Dean Koontz - False Memory

Crouching below the window again, she thought about what she had seen. At least one of the four rounds she had fired through the seat must have struck him. There hadn’t been a lot of blood, but any at all meant that he was hurting and at a disadvantage.

The keys were in the car ignition. Switch off the engine, open the trunk, free Dusty? Then it would be two against one.

No. Kevin might be waiting for her to go after the keys, might have a clear line of sight on the interior of the car, through the open passenger’s door. Even if she obtained the keys without being shot, she would be an easy target when she stood at the back of the car, fumbling at the lock and opening the trunk lid.

Although she loathed the idea, the safest thing seemed to be to retreat across this clearing into the ruins to the south. Use the cover of the crumbling structures and the cottonwoods to circle east, then north. Get around to the other side of the car, where Kevin had gone. If she made a wide enough loop, she might come in behind the northern position from which he was covering the BMW.

Of course, maybe he wasn’t hunkered down and watching the car from a fixed position. He might be on the move, too, doing the same thing that she was doing, just in reverse. Using the long-abandoned village and the trees to travel east, then south. Circling in search of her.

If she had to stalk him through the adobe-and-cottonwood maze, while he, too, was on the prowl, her chances of being the one to come out alive were dismal. She no longer had the advantage of surprise. And though he was wounded, he was the pro, skilled at this, and she was the amateur. Luck didn’t favor amateurs.

Luck didn’t favor the hesitant, either. Action.

Action would be Kevin’s motto, as well, drummed into him by whatever military or paramilitary specialists had trained him, and probably also by hard experience. She suddenly knew that he would be on the move, and that the last thing he might be expecting from a video-game designer and a housepainter’s wife would be for her to follow him boldly, seeking him out by as direct a route as she could possibly take.

Maybe this was true. Maybe it wasn’t. She convinced herself, nevertheless, that she should neither circle behind him nor lie in wait for him to appear, but aggressively pursue, tracking him by whatever spoor he had left in the fresh snow.

She didn’t dare cross through the headlights. Might as well just shoot herself and save him the ammunition.

Instead, she retreated in a crouch along the side of the car, away from the headlights. Against the rear fender, she hesitated, but then she moved around to the back of the BMW.

The red taillights were far dimmer than the blaze of headlamps, but the falling snowflakes turned to blood when they passed through the glow. The billowing exhaust was a sanguinary mist.

The plumes of vapor gave Martie cover but also blinded her, a crimson immersion, a fearful baptismal passage. Then she was out of the churning cloud, exposed and vulnerable on the north side of the car.

Action that seemed bold in the planning now seemed reckless in the execution. Staying low, but still a choice target, she angled at a run to the tracks leading from the open front door of the BMW.

Footsteps and drops of blood, half covered by the falling snow, revealed that Kevin had gone toward the round adobe structure, forty feet away.

She hadn’t been able to see this building clearly from the other side of the car. Now that she had a better view, she found the place more rather than less mysterious. A six-foot-high wall curving away into the darkness. The suggestion of a low domed roof. Hard to judge the diameter of the structure from this one aspect, but surely thirty or forty feet. Stairs, flanked by decorative stepped walls, led to the roof, where the entrance appeared to be located, and the logical deduction was that most of the building lay underground.

Kiva.

The word came to her from a documentary that she had once seen. Kiva, a subterranean ceremonial chamber, the spiritual center of the village.

As Martie hurried farther from the car, the shadows grew deeper, and by the second, torrents of snow obscured the spoor. The trail remained clear enough, however, because the footprints deteriorated into broad shuffle marks, and the spots of blood were replaced by more liberal spatters.

Her heart a tom-tom, her eardrums vibrating with a sympathetic beat, she followed him to the steps, dreading the possibility that he had climbed to the roof, had then gone down into the kiva, and was waiting there in the smooth round darkness. At the steps, however, he had hesitated, losing more blood, and then he had continued along the curving wall.

Martie moved with her back against the adobe, sidling around the kiva into ever deeper darkness, beyond the last reflection of the BMW headlights, holding the machine pistol with both hands, finger tense upon the trigger. The deep pitchy shadows were relieved only by the faintly luminous cassock of snow spread across the ground and by the phosphorescent falling flakes.

Muffled by the intervening structure and by skeins of snow, the idling car engine faded until it was barely louder than an imagined sound, and something near to silence settled around her. She listened for her quarry, for the scrape of footsteps or ragged breathing, but she heard nothing.

Even in this gloom, she was able to follow Kevin, though hardly at all by the marks that his shuffling feet had left. Now only the blood was clear enough to lead her, a drizzle of blackness across the virgin snow, laid down in looping script, as though he were writing the same number over and over again, and she thanked God that there was so much of it.

Instantly, Martie cringed at having expressed gratitude for the blood of another human being, and yet she could not repress a flush of pride at her effectiveness. This pride, she warned herself, might yet earn her a few bullets of her own.

Inching, inching, inching sideways, she remembered now and then to glance back the way she’d come, in case he’d circled the building and stolen in behind her. While looking back, she knocked her left foot against an object on the ground, and turning her head, she saw a dark shape more geometric than the patterns of blood. The clatter had been distinctive.

She froze, afraid she’d been revealed by the noise, but she was frozen also by disbelief. Not daring to hope, she finally slid down along the kiva wall, squatting, to touch the thing she’d kicked.

The second machine pistol.

She would need both hands to control the weapon already in her possession. She pushed Kevin’s dropped gun behind her, no longer worried that he might be creeping up from that direction.

Ten steps farther, she saw his large huddled form, his splayed legs dark against the snowy ground. He was slumped against the kiva wall, as though he had traveled all day on foot and was profoundly weary.

She stood just out of his reach, the machine pistol trained on him, waiting for her eyes to adapt even more fully to the unforgiving night. His head was tipped to his left. His arms hung at his sides.

As far as she could see, he produced no plume of breath.

On the other hand, there was insufficient light here to reflect upon the vapor. She couldn’t see her own breath, either.

Finally Martie moved closer, crouched, and gingerly pressed her freezing fingers to his throat, as she had done with Zachary. If he was still alive, she couldn’t walk away and leave him to die alone. She wasn’t able to bring help in time to save him, and even if help could have been gotten, she didn’t dare seek it under these circumstances, with possible charges of murder hanging over her. She could stand witness to his death, however, a vigil, because no one, even such a man as this, ought to die alone.