Dragon Tears

by Dean Koontz

  Sammy was surprised not by the question but by his inability to answer it. He was caught between the fear of death and the need to die. Each morning he was disappointed when he woke and found that he was still among the living, and each night when he curled up in his rag-and-paper bedding, he hoped for endless sleep. Yet day after day he struggled to obtain sufficient food, to find a warm place on those rare cold nights when California’s climatic grace deserted it, to stay dry when it rained so as to avoid pneumonia, and he looked both ways before crossing a street.

  Perhaps he did not want to live, but wanted only the punishment of living.

  “I’d like it better if you wanted to live,” the ratman said quietly. “More fun for me.”

  Sammy’s heart was beating too thunderously. Each pulse throbbed hardest in the bruised flesh that marked the impact points of the ratman’s ferocious kicks.

  “You’ve got thirty-six hours to live. Better do something, don’t you think? Hmmmm? The clock is running. Ticktock, ticktock.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Sammy asked plaintively.

  Instead of replying, the ratman said, “Midnight tomorrow the rats will come for you.”

  “I’ve never done anything to you.”

  The scars on the tormentor’s brutal face grew livid. “… chew out your eyes…”

  “Please.”

  His pale lips tightened as he spoke, revealing more of his rotting teeth: “… strip away your lips while you scream, nibble your tongue…”

  As the ratman grew increasingly agitated, his demeanor became not more feverish but cold. His reptilian eyes seemed to radiate a chill that found its way into Sammy’s flesh and into the deepest reaches of his mind.

  “Who are you?” Sammy asked, not for the first time.

  The ratman did not answer. He swelled with rage. His thick, filthy fingers curled to form fists, uncurled, curled, uncurled. He kneaded the air as if he hoped to squeeze blood from it.

  What are you? Sammy wondered but dared not ask.

  “Rats,” hissed the ratman.

  Afraid of what was about to happen, although it had happened before, Sammy scooted backward on his butt, toward the oleander bush that half concealed his packing crate, trying to put some distance between himself and the towering hobo.

  “Rats,” the ratman repeated, and he began to tremble.

  It was starting.

  Sammy froze, too terrified to move.

  The ratman’s trembling became a shudder. The shudder escalated into violent shaking. His oily hair whipped about his head, his arms jerked, his legs jigged, and his black raincoat flapped as if he were in a cyclone, but no wind huffed or howled. The March air was as preternaturally still as it had been since the hulking vagrant’s appearance, as if the world were but a painted stage and the two of them the only actors upon it.

  Becalmed on reefs of blacktop, Sammy Shamroe finally stood. He was driven to his feet by fear of the roiling tide of claws, sharp teeth, and red eyes that would soon rise around him.

  Beneath his clothes, the ratman’s body churned like a burlap sack full of angry rattlesnakes. He was… changing. His face melted and reformed as if he stood in a forge controlled by some mad deity intent on molding a series of monstrosities, each of which would be more terrible than the one before it. Gone were the livid scars, gone were the reptilian eyes, gone the wild beard and tangled hair, gone the cruel mouth. For a moment his head was nothing but a mass of undifferentiated flesh, a lump of oozing mush, red with blood, then red-brown and darker, glistening, like something that had been poured out of a dog-food can. Abruptly the tissue solidified, and his head was composed of rats clinging to one another, a ball of rats, tails drooping like Rastafarian dreadlocks, fierce eyes as scarlet as drops of radiant blood. Where hands should have hung from his sleeves, rats bristled out of frayed cuffs. The heads of other rodents began to poke from between the buttons of his bulging shirt.

  Though he had seen all of this before, Sammy tried to scream. His swollen tongue stuck to the roof of his dry mouth, so he made only a panicky muffled sound in the back of his throat. A scream wouldn’t help anyway. He had screamed before, during other encounters with his tormentor, and no one had responded.

  The ratman came apart as if he were a rickety scarecrow in a sundering storm, pieces of his body dropping away. When each part hit the pavement, it was an individual rat. Whiskered, wet-nosed, sharp-toothed, squealing, the repellent creatures swarmed over one another, long tails lashing left and right. More rats poured out of his shirt and from under the cuffs of his trousers, far more than his clothes could possibly have contained: a score of them, two score, eighty, more than a hundred.

  Like a deflating balloon that had been crafted in the form of a man, his clothes settled slowly to the pavement. Then each garment was transformed as well. The wrinkled lumps of cloth sprouted heads and limbs and produced more rodents, until both the ratman and his reeking wardrobe had been replaced by a seething mound of vermin squirming over and under one another with the boneless agility that made their kind so repulsive.

  Sammy could not get his breath. The air grew even more leaden than it had been. Whereas the wind had died earlier, an unnatural stillness now seemed to settle over deeper levels of the natural world, until the fluidity of oxygen and nitrogen molecules declined drastically, as if the atmosphere had begun to thicken into a liquid, which he could draw into his lungs only with the greatest effort.

  Now that the ratman’s body had disintegrated into scores of squirming beasts, the transformed corpus abruptly dispersed. The fat, sleek rats erupted out of the mound, fleeing in all directions, scuttling away from Sammy but also swarming around him, over his shoes and between his legs. That hateful, living tide spilled into the shadows along the buildings and into the vacant lot, where it either drained into holes in the building walls and in the earth—holes that Sammy could not see—or simply vanished.

  A sudden breeze harried crisp dead leaves and scraps of paper ahead of it. The swish of tires and the rumble of engines arose as cars on the main street moved past the mouth of the alley. A bee buzzed by Sammy’s face.

  He was able to breathe again. He stood for a moment in the bright noon light, gasping.

  The worst thing was that it had all happened in sunshine, in the open air, without smoke and mirrors and clever lighting and silk threads and trapdoors and the standard tools of a magician’s craft.

  Sammy had crawled out of his crate with the good intention of starting his day in spite of his hangover, maybe look for discarded aluminum cans to redeem at a recycling center, maybe do a little panhandling along the boardwalk. Now the hangover was gone, but he still didn’t feel like facing the world.

  On unsteady legs, he returned to the oleander bush. The boughs were heavily laden with red flowers. He pushed them aside and stared at the large wooden crate under them.

  He picked up a stick and poked at the rags and newspapers inside the big box, expecting a couple of rats to erupt from hiding. But they had gone elsewhere.

  Sammy dropped to his knees and crawled into his haven, letting the draperies of oleander fall shut behind him.

  From his pile of meager possessions in the back of the crate, he removed an unopened bottle of cheap burgundy and unscrewed the cap. He took a long pull of the warmish wine.

  Sitting with his back against the wooden wall, clutching the bottle in both hands, he tried to forget what he had seen. As far as he could see, forgetting was his only hope of coping. He could not manage the problems of everyday life any more. So how could he expect to deal with something as extraordinary as the ratman?

  A brain steeped in too many grams of cocaine, peppered with too many other drugs, and marinated in alcohol could produce the most amazing zoo of hallucinated creatures. And when his conscience got the better of him and he struggled to fulfill one of his periodic pledges of sobriety, withdrawal led to delirium tremens, which was populated by an even more colorful and threatening phantasmagoria of beas
ts. But none of them was as memorable and as deeply disturbing as the ratman.

  He took another generous swallow of wine and leaned his head back against the wall of the crate, holding fast to the bottle with both hands.

  Year by year, day by day, Sammy had found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fantasy. He had long ago ceased to trust his perceptions. Yet of one thing he was dismayingly certain: the ratman was real. Impossible, fantastical, inexplicable—but real.

  Sammy expected to find no answers to the questions that haunted him. But he could not stop asking: what was this creature; where did it come from; why did it want to torment and kill a grizzled, beaten-down street person whose death—or continued existence—was of little or no consequence to the world?

  He drank more wine.

  Thirty-six hours. Ticktock. Ticktock.

  3

  Cop instinct.

  When the citizen in the gray cords, white shirt, and dark-gray jacket entered the restaurant, Connie noticed him and knew he was bent in some way. When she saw that Harry had also noticed, her interest in the guy increased dramatically because Harry had a nose that would make a bloodhound envious.

  Cop instinct is less instinct than a sharply honed talent for observation and the good sense to correctly interpret whatever is observed. With Connie it was more a subconscious awareness than a calculated monitoring of everyone who crossed her line of sight.

  The suspect stood just inside the door, near the cash register, waiting while the hostess seated a young couple at a table near one of the big front windows.

  He appeared ordinary at first glance, even harmless. But on closer inspection, Connie could identify the incongruities that had caused her subconscious to recommend a closer look at the man. No signs of tension were visible in his rather bland face, and his posture was relaxed—but his hands were fisted tightly at his sides, as if he could barely control an urgent need to strike at someone. His vague smile reinforced the air of absentmindedness that clung to him—but the smile kept coming and going, flickering uncertainly, a subtle testament to inner turmoil. His sportcoat was buttoned, which was odd because he wasn’t wearing a tie and because the day was warm. More important, the coat did not hang properly; its outer and inner pockets seemed filled with something heavy that pulled it out of shape, and it bulged over his belt buckle—as if concealing a handgun jammed under the waistband of his pants.

  Of course, cop instinct wasn’t always reliable. The coat might just be old and out of shape. The guy might actually be the absent-minded professor he appeared to be; in which case his coat might be stuffed with nothing more sinister than a pipe, tobacco pouch, slide rule, calculator, lecture notes, and all sorts of items he had slipped into his pockets without quite realizing it.

  Harry, whose voice had trailed off in mid-sentence, slowly put down his chicken sandwich. He was intently focused on the man in the misshapen coat.

  Connie had picked up a few shoestring french fries. She dropped them onto the plate instead of eating them, and she wiped her greasy fingers on her napkin, all the while trying to watch the new customer without obviously staring at him.

  The hostess, a petite blonde in her twenties, returned to the reception area after seating the couple by the window, and the man in the Ultrasuede coat smiled. She spoke to him, he replied, and the blonde laughed politely as if what he’d said was mildly amusing.

  When the customer said something more and the hostess laughed again, Connie relaxed slightly. She reached for a couple of fries.

  The newcomer seized the hostess by her belt, jerked her toward him, and grabbed a handful of her blouse. His assault was so sudden and unexpected, his moves so cat-quick, that he had lifted her off the floor before she began to scream. As if she weighed nothing, he threw her at nearby diners.

  “Oh, shit.” Connie pushed back from the table and came to her feet, reaching under her jacket and behind to the revolver that was holstered in the small of her back.

  Harry rose, too, his own revolver in hand. “Police!”

  His warning was drowned out by the sickening crash of the young blonde slamming into a table, which tipped sideways. The diners toppled out of their chairs, and glasses shattered. All over the restaurant people looked up from their food, startled by the uproar.

  The stranger’s flamboyance and savagery might just mean he was on drugs—or he might also be genuinely psychotic.

  Connie took no chances, dropping into a crouch as she brought her gun up. “Police!”

  Either the guy had heard Harry’s first warning or he had seen them out of the corner of his eye, because he was already scuttling toward the back of the restaurant, between the tables.

  He had a handgun of his own—maybe a Browning 9mm, judging by the sound and by the glimpse she got. He was using it, too, firing at random, each shot thunderous in the confines of the restaurant.

  Beside Connie, a painted terra-cotta pot exploded. Chips of glazed clay showered onto her. The dracaena margenata in the pot toppled over, raking her with long narrow leaves, and she crouched even lower, trying to use a nearby table as a shield.

  She wanted in the worst way to get a shot at the bastard, but the risk of hitting one of the other customers was too great. When she looked across the restaurant at child’s level, thinking maybe she could pulverize one of the creep’s knees with a well-placed round, she could see him scrambling across the room. The trouble was, between her and him, a scattering of panicked, wide-eyed people had taken refuge under their tables.

  “Shit.” She pursued the geek while trying to make as small a target of herself as possible, aware that Harry was going after him from another direction.

  People were screaming because they were scared, or had been shot and were in pain. The crazy bastard’s gun boomed too often. Either he could change clips with superhuman speed or he had another pistol.

  One of the big windows took a direct hit and came down in a jinglejangle clangor. A waterfall of glass splashed across the cold Santa Fe tile floor.

  As Connie crept from table to table, her shoes picked up mashed french fries, ketchup, mustard, bits of oozing cacti, and crunching-tinkling pieces of glass. And as she passed the wounded, they cried out or pawed at her, desperate for help.

  She hated to ignore them, but she had to shake them off, keep moving, try to get a shot at the walking phlegm in the Ultrasuede coat. What meager first-aid she might be able to provide wasn’t going to help them. She couldn’t do anything about the terror and pain the sonofabitch had already wrought, but she might be able to stop him from doing more damage if she stayed on his ass.

  She raised her head, risking a bullet in the brain, and saw the scumbag was all the way at the back of the restaurant, standing at a swinging door that had a glass porthole in the center. Grinning, he squeezed off rounds at anything that caught his attention, apparently equally pleased to hit a potted plant or a human being. He was still unnervingly ordinary in appearance, round-faced and bland, with a weak chin and soft mouth. Even his grin failed to make him look like a madman; it was more the broad and affable smile of someone who had just seen a clown take a pratfall. But there was no doubt he was crazy-dangerous, because he shot a big saguaro cactus, then a guy in a checkered shirt, then the saguaro again, and he did have two guns, one in each hand.

  Welcome to the 1990s.

  Connie rose from shelter far enough to line up a shot.

  Harry was equally quick to take advantage of the lunatic’s sudden obsession with the saguaro. He came to his feet in another part of the restaurant and fired. Connie fired twice. Chunks of wood exploded from the door frame beside the psycho’s head, and the glass blew out of the porthole; they had bracketed him by inches with their first shots.

  The geek vanished through the swinging door, which took both Harry’s and Connie’s next rounds and kept swinging. Judging by the size of the bullet holes, the door was hollow-core, so the slugs might have gone through and nailed the sonofabitch on the othe
r side.

  Connie ran toward the kitchen, slipping a little on the food-strewn floor. She doubted they were going to be lucky enough to find the creep wounded and squirming like a half-crushed cockroach on the other side of that door. More likely, he was waiting for them. But she couldn’t rein herself in. He might even step through the door from the kitchen and cut her down as she approached. But her juices were up; she was jazzed. When her juices were up, she couldn’t help but do everything full-bore, and it didn’t even matter that her juices were up most of the time.

  God, she loved this job.

  4

  Harry hated this cowboy stuff.

  When you were a cop, you knew violence might come down sooner or later. You might suddenly find yourself up to your neck in wolves a lot nastier than any Red Riding Hood ever had to deal with. But even if it was part of the job, you didn’t enjoy it.

  Well, maybe you did if you were Connie Gulliver.

  As Harry rushed the kitchen door, going in low and fast with his revolver ready, he heard her behind him, feet slapping-crunching-squishing on the floor, coming full-tilt. He knew that if he looked back at her, she would be grinning, not unlike the maniac who had shot up the restaurant, and although he knew she was on the side of the angels, that grin never failed to unnerve him.

  He skidded to a halt at the door, kicked it, and instantly jumped to one side, expecting an answering hail of bullets.

  But the door slammed inward, swung back out, and no gunfire followed. So when it swung inward again, Connie burst past him and went into the kitchen with it. He followed her, cursing under his breath, which was the only way he ever cursed.

  In the humid, claustrophobic confines of the kitchen, burgers sizzled on a grill and fat bubbled in a deep-fryer. Pots of water boiled on a stovetop. Gas ovens creaked and popped from the intense heat they contained, and a bank of microwave ovens hummed softly.

  Half a dozen cooks and other employees, dressed in white slacks and T-shirts, their hair tucked under white string-tied caps, pale as dead men, stood or cowered midst the culinary equipment. They were wrapped by curling tendrils of steam and meat smoke, looking less like real people than like ghosts. Almost as one they turned toward Connie and Harry.

  “Where?” Harry whispered.

  One of the employees pointed toward a half-open door at the back of the kitchen.

  Harry led the way along a narrow aisle flanked on the left by racks of pots and utensils. On the right was a series of butcher blocks, a machine used to cut well-scrubbed potatoes into raw french fries, and another that shredded lettuce.

  The aisle widened into a clear space with deep sinks and heavy-duty commercial dishwashers along the wall to the left. The half-open door was about twenty feet directly ahead, past the sinks.

  Connie moved up to his side as they drew near the door. She kept enough distance between them to assure they couldn’t both be taken out by one burst of gunfire.

  The darkness past that threshold bothered Harry. A windowless storeroom probably lay beyond. The smiling, moon-faced perp would be even more dangerous once cornered.

  After flanking the door, they hesitated, taking a moment to think. Harry would gladly have taken half the day to think, giving the perp plenty of time to stew in there. But that wasn’t how it-worked. Cops were expected to act rather than react. If there was a way out of the storeroom, any delay on their part would allow the perp to escape.

  Besides, when your partner was Connie Gulliver, you did not have the luxury of dawdling or ruminating. She was never reckless, always professional and cautious—but so quick and aggressive that it seemed sometimes as if she had come to homicide investigations by way of a SWAT team.

  Connie snatched up a broom that was leaning against the wall. Holding it near the base, she poked the handle against the half-open door, which swung inward with a protracted squeak. When the door was all the way open, she threw the broom aside. It clattered like old bones on the tile floor.

  They regarded each other tensely from opposite sides of the doorway.

  Silence in the storeroom.

  Without exposing himself to the perp, Harry could see just a narrow wedge of darkness beyond the threshold.

  The only sounds were the chuckling and sputtering of the pots and deep fryers in the kitchen, the hum of the exhaust fans overhead.

  As Harry’s eyes adjusted to the gloom beyond the door, he saw geometric forms, dark gray in the threatening black. Suddenly he realized it wasn’t a storeroom. It was the bottom of a stairwell.

  He cursed under his breath again.

  Connie whispered: “What?”

  “Stairs.”

  He crossed the threshold, as heedless of his safety as Connie was of hers, because there was no other way to do it. Stairways were narrow traps in which you couldn’t easily dodge a bullet, and dark stairways were worse. The gloom above was such that he couldn’t see if the perp was up there, but he figured he made a perfect target with the backlighting from the kitchen. He would have preferred to blockade the stairwell door and find another route onto the second floor, but by then the perp would be long gone or barricaded so well that it might cost a couple of other cops’ lives to root him out.

  Once committed, he took the stairs as fast as he dared, slowed only by the need to stay to one side, against the wall, where the floorboards would be the tightest and the least likely to sag and squeak underfoot. He reached a narrow landing, moving blindly with his back to the wall.

  Squinting up into utter lightlessness, he wondered how a second floor could be as perfectly dark as a basement.

  From above came soft laughter.

  Harry froze on the landing. He was confident that he was no longer backlit. He pressed tighter to the wall.

  Connie bumped into him and also froze.

  Harry waited for the queer laugh to come again. He hoped to get a fix precise enough to make it worth risking a shot and revealing his own location.

  Nothing.