Dean Koontz - Intensity

With the sudden flood, she was surprised to hear herself say, “Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive and able to pee.” Then she was simultaneously laughing and sobbing, not with relief but with a weird sense of triumph.

Getting free of the table, shattering and shaking off the chair, and not wetting her pants seemed, together, to be an act of endurance and of courage equivalent to setting foot on the moon with the first astronauts to land there, slogging through blinding blizzards to the Pole with Admiral Peary, or storming the beaches of Normandy against the might of the German army. She laughed at herself, laughed until tears spilled down her face; nevertheless, she still felt that degree of triumph. She knew how small — even pathetic — her triumph was, but she felt that it was big.

“Rot in Hell,” she said to Edgler Vess, and she hoped that someday she would have the chance to say it to his face just before she pulled a trigger and blew him out of this world.

She had so much pain in her back from the battering that she’d endured, especially low around her kidneys, that when she was done, she checked in the toilet bowl for blood. She was relieved to see that her urine was clear.

Glancing in the mirror above the sink, however, she was shocked by her reflection. Her short hair was tangled and lank with sweat. The right side of her face along the jaw seemed to be smeared with a purple ink, but when she touched it, she discovered that this was the trailing edge of a bruise that mottled that entire side of her neck. Where it wasn’t bruised or smeared with dirt, her skin was gray and grainy, as if she had been suffering through a long and difficult illness. Her right eye was fiery, no white visible any more: just the dark iris and the darker pupil floating in an elliptical pool of blood. Both the bloodied eye and the clear left eye gazed back at her with a haunted expression so unnerving that she turned away from her own reflection in confusion and fear.

The face in the mirror was that of a woman who had already lost some battle. It wasn’t the face of a winner.

Chyna tried to press that dispiriting thought out of her mind at once. What she had seen was the face of a fighter — no longer the face of a mere survivor, but a fighter. Every fighter sustained some punishment, both physical and emotional. Without anguish and agony, there was no hope of winning.

She shuffled from the bathroom to the door on the right side of the upstairs hall, which opened onto Vess’s bedroom. Simple furniture and a minimum of it. A neatly made bed with a beige chenille spread. No paintings. No bibelots or decorative accessories. No books or magazines, or any newspapers folded open to crossword puzzles. This was nothing more than a place to sleep, not a room where he lingered or lived.

Where he truly lived was in the pain of others, in a storm of death, in the calm eye of the storm where all was orderly but where the wind howled on every side.

Chyna checked the nightstand drawers for a gun but didn’t find one. She found no phone either.

The large walk-in closet was ten feet deep and as wide as the bedroom, essentially a room of its own. At a glance, the closet held nothing useful to her. She was sure to discover something worthwhile if she searched, maybe even a well-hidden gun. But there were built-in cabinets with laden shelves and packed drawers, and boxes were stacked on boxes; she would need hours to pore through everything. More urgent tasks awaited her.

She emptied the dresser drawers on the floor, but they contained only socks, underwear, sweaters, sweatshirts, and a few rolled belts. No guns.

Across the hall from Vess’s bedroom was a Spartan study. Bare walls. Blackout blinds instead of drapes. On two long worktables stood two computers, each with its own laser printer. Of the numerous items of computer-related equipment, she could identify some but was mystified by others.

Between the long tables was an office chair. The floor was not carpeted; the bare wood was exposed, evidently to make it easier for Vess to roll between tables.

The drab, utilitarian room intrigued her. She sensed that it was an important place. Time was precious, but there was something here worth pausing to examine.

She sat in the chair and looked around, bewildered. She knew that the world was wired these days, even into the hinterlands, but it seemed odd to find all this high-tech equipment in such a remote and rustic house.

Chyna suspected that Vess was set up to enter the Internet, but there was no phone or modem in sight. She spotted two unused phone jacks in the baseboard. His meticulous security procedures had served him well again; she was stymied.

What did he do here?

On one of the tables were six or eight ring-bound notebooks with colorful covers, and she opened the nearest. The binder was divided into five sections, each with the name of an agency of the federal government. The first was the Social Security Administration. The pages were filled with what seemed to be notes from Vess to himself regarding the trial-and-error method by which he had hacked his way into the administration’s data files and had learned to manipulate them. The second divider was labeled U.S. DEPT OF STATE (PASSPORT AGENCY), and judging by the following notes, Vess was engaged in an incomplete experiment to determine if, by a byzantine route, he might be able to enter and control the Passport Agency’s computerized records without being detected.

Part of what he was doing, evidently, was preparing for the day when he slipped up in his “homicidal adventuring” and required new identities.

Chyna didn’t believe, however, that Vess’s only projects were the altering of his public records and the obtaining of fake ID. She was troubled by the feeling that this room contained information about Vess that could be of vital importance to her own survival if only she knew where to look for it.

She put down the notebook and swiveled in the chair to face the second computer. Under one end of this table stood a two-drawer file cabinet. She opened the top drawer and saw Pendaflex hanging files with blue tags; each tag featured a person’s name, with the surname first.

Each folder contained a two-sheet dossier on a different law-enforcement officer, and after a couple of minutes of investigation, Chyna decided that they were deputies with the sheriff’s department in the very county in which Vess’s house was located. These dossiers provided all vital statistics on the officers plus information about their families and their personal lives. A Xerox of each deputy’s official ID photo was also attached.

Did the freak see some advantage in collecting information on all the local cops as insurance against the day when he might find himself in a standoff with them? This effort seemed excessive even for one as meticulous as Edgler Vess; on the other hand, excess was his philosophy.

The lower drawer of the filing cabinet contained manila folders as well. The tabs of these also featured names, like those in the upper drawer, but only surnames.

In the first folder, labeled ALMES, Chyna found a full-page enlargement of the California driver’s license of an attractive young blonde named Mia Lorinda Almes. Judging by the exceptional clarity, it wasn’t a Xerox blow-up of the original license but a digitized data transmission received on a phone line, through a computer, and reproduced on a high-quality laser printer.

The only other items in the folder were six Polaroid photographs of Mia Lorinda Almes. The first two were close-ups from different angles. She was beautiful. And terrified.

This file drawer was Edgler Vess’s equivalent of a scrapbook.

Four more Polaroids of Mia Almes.

Don’t look.