Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

Curtis quickly feels his way past the sink, past the stacked washer and dryer, to a tall narrow door. A shallow closet. It's apparently packed as full and chaotically as a maniac's mind, and as he senses and then feels unseen masses of road-life paraphernalia beginning slowly to slide toward him, he jams the door shut again, to hold back the avalanche before it gains unstoppable momentum.

At the front of the vehicle, the door opens, and the first things through it are the excited voices of a man and a woman.

Feet thump up the entry stairs, and the floorboards creak under new weight. Lamps come on in the forward lounge, and a gray wash of secondhand light spills all the way to Curtis.

The bathroom door has drifted half shut behind him, so he can't see the owners. They can't see him either. Yet.

Before one of them comes back here to take a leak, Curtis opens the last door and steps into more gloom untouched by the feeble light in the bathroom. To his left, two rectangular windows glimmer dimly, like switched-off TV screens with a lingering phosphorescence, though the tint is faintly yellow.

Up front, the two voices are louder, more excited. The engine starts. Before either of the owners takes a bathroom break, they are intent on getting away from flying bullets.

No longer panting, the dog slips past Curtis, brushing his leg. Evidently the dark room holds nothing threatening that her keener senses can detect.

He crosses the threshold and eases the door shut behind him.

Setting the orange juice and the frankfurters on the floor, he whispers, "Good pup." He hopes that Old Yeller will understand this to be an admonition against eating the sausages.

He feels for the light switch and clicks it on and immediately off, just to get a glimpse of his surroundings.

The room is small. One queen-size bed with a minimum of walk-around space. Built-in nightstands, a corner TV cabinet. A pair of sliding mirrored doors probably conceal a wardrobe jammed full of too many clothes to allow a boy and a dog to shelter among the shirts and shoes.

Of course, this is a little cottage on wheels, not a castle. It doesn't afford as many hiding places as a titled lord's domain: no receiving rooms or studies, no secret passageways, no dungeons deep or towers high.

Coming in, he'd known the risks. What he hadn't realized, until now, was that the motor home has no back door. He must leave the same way he entered — or go out of a window.

Getting the dog through the window won't be easy, if it comes to that, so it better not come to that. Escape-with-canine isn't a feat that can be accomplished in a flash, while the startled owners stand gaping in the bedroom doorway. Old Yeller isn't a Great Dane, thank God, but she's not a Chihuahua, either, and Curtis can't simply tuck her inside his shirt and scramble through one of these less than generous windows with the agility of a caped superhero.

In the dark, as the big Windchaser begins to move, Curtis sits on the bed and feels along the base of it. Instead of a standard frame, he discovers a solid wooden platform anchored to the floor; the box springs and the mattress rest upon the platform, and even the thinnest slip of a boogeyman couldn't hide under this bed.

The motor-home horn blares. In fact the noisy night sounds like a honk-if-you-love-Jesus moment at a convention of Christian road warriors.

Curtis goes to the window, where the drapes have already been drawn aside, and peers out at the truck-stop parking lot. Cars and pickups and SUVs and a few RVs nearly as big as this one careen across the blacktop, moving recklessly and fast, in total disregard of marked lanes, as if the drivers never heard about the courtesy of the road. Everyone's hellbent on getting to the interstate, racing around and between the service islands, terrorizing the same hapless folks who only moments ago escaped death under the wheels of the runaway SWAT transport.

Over bleating horns, screeching tires, and squealing brakes, another sound flicks at the boy's ears: rhythmic and crisp, faint at first, then suddenly rhythmic and solid, like the whoosh of a sword cutting air; and then even more solid, a whoosh and a thump combined, as a blade might sound if it could slice off slabs of the night, and if the slabs could fall heavily to the blacktop. Blades, indeed, but not knives. Helicopter rotors.

Curtis finds the window latch and slides one pane aside. He thrusts his head out of the window, cranes his neck, looking for the source of the sound, as a slipstream of warm desert air cuffs his face and tosses his hair.

Big sky, black and wide. The brassy glare from sodium arc lamps under inverted-wok shades. Stars burning eternal. The motion of the Windchaser makes the moon appear to roll like a wheel.

Curtis can't see any lights in the sky that nature didn't put there, but the helicopter is growing louder by the second, no longer slicing the air but chopping it with hard blows that sound like an ax splitting cordwood. He can feel the rhythmic compression waves hammering first against his eardrums, then against the sensitive surfaces of his upturned eyes.

And — chuddaboom! — the chopper is right here, passing across the Windchaser, so low, maybe fifteen feet above Curtis, maybe less. This isn't a traffic-monitoring craft like the highway patrol would use, not a news chopper or even a corporate-executive eggbeater with comfortable seating for eight, but huge and black and fully armored. Bristling, fierce in every line, turbines screaming, this seems to be a military gunship, surely armed with machine guns, possibly with rockets. The shriek of the engines vibrates through the boy's skull and makes his teeth ring like an array of tuning forks. The battering downdraft slams him, rich with the stink of hot metal and motor oil.

The chopper roars past them, toward the complex of buildings, and in its tumultuous wake, the Windchaser accelerates. The driver is suddenly as reckless as all the others who are making a break for the interstate.

"Go, go, go!" Curtis urges, because the night has grown strange, and is now a great black beast with a million searching eyes. Motion is commotion, and distraction buys time, and time — not mere distance — is the key to escape, to freedom, and to being Curtis Hammond. "Go, go, go!"

BY THE TIME that Leilani rose from the kitchen table to leave Geneva's trailer, she was ashamed of herself, and honest enough to admit to the shame, though dishonest enough to try to avoid facing up to the true cause of it.

She had talked with her mouth full of pie. She had hogged down a second piece. All right, okay, bad table manners and a little gluttony were cause for embarrassment, but neither was sufficient reason for shame, unless you were a hopeless self-dramatizer who believed every head cold was the bubonic plague and who wrote lousy weepy epic poems about hangnails and bad-hair days.

Leilani herself had written lousy weepy epic poems about lost puppies and kittens nobody wanted, but she had been six years old then, seven at most, and wretchedly jejune. Jejune was a word she liked a lot because it meant "dull, insipid, juvenile, immature" — and yet it sounded as though it ought to mean something sophisticated and classy and smart. She liked things that weren't what they seemed to be, because too much in life was exactly what it seemed to be: dull, insipid, juvenile, and immature. Like her mother, for instance, like most TV shows and movies and half the actors in them — although not, of course, Haley Joel Osment, who was cute, sensitive, intelligent, charming, radiant, divine.

Micky and Mrs. D tried to delay Leilani's departure. They were afraid for her. They worried that her mother would hack her to pieces in the middle of the night or stuff cloves up her butt and stick an apple in her mouth and bake her for tomorrow's dinner- although they didn't express their concern in terms quite that graphic.