Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

Joey shoved Celeste through the open doorway and to the living-room floor. He scrambled after her, dropped beside her, rolled onto his back, and kicked the front door shut hard enough to rattle a pair of pictures — John Kennedy, Pope John XXIII — and a bronze crucifix on the wall above the sofa.

Bimmer had been thrown backward with such force that he wasn't even lying in their way, which meant that the caliber of the weapon was big, damn big, a deer rifle, maybe even bigger than that, a lot of punch. Probably hollow-point cartridges too.

In a blue bathrobe and a crown of pink hair curlers, Bimmer's wife rose from an armchair in front of the television, even as the door was slamming shut, stunned into silence but only for an instant. When she saw her husband's vest of blood and the two shotguns, she reached the logical but incorrect conclusion. Screaming, she turned away from them.

"Get down!" Joey shouted, and Celeste cried out, "Beth, stay down!"

Unheeding, in a blind panic, heading toward the back of the house, Beth Bimmer crossed in front of a window. It imploded with an incongruously merry, bell-like ringing of shattering glass. She took a shot in the temple, which snapped her head to the side so hard that it might also have broken her neck, and as the phantom audience on the television laughed uproariously, she crashed to the living-room floor in front of a birdlike elderly woman in a yellow sweatsuit, who was sitting on the sofa.

The older woman had to be Hannah, Bimmer's mother, but she had no time to grieve for her son and daughter-in-law, because two of the next three shots were generous destiny's gifts for her, pumped through the same window but delivered without the merry-bell music of breaking glass, killing her where she sat, as she reached for her hickory cane with one palsied hand, before either Joey or Celeste could even cry out to her.

It was late October of 1975, and the Vietnam War had ended back in April, but Joey felt as if he were in one of those Asian battle zones that had filled the television news when he was growing up. The sudden, senseless death might have shocked him into immobility and fatal indecision — except that he was actually a forty-year-old man in a twenty-year-old body, and those additional twenty years of experience had been gained during a time when sudden, senseless violence had grown commonplace. As a product of the latter decades of the millennium, he could cope reasonably well in the midst of gunfire and random slaughter.

The living room was filled with light, making easy targets of him and Celeste, so he rolled onto his side and fired the 20-gauge Remington at a brass floor lamp with a fringed shade. The roar of the shotgun in that confined space was deafening, but he pumped a fresh shell into the breech and fired at one of the end-table lamps flanking the sofa, then pumped it again and took out the lamp on the other end table.

Understanding Joey's intent, Celeste fired one round into the television screen, silencing the sitcom. The burnt-powder stench of gunfire was immediately overlaid with the hot, astringent odor of ruined electronics.

"Stay low, under the windows," Joey instructed. In the ear-stunning aftermath of the shotgun fire, he sounded as though he were speaking through a woolen winter scarf, but even though his voice was muffled, he could hear the tremor of fear in it. He was a child of the premillennium follies, steeled to the savagery of his fellow human beings, but he nevertheless felt as though he might wet his pants. "Follow the walls to a doorway, any doorway, just get out of the room."

Crawling frantically along the floor in the darkness, dragging the shotgun by its strap, Joey wondered what role he was supposed to serve in his brother's nightmare tableau. If Celeste's parents returned to town and stepped into P.J.'s gun sights, locals would provide all twelve bodies needed for the creation of his demented bit of theater. But he must have a use in mind for Joey too. After all, he had raced to catch up with the Mustang on the county route, swung onto Coal Valley Road, and paused tauntingly, daring Joey to follow. Although he perpetrated atrocities that any normal person would call acts of madness, P.J. didn't otherwise behave irrationally. Even within his homicidal fantasies, he operated with an appreciation for structure and purpose, however grotesque they might be.

In the Bimmers' kitchen, the light in the oven clock cast a soft green glow that barely illuminated the room — but even that was bright enough to make most of the details visible and to keep Joey close to the floor.

Two windows. One over the sink. The other beside the breakfast table. Both had side-panel curtains and, better yet, vinyl roll-up blinds that were drawn halfway down.

Cautiously rising to his feet at the side of the breakfast table, with his back pressed to the wall, he reached out and pulled that blind all the way over the glass.

Breathing hard, both from exertion and fear, he was bizarrely convinced that P.J. had circled the house and was now directly behind him, outside, with only the wall between them. In spite of the wind and rain, maybe P.J. could track him by his loud breathing and would shoot him through the wall to which his back was pressed. The moment passed, and the shot in the spine didn't come, and his terror abated somewhat.

Although he would have preferred that Celeste remain on the floor, below any possible line of fire, she risked a bullet in the arm by drawing the blind at the sink window.

"You okay?" he asked, when they eased back to the floor and met again in the center of the kitchen, staying on their knees in spite of having secured the two windows.

"They're all dead, aren't they?" she whispered bleakly.

"Yeah."

"All three."

"Yeah."

"No chance

"No. Dead."

"I've known them all my life."

"I'm sorry."

"Beth used to baby-sit me when I was little."

The eerie green glow from the oven clock made the Bimmer kitchen shimmer as though it were underwater or had passed through a veil into an unnatural realm outside the flow of real time and ordinary events. But the quality of the light alone could not provide him with blessed detachment and his gut remained knotted with tension; his throat was so constricted that he could barely swallow.

Fumbling spare shells from his pockets, dropping them through his shaky fingers, Joey said softly, "It's my fault."

"No, it's not. He knew where they were, where to find them. He knows who's still left in town and where they live. We didn't lead him here. He'd have come on his own anyway."

The dropped shells rolled away from him as he tried to recover them. His fingers were half numb, and his hands were shaking so badly that he gave up trying to reload until he calmed down.

Joey was surprised that his heart could still beat. It felt like cold iron in his chest.

They listened to the deadly night, alert for the stealthy sound of a door slowly easing open or the telltale clink of broken glass underfoot.

Eventually he said, "Back home, earlier, when I found the body in the trunk of his car, if I'd called the sheriff then and there, none of these people would be dead now."

"You can't blame yourself for that."

"Who the hell else should I blame?" He was instantly ashamed that he had responded so harshly. When he spoke again, his voice was bitter and remorseful, but his anger was directed at himself, not at her. "I knew the right thing to do, and I didn't do it."

"Listen," she said, finding one of his hands in the green gloom, holding it tightly, "that's not what I meant when I said you couldn't blame yourself. Think about it, Joey. Not calling the sheriff — you made that mistake twenty years ago, but you didn't make it tonight because your second chance didn't begin with P.J. at the house today, didn't begin with the finding of the body. It began only when you reached Coal Valley Road. Right?"