Dean Koontz - Anti-Man

The gun, the heavy rifle, was standing on the seat, its butt against the leatherette, its barrel pointing skywards. I grabbed, swung it into my arms, and came around, firing. There was a startled yelp. The light fell into the snow, face down, and was effectively shut off. For a moment, I felt a little exhilaration. Then I stopped to think for the first time in several minutes, and I realized I had just shot a man.

A man. Which is different from an elk. Much different.

I stood very still, looking out at the humped form of the body. I prayed that more of them would come out of the trees, that he would prove to be a WA soldier bent on killing me. That would make it self-defense, you see. That would make it, in some small way, pardonable. But he was alone. There were no back-up forces. When all my excuses failed me, I dropped the rifle and started off toward the man I had shot, walking at first, then running, pumping my legs up and down, my lungs afire, snow flowering up around me as I kicked it out of the way.

I fell down beside him and rolled him over. He was not in a uniform. He was a man of forty or forty-five, tall, relatively thin, sporting a gray-black moustache. His mouth was slack now, his eyes closed. Frantically, I searched him and found where the bullet had struck. It was not as bad as I thought. It had lodged in his right thigh. I probed through his uninsulated trousers, could feel no broken bones. He was bleeding freely, but it was not gushing. He was unconscious, evidently, because the force of the impact and the realization that he had been shot had been enough to throw him into a faint — and probably into a state of shock.

Two or three minutes later, I found myself staring out across the snow, daydreaming. Think, Jacob! I yelled at myself. Don't let it crack you up. You've shot a man. You. You've got to face it. And you've got to do something. Fast. If I took him back to the cabin, I could get the bullet out with kitchen utensils if I had to. I could stop the bleeding. Then the shock.

The next thing I knew, I was loading him into the second seat of the sled. I looked for a weapon, found he had been carrying none. He probably rented a cabin just like Harry's, a cabin hidden behind this rim of trees, perhaps. He had heard me shooting, had come and had found the elk, had waited to see if I would return. Just a good man trying to catch someone poaching game on government reserves. Now he had a hole in his leg.

I swung into the driver's seat, strapped myself down, and accelerated away down the slope, moving around trees, going much too fast. I was almost to the fence, twenty minutes later, when I realized I was not taking him back to the cabin. I was taking him to the hospital and to hell with being recognized.

But by then my emotions were a bit settled. I began to think more rationally again. I had shot a man. Not fatally. Sure, it was up to me to see that he received good medical care. But it wasn't up to me to jeopardize everything now, not now that we had come this far and achieved this much towards His goal. When I decided what I should do, I felt better. I turned the sled toward the main gate and the chief ranger station.

I stopped the sled five hundred feet away and looked down the road at the building, the windows warmly lighted. Quickly, I undid the straps binding my victim, hefted him more easily than I would have thought possible, and went down the road to the front door of the place. I stood him up against the door, leaning him into it so that he would not fall, then rapped sharply and ran.

Back at the sled, I jumped into the front seat and watched to see what would happen. Several seconds passed, so many that I began to think I would have to go back and knock louder. Then the door opened and my victim fell forward into the arms of a ranger. I swung the sled around, accelerated back up the mountain, broke over the snowbanks and into the open fields, moving fast.

The ranger would see the wound. He would get the man to the Cantwell medical center faster than I could, for he would have a jeep. The bullet would come out. The blood would stop. There would be no gangrene. But I had still shot him… It was still my moral responsibility. I would never forget it.

I did not want to return to the elk, but I knew I had to. It had fallen off when I was getting the victim in the seat, and He needed that meat.

He.

Suddenly, I realized that I could have taken the wounded man to Him and that He could have healed him in moments. The man could have been well, would not have had to suffer this long. I realized that I had been doing a great deal of gut-thinking these last few hours. If I didn't manage to return to my accustomed logicality, I was going to be in a great deal of trouble. They say the first signs of madness are changes in the most common of thinking patterns. A man who has always been a slow-mover begins flitting about in a great rush. A man who has been friendly withdraws; the loner begins seeking companionship. And the logical man begins letting his emotions rule him.

I loaded the elk aboard and took it back to the cabin. I tugged and twisted and heaved at it until I had it to the cellar steps, thrown inside to crash down the steps to the floor. I looked down at the frozen meat and said, "I'm tired." It sounded like someone else's voice, a distant, metallic ringing that was faintly like syllables, like words, but only faintly. It was the sort of voice you hear in a fever dream when demons and gnomes crawl at you. "I just can't do any more."

"That's all right, Jacob," the voice said, even stranger and more ominous than before. "I've almost stopped the metamorphosis. I just need enough calories now to maintain my functions and to provide substance for my productions. I can use the elk for that, plus a little of what I've stored and don't need."

I did not question the word "productions." I was far too tired to bother. I mumbled something, staggered off to bed, and slept until late afternoon, a sleep deep and almost dreamless. Almost. Now and then, I would dream of a huge gun barrel pointed at my head. I would hear the trigger click as it left primary position.

When I woke, the snow had stopped falling except for thin, light flakes that struck and melted against the glass. The only sound was a strange noise. I cocked my head and listened for a moment before I was able to identify it: helicopter blades pounding directly overhead

I had been so tired and dejected that I had slept in my clothes, and I wasted no time now in getting to the window. I wiped a thin film of steam from it and pressed my face against the cold pane. But there was nothing to see; I was at a bad vantage point, looking out on the cliffs, most of the sky shielded by tall pines. I went into the living room to the row of windows that stretched across the front of the house. I could see it from there, hanging a hundred feet out from the cabin, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet in the air. It had the giant green letters W-A bent to form a globe painted on its side, the symbol of the World Authority military. It was not a troop transport, however. Only a scout. It swung out and swept along the hill, down to the base, up over a rise, and was gone. Abruptly, it turned and came back, drifting over the house, turning again, going away fast. I knew we had been found. The snow had stopped soon after I had come in the last time. It had not covered my last few sets of footprints.

The sound of chopper blades faded. Died completely.

Our time was up.

I looked out at the snow, at the telltale markings, the ugly crimson stain of the elk's blood, the frozen red puddles. For the first time, I was retchingly nauseated with my killing spree. At the time, it had seemed an urgent assignment. I had plodded through it, shooting, hacking apart, dragging to the cabin, throwing down the cellar stairs, numb from my effort, sapped by cold and exhaustion. And all that had led to a reflex grab for the gun when that man had spotted me with the flashlight.