Dean Koontz - Dark of the Woods

"Drop her," the rep said.

"Get help for her quickly," Davis pleaded.

"Drop her," the rep said, pointing at her with the pistol. "I must warn you that I was an Alliance soldier before entering the diplomatic corps. With my training, I have no inhibitions about violence. I'm capable of — well, of anything, really. Drop her."

Proteus made grumbling sounds.

"And a protection robot isn't designed to strike out at any other human being, Davis. So forget that."

He started to bend over with Leah, to place her on the carpet.

"I did not tell you to lay her down. I told you to drop her. Just let her go."

He ignored the rep and placed her gently on the floor.

"That was a bad move," the ex-soldier said. "Another strike against you: disobeying an officer of the Alliance. That carries two years in itself. I think you had best be more courteous."

"How did you get here so quickly?" Davis asked.

"I came around to visit Matron Salsbury to discuss you, to see if she knew of any misdemeanor — violating the preserve laws or anything — we might harass you with. She had just told me what she discovered about you and the animal there when you obliged us by charging right in with your little beast." He smiled.

Davis looked down at the girl. "Will you get help for her? She's dying. A simple speedheal unit would—"

"Let her die," the rep said, still smiling.

Davis looked astonished.

"Davis, what you forgot is that no matter how intelligent an alien may seem to be, no matter how clever, it is inferior. It is not a man. Man is the highest order of life. Why do you think, in all these years of exploration into space, we've never met a race that could compete with us? We were meant to be the dominant species, man. And in the million years to come, we're not going to run across anything we can't handle. You tainted yourself by touching this little animal. You should have known better. And because you made a fool out of me and set my chances of promotion back five years by your little ruse about the sort of book you were going to write, I think I should have an opportunity to pay you back, in some small way, for your brutality. And, perhaps, if you watch her die, you'll realize that she was nothing more than an animal, a beast, a thing. She'll die, and there won't be choruses of angels singing her to her final resting place."

"You're insane."

"No," the rep said. "It's you who are insane." He stepped forward and pushed a toe of his boot against the girl's side, shoved her hard enough to flop her over on her belly. "See, Davis, insanity is judged, in part, by what is standard for society. Someone who breaks the greatest taboos with the least regard for his own being is often labeled as a lunatic. Loving an alien is very abnormal. So you will surely be judged mad as well as a traitor."

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.