Dean Koontz - Lightning

He laughed and clapped his hands like a gnome chortling over some particularly amusing side-effect of a magical spell.

In contrast to his good humor, Laura was getting a headache from trying to sort out the complexities of this thing.

Chris said, "Some people believe time travel isn't even possible 'cause of all the paradoxes. But some believe it's possible so long as the trip you make into the past doesn't create a paradox. Now if that’s true, see, then the killers couldn't come back on a second, earlier trip 'cause two of them had already been killed on the first trip. They couldn't do it because they were already dead, and it was a paradox. But the guys you didn't kill and maybe some new time travelers could make another trip to cut us oft at the end of this road." He leaned forward to peer through the streaked windshield again. "That's what all that lightning was off to the south when we were weaving to keep them from shooting us — more guys from the future were arriving. Yeah, I'll bet they're waiting for us down there somewhere, down there in the dark."

Rubbing her temples with her fingertips, Laura said, "But if we turn around and go back, if we don't drive into the trap ahead, then they'll realize we've outthought them. And so they'll make a third trip back in time and return to the Mercedes and shoot us when we try to drive back that way. They'll get us no matter which way we go."

He shook his head vigorously. "No. Because by the time they realize we're on to them, maybe half an hour from now, we'll already have turned around and driven back past the Mercedes." The boy was bouncing up and down in his seat with excitement now. "So if they try to make a third trip in time to go back to the beginning of this road and trap us there, they can't do it, because we'll already have driven back that way and out, we'll already be safe. Paradox! See, they got to play by the rules, Mom. They're not magical. They got to play by the rules, and they can be beat!"

In thirty-three years she had never had a headache that had gone from a mild throb to a pounding skull-splitter as quickly as this one. The more she tried to puzzle out the difficulties of avoiding a pack of time-traveling hitmen, the deeper rooted the pain became. Finally she said, ''] give up. J guess 1 should've been watching Star Trek and reading Robert Heinlein all these years instead of being a serious adult, because I'm just not able to cope with this. So I'll tell you what: I'm going to rely on you to outsmart them. You'll have to try to keep one step ahead of them. They want us dead. So how can they try to kill us without creating one of these paradoxes? Where will they show up next. and next? Right now, we're going to go back the way we came, past the Mercedes, and if you're right, no one will be waiting there for us. So where will they show up after that? Will we see them again tonight? Think about those things, and when you have any ideas, let me know what they are."

"I will, Mom." He slumped down in his seat, grinning broadly for a moment, then chewing on his lip as he settled deeper into the game.

Except it was not a game, of course. Their lives were really at stake. They had to elude killers with nearly superhuman abilities, and they were pinning their hopes of survival on nothing more than the richness of an eight-year-old boy's imagination.

Laura started the Jeep, put it in reverse, and backed up a couple of hundred yards until she found a place in the road wide enough to turn around. Then they headed back the way they had come, toward the Mercedes in the ditch, toward Big Bear.

She was beyond terror. Their situation contained such a large element of the unknown — and unknowable — that terror could not be sustained. Terror was not like happiness or depression; it was an acute condition that by its very nature had to be of a short term. Terror wilted fast. Or it escalated until you passed out or until you died of it, frightened to death; you screamed until a blood vessel burst in your brain. She wasn't screaming, and in spite of her headache she didn't think any vessels were going to burst. She settled into a low-key, chronic fear, hardly more than anxiety.

What a day this had been. What a year. What a life.

Exotic news.

They passed the stranded Mercedes and drove all the way to the north end of the ridge road without encountering men with submachine guns. At the intersection with the lakeside highway, Laura stopped and looked at Chris. "Well?"

"As long as we're driving around," he said, "and as long as we go to a place where we've never been and don't usually go, we're pretty safe. They can't find us if they don't have any idea where we might be. Just like your regular-type scumbags."

Scumbags? she thought. What is this — H. G. Wells meets Hill Street Blues'?

He said, "See, now that we've given them the slip, these guys are going to go back to the future and look over the records they've got about you, Mom, your history, and they're going to see where you show up next — like when you want to go five in the house again. Or if you hid out for a year and wrote another book and then went on a tour for it, they'd show up at a store where you're signing books because, see, there'd be a record of that in the future; they'd know you could be found in that store at a certain time on a certain day."

She frowned. "You mean the only way to avoid them for the rest of my life is to change my name, go on the run forever, and leave no trace of myself on any public records, just vanish from recorded history from here on out?"

"Yeah, I think maybe that's what you'll have to do," he said excitedly.

He was smart enough to have figured out how to defeat a pack of time-traveling hitmen but not adult enough to perceive how hard it would be for them to forsake everything they owned and start with only the cash in their pockets. In a way he was like an idiot savant, tremendously insightful and gifted in one narrow area, but naive and severely limited in all other ways. In matters of time-travel theory, he was a thousand years old, but otherwise he was going on nine.

She said, "I can never write another book because I'd have to have contact with editors, agents, even if by phone. So there'd be phone records that could be traced. And I can't collect royalties because no matter how many blinds I use, no matter how many different bank accounts I shift the money through, sooner or later I have to collect the funds personally, which would leave a public record. So then they'd have that record in the future, and they'd travel back to the bank to wipe me out when I showed up. How am I supposed to get my hands on the money we already have? How can I cash a check anywhere without leaving a record that they would have in the future?" She blinked at him. "Good God, Chris, we're in a box!"

Now it was the boy's turn to be baffled. He looked at her with little understanding of where money came from, how it was put aside for future use, or how difficult it was to obtain. "Well, for a couple of days, we can just drive around, sleep in motels—"

"We can only sleep in motels if I pay cash. A credit card record might be all they need to find us. Then they'd come back in time to the night I used the credit card, and they'd kill us at the motel."

"Yeah, so we use cash. Hey, we can eat at McDonald's all the time! That doesn't take much money, and it's good."

They drove down from the mountains, out of the snow, into San a city of about 300,000, without encountering assassins. She needed to get their guardian to a doctor, not only because she owed him a debt of life, but also because without him she might never learn the truth of what was happening and might never find a may out of the box they were in.

She could not take him to a hospital because hospitals kept records, which might give her enemies from the future a way of finding her. She would have to obtain medical care secretly, from someone who would not have to be told her name or anything about one patient.