Dean Koontz - Velocity

He returned to the house to inspect it from top to bottom. He dared leave nothing behind to indicate that either he or a dead body had been there. In the kitchen, he could not decide what to do about the rum, cola, sliced lime, and other items on the table. He gave himself time to think about them. Intending to start upstairs, in the master bedroom, he followed the roseflowered runner along the hallway to the front of the house. As he approached the foyer, he grew aware of an unexpected brightness to his right, beyond the living-room archway.

The revolver in his hand suddenly became less a burdensome weight than an essential tool.

On his first pass through the house, on his way upstairs to see if Lanny’s body remained in the bedroom armchair, Billy had switched on the overhead fixture in the living room, but only that. Now every lamp was aglow. Sitting on a sofa, facing the archway, a testament to unreason and the durability of thrift-shop clothes, sat Ralph Cottle.

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Chapter 51

Ralph Cottle had incredibly shed his plastic shroud, improbably ascended from thousands of feet beneath the valley floor, impossibly let himself into the Olsen house, just forty minutes after whistling down the lava pipe, and all while remaining dead and a registered skeptic.

So disorienting was the sight of Cottle that for an instant Billy believed the man had to be alive, that somehow he had never been dead, but in the next instant he realized that the first body he had dropped into the volcanic vent had not been Cottle, that the filling of the corpse burrito had been replaced. Billy heard himself say “Who?” by which he meant to ask who could have been in the tarp, and he began to turn toward the hallway behind him, intending to shoot anyone there, no questions asked.

A lead-shot sap, or something rather like it, expertly rapped him at precisely the right point above the back of the neck, at the base of the skull, inducing less pain than color. Brilliant but brief electric-blue and magma-red coruscations fanned through his head and dazzled on the backs of his descending eyelids.

He never felt the floor come up to meet him. For what seemed like hours, he dropped in free fall through a lightless lava pipe, wondering how the dead amused themselves in the cold heart of an extinguished volcano. The darkness seemed to want him more than the light, for he woke in fits and starts, repeatedly plucked back into the depths just as he floated to the surface of consciousness.

Twice, a demanding voice spoke to him, or twice that he heard. Both times he understood it, but only the second time was he able to respond. Even dazed and confused, Billy warned himself to listen to the voice, to remember the pitch and the timbre, so he could identify it later. Identification would be difficult because it didn’t sound much like a human voice; rough, strange, distorted, it insistently posed a question. “Are you prepared for your second wound?”

Following the repetition, Billy discovered that he was able to answer:

“No.”

Finding his voice, worried that it sounded so wheezy, he also found the power to open his eyes.

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Although his vision was blurred and clearing too slowly, he could see the man in the ski mask and dark clothes standing over him. The freak’s hands were clad in supple black leather, and he needed both to hold a futuristic handgun.

“No,” Billy said again.

He lay on his back, half on the rose-flowered runner, half on the dark wood floor, his right arm across his chest, his left flung out to his side, the revolver in neither hand.

As the last of the blur washed out of his vision, Billy saw that the handgun did not, after all, provide proof of a time traveler or of an extraterrestrial visitor. It was just one of those portable nail guns not limited to the length of a compressor hose.

His left hand lay palm-up on the floor, and the man in the mask nailed it to the hardwood.

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PART 3

ALL YOU HAVE IS HOW YOU LIVE

Chapter 52

Pain and fear muddle reason, fog the mind.

Punctured flesh punched a scream from Billy. A paralytic haze of terror slowed his thoughts as he realized he was pinned to the floor, immobilized in the presence of the freak.

Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows in perception if not in reality.

The best response to terror is righteous anger, confidence in ultimate justice, a refusal to be intimidated.

Those thoughts didn’t march now in orderly fashion through his mind. They were truths held in his adapted unconscious, based on hard experience, and he acted on them as if they were instincts born in blood and bone. When he’d fallen, he dropped the revolver. The freak didn’t appear to have it. The weapon might be within reach.

Billy rolled his head, searching the hallway. With his free hand, he felt the floor along his right side.

The freak threw something in Billy’s face.

He flinched, expecting more pain. Just a photograph.

He couldn’t see the image. He shook his head to cast the photo off his face. The picture flipped onto his chest, where suddenly he thought the freak would spike it.

No. Carrying the nail gun, the killer walked away along the hall, toward the kitchen. One nail well placed. His work here was done. Get an image of him. Freeze it in memory. Approximate height, weight. Big in the shoulders or not? Wide or narrow in the hips?

Anything distinctive in the walk, graceful or not?

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Pain, fear, swimming vision, but most of all the extreme angle of view—

Billy flat on his back; the killer on his feet—defeated an attempt to build a physical profile of the man in the few seconds that he was in sight. The freak disappeared into the kitchen. He moved around out there, making noise. Looking for something. Doing something.

Billy spotted the crisp shine of machined steel on the dark hardwood floor of the foyer—the revolver. The weapon lay behind him and beyond his reach. Having been to the place of the skull, having consigned Lanny to the lava pipe, Billy had exhausted his capacity for dread, or thought that he had until he realized that he must test the nail to see how securely it fixed him to the floor. He was loath to move his hand.

The pain was constant but tolerable, bad but not as terrible as he might have imagined. Trying to move the hand, however, trying to pry loose the spike, would be like chewing taffy with an abscessed tooth. He wasn’t only loath to move his hand, but also to look at it. Although he knew the image conjured in his mind had to be worse than the reality, his stomach clenched as he turned his head and focused on his wound. Except for an excess of fingers, the white latex surgical glove made his hand look like Mickey Mouse’s hand, like the cartoon hands taped to the walls and pointing the way to the chair where Lanny had been posed with one of his mother’s books. The cuff of the glove even had a little roll to it. A spidery crawling at his wrist proved to be a trickling thread of blood, which robbed the moment of even dark comedy.

He expected the bleeding to be much worse than this. The nail obstructed flow. When he extracted it…

Holding his breath, Billy listened. No noise in the kitchen. Apparently the killer had gone.

He didn’t want the freak to hear him scream again, didn’t want to give him that satisfaction.

The nail. The head had not been driven flat to the flesh. About threequarters of an inch of shank separated the nailhead from his palm. He could see the gripper marks in the steel.

He had no way of knowing the length of the nail. Judging by its diameter, he estimated that it measured at least three inches from head to point. Subtracting both the portion that stood above his palm and the portion that passed through it, as much as an inch and a half might be embedded in the