Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

RUM

RUN!

MAN EVIL

ALIEN

EVIL ALIEN

RUM!

On the face of it, the message was absurd, one level of order above meaningless gibberish, and if it had shown up on the screen as if resolving out of the ether or even if it had been typed by a preliterate child, Polly wouldn’t have acted upon it so quickly and might not have gone directly to the shotgun, but she felt justified in taking immediate and drastic action because the message had been typed by a dog with a toothbrush in its mouth! She’d never gone to college, and no doubt she’d lost a fearsome number of brain cells during the three years she spent in Hollywood, and she had no difficulty acknowledging that she was woefully ignorant about a long list of subjects, but she knew a miracle when she saw one, and if a dog typing messages with a toothbrush wasn’t a miracle, then neither was Moses parting the Red Sea nor Lazarus rising from the dead.

Besides, considering his peculiarities, Earl Bockman made more sense as an evil alien than as the bumpkin proprietor of a crossroads store and service station in the great Nevada lonesome. This was one of those seemingly impossible things that you intuitively knew were true the moment that you heard them: such as the recent report that none of the members of the hit rap-music group calling itself Sho Cop Ho Busters could read a musical note of music.

She wasn’t going to rush outside and blow Earl’s head off, if only because even in her fear and excitement, she could appreciate the difficulty of explaining this action in a court of law. She did not, in fact, know quite what she was going to do now that she had the shotgun, but she felt better with the weapon in hand.

A crackling noise caused her to spin around and bring up the 12-gauge, but Old Yeller was the source of the sound. The dog had gotten her head stuck in the empty cheese-popcorn bag that Curtis had left on the floor by the co-pilot’s chair.

Polly plucked the cellophane trap off the dog’s head, revealing a foolish grin, a wildly active tongue, and a popcorn-speckled face that she couldn’t easily relate to the determined messenger of alien doom that had labored so ingeniously over the keyboard. She turned to the computer once more, expecting the screen to be blank, but the exhortation to RUM! still burned in white letters on a blue field with five other lines of urgently conveyed information.

Old Yeller swabbed her snout with a propeller-action tongue that cleaned nose to chin to nose again, and Polly decided not to question miracles, not to dismiss the message because of the unlikely nature of the messenger, but to act, God help her, as the situation appeared to require.

And suddenly she realized: "Where's Curtis?"

The dog pricked her ears and whined.

Carrying the shotgun, Polly went to the door, took a deep breath, as she'd always taken just before she had disembarked, nude, from the flying saucer and had descended the neon stairs in that Las Vegas extravaganza, and she stepped into a prairie night turned as strange as any land reached by rabbit hole.

CURTIS HAMMOND IN COMMANDO MODE, as acutely aware as ever that he's more poet than warrior, concentrates on silence as he silently eases open the storeroom door, concentrates on stealth as stealthily he enters the store itself, concentrates on not screaming and running in terror as, not screaming and running in terror, he proceeds in a crouch along the first aisle, seeking the false mom of mom-and-pop.

The shelves of merchandise follow the rectangular shape of the store; therefore, the aisles are long, and the displays prevent him from seeing the front windows.

Apparently, prairie folk have little concern for a balanced diet, because no fresh fruits or vegetables seem to be sold here, only a variety of packaged goods. Along the back wall stand glass-door coolers stocked with beer, soft drinks, milk, and fruit juice.

At the end of the first aisle, Curtis hesitates, listening for any sound that might reveal the mom's position, but this killer seems to be concentrating on silence as assiduously as is Curtis himself.

Finally he leans forward and peers around the corner, past a display of batteries and butane lighters. This end aisle is short, leading directly to the front of the store, which in total offers only three long aisles formed by two islands of tall shelves.

He can see a portion of one dust-filmed window, but to determine if Cass and Polly have both boarded the Fleetwood, he would have to stand. The banks of shelves are taller than he is, which means if the bad mom is lingering near the front of the store, she won't see him; nevertheless, he remains in a crouch.

Soon he'll announce his presence to distract the pair of hunters and thus give the twins a chance to flee. Success, however, depends on choosing exactly the right moment to stand and reveal himself.

Moving past the batteries and the cigarette lighters, Curtis peeks warily into the middle aisle. Deserted.

He continues to the next aisle-end display — razor blades, nail clippers, penknives, regrettably no serious weaponry — and pauses again to listen.

The pooled silence is too deep, immeasurable fathoms beyond a mere stillness, deeper even than a hush. This deathly quiet makes Curtis want to shout just to prove that he remains among the living. A sudden chill on the nape of the neck. Looking behind himself, toward the fearful expectation of a creeping assassin, he almost cries out with relief when he sees that nothing stalks him. Yet.

He leans past packages of razor blades dangling from display hooks, and surveys the aisle nearest the front of the store, spotting the bad mom at once. She stands a few feet inside the open door, staring toward the pumps outside, and as far as he can tell, she's a ringer for the dead woman tumbled with her husband in the SUV.

More likely than not, these hunters are part of the pack that has been after him since Colorado, although it is possible that they are new to the mission. Because they aren't traveling in the stolen saddlery truck, aren't using local transport of any kind, he doubts that they are the two who, posing as cowboys, tracked him to the truck stop on Wednesday night.

Whether new to the hunt or members of the original pack, they are as violent and as dangerous as all the others, not individuals but members of a killing swarm. Their name is legion.

Drawn by activity at the pumps, the bad mom steps closer to the open door, and then moves all the way onto the threshold. She is now as much out of the store as in it, and she's no longer in a position to catch a glimpse of Curtis from her peripheral vision.

Between Curtis and the front door, on the counter near the cashier's station, a pistol lies in plain sight. Perhaps either the man or the woman now dead in the SUV had time to draw the handgun from under the counter but not enough time to use it. And the bad pop left it behind when he stepped outside to greet the Fleetwood.

The twins are no less endangered just because the hunter went to them unarmed. These are cruel assassins, as quick as vipers striking, more savage than crocodiles two days past their last good meal. They prefer to kill barehanded, though seldom with anything as prosaic as hands, to wade in the wet of death. The twins' beauty, kindness, wit, and high spirits will gain them not one split second of additional life if one of these hunters chooses to destroy them.

Gazing at the weapon on the counter, perhaps forty feet away, Curtis recognizes opportunity when he sees it. He doesn't even need to review his mother's numerous admonitions about the importance of seizing the moment, but sets out at once along the aisle, toward the cashier's station, proceeding in a crouch but otherwise as bold as any death-marked fool in battle who sees incoming tracers in the sky and assumes they are fireworks celebrating his impending triumph. He is halfway to the cash register when he wonders if he has mistaken bait for opportunity.