by Dean Koontz
Bluebolt thundered along the rails. It was stormy where David now traveled, but he could not hear the thunder. The rails were not in the best condition, corroded dangerously, and the train's own noise cancelled out the uproar of the elements.
He watched the track ahead with interest, but with little fear. If he were to die now, it would not be exceedingly difficult to accept, for he had been living on borrowed time for quite a while.
Lightning flashed in the heavens, streaked downward and touched the earth only several miles distance. The resultant play of shadows on the desert and the rails was lovely. David grinned and relaxed even farther into his chair.
The doors of the French Alpine Hotel stood open, and the snow had found its way inside. It drifted into the great lobby, over a pair of chairs that faced each other over a magazine table. Long white fingers grasped at the rug and clawed toward the plush couches. In the rear of the establishment, the delivery room, behind the kitchen, was as hoary as Methuselah, with great icicles hanging from the waterpipes and a blanket of snow across most of the floor.
Everything was quiet.
In the depths of the place, a pair of cats snuggled in a cellar corner, licking each other, wondering for the thousandth time why there were no guests any more . . .
Docanil the Hunter stood along the highway at the pass out of the desert valley. He had changed clothes to match the weather. Here was no place for a greatcoat He wore a light, porous suit of a fabric that resembled vinyl in appearance and cotton in comfort and to the touch. Between his shoulder blades was the clawed fist ringed with nails. He still wore gloves and boots, for the hands and feet of a Hunter are very sensitive.
"See anything?" Banalog asked from behind.
The Hunter did not respond.
"Perhaps they are already dead," Banalog suggested.
"We will soon go in," the Hunter said.
Banalog looked into the long desert beyond the rock pillars that flanked the highway at the end of the valley. He was almost selfish enough to hope that they were already dead. Alive, they might be forced to talk, to inform on him. And then the Hunter—Docanil or another, it hardly mattered—would be coming for him.
The tableau was broken as the lowering skies began to rip open and dump a fine sheet of rain on the thirsting land beneath. Docanil turned and hurried for the copter and the dryness inside. The rain was cold—and a Hunter is a sensitive creature.
High above the Earth, clouds of dust and debris, hurtled into the stratosphere by the nuclear blasts men had touched off in the last hours of the war, shifted and stretched into bands. The long streams of stones, dust, paper, wood chips, pottery shards, and other rubbish would circle the globe for weeks and possibly even months before finally settling onto the scorched surface of the planet from which they had come.
There were pieces of bone, too.
Circling above the earth.
Orbiting.
Slowly coming down again.
Chapter Sixteen
In the pulsing mass of amber flesh pressed against the plastiglass windscreen of the shuttlecraft, the Isolator formed an eye, one of the blue-white frosted orbs that had adorned its bat form only minutes earlier. It stared through the glass at Hulann and the boy where they hung in their straps, watching as its own flesh oozed inside where it could reach them at its leisure. It was as if they were suspended at the moment of Judgment on the final day of the world, hanging by a thread of time, knowing full well that the decision could only go against them.
"Can you start the shuttle?" Leo asked, cringing against his door as the yellowish jelly pressed more insistently into Hulann's side of the cabin, advancing quietly but steadily.
"It won't do any good. We can't go anywhere. It's got us trapped. For one thing, we're on our side against the cliff. Secondly, even if we were upright, its weight is enough to press us into immobility."
The glob of the Isolator already in the cabin was as large as Hulann's arm. It weaved in the air, before his face, like a snake rising from a charmer's basket. It did not, however, attack him. It seemed, instead, intent on going for Leo.
"Of course!" Hulann said, his voice suddenly miserable.
"What is it?"
"We couldn't understand why it didn't demolish the shuttle in its bat form. It couldn't. It's programmed never to hurt a naoli. If it had destroyed the car, I would have died as surely as you. The only way it could get to us was to get inside the cabin. It will kill you and leave me alone."
Suddenly, the Isolator began pouring through the metal and glass itself, threading its bulk through the molecules of the car and dripping inside from a hundred different places. In seconds, it would have enough of itself within the car to destroy the boy.
Frantically, Hulann considered starting the engines and hoping the abruptness of the action would cause the Isolator to draw back long enough for them to rock the car right-side-up and get out of there. But he knew such a strategem was pointless, for an Isolator could never be surprised. It was far too clever for that. The only way to beat the Isolator was to divide it into so many parts that none of them could carry enough group consciousness to move efficiently . . .
And he had the answer. In its wild rambling from one point to another, his overmind had discovered the only thing that might work. Hulann reached down, primed the engines, and reached for the switch.
"I thought you said that was useless," Leo said.
"It may be. But I've just realized that, since we're on our side, the Isolator is pressed up against the blades, perhaps meshed right in there with them."
Leo grinned. Hulann was amazed at the human's capacity for humor in such a dire circumstance.
He turned to the switch, twisted it, felt the engines cough. They did not catch.
The mass of amoeboid flesh within the car was half as large as Leo now and growing larger every second. It drew toward him, slopping over the seat, an amber pseu-dopod tentatively feeling in his direction.
Hulann hit the starter again.
The shuttlecraft groaned and shuddered. Then the blades stuttered, whirred, and burst into life, chopping through the huge mass of the Isolator's weapon, shredding it into thousands of minute pieces and scattering those across the sand in every direction.
The mass within the car jerked and twitched like an epileptic. It surged back toward the glass and the metal through which it had come. The Isolator was confused, perhaps even momentarily panicked. It pulled away from the glass, trying to heave itself free of the car. It merely succeeded in getting more of its bulk sucked into the whirling rotors where it was hacked into useless segments and tossed messily into the hot air.
"Rock the car!" Hulann shouted above the whine of the blades. "In time with me." He started swaying heavily back and forth, putting most of his force into the surges to his left.
Leo joined in, happier than ever.
The car leaned too far, at last, and crashed upright again, bouncing on its rubber rim, then leaping two feet above the sand as the air cushion buoyed it. Hulann leaned over the wheel, thrust his splayed foot into the wide band of the accelerator, and sent them slipping swiftly across the desert toward the road the bat thing had driven them from only a short time ago.
"What now?" Leo asked.
"We move fast," Hulann said. "With luck, we'll escape from this area before the Isolator can get another weapon after us."
"What about that?" Leo asked, pointing at a mound of quivering amber flesh on the floor between them.
"It's too small for the Isolator to control," Hulann said. "It's on its own now—brainless. We'll just endure it until we're out of the danger area. I don't want to waste time stopping and getting rid of it."
Leo pulled close to his door and watched the glob of flesh carefully, though it seemed quite as harmless as Hulann said it was.
Thirty minutes later, Hulann's spirits were tremendously revived. He was fairly certain the Isolator was not going to reach them now. It had more than likely suffered physical sho
ck when such a large portion of itself had been chopped into separate, uncontrollable entities by the blades of the shuttlecraft. If it had recovered from that by now, it would find it too late to manufacture a new weapon, he hoped. Ahead, a mile or two, laid the opening in the valley wall that, he imagined, was the end of the Isolator's domain. Beyond that, freedom . . .
Rising over the top of the rock wall was Docanil's copter, the blades like the wings of a dragonfly, mere blurs of gray against the lighter gray of the sky.
Hulann's foot strayed toward the brake, then slammed back into the accelerator once more. There was nothing to be gained by stopping. There might be equally little to gain by going on with the Hunter so near, but it was the only reasonable choice they had.
He looked at the boy. Leo looked back, shrugged his shoulders.
Hulann turned his attention back to the road, steering for the pillars of rock and what had once been freedom but was now only more fear, uncertainty, and anguish.
The copter angled down toward them, seeming to gain sped as it approached, although that was the illusion of their mutual rush toward each other. Behind the bubble window, the shapes of two naoli could be seen. One of them was Docanil, the other the traumatist Banalog. Even from here, Hulann fancied he could see the grin splitting the heavy features of the Hunter as the creature smelled its pry.
Closer . . .
Hulann waited for the discharge of a missile that would blast the two of them and the shuttlecraft across a mile of bleached and arid sand.
Then, without apparent reason, the copter made a steep climb and a vicious turn to its right, up and away from them. Even as Hulann was puzzling over the manuever, the huge bat form swept over them, low, passing with a furious wind in its wake, and slid by the helicopter with too little safety margin. Had Docanil not rose and banked, the Isolator's second weapon would have struck him head-on. As it was, the blades of the Hunter's machine sliced into the pulpy flesh of the Proteus creature and stuttered to a complete halt. The helicopter listed, groaned as the Hunter attempted to start the engines again, and fell thirty feet to the desert floor.
In its anxiousness to get the boy before the shuttlecraft passed into lands beyond its control, the Isolator had carelessly bungled the Hunter's almost certain chance to destroy them. Now they slid out of the valley and into more desert, past the last of the beast's monitoring posts. Behind, the gigantic bat form glided back and forth in the sky, looking mournfully beyond the confines of its operating limits.
Leo began laughing heartily, bent over, his small face red, tears streaming down his face.
"It was very close," Hulann said.
Leo merely continued to laugh, and soon the sound of his mirth brought a twisted smile to the alien's features. They slid across the earth, punctuating the sound of the blades beneath them with bursts of their own hilarity.
Six hours later, Docanil debarked from his battered copter beside Hulann's abandoned shuttlecar. The fury within his mind was almost greater than he could contain. His fingers twitched, and he longed to see the flames leaping from his fingers and devouring the fugitives, longed to see them twisting, writhing, turning black as they died in extreme agony. And he yet might have the opportunity to enjoy that spectacle. They probably thought the copter had been totally demolished and that he had to wait for another. They would not be expecting him so close on their trail.
"They aren't here?" Banalog asked, descending from the helicopter.
Docanil did not respond. He looked up and down the twin steel railroad lines, speculating. He examined the rails with his superb vision, calculated from the brake markings which way the train had been coming from and which way it had gone after it had picked up its two new passengers. He could not conceive of who might be driving it. But he would soon find out.
He looked West, grinned tightly. If possible, his orders had said, he was to return Hulann and the human alive so that traumatists might examine them. Yet Docanil the Hunter knew it was going to have to be death for them. There was no other recourse to alleviate his fury. Death . . . It was just going to have to be ...
Inside the glass ball, floating in the darkness and heat above the pulsing mother mass, a naoli and a human boy, each no larger than a man's hand, danced through flickering orange flames. They were in intense pain as the Isolator increased the pressure in the globe to the point where their eardrums burst and their noses bled. Yet, far past the point where they should have been dead, they lived and suffered.
The Isolator saw to that.
The boy fell to his knees and curled into a foetal position to try to cradle the pain and make it easier to bear.
The Isolator jerked him erect.
The Isolator increased the pressure.
The naoli's eyes began to bleed.
The two creatures within the glass were screaming.
The Isolator changed the fire within the shell from flickering orange and red to the more intense and more acidic licking tongue of emerald. The flesh of the two miniature creatures took on a green glow. As the gnome had done before them, they began to melt . . .
They clawed frantically at the glass.
The Isolator had given them intelligence and emotions of a sort, in order to make the torturing more enjoyable.
They dissolved.
They became quivering pieces of flesh.
The Isolator maintained their consciousness even to this point, thrusting them through wave after wave of excruciating horror and pain.
Then it abruptly dropped the ball into its mass and digested it. There was no fun in such games. Not really. It could not strike from its mind that it had failed on the real mission. But who would ever have expected a naoli to work against it? It had been expecting help from the lizard that was with the human—and had received only hindrance.
It burbled in the tank. It was restless.
A glass ball rose out of its pudding-like mass and hovered in the darkness. Inside was a gnome, dancing and gibbering on milky threads, laughing happily to itself.
Chapter Seventeen
When Hulann leaned over David's shoulder to watch the young man programming the train's complex computers on the simple keyboard, the human jumped in the command chair as if struck by a bullet, his entire body convulsing in what must have been, at least, a slightly painful spasm. His face drained to the color of dry sand bleached by the sun, and his eyes were circles stamped out by a die-press. Hulann stepped backwards, shuffling his large feet, then went to the side window to look at the passing scenery.
"I told you that he wouldn't harm us. He's our friend," Leo said impatiently.
David looked sheepishly at Hulann's back; he swallowed hard. "I'm sorry," he said.
Hulann nonchalantly waved a hand to indicate that the incident had been of no import. He could hardly expect a grown man, conditioned by twenty years and more of anti-naoli propaganda, to respond to him as quickly and as easily as an eleven-year-old boy whose mind was still fresh and open to changes of every magnitude. He remembered how reluctant he had been to touch Leo in that cellar when the boy had needed his leg wound dressed. How much harder it must be, then, for one of the defeated race to get accustomed to the presence of one of those responsible for the death of his kind.
"Why don't you sit down?" David asked. "I get jumpy; but it's the truth—when you're parading around behind me like that."
"Can't sit comfortably," Hulann explained.
"What?" David asked.
"His tail," Leo said. "Your chairs here don't have any holes in them to let his tail hang out. A naoli has a very sensitive tail. It hurts them just to sit on it."
"I didn't know."
"So he has to stand," Leo said.
Confused, David returned to the keyboard and finished typing his instructions to the computer. Yesterday, such a short time ago, he had been serene, content to flee from the enemy in his swift-wheeled magic wagon; today, he was ferrying a naoli across the country and was no longer certain he could tell an enemy from
a friend. It had begun yesterday when he had watched, from the corner of his eye, what seemed to be a shuttle pacing the train, yet attempting to remain concealed.
Near dusk, he came to a place where debris clogged the tracks and was forced to stop the Bluebolt and examine the disaster before trying to nose through it.
The blockage was a mangled trio of shattered shuttle-craft. On every side, the country was littered with dilapidated and decaying machines. People had congregated here as they had in all the "wild" areas of the world, seeking to escape the burning, exploding, crumbling, alien-infested cities where the major battles roared. But the naoli had come here too. It had only taken a little longer. And in trying to escape at any cost, the shuttle drivers had collided as in this tangled despair. David did not look too closely at the mess, for fear he would see skeletons that had once been drivers, bony fingers clutching wheels, and empty eye sockets staring through shattered glass.
When he finally determined that he could move the wreckage with the engine's cowbumper and proceed on his way, he turned to board the Bluebolt again—and came face-to-face with a naoli!
His first instinct was to go for a weapon, though he had nothing lethal and was not the type to use a gun even if he had possessed one. The second instinct was to run; however, he saw the young boy then, and the boy showed no fear—he did not seem to be stupefied by drugs. Having hesitated this short moment longer, he found it was too late to run. They both babbled excitedly at him, trying to state their case and falling all over each other in their verbal confusion. He listened to them, numb, disbelieving at first, then being won over by the story of the Hunter-Spacer correlation. The naoli had thought spacers were typical of all humans. It was just absurd, just hideously comical enough to be true.
Their shuttlecraft was seriously depleted in power stores and had no way to recharge. They proposed that the three of them ride the Bluebolt since the train could make better speed anyway. They assumed David was going to the Haven—though he found it difficult to comprehend that Hulann's destination was the same.