Dean R. Koontz - Trapped

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TRAPPED By Dean R. Koontz 1 ON THE NIGHT THAT IT HAPPENED, A BLIZZARD

SWEPT THE ENTIRE Northeast. Creatures that preferred to venture out only after

sunset were, therefore, doubly cloaked by darkness and the storm. Snow

began to fall at twilight, as Meg Lassiter drove home from the doctor's office

with Tommy. Powdery flakes sifted out of an iron-gray sky and at first fell

straight down through the cold, still air. By the time she had covered eight

miles, a hard wind had blasted in from the southwest and harried the snow at a

slant through the headlights of the jeep station wagon. Behind her, sitting

sideways on the rear seat to accommodate his cast-encumbered leg, Tommy

sighed. "I'm going to miss a lot of sledding, skiing-ice skating too."

"It's early in the season," Meg said. "You ought to heal up in time to have

some fun before spring." "Yeah, well, maybe." He had broken his leg two

weeks ago, and during the follow-up visit to Dr. Jacklin a short while ago,

they had learned that he'd be in a cast another six weeks. The fracture was

splintered - "minor but complicating comminution" - impacted as well, and it

would knit more slowly than a simple break. "But, Mom, there's only so many

winters in a life. I hate to waste one." Meg smiled and glanced at the

rearview mirror, in which she could see him. "You're only ten years old,

honey. In your case the winters ahead are countless - or darn close to it."

"No way, Mom. Soon it'll be college, which'll mean a lot more studying, not so

much time to have fun-" "That's eight years away!" "You always say time

goes faster the older you get. And after college I'll have a job, and then a

family to support.' "Trust me, buckaroo, life doesn't speed up till you're

thirty." Though he was as fun-loving as any ten-year-old, he was also

occasionally a strangely serious boy. He'd been that way even as a toddler,

but he had become increasingly solemn after his father's death two years ago.

Meg braked for the last stoplight at the north end of town, still seven miles

from their farm. She switched on the wipers, which swept the fine dry snow

from the windshield. "How old are you, Mom?" "Thirty-five." "Wow,

really?" "You make it sound as if I'm ancient." "Did they have cars when

you were ten?" His laugh was musical. Meg loved the sound of his laughter,

perhaps because she had heard so little of it during the past two years. On

the right-hand corner, two cars and a pickup were filling up at the Shell

station pumps. A six-foot pine tree was angled across the bed of the truck.

Christmas was only eight days away. On the left-hand corner was

Haddenbeck's Tavern, standing before a backdrop of hundred-foot spruces. In

the burnt-out gray twilight, the falling snow was like cascading ashes

descending from an unseen celestial blaze, though in the amber light of the

roadhouse windows, the flakes resembled not ashes but gold dust. "Come to

think of it," Tommy said from the rear seat, "how could there have been cars

when you were ten? I mean, gee, they didn't invent the wheel till you were

eleven." "Tonight for dinner - worm cakes and beetle soup." "You're the

meanest mother in the world." She glanced at the mirror again and saw that

in spite of his bantering tone, the boy was not smiling any longer. He was

staring grimly at the tavern. Slightly more than two years ago, a drunk

named Deke Slater had left Haddenbeck's Tavern at the same time that Jim

Lassiter had been driving toward town to chair a fund-raising committee at St.

Paul's Church.. Traveling at high speed on Black Oak Road, Slater's Buick ran

head-on into Jim's car. Jim died instantly, and Slater was paralyzed from the

neck down. Often, when they passed Haddenbeck's - and when they rounded the

curve where Jim had been killed - Tommy tried to conceal his enduring anguish

by involving Meg in a jokey conversation. Not today. He had already run out of

one-liners. "Light's green, Mom." She went through the intersection and

across the township line. Main Street became a two-lane county route: Black

Oak Road. Tommy had adjusted intellectually - for the most part emotionally

as well - to the loss of his father. During the year following the tragedy,

Meg had often come upon the boy as he sat quietly at a window, lost in

thought, tears slipping down his face. She hadn't caught him weeping for ten

months. Reluctantly he had accepted his father's death. He would be okay.

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Nevertheless, that didn't mean he was whole. Still - and perhaps for a long

time to come - there was an emptiness in Tommy. Jim had been a wonderful

husband but an even better father, so devoted to his son that they essentially

had been a part of each other. Jim's death left a hole in Tommy as real as any

that a bullet might have made, although it would not scar over as fast as a

gunshot wound. Meg knew that only time could knit him completely. Snow

began to fall faster and dusk surrendered to night, reducing visibility, so

she slowed the jeep wagon. Hunching over the wheel, she could see ahead only

twenty yards. "Getting bad," Tommy said tensely from the rear seat.

"Seen worse." "Where? The Yukon?" "Yep. Exactly right. Middle of the

Gold Rush, winter of 1849. You forgetting how old I am? I was mushing Yukon

dog sleds before they'd invented dogs." Tommy laughed but only dutifully.

Meg could not see the broad meadows on either side, or the frozen silver

ribbon of Seeger's Creek off to the right, although she could make out the

gnarled trunks and jagged, winter-stripped limbs of the looming oaks that

flanked that portion of the county road. The trees were a landmark by which

she judged that she was a quarter mile from the blind curve where Jim had

died. Tommy settled into silence. Then, when they were seconds from the

curve, he said, "I don't really miss sledding and skating so much. It's just

... I feel so helpless in this cast, so ... so trapped." His use of the

word "trapped" wrenched Meg because it meant that his uneasiness about being

immobilized was closely linked to memories of his dad's death. Jim's Chevy had

been so mangled by the impact that the police and coroner's men had required

more than three hours to extract his corpse from the overturned car; ensnared

by tangled metal, his body had to be cut loose with acetylene torches. At the

time, she had tried to protect Tommy from the worst details of the accident,

but when eventually he returned to his third-grade class, his schoolmates

shared the grisly facts with him, motivated by a morbid curiosity about death

and by an innocent cruelty peculiar to some children. "You're not trapped

in the cast," Meg said, as she piloted the jeep into the long, snow-swept

curve. "Hampered, yeah, but not trapped. I'm here to help." Tommy had come

home early from his first day of school after the funeral, bawling: "Daddy was

trapped in the car, couldn't move, all tangled up in the twisted metal, they

had to cut him loose, he was trapped." Meg soothed him and explained that Jim

had been killed on impact, in an instant, and had not suffered: "Honey, it was

only his body, his poor empty shell, that was trapped. His mind and soul, your

real daddy, had already gone up to Heaven." Now Meg braked as she

approached the midpoint of the curve, that curve, which would always be a

frightening place no matter how often they navigated it. Tommy had come to

accept Meg's assurances that his father had not suffered. Nevertheless, he was

still haunted by the image of his dad's body in the clutch of mangled metal.

Suddenly, oncoming headlights seared Meg's eyes. A car rushed at them, moving

too fast for road conditions, not out of control but not stable either. It

started to fishtail, straddling the double line down the center of the road.

Meg pulled the steering wheel to the right, swinging onto the hard shoulder,

pumping the brakes, afraid of putting two wheels in a ditch and rolling the

station wagon. She held it all the way around the curve, however, with the

tires churning up gravel that rattled against the undercarriage. The oncoming

car skinned past with no more than an inch to spare, vanishing in the night

and snow. "Idiot," she said angrily. When she had driven around the bend

into a straightaway, she pulled to the side of the road and stopped. "You

okay?" she asked. Tommy was huddled in one corner of the backseat, with his

head pulled turtlelike into the collar of his heavy winter coat. Pale and

trembling, he nodded. "Y-yeah. Okay." The night seemed strangely still in

spite of the softly idling jeep, the thump of windshield wipers, and the

wind. "I'd like to get my hands on that irresponsible jerk." She struck the

dashboard with the flat side of her fist. "It was a Biolomech car," Tommy

said, referring to the large research firm located on a hundred acres half a

mile south of their farm. "I saw the name on the side. `Biolomech.' " She

took several deep breaths. "You okay?" "Yeah. I'm all right. I just ...

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want to get home." The storm intensified. They were beneath the snowy

equivalent of a waterfall, flakes pouring over them in churning currents.

Back on Black Oak Road, they crawled along at twenty-five miles an hour.

Weather conditions wouldn't permit greater speed. Two miles farther, at

Biolomech Labs, the night was shot full of light. Beyond the nine-foot-high,

chain-link fence that ringed the place, sodium-vapor security lamps glowed

eerily atop twenty-foot poles, the light diffused by thickly falling snow.

Although the lamps were set at hundred-foot intervals across the expansive

grounds that surrounded the single-story offices and research laboratories,

they were rarely switched on. Meg had seen them burning on only one other

night in the past four years. The buildings were set back from the road,

beyond a screen of trees. Even in good weather and daylight, they were

difficult to see, cloistered and mysterious. Currently they were invisible in

spite of the hundred or more pools of yellow light that surrounded them.

Pairs of men in heavy coats moved along the perimeter of the property,

sweeping flashlights over the fence as if expecting to find a breach, focusing

especially on the snow-mantled ground along the chain-link. "Somebody

must've tried to break in," Tommy said. Biolomech cars and vans were

clustered around the main gate. Sputtering red emergency flares flickered and

smoked along both shoulders of Black Oak Road, leading to a roadblock at which

three men held powerful flashlights. Three other men were armed with

shotguns. "Wow!" Tommy said. "Door-buster riot guns! Something really big

must've happened." Meg braked, stopped, and rolled down her window. Cold

wind knifed into the car. She expected one of the men to approach her.

Instead, a guard in boots, gray uniform pants, and a black coat with the

Biolomech logo moved toward the jeep from the other side, carrying a long pole

at the base of which were attached a pair of angled mirrors and a light. He

was accompanied by a much taller man, similarly dressed, who had a shotgun.

The shorter guard thrust the lighted mirrors beneath the jeep and squinted at

the reflection of the undercarriage that the first mirror threw onto the

second. "They're looking for bombs!" Tommy said from the rear seat.

"Bombs?" Meg said disbelievingly. "Hardly." The man with the mirror moved

slowly around the jeep wagon, and his armed companion stayed close at his

side. Even in the obscuring snow, Meg could see that their faces were lined

with anxiety. When the pair had circled the jeep, the armed guard waved an

all-clear to the other four at the roadblock, and at last one man approached

the driver's window. He wore jeans and a bulky, brown leather flight jacket

with sheepskin lining, without a Biolomech patch. A dark blue toboggan cap

caked with snow was pulled half over his ears. He leaned down to the open

window. "I'm real sorry for the inconvenience, ma'am." He was handsome,

with an appealing - but false - smile. His gray-green eyes were disturbingly

direct. "What's going on?" she asked. "Just a security alert," he said,

the words steaming from him in the icy air. "Could I see your driver's

license, please?" He was evidently a Biolomech employee, not a police

officer, but Meg saw no reason to decline to cooperate. As the man was

holding her wallet, studying the license, Tommy said, "Spies try to sneak in

there tonight?" That same insincere smile accompanied the man's response:

"Most likely just a short circuit in the alarm system, son. Nothing here that

spies would be interested in." Biolomech was involved in recombinant-DNA

research and the application of their discoveries to commercial enterprises.

Meg knew that in recent years genetic engineering had produced a man-made

virus that threw off pure insulin as a waste product, a multitude of wonder

drugs, and other blessings. She also knew that the same science could engender

biological weapons - new diseases as deadly as nuclear bombs - but she always

avoided pondering the frightening possibility that Biolomech, half a mile

overland from their house, might be engaged in such dangerous work. In fact, a

few years ago rumors had surfaced that Biolomech had landed a major defense

contract, but the company had assured the county that it would never perform

research related to bacteriological warfare. Yet their fence and security

system seemed more formidable than necessary for a commercial facility limited

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to benign projects. Blinking snow off his lashes, the man in the

sheepskin-lined jacket said, "You live near here, Mrs. Lassiter?" "Cascade

Farm," she said. "About a mile down the road." He passed her wallet back

through the window. From the backseat, Tommy said, "Mister, do you think

terrorists with bombs are maybe gonna drive in there and blow the place up or

something?" "Bombs? Whatever gave you that idea, son?" "The mirrors on

the pole," Tommy said. "Ah! Well, that's just part of our standard

procedure in a security alert. Like I said, it's probably a false alarm. Short

circuit, something like that." To Meg he said, "Sorry for the trouble, Mrs.

Lassiter." As the man stepped back from the station wagon, Meg glanced past

him at the guards with shotguns and at more distant figures combing the eerily

lighted grounds. These men did not believe that they were investigating a

false alarm. Their anxiety and tension were visible not only in the faces of

those nearby but in the way that all of them stood and moved in the

blizzard-shot night. She rolled up the window and put the car in gear.

As she pulled forward, Tommy said, "You think he was lying?" "It's none of

our business, honey." "Terrorists or spies," Tommy said with the enthusiasm

for a good crisis that only young boys could muster. They passed the

northernmost end of Biolomech's land. The sodium-vapor security lights receded

into the gloom behind them, while the night and snow closed in from all

sides. More leafless oaks thrust spiky arms over the lane. Among their

thick trunks, the jeep headlights stirred brief-lived, leaping shadows. Two

minutes later, Meg turned left off the county route into their quarter-mile

driveway. She was relieved to be home. Cascade Farm - named after three

generations of the Cascade family who once lived there - was a ten-acre spread

in semirural Connecticut. It was not a working farm any more. She and Jim had

bought the place four years ago, after he had sold his share in the New York

ad agency that he'd founded with two partners. The farm was to have been the

start of a new life, where he could pursue his dream of being a writer of more

than ad copy, and where Meg could enjoy an art studio more spacious and in a

more serene environment than anything she could have had in the city.

Before he died, Jim had written two moderately successful suspense novels at

Cascade Farm. There also, Meg found new directions for her art: first a

brighter tone than she previously had employed; then after Jim's death, a

style so brooding and grim that the gallery handling her work in New York had

suggested a return to the brighter style if she hoped to continue to sell.

The two-story fieldstone house stood a hundred yards in front of the barn. It

had eight rooms plus a spacious kitchen with modern appliances, two baths, two

fireplaces, and front and back porches for sitting and rocking on summer

evenings. Even in this stormy darkness, its scalloped eaves bedecked with

ice, battered by wind, and lashed by whips of snow, with not a single front

window warmed by a lamp's glow, the house looked cozy and welcoming in the

headlights. "Home," she said with relief. "Spaghetti for dinner?" "Make

a lot so I can have cold leftovers for breakfast." "Yuck." "Cold

spaghetti makes a great breakfast." "You're a demented child." She pulled

alongside the house, stopped next to the rear porch, and helped him out of the

wagon. "Leave your crutches. Lean on me," she said over the whistling-hooting

wind. The crutches would be of no use on snow-covered ground. "I'll bring them

in after I put the jeep in the garage." If the heavy cast had not encased

his right leg from toes to above the knee, she might have been able to carry

him. Instead he leaned on her and hopped on his good leg. She had left a

light in the kitchen for Doofus, their four-year-old black Labrador. The

frost-rimed windows shimmered with that amber glow, and the porch was vaguely

illuminated by it. At the door, Tommy rested against the wall of the house

while Meg disengaged the lock. When she stepped into the kitchen, the big dog

did not rush at her, wagging his tail with excitement, as she expected.

Instead he slunk forward with his tail between his legs, his head down,

clearly happy to see her but rolling his eyes warily as if expecting an angry

cat to streak at him suddenly from one corner or another. She pushed the

door shut behind them and helped Tommy to a chair at the kitchen table. Then

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she took off her boots and stood them on a rag rug in the corner by the door.

Doofus was shivering, as though cold. But the oil furnace was on, and the

place was warm. The dog made an odd, mewling sound. "What's the matter,

Doofus?" she asked. "What've you been up to? Knock over a lamp? Huh? Chew up a

sofa cushion?" "Ah, he's a good pooch," Tommy said. "If he knocked over a

lamp, he'll pay for it. Won't you, Doofus?" The dog wagged his tail but

only tentatively. He glanced nervously at Meg, then looked back toward the

dining room - as if someone lurked there, someone he feared too much to

confront. Sudden apprehension clutched Meg. 2 BEN PARNELL LEFT THE

ROADBLOCK NEAR THE MAIN GATE AND DROVE his Chevy Blazer to lab number three,

the building deepest in the Biolomech complex. Snow melted off his toboggan

cap and trickled under the collar of his sheepskin-lined flight jacket. All

across the grounds, anxious searchers moved cautiously through the

sulfur-yellow glow of the security lamps. In deference to the stinging wind,

they hunched their shoulders and held their heads low, which made them appear

less than human, demonic. In a strange way he was glad that the crisis had

arisen. If he hadn't been there, he would have been at home, alone, pretending

to read, or pretending to watch television, but brooding about Melissa, his

much-loved daughter, who was gone, lost to cancer. And if he could have

avoided brooding about Melissa, he would have brooded instead about Leah, his

wife, who had also been lost to ... Lost to what? He still did not fully

understand why their marriage had ended after the ordeal with Melissa was

over. As far as Ben could see, the only thing that had come between him and

Leah had been her grief, which had been so great and dark and heavy that she

had no longer been capable of harboring any other emotion, not even love for

him. Maybe the seeds of divorce had been there for a long time, sprouting only

after Melissa succumbed, but he had loved Leah; he still loved her, not

passionately any more, but in the melancholy way that a man could love a dream

of happiness even knowing that the dream could never come true. That's what

Leah had become during the past year: not even a memory, painful or otherwise,

but a dream, and not even a dream of what might be but of what could never

be. He parked the Blazer in front of lab three, a windowless single-story

structure that resembled a bunker. He went to the steel door, inserted his

plastic ID card in the slot, reclaimed the card when the light above the

entrance changed from red to green, and stepped past that barrier as it slid

open with a hiss. He was in a vestibule that resembled the air lock of a

spaceship. The outer door hissed shut behind him, and he stood before the

inner door, stripping off his gloves while he was scanned by a security

camera. A foot-square wall panel slid open, revealing a lighted screen painted

with the blue outline of a right hand. Ben matched his hand to the outline,

and the computer scanned his fingerprints. Seconds later, when his identity

was confirmed, the inner door slid open, and he went into the main hall, off

which led other halls, labs, and offices. Minutes ago Dr. John Acuff, head

of Project Blackberry, had returned to Biolomech in response to the crisis.

Now Ben located Acuff in the east-wing corridor where he was conferring

urgently with three researchers, two men and a woman, who were working on

Blackberry. As Ben approached, he saw that Acuff was half sick with fear.

The director of the project - stocky, balding, with a salt-and-pepper beard -

was neither absentminded nor coldly analytic, in no way a stereotypical man of

science, and in fact he possessed a splendid sense of humor. There was usually

a merry, positively Clausian twinkle in his eyes. No twinkle tonight, however.

And no smile. "Ben! Have you found our rats?" "Not a trace. I want to

talk to you, get some idea where they might go." Acuff put one hand against

his forehead as if checking for a fever. "We've got to get them, Ben. And

quick. If we don't recover them tonight ... Jesus, the possible consequences

... it's the end of everything." 3 THE DOG TRIED TO GROWL AT WHOEVER WAS IN

THE DARKNESS BEYOND the archway, but the growl softened into another whine.

Meg moved reluctantly yet boldly to the dining room, fumbling along the wall

for the light switch. Clicked it. The eight chairs were spaced evenly around

the Queen Anne table; plates gleamed softly behind the beveled panes of the

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TRAPPEDByDeanR.Koontz1ONTHENIGHTTHATITHAPPENED,ABLIZZARDSWEPTTHEENTIRENortheast.Creaturesthatpreferredtoventureoutonlyaftersunsetwere,therefore,doublycloakedbydarknessandthestorm.Snowbegantofallattwilight,asMegLassiterdrovehomefromthedoctor'sofficewithTommy.Powderyflakessiftedoutofaniron-grayskyanda...

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