Dean Koontz: Anti-Man

Snow pelted the windscreen, and wind moaned eerily along the sides of the teardrop craft. I was reminded of my childhood in Ohio with drifts mounting against the windows, being tucked in bed where I could look out and watch the snow pile up and up as if it would never cease. But memories could not hold me for long. We were in the clear — for now, at least — and we had many things to do if we were to continue to enjoy our freedom.

We changed clothes as we drove until we were both decked out in insulated suits, gloves, goggles, boots, and snowshoes lashed across packs that we carried strapped to our backs.

"How's the arm?" I asked Him.

"All healed," He said, grinning broadly. "Just like I said it would be." There was no sense of the braggart in his voice, just the tone of a happy child who has learned something new.

"All healed," I echoed numbly. I was feeling numb all over, as if the constant brushing with Death over the last seven days had acted as sandpaper to wear down my receptors until life was a slick, textureless film through which I slid on greased runners. A doctor, of course, knows of Death and understands the prince. But the context in which he knows and understands him is different than what I had been encountering in this long chase. The physician sees Death in a clinical sense, as a phenomenon of Nature, as something to be combatted on a scientific level. It is something else altogether when Death sets out to claim you and you are fighting, only with your cunning and guile, to keep him from claiming you.

The auto-taxi glided to a halt before the gates of Mount McKinley National Park, the gray shape of the twin-peaked, towering colossus a lighter dark against the night. A pine forest loomed directly ahead through which the road wound in a carefree, unbusinesslike manner. "This taxi is prohibited from making runs into the park after eight o'clock at night. Please advise." The car's voice tape had been recorded by a nasal-toned woman in her late twenties or early thirties, and its metallic yet feminine quality seemed out of place coming from the wire speaker grid in the dashboard. I cannot get used to machines sounding like the sort of woman you might want to seduce. I was born and raised before the use of the Kelbert Brain. I like silent machines, mute computers. Old-fashioned, I guess.

I stuffed four poscred bills in the payment slot, two to cover our trip and two more to pay for what I was about to request. "Drive at random for the next half-hour, then return to your stall at the Port."

"At random?" it asked.

I should have realized that, even with the Kelbert Brain, it was too stupid to carry on much of a conversation. It was limited in scope to the sort of thing a customer might ask or propose, not something out of the ordinary. Just like, I thought, most of the women I had seduced whose voices were similar to the machine's. I leaned over the keyboard and punched a random series of numbers and, finally, the code series for the Port as it was listed on the directory chart beside the console. "That should do," I said. "Let's go."

The doors sprung open when we touched the release panels, and we clambered out into the night, taking our bundle of old clothes with us. The car closed up, thrummed like a hummingbird for a moment, then executed a swift turn and whizzed back the way we had come, its amber lights receding and leaving us alone in the darkness.

"What now?" He asked, coming up beside me, shifting the weight of the pack on His back until it settled just as He wanted it to.

"We hide these clothes we had on," I said, moving to a drainage ditch and pushing my bundle back into the culvert, out of sight. He followed my example, reaching even farther with His longer arms. "And now we climb the fence into the park."

"Wait," He said, moving past me to the gate where He stopped, examining the lock. He took off His gloves and placed His hands on the padlock. He stared at the thing a moment, as if imprinting the mechanism on His mind. Finally, He grunted and sucked in huge lungfulls of air. While I watched, the tip of His finger elongated, thinned to the thickness of a coathanger wire, and snaked into the keyhole on the face of the lock. A minute or so passed with the wind beating on us like a hundred rubber sledgehammers. Then something clicked. Clicked again, louder. That was the most joyous sound I had ever heard, for I had not been looking forward to the prospect of scrambling over an eight-foot fence in twenty to thirty mile-an-hour winds with a twenty-five pound pack on my back. Perhaps I'm timid and afraid of new adventures, but I preferred walking through to climbing over. He withdrew His hand, reformed His finger into more conventional shape, put on His gloves, and pushed the big gates inward with a dramatic flourish that showed He had seen or read some pretty melodramatic stuff in His free time back at the laboratory.

"Very tricky," I said, slapping Him on the back. "You should think about going into show business. Get yourself the proper manager and go on the circuit with a magic act."

We moved inside, closing the gate behind and locking it again. Except for our prints in the newly fallen snow, there was no sign that the night park had been violated, and the continuing storm would cover even those traces in a few minutes. With that flimsy gate between us and the Port, I felt relieved, though I had no reason to. "We'll follow the road for a while," I said. "It isn't likely anyone will be on it at this hour of the morning and in this weather."

We began walking, goggles over our eyes and face masks pulled down to thwart the biting cold and the tremendous, razor-edged whip' of the wind. The road had been plowed open after a recent storm, but the new snow was rapidly covering it once more. The snowbanks that had been formed on either side by the plows were layered, so many feet thick for each storm of the season. If this rugged weather continued all winter, the road would be closed before spring with nowhere to shove the succeeding deluges. We had not gone more than half a mile when He pulled off His face mask and said, "Tell me about this place we're going."

I reluctantly pulled down my own mask and winced at the stinging air. It dried my lips almost instantly and started cracking them until I could almost feel the skin slowly splitting under hard fingers of air. I shivered, blew out a cloud of steam. In the true Arctic, I am given to believe from various works I have read, the temperatures drop so far below zero that the breath, upon exiting the body, really and truly does freeze — at least the moisture in it does. The lungs, in this infernal cold, are susceptible to freezing from contact with the icy, dry air, and one must breathe shallowly to avoid this fate. Now, as we trudged along this park road, far from the ice plains of the true Arctic, I marveled that there could be any place in the world with temperatures so cold that these would be classified as a warm spell. "Is it so important to know that I have to risk freezing my mouth and picking up a lovely blue haze on my pretty face?"

"I'd just like to know," He said.

I shrugged. "At the base of the mountain and up to about five thousand feet, they lease cabins to prominent citizens for vacation retreats. Don't misunderstand me. The World Authority wouldn't want anyone thinking little things like these are reserved for the elite. That wouldn't fit the Great Democracy claims. It isn't exactly exclusively set aside for prominent people, but the prices are so stiff that only prominent people can afford to rent here. Same difference, though the politicians like the fine lines drawn in. Harry Leach — Doctor Harry Leach — the old man who ran City General when I interned there, leases one in the second level. It's secluded. Nearest other cabin is slightly over a mile away. He keeps it stocked with food and fuel for sudden whimsical weekends." Whenever a new student nurse happens to catch his eye and he can convince her an old codger like himself would do anything for such a lovely, young piece of candy, I thought. Those were about as whimsical as his weekends got.