Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

Then the kicking stopped.

With one throttling hand clamped on Joey's throat and the other hand on the belt of his blue jeans, P.J. snatched him off the floor as a world champion power lifter might clean-and-jerk a barbell that carried only light-workout weights. He hoisted him overhead, turned, and threw him.

Joey bounced off the wall beside the archway and crashed to the floor in a broken-marionette heap. Mouth full of cracked teeth. Choking on blood. Chest tight. Lungs painfully compressed, maybe even punctured by a splintered rib. Inhaling with a consumptive wheeze, exhaling with a thick wet rattle. His heart was stuttering arrhythmically. Precariously balanced on a high wire of consciousness over a bottomless dark, he blinked through scalding tears and saw P.J. turn away from him and toward Celeste.

He also saw the shotgun. Within reach.

He could not control his extremities. He strove determinedly to reach out to the Remington, but his muscles spasmed. His arm merely twitched, and his right hand flopped uselessly on the floor.

A menacing rumble rose under him. Vibrations in the hot stone.

P.J. crouched over Celeste, turning his back to Joey, giving him up for dead.

The Remington.

So close. Tantalizingly close.

Joey focused all his attention on the shotgun, marshaled all his remaining strength for the task of getting hold of it, put all his faith in the power of the weapon, and willed himself to ignore the ungodly pain that crippled him, to overcome the paralyzing shock of the brutal beating that he had endured. Come on, come on, you fucking altar boy, come on, do it, do it, do the right thing for once in your sorry damn life!

His arm responded shakily. His hand clenched into a fist, then sprang open, then reached out. His trembling fingers touched the walnut stock of the Remington.

Hunched over Celeste, P.J. reached into a pocket of his ski jacket and withdrew a knife. At the touch of a button, the six-inch springloaded blade snapped out of the handle, and the yellow light lovingly caressed the razor-sharp edge.

Smooth walnut. Hot, smooth steel. Joey curled his fingers. They palsied, weak. Not good. He had to get a firm grip. Tight. Tighter. Try to lift. Quietly, quietly.

P.J. was talking — not to Joey, not to Celeste, either to himself or to someone whom he imagined to be present. His voice was low and guttural, still disturbing and strange, and now he seemed to be speaking a foreign language. Or gibberish. Rough and rhythmic, full of hard punctuation and low animal sounds.

The rumble grew louder.

Good. A blessing, that rumble — fearful but welcome. Together, the subterranean disturbance and P.J.'s queer muttering provided some cover for any sounds that Joey made.

He had one chance, and he needed to execute his plan — his feeble, pathetic plan — smoothly, quickly, confidently, before P.J. realized what was happening.

He hesitated. Didn't want to act precipitously, before he was sure that he had summoned all his depleted resources. Wait. Wait. Be sure. Wait forever? The ultimate consequences of inaction could be greater than the consequences of action. Now or never. Do or die. Do and die, but at least, for God's sake, do something!

In one fluid movement, clenching his broken teeth against the explosion of pain that he knew would come — that came — Joey rolled up from his side into a sitting position, pulling the shotgun with him, bracing his back against the wall.

Even over his muttering and the persistent rumbling in the earth under the church, P.J. heard and reacted, simultaneously rising from his crouch and turning.

Joey had both hands on the Remington. The butt of the stock was jammed against his shoulder.

The baleful light that glimmered on the switchblade also leaped in P.J.'s eyes.

Pointblank. Joey squeezed the trigger.

The boom seemed loud enough to shatter the stone around them, and echoes of the shot crashed back and forth from one end of the room to the other, from ceiling to floor, with a volume that seemed to swell rather than diminish.

The recoil from the Remington struck lightning bolts of pain through Joey's entire body, and the shotgun fell out of his hands, clattering to the floor beside him.

The powerful blast took P.J. in the belly and chest, lifted him off his feet, spun him all the way around. He stumbled and went to his knees still facing Joey, folding his arms around his torso, bending forward, hugging himself as though to prevent his buckshot-riddled intestines from spilling out.

If Joey could have lifted his arms, he would have picked up the shotgun and fired again. He would have emptied the magazine. But his muscles would no longer even so much as twitch. His hands wouldn't even flop convulsively at his sides. He suspected that he was paralyzed from the neck down.

The rumble under the church grew louder.

Thin exhalations of sulfurous steam rose through cracks in the mortar between the flooring stones.

P.J. slowly raised his head, revealing a face that was hideously contorted in agony, eyes wide with shock, mouth stretched in a silent scream. He gagged, retched, choked rackingly. A phlegmy gurgle in his throat suddenly became a violent series of disgorging spasms. From his mouth gushed not rich arterial blood but a grotesque silver vomit, a stream of small glittering coins that rang onto the floor, as though he were a human slot machine.

Repulsed, astonished, stone-cold terrified, Joey looked up from the silver hoard as P.J. spat out one last coin and broke into a grin that could have been no more malevolent if it had been on the bare-bone face of Death himself. He unfolded his arms from his blasted torso and held his pale hands out in the manner of a magician saying Presto! , and although his clothes had been torn by the buckshot, he seemed to have suffered no wounds at all.

Joey knew that he must be dying, hallucinating, more than halfway to the Other Side and out of his head with pain. The delirium tremens of death made the crawling walls of a drunkard's nightmares seem amusing by contrast.

He screamed at Celeste to wake up, to run, but the warnings were only whispers that even he could barely hear.

The quaking, steaming floor abruptly cracked the width of the room. Along that jagged line, thin spears of fierce orange light stabbed up from the realm below. Mortar crumbled into the burning mine. Stones broke loose and tumbled out of sight. The overhead timbers cracked, and the cellar walls shook. The fissure in the floor rapidly widened to an inch, two inches, six inches, a foot, two feet, filling the room with blinding light, providing a glimpse of white-hot mine walls below, separating Joey from P.J. and Celeste.

Over the groans and skreeks of the shaken church, over the roar of the fire below and the thunder of subsidence, P.J. said, "Better say goodbye to the bitch, altar boy." He shoved Celeste into the blaze beneath Coal Valley, into volcanic heat and molten anthracite and instant death.

Ah, no! No! Please, God, no, no, please, no, not her, not her. Me, but not her. I'm self-pitying, arrogant, weak, blind to the truth, too ignorant to know what a second chance means, and I deserve whatever happens to me, but not her, not her in all her beauty, not her in all her kindness, not her!

A flutter. Behind Joey's eyes.

A flutter like the feathery shadows of many wings taking flight across a mysterious, great sphere of light.

Everything had changed.

He was uninjured. Free of pain. On his feet.

He was upstairs in the church.

Replay.

The Mustang had already crashed through the wall. P.J. already had Celeste.

Time had been wound backward but not far enough to give him an opportunity to think through his predicament. Only a couple of minutes remained until the subsidence would hit, not a second to waste.