Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

The Corvette-what-ain't-a-Corvette is roomier than the sports car that it pretends to be. The vehicle can comfortably accommodate four passengers.

Ever hopeful, as he was raised to be, Curtis will operate under the assumption that only two assassins are present at the crossroads. Anyway, if there are four, he has no chance whatsoever of surviving a confrontation. And in that event, he wouldn't know how to fight a quartet of these vicious predators; consequently, faced with four, his only sensible strategy would be to run into the prairie in search of a high cliff or a drowning river, or in pursuit of some other death that might be easier than the one that the killers plan to measure out to him.

Although usually he would avoid a clash with even just two of these hunters — or with one! — he doesn't have the luxury of flight in this case, because he has an obligation to Cass and Polly. He's told them to run, but they might not be permitted to leave if they are thought to harbor him. In that case, he can only distract the enemy from the twins by revealing himself.

Quickly now, into the thick of it, between the meat-wagon Ford Explorer and the extraterrestrial road-burner, to the back door of the building. Try the knob carefully, quietly.

Locked.

Curtis challenges the door, willpower against matter, on the micro scale where will should win — as it won at the back door of the Hammond farmhouse in Colorado, as it won at the door of the SUV on the auto carrier in Utah, and elsewhere.

He has no sixth sense, no superpowers that would make him prime material for a series of comic books portraying him in colorful cape and tights. His main difference lies in his understanding of quantum mechanics, not as it is half understood on this world, but as it is more fully understood on others.

At the fundamental structural level of the universe, matter is energy; everything is energy expressed in myriad forms. Consciousness is the marshaling force that builds all things from this infinite sea of energy, primarily the all-encompassing consciousness of the Creator, the playful Presence in the dog's dreams. But even a mere mortal, having been granted intelligence and consciousness, possesses the power to affect the form and function of matter by a sheer act of will. This isn't the great world-making, galaxy-creating power of the playful Presence, but a humble power with which we can achieve only limited effects.

Even on this world, at its current early stage of development, scientists specializing in quantum mechanics are aware that at the subatomic level, the universe seems to be more like thought than like matter. They also know that their expectations, their thoughts, can affect the outcome of some experiments with elemental particles like electrons and photons. They understand that the universe is not as mechanistic as they once believed, and they have begun to suspect that it exists as an act of will, that this willpower — the awesomely creative consciousness of the playful Presence — is the organizing force within the physical universe, and that this power is reflected in the freedom that each mortal possesses to shape his or her destiny through the exercise of free will.

Curtis is already hip to all this.

Nevertheless, he remains afraid.

Fear is an unavoidable element of the mortal condition. Creation in all its ravishing beauty, with its infinite baroque embellishments and subtle charms, with all the wonders that it offers from both the Maker and the made, with all its velvet mystery and with all the joy we receive from those we love here, so enchants us that we lack the imagination, less than the faith, to envision an even more dazzling world beyond, and therefore even if we believe, we cling tenaciously to this existence, to sweet familiarity, fearful that all conceivable paradises will prove wanting by comparison.

Locked. The back door of the crossroads store is locked.

Then it isn't.

Beyond lies a small storeroom, revealed not by the single bare bulb dangling on a cord at ceiling center, but only by the light that sifts in from another room, around an inner door standing ajar, and dusts this chamber as if with a fine-ground fluorescent powder.

Curtis steps inside. He quietly closes the outer door behind him to prevent the breeze from shutting it with a bang.

Some silences soothe, but this one unnerves. This is the cold steel silence of the guillotine blade poised at the top of its track, with the target neck already inserted through the lunette below, the harvesting basket waiting for the head.

Ever hopeful even in his fear, Curtis eases toward the door that stands two inches ajar.

IN THE BEDROOM of the motor home, Polly grabbed the pump-action, pistol-grip, 12 — gauge shotgun from the mounting brackets at the back of the closet, where it was stored behind the hanging clothes.

The dog watched.

Polly yanked open a dresser drawer and seized a box of shells. She inserted one in the breech, three more in the tube-type magazine.

The dog lost interest in weaponry and began to sniff curiously at the shoes on the closet floor.

In the interest of a snug fit that was flattering to the figure, her white toreador pants had no pockets. Polly tucked three spare shells into her halter top, between her breasts, grateful that nature had given her sufficient cleavage to serve as an ammunition depot.

The dog followed from the bedroom, through the bath, into the kitchen, but then was distracted by a whiff of some tasty treat in the food cupboard.

As Old Yeller sniffed inquisitively at the narrow gap between the cabinet doors, Polly stepped into the lounge and stared down at the laptop computer on the floor. On her return from the bedroom, she'd been half convinced that she'd imagined the business with the dog and the computer; but the proof remained before her, glowing on the screen.

The laptop had been stored on a shelf in the entertainment center, under the TV. After the trick with the cards, the dog had stood on her hind feet, pawing at the shelf, until Polly moved the laptop to the floor, opened it, and switched it on.

Bewildered but game, her sense of wonder surprisingly intact after three years in the wonder-crushing upper echelons of the film industry, Polly had quickly set up the computer, while the dog had raced into the bathroom. Following a clatter, the pooch had returned with Cass’s toothbrush. Using the brush as a stylus, Old Yeller then tapped out a message on the keyboard.

RUM, the dog had typed, whereupon Polly had decided that any dog able to differentiate one playing card from another and possessed of advanced numerical skills ought to be allowed to indulge in an adult beverage if it wanted one, assuming that it could hold its booze and exhibited no tendency to alcoholism. Polly would have prepared Old Yeller a pina colada right then, or a mai tai, thought she suspected that she had lost her mind and that paramedics with psychiatric training, medevacked her to the prairie from the nearest metropolitan center, were even now approaching the Fleetwood with a straitjacket and a drawn dose of Thorazine in a syringe of a size usually employed to treat horses. Unfortunately, she had no rum, only beer and a small collection of fine wines, a fact that she conveyed to the dog along with an apology for being an inadequate hostess.

RUM had proved to be not the wanted word, but an error resulting from the understandable clumsiness of a dog gripping a toothbrush in its mouth as a stylus with which to type on a keyboard. With a whine of frustration but with admirable determination, Old Yeller had tried again: RUN!

So here and now, but a minute after the dog had finished typing, Polly stood staring down at the laptop, on which continued to burn the entire six-line message that had motivated her to race to the bedroom and load the shotguns.