Dean Koontz - Intensity

No keys.

She glanced at the house, wondering how long he would be gone. Maybe he was searching for valuables now that the killing was done. Or selecting souvenirs. That could take five minutes, ten minutes, even longer. Which might be enough time to get Laura out of the motor home and hide her somewhere. Somehow.

She still had the knife. And now that she was in the killer’s domain without his knowledge, she had regained the precious element of surprise.

Nevertheless, her heart raced, and her dry mouth was filled with the slightly metallic taste of feverish anxiety.

The seat swiveled, clearing the console. She was able to step from behind the steering wheel into the lounge area, which featured built-in sofas upholstered in a hunter-plaid fabric.

The steel floor was carpeted, of course, but after long years of hard travel, it creaked softly under her feet.

She had expected the place to smell like a Grand Guignol theater where the sadistic plays involved no make-believe, but instead the air was redolent of recently brewed coffee and cinnamon rolls. How odd — and somehow profoundly disturbing — that a man like this should find any satisfaction at all in innocent pleasures.

“Laura,” she whispered, as though the killer might hear her all the way from the house. Then more fiercely than ever, yet in a whisper: “Laura!”

Beyond the lounge and open to it were a kitchenette and a cozy dining alcove with a booth upholstered in red vinyl. Running off the battery, a lamp hung aglow over the dining-nook table.

Laura was not to be seen anywhere.

Moving swiftly out of the dining area, Chyna came to the rear door standing open on the right, through which the killer had entered with the unconscious girl in his arms.

“Laura.”

Aft of the outer door, a short cramped hall led along the driver’s side of the vehicle, illuminated by a low-voltage safety fixture. There was also a skylight, now black. On the left were two closed doors, and at the end a third stood ajar.

The first door opened into a tiny bath. The space was a marvel of efficient design: a toilet, a sink, a medicine cabinet, and a corner shower stall.

Behind the second door was a closet. A few changes of clothes hung from a chrome rod.

At the end of the hall was a small bedroom with imitation-wood paneling and a closet with an accordion-style vinyl door. The meager light from the hall didn’t brighten the place much, but Chyna could see well enough to identify Laura; the girl was lying facedown on the narrow bed, swaddled in a sheet, with only her small bare feet and her golden hair revealed.

Urgently whispering her friend’s name, Chyna stepped to the bed and dropped to her knees.

Laura didn’t respond. Still unconscious.

Chyna couldn’t lift the girl, couldn’t carry her as the killer had done, so she had to try to rouse her instead. She pulled aside a flap of sheet and was eye-to-eye with her friend.

They were sapphire-blue eyes now, not pale-sky blue, perhaps because the light in the room was so poor or perhaps because they were occluded with death. Her mouth was open, and blood moistened her lips.

The crazy fucking hateful bastard had taken her with him even though she was dead, for God-knew-what purposes, maybe because she was something he could touch and look at and talk to for a few days to remind him of the glory. A souvenir.

Chyna’s stomach cramped painfully, not with revulsion or disgust but with guilt, with failure and futility and sheer black despair.

“Oh, baby,” she said to the dead girl. “Oh, baby, sweetie, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Not that she could have done anything more than she had tried to do. What could she have done? She couldn’t have attacked the bastard bare-handed when she had stood behind him in the upstairs hall, when he had been cooing to the dangling spider. What could she have done? She couldn’t have gotten to the kitchen any sooner, found the knife any faster, climbed the back stairs any quicker.

“I’m so sorry.”

This beautiful girl, this dear heart, would never find the husband about whom she had fantasized, never have the children who would have been a betterment to the world by the simple virtue of having been her children. Twenty-three years of getting ready to make a contribution, to make a difference in the lives of others, so full of ideals and hope: But now her gift would never be given, and the world would be immeasurably poorer for it.

“I love you, Laura. We all love you.”

Any words, any sentiment, any expression of grief was horribly inadequate; worse than inadequate — meaningless. Laura was gone, all that warmth and kindness gone forever, and even the most heartfelt words were only words.

Chyna’s stomach cramped with a sense of loss, clenched tight and pulled her relentlessly into a black hole within herself.

At the same time she felt her breast swelling with a sob that, if voiced, would be explosive. A single tear would loose a flood. Even one soft sob would bring on an uncontrollable wail.

She couldn’t risk grief. Not while she was in the motor home. The killer would be returning at any minute, and she couldn’t mourn Laura until she was safely out of there and until he was gone. She no longer had any reason to stay, for Laura was indisputably dead and irretrievable.

Nearby a door slammed hard, shaking the thin metal walls around Chyna.

The killer was back.

Something rattled. Rattled.

With the butcher knife in hand, Chyna swiftly backed away from Laura to the wall next to the open door. Unexpressed grief was a high-octane fuel for rage, and in an instant she was burning with fury, afire with the need to hurt him, slash him, spill his guts, hear him scream, and bring the haunting awareness of mortality to his eyes as he had brought it to Laura’s.

He’ll come into the room. I’ll cut him. He’ll come and I’ll cut him. It was a prayer, not a plan. He’ll come. I’ll cut him. He’ll come. I’ll cut him.

The shadowy room darkened. He was at the door, blocking the meager light from the hall.

Silently, the knife in her hand jittered furiously up and down like the needle on a sewing machine, stitching the pattern of her fear in the air.

He was at the threshold. Right there. Right there . He would come in for one more look at the pretty blond dead girl, for one more feel of her cool skin, and Chyna would get him when he crossed the threshold, cut him.

Instead, he closed the door and went away.

Aghast, she listened to his retreating footsteps, the creaking as the carpeted steel floor torqued under his boots, and she wondered what to do now.

The driver’s door slammed. The engine started. The brakes released with a brief faint shriek.

They were on the move.

Dead girls lie as troubled in the dark as in the light. As the motor home sped along the runneled driveway, Laura’s shackles clinked ceaselessly, only half muffled by the sheet in which she was loosely wrapped.

Blinded, still pressed to the fiberboard wall beside the bedroom door, Chyna Shepherd could almost believe that even in death Laura struggled against the injustice of her murder. Clink-clink.

Periodic sprays of gravel spurted from beneath the tires and rattled against the undercarriage. Shortly the motor home would reach the county road, smooth blacktop.

If Chyna tried to bail out now, the killer was sure to hear the back door bang open when the wind tore it out of her grasp, or spot it in his sideview mirror. In these winter-dormant grape fields, where the nearest houses were inhabited only by the dead, he would certainly risk stopping and giving chase, and she would not get far before he brought her down.