Dean Koontz - False Memory

An arrhythmic pulse. A flush of hot breath across the back of her hand.

Like a spring-loaded trap, his hand flew up, seized her wrist.

She fell out of her squat, onto her back, squeezing the trigger. The pistol leaped with recoil in her hand, and bullets tore uselessly into the high branches of a nearby cottonwood.

Time out of whack, seconds as long as minutes, minutes as long as hours, here in the trunk of the BMW.

Martie had told Dusty to wait, to be quiet, because she needed to hear movement out there. One down, she had said. One down, and maybe two.

The maybe was the source of his terror. This little maybe was like the culturing medium in a petri dish, breeding fear rather than bacteria, and Dusty was already sick half to death with what it had bred.

From the moment they had put him in the trunk, he had blindly explored the space, especially along the bottom of the lid, searching for a latch release. He couldn’t find one.

In a side well, a few tools. A combination lug wrench, jack handle, and pry bar. But even if the locked lid could be pried open, the leverage would have to be applied from outside, not from within.

The thought of her alone with them, and then the gunfire, and now the silence. Just the ticking of the engine, a low vibration in the floor of the trunk. Waiting, waiting, feverish with terror. Waiting, until finally the waiting was unendurable.

Lying on his side, he worked the blade end of the crowbar along the edges of the carpeted panel on the forward wall of the trunk, popped staples, bent the edges of the panel, got his fingers around it, and with considerable effort tore it out of the way, flattened it on the floor.

He put the crowbar aside, rolled onto his back, drew his knees toward his chest as far as the cramped space would allow, and jackhammered his feet into the forward wall of the trunk, which was formed by the backseat of the car. And again, again, and a fourth time, a fifth, gasping for breath, his heart booming — but not booming so loud that he failed to hear another burst of gunfire, the hard ugly chatter of a fully automatic weapon, in the distance, tat — tat — tat — tat — tat — tat.

Maybe two down. Maybe not.

Martie didn’t have a machine pistol The creeps had them.

He held his breath, listening, but there was not immediately another burst of fire.

Again, he kicked, kicked, kicked, until he heard plastic or fiberboard crack, felt something shift. A ribbon-thin line of pale light in the blackness. Light from the passenger compartment. He swiveled around, pressing with his hands, putting his shoulder to it, heaving.

The dying man expended the last of his strength when he clutched Martie’s wrist, perhaps not with the intention of harming her, but to get her keen attention. When she fell out of her squat and onto her back, squeezing off eight or ten rounds into the tree, Kevin’s hand let go and dropped away from her.

As pieces of branches rattled down through the huge cottonwood, clicked off the kiva wall, and plopped in the snow, Martie scrambled backward and then onto her knees, gripping the machine pistol with both hands again. She trained the weapon on Kevin but didn’t squeeze the trigger.

The last bits of cottonwood descended as Martie managed to stop gasping, and in the returning quiet, the man wheezed, “Who are you?”

She thought he must be delirious in these last moments of his life, his mind cloudy from the loss of so much blood.

“Better make your peace,” she advised gently, because she could think of nothing else to say. This would have been the only valuable counsel anyone could have given even if this man had been a saint, and it was only more apt considering how far removed from saintliness he was.

When he summoned enough breath to speak again, the judgment of delirium seemed hasty. His voice as thready as any cloth that had been woven millennia ago: “Who are you, really?” She could barely see the faint shine of his eyes. “What were we… dealing with… in you?”

A chill passed through Martie, unrelated to the cold night or to the snow, for she was reminded of the similar questions that Dusty had asked about Dr. Ahriman, just before they rounded the turn in the ranch road and ran over the spike strip.

“Who… are you… really?” Kevin asked once more.

He choked and then gagged on a thickness rising in his throat. The crisp air became brittle with a coppery scent that steamed out of him with his last breath, and blood flooded from his mouth.

At his passing, there was not even an eddy in the snow, neither the briefest glimpse of the occluded moon nor the faintest stirring through the trees. In this regard, her death, when sooner or later it came, would be like his: the world indifferent, turning smoothly onward toward the fascination of another dawn.

As in a dream, Martie rose from the dead man and stood, chilled and half bewildered, unable to find an answer to his final question.

She followed in her footsteps and in his, returning by the route that had brought her to him. Once, she leaned against the kiva wall. And then went on.

Curving toward the light, through hard-falling snow that seemed eternal, Martie held the pistol ready in both hands, troubled by an almost superstitious sense that a dangerous creature still was afoot, but then she lowered the weapon when she realized that hers were the eyes through which this dangerous creature studied the night.

To the clearing, toward the idling car, the encircling ruins. The world steadily dissolving and spinning away in the snowfall.

Dusty, having freed himself, was following a swiftly blurring trail of footprints and blood.

At the sight of him, Martie let the gun slip from her hands.

They met at the bottom of the kiva stairs and held each other.

He anchored her. The world could not dissolve or spin away with him in it, for he seemed eternal, as everlasting as mountains. Perhaps this was an illusion, too, as were the mountains, but she clung to it.

Long after twilight, hitching their pants up over full bellies, prying stubborn wads of mulch from their teeth with toothpicks, Skeet and his florid friend hurried out of Green Acres directly to their environmentally disastrous vehicle, which fired up with a wheeze of burnt oil that the doctor swore he could smell even inside his closed El Camino.

A minute later, Jennifer exited the restaurant, too, as glossy and robust as a young horse, revitalized by the feed bag. She did a few stretching exercises, working out the kinks in her rump, stifles, gaskins, hocks, and fetlocks. Then she set out for home, at an easy canter instead of a racewalk, her mane bobbing and her pretty head no doubt filled with dreamy thoughts of fresh straw bedding free of stable mice and a good crisp apple just before sleep.

As tireless as they were witless, the detectives gave pursuit, their task complicated by the filly’s slower pace and the darkness.

Although even Skeet and his pal might soon realize that this woman had no rendezvous to keep with the doctor and that their true quarry had long ago given them the slip, Ahriman risked not following them. Once more, he skipped ahead, this time to the street in front of the apartment complex in which Jennifer lived. He parked beneath the spreading limbs of a coral tree large enough to serve as a guest house for the Swiss Family Robinson, protected here from the glow of nearby streetlamps.

In other circumstances, Martie and Dusty would have turned to the police, but this time they gave that option little consideration.

Remembering Bernardo Pastore’s patched face and the frustration the rancher had met, at every turn, when trying to find justice for his murdered son and self-accused dead wife, Dusty shuddered at the prospect of bringing the police back here. Mere facts would probably not convince them that the Bellon-Tockland Institute, in its stirring quest for world peace, was in the habit of employing hit men.