by Dean Koontz
The young, red-haired killer stood in the doorway, looking even more terrified than Christine felt. He was gibbering senselessly. His hands were shaking worse than hers. Snot hung from one of his nostrils, but he seemed unaware of it.
She pointed the pistol at him, pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The safety was on.
The assassin seemed startled to find her armed. His shotgun was empty again. He dropped it and pulled a revolver from the waistband of his trousers.
She heard herself saying, “No, no, no, no, no,” in a chant of pure fear as she fumbled for the two safeties on the pistol. She snapped off both of them, pulled the trigger again and again and again.
The thunder of her own gunfire, booming off the walls around her, was the sweetest sound she’d ever heard.
The intruder went to his knees as the bullets ripped into him, then sprawled on his face. The revolver fell out of his limp hand.
Joey was crying.
Christine cautiously approached the body. Blood was soaking into the carpet around it. With one foot she prodded the man. He was dead weight.
She went to the door, looked into the shadowy hall, which was littered with fragments of the stairway railing and splinters of glass from the light fixture that had been struck by shotgun pellets. The carpet was spotted with blood from the dead gunman’s bitten leg; he had left a trail from the head of the stairs.
She listened. No one moved or spoke downstairs. There were no footsteps.
Had there been just two assassins?
She wondered how many bullets she had left. The magazine held ten. She thought she had fired five. Five left.
Joey’s sobbing subsided. “M-Mom?”
“Sshhh,” she said.
They both listened.
Wind. Thunder. Rain on the roof, tapping the windows.
Four men dead. That realization hit her, and she felt nausea uncoiling in her stomach. The house was a slaughtering pen, a graveyard.
Wind-stirred, a tree branch scraped against the house.
Inside, the funereal silence deepened.
Finally she looked at Joey.
He was bleached white. His hair hung in his face. His eyes looked haunted. In a moment of terror, he had bitten his lip, and a thread of blood had sewn a curving red seam down his chin, along his jawline, and part of the way down his neck. As always, she was shocked by the sight of his blood. However, considering what had almost happened to him, this injury could be borne.
The cemetery stillness lost its cold grip on the night. Outside, along the street, there were shouts, not of anger but of fear and curiosity, as neighbors at last ventured out of their homes. In the distance, a siren swelled.
PART THREE
The Hounds
Satan hasn’t a single salaried helper;
the Opposition employs a million.
—Mark Twain
The hounds, the hounds
come baying at his heels.
The hounds, the hounds!
The breath of death he feels.
—The Book of Counted Sorrows
26
As the authorities went about their work, Christine and Joey waited in the kitchen because that was one of the few rooms in the house that wasn’t splashed with blood.
Christine had never seen so many policemen in one place before. Her house was crowded with uniformed men, plainclothes detectives, police lab technicians, a police photographer, a coroner and his assistant. Initially, she had welcomed the lawmen because their presence gave her a feeling of security, at last. But after a while she wondered if one of them might be a follower of Mother Grace and the Church of the Twilight. That notion didn’t seem far-fetched. In fact, the logical assumption was that a militant religious cult, determined to force its views upon society at large, would make a special point of planting its people in various law-enforcement agencies and converting those who were already employed in that capacity. She remembered Officer Wilford, the born-again Christian who had disapproved of her language and manner of dress, and she wondered if perhaps Grace Spivey had been the midwife of his “rebirth.”
Paranoia.
But considering the situation, perhaps a measure of paranoia was not a sign of mental illness; maybe, instead, it was prudent, a necessity for survival.
As rain continued to spatter the windows and as thunder shoved its way roughly through the night outside, she watched the cops warily, regarded each unusual move with suspicion. She realized that she couldn’t go through the rest of her life distrusting everyone; that would require a constant watchfulness and a level of tension that would utterly drain her physical, emotional, and mental energies. It would be like living a life entirely on a high wire. For the moment, however, she couldn’t relax; she remained on guard, alert, her muscles half tensed, ready to spring at anyone who made a threatening move toward Joey.
Again, the boy’s resiliency surprised her. When the police had first arrived, he had seemed to be in shock. His eyes had been glazed, and he hadn’t been willing or able to speak. The sight of so much bloody violence and the threat of death had left a mark on him that, for a while, had seemed disturbingly profound. She knew this experience would scar him for life; there was no escaping that. But for a time she had been afraid that the harrowing events of the past couple of hours would render him catatonic or precipitate some other dangerous form of psychological withdrawal. But eventually he had come out of it, and she had encouraged him by getting his battery-powered Pac-Man game and playing it with him. The electronic Pac-Man musical theme and the beeping sounds made by the cookiegobbling yellow circle on the game board made a bizarre counterpoint to the grimness of murder and the seriousness of the homicide investigation being conducted around them.
Joey’s recovery had also been helped by Chewbacca’s miraculous recovery from the blow to the head that one of the assassins had delivered with the butt of a shotgun. The dog had been knocked unconscious, and his scalp had been skinned a bit, but the mild bleeding had stopped in response to pressure which Christine applied with antiseptic pads. There were no signs of concussion. Now the pooch was almost as good as new, and he stayed close to them, lying on the floor by Joey’s chair, occasionally rising and looking up at the Pac-Man game, cocking his head, trying to figure out what the noisy device was.
She was no longer so sure that this dog’s strong resemblance to Brandy was a bad thing. To endure the horror and turmoil, Joey needed reminders of more placid times, and he needed a sense of continuity that, like a bridge, would let him cross this period of chaos with his wits intact. Chewbacca, largely because of his resemblance to Brandy, could serve both those functions.
Charlie Harrison was in and out of the kitchen every ten or fifteen minutes, checking up on them and on the two new bodyguards he had stationed with them. One man, George Swarthout, sat on a tall stool by the kitchen phone, drinking coffee, watching Joey, watching the police who came in and out, watching Christine as she watched the police. The other, Vince Fields, was outside on the patio, guarding the rear approach to the house. It wasn’t likely that any of Grace Spivey’s people would launch a second attack while the house was swarming with cops, but the possibility couldn’t be ruled out altogether. After all, kamikaze missions had a certain popularity with religious fanatics.
On each of his visits to the kitchen, Charlie kidded with Joey, played a game of Pac-Man, scratched behind Chewbacca’s ears, and did whatever he could to lift the boy’s spirits and keep his mind off the carnage in the rest of the house. When the police wanted to question Christine, Charlie stayed with Joey and sent her into another room, so the boy wouldn’t have to listen to such gruesome talk. They wanted to question Joey, too, but Charlie managed their interrogation of the boy and kept it to a minimum. Christine realized that it wasn’t easy for him to be such a rock, such a font of good spirits; he had lost two of his men, not only employees but friends. She was grateful that he seemed determined to conceal his own horror,
tension, and grief for Joey’s sake.
At eleven o’clock, just as Joey was tiring of Pac-Man, Charlie came in, pulled up a chair to the kitchen table, sat down, and said, “Those suitcases you packed this morning—”
“Still in my car.”
“I’ll have them put in mine. Go pack whatever else you might need for . . . say . . . a week. We’ll be leaving here as soon as you’re ready.”
“Where are we going?”
“I’d rather not tell you just now. We could be overheard.”
Had he, too, considered the possibility that one of Grace Spivey’s people might be working as a cop? Christine wasn’t sure whether his paranoia made her feel better or worse.
Joey said, “We gonna hole up in a hideout somewhere?”
“Yep,” Charlie said. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
Joey frowned. “The witch has magic radar. She’ll find us.”
“Not where I’m taking you,” Charlie said. “We’ve had a sorcerer cast a spell on the place so she can’t detect it.”
“Yeah?” Joey said, leaning forward, fascinated. “You know a sorcerer?”
“Oh, don’t worry, he’s a good guy,” Charlie said. “He doesn’t do black magic or anything like that.”
“Well, sure,” the boy said. “I wouldn’t figure a private eye would work with an evil sorcerer.”
Christine had a hundred questions for Charlie, but she didn’t think it was a good idea to ask any of them in front of Joey and perhaps disturb his fragile equilibrium. She went upstairs, where the coroner was overseeing the removal of the red-haired killer’s body, and she packed another suitcase. Downstairs, in Joey’s room, she packed a second case for him, then, after a brief hesitation, stuffed some of his favorite toys in another bag.
She was gripped and shaken by the unsettling feeling that she would never see this house again.
Joey’s bed, the Star Wars posters on his wall, his collection of plastic action figures and spaceships seemed slightly faded, as if they were not really here, as if they were objects in a photograph. She touched the bedpost, touched an E.T. doll, put a hand to the cool surface of the blackboard that stood in one corner, and she could feel those things beneath her fingers, but still, somehow, they didn’t seem real anymore. It was a strange, cold, augural feeling that left a hollowness within her.
No, she thought. I’ll be back. Of course I will.
But the feeling of loss remained with her as she walked out of her son’s room.
Chewbacca was taken out first and put into the green Chevy.
Then, in raincoats, shepherded by Charlie and his men, they left the house, and Christine shuddered when the cold, stinging rain struck her face.
Newspapermen, television camera teams, and a van from an all-news radio station awaited them. Powerful camera lights snapped on as soon as Christine and Joey appeared. Reporters jostled one another for the best position, and all of them spoke at once:
“Mrs. Scavello—”
“—a moment, please—”
“—just one question—”
She squinted as the lights lanced painfully at her eyes.
“—who would want to kill you and—”
“—is this a drug case—”
She held Joey tightly. Kept moving.
“—do you—”
“—can you—”
Microphones bristled at her.
“—have you—”
“—will you—”
A kaleidoscope of strange faces formed and reformed in front of her, some in shadow, some unnaturally pale and bright in the backsplash of the camera lights.
“—tell us what it feels like to live through—”
She got a glimpse of the familiar face of a man from KTLA’s “Ten O’clock News.”
“—tell us—”
“—what—”
“—how—”
“—why—”
“—terrorists or whatever they were?”
Cold rain trickled under the collar of her coat.
Joey was squeezing her hand very hard. The newsmen were scaring him.
She wanted to scream at them to get away, stay away, shut up.
They crowded closer.
Jabbered at her.
She felt as if she were making her way through a pack of hungry animals.
Then, in the crush and babble, an unfamiliar and unfriendly face loomed: a man in his fifties, with gray hair and bushy gray eyebrows. He had a gun.
No!
Christine couldn’t get her breath. She felt a terrible weight on her chest.
It couldn’t be happening again. Not so soon. Surely, they wouldn’t attempt murder in front of all these witnesses. This was madness.
Charlie saw the weapon and pushed Christine and Joey out of the way.
At that same instant, a newswoman also saw the threat and tried to chop the gun out of the assailant’s hand, but took a bullet in the thigh for her trouble.
Madness.
People screamed, and cops yelled, and everyone dropped to the rain-soaked ground, everyone but Christine and Joey, who ran toward the green Chevy, flanked by Vince Fields and George Swarthout. She was twenty feet from the car when something tugged at her, and pain flashed along her right side, just above the hip, and she knew she had been shot, but she didn’t go down, didn’t even stumble on the rain-slick sidewalk, just plunged ahead, gasping for breath, heart pounding so hard that each beat hurt her, and she held on to Joey, didn’t look back, didn’t know if the gunman was pursuing them, but heard a tremendous volley of shots, and then someone shouting, “Get me an ambulance!”
She wondered if Charlie had shot the assailant.
Or had Charlie been shot instead?
That thought almost brought her to a stop, but they were already at the Chevy.
George Swarthout yanked open the rear door of the car and shoved them inside, where Chewbacca was barking excitedly.
Vince Fields ran around to the driver’s door.
“On the floor!” Swarthout shouted. “Stay down!”
And then Charlie was there, piling in after them, half on top of them, shielding them.
The Chevy’s engine roared, and they pulled away from the curb with a shrill screeching of tires, rocketed down the street, away from the house, into the night and the rain, into a world that couldn’t have been more completely hostile if it had been an alien planet in another galaxy.
27
Kyle Barlowe dreaded taking the news to Mother Grace, although he supposed she had already learned about it through a vision.
He entered the back of the church and stood there for a while, filling the doorway between the narthex and the nave, his broad shoulders almost touching both jambs. He was gathering strength from the giant brass cross above the altar, from the Biblical scenes depicted in the stained-glass windows, from the reverent quietude, from the sweet smell of incense.
Grace sat alone, on the left side of the church, in the second pew from the front. If she heard Barlowe enter, she gave no indication that she knew he was with her. She stared straight ahead at the cross.
At last Barlowe walked down the aisle and sat beside her. She was praying. He waited for her to finish. Then he said, “The second attempt failed, too.”
“I know,” she said.
“What now?”
“We follow them.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.” She spoke softly at first, in a whisper he could barely hear, but gradually her voice rose and gained power and conviction, until it echoed eerily off the shadowhung walls of the nave. “We give them no peace, no rest, no haven, no quarter. We must be pitiless, relentless, unsleeping, unshakable. We will be hounds. The hounds of Heaven. We will bay at their heels, lunge for their throats, and bring them to ground, sooner or later, here or there, when God wills it. We shall win. I am sure of it.”
She had been staring intently at the cross as she spoke, but now she turned her colorless gra
y eyes on him, and as always he felt her gaze penetrating to the core of him, to his very soul.
He said, “What do you want me to do?”
“For now, go home. Sleep. Prepare yourself for the morning.”
“Aren’t we going after them again tonight?”
“First, we must find them.”
“How?”
“God will lead. Now go. Sleep.”
He stood, stepped into the aisle. “Will you sleep, too? You need your rest,” he said worriedly.
Her voice had faded to a reedy whisper once more, and there was exhaustion in it. “I can’t sleep, dear boy. An hour a night. Then I wake, and my mind is filled with visions, with messages from the angels, contacts from the spirit world, with worries and fears and hopes, with glimpses of the promised land, scenes of glory, with the awful weight of the responsibilities God has settled upon me.” She wiped at her mouth with the back of one hand. “How I wish I could sleep, how I long for sleep, for surcease from all these demands and anxieties! But He has transformed me so that I can function without sleep during this crisis. I will not sleep well again until the Lord wills it. For reasons I don’t understand, He needs me awake, insists upon it, gives me the strength to endure without sleep, keeps me alert, almost too alert.” Her voice was shaking, and Barlowe imagined it was both awe and fear that put the tremor in it. “I tell you, dear Kyle, it’s both glorious and terrible, wonderful and frightful, exhilarating and exhausting to be the instrument of God’s will.”
She opened her purse, withdrew a handkerchief, and blew her nose. Suddenly she noticed that the hankie was stained brown and yellow, disgustingly knotted and crusted with dried snot.
“Look at this,” she said, indicating the handkerchief.
“It’s horrible. I used to be so neat. So clean. My husband, bless his soul, always said my house was cleaner than a hospital operating room. And I was always very conscious of grooming; I dressed well. And I never would have carried a revolting handkerchief like this, never, not before the Gift was given to me and crowded out so many ordinary thoughts.” Tears glimmered in her gray eyes. “Sometimes . . . I’m frightened . . . grateful to God for the Gift, yes . . . grateful for what I’ve gained . . . but frightened about what I’ve lost . . .”