Dean Koontz - 77 Shadow Street

Iris was weak, and Winny wasn’t strong, but he was stronger than she was, and that meant he owed her a defense. His father was strong, really strong, and he got in bar fights and shoved people’s heads in toilets, but you didn’t always have to misuse strength. You could use strength, whatever little of it you might have, for the right thing, even if you knew there was no chance you would win the fight, even if you were doomed from the start, you could stand up and swing your skinny arms, because trying against the worst odds was what life was all about. And there he had found the harder thing he needed to do, the hardest thing of all hard things: do what was right even if there was no hope of success or expectation of reward.

Clutching Iris’s hand again, Winny pulled her away from the wall, scrambled with her from the bracketing skeletons, ran a few steps, kicking aside brass shell casings, and turned to confront the beast. It remained upon the wall, its head craned to one side, watching them with eyes as steady and icy and gray as tombstone granite.

Winny let go of the girl’s hand and pushed her behind him. He snatched up the old rifle with the fixed bayonet and held it in both hands, point thrust forward. He was like a rabbit threatening a wolf, and he felt fear—oh, yeah—but he did not feel either useless or stupid.

Bailey Hawks

In Kirby Ignis’s restored and spotless kitchen, Mickey Dime sat at the dinette, his hands folded on the table in front of him. His face had an odd childlike quality, and his mouth curved in a sweet, almost cherubic smile. To one side of him, out of easy reach, lay a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor.

Dime nodded at Bailey and said, “Sheriff.” He nodded again at Tom Tran and at the one who called himself Witness. “Deputies. I wish to surrender myself and ask for a psychiatric evaluation.”

In this apartment, the sense of the One’s oppressive hatred relented, and Bailey’s mind was clearer than it had been in a while. Yet this development was no less strange than everything that had come before it.

Picking up Dime’s pistol, Bailey said, “I’m not a sheriff.”

“Sheriff, former military, whatever. I know you’re something. I’m insane, you see, but not disoriented. I’ve killed people. Now I just want to surrender and be committed to a sanatorium. I’ll be no burden to the state. I have resources. I just don’t want to have to think anymore. I’m not good at it.”

Bailey handed his Beretta to Tom Tran, who took it as if he knew how to use it well.

To Witness, Bailey said, “What is this?”

“I didn’t even realize he was here.”

Mickey Dime smiled and nodded. “I came of my own free will. I’m quite insane. I see things that can’t be there.”

Bailey ejected the magazine of the pistol that he confiscated, saw that it was fully loaded, and snapped it back into the weapon.

He looked at his wristwatch.

Winny

The beast came down from the wall, rose onto its feet, and stood among the skeletons, regarding Winny with what he at first thought must be amusement. But then he decided that this thing wasn’t capable of being amused, that it was either without emotions or fueled only by rage.

In the movies, this was where the star said something like, Go ahead, make my day , or maybe, Come on, asshole, Hell’s waiting for us . But Winny didn’t go for the cool quip because he wasn’t a star, he wasn’t a hero. That fantasy was far behind him now. All he wanted was to do the right thing here at the end, not any of the easy things he might have done, do the hard thing but not for the glory of it, because there wasn’t any glory in dying. Glory was for movie stars and country singers, and it wasn’t worth spit. He wanted only not to embarrass himself, not to cower, to be better than he had always thought he was.

“Iris!”

“Winny!”

He glanced back and saw Mrs. Sykes with a flashlight, his mom with a gun, and what a moment that was.

The creature hissed.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

If he was right about what this Gaea had contemplated and what decision she had reached when all of nature stopped out there, Kirby finally decided that he needed to see his rooms. Without explanation, he expressed his desire to go down to the second floor, insisting that Silas and Padmini should remain here in the Cupp apartment. But they would not let him leave without an armed escort; therefore, when he continued to be determined to go, they accompanied him.

As he stepped across the threshold of 2-F and found that his apartment here, in this Pendleton, was much as it had been in his own time, preserved when all else in the building had been scoured away and allowed to decline into squalor, the awe that had earlier overtaken him now almost overwhelmed him, and his legs felt weak.

With Silas and Padmini trailing behind him, Kirby followed voices to the kitchen, where he found Dime sitting behind the table, Hawks to one side of it, Tom Tran by the refrigerator, and one of the best staff members of his institute, Jason Reinholt, standing by the sink.

“Jason? Why were you in the building when the leap occurred?”

“I wasn’t, Dr. Ignis. I came to the Pendleton years after that event, and I’ve been here now almost a decade and a half. Since after the first Pogrom to reduce the human burden on the planet, and before the second Pogrom, which wasn’t planned.”

Kirby stared at him, agape, for the first time in his life wanting not to comprehend, but unable to hold back understanding.

Winny

Iris shuffled away from Winny and to her mother’s side. He stood alone for a moment before backing slowly toward his mom, holding the rifle bayonet at the ready.

The creature came forward a few steps, but then halted again. It looked from one to the other of them, as if deciding in what order to kill them.

Mrs. Sykes said, “What the hell is that thing?”

Winny had no answer, but as it turned out, the monster spoke for itself, a single word: “Pogromite.”

Bailey Hawks

As Padmini and Silas entered the kitchen, Kirby Ignis said, “But Jason, after so many years, you look … so young.”

“I don’t use that name anymore. I’m just Witness. I’m young because I was among the first volunteers for full-spectrum BioMEMS enhancement. In fact, I was your first.”

Kirby put a hand to the young man’s face and said wonderingly, “So it worked. A kind of immortality.”

“It worked,” Witness confirmed.

Turning his hands palms-up, Kirby stared at them for a moment, as if they amazed him, as if they were quite apart from him and had done things he could scarcely imagine.

Returning his gaze to Witness, he said, “But this Gaea, this world consciousness, how did she—”

“It calls itself the One. The world is without gender now. The Pogrom was begun with the intention of reducing the human plague to a more manageable number … to be followed by the Fade when we would scrub away what infrastructure wasn’t needed for such a reduced population.”

“And me? Where am I in this future?”

“Dead. Converted by a Pogromite into another Pogromite. You lived out your final days as a programmed killing machine.”

Stepping farther into the room, addressing Kirby Ignis, Padmini Bahrati said, “You did this?”