by Dean Koontz
As Gabby wrenches open a man-size door next to the larger doors of the barn, a hard flat crump draws Curtis’s attention to the town just in time to see one of the larger structures—perhaps the saloon and gambling hall—implode upon itself, as if collapsing into a black hole. The reverse-pressure wave pulls eddies of salt from the dry bed of the ancient ocean, sucking them toward the town, and Curtis rocks on the balls of his feet.
A second crump, following close after the first, is accompanied by a whirlpool of fiery orange light where the saloon had stood. In that churning blaze, the imploded structure seems to disgorge itself: Planks and shingles, posts and balcony railings, doors, cocked window frames—plus two flights of stairs like a portion of a brontosaurus spine—erupt from the darkness that had swallowed them, spinning in midair, in tornadolike suspension, silhouetted by the flames. As a pressure wave casts back the eddies of salt and chases them with showers of sand, nearly rocking Curtis off his feet once more, it’s possible to believe that the whirling rubble of the saloon will magically reassemble into a historic structure once more.
Gabby has no time for the spectacle, and Curtis should have none, either. He follows the caretaker and the dog into the barn.
The door isn’t as rickety as he expects. Rough wood on the exterior but steel on the inside, heavy, solid, it swings smoothly shut behind him on well-oiled hinges.
Inside lies a short shadowy corridor with light beyond an open doorway at the end. Not the light of an oil lamp, but a constant fluorescent glow.
The air contains neither the faint cindery scent of the desert nor the alkali breath of the salt flats. And it’s cool.
Pine trees, pine trees, close to the floor, pine on the floor. Pine-scented wax on the vinyl tiles. Cinnamon and sugar, crumbs of a cookie, butter and sugar and cinnamon and flour. Good, good.
The fluorescent light arises in a windowless office with two desks and filing cabinets. And a refrigerator. Chilled air floods out of a ventilation duct near the ceiling.
Barely detectable vibrations in the floor suggest a subterranean vault containing a gasoline-powered generator. This is a barn worthy of Disneyland: entirely new, but crafted to resemble the battered remains of a home-steader’s farm. The building provides office and work space for the support staff that oversees maintenance of the ghost town, without introducing either contemporary structures or visible utilities that would detract from the otherwise meticulously maintained period ambience.
On the nearest of the desks stands a cup of coffee and a large thermos bottle. Beside the cup lies a paperback romance novel by Nora Roberts. Unless the official night-shift support staff includes a ghost or two, the coffee and the book belong to Gabby.
Although they are on the run, with the prospect of heavily armed searchers bursting into this building behind them at any second, the caretaker pauses to sweep the paperback off the desk. He shoves it under a sheaf of papers in one of the drawers.
He glances sheepishly at Curtis. His deeply tanned face acquires a rubescent-bronze tint.
The dilapidated barn isn’t at all what it appears to be from outside, and Gabby isn’t entirely what he appears to be, either. The not-entirely-what-he-or-she-or-it-appears-to-be club has an enormous membership.
“Judas jump to hellfire, boy, we’re in dangerous territory here! Don’t just stand there till you’re growed over with clockface an’ cow’s-tongue! Let’s go, let’s go!”
Curtis stopped at the desk only because Gabby stopped there first, and he realizes that the caretaker is shouting at him merely to distract his attention from the incident with the romance novel.
As he follows Gabby across the room to another door, however, Curtis wonders what sort of plants clockface and cow’s-tongue might be and whether in this territory they really grow so fast that you could be completely overtaken by them if you stand too still even for a few seconds. He wonders, too, whether these are carnivorous plants that not only cocoon you, but then also feed on you while you’re still alive.
The sooner he gets out of Utah, the better.
Beyond the first office lies a second and larger office. The four doors leading from this space suggest additional rooms beyond.
Gimping like a dog with two short legs on the left side, Gabby leads Old Yeller and Curtis to the farthest door, snares a set of keys off a pegboard, and proceeds into a garage with bays for four vehicles. Three spaces are empty, and an SUV waits in the fourth, facing toward the roll-up door: a white Mercury Mountaineer.
As Curtis hurries around to the passenger’s side, Gabby pulls open the driver’s door and says, “That dog, she broke?”
“She fixed, sir.”
“Say what?”
“Say fixed, sir,” says Curtis as he frantically jerks open the front door on the passenger’s side.
Levering himself in behind the steering wheel, Gabby shouts at him, “Tarnation, I ain’t havin’ no biscuit-eater pissin’ in my new Mercury!”
“All we had was frankfurters, sir, and then some orange juice,” Curtis replies reassuringly as, not without difficulty, he clambers into the passenger’s seat with the dog in his arms.
“Spinnin’ syphilitic sheep! What for you bringin’ her in the front seat, boy?”
“What for shouldn’t I, sir?”
As he pushes a button on a remote-control unit to put up the garage door, and starts the engine, the caretaker says, “Iffen God made little fishes, then passengers what has a tail ought to load up through the tailgate!”
Pulling shut the passenger’s door, Curtis says, “God made little fishes, sure enough, sir, but I don’t see what one has to do with the other.”
“You got about as much common sense as a bucket. Better hold tight to your mongrel ’less you want she should wind up bug-spattered on the wrong side of the windshield.”
Old Yeller perches in Curtis’s lap, facing front, and he locks his arms around the dog to hold her in place.
“We gonna burn the wind haulin’ ass outta here!” Gabby loudly declares as he shifts the Mountaineer out of park.
Curtis takes this to be a warning against the likelihood that they’re going to experience flatulence, but he can’t imagine why that will happen.
Gabby tramps on the accelerator, and the Mountaineer shoots out of the garage, under the still-rising door.
First pinned back in his seat, then jammed against the door when the caretaker turns west-southwest almost sharply enough to roll the SUV, Curtis remembers the applicable law and raises his voice over the racing engine: “Law says we have to wear seat belts, sir!”
Even in the weak light from the instrument panel, the boy can see Gabby’s face darken as though someone from the gov’ment were throttling him at this very moment, and the old man proves that he can rant and drive at the same time. “Whole passel of politicians between ’em ain’t got a brain worth bug dust! No scaly-assed, wart-necked, fly-eatin’, toad-brained politician an’ no twelve-toed, fatassed, pointy-headed bureaucrat ain’t goin’ to tell me iffen I got to wear a seat belt nor iffen I don’t got to wear one, as far as that goes! Iffen I want to stand on these brakes an’ bust through the windshield with my face, damn if I won’t, an’ no one can tell me I ain’t got the right! Next thing them power-crazy bastards be tellin’ us the law says wear a jockstrap when you drive!”
While the caretaker continues in this vein, Curtis turns in his seat as best he can, still holding on to Old Yeller, and looks back, to the east and north, toward the embattled ghost town. It’s a light show back there, violent enough to make even Wyatt Earp hide in the church. When the shootout ends, whatever historical society oversees this site is going to be hard-pressed to restore the town from the splinters, bent nails, and ashes that will be left.
He remains amazed that the FBI is aware of him and of the forces pursuing him, that they have intervened in this matter, and that they actually think they have a chance of locating him and taking him into protective custody before his enemies can find and destroy him. Th
ey must know how outgunned they are, but they’ve plunged in nonetheless. He can’t help but admire their kick-butt attitude and their courage, even though they would eventually subject him to experiments if they had custody of him long enough.
Gabby can drive even faster than he can talk. They are rocketing across the salt flats.
To avoid drawing unwanted attention, they’re traveling without headlights.
Failure to employ headlights between dusk and dawn is against the law, of course, but he decides that to broach this subject with Gabby would qualify as poor socializing. Besides, Curtis has, after all, broken the law himself more than once during his flight for freedom, though he’s not proud of his criminality.
The clouded sky casts down no light whatsoever, but the natural fluorescence of the land ensures that they aren’t driving blind, and fortunately Gabby is familiar with this territory. He avoids whatever roads might cross this desolate valley and stays on the open land, so there’s no risk of turning a bend and ramming head-on into innocent motorists, with all the unfortunate physical and moral consequences that would ensue.
The salt flats glow white, and the Mercury Mountaineer is white, so the vehicle shouldn’t be easily visible from a distance. The tires spin up a white plume behind them, but this is a wispy telltale, not a thick billowing cloud, and it quickly settles.
If FBI agents or the worse scalawags are using motion-detection gear to sweep the flats either from a point atop the valley crest or from an aerial platform, then Gabby might as well not just turn on the headlights but fire off flares, as well, because this white-on-white strategy won’t be clever enough to save them from being turned into buzzard grub like the man who had come tumbling in flaming ruin between the buildings.
“…hogtie ’em with one of their aggravatin’ seat belts, douse ’em with some bacon grease, throw ’em in a root cellar with maybe ten thousand half-starved STINK BUGS, an’ just see how all-fired safe the God-mockin’ bastards feel then!” Gabby concludes.
Seizing this opportunity to change the subject, Curtis says, “Speakin’ of stink, sir, I ain’t farted, and I don’t think I’m goin’ to, neither.”
Though he doesn’t reduce their speed and might even accelerate a little, the old caretaker shifts his attention away from the salt flats hurtling toward them. He fixes Curtis with a look of such open-mouthed bewilderment that for a moment it prevents him from talking.
But only for a moment, whereafter he smacks his lips together and gets his tongue working again: “Judas humpin’ hacksaws in Hell! Boy, what the blazes did you just say an’ why’d you say it?”
Disconcerted that his well-meaning attempt at small talk has excited something like outrage from the caretaker, Curtis says, “Sir, no offense meant, but you’re the one who first said about burnin’ the wind and haulin’ ass.”
“Here’s that spit-in-the-eye-malefactor side of you what ain’t a pretty thing to see.”
“No offense, sir, but you did say it, and I was just observin’ that I ain’t farted, like you expected, and you ain’t neither, and neither ain’t my dog.”
“You keep sayin’ no offense, boy, but I’m tellin’ you right now, I’m bound to take some offense iffen your dog starts fartin’ in my new Mercury.”
This conversation is going so badly and they are tearing across the salt flats at such a scary speed that changing the subject seems to be a matter of life and death, so Curtis figures the time has come to compliment Gabby on his celebrity lineage. “Sir, I dearly loved Helldorado, Heart of the Golden West, and Roll on Texas Moon.”
“What in tarnation’s wrong with you, boy?”
The dog whines and twitches in Curtis’s lap.
“Look ahead, sir!” the boy exclaims.
Gabby glances at the onrushing salt flats. “Just tumbleweed,” he says dismissively as an enormous prickly ball bounces off the front fender, rolls across the hood, over the windshield, and spins front to back across the roof with a clitter-click like skeleton fingers clawing at the underside of a coffin lid.
Nervously but valiantly making another effort to establish better rapport with the caretaker, Curtis says, “Along the Navajo Trail was really a fine movie, and The Lights of Old Santa Fe. But maybe the best of them was Sons of the Pioneers.”
“You say movies?”
“I say movies, sir.”
Even as Gabby presses the Mountaineer still faster, faster, he disregards the land ahead, as though confident that he can perceive oncoming catastrophe through a sixth sense, and he focuses on Curtis with disconcerting intensity. “With gov’ment maniacs blowin’ up the world behind us, what in the name of the beheaded baptist are you talkin’ movies for?”
“’Cause they’re your grandfather’s movies, sir.”
“My grandpa’s movies? Criminy spit an’ call it wine, an’ give me two bottles! What are you babblin’ about? My grandpa was a mercantile porch-squatter, sellin’ Bibles an’ useless ’cyclopedias if you was crazy enough to open your door to him.”
“But if your grandpa was a porch-squatter, then what about Roy Rogers?” Curtis pleads.
Gabby’s wiry beard, eyebrows, and ear hairs bristle with either exasperation or static electricity generated by a combination of high speed and dry desert air. “Roy Rogers?” He’s shouting again. He holds the steering wheel with one hand and pounds it with the other. “What in the blue blazes does a fancy-boots, picture-show, singin’, dead cowboy got to do with you or me, or the price of beans?”
Curtis doesn’t know the price of beans or why the price is of sudden importance to the caretaker at this particular time, but he knows that they are going far too fast—and still gaining speed. The more perturbed that Gabby becomes, the heavier his foot grows on the accelerator, and everything that Curtis says perturbs him further. The floor of the valley is remarkably flat, but at this reckless velocity, even the smallest runnel or bump rattles the Mountaineer. If they encounter a deep rut or a rock, or one of those sun-bleached cow skulls that so often show up in Western movies, the best Detroit engineering won’t save them, and the SUV will roll like, well, like Judas strapped to a log and tumbled down the mill chute to Hell.
Curtis is afraid to say anything, but Gabby appears to be ready to thump the steering wheel again if he doesn’t say something. So without any desire to argue, intending only to express an alternative opinion, and by engaging in some pleasant conversation to reduce the caretaker’s agitation and also the speed of the Mountaineer, he says, “No offense, sir, but Roy Rogers’s boots didn’t seem to me to be all that fancy.”
Gabby glances at the land ahead, which is a relief to Curtis, but immediately he looks at Curtis once more, and yet again the SUV accelerates. “Boy, you ’member way to hell back there at the pump, when I asked was you stupid or somethin’?”
“Yes, sir, I ’member.”
“An’ you ’member what you said?”
“Yes, sir, I said I guessed I was somethin’.”
“Ever any fool was to ask you that question again, boy, you’d be better advised to tell ’em stupid!” Pounding the steering wheel again, he’s off on another rant. “Shove a bottle rocket in my butt an’ call me Yankee Doodle! Here I put myself at war with the whole egg-suckin’ gov’ment, with their bombs an’ tanks an’ tax collectors, all ’cause you claim they done killed your folks, an’ now I see you’re liable to say anythin’ what makes no more sense than chicken gabble, and maybe the gov’ment never done killed your folks at all.”
Appalled to discover this misunderstanding, fighting back tears, Curtis hastens to correct the caretaker: “Sir, I never done said the government done killed my folks.”
Flabbergasted and outraged, Gabby roars, “Cut off my co-jones an’ call me a princess, but don’t you ever tell me that ain’t what you claimed!”
“Sir, I claimed it was the worse scalawags what done killed my folks, not the government.”
“Ain’t no worse scalawags than the gov’ment!”
“Oh, b
ig-time worse, sir.”
Old Yeller fidgets in Curtis’s lap. She whimpers nervously, and icy sweat drips rapidly from her black nose onto his hands, and he senses that she wants to relieve herself. Through their special boy-dog bond, he encourages her to keep control of her bladder, but now he’s reminded that their relationship is dog-boy as well as boy-dog, that it can work both ways if he isn’t careful, and her need to pee is rapidly becoming his need to pee. He can too easily imagine the catastrophe that would ensue if he and the dog both peed in Gabby’s new Mercury, causing the caretaker to have a stroke and lose control of the vehicle at high speed.
For the first time since the truck-stop restaurant, the boy is losing confidence in his ability to be Curtis Hammond. Lacking adequate self-assurance, no fugitive can maintain a credible deception. Perfect poise is the key to survival. There you have Mother’s wisdom as pure as it gets.
Gabby is ranting again, and the Mercury Mountaineer shudders and groans like a space shuttle blasting into orbit, and in spite of all the uproar, something that the caretaker said a moment ago makes a connection in Curtis’s mind to another misunderstanding earlier in the evening. A small illumination follows, and Curtis desperately seizes upon his sudden insight to try to change the direction of the conversation and to reestablish the far-friendlier tone that existed between them such a short while ago.
According to the movies, most Americans strive always to better their lives and to improve themselves, and because movies provide reliable information, Curtis interrupts Gabby’s blustering with the intention of offering a vocabulary lesson for which the caretaker will no doubt be grateful. “Sir, the reason I was confused is you weren’t pronouncing it properly. You meant testicles!”
Every look of surprise that heretofore made such dramatic use of the caretaker’s highly expressive face is as nothing to the brow-corrugating, eyebrow-steepling, eye-popping, wrinkle-stretching, beard-frizzling astonishment that now possesses his features.