Dean Koontz - Lost Souls

The air was full of fumes. Nummy had to turn his head away from the cocoons, toward the door, to get any breath at all.

Mr. Lyss seemed to be breathing with no trouble. He dropped onto one knee beside the basket. One at a time, he removed the caps from the paint thinner, the charcoal starter, and the lamp oil, and he tossed each can on the carpet under the cocoons, where the contents gurgled out of them.

The fumes were worse than ever.

“I got some gas on my hands, Peaches. I’m a little leery about striking a match. You do the honors.”

“You want me to light up a match?”

“You know how, don’t you?”

“Sure, I know how.”

“Then better do it before the air’s so full of fumes it goes off like a bomb.”

Nummy slid open the box and selected a wooden match. He closed the box-you always close before striking-and scraped the match on the rough paper side. He only had to strike it twice to light it.

“There,” he said, showing it to Mr. Lyss.

“Good job.”

“Thank you.”

On the creaking ceiling, the plaster began to crack between the knotty-pine beams.

Mr. Lyss said, “Now throw the match where the carpet’s wet.”

“You’re really sure?”

“I’m very sure. Throw it now.”

“Once I throw it, we can’t never undo what we done.”

“No, we can’t,” Mr. Lyss agreed. “That’s the way life is. Now throw it before you burn your fingers.”

Nummy threw the match, it landed on the carpet, and-whoosh!-flames jumped from the floor to the sacks. Suddenly the bedroom was bright and hot, and the things in the cocoons went crazy.

Some plaster fell down, Nummy saw one of the burning cocoons begin to split open, and then Mr. Lyss had him by the coat and was pulling him into the hallway, telling him to run.

Nummy didn’t need to be told to run, not the way that he needed to be told to throw the wooden match, because he’d been wanting to run from the moment they saw the cocoons. He went down the stairs so fast he almost fell, but when he stumbled, he bounced off the wall, and somehow the bounce got him balanced again, and he made it all the way to the bottom still on his feet.

When Nummy looked up the stairs, he saw Mr. Lyss plunging toward him, and on the second floor, a big burning something staggered out of the bedroom. Nummy couldn’t say whether it was a bug like Mr. Lyss thought or more of a walking snake, because it was a not-finished thing that hadn’t been in the cocoon long enough, just dark shapes changing inside whirling fire.

A walking snake would have been more interesting and maybe even scarier than a bug, but either way, Mr. Lyss didn’t care about what was behind him, only about getting out of the house. He shouted, “Go, go, go!” as he grabbed his long gun from where he’d stood it against a wall.

Nummy hurried out the front door, into the night, across the porch, down the steps, and onto the lawn, where he stopped and turned to see what would happen next.

Mr. Lyss stopped next to Nummy and faced the house, holding the long gun in two hands.

Fire swelled bright in the upstairs. A window exploded, glass rained down on the porch roof, and Nummy thought something was coming out after them. But another window exploded, and he thought maybe it was just the heat that did it. Fire crawled on the roof now, and fire came downstairs, too, and there was thick smoke.

Mr. Lyss lowered the gun and said, “Good riddance to them. Come on, Peaches.”

Side by side they walked the narrow lane out to the mailbox, which was painted pretty with the words SADDLE UP WITH JESUS, though Nummy couldn’t read them and had to trust Mr. Lyss’s say-so that they were any kind of words at all.

Mr. Lyss held the long gun at his right side, pointed at the ground, so people in passing cars couldn’t see it. They turned right and followed a sidewalk overhung by pines that smelled better than the smoke.

The air was cold and clear. Nummy breathed through his open mouth until he blew away the last of the taste of gasoline fumes.

“I don’t hear no sirens yet,” he said.

“If the firemen in this hickville are anything like the cops, they’ll let it burn to the ground.”

Rattling the box in his hand, Nummy said, “I still got them matches. You want me to keep them?”

“Give them to me,” Mr. Lyss said, and he tucked them away in a pocket of Poor Fred’s coat.

They walked in silence for a minute or two, and then Nummy said, “We burned down a preacher’s house.”

“Yes, we did.”

“Can you go to Hell for that?”

“Under the circumstances,” Mr. Lyss said, “you shouldn’t even have to go to jail for it.”

Cars passed in the street, but none of them was a police car. Besides, there were no streetlamps in this block, and it was dark under the pines.

“Some day, huh?” Nummy said.

“Quite a day,” Mr. Lyss agreed.

“I’m never going to jail again for my own protection.”

“That’s a damn good idea.”

“I just thought.”

“Thought what?”

“We didn’t leave no I-owe-you.”

“Nowhere to leave it with the house burnt down.”

“You could leave it on the driveway under a rock.”

“I’m not going back there tonight,” Mr. Lyss said.

“I guess not.”

“Anyway, I don’t have a pen or any notepaper.”

“We’ll have to buy us some,” Nummy said.

“I’ll put that on my to-do list for tomorrow.”

They walked a little farther before Nummy said, “Now what?”

“We leave this town and never look back.”

“How do we leave it?”

“Find some transportation.”

“How do we do that?”

“We steal a car.”

Nummy said, “Here we go again.”

At the unmarked warehouse, the sectional bay door rolled up, and one of the spotless blue-and-white trucks drove out. As before, two men occupied the cab. Exiting the warehouse parking lot, the truck turned left.

From his position across the street, Deucalion took one step away from the Dumpster. His second step brought him into the enclosed cargo hold of the moving truck, where he stood swaying in harmony with the vehicle.

To other eyes, this space might have been pitch-black; to Deucalion, it was dim, shadowy, but not a blind hole. He saw at once that nothing had been loaded for delivery. This suggested that the truck must be making pickups along its route and delivering something to the warehouse.

What appeared to be benches were bolted to both long walls. The implications of this were disturbing.

He sat on a bench and waited. If the men up front had been talking, he would have heard their muffled voices, but they were quiet. Unlike most workingmen whose jobs involved a lot of driving, they didn’t listen to music, either, or to talk radio. They might as well have been deaf and mute.

They braked to a full stop several times, but they didn’t switch off the engine, and after each pause they began to roll again. Stop signs and traffic lights.

When eventually the truck stopped and the driver killed the engine, Deucalion rose to his feet. He reached with one hand toward the ceiling and, thanks to his gift, was in the next instant lying on his back on the roof, his feet toward the driver’s cab.

Overhead hung the starless sky, stuffed with winter batting full of unshed snow.

The driver and his assistant got out of the cab. One of them closed his door, but the other left his standing open.

A moment later, they unbolted and opened the cargo-box doors at the back.