Dean Koontz - False Memory

At an all-night grocery, they purchased a loaf of white bread, a package of cheese, a jar of mustard, corn chips, and beer.

Moving along the aisles, making selections, engaged in what otherwise might have been a task that made him impatient, Dusty was so overcome with emotion, so thankful to be alive, so glad to have Martie at his side, that his legs grew weak, and gratitude almost drove him to his knees. He leaned against a shelf, pretending to read the label on a can of stew.

If others in the store saw him, they were probably fooled. Martie wasn’t deceived. She stood with him, one hand on the back of his neck, pretending to read the label with him, and in a whisper she said, “I love you so much, babe.”

Back in their room, he phoned an airline’s 800 number, seeking the earliest possible flight. He found available seats and used a credit card solely to reserve them, asking the agent not to run the purchase. “I prefer to pay cash when I pick them up tomorrow.”

They took very hot, long showers. The thin, miniature cakes of hotel soap had melted away by the time they finished.

Dusty discovered a skinned spot just behind his right ear. It was caked with blood. Perhaps he had taken a knock when the car rolled. He hadn’t even felt it until now.

Sitting in bed, using a bath towel for a tablecloth, they made cheese sandwiches. They had kept the cans of beer cold in a snow-filled wastebasket.

The sandwiches and the chips tasted neither good nor bad. It was just something to eat. Fuel to keep them going. The beer was to help them sleep, if they could.

Neither of them had talked much on the trip from Santa Fe, and neither of them said much now. In the years to come, should they be lucky enough to have years left instead of mere hours or days, they probably wouldn’t speak often or at length about what had happened in those Indian ruins. Life was too short to dwell on nightmares instead of dreams.

Too worn out to talk, they watched TV while they ate.

The television news was full of images of warplanes. Explosions in the night, somewhere half a world away.

On the advice of experts in international relations, the world’s most powerful alliance of nations was once again trying to bring two military factions to the bargaining table by bombing the crap out of civilian infrastructure. Bridges, hospitals, electric-power plants, video-rental stores, waterworks, churches, sandwich shops. Judging by the news, no one across the spectrum of politics or media, or in fact anywhere in the higher reaches of the social order, questioned the morality of the operation. The debate among the experts centered, instead, on how many millions of pounds of bombs in what type of high-tech packages would have to be dropped to bring about a popular uprising against the targeted government, thereby avoiding a full-fledged war.

“To the people who were in that fucking sandwich shop,” Martie said, “it’s already a war,”

Dusty turned off the TV.

After they’d eaten — and finished two beers each — they got under the covers and lay in the dark, holding hands.

The previous night, sex had been an affirmation of life. Now it would seem like blasphemy. Closeness was all they needed, anyway.

After a while, Martie asked, “Is there a way out of this?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly.

“These people at the institute. whatever they’re doing, they didn’t really have any bone to pick with us before we came here. They went after us just to protect Ahriman.”

“But now there’s Zachary and Kevin.”

“They’ll probably take a practical view about that. I mean, for them, it’s a cost of doing business. We don’t have anything on them. We’re no real threat to them.”

“So?”

“So if Ahriman were dead. wouldn’t they leave us alone?”

“Maybe.”

Neither of them spoke for a while.

The night was so hushed that Dusty almost believed he could hear the snowflakes striking the ground outside.

“Could you kill him?” he finally asked.

She was a long time answering: “I don’t know. Could you? Just… in cold blood? Walk up to him and pull the trigger?”

“Maybe.”

She was silent for minutes, but he knew she wasn’t drawing near to sleep.

“No,” she said eventually. “I don’t think I could. Kill him, I mean. Him or anyone. Not again.”

“I know you wouldn’t want to have to do it. But I think you could. And so could I.”

To his surprise, he found himself telling her about the optical illusion that had fascinated him as a kid: the drawing of the forest that by a simple shift of perspective suddenly revealed a bustling metropolis.

“This applies?” she asked.

“Yeah. Because tonight I was that drawing. I always thought I knew exactly who I was. Then a simple shift of perspective, and I see a different me. Which one is real and which is fiction?”

“They’re both the real you,” she said. “And that’s okay.”

Hearing her say that it was okay actually made it okay in his mind. Although she didn’t know it, and although he would never be able to quite put his feelings into words that she would understand, Martie was the only touchstone by which Dusty measured his value as a human being.

Later, when he was near sleep, she said, “There’s got to be a way out. Just… shift perspective.”

Maybe she was right. A way out. But he couldn’t find it either in the waking world or in dreams.

In the blue morning, flying out of Albuquerque with neither a toy fire truck nor a handgun, stiff and sore from the previous day’s exertions, Martie felt tired and old. While Dusty read Learn to Love Yourself to better understand their enemy, Martie pressed her forehead to the window and gazed down at the snow-dusted city as it rapidly disappeared below them. The whole world had grown so strange that she might as well have been flying out of Istanbul or another exotic capital.

Slightly less than seventy-two hours ago, she’d taken Valet for his morning walk, and her shadow had briefly frightened her. After the odd moment passed, she’d been amused. Her dearest friend had still been alive. She had not yet been to Santa Fe. Back then, she believed that life had a mysterious design, and she saw reassuring patterns in the events of her days. She still believed in the existence of design, though the patterns she saw now were different from those she’d seen before, different and troublingly more complex.

She had expected to suffer terrible nightmares — and not from two cans of beer and crummy cheese sandwiches. But her sleep hadn’t been disturbed.

Smilin’ Bob had not come to her in dreams, either, nor in those moments during the night when, awake, she had searched the shadows of the motel room for the distinctive shape of his helmet and the faintly luminescent stripes on his turnout coat.

Martie had badly wanted to see him in dreams or otherwise. She felt abandoned, as if she no longer deserved his guardianship.

With California coming and with all that waited there, she needed both the men in her life, Dusty and Smilin’ Bob, if she were to have hope.

The doctor rarely saw patients other than on the first four days of the week. Only Martie and Dusty Rhodes were on his schedule this Friday, and they were not going to be able to keep their appointment.

“You better be careful,” he told his reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Pretty soon, you’re not going to have any practice at all if you keep killing off your patients.”

Having sailed through the crises of the past two days with his tail unbobbed and both horns intact — a little metaphysical humor, there — he was in a splendid mood. Moreover, he had thought of a way to revive the game that had seemed hopelessly unplayable last night, and he had arrived at a lovely use for the fragrant contents of the blue bag.