Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

Shepherd shook his head violently.

'Would that be all right, Shep? Would it? Shep?'

'No.'

'Some things that don't offend us may offend other people, so we have to be respectful of other people's feelings if we want them to be respectful of ours.'

'I know.'

'Good! So we don't eat Goldfish in front of certain people-'

'No Goldfish.'

'-and we don't pee in public-'

'No pee.'

'-and we don't fold in or out of public places.'

'No fold.'

'No Goldfish, no pee, no fold,' Dylan said.

'No Goldfish, no pee, no fold,' Shep repeated.

Although the pained expression still clenched his face, Dylan spoke in a softer and more affectionate tone of voice, and with apparent relief: 'I'm proud of you, Shep.'

'No Goldfish, no pee, no fold.'

'I'm very proud of you. And I love you, Shep. Do you know that? I love you, buddy.' Dylan's voice thickened, and he turned from his brother. He didn't look at Jilly, perhaps because he couldn't look at her and keep his composure. He solemnly studied his big hands, as if he'd done something with them that shamed him. He took several deep breaths, slow and deep, and into Shepherd's embarrassed silence, he said again, 'Do you know that I love you very much?'

'Okay,' Shep said quietly.

'Okay,' Dylan said. 'Okay then.'

Shepherd mopped his sweaty face with one hand, blotted the hand on his jeans. 'Okay.'

When Dylan at last met Jilly's eyes, she saw how difficult part of that conversation with Shep had been for him, the bullying part, and her voice, too, thickened with emotion. 'Now… now what?'

He checked for his wallet, found it. 'Now we have lunch.'

'We left the computer running back in the room.'

'It'll be all right. And the room's locked. There's a Do Not Disturb sign on the door.'

Traffic still passing in liquid ripples of sunlight. The far side of the street shimmering like a phantasm.

She expected to hear the silvery laughter of children, to smell incense, to see a woman wearing a mantilla and sitting on a pew in the parking lot, to feel the rush of wings as a river of white birds poured out of the previously birdless sky.

Then, without raising his head, Shepherd unexpectedly reached out to take her hand, and the moment became too real for visions.

They went inside. She helped Shep find his way, so he would not have to look up and risk eye contact with strangers.

Compared to the day outside, the air in the restaurant seemed to have been piped directly from the arctic. Jilly was not chilled.

For Dylan, the thought of hundreds of thousands or millions of microscopic machines swarming through his brain was such an appetite-killing consideration that he ate, ironically, almost as though he were a machine refueling itself, with no pleasure in the food.

Presented with the perfect entree – a grilled-cheese sandwich made with square bread lacking an arched crust, cut into four square pieces – complimented by rectangular steak fries with blunt ends, dill pickles that Dylan trimmed into rectangular sticks, and thick slices of beefsteak tomatoes that had also been trimmed into squares, Shep ate contentedly.

Although Shep used his fingers to pick up not just the sandwich, fries, and pickles, but also the remodeled tomatoes, Dylan made no effort to remind him of the rules of fork usage. There were proper times and places to reinforce table manners, and there was this time and place, where it made sense just to be thankful that they were alive and together and able to share a meal in peace.

They occupied a booth by a window, though Shep disliked sitting where he could be 'looked at by people inside and people out.' These plate-glass windows were so heavily tinted against the glare of the desert sun that from the outside, in daylight, little of the interior could be seen.

Besides, the only booths in the establishment were along the windows, and the regular tables were so closely set that Shep would have quickly become agitated when the growing lunch crowd pressed in around him. The booth offered structural barriers that provided a welcome degree of privacy, and following his recent chastisement, Shep was in a flexible mood.

Psychic imprints on menus and utensils squirmed under Dylan's touch, but he discovered that he continued to get better at being able to suppress his awareness of them.

Dylan and Jilly chatted inanely about inconsequential things, like favorite movies, as though Hollywood-produced entertainments could possibly have serious relevance to them now that they had been set apart from the rest of humanity and were most likely by the hour traveling further beyond ordinary human experience.

Soon, when movie talk began to seem not merely insignificant but bizarre, evidence of epic denial, Jilly started to bring them back to their dilemma. Referring to the convoluted chain of logic with which Dylan had gotten his brother to accept that folding out of or into a public place was as taboo as peeing on old ladies' shoes, she said, 'That was brilliant out there.'

'Brilliant?' He shook his head in disagreement. 'It was mean.'

'No. Don't beat yourself up.'

'In part it was mean. I hate that, but I've gotten pretty good at it when I have to be.'

'The point needed to be made,' she said. 'And quickly.'

'Don't make excuses for me. I might enjoy it too much, and start making them for myself.'

'Grim doesn't look good on you, O'Conner. I like you better when you're irrationally optimistic.'

He smiled. 'I like me better that way, too.'

After finishing the last bite of a club sandwich and washing it down with a swallow of Coors, she sighed and said, 'Nanomachines, nanocomputers… if all those little buggers are busy making me so much smarter, why do I still have trouble getting my mind around the whole concept?'

'They aren't necessarily making us smarter. Just different. Not all change is for the better. By the way, Proctor found it awkward to keep talking about nanomachines controlled by nanocomputers, so he invented a new word to describe those two things when they're combined. Nanobots. A combination of nano and robots .'

'A cute name doesn't make them any less scary.' She frowned, rubbed the back of her neck as if working a chill out of it. 'Deja vu all over again. Nanobots. That rings a bell. And back in the room, you seemed to expect me to know more about this. Why?'

'The piece I called up for you to read on the laptop, the one I condensed for you instead… it was a transcript of an hour-long interview that Proctor did on your favorite radio program.'

'Parish Lantern?'

'Proctor's been on the show three times in five years, the third time for two hours. It figures you might've heard him once, anyway.'

Jilly brooded about this development for a moment and clearly didn't like the implications. 'Maybe I'd better start worrying more about Earth's magnetic pole shifting, and about brain leeches from an alternate reality, for that matter.'

Outside, a vehicle pulled off the street, into the parking lot, and raced past the restaurant at such imprudent speed that Dylan's attention was drawn by the roar of its engine and by the flash of its passage. A black Suburban. The rack of four spotlights fixed to the roof above the windshield didn't come as a standard accessory with every Suburban sold.

Jilly saw it, too. 'No. How could they find us?'

'Maybe we should've changed plates again after what happened at the restaurant in Safford.'

The SUV braked to a stop in front of the motel office, next door to the coffee shop.

'Maybe that little weasel, Skipper, at the service station suspected something.'

'Maybe a hundred things.'

Dylan faced the motel, but Jilly was sitting with her back to the action. Or to some of it. She pointed, tapping one index finger against the window. 'Dylan. Across the street.'