Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

He’d brought the printouts of four articles about Teknologik, which he had gotten from Randy Colway’s computer at the Post. The business-section prose was so dry, however — and his attention span so short after only three and a half hours of sleep — that he wasn’t able to concentrate.

He dozed fitfully across the Mojave Desert and the Rockies: two hours and fifteen minutes of half-formed dreams lit by oil lamps and the glow of digital clocks, in which understanding seemed about to wash over him but from which he woke still thirsty for answers.

In Denver, the humidity was unusually high and the sky overcast. To the west, the mountains lay buried under slow avalanches of early-morning fog.

In addition to his driver’s license, he had to use a credit card as ID to obtain a rental car. He put down a cash deposit, however, trying to avoid the actual use of the card, which might leave a trail of plastic for anyone who was tracking him.

Though no one on the plane or in the terminal had seemed to be especially interested in him, Joe parked the car at a shopping centre not far from the airport and searched it inside and out, under the hood and in the trunk, for a transponder like the one that he had found on his Honda the previous day. The rental Ford was clean.

From the shopping centre, he wove a tangled course along surface streets, checking his rear-view mirror for a tail. Convinced that he was not being followed, he finally picked up Interstate 25 and drove south.

Mile by mile, Joe pushed the Ford harder, eventually ignoring the speed limit, because he became increasingly convinced that if he didn’t get to Barbara Christman’s house in time, he would find her dead by her own hand. Eviscerated. Immolated. Or with the back of her head blown out.

In Colorado Springs, Joe found Barbara Christman’s address in the telephone book. She lived in a diminutive jewel-box Victorian, Queen Anne style, exuberantly decorated with elaborate millwork.

When she came to the door in answer to the bell, she spoke before Joe had a chance to identify himself. ‘Even sooner than I expected you.’

‘Are you Barbara Christman?’

‘Let’s not do this here.’

‘I’m not sure you know who I—’

‘Yes, I know. But not here.’

‘Where?’

‘Is that your car at the curb?’ she asked.

‘The rental Ford.’

‘Park it in the next block. Two blocks. Wait there, and I’ll pick you up.’

She closed the door.

Joe stood on the porch a moment longer, considering whether he should ring the bell again. Then he decided that she wasn’t likely to be planning to run out on him.

Two blocks south of Christman’s house, he parked beside a grade-school playground. The swings, seesaws, and jungle gyms were unused on this Sunday morning. Otherwise, he would have parked elsewhere, to be safe from the silvery laughter of children.

He got out of the car and looked north. There was no sign of the woman yet.

Joe consulted his wristwatch. Ten minutes till ten o’clock, Pacific Time, an hour later here.

In eight hours, he would have to be back in Westwood to meet Demi — and Rose.

Along the sleepy street came a cat’s paw of warm wind searching the boughs of the pine trees for hidden birds. It rustled the leaves on the branches of a nearby group of paper birches with trunks as luminous white as choirboys’ surplices.

Under a sky grey-white with lowering mist to the west and drear with gun-metal thunderheads to the east, the day seemed to carry a heavy freight of dire portents. The flesh prickled on the nape of Joe’s neck, and he began to feel as exposed as a red bull’s-eye target on a shooting range.

When a Chevy sedan approached from the south and Joe saw three men in it, he moved casually around to the passenger’s side of the rental car, using it for cover in the event that they opened fire on him. They passed without glancing in his direction.

A minute later, Barbara Christman arrived in an emerald-green Ford Explorer. She smelled faintly of bleach and soap, and he suspected she had been doing the laundry when he’d rung her bell.

As they headed south from the grade school, Joe said, ‘Ms. Christman, I’m wondering — where have you seen a photograph of me?’

‘Never have,’ she said. ‘And call me Barbara.’

‘So, Barbara… when you opened your door a bit ago, how did you know who I was?’

‘Hasn’t been a stranger at my door in ages. Anyway, last night when you called back and I didn’t answer, you let it ring more than thirty times.’

‘Forty.’

‘Even a persistent man would have given up after twenty. When it kept ringing and ringing, I knew you were more than persistent. Driven. I knew you’d come soon.’

She was about fifty, dressed in Rockports, faded jeans, and a periwinkle-blue chambray shirt. Her thick white hair looked as if it had been cut by a good barber rather than styled by a beautician. Well-tanned, with a broad face as open and inviting as a golden field of Kansas wheat, she appeared honest and trustworthy. Her stare was direct, and Joe liked her for the aura of efficiency that she projected and for the crisp self-assurance in her voice.

‘Who are you afraid of, Barbara?’

‘Don’t know who they are.’

‘I’m going to get the answer somewhere,’ he warned.

‘What I’m telling you is the truth, Joe. Never have known who they are. But they pulled strings I never thought could be pulled.’

‘To control the results of a Safety Board investigation?’

‘The Board still has integrity, I think. But these people… they were able to make some evidence disappear.’

‘What evidence?’

Braking to a halt at a red traffic signal, she said, ‘What finally made you suspicious, Joe, after all this time? What about the story didn’t ring true?’

‘It all rang true — until I met the sole survivor.’

She stared blankly at him, as though he had spoken in a foreign language of which she had no slightest knowledge.

‘Rose Tucker,’ he said.

There seemed to be no deception in her hazel eyes but genuine puzzlement in her voice when she said, ‘Who’s she?’

‘She was aboard Flight 353. Yesterday, she visited the graves of my wife and daughters while I was there.’

‘Impossible. No one survived. No one could have survived.’

‘She was on the passenger manifest.’

Speechless, Barbara stared at him.

He said, ‘And some dangerous people are hunting for her — and now for me. Maybe the same people who made that evidence disappear.’

A car horn blared behind them. The traffic signal had changed to green.

While she drove, Barbara reached to the dashboard controls and lowered the fan speed of the air-conditioning, as though chilled. ‘No one could have survived,’ she insisted. ‘This was not your usual hit-and-skip crash, where there’s a greater or lesser chance of any survivors depending on the angle of impact and lots of other factors. This was straight down, head-in, catastrophic.’

‘Head-in? I always thought it tumbled, broke apart.’

‘Didn’t you read any newspaper accounts?’

He shook his head. ‘Couldn’t. I just imagined…

‘Not a hit-and-skip like most,’ she repeated. ‘Almost straight into the ground. Sort of similar to Hopewell, September ninety-four. A USAir 737 went down in Hopewell Township, on its way to Pittsburgh, and was just… obliterated. Being aboard Flight 353 would have been… I’m sorry, Joe, but it would have been like standing in the middle of a bomb blast. A big bomb blast.’

‘There were some remains they were never able to identify.’

‘So little left to identify. The aftermath of something like this. it’s more gruesome than you can imagine, Joe. Worse than you want to know, believe me.’