Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

"Put on your coat," she told Tommy.

Doofus's ears pricked. He sniffed the air. He turned his head side to side, surveying the base of the cupboards, the refrigerator, the unlit open cabinet under the sink.

Holding the Mossberg in her right hand, Meg speared her own coat off the rack with her left, struggled until she got her arm into it, took the shotgun in her left hand, shrugged her right arm into the second sleeve. She used just one hand to pull on her boots, refusing to put down the weapon.

Tommy was staring at the rat trap that she had left on the counter, the one that she had taken from under the sink. The stick that the rats had used to trip the mechanism was still wedged between the anvil and the hammer bar. Tommy frowned at it.

Before he could ask questions or have more time to think, Meg said, "You can do without a boot on your good foot. And leave your crutches here. They're no good outside. You'll have to lean on me."

Doofus twitched and went rigid.

Meg brought up the gun and scanned the kitchen.

The Labrador growled deep in his throat, but there was no sign of the rats.

Meg pulled open the back door, letting in the frigid wind. "Let's move, let's go, now."

Tommy lurched outside, holding on to the door frame, then balancing against the porch wall. The dog slipped out after him. Meg followed, closing the door behind them.

Holding the Mossberg in her right hand, using her left arm to support Tommy, she helped the boy across the porch, down the snow-covered steps, and into the yard. With the windchill factor, the temperature must have been below zero. Her eyes teared, and her face went numb. She hadn't paused to put on gloves, and the cold sliced through to the bones of her hands. Still, she felt better outside than in the house, safer. She didn't think that the rats would come after them, for the storm was a far greater obstacle to those small creatures than it was to her and Tommy.

Conversation was impossible because the wind keened across the open land, whistled under the eaves of the house, and clattered the bare branches of the maples against one another. She and Tommy progressed silently, and Doofus stayed at their side.

Though they slipped several times and almost fell, they reached the barn quicker than she had expected, and she hit the switch to put up the electric door. They ducked under the rising barrier before it was entirely out of their way. In the weak light of the lone bulb, they went directly to the station wagon.

She fished her keys out of her coat pocket, opened the door on the passenger side, slid the seat back all the way on its tracks, and helped Tommy into the front of the car because she wanted him beside her now, close, not in the backseat, even if he would have been more comfortable there. When she looked around for the dog, she saw that he was standing outside the barn, at the threshold, unwilling to follow them inside.

"Doofus, here, quick now," she said.

The Labrador whined. Surveying the shadows in the barn, he let the whine deepen into a growl.

Remembering the feeling of being watched when she had parked the jeep in the barn earlier, Meg also scanned the murky corners and the tenebrous reaches of the loft, but she saw neither pale, slinking figures nor the telltale red glimmer of rodent eyes.

The Labrador was probably excessively cautious. His condition was understandable, but they had to get moving. More forcefully, Meg said, "Doofus, get in here, right now."

He entered the barn hesitantly, sniffing the air and floor, came to her with a sudden urgency, and jumped into the backseat of the station wagon.

She closed the door, went around to the other side, and got in behind the wheel. "We'll drive back to Biolomech," she said. "We'll tell them we've found what they're looking for."

"What's wrong with Doofus?"

In the backseat, the dog was moving from one side window to the other, peering out at the barn, making thin, anxious sounds.

"He's just being Doofus," Meg said.

Huddled in his seat, angled awkwardly to accommodate his cast, Tommy appeared to be younger than ten, so frightened and vulnerable.

"It's okay," Meg said. "We're out of here."

She thrust the key in the ignition, turned it. Nothing. She tried again. The jeep would not start.

AT THE HIGH FENCE ALONG THE NORTHEAST FLANK OF THE BIOLOMECH property, Ben Parnell crouched to examine the rat-size tunnel in the half-frozen earth. Several of his men gathered around him, and one directed the beam of a powerful flashlight on the patch of ground in question. Luckily the hole was in a place where the wind scoured most of the snow away instead of piling it in drifts, but the searchers had still not spotted it until they'd made a second circuit of the perimeter.

Steve Harding raised his voice to compete with the wind: "Think they're in there, curled up in a burrow?"

"No," Ben said, his breath smoking in the arctic air. If he'd thought that the rats were in a burrow at the end of this entrance tunnel, he would not have been crouched in front of the hole, where one of them might fly out at him, straight at his face.

Hostile, John Acuff had said. Exceedingly hostile.

Ben said, "No, they weren't digging a permanent burrow. They came up somewhere on the other side of this fence, and they're long gone now.'

A tall, lanky young man in a county sheriff's department coat joined the group. "One of you named Parnell?"

"That's me," Ben said.

"I'm Joe Hockner." He was half shouting to be heard above the skirling wind. "Sheriff's office. I brought the bloodhound you asked for."

"Terrific."

"What's happenin' here?"

"In a minute," Ben said, returning his attention to the tunnel that went under the fence.

"How do we know it was them that dug here?" asked George Yancy, another of Ben's men. "Could've been some other animal."

"Bring that light closer," Ben said.

Steve Harding shone the beam directly into the five-inch-diameter tunnel.

Squinting, leaning closer, Ben saw what appeared to be snippets of white thread adhering to the moist earth just far enough inside the hole to be undisturbed by the wind. He took off his right glove, reached carefully into the mouth of the tunnel, and plucked up two of the threads. White hairs.

TOMMY AND THE DOG STAYED IN THE STATION WAGON WHILE MEG GOT out with the shotgun — and with a flashlight from the glove compartment — to open the hood. The light revealed a mess of torn and tangled wires inside the engine compartment; all the lines from the spark plugs to the distributor cap were severed. Holes had been gnawed in the hoses; oil and coolants dripped onto the barn floor under the jeep.

She was no longer just scared. She was flat-out terrified. Yet she had to conceal her fear to avoid panicking Tommy.

She closed the hood, went around to the passenger's side, and opened the door. "I don't know what's wrong, but it's dead."

"It was all right a while ago, when we came home."

"Yes, well, but it's dead now. Come on, let's go."

He allowed her to help him out of the car, and when they were face to face, he said, "The rats got to it, didn't they?"

"Rats? The rats are in the house, yes, and they're ugly things, like I said, but—"

Interrupting her before she could lie to him, the boy said, "You're trying not to show it, but you're afraid of them, really afraid, which must mean they're not just a little different from ordinary rats but a whole lot different, because you don't scare easy, not you. You were scared when Dad died, I know you were, but not for long, you took charge real quick, you made me feel safe, and if Dad's dying couldn't make you fall to pieces, then I guess pretty much nothing can. But these rats from Biolomech, whatever they are, they scare you more than anything ever has."