Dean Koontz - Dark of the Woods

"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…

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.