Dean Koontz - Intensity

The killer backed away from her, holding the weapon, his eyes sparkling with excitement. “What a kick that was.”

Chyna huddled against the side of the refrigerator, tramping on kitten faces.

“I knew it was the same gun,” he said, “but what if I’d been wrong? I’d have one big hole in my face right now, wouldn’t I, little lady?”

Weak and dizzy with terror, she looked around desperately for anything that could be used as a weapon, but there was nothing close at hand.

“One big hole in my face,” he repeated, as if he found that prospect amusing.

One of the cabinets might contain knives, but she had no way of knowing which drawer to check.

“Intense,” he said, smiling at the revolver in his hand.

A pistol lay on the counter across the kitchen, beside the sink, well out of her reach. Chyna couldn’t believe this: He had brought a gun of his own, but he hadn’t used it, had set it aside, and had gone for her bare-handed instead.

“You’re an attractive woman.”

She looked away from the pistol, hoping he hadn’t noticed that she’d seen it. But she was fooling herself, and she knew it, because he saw everything, everything.

He pointed the revolver at her. “You were back there in the service station last night.”

She was gasping for breath, but she didn’t seem to be drawing any air. She was breathing too fast and too shallowly, in danger of hyperventilating, and she was furious with herself, furious, because he was so calm.

He said, “I know you were there, somehow, somewhere, and I know you found this Chief’s Special after I left, but for the life of me, I can’t figure why you’re here .”

Maybe she would be able to get to the pistol before he could stop her. It was a million-to-one chance. Two million, three. Hell, face it, impossible.

From five feet away, aiming the revolver at the bridge of her nose, his voice bubbly with exhilaration, the killer said, “But even though it was the Asian’s piece, I was walking into the mouth of the dragon here. I was lucky just now. Are you?”

Although reaching the pistol was probably impossible, she didn’t have any alternatives. Nothing to lose.

With a note of impatience, he said, “Honey, listen to me, please, I’m talking to you. Do you feel lucky right now? As lucky as I’ve been?”

Trying not to stare at the pistol, reluctant to look into his too-normal eyes, she gazed down the bore of the revolver and managed to say, “No,” and she half believed that she heard that single word echoing back to her out of the barrel, No .

“Let’s see if you are.”

“No.”

“Oh, be adventurous, sweetheart. Let’s see if you’re lucky,” he said, and he pulled the trigger.

Although the weapon had failed to fire three times, she expected it to explode in her face, because that seemed to be the way luck was running for her, and she flinched.

Click.

“You are lucky, even more so than I am.”

Chyna didn’t know what he was talking about. She couldn’t focus her thoughts on anything but the pistol by the sink, this last miraculous chance.

“When Fuji started to pull this piece on me,” the killer said, “didn’t you hear what I promised him?”

All this talking and the bastard’s calm demeanor unnerved Chyna even further. She expected him to shoot her, cut her, beat her, and probably rape her, torture answers from her before or after, but she didn’t expect to have to chat with him, for God’s sake, as if what they had been through was only a pleasant little road trip, a shared vacation that had taken a couple of interesting twists.

Still pointing the revolver at her, he said, “What I told Fuji was, ‘Don’t, or I’ll shove the bullets up your ass.’ I always keep my promises. Don’t you?”

His patter finally captured her undivided attention.

“In such poor light, and with all that blood everywhere, not wanting to look, squeamish, you probably didn’t see that Fuji’s pants were pulled down.”

He was right. After a glance showed her that the clerks were both dead, she had averted her eyes and stepped around their bodies.

He said, “I managed to insert four rounds in him.”

Now she closed her eyes. Opened them at once. She didn’t want to see him, looming and handsome with his nice smile, dry bloodstains on his clothes and nothing disturbing in his eyes. But she didn’t dare look away.

Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.

“I put four bullets in,” he said, “but then they started popping back out. A little postmortem gas release. It was ridiculous, quite funny, really, but I was pressed for time, as you might understand, and finally it was just too much trouble to do the fifth.”

Maybe this was best. Maybe one more round of Russian roulette, and then peace at long last, no more trying to understand why there was so much cruelty in the world when kindness was the easier choice.

He said, “This is a five-shot weapon.”

The empty socket of the muzzle stared blindly at her, and she wondered if she would see the flash and hear the roar or whether the blackness in the barrel would become her own blackness, without any awareness of the exchange.

Then the killer turned the revolver away from her and pulled the trigger. The blast rattled windows, and the slug tore through a cabinet door along the nearest wall, spraying splinters of pine and shattering dishes inside.

Bits of wood were still flying when Chyna grabbed a drawer and yanked it out of the cabinet. It was so heavy that it almost pulled out of her hand, but she was suddenly strong with desperation, and she slung it upward at the killer’s head, the contents spilling from it as it arced high toward his brow.

Spoons, forks, butter knives dueling in the air, flashing with cold fluorescent reflections, ringing down on him and across the tile floor, startled him backward into the dinette table.

Even as the killer stumbled away in surprise, Chyna was moving toward the sink. An instant after she heard the empty drawer crash against something, she put her hand on the grip of the pistol. She saw a red dot on the steel frame, which was probably exposed when the safety was off, as on other pistols with which she was familiar, and she didn’t have to worry about empty chambers, as with the revolver, because if there was even one bullet in the magazine, just one, it would be in the breech, please, and at this close range one round might be all that she needed.

But her trigger finger was already stiffening and swelling, and when she tried to hook it through the guard, the flare of pain rocked her. She bobbled on a black tide of nausea, swayed, fumbling at the trigger guard with her middle finger.

Skating across the littered floor with an ice-brittle clatter-clink of scattering tableware, the killer reached Chyna before she could bring the gun up and turn. He slammed his arm down on hers and trapped her hand against the countertop.

Reflexively her finger pulled the trigger. A bullet smashed the backsplash. Chips of yellow ceramic tile sprayed in her face, and she might have been blinded if she hadn’t squeezed her eyes shut in time.

He slammed the heel of his hand against the side of her head, sending a spray of darkness across the backs of her eyes, like shards of exploding black glass, and then he clubbed his fist against the nape of her neck.

With no memory of having fallen, Chyna was lying on the kitchen floor, with a bug’s-eye view across the vinyl tile, gazing through a cataclysmic tumble of eating utensils. Interesting. Spoons were the size of shovels. Forks as big as pitchforks. Knives were lances.

The killer’s boots. Black boots. Moving around.