Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

Micky wished, not for the first time, that she had been Geneva's daughter. How different her life would have been: so free of anger and self-destructive impulses.

Meeting Micky's eyes, Geneva read the love in them, and smiled, but then seemed to read something else as well, something that helped her to understand the depth of her naivete on this matter. Her smile faltered, faded, vanished. "No mother anywhere," she repeated softly, but to Micky this time. "That's what I've always thought. If I'd ever realized differently, I wouldn't have just. stood by."

Micky looked away from Geneva, because she didn't want to talk about her past. Not here, not now. This was about Leilani Klonk, not about Michelina Bellsong. Leilani was only nine, and in spite of what she'd been through, she wasn't screwed up yet; she was tough, smart; she had a chance, a future, even if at the moment it seemed to hang by a gossamer thread; she didn't have a thousand stupid choices to live down. In this girl, Micky saw the hope of a good, clean life full of purpose — which she couldn't quite yet see clearly in herself.

Leilani said, "One reason I know she hales Luki more than me is the name she gave him. She says she called me Leilani, which means 'heavenly flower,' because maybe. maybe people will think of me as more than just a pathetic cripple. That's old Sinsemilla at the peak of her motherly concern. But she says she knew Luki for what he was even before he popped out of her. Lukipela is Hawaiian for Lucifer."

Appalled, Geneva looked as though she might bring to the table the brandy that Micky had thus far resisted, though strictly for her own fortification.

"Photographs," Micky said. "Pictures of you and Luki. That would be proof he wasn't just your imaginary brother."

"They destroyed all the pictures of him. Because when he comes back with the aliens, he'll be completely fit. If anybody ever saw pictures of him with deformities, they'd know it had to be aliens who made him right. Then the jig would be up for our friends, the ETs. They'd be so busy dodging alien hunters that they wouldn't be able to lift up human civilization and get us into the Parliament of Planets, with all the cool Welcome Wagon gifts and valuable discount coupons that come with membership. Sinsemilla also buys that one. Probably because she wants to. Anyway, I hid two snapshots of Luki, but they found them. Now the only place I can see his face is in my mind. But I take time every day to concentrate on his face, on remembering it, keeping the details sharp, especially his smile. I'm never going to let his face fade away. I'm never going to forget the way he looked." The girl's voice grew softer but also more penetrating, as air finds its way into places from which water is kept out. "He can't have been here ten years and suffered like he did, and then just be gone as if he never lived. That's not right. Hell if it is. Hell if it is. Someone's got to remember, you know. Someone."

Realizing the full horror of the girl's situation, Aunt Gen was reduced to stunned silence and to at least a temporary emotional paralysis. All her life, until now, Geneva Davis had always found exactly the right consoling words for any situation, had known when she could smooth your hackled heart just by lovingly smoothing your hair, quell your fear with a cuddle and a kiss on the brow.

Micky was scared as she hadn't been scared in fifteen years or longer. She felt enslaved once more to fate, to chance, to dangerous men, as helpless as she had been throughout a childhood lived under the threat of those same forces. She could think of no way to rescue Leilani, just as she had never been able to save herself, and this impotence suggested that she might never find the wit, the courage, and the determination to accomplish the far more difficult task of redeeming her own screwed-up life.

Solemnly, Leilani finished the second piece of pie, solemnly, as though she were eating it not to satisfy her own need or desire, but as though she were eating it on behalf of he who could not share this table with them, eating it in the name of a boy with a wickedly malformed pelvis and Tinkertoy hips, a boy who clomped along bravely in one built-up shoe, a brother who had probably liked apple pie and whose memory must be fed in his enduring absence.

A butterfly flutter of light, a sibilant sputter, a serpent of smoke rising lazily from the black stump of a dead wick: One of the three candles burned out, and darkness eagerly pulled its chair a little closer to the table.

GUNFIRE but also frankfurters. Hunters loom, but the chaos provides cover. Hostility is all around, but hope of escape lies ahead.

Even in the darkest moments, light exists if you have the faith to see it. Fear is a poison produced by the mind, and courage is the antidote stored always ready in the soul. In misfortune lies the seed of future triumph. They have no hope who have no belief in the intelligent design of all things, but those who see meaning in every day will live in joy. Confronted in battle by a superior foe, you will find that a kick to the sex organs is generally effective.

Those sagacities and uncounted others are from Mother's Big Book of Street-Smart Advice for the Hunted and the Would-Be Chameleon. This isn't a published work, of course, although in the boy's mind, he can see those pages as clearly as the pages of any real book that he's ever read, chapter after chapter of hard-won wisdom. His mom had been first of all his mom, but she'd also been a universally admired symbol of resistance to oppression, an advocate of freedom, whose teachings — both her philosophy and her practical survival advice— had been passed from believer to believer, much the way that folk tales were preserved through centuries by being told and retold in the glow of campfire and hearth light.

Curtis hopes that he won't have to kick anyone in the sex organs, but he's prepared to do whatever is required to survive. By nature, he's more of a dreamer than he is a schemer, more poet than warrior, though he's admittedly hard-pressed to see anything either poetic or warriorlike about clutching a package of frankfurters to his chest, scampering like a monkey, and retreating pell-mell from the battle that has broken out behind him.

Around and under more prep tables, past tall cabinets with open shelves full of stacked dishes, taking cover behind hulking culinary equipment of unknown purpose, Curtis moves indirectly but steadily into the end of the kitchen toward which the workers had initially seemed to be directing him.

None of the employees any longer offers guidance. They're too busy diving for cover, belly-crawling like soldiers seeking shelter in an unexpected firefight, and saying their prayers, each of them determined to protect the precious bottom that his mama once talcumed so lovingly.

In addition to the sharp crack of gunfire, Curtis hears lead slugs ricocheting with a whistle or with a cymbal-like ping off range hoods and off other metal surfaces, slamming — thwack! — into wood or plaster, puncturing full soup pots with a flat bonk and drilling empty pots with a hollow reverberant pong. Shot dinnerware explodes in noisy disharmonious chords; bullet-plucked metal racks produce jarring arpeggios; from a severed refrigeration line, a toxic mist of rapidly evaporating coolant hisses like a displeased audience at a symphony of talentless musicians; and perhaps he's able to call forth his poetic side in the midst of warfare, after all.

The FBI doesn't as a matter of habit open negotiations with gunplay, which means the cowboys must have initiated hostilities. And the two men wouldn't resort to violence so immediately if they weren't certain that these Bureau agents know them for who they really are.

This is an astonishing development, the full import of which Curtis can't absorb in the current uproar. If federal authorities have become aware of the dark forces that pursue this motherless boy, then they are aware of the boy himself, and if they can recognize the hunters, they must be able to recognize the boy, as well.