Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

Throughout history, cash or the equivalent — diamonds, gold coins — had been the best guarantor of freedom and mobility. Cash meant the same things to Joe and nothing more. Yet from Heather and her bosses, he continued to endure a surreptitious scrutiny that seemed to be based on the assumption that he was engaged in some criminal enterprise or, at best, was on his way for a few days of unspeakable debauchery in Las Vegas.

As Heather put the twenty thousand in a manila envelope, the phone rang on the assistant manager’s desk. Murmuring into the mouthpiece, he continued to find Joe of interest.

By the time Joe left the bank, five minutes past closing time, the last customer to depart, he was weak-kneed with apprehension.

The heat remained oppressive, and the five-o’clock sky was still cloudless and blue, although not the profound blue that it had been earlier. Now it was curiously depthless, a flat blue that reminded him of something he had seen before. The reference remained elusive until he had gotten into the car and started the engine — and then he recalled the dead-blue eyes of the last corpse that he had seen on a morgue gurney, the night he walked away from crime reporting forever.

When he drove out of the bank lot, he saw that the assistant manager was standing beyond the glass doors, all but hidden by the reflected bronze glare of the westering sun. Maybe he was storing away a description of the Honda and memorizing the license-plate number. Or maybe he was just locking the doors.

The metropolis shimmered under the blind blue stare of the dead sky.

Passing a small neighbourhood shopping centre, from across three lanes of traffic, Joe saw a woman with long auburn hair stepping out of a Ford Explorer. She was parked in front of a convenience store. From the passenger side jumped a little girl with a cap of tousled blond hair. Their faces were hidden from him.

Joe angled recklessly across traffic, nearly colliding with an elderly man in a grey Mercedes. At the intersection, as the light turned from yellow to red, he made an illegal U-turn.

He already regretted what he was about to do. But he could no more stop himself than he could hasten the day’s end by commanding the sun to set. He was in the grip of a bizarre compulsion.

Shaken by his lack of self-control, he parked near the woman’s Ford Explorer. He got out of the Honda. His legs were weak.

He stood staring at the convenience store. The woman and the child were in there, but he couldn’t see them for the posters and merchandise displays in the big windows.

He turned away from the store and leaned against the Honda, trying to compose himself.

After the crash in Colorado, Beth McKay had referred him to a group called The Compassionate Friends, a nationwide organization for people who had lost children. Beth was slowly finding her way to acceptance through Compassionate Friends in Virginia, so Joe went to a few meetings of a local chapter, but he soon stopped attending. In that regard, he was like most other men in his situation; bereaved mothers went to the meetings faithfully and found comfort in talking with others whose children had been taken, but nearly all the fathers turned inward and held their pain close. Joe wanted to be one of the few who could find salvation by reaching out, but male biology or psychology — or pure stubbornness or self-pity — kept him aloof, alone.

At least, from Compassionate Friends, he had discovered that this bizarre compulsion, by which he was now seized, was not unique to him. It was so common they had a name for it: searching behaviour.

Everybody who lost a loved one engaged in a degree of searching behaviour, although it was more intense for those who lost children. Some grievers suffered it worse than others. Joe had it bad.

Intellectually, he could accept that the dead were gone forever. Emotionally, on a primal level, he remained convinced that he would see them again. At times he expected his wife and daughters to walk through a door or to be on the phone when it rang. Driving, he was occasionally overcome by the certainty that Chrissie and Nina were behind him in the car, and he turned, breathless with excitement, more shocked by the emptiness of the backseat than he would have been to find that the girls were indeed alive again and with him.

Sometimes he saw them on a street. On a playground. In a park. On the beach. They were always at a distance, walking away from him. Sometimes he let them go, but sometimes he was compelled to follow, to see their faces, to say, ‘Wait for me, wait, I’m coming with you.’

Now he turned away from the Honda. He went to the entrance of the convenience store.

Opening the door, he hesitated. He was torturing himself. The inevitable emotional implosion that would ensue when this woman and child proved not to be Michelle and Nina would be like taking a hammer to his own heart.

The events of the day — the encounter with Rose Tucker at the cemetery, her words to him, the shocking message waiting for him at the Post— had been so extraordinary that he discovered a gut-deep faith in uncanny possibilities that surprised him. If Rose could fall more than four miles, smash unchecked into Colorado rock, and walk away… Unreason overruled facts and logic. A brief, sweet madness stripped off the armour of indifference in which he’d clothed himself with so much struggle and determination, and into his heart surged something like hope.

He went into the store.

The cashier’s counter was to his left. A pretty Korean woman in her thirties was clipping packages of Slim Jim sausages to a wire display rack. She smiled and nodded.

A Korean man, perhaps her husband, was at the cash register. He greeted Joe with a comment about the heat.

Ignoring them, Joe passed the first of four aisles, then the second. He saw the auburn-haired woman and the child at the end of the third aisle.

They were standing at a cooler full of soft drinks, their backs to him. He stood for a moment at the head of the aisle, waiting for them to turn toward him.

The woman was in white ankle-tie sandals, white cotton slacks, and a time-green blouse. Michelle had owned similar sandals, similar slacks. Not the blouse. Not the blouse, that he could recall.

The little girl, Nina’s age, Nina’s size, was in white sandals like her mother’s, pink shorts, and a white T-shirt. She stood with her head cocked to one side, swinging her slender arms, the way Nina sometimes stood.

Nine-ah, neen-ah, have you seen her.

Joe was halfway down the aisle before he realized that he was on the move.

He heard the little girl say, ‘Please, root beer, please?’

Then he heard himself say, ‘Nina,’ because Nina’s favourite drink had been root beer. ‘Nina? Michelle?’

The woman and the child turned to him. They were not Nina and Michelle.

He had known they would not be the woman and the girl whom he had loved. He was operating not on reason but on a demented impulse of the heart. He had known, had known. Yet when he saw they were strangers, he felt as though he had been punched in the chest.

Stupidly, he said, ‘You. I thought.. standing there…’

‘Yes?’ the woman said, puzzled and wary.

‘Don’t… don’t let her go,’ he told the mother, surprised by the hoarseness of his own voice. ‘Don’t let her go, out of your sight, on her own, they vanish, they’re gone, unless you keep them close.’

Alarm flickered across the woman’s face.

With the innocent honesty of a four-year-old, piping up in a concerned and helpful tone, the little girl said, ‘Mister, you need to buy some soap. You sure smell. The soap’s over that way, I’ll show you.’

The mother quickly took her daughter’s hand, pulled her close. Joe realized that he must, indeed, smell. He had been on the beach in the sun for a couple of hours, and later in the cemetery, and more than once he’d broken into a sweat of fear. He’d had nothing to eat during the day, so his breath must be sour with the beer that he had drunk at the shore.