Dean Koontz: Sole Survivor

Rose intends to start with Joe Carpenter, but she can’t locate him. His co-workers at the Post have lost track of him. He has sold the house in Studio City. He has no listed phone. They say he is a broken man. He has gone away to die.

She must begin the work elsewhere.

Because the Post published photographs of only a fraction of the Southern California victims and because she has no easy way to gather photos of the many others, Rose decides not to use portraits, after all. Instead, she tracks down their burial places through published funeral-service notices, and she takes snapshots of their graves. It seems fitting that the imbued image should be of a headstone, that these grim memorials of bronze and granite should become doorways through which the recipients of the pictures will learn that Death is not mighty and dreadful, that beyond this bitter phase, Death himself dies.

High in the wind-churned mountains, with waves of moon-silvered conifers casting sprays of needles onto the roadway, still more than twenty miles from Big Bear Lake, Rose Tucker spoke so softly that she could barely be heard over the racing engine and the hum of the tyres: ‘Joe, will you hold my hand?’

He could not look at her, would not look at her, dared not even glance at her for a second, because he was overcome by the childish superstition that she would be all right, perfectly fine, as long as he didn’t visually confirm the terrible truth that he heard in her voice. But he looked. She was so small, slumped in her seat, leaning against the door, the back of her head against the window, as small to his eyes as 21–21 must have appeared to her when she had fled Virginia with the girl at her side. Even in the faint glow from the instrument panel, her huge and expressive eyes were again as compelling as they had been when he’d first met her in the graveyard, full of compassion and kindness — and a strange glimmering joy that scared him.

His voice was shakier than hers. ‘It’s not far now.’

‘Too far,’ she whispered. ‘Just hold my hand.’

‘Oh, shit.’

‘It’s all right, Joe.’

The shoulder of the highway widened to a scenic rest area. He stopped the car before a vista of darkness: the hard night sky, the icy disc of a moon that seemed to shed cold instead of light, and a vast blackness of trees and rocks and canyons descending.

He released his seat belt, leaned across the console, and took her hand. Her grip was weak.

‘She needs you, Joe.’

‘I’m nobody’s hero, Rose. I’m nothing.’

‘You need to hide her… hide her away…‘

‘Rose—’

‘Give her time. for her power to grow.’

‘I can’t save anyone.’

‘I shouldn’t have started the work so soon. The day will come when… when she won’t be so vulnerable. Hide her away… let her power grow. She’ll know… when the time has come.’

She began to lose her grip on him.

He covered her hand with both of his, held it fast, would not let it slip from his grasp.

Voice ravelling away, she seemed to be receding from him though she did not move: ‘Open. open your heart to her, Joe.’

Her eyelids fluttered.

‘Rose, please don’t.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘Please. Don’t.’

‘See you later, Joe.’

‘Please.’

‘See you.’

Then he was alone in the night. He held her small hand alone in the night while the wind played a hollow threnody. When at last he was able to do so, he kissed her brow.

The directions Rose had given him were easy to follow. The cabin was neither in the town of Big Bear Lake nor elsewhere along the lake front, but higher on the northern slopes and nestled deep in pines and birches. The cracked and potholed blacktop led to a dirt driveway, at the end of which was a small white clapboard house with a shake-shingle roof.

A green Jeep Wagoneer stood beside the cabin. Joe parked behind the Jeep.

The cabin boasted a deep, elevated porch, on which three cane backed rocking chairs were arranged side by side. A handsome black man, tall and athletically built, stood at the railing, his ebony skin highlighted with a brass tint cast by two bare, yellow light bulbs in the porch ceiling.

The girl waited at the head of the flight of four steps that led up from the driveway to the porch. She was blond and about six years old.

From under the driver’s seat, Joe retrieved the gun that he had taken from the white-haired storyteller after the scuffle on the beach. Getting out of the car, he tucked the weapon under the waistband of his jeans.

The wind shrieked and hissed through the needled teeth of the pines.

He walked to the foot of the steps.

The child had descended two of the four treads. She stared past Joe, at the Ford. She knew what had happened.

On the porch, the black man began to cry.

The girl spoke for the first time in over a year, since the moment outside the Ealings’ ranch house when she had told Rose that she wanted to be called Nina. Gazing at the car, she said only one word in a voice soft and small: ‘Mother.’

Her hair was the same shade as Nina’s hair. She was as fine-boned as Nina. But her eyes were not grey like Nina’s eyes, and no matter how hard Joe tried to see Nina’s face before him, he could not deceive himself into believing that this was his daughter.

Yet again, he had been engaged in searching behaviour, seeking what was lost forever.

The moon above was a thief, its glow not a radiance of its own but a weak reflection of the sun. And like the moon, this girl was a thief — not Nina but only a reflection of Nina, shining not with Nina’s brilliant light but with a pale fire.

Regardless of whether she was only a lab-born mutant with strange mental powers or really the hope of the world, Joe hated her at that moment, and hated himself for hating her — but hated her nonetheless.

Hot wind huffed at the windows, and the cabin smelled of pine, dust, and the black char from last winter’s cosy blazes, which coated the brick walls of the big fireplace.

The incoming electrical lines had sufficient slack to swing in the wind. From time to time they slapped against the house, causing the lights to throb and flicker. Each tremulous brown-out reminded Joe of the pulsing lights at the Delmann house, and his skin prickled with dread.

The owner was the tall black man who had broken into tears on the porch. He was Louis Tucker, Mahalia’s brother, who had divorced Rose eighteen years ago, when she proved unable to have children. She had turned to him in her darkest hour. And after all this time, though he had a wife and children whom he loved, Louis clearly still loved Rose too.

‘If you really believe she’s not dead, that she’s only moved on,’ Joe said coldly, ‘why cry for her?’

‘I’m crying for me,’ said Louis. ‘Because she’s gone from here and I’ll have to wait through a lot of days to see her again.’

Two suitcases stood in the front room, just inside the door. They contained the belongings of the child.

She was at a window, staring out at the Ford, with sorrow pulled around her like sackcloth.

‘I’m scared,’ Louis said. ‘Rose was going to stay up here with Nina, but I don’t think it’s safe now. I don’t want to believe it could be true — but they might’ve found me before I got out of the last place with Nina. Couple times, way back, I thought the same car was behind us. Then it didn’t keep up.’

‘They don’t have to. With their gadgets, they can follow from miles away.’

‘And then just before you pulled into the driveway, I went out on to the porch ‘cause I thought I heard a helicopter. Up in these mountains in this wind — does that make sense?’