by Dean Koontz
To the left of the dresser was a door to the master bathroom. To the right, a closet door. In the blinding dark, her trembling fingers found the lever handle on the closet door, which would make a ratcheting noise if operated too fast. She eased the handle down from horizontal. The door, if swollen, sometimes stuttered against the jamb, so she pulled carefully on it.
In the walk-in closet, she closed the door and dared to switch on the light.
Standing tiptoe, she could barely reach the loop on the end of the cord that allowed her to pull down the trapdoor in the ceiling, to the back of which was fixed a folded ladder. The heavy springs on the trap protested, but she doubted that the sound could be heard through two closed doors and as far away as the hallway. The ladder automatically unfolded its three segments as the trapdoor opened.
She clicked the wall switch and, in blackness purified of light, climbed monkeylike on all fours. She scampered into the attic, felt blindly for the recall lever in the trapdoor frame, found it, and grimaced as the three sections of rungs accordioned upward with more noise than they had made when descending to the closet floor, although perhaps still not making enough racket to draw anyone’s attention. The ladder-loaded trap returned to its frame with a soft thump.
The attic had a finished floor of plywood. In this raftered darkness, which was high enough for her father to stand erect, boxes were stacked in rows: all of Christmas—except the tree—sealed in cardboard; excess books displaced from shelves downstairs; souvenirs of times and places that were too distant to be of current interest but too important to be discarded; Mother’s glorious wedding dress in a zippered vinyl bag inside a cedar-lined chest….
With her arms held out to the left and right, her fingertips sliding along palisades of cardboard, Laurie inched blindly forward. Her father had installed this flooring when the house was remodeled, not long before her birth; he used the best materials and secured the plywood to the joists with screws instead of nails, but here and there between the plies were small voids that squeaked underfoot.
This center aisle pretty much aligned with the second-floor hall, where Janis Dern and Chris Hornydude might still be discussing his inexplicable lust for her and her cool indifference. If enough squeaking arose in the ceiling above them, they might decide that the cause was something more than mice.
The attic received a cleaning twice a year, but dust gathered there in the interim, and Laurie disturbed it in her passage. An unspent sneeze teased her nose, and she paused to pinch her nostrils shut until the urge passed.
Only she could hear her stampeding heart, though the pounding made it harder to judge how much noise she was making otherwise.
With the sneeze quelled, she began to move again, only to press her face through the silken strands of a spiderweb that masked her from brow to chin. Startled, she paused to wipe off those sticky threads, wondering if the eight-legged architect might even now be crawling through her hair.
Stay cool. Even if a spider was in her hair, it wouldn’t bite. If it did bite, the bite wouldn’t harm her unless the biter was a brown recluse. It wasn’t a brown recluse. She just knew it wasn’t.
Suddenly from below came the voice of the beast at a volume to rattle windows—“The little bitch, the little shit, she’s gone!”—followed by other voices and slamming doors and swift footfalls on the front stairs.
Confident that what noises she made would now be covered by the hubbub below, Laurie moved more quickly through the high dark, with her left hand still sliding along stacked boxes, but her right arm extended in front of her. She halted when her outthrust hand made contact with cold steel. She felt her way around the tight coil and entered the open spiral stairs.
The treads were padded with rubber, and the handrail kept her steady. She made only a little noise as she climbed into the round room at the very top and center of the house, where the encircling windows admitted the light of moon and stars. This space was ten feet in diameter, like an enclosed widow’s walk where the wives of fishermen went to keep a lookout for their menfolk’s boats at sea.
The sea in this case was the plain that stretched to every horizon, lush with tall grass, and when anyone climbed up here with dread in his heart, he came to monitor not fishing trawlers but the progress of fire. Some years the rains didn’t come but the sun did, and the wind did, and the sun and the wind made dry kindling of the grass across those thousands of acres. Nature nurtured, but it also afflicted. There were times when thunder seemed to announce a storm, but the sky proved to be filled with more bang and flash than with rain, the latter falling in barely enough quantity to chase the birds to their roosts for a few minutes, while the lightning spat fire onto the plain. If the wind was fierce, the vast fields of wild grass could raise walls of flame thirty feet high, even higher, and the fire front moved as fast as a train. Owning a quantity of horses and not enough transports to move them all at once, you wanted to monitor the burning plain from a high vantage point, to know in which direction and at what pace the blaze might be advancing.
The round chamber was mostly glass, but on a shelf between two windows stood one of the eight-line hybrid phones that also served as an intercom, featuring an indicator board with labeled buttons for nearly every room in the house and for each of the stables.
Laurie was pretty sure they would search the house for her but that the search wouldn’t extend to the attic. They would expect that she had fled, perhaps to mount a horse or to run out to the state highway in hope of encountering a motorist who might help.
Whatever these people were, they weren’t real FBI. Real FBI agents didn’t want to use brain implants to make slaves out of people, and they didn’t tear up a kid’s book collection, and they didn’t promise to make you over into Little Miss Lickspittle. These FBI imposters wouldn’t want the county sheriff’s department showing up to check out a report of armed thugs holding hostages. Maybe they would just skedaddle.
As Laurie reached for the phone, she was struck by the thought that perhaps these intruders were FBI after all—FBI gone bad like in the movies, wicked and corrupt. If they had real ID and could prove to the sheriff who they were, then maybe the sheriff would just go away.
Or what if…
If some FBI agents could be so evil, maybe the county sheriff and his deputies couldn’t be trusted, either. Maybe they would take her call and listen with concern and promise to come right away with sirens blaring…but would instead phone the hideous Dern beast or Chris Sexfiend and say, The little bitch is in the lookout at the top of the house. Then the FBI bad hats would come running up here and inject her, and she would have to kiss the Dern monster’s ass every time she was ordered to kiss it.
Laurie stood in the dark room, gazing out at the dark plain, and all that darkness seemed to be seeping into her through her eyes and ears and nose. Although rain had fallen this season and the grass was green, she wished for fire and wind and walls of flame to scare away these hateful invaders.
Then she realized who she could trust. Firemen.
The county had several well-equipped fire stations here and there, and a network of volunteer firemen and firewomen who had undergone training. Her dad was one of them. The firemen were all good people, looking out for one another. She knew many of them, because they got together on Memorial Day and Labor Day for a picnic and games, and again for an evening celebration at a rented hall in Worstead each December.
The chief of the volunteers was Mr. Linwood Haney. His wife, Corrine, was a firewoman. They had a daughter—Bonnie Jean, better known as Beejay—who was Laurie’s age. Beejay, who liked horses and motorbikes, wanted to be a Marine sniper when she grew up, and the Haneys lived only three miles away, which was just about next door, so it was inevitable, like destiny or something, that she and Laurie were friends. Mr. and Mrs. Haney would for sure believe her, and they would come with other firemen and firewomen.
Until sh
e picked up the handset, Laurie forgot that doing so would cause a green indicator light to appear on the intercom panel beside the label marked FIRE WATCH. In fact, the same green indicator had at that instant lit on every phone in the house and the stables, just to the right of the dark buttons labeled MASTER BED and MASTER BATH.
Maybe none of these intruders had previously noticed the words FIRE WATCH on the phone boards. But if one of the creeps happened to be looking at a phone now, he’d wonder where the fire watch was and who might be using a phone at that location.
She quickly returned the handset to its cradle. The green light winked off.
For a long moment, she stood shaking, trying to think what else she could do.
Nothing. There was nothing to be done but call the Haneys, wake them, and persuade them to marshal the volunteer firemen. Be brief but persuasive. Brief enough so that maybe none of the bad-hat FBI agents would notice the FIRE WATCH light, but convincing enough that Mr. Haney wouldn’t think she was pranking him and wouldn’t call back to talk to her parents, thereby alerting the Dern beast and her perverted pals.
Laurie couldn’t stop shaking.
She didn’t like being a scaredy-cat. She wasn’t a scaredy-cat. Just prudent. Mother said prudence was one of the greater virtues.
Horseshit. This wasn’t prudence. This was gutless fear.
What would that cute Ethan Stackpool think of her if he could see her now?
She picked up the handset. Green light. She put the handset down. She picked it up. Green light. She almost put it down again, but then she entered the Haneys’ number.
4
THEY CRUISE IN THE JACKED-UP VelociRaptor, lords of the night, the engine grumbling low, like the voice of some pagan animal god that, in simmering wrath, has stepped out of eternity and into time to hand down hard judgments.
Although he knows the question won’t be adequately answered, from his shotgun position Jergen says, “What are we looking for?”
“Indications, signs, manifestations, clues,” Dubose replies.
“And how will we know them when we see them?”
“I’m not sure how you will know them, my friend, but I’ll see them as stains on the fabric of normalcy.”
So, as sometimes he does, the hulk is going to pretend to the brilliance of Sherlock Holmes. The five hours till dawn might seem like a hundred before the sun rises at last.
County Highway S3 and Borrego Springs Road are two of the four principal entrances to the valley. Three miles south of the junction of those roads, Dubose slows as he passes a truck bearing the power company’s name, which stands just off the pavement along Highway S3, as though loaded with materials and parked in anticipation of some project that will be started in the morning when a crew returns.
In fact, the truck is the property of the NSA and contains a bank of lithium batteries that will power its camera and transmitter for forty-eight hours. The camera is a license-plate scanner that reads the tags on passing vehicles that have turned off California State Highway 78 and come north toward Borrego Springs. The image of every plate will be received in real time at the Desert Flora Study Group tent, where agents keep open back doors to California’s and neighboring states’ DMVs, ready quickly to identify to whom each vehicle is registered.
A similar truck is parked along Borrego Springs Road, a half mile north of Highway 78. At two strategic points just inside the valley, along County Highway S22, which passes east-west through the town of Borrego Springs, other vehicles are performing the same function under different disguises.
Every car, SUV, van, truck, motor home, and bus entering the valley is scrutinized. Any smallest reason for suspicion triggers an investigation of the people in the suspect vehicle.
If Jane Hawk uses one of several unpaved tracks to enter the valley or if she comes off-road altogether in an all-wheel-drive vehicle, men positioned at key points throughout that rough terrain will surely see her. They will scope her out, report her, and relay the tracking of her from one spotter to another, until she can be intercepted and arrested when she arrives at a paved highway, if not before.
They don’t believe she will get here before noon tomorrow. She will not rush in pell-mell. She’ll take time to think it through, devise a plan.
Occupying the driver’s seat as if it is his birthright, Radley Dubose picks at the scab that hasn’t healed over an injustice that frustrates him. “These desk-jockey chickenshits we take orders from, do they have the balls to do what’s necessary to take this country and make it ours? They should’ve let us inject every sheriff’s deputy, use them to augment our forces. Then we could lock down the town and the entire valley the moment we think she’s here, make it a freakin’ concentration camp and grind our way through it, door to door, till we’ve found the bitch and the kid.”
Having long ago taken it upon himself to be the voice of reason in moments when the West Virginia hillbilly wants to do surgery with a chain saw instead of a scalpel, Jergen responds in a low and even tone of voice. “There wasn’t time to inject so many.”
“Plenty of time,” Dubose disagrees. “The new control mechanism takes just four hours to assemble in the brain.”
The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department maintains a substation in Borrego Springs. Immediately following the shooting of Gavin and Jessica Washington, the watch captain, a man named Foursquare, and some deputies proceeded as if they had authority to investigate. They backed off when Jergen was able to put Captain Foursquare on the phone with the deputy director of the NSA, a former United States senator who was known as a friend of law enforcement and who assured Foursquare that this was a matter of national security, though the name Jane Hawk was not mentioned.
Jergen perseveres. “Trying to overpower and inject deputies who’re well armed even off duty, who’re suspicious by their very nature and trained to resist aggression…we couldn’t have taken them all by surprise. It would’ve gotten messy.”
Mistaking his hardball tactics for brilliant strategy, Dubose says, “Yes, all right, a few maybe you can’t take by surprise and inject. Big deal. So you blow their brains out. Then you pin the deaths on Jane after she’s either captured or worm food.”
“And what if one of the deputies you intend to kill instead kills you?”
Looking away from the road, regarding Jergen as he might a slow-witted child, the big man says, “Like that could happen.”
“Anyway,” Jergen says, “by the time Jane is here, we’ll have that little zombie army you want, all of them locals who know the area, a lot more of them than all the deputies at the substation.”
Crews have been busy for twenty-four hours, identifying easy targets for injection, approaching them as FBI agents, converting them into adjusted people in the privacy of their homes. More than forty thus far.
Dubose is dismissive. “They’re civilians, not in uniform; they can’t openly carry guns like the deputies can.”
“Not every problem can be settled with a gun,” Jergen says.
Dubose favors him with that pitying look again, but before the hulk can reply, Jergen’s smartphone rings.
It’s from the guy manning the communications hub at the Desert Flora Study Group. Something has gone wrong at one of the houses in which injections are being administered.
5
LAURIE LONGRIN IN THE FIRE-WATCH room, like a bird in a glass cage, unable to fly away, unable to go down below where all the nasty cats were eager to find her and tear off her wings…
When Mr. Linwood Haney answered the phone, having surely been awakened from sleep, Laurie said, “It’s me, Laurie, Laurie Longrin, at Longrin Stables, terrible things are happening here, Mr. Haney.” By the time she had said that much, she became a motormouth, words spinning from her at high speed: “They say FBI, it’s a lie, they’re rotten, they want Mr. and Mrs. Hawk, where they’ve gone, Mom and Dad tied
up, this crazy woman hit me, she has a gun, all of them guns, six and six more coming, they want to kill us or worse, I’m in the fire watch, they’ll find me soon, I don’t trust the sheriff, I only trust you.”
Mr. Haney calmed her, though she surprised herself when she interrupted him more than once with additional details of what had happened at Longrin Stables. She couldn’t quite control herself. She was dismayed at the sharp fear in her voice, because she prided herself on being less of a child than some others her age, on being of sturdy Texas rancher stock.
However, it was only when she started talking to Mr. Haney that she truly realized the full extent of the danger to herself, to her parents and sisters. Oh, she’d known they were in deep shit. She wasn’t stupid. But somehow she’d not let herself think clearly about the worst that might happen, maybe because thinking about it would have paralyzed her. When she told Mr. Haney that these vicious, rotten people wanted to kill them or worse, the possibility of such a horror became more real when she heard herself put it into words, so real that her fear flashed into fright, hampering her breathing and raising a pain in her chest, as if some demonic angler had cast a line and snared her heart with one of those fishing lures that had multiple wicked hooks.
She took hope when Mr. Haney believed her. He said, “Something like this happened at Ancel and Clare’s place Sunday night. Stay calm, Laurie, stay where you are. We’re coming. Everything will be okay.”
Staring at the phone, at the green light burning beside the words FIRE WATCH, Laurie said, “Hurry. Please, please hurry.” And she hung up.
6
FEWER THAN FOUR THOUSAND RESIDENTS live in Borrego Springs itself, a desert town that Carter Jergen finds offensive to his every sense and sensibility. The place is too warm, too dry, too dusty, the backwater of all backwaters—with only a pittance of water. Many of the palm trees appear stressed, and the only real grass of which he’s aware is in Christmas Circle, a park in the center of town. There are acres and acres of concrete and blacktop and more acres of nearly barren desert that reach here and there into the town’s precincts, as if the Anza-Borrego Desert is aware of this human encroachment and remains determined to reclaim everything sooner than later. He has seen neither a restaurant serving four-star French cuisine nor one of any kind in which he would want to eat, nor a motel with even half the number of stars in its rating that he would require before staying there, nor a clothing store carrying the finest designer brands. The so-called art gallery contains not one item that resembles any school of art he studied during his university days or since.
