Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

Phantasm soon gave way to reality, and the highway clarified out of the last seething shoals of doves gone now to boughs and belfries.

Gradually Jilly's heart rate subsided from its frantic pace, but each slower beat seemed as hard struck as when her fear had been more tightly wound.

Moon behind them, wheel of stars turning overhead, they traveled in the hum of tires, in the whoosh-and-swish of passing cars, in the grind-and-grumble of behemoth trucks for a mile or two before Dylan's voice added melody to the rhythm: 'What's your modus operandi? As a comedian.'

Her mouth was dry, her tongue thick, but she sounded normal when she spoke. 'My material, I guess you mean. Human stupidity. I make fun of it as best I can. Stupidity, envy, betrayal, faithlessness, greed, self-importance, lust, vanity, hatred, senseless violence… There's never a shortage of targets for a comedian.' Listening to herself, she cringed at the difference between the inspirations he claimed for his art and those she acknowledged for her stage work. 'But that's how all comedians operate,' she elaborated, dismayed by this impulse to justify herself, yet unable to repress it. 'Comedy is dirty work, but someone has to do it.'

'People need to laugh,' he said inanely, reaching for this trite bit of reassurance as though he sensed what she'd been thinking.

'I want to make them laugh till they cry,' Jilly said, and at once wondered where that had come from. 'I want to make them feel…'

'Feel what?'

The word that she had almost spoken was so inappropriate, so out of phase with what everyone expected a comedian's motivations to be, that she was confused and disturbed to hear it in the echo chamber of her mind. Pain . She'd almost said, I want to make them feel pain . She swallowed the word unspoken and grimaced as if it had a bitter taste.

'Jilly?'

The dark charm of self-examination abruptly had less appeal than the threat-filled night from which they'd both taken a brief holiday and to which she preferred to return. Frowning at the highway, she said, 'We're headed east.'

'Yeah.'

'Why?'

'Black Suburbans, explosions, gorillas in golf clothes,' he reminded her.

'But I was headed west before all this… all this excrement happened. I've got a three-night gig in Phoenix next week.'

In the backseat, Shepherd broke his silence: 'Feces. Feculence. Defecation.'

'You can't go to Phoenix now,' Dylan objected. 'Not after all this, after your mirage-'

'Hey, end of the world or not, I need the money. Besides, you don't book a date, then back out at the last minute. Not if you want to work again.'

'Movement. Stool. Droppings,' said Shep.

'Did you forget about your Cadillac?' Dylan asked.

'How could I forget? The bastards blew it up. My beautiful Coupe DeVille.' She sighed. 'Wasn't it beautiful?'

'A jewel,' he agreed.

'I loved those tastefully subdued tail fins.'

'Elegant.'

'Its howitzer-shell front bumper.'

'Very howitzery.'

'They put the name, Coupe DeVille , in gold script on the sides. That was such a sweet detail. Now it's all blown up, burned, and stinking of one toasted Frankenstein. Who forgets such a thing?'

Shep said, 'Manure. Ordure.'

Jilly asked, 'What's he doing now?'

'A while ago,' Dylan reminded her, 'you told me I was crude. You suggested I find polite synonyms for a certain word that offended you. Shep accepted your challenge.'

'Crap. Coprolite.'

'But that was back before we left the motel,' she said.

'Shep's sense of time isn't like yours and mine. Past, present, and future aren't easily differentiated for him, and sometimes he acts as if they're all the same thing and happening simultaneously.'

'Poopoo,' said Shep. 'Kaka.'

'My point about the Caddy,' Dylan continued, 'is that when those thugs in polo shirts discover it doesn't belong to Frankenstein, that it's registered to one Jillian Jackson, then they're going to come looking for you. They'll want to know how he got your car, whether you gave it to him willingly.'

'I knew I should've gone to the cops. Should've filed a stolen-vehicle report like a good citizen would. Now I look suspicious.'

'Doodoo. Diaper dump.'

'If Frankenstein was right,' Dylan warned, 'maybe the cops can't protect you. Maybe these people can pull rank on the cops.'

'Then I guess we'd have to go to – who? The FBI?'

'Maybe you can't escape these guys. Maybe they can pull rank on the FBI, too.'

'Who in God's name are they – the Secret Service, the CIA, Santa Claus's elf gestapo out making their who's-been-naughty list?'

'Cow pie. Waste.'

'Frankenstein didn't say who they were,' Dylan reported. 'He just said if they find the stuff in our blood, we'll be as dead as dinosaurs and buried where our bones won't ever be found.'

'Yeah, maybe that's what he said, but why should we believe him anyway? He was a mad scientist.'

'Evacuation. Voidance. Toilet treasure.'

'He wasn't mad,' Dylan averred.

'You called him a lunatic.'

'And you called him a salesman. We've called him a lot of things in the heat of the moment-'

'Potty packing. Outhouse input. Excreta.'

'-but given his options,' Dylan continued, 'considering that he knew those guys were on his tail and were going to kill him, he took the most logical, rational action available to him.'

Her mouth opened as wide as if she were assuming the cooperative position for a root canal. 'Logical? Rational?' She reminded herself that she didn't really know Mr. Dylan O'Conner. In the end, he might prove to be more peculiar than his brother. 'Okay, let me get this straight. The smiley creep chloroforms me, shoots Dr. Jekyll juice or something into my veins, steals my fabulous car, gets himself blown up – and in your enlightened view, that behavior qualifies him to coach the university debating team?'

'Obviously, they'd pushed him into a corner, time was running out, and he did the only thing he could do to save his life's work. I'm sure he didn't intend to get himself blown up.'

'You're as insane as he was,' Jilly decided.

'Dejecta. Bulldoody.'

'I'm not saying that what he did was right ,' Dylan clarified. 'Only that it was logical. If we operate under the assumption that he was just nuttier than a one-pound jar of Jif, we're making a mistake that could get us killed. Think about it: If we die, he loses. So he wants us to stay alive, if only because we're his… I don't know… because we're his living experiments or something. Consequently, I have to assume that everything he told me was meant to help us stay alive.'

'Filth. Dung. A withdrawal from the bowel bank.'

Immediately to the north and south of the interstate lay plains as black as ancient hearthstones stained by the char of ten thousand fires, with isolated mottlings as gray as ashes where moonlight and starlight glimmered off the reflective surfaces of desert vegetation and mica-flecked rock formations. Directly east, but also curving toward the highway with viselike relentlessness from the northeast and the southeast, the Peloncillo Mountains presented a barren and forbidding silhouette: hard, black, jagged slabs darker than the night sky into which they thrust.

This wasteland offered no comfort to the mind, no consolation to the heart, and except for the interstate, it provided no evidence that it existed on a populated planet. Even along these paved lanes, the lights of the oncoming and receding traffic made no conclusive argument for a living population. The scene possessed an eerie quality that suggested the science-fiction scenario of a world on which all species had perished centuries before, leaving their domain as morbidly still as a glass-encased diorama through which the only movement was the periodic bustle of perpetual-motion machines engaged in ancient programmed tasks that no longer held any meaning.