Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

I dove to the right, behind an exhaust housing. Cautiously, I peered over the top and saw Stone standing by the wheelhouse steps, his bright eyes flashing, his palms flattened in my direction.

The boat rushed closer to the shore.

But not fast enough to suit me.

Two pods spun over my head, landed on the deck behind, and ate down through the planking. Before long, the yacht was going to be honeycombed with the white tentacles, each as thin as a thread but as strong, surely, as a steel wire.

A whining sound arose, the sound of tortured metal. The deck of the boat shuddered, and we seemed almost to come to a stop. Then there was a jolt, and we sped forward again. The bottom had dragged over a shoreline rock formation, but we had not been grounded.

And then we were.

The boat hit the second reef, tore out its bottom, and settled into four feet of water, most of its bulk still high and dry.

I rolled back across the deck, grabbed the rail, heaved myself over the side. I struck shallow water and went under, striking my jaw on a hunk of smooth driftwood. My mouth sagged open, and I swallowed water. So this is what it's like to drown , I thought. Then I closed my stupid kisser and struggled to the surface again. I broke water, flailed my arms, pushed up, and staggered toward that blessed beach, sputtering and coughing and trying not to pass out.

I may not have a number of qualities that modern society considers admirable — like refined tastes and finesse. But there's one thing I do have, damn it. Grit.

I was five short steps from dry ground when the pods of fungus erupted before me. Two. Then two more. A wild tangle of white snakes rose up to block my escape. I turned and looked back. Graham Stone, alien Anglophile, looking like an evil Cary Grant, had left the ship too. He was splashing toward me.

I turned to my right. Two spores fell there. The pale snakes twisted out of the water, seeking, wriggling toward me.

On my left, two more.

No respect for tradition at all.

The water was only halfway up my calves, not deep enough for me to go beneath the surface and swim away. Besides, if the fungus was going to take me, I'd rather it happened up here, where I could see what those filaments were doing.

Graham Stone came relentlessly onward, holding his fire now. He knew he had me.

We were on a dark stretch of shore. No one to whom I could call for help.

Then from the left arose the furious whine of a small powerboat driven to the limits of its performance. A whooping siren wailed to life, one of those ooga horns from ancient automobiles. Out of the gloom and the falling snow, Bruno appeared. He was standing in a two-seat twelve-footer, holding on to the wheel for all he was worth. The craft was hitting better than fifty miles an hour. It skimmed the water, the bow in the air. Since the boat sat higher in the water than the yacht, it passed over the rock formations and kept coming.

"Bruno!" I shouted.

He was a textbook example of a man — or a bear — in the grip of an anxiety attack. His big eyes rolled wildly, and he braced for the worst.

The little boat hit the beach, the screws churning frantically. It slammed forward through the sand at twenty miles an hour for ten feet or so, struck a rock, stopped dead, and pitched the bruin over the windshield, across the bow, and onto the beach, flat on his enormous back.

And he got up. He looked dizzy, and he was covered with sand, but he had survived.

I started jumping up and down in the water yelling, "Get him, Bruno! Get him now!"

Those white tentacles were threading their way closer to me, even though Graham Stone had stopped approaching.

The bear raised his head, looked at me, felt for his floppy hat, then shrugged when he couldn't find it.

"Get him, Bruno, get him!" I bellowed.

He took out that silly-looking pistol of his, and while Stone tried to hit him with a spore of fungus, my friend the bear burned the sonofabitch on the spot with the Disney.780 Death Hose. The only thing left was some ashes, which floated away.

I knew I was going to have to get one of those. Maybe Mickey Mouse sold them out of a secret shop in Tomorrow Land.

"You killed him!" I shouted as Bruno burned down the white forest of fungus on all other sides of me.

Then I must have had an attack of low blood sugar or something, because I passed out. I'm sure I didn't faint.

WE HAD TO DISPOSE OF THE YACHT. IN ABOUT FIFTEEN SECONDS, WHEN Bruno was done with it, it was only a dusting of ashes slowly washing away on the water. No fire, really. Just whoosh —and it was nothing but dust. He destroyed the powerboat too, every trace of what had taken place here this evening.

We walked the dark shore for about a mile, until we found a waterside club where we could call a cab, and went back to my place. The driver kept wanting to know if Bruno had won the prize at the costume party, but we didn't answer him.

At home, we cleaned up, ate every steak in my refrigerator, every egg, every slice of cheese, every — well, everything. Then we finished off three bottles of Scotch between us — though I have to admit that he drank most of it himself.

We didn't talk about Graham Stone once. We talked a lot about being a cop — both the private and the badge-carrying kind. We talked about the types of punks at work out there — and discovered that they don't vary much from probability to probability. He explained why my Earth is not civilized enough to be welcomed into the probability societies — besides that credit thing. Strangely, he said that it won't be quite good enough until my type has all but vanished from the face of the Earth. Yet he liked me. I'm sure of that. Strange.

Shortly before dawn, he gave himself an injection that sobered him instantly. We shook hands (or at least he reached down and shook mine) and parted company. He went off to find a transmitting point to return to his own probability. And I went to sleep.

I never saw Bruno again.

But there have been other odd characters. Stranger than all the crooks I've known in this city. Stranger than Benny "the Ostrich" Deekelbaker and Sam "the Plunger" Sullivan. Stranger than Hunchback Hagerty, the deformed hired killer. Stranger, in fact, than either Graham Stone or Bruno. I'll tell you about them sometime. Right now, I've got a date with the cutest redhead you ever saw. Her name's Lorella, she can dance like a dream, and aside from a weird interest in ventriloquist dummies, she's got her head on straight.

JONATHAN, JESSICA, AND I ROLLED OUR FATHER THROUGH THE DINING room and across the fancy Olde English kitchen. We had some trouble getting Father through the back door, because he was rather rigid. This is no comment on his bearing or temperament, though he could be a chilly bastard when he wanted. Now he was stiff quite simply because rigor mortis had tightened his muscles and hardened his flesh. We were not, however, to be deterred. We kicked at him until he bent in the middle and popped through the door frame. We dragged him across the porch and down the six steps to the lawn.

"He weighs a ton!" Jonathan said, mopping his sweat-streaked brow, huffing and puffing.

"Not a ton," Jessica said. "Less than two hundred pounds."

Although we are triplets and are surprisingly similar in many ways, we differ from one another in a host of minor details. For example, Jessica is by far the most pragmatic of us, while Jonathan likes to exaggerate, fantasize, and daydream. I am somewhere between their two extremes. A pragmatic daydreamer?

"What now?" Jonathan asked, wrinkling his face in disgust and nodding toward the corpse on the grass.