Dark Of The Woods

by Dean Koontz

  He wiped the dewy vapor from his face, squinted his eyes and tried to see through the water droplets that immediately beaded his eyelashes. There was a dense cloud of snow eddying in the air currents in the valley bottom, a couple of hundred feet below, and it effectively shielded anything down there from his vision.

  Wiping his face once more, he stumbled foward, grabbing trees and shattered saplings for handholds, slipping, crashing into rock formations and yil trunks with his hips, but somehow managing not to fall. He was breathing well enough now that the vapor had begun to settle, but his heart still thumped wildly in his chest. He had recalled the dream he had had only a couple of hours before in which he had been imprisoned in a house of ice and Leah had come to release him by melting the walls down—and how she, in turn, had been led away, appropriated by the Alliance soldier without a face…

  If she were dead, in this avalanche, it would be as much the Alliance's fault as if a blue suited, brass buttoned officer had come and taken her and shot her…

  No. No, he had to face up to the fact that some of the blame would lie with him. He should have tied her to a tree, tied both of them firmly, to protect against the possibility of an avalanche. Never before in his life had there been another human being for which he had felt responsible. It had always been him, alone, against the world, and any cuts or wounds incurred were marks of pride to satisfy the sadistic trait in him. Now the "me" was "us" as he had been reminding himself ever since that day in the temple, in the corridors of God's mind, when the point of no return had been reached and passed at blinding speeds. And while one half of "us" was rather big and brutish and able to take care of itself, the other half was frail, light, and in need of help when the forces of the opposition were very large.

  He cursed his mother and, to a lesser degree but still vehemently, his father. If they had been reasonable, open human beings instead of ego-bloated back-biters, perhaps he would have learned the concept of "us" when he should have, in his childhood. But from the very first days, when he saw that one or the other only took his side in order to goad the one who disagreed with him, he had realized it was Stauffer against them, Stauffer in the singular. Because of them and the lateness with which he had come to the discovery of love and the responsibilities it carried with it, he might very well have made a mistake in judgment that would cost him the other half of "us." And so soon, before he had even had time to explore all the possibilities of the amplified self that now included this winged Demosian girl…

  "Leah!" he shouted as he reached the edge of the wall of snow.

  Silence. Except for the faint sigh of the wind.

  "Leah!"

  "Here," she called half-heartily, thirty feet to the right and forty feet behind. She had been brought up against the thick base of an enormous, black-barked tree and had not suffered the ride clear to the bottom. She was struggling to get out of the imprisoning snow, but with little luck.

  He started after her at a run, fell, cracked his head on a bared section of stony ground, got up a little dizzy. By the time he reached her she was half to her feet, and he had her clear of the mounds in seconds. He drew her to him, nearly crushed her, despite the padding of her survival coat. He wanted to say very many things, but there were not really words to frame them. They were emotions, formless thoughts of happiness. Instead, he kissed her and stood back to look her over. "In one piece?"

  "No broken bones. Though I guess I'll ache pretty terribly by tomorrow."

  "An ache can be borne. I don't know quite how we'd handle a broken leg or something like that. The speedheal doesn't have the facilities."

  She turned and looked up at the top of the ridge. "Well, we've broken through right enough."

  "And if anyone is on the trail," he said, "that should bring them running. Come on, let's get a move on."

  "The suitcase," she protested. "It has the blanket and the plastic in it."

  He looked at the tons of snow at the bottom of the ravine. "We'd never find it, even if we had days to look. We'll just have to make do with what we have."

  "Not down there," she protested. "I held onto it until after I was stopped by the tree. It's in this mound, right here somewhere."

  He looked up to the point where they had stood, where the slide had struck them. "You held on to that heavy case all the way down?"

  "I knew, if we lost it, we'd not have any heat when we slept and that would mean the end of it. Right?" She looked so serious and yet so elfin at the same time that he burst into laughter.

  "What's so funny?" she asked.

  "You. I had my rucksacks strapped on, and they were very nearly ripped off me. Yet you had presence of mind enough to clutch that damned suitcase and make it stay with you. Lady, remind me never to challenge you to a fist fight."

  The suitcase was near the surface, and they uncovered it in a few minutes. It had been dented when it struck the tree, but was otherwise undamaged. When Davis started up the hill with it, she insisted he let her take it. He tried to argue, realized that would lead him nowhere, and finally let her have it.

  "Now, dammit, let's get going," he said, grasping her elbow and helping her up the side of the ravine toward the top which was no longer drifted shut.

  Proteus came behind. His plasti-plasma was gurgling quite a bit, and his cataracted sight sensors swiveled and twisted, as if something like the avalanche might strike again.

  But something worse happened.

  "What are they?" Leah asked as they pulled themselves onto level ground and began walking across the short table of the mountaintop.

  Paralleling them to their right were three blue spheres, each as large as a one-man plane, painted with flat light-absorbing paint that did not gleam or reflect the slightest minim of dim sunlight. Even as he watched, they arced, changed course, angled in toward he and Leah. There were no men inside them, he knew, but that did not make the situation the least bit better for them.

  "Sherlock robots," he explained, watching the advancing balls of blue with fascination. "They must have brought them in and set them loose before dawn. I wouldn't have thought a backwoods world like this would have any. They most likely released them at three different locations. They've been closing in on us all night, coming toward one another as their data was correlated, shared, and factored. They've got the most sophisticated tracking gear the Alliance possessses, all microminiaturized and stuffed in that shell. You can't escape one of them."

  "How do they kill?" she asked gloomily, her large, oval eyes fixed to the middle of the trio of globes.

  "They don't. But don't look relieved about that. They're just as deadly as if they were killers. But with heat sensors, sound sensors, visual apparatus, infrared scanners, encephalographic trackers, and a complete library of card indices on every public act you and I have engaged in, they have no room for weapons. But they've certainly already radioed our position back to the Alliance soldiers. You can expect a squadron of police to be dropped in here within minutes—if the weather isn't too bad to permit that."

  The Sherlocks slowed.

  The snow continued to fall.

  "What do we do?" Leah asked. "Just wait to be picked up?"

  Chapter Eight

  He did feel standing there with the wind whipping his coat tightly against his legs—with the weight of their supplies on his shoulders, with his nerves still unquieted from the near disaster of the snowslide—like doing nothing heroic, like waiting for them and going with them as meekly as they could possibly desire, letting them do to him whatever they wished. But he reminded himself that such thinking was selfish and that "us" should not be ignored in a rush to consider the bone-aching exhaustion and the desire for rest and peace that plagued "me." With so many miles left to go before they would reach Tooth, their chances for survival were slim. How much easier and less painful it would be to die under the guns of the Alliance soldiers than under the sapping wind and cold of Demos's winter.

  Intellectually, he was aware that the death wish tha
t now flirted about the back of his mind was a holdover from earlier days, from those dark hours in his childhood when he found rebuff from both parents and turned to his books for solace given second-hand where none of first-hand nature was obtainable. He read books of stories about the supernatural, of demons and devils, angels and spirits. In those days, it seemed as if it would be so much more bearable to be dead, to inhabit the regions of the netherworld creatures where odd and magical things transpired and where there were no great emotional tangles that made you sick deep in your stomach, no fights and scoldings that made you shake like an old man with the ague.

  But he was no longer a child.

  And there was solace to be had in this world, in the land of the living. If only he could keep both of them alive long enough to enjoy it and strengthen the bond of affection that joined them, he might eventually learn to stand up to adverse conditions without hesitation, without first falling back on the deathwish and the easy way out of a bad position.

  "Gun forward!" he directed Proteus. "Fire one!"

  The projectile struck the center Sherlock, tearing the delicate and complex machine into thousands of whirling, twisted pieces of junk. Now he had added yet another crime to his string of punishable acts on his record: willfully destroying a major piece of Alliance property. He wondered how many years that carried with it, and he felt an elation rise in him the likes of which he had not felt since he was a boy and had secretly violated one of the many rules his mother or father laid down for him.

  The other two detection robots curved away to avoid the same fate, but he shouted for Proteus to track the one on the right and fire when on target. He was rewarded with a flash of green-blue light as the casing of the second Sherlock split and poured forth a long stream of mechanical guts.

  He turned to look for the third of the devices, but he could not locate it. "Damn!" he snapped.

  "It disappeared between the trunks of those trees, straight ahead," she said.

  "Let's go. It'll have to follow us. Maybe, if we make it move, we'll get a look at it."

  They struck out for the trees, moving as swiftly as the terrain and the weather permitted. Proteus floated ahead of them, watchful of the deep shadows through which they must pass. Now that the Sherlocks had been identified by Davis as enemies, the protection robot would be constantly alert until the third device had been demolished. It did not withdraw its projectile weapons barrel through its flawless shell but maintained it in firing position as it scanned the woods with all of its senses. It was more likely to have luck finding the Sherlock than it would have had finding a man under the same conditions, for the Alliance detection system would be radiating leaked power plus the traceable sensor emanations of its multiple tracking facilities. By the virtue of the very same instruments it used to keep touch of them, Proteus could keep its position known.

  They entered the copse of trees and weaved between the smooth boles, following the path of some mountain deer herd which had passed this way and provided an easier thoroughfare than they had been used to in the last several hours.

  "It only takes one of them, doesn't it?" Leah asked, marching along behind him, bent a little to accommodate the weight of the suitcase.

  "What?" he asked, not looking back. There wasn't any time to look back now.

  "One Sherlock. To let them know where we are."

  "That's right."

  "Then, no matter how fast we walk, no matter how far we go before they can get police on the mountain, they'll still have us pinpointed?"

  "Proteus will find it and destroy it, eventually."

  "But until he does, shouldn't we take one of these other trails that cross this one every once and a while? If we moved in the wrong direction, and we make a few thousand feet before Proteus can destroy the Sherlock, then they will be left with the wrong fix on us as their last bit of data. As soon as the Sherlock is finished, we backtrack, pick up this path again, and go the way we really want to go."

  He stopped so suddenly that she almost walked into the back of him, and when he turned around, her face was nearly up against his chest. He kissed her nose, said, "How come you're smarter than me?"

  "I'm not."

  "You've proven it a couple of times now."

  "It's just that you've never been in a war. You don't understand about things like this as well as I do. You'll learn." She said it with such sincerity that he was forced to laugh again, though the situation certainly did not merit mirth.

  "There's a cross trail just ahead," he said. "Left or right?"

  "Doesn't matter. Maybe right, since we'll be bearing just slightly to the left when we start down the other side of this mountain."

  "Let's go," he said, leading the way, taking the right turn and striking off on the false trail. He just hoped Proteus would locate the Sherlock and destroy it in time to let them get back to the right trail and make some distance on it before the blue uniformed boys arrived.

  Proteus's plasti-plasma gurgled.

  It seemed an interminable time that they walked, though he knew it could not have been more than three or four minutes. But each step away from the trail they intended to regain seemed like a step into a swamp from which there was no egress—a swamp lined, beneath the brackish water, with quicksand. He even fantasized, for a moment, that the Sherlock might be quite aware of their plan and only leading them on long enough for the soldiers to arrive. But that was hogwash, for the Sherlock could not think, not even as much as Proteus. It was a densely packed shell of seeking equipment, nothing more. It was a game machine, a very clever one at that, but not a man.

  Still, it would not show itself. At least, not visually. He wished there were some way he could know if Proteus had it spotted. He remembered having often pondered the simplicity of being a machine, of seeing the world in black and white, in quantities of good and bad without shades of gray in the middle. Now he realized a few other values in a machine's existence. There was no fear, no worry. No anxiety—and therefore no urgency. He wished there were some way to make Proteus aware of the value of these ticking seconds that slipped by them so terribly fast.

  The projectile weapon made a whoofing noise as Proteus blasted at something almost directly ahead, through the trees. There was an explosion, light and smoke, then silence.

  "He got it!" Leah cried.

  "Let's see before we celebrate," he said, rushing forward to the spot where the projectile had struck. There, steaming in the snow, melting hollows in it, were dozens of chunks of the blue-husked Sherlock.

  Leah dropped the suitcase and slapped her hands against her bulkily clothed hips, laughing much as he had seen the other Demosian girls laughing when they had been playing games with the mythical demons in the forest back at the Sanctuary. He was intrigued by the way these people could mix joy and humor with the direst of events, the manner in which they never lost track of the things that should be appreciated in life no matter how many tons of dross and ugliness those nuggets were buried under.

  "Fast now," he urged, turning and pushing past her to lead the way back to the other trail. "They'll be here in moments if they've taken a chance of sending a copter up in this storm."

  They gained the first herd path in two minutes, moving at a trot. When they got there, he insisted taking the suitcase from her was the wisest course, since—for a short period anyway—he could run faster with it than she could and, without it, she would be able to keep up. She did not argue this time, perfectly aware of the urgency involved and the truth of it. She was, just as she said, a good soldier. Had it been better for her to struggle with the luggage, she would have refused; but seeing the wisdom of his suggestion, she complied.

  Time passed much too quickly for comfort.

  There was no sound but the wind, the rattling of the branches overhead, and the squeak of their feet in the snow.

  He estimated their remaining time before the arrival of the troops at a little more than five minutes. He tried counting seconds as they ran, but he lost t
rack so often that he gave it up and concentrated on moving just a few feet per minute faster than they already were.

  For a time, it seemed as if they were the only living beings in all the world, two figures in a landscape without purpose and without meaning. All other things were inanimate: cold, snow, sky, earth, stark trees, strangely stilled wind…

  It was a tomb planet, a dead world, and they were rodents scurrying through its corridors and chambers in search of some exit that would lead them into life.

  The thing which made them run so fast was the knowledge that they might soon cease to be rodents and become two more corpses to inhabit the cells of the tomb.

  Then, with the swiftness of a sleepwalker stepping on a nail, the world came awake with a thundering explosion of sound. The sky was filled with the chatter of the blades of an aircraft whose flight pattern was too high for grav plates to be of any use—a staccato barrage like machine guns from some ancient period of man's history. The forest took up the sharp call and threw the clatter of the big engines back at the low clouds.

  "Hurry," Davis said as they reached the edge of the mountain flatland and began to descend another treacherous slope toward the long bowl of the valley through which they would be walking for the next four or five hours, if Leah was not confused about the way to the Tooth.

  "Let me have the suitcase," she said.

  "Never mind that."

  "You can't brace yourself with two rucksacks and the suitcase on uneven ground. You know that as well as I do. Now quit arguing and hurry it!"

  He set the case down without stopping, merely slowing his pace for a moment, heard her grapple with it, heft it and bring it after him. He worked from tree to tree down the sheet-white land beneath the bare trees, his eyes on the skies that could be seen through the crosshatch of limbs more often than they were focused on the terrain ahead.

  She followed.

  When they were halfway down, the police copter rushed by overhead, oblivious of them as it sped toward the spot the Sherlock had last pinpointed them. Under its belly was the "A" of the Alliance, ringed with the circle of green worlds that was the government symbol. Then it was gone, and its hoarse voice diminished as it put distance between itself and the very fugitives it was seeking.