Fear Nothing

by Dean Koontz

  I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was trembling with dread.

  “Maybe we should take him to a vet,” Sasha said.

  I shook my head. No vet.

  I would not cry. I do not cry. How bitter do you risk becoming by swallowing too many tears?

  When I could speak, I said, “I wouldn’t trust any vet in town. They’re probably part of it, co-opted. If they realize what he is, that he’s one of the animals from Wyvern, they might take him away from me, back to the labs.”

  Orson stood with his face turned up to the rain, as if he found it refreshing.

  “They’ll be back,” Bobby said, meaning the troop.

  “Not tonight,” I said. “And maybe not for a way long time.”

  “But sooner or later.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And who else?” Sasha wondered. “What else?”

  “It’s chaos out there,” I said, remembering what Manuel had told me. “A radical new world. Who the hell knows what’s in it—or what’s being born right now?”

  In spite of all that we had seen and all that we had learned about the Wyvern project, perhaps it was not until this moment on the porch steps that we believed in our bones that we were living near the end of civilization, on the brink of Armageddon. Like the drums of Judgment, the hard and ceaseless rain beat on the world. This night was like no other night on earth, and it couldn’t have felt more alien if the clouds had parted to reveal three moons instead of one and a sky full of unfamiliar stars.

  Orson lapped puddled rainwater off the lowest porch step. Then he climbed to my side with more confidence than he had shown when he had descended.

  Hesitantly, using the nod-for-yes-shake-for-no code, I tested him for concussion or worse. He was okay.

  “Jesus,” Bobby said with relief. I’d never heard him as shaken as this.

  I went inside and got four beers and the bowl on which Bobby had painted the word Rosebud. I returned to the porch.

  “A couple of Pia’s paintings took some. buckshot,” I said.

  “We’ll blame it on Orson,” Bobby said.

  “Nothing,” Sasha said, “is more dangerous than a dog with a shotgun.”

  We sat in silence awhile, listening to the rain and breathing the delicious, fresh-scrubbed air.

  I could see Scorso’s body out there in the sand. Now Sasha was a killer just like me.

  Bobby said, “This sure is live.”

  “Totally,” I said.

  “Way radical.”

  “Insanely,” Sasha said.

  Orson chuffed.

  34

  That night we wrapped the dead monkeys in sheets. We wrapped Scorso’s body in a sheet, too. I kept expecting him to sit up and reach out for me, trailing his cotton windings, as though he were a mummy from one of those long-ago movies filmed in an era when people were more spooked by the supernatural than the real world allows them to be these days. Then we loaded them into the back of the Explorer.

  Bobby had a stack of plastic drop cloths in the garage, left over from the most recent visit by the painters, who periodically hand-oiled the teak paneling. We used them and a staple gun to seal the broken windows as best we could.

  At two o’clock in the morning, Sasha drove all four of us to the northeast end of town and up the long driveway, past the graceful California pepper trees that waited like a line of mourners weeping in the storm, past the concrete Pietà. We stopped under the portico, before the massive Georgian house.

  No lights were on. I don’t know if Sandy Kirk was sleeping or not home.

  We unloaded the sheet-wrapped corpses and piled them at his front door.

  As we drove away, Bobby said, “Remember when we came up here as kids—to watch Sandy’s dad at work?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Imagine if one night we’d found something like that on his doorstep.”

  “Cool.”

  There were days of cleanup and repairs to be undertaken at Bobby’s place, but we weren’t ready to bend to that task. We went to Sasha’s house and passed the rest of the night in her kitchen, clearing our heads with more beer and going through my father’s account of the origins of our new world, our new life.

  My mother had dreamed up a revolutionary new approach to the engineering of retroviruses for the purpose of ferrying genes into the cells of patients—or experimental subjects. In the secret facility at Wyvern, a world-class team of big brows had realized her vision. These new microbe delivery boys were more spectacularly successful and selective than anyone had hoped.

  “Then comes Godzilla,” as Bobby said.

  The new retroviruses, though crippled, proved to be so clever that they were able not merely to deliver their package of genetic material but to select a package from the patient’s—or lab animal’s—DNA to replace what they had delivered. Thus they became a two-way messenger, carrying genetic material in and out of the body.

  They also proved capable of capturing other viruses naturally present in a subject’s body, selecting from those organisms’ traits, and remaking themselves. They mutated more radically and faster than any microbe had ever mutated before. Wildly they mutated, becoming something new within hours. They had also become able to reproduce in spite of having been crippled.

  Before anyone at Wyvern grasped what was happening, Mom’s new bugs were ferrying as much genetic material out of the experimental animals as into them—and transferring that material not only among the different animals but among the scientists and other workers in the labs. Contamination is not solely by contact with bodily fluids. Skin contact alone is sufficient to effect the transfer of these bugs if you have even the tiniest wound or sore: a paper cut, a nick from shaving.

  In the years ahead, as each of us is contaminated, he or she will take on a load of new DNA different from the one that anybody else receives. The effect will be singular in every case. Some of us will not change appreciably at all, because we will receive so many bits and pieces from so many sources that there will be no focused cumulative effect. As our cells die, the inserted material might or might not appear in the new cells that replace them. But some of us may become psychological or even physical monsters.

  To paraphrase James Joyce: It will darkle, tinct-tint, all this our funanimal world. Darkle with strange variety.

  We know not if the change will accelerate, the effects become more widely visible, the secret be exposed by the sheer momentum of the retrovirus’s work—or whether it will be a process that remains subtle for decades or centuries. We can only wait. And see.

  Dad seemed to think the problem didn’t arise entirely because of a flaw in the theory. He believed the people at Wyvern—who tested my mother’s theories and developed them until actual organisms could be produced—were more at fault than she, because they deviated from her vision in ways that may have seemed subtle at the time but proved calamitous in the end.

  However you look at it, my mom destroyed the world as we know it—but, for all that, she’s still my mom. On one level, she did what she did for love, out of the hope that my life could be saved. I love her as much as ever—and marvel that she was able to hide her terror and anguish from me during the last years of her life, after she realized what kind of new world was coming.

  My father was less than half-convinced that she killed herself, but in his notes, he admits the possibility. He felt that murder was more likely. Although the plague had spread too far—too fast—to be contained, Mom finally had wanted to go public with the story. Maybe she was silenced. Whether she killed herself or tried to stand up to the military and government doesn’t matter; she’s gone in either case.

  Now that I understand my mother better, I know where I get the strength—or the obsessive will—to repress my own emotions when I find them too hard to deal with. I’m going to try to change that about myself. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to do it. After all, that’s what the world is now about: change. Relentless change.

  Although some hat
e me for being my mother’s son, I’m permitted to live. Even my father wasn’t sure why I should be granted this dispensation, considering the savage nature of some of my enemies. He suspected, however, that my mother used fragments of my genetic material to engineer this apocalyptic retrovirus; perhaps, therefore, the key to undoing or at least limiting the scope of the calamity will eventually be found in my genes. My blood is drawn each month not, as I’ve been told, for reasons related to my XP but for study at Wyvern. Perhaps I am a walking laboratory: containing the potential for immunity to this plague—or containing a clue as to the ultimate destruction and terror it will cause. As long as I keep the secret of Moonlight Bay and live by the rules of the infected, I will most likely remain alive and free. On the other hand, if I attempt to tell the world, I will no doubt live out my days in a dark room in some subterranean chamber under the fields and hills of Fort Wyvern.

  Indeed, Dad was afraid that they would take me anyway, sooner or later, to imprison me and thus ensure a continuing supply of blood samples. I’ll have to deal with that threat if and when it comes.

  Sunday morning and early afternoon, as the storm passed over Moonlight Bay, we slept—and of the four of us, only Sasha didn’t wake from a nightmare.

  After four hours in the sack, I went down to Sasha’s kitchen and sat with the blinds drawn. For a while, in the dim light, I studied the words Mystery Train on my cap, wondering how they related to my mother’s work. Although I couldn’t guess their significance, I felt that Moonlight Bay isn’t merely on a roller-coaster ride to Hell, as Stevenson had claimed. We’re on a journey to a mysterious destination that we can’t entirely envision: maybe something wondrous—or maybe something far worse than the tortures of Hell.

  Later, using a pen and tablet, I wrote by candlelight. I intend to record all that happens in the days that remain to me.

  I don’t expect ever to see this work published. Those who wish the truth of Wyvern to remain unrevealed will never permit me to spread the word. Anyway, Stevenson was right: It’s too late to save the world. In fact, that’s the same message Bobby’s been giving me throughout most of our long friendship.

  Although I don’t write for publication anymore, it’s important to have a record of this catastrophe. The world as we know it should not pass away without the explanation of its passing preserved for the future. We are an arrogant species, full of terrible potential, but we also have a great capacity for love, friendship, generosity, kindness, faith, hope, and joy. How we perished by our own hand may be more important than how we came into existence in the first place—which is a mystery that we will now never solve.

  I might diligently record all that happens in Moonlight Bay and, by extension, in the rest of the world as the contamination spreads—but record it to no avail, because there might one day be no one left to read my words or no one capable of reading them. I’ll take my chances. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that some species will arise from the chaos to replace us, to be masters of the earth as we were. Indeed, if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the dogs.

  Sunday night, the sky was as deep as the face of God, and the stars were as pure as tears. The four of us went to the beach. Fourteen-foot, fully macking, glassy monoliths pumped ceaselessly out of far Tahiti. It was epic. It was so live.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Moonlight Bay’s radio station, KBAY, is entirely a fictional enterprise. The real KBAY is located in Santa Cruz, California, and none of the employees of the Moonlight Bay station is based on any past or present employee of the Santa Cruz station. These call letters were borrowed here for one reason: They’re cool.

  In chapter seventeen, Christopher Snow quotes a line from a poem by Louise Glück. The title of the poem is “Lullaby,” and it appears in Ms. Glück’s wonderful and moving Ararat.

  Christopher Snow, Bobby Halloway, Sasha Goodall, and Orson are real. I have spent many months with them. I like their company, and I intend to spend a lot more time with them in the years to come.

  —DK

  About the Author

  DEAN KOONTZ, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives with his wife, Gerda, and the enduring spirit of their golden retriever, Trixie, in southern California.

  Correspondence for the author should be addressed to:

  Dean Koontz

  P.O. Box 9529

  Newport Beach, CA 92658

  Also by DEAN KOONTZ

  The Good Guy • Brother Odd • The Husband • Forever Odd • Velocity • Life Expectancy • The Taking • Odd Thomas • The Face • By the Light of the Moon • One Door Away From Heaven • From the Corner of His Eye • False Memory • Seize the Night • Fear Nothing • Mr. Murder • Dragon Tears • Hideaway • Cold Fire • The Bad Place • Midnight • Lightning • Watchers • Strangers • Twilight Eyes • Darkfall • Phantoms • Whispers • The Mask • The Vision • The Face of Fear • Night Chills • Shattered • The Voice of the Night • The Servants of Twilight • The House of Thunder • The Key to Midnight • The Eyes of Darkness • Shadowfires • Winter Moon • The Door to December • Dark Rivers of the Heart • Icebound • Strange Highways • Intensity • Sole Survivor • Ticktock • The Funhouse • Demon Seed

  DEAN KOONTZ’S FRANKENSTEIN

  Book One: Prodigal Son • with Kevin J. Anderson

  Book Two: City of Night • with Ed Gorman

  In Moonlight Bay, California, children are disappearing. From their homes. From the streets.

  Christopher Snow believes the lost children are still alive. He is convinced their disappearances have everything to do with the secret research conducted deep within Fort Wyvern.

  In Seize the Night Chris will challenge the powerful and violent people who would conceal even the most heinous crimes in order to hide the secrets of Fort Wyvern. His greatest advantage is that he knows the night world better than anyone—better even than his adversaries, who seem at one with the darkness….

  Available Now, in hardcover…

  Dean Koontz’s

  THE GOOD GUY

  This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  FEAR NOTHING

  A Bantam book

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use the following material: “Lullaby” from Ararat by Louise Glück. Copyright ©1990 by Louise Glück. Reprinted by permission of The Ecco Press.

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published 1998

  Bantam export edition / June 1998

  Bantam paperback edition / December 1998

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1998 by Dean Koontz.

  Cover art copyright © 1998 by Tom Hallman

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-41129

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-41410-6

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  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

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