Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

by Steven Leonard

  The living room was filled with light, making easy targets of him and Celeste, so he rolled onto his side and fired the 20-gauge Remington at a brass floor lamp with a fringed shade. The roar of the shotgun in that confined space was deafening, but he pumped a fresh shell into the breech and fired at one of the end-table lamps flanking the sofa, then pumped it again and took out the lamp on the other end table.

  Understanding Joey's intent, Celeste fired one round into the television screen, silencing the sitcom. The burnt-powder stench of gunfire was immediately overlaid with the hot, astringent odor of ruined electronics.

  "Stay low, under the windows," Joey instructed. In the ear-stunning aftermath of the shotgun fire, he sounded as though he were speaking through a woolen winter scarf, but even though his voice was muffled, he could hear the tremor of fear in it. He was a child of the premillennium follies, steeled to the savagery of his fellow human beings, but he nevertheless felt as though he might wet his pants. "Follow the walls to a doorway, any doorway, just get out of the room."

  Crawling frantically along the floor in the darkness, dragging the shotgun by its strap, Joey wondered what role he was supposed to serve in his brother's nightmare tableau. If Celeste's parents returned to town and stepped into P.J.'s gun sights, locals would provide all twelve bodies needed for the creation of his demented bit of theater. But he must have a use in mind for Joey too. After all, he had raced to catch up with the Mustang on the county route, swung onto Coal Valley Road, and paused tauntingly, daring Joey to follow. Although he perpetrated atrocities that any normal person would call acts of madness, P.J. didn't otherwise behave irrationally. Even within his homicidal fantasies, he operated with an appreciation for structure and purpose, however grotesque they might be.

  In the Bimmers' kitchen, the light in the oven clock cast a soft green glow that barely illuminated the room - but even that was bright enough to make most of the details visible and to keep Joey close to the floor.

  Two windows. One over the sink. The other beside the breakfast table. Both had side-panel curtains and, better yet, vinyl roll-up blinds that were drawn halfway down.

  Cautiously rising to his feet at the side of the breakfast table, with his back pressed to the wall, he reached out and pulled that blind all the way over the glass.

  Breathing hard, both from exertion and fear, he was bizarrely convinced that P.J. had circled the house and was now directly behind him, outside, with only the wall between them. In spite of the wind and rain, maybe P.J. could track him by his loud breathing and would shoot him through the wall to which his back was pressed. The moment passed, and the shot in the spine didn't come, and his terror abated somewhat.

  Although he would have preferred that Celeste remain on the floor, below any possible line of fire, she risked a bullet in the arm by drawing the blind at the sink window.

  "You okay?" he asked, when they eased back to the floor and met again in the center of the kitchen, staying on their knees in spite of having secured the two windows.

  "They're all dead, aren't they?" she whispered bleakly.

  "Yeah."

  "All three."

  "Yeah."

  "No chance

  "No. Dead."

  "I've known them all my life."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Beth used to baby-sit me when I was little."

  The eerie green glow from the oven clock made the Bimmer kitchen shimmer as though it were underwater or had passed through a veil into an unnatural realm outside the flow of real time and ordinary events. But the quality of the light alone could not provide him with blessed detachment and his gut remained knotted with tension; his throat was so constricted that he could barely swallow.

  Fumbling spare shells from his pockets, dropping them through his shaky fingers, Joey said softly, "It's my fault."

  "No, it's not. He knew where they were, where to find them. He knows who's still left in town and where they live. We didn't lead him here. He'd have come on his own anyway."

  The dropped shells rolled away from him as he tried to recover them. His fingers were half numb, and his hands were shaking so badly that he gave up trying to reload until he calmed down.

  Joey was surprised that his heart could still beat. It felt like cold iron in his chest.

  They listened to the deadly night, alert for the stealthy sound of a door slowly easing open or the telltale clink of broken glass underfoot.

  Eventually he said, "Back home, earlier, when I found the body in the trunk of his car, if I'd called the sheriff then and there, none of these people would be dead now."

  "You can't blame yourself for that."

  "Who the hell else should I blame?" He was instantly ashamed that he had responded so harshly. When he spoke again, his voice was bitter and remorseful, but his anger was directed at himself, not at her. "I knew the right thing to do, and I didn't do it."

  "Listen," she said, finding one of his hands in the green gloom, holding it tightly, "that's not what I meant when I said you couldn't blame yourself. Think about it, Joey. Not calling the sheriff - you made that mistake twenty years ago, but you didn't make it tonight because your second chance didn't begin with P.J. at the house today, didn't begin with the finding of the body. It began only when you reached Coal Valley Road. Right?"

  "Well ..."

  "You weren't given a second chance to turn him in to the sheriff earlier."

  "But twenty years ago I should've-"

  "That's history. Terrible history, and you'll have to live with that part of it. But now all that matters is what happens from here on. Nothing counts except how you chose - and continue to choose - to handle things after you took the right highway tonight."

  "Haven't handled them well so far, have I? Three people dead."

  "Three people who would've died anyway," she argued, "who probably did die the first time you lived through this night. It's horrible, it's painful, but it looks as if that part of it was meant to be, and there's no changing it."

  Sinking deeper into anguish, Joey said, "Then what's the point of being given a second chance if it isn't to save these people?"

  "You might be able to save others before the night is through."

  "But why not all of them? I'm screwing up again."

  "Stop beating yourself up. It's not for you to decide how many people you can save, how much you can change destiny. In fact, maybe the purpose of being given a second chance wasn't to save anyone in Coal Valley."

  "Except you."

  "Maybe not even me. Maybe I can't be saved either."

  Her words left him speechless. She sounded as though she could accept the possibility of her own death with equanimity - while for Joey, the thought of failing her was like a hammer blow to the heart.

  She said, "It may turn out that the only thing you can really accomplish tonight is to stop P.J. from going on from here. Stop him from committing twenty more years of murder. Maybe that's the only thing expected of you, Joey. Not saving me. Not saving anyone. Just stopping P.J. from doing even worse than what he'll do tonight. Maybe that's all God wants from you."

  "There's no God here. No God in Coal Valley tonight."

  She squeezed his hand, digging her fingernails into his flesh. "How can you say that?"

  "Go look at the people in the living room."

  "That's stupid."

  "How can a god of mercy let people die like that?"

  "Smarter people than us have tried to answer the same question."

  "And can't."

  "But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer," she said with rising anger and impatience. "Joey, if God didn't give you the chance to relive this night, then who did?"

  "I don't know," he said miserably.

  "You think maybe it was Rod Serling, and now you're stuck in the Twilight Zone?" she asked scornfully,

  "No, of course not."

  "Then who?"

  "Maybe it was just ... just an anomaly of physics. A random fold in time. An energy wave.
Inexplicable and meaningless. I don't know. How the hell could I know?"

  "Oh. I see. Just some mechanical breakdown in the great cosmic machinery," she said sarcastically, letting go of his hand.

  "Seems to make more sense than God."

  "So we're not in the Twilight Zone, huh? Now we're aboard the starship Enterprise with Captain Kirk, assaulted by energy waves, catapulted into time warps."

  He didn't reply.

  She said, "You remember Star Trek? Anyone still remember it up there in 1995?"

  "Remember? Hell, I think maybe it's a bigger industry than General Motors."

  "Let's bring a little cool Vulcan logic to the problem, okay? If this amazing thing that happened to you is meaningless and random, then why didn't you get folded back in time to some boring day when you were eight years old and had the puking flu? Or why not to some night a month ago, when you were just sitting in your trailer out in Vegas, half drunk, watching old Road Runner cartoons or something? You think some random anomaly of physics would just by purest chance bring you back to the most important night of your life, this night of all nights, to the very moment it all went wrong beyond any hope of recovery?"

  Just listening to her had calmed him, although his spirits had not been lifted. At least he was able to pick up the spilled shells and reload his shotgun.

  "Maybe," she said, "you're living this night again not because there's something you have to do, not to save lives and bring down P.J. and be a hero. Maybe you're living this night again only so you'll have one last chance to believe."

  "In what?"

  "In a world with meaning, in life with some greater purpose."

  At times she seemed able to read his mind. More than anything, Joey wanted to believe in something again - as he had when he'd been an altar boy, so many years ago. But he vacillated between hope and despair. He remembered how filled with wonder he'd been a short while ago when he'd realized that he was twenty again, how grateful he had been to something-someone for this second chance. But already it was easier to believe in the Twilight Zone or in a fluke of quantum mechanics than in God.

  "Believe," he said. "That's what P.J. wanted me to do. Just believe in him, believe in his innocence, without one shred of proof. And I did. I believed in him. And look where that got me."

  "Maybe it wasn't believing in P.J. that ruined your life."

  "It sure didn't help," he said sourly.

  "Maybe the main problem was that you didn't believe in anything

  else."

  "I was an altar boy once," he said. "But then I grew up. I got an education."

  "Having gone to college a little, you've surely heard the word ,sophomoric,'" Celeste suggested. "It describes the kind of thinking you're still indulging in."

  "You're really wise, huh? You know it all?"

  "Nope. I'm not wise at all, not me. But my dad says - admitting you don't know everything is the beginning of wisdom."

  "Your dad the jerkwater high-school principal - suddenly he's a famous philosopher?"

  "Now you're just being mean," she said.

  After a while, he said, "Sorry."

  "Don't forget the sign I was given. My blood on your fingertips. How can I not believe? More important, how can you not believe after that? You called it a 'sign' yourself."

  "I wasn't thinking. I was all ... emotional. When you take time to think about it, apply just a little of that cool Vulcan logic you mentioned-"

  "If you think hard enough about anything, you won't be able to believe in it. If you saw a bird fly across the sky - the moment it's out of sight, there's no way to prove it existed. How do you even know Paris exists - have you ever been there?"

  "Other people have seen Paris. I believe them."

  "Other people have seen God."

  "Not the way they've seen Paris."

  "There are a lot of ways to see," she said. "And maybe neither your eyes nor a Kodak is the best way."

  "How can anyone believe in any god so cruel that he'd let three people die like that, three innocent people?"

  "If death isn't permanent," she said without hesitation, "if it's only a transition from one world to the next, then it isn't necessarily cruel."

  "It's so easy for you," he said enviously. "So easy just to believe."

  "It can be easy for you too."

  "No."

  "Just accept."

  "Not easy for me," he insisted.

  "Then why even bother to believe that you're living this night again? Why not write it off as just a silly dream, roll over, go on sleeping, and wait to wake up in the morning?"

  He didn't answer. He couldn't.

  Although he knew it was pointless to try, he crawled to the wall phone, reached up, and pulled the receiver off the cradle. No dial tone.

  "Can't possibly work," Celeste said with an edge of sarcasm.

  "Huh?"

  "Can't work because you've had time to think about it, and now you realize - there's no way to prove there's anyone else in the world to call. And if there's no way to prove beyond a doubt, right here, right now, that other people exist - then they don't exist. You must have learned the word for that in college. 'Solipsism.' The theory that nothing can be proven except your own awareness, that there is nothing real beyond yourself."

  Letting the telephone handset dangle on its springy cord, Joey leaned back against the kitchen cabinet and listened to the wind, to the rain, to the special hush of the dead.

  Eventually Celeste said, "I don't think P.J.'s going to come in after us."

  Joey had arrived at the same conclusion. P.J. wasn't going to kill them. Not yet. Later. If P.J. had wanted to waste them, he could have nailed them easily when they were on the front porch, standing in the light with their backs to him. Instead, he had carefully placed his first shot in the narrow gap between their heads, taking out John Bimmer with a perfectly placed bullet in the heart.

  For his own twisted reasons, P.J. evidently wanted them to bear witness to the murders of everyone in Coal Valley, then waste them. Apparently he intended that Celeste should be the twelfth and final

  apostle in the freeze-frame drama that he was creating at the church.

  And me? Joey wondered. What do you have in mind for me, big brother?

  14

  THE BIMMER KITCHEN WAS PURGATORY WITH LINOLEUM FLOORS AND Formica countertops. Joey waited to be propelled from that place either by events or by inspiration. There must be something that he could do to stop P.J.

  Nevertheless, merely proceeding to the Dolan house with the intention of preventing those five pending murders would be sheer folly. He and Celeste would only serve as witnesses to the deaths.

  Maybe they could slip into the Dolan place without anyone being shot down at the front door or at the windows. Maybe they could even convince the Dolans of the danger and conspire with them to turn the house into a fortress. But then P.J. could easily set a fire to kill them where they hid or to drive them out into the night where he could shoot them down.

  If the Dolan house had an attached garage, and if the Dolans could get in their car and make a run for it, P.J. would shoot out the tires as they tried to flee. Then he would kill them with a spray of gunfire while they were helpless in the disabled vehicle.

  Joey had never met the Dolan family. At that moment, convincing himself that they actually existed was, in fact, harder than he would have thought. How easy it would be to sit there in the kitchen and do nothing, let the Dolans - if they existed - look out for themselves, and believe only in the bottle-green shadows around him, the faint smell of cinnamon, the strong aroma of fresh coffee warming in the pot, the hard wood against his back, the floor beneath him, and the hum of the refrigerator motor.

  Twenty years ago, when he turned his back on the grisly proof of what his brother had done, he had been equally unable to believe in all the victims to come. Without their bloodied faces before him, without their battered bodies piled high, they had been as unreal to him as the citizens of Paris were
unreal to a man convinced of the wisdom of solipsism. How many people had P.J. killed in those twenty years following the first passage of this night? Two per year, forty in all? No. Too low. Killing that infrequently would be too little challenge, too little thrill. More than one a month for twenty years? Two hundred fifty victims: tortured, mutilated, dumped along back roads from one end of the country to the other or buried in secret graves? P.J. seemed more than sufficiently energetic to handle that. By refusing to believe in future horrors, Joey had ensured that they would come to pass.

  For the first time he was aware of the true size of his burden of responsibility, which was far greater than he wanted to believe. His acquiescence to P.J. on that long-ago night had resulted in a triumph of evil - so enormous that now he was half crushed by the belated recognition of its weight, under which his soul was pinned.

  The ultimate consequences of inaction could be greater than the consequences of action.

  "He wants us to go to the Dolans' place, so I can see them being murdered," Joey said thickly. "If we don't go right away ... we'll be buying them a little time at least."

  "We can't just sit here," she said.

  "No. Because sooner or later, he'll go kill them anyway."

  "Sooner," she predicted.

  "While he's still watching us here, waiting for us to come out, we have to do something he's not expecting, something that'll make him curious and keep him close to us, away from the Dolans, something that'll surprise and unsettle him."

  "Like what?"

  The refrigerator motor. The rain. Coffee, cinnamon. The oven clock: ticking, ticking.

  "Joey?" she prodded.

  "It's so hard to think of something that might rattle him," he said miserably. "He's so sure of what he's doing, so bold."