Dark Of The Woods

by Dean Koontz

  In one swift, clean movement, Davis locked hands and brought the resultant club in an upswing that caught the rep under the chin, snapped his head back. The ex-soldier's eyes rolled up until they were all white, and he toppled backwards, crashed onto the floor, his head striking hard at the temple. He had never been expecting a civilian to possess the ability to commit such a vicious act of violence against another human being, and his smugness had made it the simplest thing in the world for Davis to take him out of the picture.

  Davis looked up, saw Matron Salsbury running for a phone screen outlet near the reception desk. He bounded after her, pulled her away from it after she had punched out two of the eight numbers, cleared the board by tapping the "cancel" bar, and shoved her back toward the rep who was lying quite still.

  "What are you going to do to us?" she asked.

  "Sit down!" he ordered her, pushing her next to the unconscious Alliance man. She plopped next to him, her fatty body jiggling with the impact. "Don't move and you'll not be hurt."

  "He was right," she said, her voice quavering on the edge of hysteria. "You are mad."

  Davis ignored her, well aware that no amount of facts, logic, or argument could ever sway someone with her sort of mind, just as the rep would never renounce one of his prejudices. Their lives were based on the assumption that they were superior, at least, to aliens. If they should ever be convinced that many, many aliens were their intellectual superiors, their psyches would crumble in the instant. They were inferior people, the lackeys of those in power, and without the government behind them, they would be jellyfish and nothing more.

  He tore down the draperies over the high windows, ripped each panel in two long strips and used these to bind both the rep and the Sanctuary keeper, tying them stoutly enough to last until he came up with something to get he and Leah out of this mess. When that was done, he turned to the girl, rolled her over, and examined the progress of the black line up her delicate arm. It was growing quite near her armpit. In another fifteen minutes, she might very well be dead. Perhaps sooner. Her breathing was shallow, birdlike, and the beat of her large heart was fast, much faster than it should be even for a Demosian.

  "Do you have a speedheal kit around here?" he asked Matron Salsbury.

  "No," she said.

  He knelt, slapped her twice across the face. "He thought I couldn't hurt him. Don't make the same mistake." He held the rep's gun at her neck. He had not acquired so much of a violence drive that he could kill a human being, but as long as she did not know that, it was an effective threat.

  "There's an infirmary on the ground floor here," she said. "That door, the green one. There should be a speedheal equipment racked in the open."

  He patted her cheek, smiled, and raced into the infirmary where he located and brought back a speedheal kit inside of two minutes. When he returned to the lounge, Matron Salsbury was whispering to the rep, trying to wake him. He was moaning a little, but still fairly well out. "Save your breath," Davis said, enjoying the way she snapped her head around to look at him, frightened and confused. After being terrified, for weeks, of what the Alliance would do to him if it discovered his indiscretion, it was nice to see the Alliance people doing the cowering.

  He lifted Leah and placed her on one of the comfortable sofas, which dotted the floor of the lobby, on her back so that he could keep close watch on her respiration and the vitality of her heartbeat. Opening the medical kit, he began extracting the tools he would require to work on her and was soon absorbed by the job of stopping the advancing line of poison before it was too late to contain it and destroy it. For a while, he thought he was going to lose the race against the infection, but then he had the foreign element on the retreat, eliminated it, and was nearly to home base. He applied the speedheal bandages, set the circuits into operation, checked the power level of the microminiature battery attached to the yellow cloth, and settled back, feeling as if a ton or two of steel had been lifted from each shoulder. She was going to be all right.

  "Very touching," the rep said from behind him. He whirled, but the Alliance man was still tied properly. "Very touching, but foolish. Now you have a third charge against you: molesting an officer of the Alliance. Damn, I'll bet that charge hasn't been leveled against anyone in this century. How did you do it, Davis? How were you able to hit me?"

  He didn't want to explain that the antiviolence taboo had shattered and died in that gas shelter when he had had to resort to violence to save a girl he loved from the claws and teeth of a rat—or watch her die and be torn apart. He didn't want to explain that such a thing might not be strong enough stimulus to push every modern Alliance citizen into violence, but that it was plenty for a man who had been seeking love all his life and had never found it until he had met that girl. So he didn't explain. And refusing to explain to an Alliance officer made him feel even tougher and more of a man than he felt now—and he felt better at this moment than he had in all the rest of his life.

  "Look," he said to the mustachioed rep, "you're going to be my hostage to see that I get public notice. Otherwise the Alliance might stick me in a back room somewhere and no one would ever hear of me. If I'm to have a fair chance, I have to be allowed a trial. If it's splashed all over the statsheets on the next news hour, the Alliance won't dare try to railroad me without due process. And all I want is a chance to fight the miscegenation laws."

  "Go to hell," the rep snarled.

  "You'll call your boys off if they—"

  "I'd rather," the rep hissed, his voice tight and whispered, "order them to shoot to kill, whether or not I'm liable to be shot also. You've ruined a career I've worked years to build. They won't ever advance me within the diplomatic corps. And I won't be permitted back in the army. That means their going to condemn me to a civilian position, and I couldn't stand that. I'd rather die first."

  "I believe you," Davis said soberly. "Without power of some sort, military, or governmental, your type of pest can't survive."

  The rep spat on him.

  "That hit home, didn't it?"

  "Go to hell."

  "You're repeating yourself. You gave me that direction only a short while ago."

  "So all you can do is run," the rep said, managing to smile again. "And with winter setting in, how far will you get? You can't leave the planet with her. And I think you're stupid enough to stay here rather than leave her behind."

  Davis did not respond, except by tearing down the last two panels of drapes and ripping them up to bind the two prisoners more thoroughly. He finished the job with two tight and effective gags, then dragged them to a supplies closet behind the reception desk. He loaded the rep into the cubbyhole, then decided he might as well have as much information as possible with which to make their escape. He removed the gag from Matron Salsbury.

  "When will you be missed?"

  "Supper's over. Not until breakfast. I don't always make a room check at night anymore."

  "Where are the other girls?"

  "Upstairs, in the game room."

  He stuffed the gag back in her mouth, wrapped the band around her face to keep it in, knotted it tightly behind her head. She was harder to move than the man had been, heavier and more hysterical. When he had her wedged into the closet, facing the rep, he closed the door and hurried back to Leah. She was still sleeping, but he could not afford to wait for her to wake. He lifted her, carried her outside, down the steps, and across the flat parking area to the grav car that the rep had driven up from the port in.

  He placed her in the passenger's seat, strapped her in, waited until Proteus had clambered in the back, then slipped behind the wheel and reached for the controls. It was then, that he first noticed the blinking amber light above the radio that indicated a call was being made. He contemplated answering it and trying to fake it out, but knew that would end in dismal failure. Better to let it ring. Eventually, they would begin to worry, but perhaps not for an hour or two. And by that time, he and Leah might be too far along in their escape for
it to matter.

  Escape…

  He looked to the mountains, the heavy clouds hanging low on them, and the sheets of snow that were driving before a stiff wind that looked as if it might grow more fierce as the storm worsened during the night. That was their escape: the mountains, the wildlands of Demos. With that rep in command of the Alliance police on Demos, there would be no chance of running up the legal flag and battling this in courts. No chance at all. If they could not avoid the police, they were dead. They were probably equally as dead if they tried escaping into the mountains at the beginning of the winter, but there was no other proposition, open to them. The rep had seen to that.

  For the first time, Davis realized that he did not even know the Alliance representative's name. He had just been a puppet of the government. There had never been initial cordialities. He had not thought to ask, and the Alliance man had not thought to volunteer the information. It was the ultimate proof of the dehumanization of man by bureaucracy. The little ex-soldier with the mustache was no longer an individual, but a cog in the corporate image of the Alliance government, the Supremacy of Man party, adhering to doctrine, driven by dogma, unthinking and uncaring about anything but power and the means of obtaining it.

  The radio light continued to blink.

  He started the grav car, pulled away from the Sanctuary, and pushed the accelerator all the way down as he followed the road back to the aviary which contained his things, from which they would have to pack their provisions for the long trek ahead…

  Chapter Five

  She had not regained consciousness by the time they reached the aviary, and though he did not feel good about interrupting her sleep, he administered a stimulant to her with a hypodermic and began vigorously rubbing her cheeks and hands. There was so little time to do so much that he required her assistance every step of the way.

  She stirred, muttered sleepily, sat partway up without opening her oval eyes. Her wings uncrinkled a bit, strained to open, then settled back and folded into place. She shook her head, made blubbering sounds, and finally looked up at him. There were dark circles under her eyes, but they only served to make her that much more stunning, intriguing.

  "Where are we?" she asked.

  "At the aviary with my things."

  "The wolves…"

  "I'll tell you as we pack things," he said, pulling hex to her feet. "You feel up to working a little?"

  "I'm tired. But I can manage," she said.

  "The arm?"

  "It doesn't hurt anymore."

  "Let's hurry then."

  She took time to kiss him, once, long and languidly, then they began rounding up compact food products, concentrates, thermos jugs for water, portable electric torches, everything it seemed likely they might find use for and be able to carry without much trouble. Once, she paused to try to persuade him that he should turn her back to them, try to make amends. He convinced her that such a suggestion not only insulted him and underrated his feelings about her but was totally fanciful since the Alliance rep was now out for blood and revenge and would never accept anything less. The packing resumed at the same furious pace.

  "But where are we going?" she asked as they worked the last of the items Davis felt they needed into the rucksacks and the single suitcase.

  He started to answer, then only packed more quickly. Several minutes later, he said, "If we can get to the woods, buy some time, maybe they'll think we died in the mountains during the winter. Maybe we will. But we'll try like the devil not to. And if we make it, maybe, in the spring, I'll be able to go into the port city without any trouble, unrecognized."

  "It's no good," she said.

  He shrugged. He knew it was unworkable as well as she. But what else had been left open to them? They were nothing now but two scurrying creatures caught in the web of the megalomaniacs, the power seekers, mice in the walls of an inconceivably vast social order. Their only chance was to act exactly like mice, living off that order, in the fringes of that order, without being discovered and eradicated. Not the best of lives. But better than being dead.

  "I may have a suggestion," she said.

  He continued to pack, stuffing the last few items into the bulging rucksack. "What's that?"

  "A fortress."

  He looked up as he strapped the flap of the sack down, not quite grasping what she was trying to tell him. "What?"

  "A fortress. Remember my telling you about them, about how they were supposed to be the thing that would turn the course of the war in the favor of my people?"

  The word clicked into place then, and all the notes he had taken on the subject and studied in detail appeared before his mind with the almost total recall he possessed. According to Leah, the Demosian government had constructed, during the tail end of the war when the sterilizing gases had had their effect and there was a grave shortage of fighters, four fortresses deep within the earth, scattered over this one large continent on which most of the winged people had made their homes. The fortresses were deep, impregnable shelters against every sort of attack and were equipped with, according to rumors, experimental laboratories for the development of new weapons—and experimental genetics labs which were to find some method of producing more Demosians without the need of fertile men and women. The great push by the Alliance forces had come just as the fortresses were completed, and the men who would have staffed them were needed in the last desperate attempt to stave off the Earthmen—which, of course, failed. The fortresses, if they ever had existed, were never discovered. Leah's grandfather had been an engineer in charge of the heavy construction workers in the building of the nearest of these fortresses and had been assigned, with his family, to occupy quarters there to take charge of the maintenance once the structure was in operation. But he died in the last battle.

  "Could these fortresses be myths?" he asked. "A desperate people will evolve all sorts of ethereal fantasies to give them hope."

  "My grandfather was a realist," she said. "It was no myth."

  "And you know the location?"

  "Not exactly. But from listening to my grandfather and analyzing what I can remember, I've since decided it has to be inside the mountain we call Tooth, which is a good ways from here, but not so far that we cannot make it on these provisions."

  He thought a moment, then stood, grabbed the rucksacks. "It's worth a try. We don't have anything better in mind. Don't get your hopes up, love. Even if there is a fortress, it might very well be crumbling and uninhabitable."

  "They were not built to crumble."

  "Perhaps," he said, smiling. "I'll take these out to the car and come back for the suitcase. You think you can wear that coat without hurting your wings?"

  She looked at the two coats he had laid out for them, picked up a huge, furry Alaskan survival coat that would come down below his knees an inch or two but which came to her toes. "It'll be all right."

  He loaded the car, helped her down the rickety stairs since she could not fly while wearing the survival coat, and got her in the car. He wore the fall coat he had, plus several shirts, and he was not too cold—though he wondered whether a day or two spent in the open would have him as warm.

  "Trouble," he said as he pulled the grav car out onto the lane which the snow had obscured.

  "What?" she asked.

  He pointed to the radio. "The bulb has stopped blinking. Which means they may have decided their rep is in trouble."

  The snow whooshed up around them, obliterating the forest on either side as the grav plates' field disturbed the powdery stuff. Davis drove the car back the lane, toward the Sanctuary, until Leah directed him to the best point of entrance into the woods for the journey to the mountain called Tooth and the fortress that might or might not be there. He angled across open fields at her insistence, which meant the speed of the grav car had to be reduced. He kept anxiously studying the road in the rearview mirror, certain the dark shapes of police vans would glide into view at any moment. It was a good four miles through the rising
, sparsely vegetated foothills, always rising, disappearing from the highway for short moments, then reappearing again as they started up the slope of the next hill which was higher than the last. In ten minutes, they arrived at the edge of the woods where he drove the car between the trees, scraping the paint from it, tearing off a strip of chrome, but effectively concealing it from anyone down there on the lane who might chance to look up and see the dark gleam of metal.

  "It's on foot now," he said. "I'm going to give you an injection of adrenalin and a few c.c.s of a speedheal restorative. Roll up your sleeve."

  She struggled with the bulky garment, finally managed to oblige, and didn't protest when the needles punctured her slim arm. Two little marks of blood were left behind, but she had bled enough recently not to be bothered by that.

  "I'll carry a rucksack on each shoulder and switch the suitcase from hand to hand until you've built enough energy through those drugs to lend me support."

  "I can do it now," she said.

  "Yeah. Maybe for ninety seconds. Come on, love. I know you're a brave girl and a strong girl, but let's be honest with ourselves. When we're tired, we rest. If we don't make that rule, we'll collapse before we're a third of the way to this fortress of yours."

  They got out, Proteus immediately behind, and Davis loaded up with the gear. As he was picking up the suitcase, both rucksacks firmly on his shoulders, Leah gasped and said, "Look! Down at the Sanctuary!"

  He looked back down the rippling landscape at the temple and the Sanctuary, which was only partially visible on the other side of the religious structure. Perched on the hilltop around the ugly place were four grav vehicles much too large to be anything but police vans. Even as they watched, the things began moving away from the Sanctuary, down the lane toward the aviary where he had been doing his research. Their headlights were like the luminous eyes of giant moths, slicing down the darkness that had begun to descend. In minutes, they would find their prey had fled. And, Davis noted miserably, the grav car had left a perfect trail up the foothills to the forest, a trail a blind and noseless bloodhound could follow. The only thing that might possibly yet save them was the night which was rapidly settling over the land.