by Dean Koontz
She stripped the sheets off the body and buried those, but she didn’t dig a grave for the cadaver itself because she hoped that night scavengers and vultures would pick the bones clean quicker if it was left exposed. Once the denizens of the desert had chewed and pecked the soft pads of Vince’s fingers, once the sun and the carrion eaters got done with him, his identity might be deduced only by dental records. Since Vince had rarely seen a dentist, and never the same one twice, there were no records for the police to consult. With luck, the corpse would go undiscovered until the next rainy season, when the withered remains would be washed miles and miles away, tumbled and broken and mixed up with piles of other refuse, until they had essentially disappeared.
That night Janet packed what little they owned and drove away in the old Dodge with Danny She was not even sure where she was going until she had crossed the state line and driven all the way to Orange County. That had to be her final destination because she couldn’t afford to spend more money on gasoline just to get farther away from the dead man in the desert.
No one back in Tucson would wonder what had happened to Vince. He was a shiftless drifter, after all. Cutting loose and moving on was a way of life to him.
But Janet was deathly afraid to apply for welfare or any form of assistance. They might ask her where her husband was, and she didn’t trust her ability to lie convincingly.
Besides, in spite of carrion-eaters and the dehydrating ferocity of the Arizona sun, maybe someone had stumbled across Vince’s body before it had become unidentifiable. If his widow and son surfaced in California, seeking government aid, perhaps connections would be made deep in a computer, prompting an alert social worker to call the cops. Considering her tendency to succumb to anyone who exerted authority over her—a deeply ingrained trait that had been only slightly ameliorated by the murder of her husband—Janet had little chance of undergoing police scrutiny without incriminating herself.
Then they would take Danny away from her.
She could not allow that. Would not.
On the streets, homeless but for the rusted and rattling Dodge, Janet Marco discovered that she had a talent for survival. She was not stupid; she had just never before had the freedom to exercise her wits. From a society whose refuse could feed a significant portion of the Third World, she clawed a degree of precarious security, feeding herself and her son with recourse to a charity kitchen for the fewest possible meals.
She learned that fear, in which she had long been steeped, did not have to immobilize her. It could also motivate.
The breeze had grown cool and had stiffened into an erratic wind. The rumble of thunder was still far away but louder than when Janet had first heard it. Only a sliver of blue sky remained to the east, fading as fast as hope usually did.
After mining two blocks of trash containers, Janet and Danny’ headed back to the Dodge with Woofer in the lead.
More than halfway there, the dog suddenly stopped and cocked his head to listen for something else above the fluting of the wind and the chorus of whispery voices that were stirred from the agitated eucalyptus leaves. He grumbled and seemed briefly puzzled, then turned and looked past Janet. He bared his teeth, and the grumble sharpened into a low growl.
She knew what had drawn the dog’s attention. She didn’t have to look.
Nevertheless she was compelled to turn and confront the menace for Danny’s sake if not her own. The Laguna Beach cop, that cop, was about eight feet away.
He was smiling, which is how it always started with him. He had an appealing smile, a kind face, and beautiful blue eyes.
As always, there was no squad car, no indication of how he had arrived in the alleyway. It was as if he had been lying in wait for her among the peeling trunks of the eucalyptuses, clairvoyantly aware that her scavenging would bring her to this alley at this hour on this very day.
“How’re you, Ma’am?” he asked. His voice was initially gentle, almost musical.
Janet didn’t answer.
The first time he approached her last week, she had responded timidly, nervously, averting her eyes, as excruciatingly respectful of authority as she had been all her life—except for that one bloody night outside of Tucson. But she had quickly discovered that he was not what he appeared to be, and that he preferred a monologue to a dialogue.
“Looks like we’re in for a little rain,” he said, glancing up at the troubled sky.
Danny had moved against Janet. She put her free arm around him, pulling him even closer. The boy was shivering.
She was shivering, too. She hoped Danny didn’t notice.
The dog continued to bare his teeth and growl softly.
Lowering his gaze from the stormy sky to Janet again, the cop spoke in that same lilting voice: “Okay, no more farting around. Time to have some real fun. So what’s going to happen now is… you’ve got till dawn. Understand? Hmmmmm? At dawn, I’m going to kill you and your boy.”
His threat did not surprise Janet. Anyone with authority over her had always been as a god, but always a savage god, never benign. She expected violence, suffering, and imminent death. She would have been surprised only by an exhibition of kindness from someone with power over her, for kindness was infinitely rarer than hatred and cruelty.
In fact, her fear, already nearly paralyzing, might have been made even greater only by that unlikely show of kindness. Kindness would have seemed, to her, nothing more than an attempt to mask some unimaginably evil motive.
The cop was still smiling, but his freckled, Irish face was no longer friendly. It was chillier than the coolish air coming off the sea in advance of the storm.
“Did you hear me, you dumb bitch?”
She said nothing.
“Are you thinking that you ought to run, get out of town, maybe go up to L.A. where I can’t find you?”
She was thinking something rather like that, either Los Angeles or south to San Diego.
“Yes, please, try to run,” he encouraged. “That’ll make it more fun for me. Run, resist. Wherever you go, I’ll find you, but it’ll be a lot more exciting that way.”
Janet believed him. She had been able to escape her parents, and she had escaped Vince by killing him, but now she had come up against not merely another of the many gods of fear who had ruled her but the God of fear whose powers exceeded understanding.
His eyes were changing, darkening from blue to electric green.
Wind suddenly gusted strongly through the alley, whipping dead leaves and a few scraps of paper ahead of it.
The cop’s eyes had become so radiantly green, there seemed to be a light source behind them, a fire within his skull. And the pupils had changed, too, until they were elongated and strange like those of a cat.
The dog’s growl became a frightened whine.
In the nearby ravine the eucalyptus trees shook in the wind, and their soft soughing grew into a roar like that of an angry mob.
It seemed to Janet that the creature masquerading as a cop had commanded the wind to rise to lend more drama to his threat, though surely he did not have so much power as that.
“When I come for you at sunrise, I’ll break open your bodies, eat your hearts.”
His voice had changed as completely as had his eyes. It was deep, gravelly, the malevolent voice of something that belonged in Hell.
He took a step toward them.
Janet backed up two steps, pulling Danny along. Her heart was hammering so hard, she knew her tormentor could hear it.
The dog also retreated, alternately whining and growling, his tail tucked between his legs.
“At dawn, you sorry bitch. You and your snot-nosed little brat. Sixteen hours. Only sixteen hours, bitch. Ticktock… ticktock… ticktock….”
The wind died in an instant. The whole world fell silent. No rustling of trees. No distant thunder.
A twig, bristling with half a dozen long eucalyptus leaves, hung in the air a few inches to her right and a foot in front of her face. It was motionless, a
bandoned by the whooping wind that had supported it, but still magically suspended like the dead scorpion in the souvenir acrylic paperweight that Vince had once bought at an Arizona truckstop.
The cop’s freckled face stretched and bulged with amazing elasticity, like a rubber mask behind which a great pressure had been exerted. His green, catlike eyes appeared ready to pop out of his wildly deformed skull.
Janet wanted to run for the car, her haven, home, lock the door, safe in their home, and drive like hell, but couldn’t do it, dared not turn her back on him. She knew she would be brought down and torn apart in spite of the promised sixteen-hour headstart, because he wanted her to watch his transformation, demanded it, and would be furious if ignored.
The powerful were intensely proud of their power. The gods of fear needed to preen and to be admired, to see how their power humbled and terrified those who were powerless before them.
The cop’s distended face melted, his features running together, eyes liquefying into red pools of hot oil, the oil soaking into his doughy cheeks until he was eyeless, nose sliding into his mouth, lips spreading out across his chin and cheeks, then no chin or cheeks any more, just an oozing mass. But his waxlike flesh didn’t steam or drip to the ground, so the presence of heat was probably an illusion.
Maybe all of it was an illusion, hypnosis. That would explain a lot, raise new questions, yes, but explain a lot.
His body was pulsing, writhing, changing inside his clothes. Then his clothes were dissolving into his body, as if they had never been real clothes but just another part of him. Briefly the new form he assumed was covered with matted black fur: an immense elongated head began taking shape on a powerful neck, hunched and gnarled shoulders, baleful yellow eyes, a ferocity of wicked teeth and two-inch claws, a movie werewolf.
On each of the four previous occasions this thing had appeared before her, it had manifested itself differently, as if to impress her with its repertoire. But she was unprepared for what it became now. It relinquished the wolf incarnation even before that body had completely taken form, and assumed a human guise once more, though not the cop. Vince. Even though the facial features were less than half developed, she believed it was going to become her dead husband. The dark hair was the same, the shape of the forehead, the color of one malevolent pale eye.
The resurrection of Vince, buried beneath Arizona sands for the past year, shook Janet more than anything else the creature had done or become, and at last she cried out in fear. Danny screamed, too, and clung even more tightly to her.
The dog did not have the fickle heart of a stray. He stopped whining and responded as if he had been with them since he was a pup. He bared his teeth, snarled, and snapped at the air in warning.
Vince’s face remained less than half formed, but his body took shape, and he was naked as he had been when she had overwhelmed him in his sleep. In his throat, chest, and belly, she thought she saw the wounds left by the kitchen knife with which she had killed him: gaping gashes that were bloodless, but dark and raw and terrible.
Vince raised one arm, reaching toward her.
The dog attacked. Collarless life on the streets had not left Woofer weak or sickly. He was a strong, well-muscled animal, “and when he launched himself at the apparition, he seemed to take flight as readily as a bird.
His snarl was clipped off, and he was miraculously halted in midair, body in the arc of attack, as if he were only an image on a videotape after someone pushed the “pause” button. Flash-frozen. Foamy slaver shone like frost on his black lips and in the fur around his muzzle, and his teeth gleamed as coldly as rows of small sharp icicles.
The eucalyptus twig, clothed in silvery-green leaves, hung unsupported to Janet’s right, the dog to her left. The atmosphere seemed to have crystallized, trapping Woofer for eternity in his moment of courage, yet Janet was able to breathe when she remembered to try.
Still half-formed, Vince stepped toward her, passing the dog.
She turned and ran, pulling Danny with her, expecting to freeze in mid-step. What would it feel like? Would darkness fall over her when she was paralyzed or would she still be able to see Vince walk into view from behind her and come eye to eye again? Would she drop into a well of silence or be able to hear the dead man’s hateful voice? Feel the pain of each blow that he rained on her or be as insensate as the levitated eucalyptus twig?
Like flood waters, a tide of wind roared through the alleyway, nearly knocking her over. The world was filled with sound again.
She spun around and looked back in time to see Woofer return to life in midair and finish his interrupted leap. But there was no longer anyone for him to attack. Vince was gone. The dog landed on the pavement, slipped, skidded, rolled over, and sprang to his feet again, snapping his head around in fear and confusion, looking for his prey as if it had vanished before his eyes.
Danny was crying.
The threat seemed to have passed. The backstreet was deserted but for Janet, her boy, and the dog. Nevertheless, she hurried Danny toward the car, eager to get away, glancing repeatedly at the brush-filled ravine and at the deep shadows between the huge trees as she passed them, half expecting the troll to climb out of its lair again, ready to feed on their hearts sooner than it had promised.
Lightning flickered. The roar of thunder was louder and closer than before.
The air smelled of the rain to come. That ozone taint reminded Janet of the stink of hot blood.
8
Harry Lyon was sitting at a corner table at the rear of the burger restaurant, clasping a water glass in his right hand, his left hand fisted on his thigh. Now and then he took a sip of water, and each sip seemed colder than the one before it, as if the glass absorbed a chill, instead of heat, from his hand.
His gaze traveled over the toppled furniture, ruined plants, broken glass, scattered food, and congealing blood. Nine wounded had been carried away, but two dead bodies lay where they had fallen. A police photographer and lab technicians were at work.
Harry was aware of the room and the people in it, the periodic flash of the camera, but what he saw more clearly was the remembered moon face of the perpetrator peering down at him through the tangled limbs of the mannequins. The parted lips wet with blood. The twin windows of his eyes and the view of Hell beyond.
Harry was no less surprised to be alive now than when they had pulled the dead man and the department-store dummies off him. His stomach still ached dully where the plaster hand of the mannequin had poked into him with the full weight of the perp behind it. He’d thought he’d been shot. The perp had fired twice at close range, but evidently both rounds had been deflected by the intervening plaster torsos and limbs.
Of the five rounds that Harry had fired, at least three had done major damage.
Plainclothes detectives and techs passed in and out of the nearby, bullet-torn kitchen door, on their way to or from the second floor and attic. Some spoke to him or clapped him on the shoulder.
“Good work, Harry.”
“Harry, you okay?”
“Nice job, man.”
“You need anything, Harry?”
“Some shitstorm, huh, Harry?”
He murmured “thanks” or “yes” or “no” or just shook his head. He wasn’t ready for conversation with any of them, and he certainly wasn’t ready to be a hero.
A crowd had gathered outside, pressing eagerly against police barriers, gawking through both broken and unbroken windows. He tried to ignore them because too many of them seemed to resemble the perp, their eyes shining with a fever glaze and their pleasant everyday faces unable to conceal strange hungers.
Connie came through the swinging door from the kitchen, righted an overturned chair, and sat at the table with him. She held a small notebook from which she read. “His name was James Ordegard. Thirty-one. Unmarried. Lived in Laguna. Engineer. No police record. Not even a traffic citation.”
“What’s his connection with this place? Ex-wife, girlfriend work here?”
“Carrying a suicide note?”
“Nope. Looks like random violence.”
“They talk to anyone where he works?”
She nodded. “They’re stunned. He was a good worker, happy—”
“The usual model citizen.”
“That’s what they say.”
The photographer took a few more shots of the nearest corpse—a woman in her thirties. The strobe flashes were jarringly bright, and Harry realized that the day beyond the windows had grown overcast since he and Connie had come in for lunch.
“He have friends, family?” Harry asked.
“We have names, but we haven’t talked to them yet. Neighbors either.” She closed the notebook. “How you doin‘?”
“I’ve been better.”
“How’s your gut?”
“Not bad, almost normal. It’ll be a lot worse tomorrow. Where the hell did he get the grenades?”
She shrugged. “We’ll find out.”
The third grenade, dropped through the attic trapdoor into the room below, had caught a Laguna Beach officer by surprise. He was now in Hoag Hospital, desperately clinging to life.
“Grenades.” Harry was still disbelieving. “You ever hear anything like it?”
He was immediately sorry he had asked the question. He knew it would get her started on her favorite subject—the pre-millennium cotillion, the continuing crisis of these new Dark Ages.
Connie frowned and said, “Ever hear anything like it? Not like, maybe, but just as bad, worse, lots worse. Last year in Nashville, a woman killed her handicapped boyfriend by setting his wheelchair on fire.”
Harry sighed.
She said, “Eight teenagers in Boston raped and killed a woman. You know what their excuse was? They were bored. Bored. The city was at fault, you see, for doing so little to provide kids with free leisure activities.”
He glanced at the people crowding the crime-scene barriers beyond the front windows—then quickly averted his eyes.
He said, “Why do you collect these nuggets?”
“Look, Harry, it’s the Age of Chaos. Get with the times.”
“Maybe I’d rather be an old fogey.”
“To be a good cop in the nineties, you’ve gotta be of the nineties. You gotta be in sync with the rhythms of destruction. Civilization is coming down around our ears. Everyone wants a license, no one wants responsibility, so the center won’t hold. You’ve gotta know when to break a rule to save the system—and how to surf on every random wave of madness that comes along.”
He just stared at her, which was easy enough, much easier than considering what she had said, because it scared him to think she might be right. He couldn’t consider it. Wouldn’t. Not right now, anyway. And the sight of her lovely face was a welcome distraction.
Although she did not measure up to the current American standard of ultimate gorgeousness set by beer-commercial bimbos on television, and though she did not possess the sweaty exotic allure of the female rock stars with mutant cleavage and eight pounds of stage makeup who unaccountably aroused a whole generation of young males, Connie Gulliver was attractive. At least Harry thought so. Not that he had any romantic interest in her. He did not. But he was a man, she was a woman, and they worked closely together, so it was natural for him to notice that her dark-brown-almost-black hair was beautifully thick with a silken luster though she cropped it short and combed it with her fingers. Her eyes were an odd shade of blue, violet when light struck them at a certain angle, and might have been irresistibly enticing if they had not been the watchful, suspicious eyes of a cop.
She was thirty-three, four years younger than Harry. In rare moments when she let her guard down, she looked twenty-five.
Most of the time, however, the dark wisdom acquired from police work made her seem older than she was.
“What’re you staring at?” she asked.
“Just wondering if you’re really as hard inside as you pretend to be.”
“You ought to know by now.”
“That’s just it—I ought to.”
“Don’t get Freudian on me, Harry.”
“I won’t.” He took a sip of water.
“One thing I like about you is, you don’t try to psychoanalyze everyone. All that stuff’s a load of crap.”
“I agree.”
He wasn’t surprised to find they shared an attitude. In spite of their many differences, they were enough alike to work well as partners. But because Connie avoided self-revelation, Harry had no idea whether they had arrived at their similar attitudes for similar— or totally opposed—reasons.
Sometimes it seemed important to understand why she held certain convictions. At other times Harry was equally sure that encouraging intimacy would lead to a