Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

He had to do it right this time. No mistakes. Finish him off.

Toting the gun, Joey climbed onto the precariously stacked pews. They creaked and groaned, wobbled and shuddered, treacherous beneath him. Wary of protruding nails and glass daggers, he nevertheless clambered quickly across upturned benches, splintered window frames, cracked two-by-fours, and slabs of wallboard, reaching the car much faster than when he'd had to snake his way to it from the bottom of the rubble.

Even as he jumped down from a pew onto the Mustang's hood, he fired a round from the shotgun into the pitch-dark interior of the car. He wasn't well balanced, and the recoil nearly knocked him off his feet, but he stayed upright, pumped the Remington, fired again, and a third time, filled with savage judgmental glee, confident that P.J. could not have lived through that storm of buckshot.

The three shots were thunderous, and in the fading echo of the third, he heard a movement behind him that didn't sound like merely another settling noise, that seemed to be more purposeful. It was impossible that P.J. could have gotten out of the car before Joey had arrived this time, impossible that he could have both gotten out and circled around behind. Joey started to turn, looking back and up — and beheld the impossible from the corner of his eye. P.J. was right there , coming down on him, descending the precarious woodpile with daunting agility, swinging a length of two-by-four.

The flat of the heavy club struck Joey hard along the right temple. He fell onto the car hood, losing his grip on the shotgun, instinctively rolling away from his assailant, drawing his knees up and tucking his head down in the fetal position. The second blow smashed the ribs along his left side and drove all the breath out of him. Wheezing for air, getting none, he rolled again. The third blow landed on his back, and a scintillant pain coruscated along his spine. He rolled through the shot-out windshield, over the dashboard, into the front seat of the dark Mustang, and from there dropped into a far deeper, more profound blackness.

When he came around, rising out of a cloistered inner space of softly scurrying midnight spiders, he was certain that he'd been unconscious for only a few seconds, surely less than a minute. He was still struggling mightily to breathe. Sharp pain in his ribs. The taste of his own blood.

Celeste.

Sliding through gummy safety glass and buckshot, Joey pulled himself behind the steering wheel. He pushed the door open as far as the embracing rubble would allow, but that was far enough to get out into the October wind and the flickering light.

Toward the narthex and the overturned holy-water font, sparks cascaded from a ceiling fixture.

In the other direction, orange reflections of fire and shadows of flames slithered up the back wall of the sacristy, but he couldn't see the blaze itself through the encircling ruins.

Having taken the first blow from the two-by-four on the right side of his head, he had little vision in that eye. Blurred shapes throbbed and swarmed among twinkling phantom lights.

He smelled gasoline.

He dragged-levered-kicked himself onto the roof of the Mustang. He was too dizzy to get all the way to his feet. On his knees, he surveyed the church.

With his left eye, he could see P.J. ascending the altar steps with Celeste unconscious in his arms.

The candles had toppled. The altar cloth was afire.

Joey heard someone cursing, then realized that he was listening to his own voice. He was cursing himself.

Cruelly dropping Celeste onto the seething altar platform, P.J. Snatched up the hammer.

Joey heard sobbing where there had been cursing, and devastating pain detonated along his left side, through his broken ribs.

The hammer. Raised high.

Stung to wakefulness by the fire, Celeste screamed.

From the altar platform, P.J. peered across the church, toward the Mustang, toward Joey, and his eyes were filled with jack-o'-lantern light.

The hammer crashed down.

A flutter. Behind Joey's eyes. Like a darting shadow of wings on rippled, sun-spangled water. Like the flight of angels half seen at the periphery of vision.

Everything had changed.

His ribs were no longer broken.

His vision was clear.

He had not yet been beaten by his brother.

Rewind. Replay.

Oh, Jesus.

Another replay.

One more chance.

Surely it would be the last.

And he hadn't been cast backward in time as far as he had been before. His window of opportunity was narrower than ever, giving him less time to think; his chances of altering their fate were poor, because now he didn't have leeway for even a small error in judgment. The Mustang had already rammed into the church, the high altar was burning, and Joey was already scrambling across the steepled rubble, jumping down onto the hood of the car, squeezing the trigger on the Remington.

He checked himself just in time to avoid his previous mistake, whirled, and instead fired up at the jumbled pews behind him, from which P.J. had attacked him with the two-by-four. The buckshot shredded empty air. P.J. wasn't there.

Confused, Joey turned to the car and blasted out the windshield, as he had done before, but no scream came from inside, so he whipped around to cover his back again. P.J. still wasn't coming at him with the two-by-four.

Jesus! Screwing up again, screwing up, doing the wrong thing again. Think. Think!

Celeste. She was all that mattered.

Forget about taking P.J. Just get to Celeste before he does.

Carrying the shotgun with him even though it inhibited movement, Joey scrambled up the tilted pews and kneelers, across the rubble, toward the rear of the nave, down again into the center aisle where he'd seen Celeste knocked unconscious by the spinning chunk of wood. She wasn't there.

"Celeste!"

In the sanctuary at the front of the church, a slouching figure hunched along the ambulatory, through the dervish reflections of the altar fire above. It was P.J. He was carrying Celeste.

The center aisle was blocked. Joey ran between two rows of pews to the side aisle along the east wall of the church, and then raced forward along the unbroken panes of rain-beaten glass toward the sanctuary railing.

Rather than proceed to the altar as before, P.J. disappeared with Celeste through the door to the sacristy.

Joey leaped over the sanctuary railing, as though too eager to accept a proffered sacrament, and edged swiftly but warily along the wall to the sacristy. He hesitated at the doorway, fearful of stepping face-first into a hard-swung two-by-four or a gun blast, but then he did what must be done — the right thing — and stepped up to the threshold.

The sacristy door was closed, locked.

He stepped back, aimed the shotgun. One round trashed the lock and blew the door open.

The sacristy was deserted — except for Beverly Korshak's body, which lay in a corner, a pale mound in a plastic shroud.

Joey went to the exterior door. It was secured with a deadbolt from the inside, as he had left it.

The cellar door. He opened it.

In the moon-yellow light below, a serpentine shadow slithered into a coil and rolled out of sight around a corner.

The stairs were unpainted wood, and in spite of every effort he made at stealth, his boots met every tread with a hollow knock like the deliberative countdown of a doomsday clock.

Heat rose in parching currents, in torrid waves, in scorching tides, and by the time he reached the basement floor, he felt as if he had descended into a primal furnace. The air was redolent of superheated wood ceiling beams on the brink of charting, hot stone from the masonry walls, hot lime from the concrete floor — and a trace of sulfur from the mine fires below.