The Crooked Staircase

by Dean Koontz

  Both the helo and the VelociRaptor are equipped with special FM receivers and transmitters operating below the standard commercial band occupied by radio stations, tuned to an unused spot on the dial. In addition to his night-vision headgear, Carter Jergen wears an earbud on which he receives guidance from the crew of the helo, and he passes this along to Dubose. His role is important, but it doesn’t compensate for being aced out of the driver’s seat.

  He consoles himself with the knowledge that if they get this right, they will be heroes of the Arcadian revolution forever. They will rise high in the ranks to positions of greater privilege, even if only one of them deserves to be rewarded.

  He and Dubose must try to avoid killing the Washingtons, so that the husband and wife can be injected, controlled, and questioned as to everything they know about the Hawk bitch and about who else might have been helping her. Her precious cub, Travis, will become their hostage, and mama bear will be given damn little time to surrender or else be responsible for his suffering.

  A hundred yards ahead of them, the helo hovers, identified by an illegal minimum of running lights that register as three small points of green fire, as well as by a pale haze produced by the luminous displays of its night-vision cameras on its cockpit glass. Nothing of its real shape can be perceived, so that the imagination can make of it a levitating sphere or even a saucer-shaped vessel.

  If Jergen didn’t know what lay before him, he might be persuaded that it is a ship from another world.

  The copilot of the helo reports, “Disturbance patterns in an otherwise uniform slope of scree. Could be from a vehicle.”

  “We’ll check it out,” Jergen replies.

  When he turns to Dubose and passes on the message, the big man’s face is green and, in Jergen’s judgment, brutish, even a bit Neanderthaloid, and he is reminded of another comic-book figure, the Hulk.

  “This light really messes with your head,” Dubose says. “I feel as if I’ve fallen inside the virtual reality of a video game, one of those early ones where the VR wasn’t as realistic as it is these days. It’s eerie, isn’t it? ‘Obscure and lonely, haunted by ill angels only.’ ”

  Jergen recognizes the reference to Poe. He is unsettled by the entire character of Dubose’s little speech, because it does not seem to be anything someone of his rustic bloodline would say, even after an education at Princeton, if education is the right word for what that institution confers on its students.

  They speed across a largely barren area, where the scattered clump grass struggles for existence and is so twisted and ragged from winds of other days that whatever damage even the VelociRaptor does to this flora could not be taken as signs of its passage. They come to a short declining slope and a wide swale, beyond which lies a long upward grade. While the helo hovers a hundred feet overhead, Dubose drives down and stops in the shallow trough.

  Through the windshield, Jergen can just barely make out where the ghostly rising slope of gravelstone has been disturbed, although nothing as clearly defined as tire tracks can be seen.

  He is grateful to have a reason to take off his night-vision goggles and get out of the VelociRaptor before Dubose might quote another poet and thereby require a complete reassessment of his nature and his mental capacity. The downdraft from the rotary wing of the chopper tosses Jergen’s hair and flutters the collar points of the Diesel Black Gold denim jacket against his throat, as if the embroidered scorpions have come alive and crawled up from his chest.

  He carries an LED flashlight with which he sweeps the slope ahead. It is a broad expanse of deep scree that time and weather have combed into an even texture, except for a nine- or ten-foot-wide section that appears to have been disturbed by something. A small seismic event would likely have affected the entire face of the slope, so this might in fact be the work of the Land Rover.

  Bent forward, studying the mass of small stones, he works his way up the slope with some effort, the scree shifting treacherously underfoot, the rhythmic whump-whump-whump of the helo timed like an amplification of his heart’s systole. At about the halfway point, something glistens in the beam of the flashlight. A brownish-black glob. He wipes up a bit of it with his forefinger. Studies the stuff. Smells it. Axle grease.

  2

  The coyotes lost interest in the Land Rover, whidding away into the moonless dark, on the track of some irresistible scent.

  In this part of California, it was possible to proceed in a twisting route through contiguous stretches of unincorporated scrubland, protected state wildernesses, national forests, and national monuments, skirting even the smallest population centers, passing under little-traveled county and state roads that bridged the canyons, all the way to the Mexican border, where they could leave the U.S. discreetly either at Tecate or Calexico-Mexicali. Alternately, because the Rover had a spare fuel tank, they could venture overland into southern Arizona.

  However, it wasn’t Gavin’s intention to spend the entire night off-road or to leave California. In consultation with Jane, he and Jessie had developed a plan in anticipation of a day when they might have to go on the run for a while, until this Arcadian conspiracy was blown up, which it would be because it must be.

  Considering that they were fleeing from a murderous cabal and might be leaving their comfortable life behind forever, he felt surprisingly confident. Not lighthearted. Not full of breezy good cheer. He was buoyed by the kind of sober-minded high spirits that warriors knew after a successful operation, an exhilaration tempered by being well-acquainted with death.

  He’d survived numerous near-death moments in Afghanistan, and Jessie had survived two helicopters being shot down and an IED detonating directly under her Jeep. When you miraculously escaped mortal threats often enough, changes occurred in your thinking. For one thing, you came to believe in miracles, although it was better not to expect them routinely.

  For another thing, you began to wonder if just maybe there was a scheme to things and if perhaps your sorry ass had been saved for a purpose. When Jane showed up on their doorstep, needing a place in which to hide Travis, Gavin had at once thought, This is it, the very reason why my sorry ass is still on the planet. He had looked at Jessica, and her smile had confirmed that she’d arrived at the same conviction. She was the one who had said yes by saying, As long as this boy’s here with us, the worst thing that’ll happen to him is maybe he’ll stub a toe.

  Saying such a thing was tempting fate, but it was the kind of bravado that Jane had needed to hear.

  Now the time had come either to make good on that promise or die trying.

  The first leg of their journey required them to cross out of Orange County, into San Diego County, far from where they had ridden horses earlier in the day, and pick up State Highway 76 east of Pala. The overland part of the journey was twenty-five miles if you drew a straight line between points, but the rough terrain didn’t permit direct travel; in fact, they might have to go as far as fifty miles. And there were stretches of ground over which they could not attain any significant speed, especially because of the need to avoid using headlights. Gavin hoped to reach Highway 76 by midnight, a little more than four hours after setting out.

  He expected to be pursued. The only question was how much of a head start they might get. Jessie was certain—Gavin had to agree—there would be an aerial component to the search team. Which meant the pursuer would make faster progress than the pursued.

  Consequently, he stopped periodically and switched off the engine and got out of the Land Rover to listen to the night and scan the land behind them through the NVGs. He needed to guard against the posse abruptly coming upon them without their knowledge.

  The third time, when he parked at the head of a long decline, there were the usual desert-insect buzzes and clicks and busy ticks. Also feline cries that might have been a family of bobcats on the hunt. And from a distance…the distinctive sound of a helicopter.
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  He surveyed the night to the northwest, the direction from which they had come. At first, nothing. Just a green dark. Then he identified a three-point constellation in the totally overcast sky, brighter than any stars would have been, each as brilliant as Venus. The constellation rotated. Not stars. A minimal array of aircraft running lights.

  They were closer than he expected. He needed to take the Land Rover to lower ground at once and proceed only through valleys and canyons, as deep below the rolling hilltops as he could get, where the engine heat would not register on the helo’s look-ahead cameras.

  When he got in behind the wheel and started the engine, Jessie asked, “Has the shit hit the fan?”

  “Not yet, but they’re flingin’ it our direction.”

  Jessie looked over her left shoulder. “Are you belted in back there, cowboy?”

  “Belted,” Travis assured her. “And the dogs are down like they’re supposed to be.”

  Because of the noise made by the chopper, the pursuing ground unit wouldn’t be able to listen for the Land Rover. Gavin goosed the engine, and they sped down the long slope with stones rattling hard against the undercarriage and quick-settling dust billowing out behind them.

  He had to stay as much as possible on sandstone and mudstone and slopes of talus, away from soft soil, avoiding any vegetation that would betray their passage, until he found a place to go to ground. He didn’t think he could reach the state route across the county line before they came upon him. His best chance might be to tuck the Rover away somewhere, lie low, and hope that the helo would pass over them, fruitlessly quartering the wilds in search of their human game.

  But when you had a vehicle with a hot engine, where did you hide it from an infrared search in a night-cooled landscape as barren as this one?

  3

  In the kitchen, Gilberto didn’t need black coffee or caffeine tablets or lively music to stay awake. In the chair directly across the dinette table from him, Booth Hendrickson was the perfect cure for drowsiness.

  Jane had ordered the man to sleep, and he slept, but his sleep was dream-riddled and never restful. Behind his pale lids, his eyes moved ceaselessly, fixing on whatever sights in some dark nightmare kingdom. His face was not slack, but enlivened by expressions ranging from perplexion to abhorrence to revulsion.

  When he wasn’t grinding his teeth or chewing his lips, he made soft pathetic sounds or talked in his sleep, his voice haunting the kitchen as if it issued from another dimension.

  “Hands and hands and more hands, a thousand hands…”

  Because he was restrained by zip-ties linking his ankles to the stretcher bar between the back legs of his chair, his hands remained free. As he spoke, they crawled upon the table, nervous, uncertain, this way and that, as if he were seeking something that he feared finding.

  “Don’t make me, don’t make me, don’t make me,” he pleaded in a whisper.

  His respiration grew ragged and then panicky as he gasped for breath and exhaled in gusts, making thin sounds of desperation, as if some creature born of Hell pursued him. It seemed that he must wake himself, but each time the panic subsided and still he slept, sliding into a less urgent state of anxiety.

  From time to time, he returned to the subject of eyes. “Their eyes…their eyes…” And later: “What’s that in their eyes? Do you see? Do you see what’s in their eyes?”

  Although Gilberto didn’t need caffeine, he wanted something to settle his stomach. The Scotch he’d drunk had soured in his gut, and acid refluxed on him. He brought a glass of cold milk to the table and used it to chase a tablet of Pepcid AC before he sat down again.

  “Don’t leave me in the dark,” Hendrickson pleaded in an urgent and despairing whisper. “No way is the way you think it is, there’s no out, only in.”

  For a few minutes the man was silent, though his face appeared no less tortured.

  Abruptly he opened his eyes and sat forward in his chair and seemed to look at Gilberto as he whispered, “Heads inside heads, eyes inside eyes, they’re coming now, I know they’re coming, no way to keep them out of my eyes, out of my head. They’re coming.”

  “What can I do for you?” Gilberto asked. “Can I help you somehow?”

  But maybe Hendrickson didn’t see him after all, hadn’t been speaking to him, and was still asleep even when his eyes were open. He closed them and settled back in his chair and grew quiet again.

  Gilberto doubted that the milk and acid reducer were going to work.

  4

  Radley Dubose becomes increasingly agitated as forty minutes pass with no sign of further spoor left by their quarry. He curses the Washingtons, the night, the desert, the helicopter, its pilot, and its copilot. Even though he gets to drive a VelociRaptor with all the features that Hennessey’s wizards of customization can provide, a truck costing north of three hundred thousand dollars, he is not happy. He is possessed by a backwoods urge to whup somebody, anybody.

  Carter Jergen is also frustrated, though he would be much less so if he were behind the wheel instead of stuck in the passenger’s seat, relaying messages from the helo copilot, who for forty minutes has not had any news worth passing along. It’s almost as if the Land Rover has gone airborne.

  In the green dark, the helo quarters west to east, east to west, while moving steadily southward. If they don’t find something in the next fifteen minutes or so, they’ll have to retreat northward through territory already searched, to be sure they haven’t missed anything.

  This scrub desert is not arid all year long, not in its every contour, especially not here at the end of the rainy season. They arrive at the brink of a deeper canyon than any they have thus far searched. About two hundred feet below, a wide, fast-moving stream, born of snowmelt in the distant mountains and swelled by rain in the foothills, slips over such a smooth course that it appears to flow without cataracts or counterflux. Above the dark-green water spread lighter-green shapes of mature trees that form cloisters in which sections of the stream disappear, and this side of the trees is the still paler green of the rocky canyon floor.

  Jergen and Dubose wait in the VelociRaptor at the edge of the canyon and watch as the helicopter slowly quarters more than a mile to the east. Then it moves back toward them, past them, before hovering above the stream at a point at least half a mile to the west of their position.

  The copilot reports, “We have a heat source under the tree cover. No clear profile. Diffused heat. Might not be them.”

  When Jergen repeats this message, Dubose says, “Damn right it’s them. Parked in the running water, engine off, hoping the Rover will cool down so the trees can fully screen it.”

  The canyon wall is without vegetation and not an easy slope, steeper in some places than in others.

  When it seems that Dubose is about to angle off the brink and down, Jergen says, “Wait, wait. It’s too precipitous here. Go west a little way.”

  “It’s not too precipitous,” Dubose says.

  “Yes, it is,” Jergen insists.

  “Don’t go fully pussy on me.”

  This bumpkin’s cloddish rudeness offends Jergen. “I’ve never gone fully pussy in my life.”

  “Maybe not, but you’ve got the tendency,” says Dubose, and drives off the brink, onto the precipitous slope, along which they descend at such a perilous angle, rollicking over such forbidding terrain, that the night-vision picture, already alien to the eye, becomes a meaningless jumble of leaping shapes in shades of green, as if they are hapless characters in an outer-space movie, rocketing through a meteor storm.

  To prove his mettle, Jergen never cries out on the way down, nor does he reach for the grab bar above the door, nor does he raise his feet to brace himself against the dashboard. He relies solely on his harness even though at moments it seems the truck has slipped the bonds of gravity and that he will float out of his seat.

/>   5

  VelociRaptor hulking on the deep canyon floor, engine off, both front windows open, and to the port side, silhouettes of trees and then the stream like magma pouring from a wound in the earth, such a scene as a sleeper might imagine after a highly spiced dinner…Night air wafting cool into the truck, the chuckle and susurration of fast-moving water, a sweet licorice-like fragrance evidently issuing from some plant along the stream’s edge and the fainter limy scent of wet stone, all things green on green with shadows deep…

  Dubose has parked about three hundred yards from where the helo is hovering and has switched off the engine.

  He says, “They know they’ve been found, so if they were gonna give up, they’d have shown themselves already. We’ve gotta take the boy alive. But with the other two, we only make our best effort.”

  “Instructions were all three alive. Inject the Washingtons and interrogate them.”

  “Thanks for refreshing my memory,” Dubose replies with heavy irony. “But these two, they’ll be better armed than anyone in your average Quentin Tarantino movie.”

  “Maybe they will be. On the other hand, with the boy to think about, maybe they won’t.”

  “They’re ex-military. They’ll have a damn arsenal, and with their training, they won’t be pushovers.”

  “We’ve been trained, too,” Jergen says.

  “Law-enforcement training and Army Special Forces training are different worlds. You read this tough bastard’s service record? And the bitch lost both legs from the knees down, but still competes in marathons.”

  “Ten-K runs,” Jergen corrects. “Not marathons anymore.”

  Again with the unnecessary irony, Dubose says, “Oh, that’s a whole different story, then. What kind of wimp is the bitch, able to run just ten K without legs?”