Dean Koontz - Innocence

Gazing up at the shining multitudes, turning, turning, I spoke to them from my heart, because I knew they could hear that even more clearly than they could hear my voice. I reminded them of the many millions of children, of the fathers who loved and the mothers who cherished, of the simple-minded who in their simplicity were without blame, of the humble and the would-be chaste and the would-be honest and those who loved truth even if they didn’t always speak it, who struggled daily toward an ideal that they might never reach, but for which they yearned. There was hatred among people, but there was also love, bitter envy but also gladness for the fortune of others, greed but also charity, rage but also compassion. No matter how ardently or eloquently I might plead the case of humanity, however, I knew that this radiant audience would not, could not, prevent what was coming, that after we had brought ourselves to this pass, they could not be guardians but only witnesses. The world was run by our free will, and if they were to step down from their ledges and rooftops to undo what had been done, they would take from humanity our free will, after which we would be nothing more than robots, golems with hearts of mud and regimented minds. If some people chose to seek the power to strip the Earth of human life and if others of good intention did not take all necessary steps to defend against such madness, the consequences were as certain as that thunder will follow lightning. These shining multitudes did not stare down with cruel indifference, but with love and pity and grief that perhaps exceeded all of the grief that would wash through the dying nations in the days to come.

My face was stiff with frozen tears when, from the corner of my eye, I saw movement in the street. One Clear had come down among us for the purpose of leading three children to me. They were all under the age of five. I knew them by their bruises and their scars, by the emaciation of forced starvation that hollowed the faces of the twin boys, by the bleeding abrasion that encircled the girl’s neck, which was evidence of the coarse ligature with which she had nearly been strangled. They were like me and Gwyneth and Moriah, outcasts once hated and reviled, now heirs to all the world.

The Clear was the same woman who had visited the ninth apartment while Gwyneth played the piano piece that she had composed in memory of her father. I remembered what she had told me the first night that we met, when she had prepared for us scrambled eggs and brioche with raisin butter. I had asked if she lived alone, and she’d said, There is one who comes and goes infrequently, but I won’t speak of that . This Clear was the one who came and went.

The great host of Clears gathered above me were too far away for me to look into their eyes. In spite of Father’s warning, I met the eyes of this woman, and he was right when he’d told me that I would find them terrible. They were terrible in the sense that they were august and imposing and exalted, blue and yet as clear as glass, containing depths that no eyes I’d ever seen before could contain, as if I were looking through them to the end of time. By her stare, this woman settled a solemn awe upon my heart, and I was frightened by the degree to which I felt humbled and by the intensity with which I felt loved, and I had to look away.

The three children were small, and there was room for them in the backseat with Moriah.

We drove a block in silence, and we knew that however far we might go, we would find the multitudes shining and observant and sorrowing, sentinels to the end.

Suddenly more traffic appeared on the streets, far less than you would expect on a night of good weather, more than I had ever seen in a snowstorm. The drivers were heedless of risk, as if all of them were being pursued.

In Ford Square, the Jumbotron loomed like a giant window that offered a somber view of our future as it was already playing out in Asia, where the dead were lying in the streets and desperate mobs struggled to board ships already overcrowded. The news crawl listed American cities where deaths from the swift-moving plague were being reported, and the geographic spread was so wide that already it should have been clear even to the most confirmed optimists that there would be no refuge.

When three snow plows crossed an intersection in front of us, one after the other in a train, moving fast with emergency beacons flashing, Gwyneth said, “They aren’t serving the city now. They’re fleeing it.”

We fell in behind them, and they cleared the way for us, though that was not their intention.

Soon we reached the outskirts of the last borough, where we first saw looters. Bent-backed and frenzied, like figures from a nightmare of lupine predators, they poured out of shattered store windows, pushed grocery-store carts, pulled laden slat-sided wagons as if they were dray animals, loaded SUVs and cars with the latest electronic gear and all manner of luxury goods, some of them as wild-eyed as spooked horses and others as giddy as little children on a birthday-party treasure hunt.

The Clears stood witness to this, as well.

By the time that we were passing through the suburbs, the city plows no longer leading us, many of the sacked businesses were on fire, and the looters were stealing from one another now, defending their swag with guns and tire irons and pickaxes. A man in burning clothes ran across the street in front of us, still clutching a box bearing the Apple logo as the flames leaped from his coat to his hair and broiled him, screaming, to the pavement.

BY DAWN, THE SNOW STOPPED, AND WE WERE DRIVING through territory that had been less heavily blanketed, the roads clear except for some vehicles driven by desperate or panicked people, most of whom didn’t seem certain of where they were going, recklessly bound nowhere in particular.

We were at first puzzled that the roads were not choked with traffic, that thousands weren’t fleeing to remote places, even though they knew escape was impossible. Then we heard on the radio that the president had ordered Homeland Security to close off major arteries out of cities that offered international air traffic and shipping, because the first wave of plague reports were coming from those metropolitan areas. The hope was to contain the disease. We had gotten out just in time.

The pointlessness of the government’s action was made clear when a squall of cedar waxwings burst into flight from a berried hedge, fluttering across the road, up and away, reminding us that birds were a vector. For its spread, the plague didn’t depend on travelers from Asia debarking from planes and cruise ships.

Although tired, we were loath to stop short of our destination. The previous night, when Gwyneth had driven to the pond in Riverside Commons and given me my first ride in a motor vehicle, she mentioned a place in the country that her father had prepared for her, in the event that, for whatever reason, she ever needed to leave the city. We hoped to make it to that haven before nightfall.

In the backseat, Moriah slept. The three exhausted young ones were bunked down in the cargo space behind her.

At a Mobil station and convenience store in a quaint country town, a man dressed in khaki pants and shirt lay dead and befouled outside the raised doors of the repair garage. The establishment was otherwise deserted, but the pumps were working. We didn’t have a credit card. Steeling myself for the horror, I chased the pecking crows from the corpse, found the right plastic in his wallet, and filled the tank of the Land Rover.

In the convenience store, I loaded a handbasket with snack crackers, granola bars, and bottles of apple juice, provisions for the last leg of our journey.

Gwyneth’s father, Bailey, had given her both detailed directions and a map, but once she’d entered the destination in the Land Rover’s navigation system, we no longer needed to consult them.