Dean Koontz - 77 Shadow Street

Everyone but Mickey Dime, who lived in his own world now, stood hushed by astonishment for a long moment.

Then Ignis shook his head in denial. “No. I wouldn’t have. I couldn’t have. Not this.” He twitched with a sudden electrifying thought. To Witness, he said, “Norquist.”

The perpetually young man nodded. “Your theories, your life’s work —his applications.”

Ignis turned in place, surveying the faces aimed at him. “Von Norquist is a senior partner at the institute. A brilliant man. He has some controversial views … but not this extreme.”

To Bailey, Witness said, “The world was lucky for centuries. Scientists are rarely charismatic. But Norquist was both brilliant and exceptionally charismatic. He had the megalomania to make of his science a religion—and to persuade others like me, in our ignorance, to take up the cause.” To Ignis, he said, “He became more extreme.”

Winny

Winny didn’t think this creature could be easily stopped with bullets. He didn’t think the gun worried it.

Yet it didn’t rush them in a killing frenzy, and there must have been a good reason why it hesitated.

His mom had some faith in the pistol. She said, “Okay, everyone move nice and slow, everyone get behind me.” She sounded calm, as if she were just getting them all organized to go on an excursion to the museum. “You move toward the door, and I’ll move with you but keep it covered.”

“Don’t shoot it,” Winny warned. “I’m pretty sure shooting it will just piss it off.”

Before they could start to move, the beast sprang across the floor, not at them but around them, and stopped between them and the route out of the vault.

Bailey Hawks

Ignis turned to Bailey. “I’ll stop Von Norquist. I’ll stop him cold. I’ll push him out of the institute in such a way that he’ll not get work anywhere. He must have done this behind my back.”

“You knew everything,” Witness said. “At first you pretended not to see, not to understand where it was all leading. But when at last you saw what he intended, you approved by not disapproving.”

Shaking his head violently, refusing to accept what he’d been told, Ignis said, “No. No, it will be stopped. I won’t let it happen. I’ll start by closing our weapons division. I’ll cancel all of our contracts with the Department of Defense.”

“How far has your weapons division gone with this?” Tom Tran asked.

Acutely aware of the pistol in Tom’s hand, Ignis said, “It can be wound back. Everything that’s done can be wound back, undone.”

“That wasn’t exactly an answer,” Silas noted. “It wouldn’t please a prosecutor.”

“Unwind it all, not just the weapons division,” Tom said. “This entire institute of yours. Unwind it all.”

Ignis’s shock at his culpability was tempered now with a note of impatience. “There’s nothing wrong with the science . It’s only how the science was applied. You’ve got to make that distinction. The world doesn’t have to turn out this way just because of the science . We’ve been given this chance to set it right.”

No one replied to him.

Turning to Bailey, seeming to identify him as one who could be reasoned with, Ignis said, “Yes, this future is a catastrophe, but it does prove that the world can be dramatically changed. If it can be so totally changed for the worse, it can be totally changed for the better. It’s all in the application of the knowledge, it all depends on the technology developed from the science and with what wisdom it’s applied. We can make a perfect world.”

“The One suddenly stopped killing us,” Bailey said.

Ignis blinked. “What?”

“Maybe it stopped killing us because it decided that for you to go back to our time alone would bring too much attention to you, with all the rest of us missing. How would you explain it? So it stopped killing us to be sure that you’d go on with your work unhindered when you returned to your own time.”

Ignis shook his head. “It doesn’t rule me. It’s not my master. I’ll do what must be done when I get back.”

“ ‘What must be done,’ ” Bailey said. “Is that an interesting way to put it, Silas?”

“Deception cloaked in earnestness,” the attorney said.

Ignis closed his eyes. His jaw muscles bulged as he clenched his teeth, and his tightly pressed lips were bloodless. He seemed to be either biting back anger or searching for the words to convince them that he was as benign as he appeared to be.

When Ignis’s stillness and silence seemed about to become his only answer to Silas’s charge of deception, Bailey said, “Exactly what is it you think ‘must be done,’ Kirby?”

Ignis opened his eyes. He shook his head as if resigned to—but saddened by—their suspicion. “I don’t have to subject myself to this.” He turned away from them and walked toward the door.

Leveling Mickey Dime’s pistol at the scientist’s back, Bailey said, “Stop right there.”

Ignis kept moving. “You don’t dare kill me.”

The ceiling creaked, and behind those panels of Sheetrock, something slithered.

Witness said, “The One is all around us.”

Ignis left the kitchen, crossed the dining room.

Bailey glanced at Padmini, Padmini looked at Tom, and Tom said, “Where’s he going? He’s up to something.”

Winny

The Pogromite stood between them and escape, watching them but apparently with no immediate aggressive intentions.

Then it lifted its ugly head high, as though listening to a voice that only it could hear. Its shining eyes became dull behind what seemed to be inner, semitransparent lids. The creature began to sway back and forth, as if to music. The beast was so lithe, Winny thought of a cobra charmed by a flute.

“It’s … gone away somewhere,” Mrs. Sykes whispered.

Winny’s mom said, “Stay together. Move around it. Quiet.”

Bailey Hawks

By the time Bailey reached the public hallway, Kirby Ignis was a third of the way to the north stairs. He wasn’t running, but he walked briskly, with apparent purpose.

Beside Bailey, Padmini said, “Look up.”

The ceiling seemed to have turned soggy and soft, sagging under some moist weight, and every seam shed the concealing plaster, as if the big panels of Sheetrock were coming apart.

Tom Tran stepped out of Ignis’s apartment, keeping Bailey’s Beretta on Mickey Dime. The killer’s dreamy smile was as unfaltering as if his lips had been sewn into their arc.

Silas followed, too, but Witness remained behind.

“Come on,” Bailey said, and led them after the scientist.

There didn’t seem to be anything Ignis could do to put them in greater danger. And Bailey couldn’t imagine where the man thought he might flee to escape his responsibility when the transition reversed. But Ignis’s purposefulness suggested that he had a destination and a plan, which couldn’t be good for the rest of them.

The ceiling groaned behind them and softened ahead. Dry-wall nails squealed as they pulled slowly out of the overhead joists, and from that lumber came a worrisome cracking as if it must be under enormous, rapidly increasing stress. To the left and right, electric receptacles and the junction boxes in which they were seated blew out of the walls, trailing green and black and white wires, and something pale squirmed at the resultant rectangular holes, as if eager to get out of the wall and into the hallway.