by Dean Koontz
His situation had improved in at least one respect: The air circulating under the van was not as stale and disgusting as that in the Chevrolet had been. He could smell wildflowers, the teasing scent of goldenrod, and the dusty aroma of the parched grass.
His nose itched. Tickled.
To his horror, he realized he was going to sneeze. He clamped one hand to his face, pinched his nose, but found he couldn’t stop the inevitable. He muffled the noise as best he could and waited with dread to be discovered.
But Roy didn’t come. He evidently hadn’t been close enough to hear.
Colin passed another couple of minutes under the truck, just to be safe, then slithered out. Roy was not in sight, but he could be hunkered down in any of a thousand pockets of darkness, waiting to strike.
Cautiously, Colin stole eastward through the cemetery of dead machinery. He ran in a crouch across the open spaces, lingered in the wreckage between until he was fairly certain that the next unprotected patch of ground was safe, then dashed on. When he was fifty or sixty yards from the delivery van where he had last seen Roy, he turned north, toward Hermit Hobson’s shack.
If only he could get to the bicycles while Roy was searching for him elsewhere, he would be able to escape. He would damage Roy’s bike—bend a wheel or something—and then leave on his own, confident that there could be no effective pursuit.
He reached the edge of the junkyard and huddled next to a demolished station wagon while he surveyed the deep pools of blackness that lay around Hobson’s shack. He saw the bicycles at the foot of the sagging porch steps, lying side by side where the grass was stunted and still a bit green, but he didn’t go straight to them. Roy might expect him to come back to this place; he might be concealed already in those shadows, tense, waiting to pounce. Colin stared hard at each trouble spot, looking for movement or the glint of an errant moonbeam on a shape that did not belong there. In time he was able to see through most of the dark pockets and to determine that they were uninhabited. But in a few small areas the night seemed to back up like river sludge; and in those puddles it was far too thick for the eye to penetrate it.
At last Colin decided that the possibility of escape outweighed the risk of going to the bicycles and making a target of himself. He stood, wiped sweat from his brow, and walked into the twenty-yard-wide band of open ground between the junkyard and the shack. Nothing moved in the darkness. He advanced slowly at first, then more boldly, and finally sprinted the last ten yards.
Roy had locked their bikes together. He had used his security parking chain and padlock to bind one wheel of his bicycle to one wheel of Colin’s.
Colin pulled on the chain and tugged angrily at the gate of the lock, but his efforts were wasted; the device was heavy and sturdy. He could see no way to get the bikes apart without the combination to Roy’s lock. And he certainly couldn’t use them in tandem, even if the chain had been loose enough to permit them to be stood on their wheels and moved simultaneously—which it was not.
Crestfallen, he scurried back to the station wagon to consider his options. He really had only two. He could try to get home on foot—or he could continue to play cat-and-mouse with Roy in the endless passageways of the junkyard.
He preferred to stick where he was. The chief recommendation for it was that he had survived thus far. If he held out long enough, his mother would report him missing. She might not get home until one or two o‘clock in the morning, but it must be past midnight now. He pushed the button on his digital watch and was stunned to see how early it was: a quarter till ten. He could have sworn that he had been playing this dangerous game of hide-and-seek for at least three or four hours. Well, maybe Weezy would get home early. And if he wasn’t in by midnight, she’d call Roy’s folks and find out Roy wasn’t home either. By one o’clock at the very latest, they would call the cops. The police would start looking for them at once and—Yeah, but where would they begin the search? Not out here in the junkyard. In town. And down at the beach. Then in the nearby hills. It would be late afternoon tomorrow, maybe even Thursday or Friday, before they came all the way out to Hermit Hobson’s. As much as he wanted to stay near the myriad bolt-holes of the rubble-covered hilltop, he knew he could not keep out of Roy’s grasp for forty-eight or thirty-six or even twenty-four hours. He’d be damned lucky to make it through to daylight.
He would have to walk home. Of course, he couldn’t go back the way they had come, for if Roy suspected he’d left the junkyard and came looking for him, there was too great a danger that they would meet on a lonely stretch of road. A bicycle made little or no noise on a paved surface, and Colin was afraid he would not hear Roy coming in time to hide. He would have to trek overland, down the hill to the railroad tracks, along the tracks to the dry creekbed near Ranch Road, then into Santa Leona. That route would be more arduous than the other, especially in the dark, but it might also cut the distance from eight miles to seven or even six.
Colin was painfully aware that his planning was guided by one overriding consideration: cowardice. Hide. Run. Hide. Run. He seemed incapable of entertaining any alternative to those weak courses of action, and he felt miserably inadequate.
—So stay here. Turn the tables on Roy.
Fat chance.
—Don’t run. Attack.
That’s a pleasant fantasy, but it’s impossible.
—It isn’t. Become the aggressor. Surprise him. He’s faster and stronger than me.
—Then be devious. Set a trap.
He’s too clever to fall for any trap I could set.
—How can you know if you don’t try?
I know.
—How?
Because I’m me. And he’s Roy.
Colin put a quick end to the interior dialogue because it was a waste of time. He understood himself all too well. He simply did not have within him the power or the will to transform himself. Before he tried to become the cat, he would have to be convinced that there was absolutely no percentage whatsoever in continuing to be the mouse.
This was one of those bleak and too-frequent moments in which he despised himself.
Pausing every few yards to reconnoiter the way ahead before pressing on, Colin crept from one car to another. He moved steadily toward the hill where Roy had attempted to push the Ford pickup into the train, for it was there that he most easily could get down to the railroad tracks. The night was much too still. Every rustle of his shoes in the brittle grass sounded like thunder and seemed certain to bring Roy down on him. Eventually, however, he came undiscovered to the far end of the junkyard.
In front of him, the open space between the last of the cars and the brow of the hill was approximately forty feet wide. At the moment it looked like a mile. The moon was shining unhindered, and that stretch of grass was bathed in far too much milky light to make a crossing feasible. If this area were being watched, he would be spotted before he had covered a quarter of the distance. Fortunately, scattered but solid masses of clouds had rolled in from the ocean during the past hour. Each time that a cluster of them shrouded the moon, the resultant darkness offered excellent cover. He waited for one of these brief eclipses. When the broad belt of grass fell under a shadow, he ran as silently as he could manage, up on his toes, holding his breath, to the brink, and then over.
The hillside was steep, but not so precipitous as to be unnegotiable. He went down fast because there was no other way to go; the pull of gravity was irresistible. He bounded wildly from one foot to the other, out of control, taking big, ungainly steps, and halfway to the bottom he found that he suddenly was dancing on a landslide. The dry, sandy soil collapsed under him. For an instant he rode it as if he were a surfer on a wave, but then he lost his footing, fell, and rolled the last twenty feet. He came to a stop in a cloud of dust, flat on his back, on the railroad right-of-way, one arm across the tracks.
Stupid. Stupid and clumsy. Stupid, clumsy idiot.
jeez.
He lay still for several seconds, a bit winded, but s
urprised that nothing hurt. His pride was injured, of course, but not anything else.
The dust began to settle.
As he started to sit up, Roy called to him: “Blood brother?”
Colin shook his head in disbelief and looked left, right, then up.
“Blood brother, is that you?”
The moon sailed out from behind the clouds.
In the wash of pale light, Colin saw Roy standing at the top of the eighty-foot slope, silhouetted against the sky, staring down.
He can’t see me, Colin told himself. At least he can’t see me as clearly as I see him. He’s there with the sky behind him; I’m here in the shadows.
“It is you,” Roy said.
He charged down the hillside.
Colin got up, stumbled over the railroad tracks, and hurried into the wasteland beyond.
26
Colin felt terribly vulnerable as he raced across the field. As far as the moonlight revealed, there was no cover, no place for him to hide. He had the crazy thought that a giant shoe was going to come down on him at any second, squashing him as if he were a bug scurrying across a vast kitchen floor.
In the stormy season, rain saturated the hillsides, then gushed off the slopes into natural drainage channels that cut through the flat land west of the railroad tracks. At least once every winter, the gullies overflowed, and the plain became a lake, part of the water-retention system created by the county flood-control project. Because the earth was underwater an average of two months every winter, it boasted very little vegetation even in the summer. There were patches of grass that had a tenuous hold on the silt, beds of the wildflowers that thrived nearly everywhere in California, and prickly tumbleweed; but there were no trees, no dense undergrowth, and no bushes in which Colin could conceal himself.
He got off the bare land as quickly as he could by jumping down into a small arroyo. The gulch was fifteen to twenty feet in width and more than seven feet deep, with almost vertical walls. During a winter storm, it was a surging river, wild and muddy and dangerous, but now it held not one drop of water. He sprinted along a straightaway, pain stabbing through his calves and side, lungs burning. As he came to a broad curve in the arroyo, he glanced back for the first time since he’d crossed the railroad tracks. So far as he could see, Roy had not yet come down into the big ditch in pursuit of him. He was surprised that he had such an encouraging lead, and he wondered if it were possible that Roy had not seen where he’d gone.
Beyond the bend, seeking shelter, he turned into a secondary watercourse that branched off the main channel. This was about ten feet wide at its mouth, but the walls rapidly drew nearer to each other as he progressed to the source. The floor rose steadily until the depth of the gully decreased from seven to five feet. When he had gone no more than a hundred yards, the passageway had narrowed to six feet. If he stood erect, his head would be above ground level. At that point the channel split into a pair of short, dead-end corridors that cut no more than four feet below the surface of the field. He moved into one of these cul-de-sacs, wedged himself into it, each shoulder pressed firmly against a sandy embankment. He sat down, drew his knees up to his chin, clamped his arms around his legs, and tried to be invisible.
—Rattlesnakes.
Oh, jeez.
—Better think about it.
No.
—This is rattlesnake country.
just shut up.
—Well, it is.
They don’t come out at night.
—The worst things always come out at night.
Not rattlesnakes.
—How do you know?
I read it in a book.
—What book?
Can’t remember the title.
—There wasn’t any book.
/tMt shut up.
—Rattlesnakes all over the place.
jeez!
He hunched down in the dirt, listening for rattlesnakes, waiting for Roy; and a long time passed during which he was not bothered by either nemesis. Every few minutes he checked his digital watch, and when he had been in the ditch for half an hour, he decided it was time to leave. If Roy had been searching the network of drainage canals all this time, he would have come close enough for Colin to be aware of him, or at least he would have made a noise in the distance; but he had not. Evidently he had abandoned the pursuit, perhaps because he’d lost track of Colin in the dark, hadn’t seen in which direction he had gone, and had no clear idea where to look for him. If true, it was a tremendous piece of luck. But Colin felt that he would be pushing Fate too hard if he stayed where he was, in this den of vipers, expecting to be safe forever from rattlesnakes.
He crawled out of the trench, stood, and studied the scarred, moonlit landscape. Within his limited circle of vision, there was no sign of Roy.
With extreme caution, stopping again and again to listen to the night, Colin headed southeast. Repeatedly, at the comers of his vision, there was movement; but it always proved to be a clump of tumbleweed rolling in front of the wind. Eventually he recrossed the flat land and reached the railroad tracks once more. He was at least a quarter of a mile south of the junkyard, and he quickly began to put even more distance between himself and Hermit Hobson’s place.
An hour later, when he reached the intersection of the tracks and Santa Leona Road, he was weary to his bones. His mouth was dry. His back ached. Every muscle in his legs was knotted and throbbing.
He considered following the highway into town. It was tempting: fairly straight and direct, with no holes or ditches or obstacles hidden in its shadows. He already had shortened the trek as much as he possibly could by going overland. From this point on, continued avoidance of the roads would only prolong the journey.
He took a few steps on the blacktop but realized again that he did not dare pursue the easy route. He almost surely would be attacked before he reached the edge of town, where people and lights would make murder more difficult than it would be in the lonely countryside.
—Hitchhike.
There’s no traffic at this hour.
—Someone will come along.
Yeah. Maybe Roy.
He left Santa Leona Road. He veered southwest from the railway line, striking out through more scrubland where only he and the tumbleweeds moved.
Within half a mile, he came to the dry creekbed that paralleled Ranch Road. It had been widened and deepened for flood-control purposes, and the walls of it were not earth but concrete. He descended on one of the regularly spaced service ladders, and when he stood on the floor of the creek, the rim was twenty feet above him.
Two miles farther, in the heart of town, he climbed up another ladder and through a safety railing. He was on the sidewalk along Broadway.
Although 1 A.M. was fast approaching, there were still people on the streets: several in passing cars; a few in an all-night diner; an attendant at a filling station. An elderly man walked arm-in-arm with a pixie-faced, white-haired woman, and a young couple strolled past the closed stores, window-shopping in spite of the hour.
Colin had an urge to rush up to the nearest of them and blurt out the secret, the story of Roy’s madness. But he knew they would think he was a lunatic. They didn’t know him, and they didn’t know Roy. None of it would make sense to strangers. He wasn’t even sure it made sense to him. And even if they did comprehend and believe, they couldn’t help him.
His first ally would have to be his mother. When she heard the facts, she would call the police, and they would respond to her much more quickly and seriously than they would to a fourteen-year-old boy. He had to get home and tell Weezy all about it.
He hurried along Broadway toward Adams Avenue, but after only a few steps he stopped because he suddenly realized that he would have to undertake the last part of his journey with the same caution that had marked it thus far. Roy might intend to ambush him within a few feet of his front door. In fact, now that he thought about it, he was positive that’s what would happen. Roy would most likely lie in wa
it directly across the way from the Jacobs house; half that block was a pocket park with many hiding places from which he could observe the entire street. The instant he saw Colin approaching the house, he would move; he would move real fast. For just a moment, as if briefly cursed with a clairvoyant’s vision, Colin could see himself being clubbed to the ground, being stabbed, being left there in blood and pain to die within inches of safety, on the threshold of sanctuary.
He stood in the middle of the sidewalk, trembling. He stood there for quite a while.
—Got to move, kid.
Where?
—Call Weezy. Ask her to come get you.
She’ll tell me to walk. It’s only a few blocks.
—So tell her why you can’t walk.
Not on the phone.
—Tell her Roy’s out there, waiting to kill you.
I can’t make it sound right on the phone.
—Sure you can.
No. I’ve got to be there when I tell her. Otherwise, it won’t sound right, and she’ll think it’s a joke. She’ll be mad.
—You’ve got to try to do it on the phone so she’ll come get you. Then you’ll get home safely.
I can’t do it on the phone.
—What’s the alternative?
Finally he walked back to the service station near the dry creekbed. A telephone booth stood on one comer of the property. He dialed the number and listened to it ring a dozen times.
She wasn’t home yet.
Colin slammed down the receiver and left the booth without recovering his dime.
He stood on the sidewalk, hands fisted at his sides, shoulders hunched. He wanted to punch something.
—The bitch.
She’s your mother.
—Where the hell is she?
It’s business.
—What’s she doing?
It’s business.
—Who’s she with?
It’s just business.
—I’ll bet.
The service-station attendant started closing for the night. The banks of fluorescent lights above the pumps blinked out.