of the sound. The male is not aware of you.
You stand to one side of this clear shape through which light falls, so you can’t be easily seen. You watch the male. You watch.
A thing happens that excites you. Water gushes, arcs, and the white object becomes black.
Like day becomes night, white becomes black. But no one makes day into night. Day makes itself into night.
This male Other frightens you. Can he make day into night? Can he wash away the light forever? Such power terrifies you.
No cure for fear except rage, and rage seething into fury.
You look around in growing desperation.
Urgent, urgent.
Things you grip pull open other things, revealing spaces within. Spaces full of familiar items, but you have no names for them, can imagine no purpose for them.
Until you find the space full of sharp things. A row of sharp things. You know what to do with one of these. Yes, you know just what to do.
7
CARTER JERGEN IS CERTAIN THAT he and Dubose will find Minette Butterworth, wild and naked, within five minutes of driving into the barrens behind the Atlee family’s wrecked house. That expectation is not fulfilled.
These sun-hammered wastes don’t offer many places to hide. Here and there a zigzagging declivity has been cracked into the land by an earthquake. A few shallow washes mark the paths of flash floods that on rare occasions overwhelm the Anza-Borrego with tarantula-drowning downpours. The desert scrub is too sparse to provide cover. An occasional cluster of trees, perhaps sustained by an artesian well within reach of their roots, might conceal a woman who’d gone through the forbidden door and fallen into a psychological abyss; but none of them does.
In this part of the valley, houses are far apart. In her new incarnation, however, the former Minette Butterworth seems to be as fast as an instinctive predator. She might have homed in on another residence and made it to that cover in a few minutes.
When Jergen pictures her—and others like her—bursting in on an unsuspecting family, the catastrophe under way abruptly expands to terrifying dimensions in his imagination.
Unable to find any sign of the feral woman in the open desert, they now need to move from house to house, seeking the place—and the people—she might at this moment be destroying.
As he returns to the county highway and pilots the VelociRaptor down-valley, Dubose holds forth as though for a rapt audience. “Like the girls whose pasts and personalities are flushed out of them so they can be remade into eager sex toys for the Aspasia clubs, those men transformed into rayshaws for security duty have no more inner life than machines.”
Raymond Shaw is the brainwashed assassin in The Manchurian Candidate. When the late Bertold Shenneck created brain-screwed and programmed men to serve as obedient and fearless security agents at his gated estate in Napa, the great scientist thought it was amusing to call them rayshaws. Except for their expressionless faces and a disturbing deadness in the eyes, they are able to pass for normal: neatly dressed, quiet, eerily polite. They are more focused on their duties than even the most highly trained, dedicated, and fearless bodyguards could ever be. When a threat to their master manifests, they are swift and brutal in response, for they harbor no slightest compunction about killing any trespasser.
As Dubose waxes on about the viciousness of rayshaws and their incapacity for doubt or remorse, Jergen finally interrupts. “And your point is what?”
“My point, Cubby, is that I’ve thought the last thing I would ever want would be to have a gladiator moment with a rayshaw as my opponent. But having seen what Ramsey Corrigan did to his family and what our fair Minette did to her husband, old Lucky Bob, I’d go toe to toe with any rayshaw before I’d want to be locked in a room with that bitch and no weapon but my bare hands. A rayshaw is just a meat machine with sophisticated programming, but she’s something else altogether. She’s a slaughtering zombie, purely demonic.”
Jergen suspects that Dubose is playing some stupid Princeton sport with him, some psychological game intended to maneuver him into a panic room of the mind, so that he will say something that can be mocked.
Nevertheless, he asks, “If she’s a purely demonic, slaughtering zombie, then why are we being so dumb that we’re chasing her?”
“Because such is our fate, Cubby. A man can’t escape his fate, especially not men like us, dedicated revolutionaries who have bound over our fortunes to the cause, reaching for the brass ring of total power, knowing that if we miss it, we will be destroyed, crushed and thrown away as if we never lived. Such is the hard bargain we made with destiny, a bargain few men have the courage to make.”
Exasperated by this grandiose speechifying, Jergen says, “Well, I don’t see myself at all that way.”
Dubose turns upon Jergen a smile of genteel pity. “I know you don’t, Cubby. That’s why from time to time I give you these little pep talks. To encourage you to better understand yourself and the heroic enterprise on which you’re embarked.”
8
TRAVIS HAD HIS BAGS PACKED and standing by, but as it turned out, Cornell Jasperson had packed a bag, too.
Like a benign gargoyle that had come alive and climbed down from its high perch on some Gothic building, the big man stood before Jane in a beseeching posture. He swayed from side to side, scuffing the floor with his shoes, holding his hands against his chest as though to contain the hope in his heart for fear it would escape him. “I need to go with the boy, please and thank you. I need to go with the boy. I need to go with him. The boy.”
Jane had known that Travis could not be asked to abandon the dogs in spite of the difficulty they would pose during any escape from Borrego Valley. He had lost too much already. He no doubt felt guilty about Gavin and Jessie, though he had no responsibility for the sacrifice they had willingly made. Even though he had known Duke and Queenie for only a few months, the bonds between a boy and his dogs were such that, after what he had already been through, forcing him to leave the German shepherds behind would break something in him that might never be repaired. She’d made preparations for the dogs, but not for a gentle giant with a personality disorder, who couldn’t be touched without suffering a disabling anxiety attack.
“Umm. Umm. I’m pretty sure I can be a better burden,” said Cornell. “Umm. What I meant to say is a better person. If you take me with you, I’m pretty sure I’ll betray well. Behave well.”
Whether they had conspired in this beforehand or not, Travis was instantly on board with Cornell’s request. “We have to take him with us, Mom. Me and Mr. Jasperson, we’re going to Atlanta someday to see them bottle Coca-Cola.”
“The last couple days,” said Cornell, “the dogs touched me, but I always pretended like they didn’t, pretended really hard, and so I didn’t have an attack. Then after a while, I didn’t need to pretend anymore.” He reached down to touch one of the shepherds, and the big dog wagged its tail.
“You gotta let him come,” Travis pleaded. “He makes really good sandwiches and the best muffins ever. He’s got a fipaleen recipe for pineapple-coconut muffins, and he made them all millionaires.”
“Not the muffins,” Cornell explained. “I made the Filipino workers all millionaires. I can’t touch people because I’m a full-on Planters nutbar that way. Umm. Umm. But I can take good care of the dogs.” He looked down at his feet, as shy as a child, then raised his eyes to Jane once more. “Besides, if I stay here, sooner or later the bad people will come for me. Won’t they come for me?”
He was right. They would figure out where Travis had been kept, and they would take Cornell into custody if for no other reason than to bleed him of his fortune.
She said, “We don’t leave the wounded behind. Somehow we’ll fit you in.”
“He reads aloud better than anyone,” Travis assured her with a note of desperation, “and he was real nice about the toothbrush.”
“Relax, cowboy,” she said. “It’s already decided. You two wait here with the dogs. I’ll go see how Luther’s doing, and we’ll bring the Suburban over here to load up.”
9
IT WAS A SLOW DAY in the convenience store. Bipin Gaitonde, born in Bombay but a proud citizen of the desert for seventeen years, husband of Zoya, father of three, enterprising entrepreneur, attended the cash register in his store when customers were present, and when he was alone, he busied himself replenishing the candy racks.
He had just come out of the stockroom with a carton of PayDay bars when the Cadillac XT5 exploded through the big front window. A fierce horizontal rain of glittering bits of glass sleeted through the store, followed by a storm of Cheez Doodles shot from bursting bags. Potato chips expelled from their ruptured packages were cast through the air like a barrage of martial-arts throwing stars.
Insanely, the motorist accelerated upon entrance. The first row of displays came apart and toppled noisily into aisle two, and the Cadillac began to surmount the broken shelves and all the scattered merchandise.
Bipin dropped the PayDays. He leaped out of the way, scrambled onto the cashier’s counter.
The vehicle came to a halt mid-store, canted on rubble, two tires punctured, its windshield dissolved. Veils of steam rose around the edges of its buckled hood.
The driver forced open his door and bulled his way out of the Caddy, pressing aside parts of a shattered display, kicking angrily at obstructing packages of national-brand cupcakes and cream-filled baked goods that Bipin found tasteless but that sold well.
He knew this man. Buckley Tolbert. Founder of Heart of Home, the oldest restaurant in Borrego Springs. Sixtysomething white-haired sweet-faced soft-spoken Bucky Tolbert was a friend to everyone, generous and amusing.
Getting out of the Cadillac, Bucky fired off a fusillade of uncharacteristic vulgarities and obscenities, filth exploding from him like bullets from a machine gun.
Crouched atop the cashier’s counter, Bipin Gaitonde was shocked by those indecencies. Although he sold certain risqué magazines in his store, he displayed them in plain-paper sleeves that revealed only the name of the publication and prevented the magazine from being opened until it was purchased and removed from the premises.
“Mr. Tolbert,” Bipin admonished, “do you not hear yourself?”
As though he became aware of Bipin only then, the restaurateur began peppering his salty language with vicious threats, primarily involving Bipin’s emasculation. In spite of his age, and though as a hazard of his occupation he weighed perhaps forty pounds too much, Buckley Tolbert clambered over the wreckage, crossing the store and coming toward Bipin, with the alacrity and grace of a mountain lion.
Once an ardent hiker, Bipin had been high in the San Bernardino Mountains five years earlier when, late in the afternoon, he turned a bend in the trail and saw a four-hundred-pound mountain lion leap from an upslope stand of pines onto the back of an unsuspecting deer. The big cat drove its prey to the ground and tore out its throat before Bipin had the presence of mind to start shaking with terror. He had not gone hiking since that day.
Now it seemed as if some god of lions had descended to the earth and had come to Bipin in an avatar that had once been Buckley Tolbert. Reflections of the store’s flickering lights flashed in Tolbert’s eyes. The man’s face flushed and twisted with such insane fury that it seemed his rage alone ought to pop a cerebral artery or torture his aging heart into cardiac arrest. Bipin realized—almost too late—that he was the deer in this scenario, not entirely unsuspecting but paralyzed by disbelief.
As Buckley Tolbert approached the cashier’s station, shrieking now like some venomous spirit liberated from Hell, Bipin dropped from the counter into the space behind. He could hardly believe it was necessary to reach for the pistol that he kept on a shelf under the cash register, for he had obtained it to defend against total strangers who might enter the store with armed robbery in mind, which had not yet once happened in quiet Borrego Springs. He had definitely not purchased the gun with the expectation that he would need it to shoot a neighbor and friend, but he grabbed it anyway.
Buckley Tolbert vaulted onto the counter and stood up, and Bipin turned with the pistol in hand as his former friend towered over him. Tolbert’s white hair stood out from his scalp as if he’d received an electric shock. His eyes were pools of malice. A thick string of snot hung from his nose, quivering like an extruded worm. Blood slicked his chin, encircled his mouth, glistened on his lips, and misted on his exhalation when he hissed fiercely between his clenched and bloodstained teeth.
Somehow Bipin Gaitonde knew that this blood was not Tolbert’s, that it was evidence of an unthinkable attack on someone else before he had crashed his Cadillac into the convenience store. In the same instant, Tolbert plunged from the counter and Bipin fired. The big man fell past him, snaring a fistful of Bipin’s hair and pulling him off his feet.
They landed with Bipin on top. Although the space behind the counter was narrow, Tolbert rolled them and achieved the superior position, maybe wounded or maybe not.
Bipin still gripped the pistol in his right hand, but that arm was under him, crushed between him and the floor. Pain coursed from shoulder to wrist. Under his attacker’s bulk, he could draw only shallow breaths into his compressed lungs.
With inhuman strength, Tolbert—this thing that had been Tolbert—pinned Bipin’s left arm to the floor, incapacitating him. He lowered his florid face close to Bipin’s face, spraying him with spittle and blood. His left hand scraped at his captive’s brow, the fingers curved into a claw, and Bipin had no doubt that Tolbert was going to take his eyes.
He thought of his wife, Zoya, and their children being left alone in this dark world. The horror of failing them gave him the strength to heave up, not violently enough to throw Tolbert off, but enough to free his trapped right arm, in which the nerves were hot wires conducting a disabling pain through muscle and bone.
Maybe his arm was broken. Maybe he couldn’t grip the gun. But it was not broken. As he brought up the weapon, he fired, and the shot took off a piece of his attacker’s left ear.
Howling, Tolbert flinched back, clamping his hands over both ears, as though for an instant he couldn’t tell which of them was bullet-torn.
Recoil almost denied Bipin the pistol, but he held the weapon now in a two-hand grip. At a range of mere inches, he shot Tolbert in the face once, twice.
The attacker fell to the right, mouth open in a silent scream, the architecture of his face remodeled by the double blast, his hair on fire from the muzzle flash.
Bipin sat up and frantically scooted backward on the vinyl-tile floor until a wall of the wraparound cashier’s station prevented further retreat. He struggled to his feet and stood with the pistol in both hands, arms fully extended, as though Tolbert’s resurrection and a renewed assault were a matter not of if, but when.
At thirty-five, Bipin Gaitonde had never before raised a hand against another human being. When he bought the pistol, Zoya had smiled and said that he was too gentle ever to use it, so empathetic that he would sympathize with a robber in need and not only give him all the cash in the register but also offer to write a check.
Weeping quietly, he stood over the dead restaurateur and did not look up from the corpse until a siren shrilled. It was a rare sound in Borrego Springs.
He turned his attention toward the shattered front window, but he didn’t expect the imminent arrival of the police. Intuitively
, he knew this: The madness that had burst into his store was something new in the world, hydra-headed and already manifesting elsewhere.
10
THE DAY WAS THE SAME as it had been before Jane went into the library for the end of the world: hot, dry, still, with the faintest alkaline smell to the air, the signature scent of a true desert. Unseen insects were engaged in a monotone celebration of life, and in the distance a low-flying twin-engine airplane sought cellphone revelations that she was not foolish enough to provide.
In spite of the sameness of the day then and the day now, she’d gone only a few steps from the dilapidated barn when that intuitive perception of things seen and unseen told her change had come, the degree of risk had risen, time was running out.
She halted, alert for threats, scanning the day more carefully. Luther was finishing the transformation of the Suburban from white to black. The solvent provided by Ricky de Soto appeared to be worth the outrageous price he placed on it.
If something had gone wrong, if a crisis was impending, Luther seemed unaware. His years in law enforcement and his intelligence had left him with intuition no less sharp than hers, so if he was unconcerned, perhaps she was just jumpy, more worried mother now than calculating cop.
Yes, but…Luther was handling the hose, and the water that sluiced the white paint from the Suburban drummed loudly enough to mask other sounds from him. Intuition was in part subconscious perception. What the busy surface of the mind might be too occupied to notice, the quiet inner mind perceived, interpreted; then it tried to pass along its concern by raising the hairs on the back of your neck or sending a faux centipede down the ladder of your spine.
If one of the five senses was compromised—in this case Luther’s hearing—intuition was to that degree crippled.
A few steps after leaving the barn, perhaps Jane perceived the merest suggestion of the figure in the doorway of the blue stucco house. In any case, she saw it more clearly when she had closed from seventy yards to fifty, its full nature undefined in those shadows but somehow peculiar—and beyond Luther’s awareness.