Dean Koontz - False Memory

Her stride was as quick and impressively long as it had been at the start of her trek, and her arms swung with undiminished vigor. Her ponytail bounced cheerily. Looking as though she had not raised the slightest sweat, she churned toward Green Acres, shiny-eyed and clearly eager to sit down to the finest of fodder and slops.

Creeping after Jennifer at an indiscreet distance, spewing blue exhaust fumes, as conspicuous as a spawned and flatulent fox on the trail of a rabbit, the aging pickup with camper shell entered the lot just as the ponytailed quarry opened the door to Green Acres and took her well-muscled haunches inside. They parked closer to the doctor than he would have preferred; but they would have been oblivious of him even if he had been sitting in a Rose Parade float, wearing a Carmen Miranda banana hat.

They waited a few minutes, apparently discussing their options, and then the blushing man got out of the truck, stretched, and went into Green Acres, leaving Skeet alone.

Perhaps they suspected that Jennifer had come here to meet the doctor himself, for a romantic tête-a-tête over bowls of bran mash and platters of steamed squash.

Ahriman considered walking over to the pickup, opening Skeet’s door, and trying to access him with Dr. Yen Lo. If it worked, he might be able to bring Skeet back to the El Camino and drive away with him before the other man returned.

Skeet’s program didn’t always function properly, however, due to the unfortunate custard consistency of his drug-addled brain, and if the encounter didn’t go smoothly, then the pie-faced partner might catch the doctor in the act.

He couldn’t just walk over to the truck and shoot Skeet, either, because with twilight, multitudes of the terminally taste-challenged were driving into the restaurant lot. Witnesses were witnesses, after all, regardless of whether they were gourmets or gourmands.

The blushing man came out of the restaurant and returned to the pickup truck, and after only two minutes, both he and Skeet went into Green Acres. Evidently they were going to conduct surveillance of Jennifer while shoveling down some swill of their own.

The doctor’s mood was ever rising, because he expected to have a clear shot at both men, in a suitably private setting, before the night was out, and then a dinner fit for a predator. He intended to use all ten shots in the magazine, whether he needed them or not, just for the fun of it.

The threatened rain had never fallen, and now the clouds were breaking apart in the twilight, revealing stars. This pleased the doctor, too. He liked stars. He’d once wanted to be an astronaut.

He was half way through his third cookie when he saw something that threatened to spoil his wonderful mood. One row away and east in the parking lot stood a beautiful white Rolls-Royce with tinted windows, traditional hood ornament, and polished titanium hubcaps. He was shocked that anyone wealthy enough to own a Rolls and refined enough to choose to drive such a motorcar would come to Green Acres for dinner other than at gunpoint.

This truly was a dying culture. Rampant capitalism had spread wealth so widely that even root-chewing, grass-grazing vulgarians could drive in royal equipage to dine at the vegetarian equivalent of a Wienerschnitzel franchise.

The sight of this vehicle here, of all places, was enough to make the doctor want to consign his vintage Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud to the nearest hydraulic automobile crusher. He looked away from the white beauty and vowed not to look again. To put the depressing sight out of his mind, he started the El Camino, popped a classic-radio tape of old Spike Jones programs into the cassette deck, and concentrated on his cookie.

On three sides, the ghost village. In centuries past, watchfires and tallows burning, mica-lens lanterns holding back the night. Now, no resistance to the frigid dark. Populated by wraiths, perhaps all of them merely figures of snow, perhaps some spirits.

To the south, behind Martie, half seen in the murk, stood broken and weathered adobe walls, two stories in places, a few feet high in others, with deep-set window openings. Doorless doorways led to rooms more often than not roofless and filled with debris, inhabited in warm weather by tarantulas and scorpions.

In the east, better revealed by the car headlights but still resistant to full revelation, tall fractured chimneys of stone rose from round stone formations: perhaps ancient ovens or fireplaces.

North lay the low curving walls of a structure largely blocked from view by the BMW.

Surprisingly, looming throughout the crescent of ruins were tall cottonwoods. In addition to the deep well that Zachary had mentioned, there must be water near the surface, within reach of roots.

Kevin could be circling Martie, moving from one crumbling structure to the next, from tree to tree. She had to get out of the open, but she dreaded the thought of stalking him — and being stalked — through this strange and ancient place.

In a crouch, she hurried to the car and huddled against the rear tire on the driver’s side.

The back door was open. Pale light from the ceiling fixture.

She dropped flat and risked a quick look under the car. Kevin wasn’t there.

In the backwash of headlights, the thin mantle of snow on the far side of the BMW was aglow. From this ground-level perspective, the otherwise pristine whiteness appeared in one place to have been disturbed by someone heading away from the car.

Rising into a crouch again, she leaned into the light that came from within the BMW, and she examined the machine pistol to make sure that nothing about it would surprise her if and when she was forced to use it. The extended magazine scared her. From the high ammo capacity, she inferred that the pistol was fully automatic, not just semi, and she didn’t have much confidence in her ability to control such a powerful weapon.

Her hands were cold, too. Fingers growing numb.

She closed the rear door and leaned with her back against it, studying Zachary. He remained motionless, facedown on the ground. If he was faking unconsciousness, waiting for her to lower her guard, he was supernaturally patient.

Before she could concentrate on Kevin, she had to know whether this man was still a threat.

After consideration, she approached him boldly rather than with caution, moving in fast and poking the muzzle of the machine pistol against the nape of his neck.

He didn’t move.

She pulled back the collar of his quilted ski jacket and pressed her cold fingers against his throat, searching for a carotid-artery pulse. Nothing.

His head was turned to one side. She thumbed back his eyelid. Even in the poor light, his fixed stare was unmistakable.

Guilt sutured her heart and mind together, so that the thought of what she had done caused stitches of pain to pull in her breast. She would never be the same person again, for she had taken a life. Although circumstances had given her no option but to kill or be killed, and though this man had chosen to serve evil and to serve it well, the gravity of Martie’s action weighed on her nonetheless, and she felt diminished in more ways than she could count. Gone was a certain innocence that she would never be able to regain.

And yet, cohabiting with the guilt was a sense of gratification, a cold and keenly felt satisfaction that she had acquitted herself so well thus far, that her and Dusty’s odds of survival had improved, and that she had shattered the gunmen’s smug assumptions of superior power. A thrill of righteousness filled her, and she found it simultaneously heartening and terrifying.

To the car once more, to the front door on the driver’s side, slowly rising until she could see through the window. The door open on the passenger’s side. Kevin gone. Blood on the seat.