Dean Koontz - Lost Souls

“Do you want me to put an address in the navigator?” Carson persisted. “What’s the address?”

Looking left to right, right to left, back and forth as he slowly cruised the street, Deucalion said, “So it’s important to you to be behind the wheel, to control your fate. And on a subconscious level, perhaps you equate speed-or at least being in motion-with safety.”

“I realize you’re old enough to have known Sigmund Freud,” she said, “but I consider his entire life’s work to be claptrap, so save the analysis.”

“I’m just looking for a junction. Ah… here it is ahead, and we’re going to need a little speed, no less than fifty-seven miles an hour, no more than fifty-nine.”

The Jeep shot forward. They raced to the end of the block, he hung a right so sharp they bounced onto the curb and off, and when they came out of the turn, San Francisco was gone.

They were on a rural road flanked by golden meadows. Beyond the fields to their right were forested foothills. Farther away, majestic mountains rubbed their stegosaurian backs against iron-gray clouds that looked harder than the granite peaks.

“ Montana,” Deucalion said, and stopped on the shoulder of the highway. “Would you like to drive now, Carson?”

She seemed unable to exhale.

In the backseat, Michael said, “An intuitive understanding of the quantum nature of the universe.”

Deucalion apparently thought his words explained the miraculous transition when he said, “At the most fundamental level of structure, Montana is as close to San Francisco as the first page of a notebook is close to the twentieth.”

Carson said, “Yeah, sure, I’ll drive.”

When she got out of the Jeep, she needed to lean against it for a moment because the tremors in her legs and a weakness in her knees made her unsteady.

She took slow deep breaths. The cool air was the cleanest she had ever breathed. It seemed to purge from her the weariness of a night spent conducting surveillance, and the stress of the showdown with Chang.

Twenty yards to the north, a herd of elk grazed in a meadow, scores of them. The bulls looked as if they must weigh a thousand pounds or more. They were adorned with massive racks of antlers, elaborate four-foot-high crowns that gave them a regal bearing. The past summer’s newborns were growing but were still recognizably calves, and each stayed near its mother.

Scout and Arnie were nearly a thousand miles away by air, yet they were as close to her as these calves were to their mothers, not just close in her heart but also in fact. Without Deucalion, Carson could not be at their side in a single step or with one revolution of the Jeep Cherokee’s wheels, yet she took comfort from the thought that the farthest place on a map was in some strange way as near as the house next door. The layered mysteries of this world were proof that her life and her actions mattered, for mystery was the mother of meaning.

The driver’s door opened, and Deucalion got out of the Cherokee. Across the roof of the vehicle, he said, “I entered Erika’s address in the navigator for you. She’s no more than five minutes west of here. Rainbow Falls is only a few miles farther.”

He opened the left rear door of the Jeep and settled in the backseat as Michael opened the right rear door and got out.

Carson went around the front of the vehicle and claimed the driver’s seat, pulling the door shut behind her.

Michael took his customary position in the front passenger seat. He said, “Better.”

“Of course,” Carson said.

“You know, it’s funny, I didn’t sleep all night, yet suddenly I feel fresh and awake.”

As Carson put the car in gear and drove onto the highway, she said, “Me too. I think maybe it’s the Montana air, so clean.”

From the backseat, Deucalion said, “It isn’t the Montana air. You had considerable rest during our drive from San Francisco.”

“It was like a two-second road trip,” Michael said, “and anyway I didn’t nap during it.”

Deucalion leaned forward to explain. “On the subjective level of our five senses, the arrow of time is always moving forward, but on the quantum level, the arrow of time is indeterminate and, for certain purposes, its flight can be adjusted to one’s intention. We can’t actually go back in time to affect the future, but we can travel through the past on the way to the future.”

Carson said, “We don’t really need to understand.”

“To bring us to Montana,” Deucalion continued, “… let’s just imagine that for us the arrow of time flew in a circle, backward into the past for a few hours, then forward to the moment from which we departed, simultaneously moving us nearly a thousand miles through space. You were unaware of the hours the journey took backward and forward in time, because we arrived at the same moment we left. But being unaware on a subjective level has, in this case, the equivalent rehabilitating effect of sleep.”

After a silence, Carson said, “I’d rather think it’s just the fresh Montana air.”

“Me too,” Michael agreed.

“Is that all right with you?” Carson asked Deucalion.

“If it makes you happier.”

Carson said, “It does. It makes me happier.”

Michael took a deep breath and exhaled with gusto. “So clear and crisp.”

The reassuring female voice of the navigator said, “You will make a right turn in two point seven miles.”

The lunch trays were inexcusably late. The orderly and nurse who delivered them offered no apologies or explanations.

After convincing the shift supervisor, Doris Makepeace, that he was Travis Ahern’s uncle by marriage-a lie-Bryce Walker received his lunch in the boy’s room.

The food was indifferently presented on the plate. The soup was lukewarm in spite of being served in a capped, insulated cup. Neither Bryce nor Travis had much of an appetite.

Every fifteen minutes or so, Bryce tried to call Travis’s mother at Meriwether Lewis Elementary, but each time the recorded voice told him that the hospital phones were temporarily out of service.

The dead phones, the confiscated BlackBerry, the demeanor and behavior of the staff, and the voices in the ductwork were evidence for the case that something had gone wrong at Memorial Hospital, that possibly some kind of conspiracy was being carried out, that violence had occurred, and that more violence must be impending.

Try as he might, however, Bryce could not imagine for what purpose the entire staff of the institution would turn against the patients-who were in many cases friends and neighbors-or what could cause the personality changes that they seemed to have undergone. He couldn’t explain why previously peaceful people might abruptly turn to senseless violence.

After hearing about the voices in the duct, young Travis didn’t have to imagine; he knew the answer. As a product of contemporary culture, having seen scores of science-fiction films and having read hundreds of comic books, he harbored no doubt that Rainbow Falls had been invaded by aliens, extraterrestrials who could masquerade as the human beings they killed and replaced.

Bryce had been shaped by far different fiction from the stories to which Travis had turned for entertainment. The Westerns he spent a long lifetime reading-and writing-were about good and evil of the human kind, about courage and conviction in response to danger and hardship. Westerns taught him a love of place, of home and family and truth, taught him how to live honorably. The genre hadn’t prepared him to cope with otherworldly shape-changers intent on exterminating the human race; indeed, it hadn’t prepared him even to imagine such a threat.