Koontz, Dean - Sole Survivor

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This e-book was scanned by -=BuDDy[uk]=- anexperience
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Releases:
Dean Koontz - Demon Seed
Clive Barker - Books Of Blood Vol 2
Dean Koontz - Ticktock
Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor
Next Release:
Clive Barker - Books Of Blood Vol 1
Author: Dean Koontz
Title: SOLE SURVIVOR
Original copyright year:1997
Version: 1.0
Date of e-text: 07/12/00
ISBN 0 7472 1756 4 (Hardback)
ISBN 0 7472 7705 2 (Paperback)
Comments: Please correct the errors you find in this e-text,
update the version number and redistribute
Dean Koontz - SOLE SURVIVOR
I used
Hardback copy of Dean Koontz - SOLE SURVIVOR (Still Intact)
A heavy book
PC
Black Widow 4830pro flatbed scanner
Textbridge Pro V9.0
Word 2000
Hope you enjoy this book
START
Dean Koontz
SOLE
SURVIVOR
Also by Dean Koontz from Headline Feature
TICKTOCK
INTENSITY
STRANGE HIGHWAYS
DARK RIVERS OF THE HEART
MR MURDER
DRAGON TEARS
HIDEAWAY
COLD FIRE
THE BAD PLACE
MIDNIGHT
LIGHTNING
WATCHERS
ICEBOUND
WINTER MOON
THE FUNHOUSE
THE FACE OF FEAR
THE MASK
SHADOWFIRES
THE EYES OF DARKNESS
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THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT
THE DOOR TO DECEMBER
THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT
THE HOUSE OF THUNDER
PHANTOMS
WHISPERS
SHATTERED
CHASE
TWILIGHT EYES
THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT
STRANGERS
DARKNESS COMES
THE VISION
NIGHT CHILLS
DEDICATION
To the memory of Ray Mock, my uncle, who long ago moved on to a better world.
In my childhood, when I was troubled and despairing, your decency and kindness and good humour
taught me everything I ever needed to know about what a man should be.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The real Barbara Christman won a prize: the use of her name in this novel. Considering that she
was one of a hundred booksellers involved in the lottery, I am surprised by the way in which her
name resonates in this particular story. She was expecting to be portrayed as a psychotic killer;
instead, she will have to settle for being a quiet heroine. Sorry, Barbara.
The sky is deep, the sky is dark.
The light of stars is so damn stark.
When I look up, I fill with fear.
If all we have is what lies here,
this lonely world, this troubled place,
then cold dead stars and empty space.
Well, I see no reason to persevere,
no reason to laugh or shed a tear,
no reason to sleep or ever to wake,
no promises to keep, and none to make.
And so at night I still raise my eyes
to study the clear but mysterious skies
that arch above us, as cold as stone.
Are you there, God? Are we alone?
-The Book of Counted Sorrows
ONE
LOST FOREVER
1
At two-thirty Saturday morning, in Los Angeles, Joe Carpenter woke, clutching a pillow to his
chest, calling his lost wife’s name in the darkness. The anguished and haunted quality of his own
voice had shaken him from sleep. Dreams fell from him not all at once but in trembling veils, as
attic dust falls off rafters when a house rolls with an earthquake.
When he realized that he did not have Michelle in his arms, he held fast to the pillow anyway. He
had come out of the dream with the scent of her hair. Now he was afraid that any movement he made
would cause that memory to fade and leave him with only the sour smell of his night sweat.
Inevitably, no weight of stillness could hold the memory in all its vividness. The scent of her
hair receded like a balloon rising, and soon it was beyond his grasp.
Bereft, he got up and went to the nearest of two windows. His bed, which consisted of nothing but
a mattress on the floor, was the only furniture, so he did not have to be concerned about
stumbling over obstructions in the gloom.
The studio apartment was one large room with a kitchenette, a closet, and a cramped bathroom, all
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over a two-car detached garage in upper Laurel Canyon. After selling the house in Studio City, he
had brought no furniture with him, because dead men needed no such comforts. He had come here to
die.
For ten months he had been paying the rent, waiting for the morning when he would fail to wake.
The window faced the rising canyon wall, the ragged black shapes of evergreens and eucalyptuses.
To the west was a fat moon glimpsed through the trees, a silvery promise beyond the bleak urban
woods.
He was surprised that he was still not dead after all this time. He was not alive, either.
Somewhere between. Halfway in the journey. He had to find an ending, because for him there could
never be any going back.
After fetching an icy bottle of beer from the refrigerator in the kitchenette, Joe returned to the
mattress. He sat with his back against the wall.
Beer at two-thirty in the morning. A sliding-down life.
He wished that he were capable of drinking himself to death. If he could drift out of this world
in a numbing alcoholic haze, he might not care how long his departure required.
Too much booze would irrevocably blur his memories, however, and his memories were as sacred to
him as the impression of Christ’s face on the Shroud of Turin was precious to the priests who
believed in its authenticity and dedicated their lives to its preservation. He allowed himself
only a few beers or glasses of wine at a time.
Other than the faint tree-filtered glimmer of moonlight on the window glass, the only light in the
room came from the backlit buttons on the telephone keypad beside the mattress.
He knew only one person to whom he could talk frankly about his despair in the middle of the night
- or in broad daylight. Though he was only thirty-seven, his mom and dad were long gone. He had no
brothers or sisters. Friends had tried to comfort him after the catastrophe, but he had been too
pained to talk about what had happened, and he had kept them at a distance so aggressively that he
had offended most of them.
Now he picked up the phone, put it in his lap, and called Michelle’s mother, Beth McKay.
In Virginia, nearly three thousand miles away, she picked up the phone on the first ring. ‘Joe?’
‘Did I wake you?’
‘You know me, dear - early to bed and up before dawn.’
‘Henry?’ he asked, referring to Michelle’s father.
‘Oh, the old beast could sleep through Armageddon,’ she said affectionately.
She was a kind and gentle woman, full of compassion for Joe even as she coped with her own loss.
She possessed an uncommon strength.
At the funeral, both Joe and Henry had needed to lean on Beth, and she had been a rock for them.
Hours later, however, well after midnight, Joe had discovered her on the patio behind the Studio
City house, sitting in a glider in her pyjamas, hunched like an ancient crone, tortured by grief,
muffling her sobs in a pillow that she had carried with her from the spare room, trying not to
burden her husband or her son-in-law with her own pain.
Joe sat beside her, but she didn’t want her hand held or an arm around her shoulders. She flinched
at his touch. Her anguish was so intense that it had scraped her nerves raw, until a murmur of
commiseration was like a scream to her, until a loving hand scorched like a branding iron.
Reluctant to leave her alone, he had picked up the long-handled net and skimmed the swimming pool:
circling the water, scooping gnats and leaves off the black surface at two o’clock in the morning,
not even able to see what he was doing, just grimly circling, circling, skimming, skimming, while
Beth wept into the pillow, circling and circling until there was nothing to strain from the clear
water except the reflections of cold uncaring stars. Eventually, having wrung all the tears from
herself, Beth rose from the glider, came to him, and pried the net out of his hands. She had led
him upstairs and tucked him in bed as though he were a child, and he had slept deeply for the
first time in days.
Now, on the phone with her at a lamentable distance, Joe set aside his half-finished beer. ‘Is it
dawn there yet, Beth?’
‘Just a breath ago.’
‘Are you sitting at the kitchen table watching it through the big window? Is the sky pretty?’
‘Still black in the west, indigo overhead, and out to the east, a fan of pink and coral and
sapphire like Japanese silk.’
As strong as Beth was, Joe called her regularly not just for the strength she could offer, but
because he liked to listen to her talk. The particular timbre of her voice and her soft Virginia
accent were the same as Michelle’s had been.
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He said, ‘You answered the phone with my name.’
‘Who else would it have been, dear?’
‘Am I the only one who ever calls this early?’
‘Rarely others. But this morning. . . it could only be you.’
The worst had happened one year ago to the day, changing their lives forever. This was the first
anniversary of their loss.
She said, ‘I hope you’re eating better, Joe. Are you still losing weight?’
‘No,’ he lied.
Gradually during the past year, he had become so indifferent to food that three months ago he
began dropping weight. He had dropped twenty pounds to date.
‘Is it going to be a hot day there?’ he asked.
‘Stifling hot and humid. There are some clouds, but we’re not supposed to get rain, no relief. The
clouds in the east are
fringed with gold and full of pink. The sun’s all the way out of bed now.’
‘It doesn’t seem like a year already, does it, Beth?’
‘Mostly not. But sometimes it seems ages ago.’
‘I miss them so much,’ he said. ‘I’m so lost without them.’
‘Oh, Joe. Honey, Henry and I love you. You’re like a son to us. You are a son to us.’
‘I know, and I love you too, very much. But it’s not enough, Beth, it’s not enough.’ He took a
deep breath. ‘This year, getting through, it’s been hell. I can’t handle another year like this.’
‘It’ll get better with time.’
‘I’m afraid it won’t. I’m scared. I’m no good alone, Beth.’
‘Have you thought some more about going back to work, Joe?’ Before the accident, he had been a
crime reporter at the Los Angeles Post. His days as a journalist were over.
‘I can’t bear the sight of the bodies, Beth.’
He was unable to look upon a victim of a drive-by shooting or a car-jacking, regardless of age or
sex, without seeing Michelle or Chrissie or Nina lying bloody and battered before him.
‘You could do other kinds of reporting. You’re a good writer, Joe. Write some human interest
stories. You need to be working, doing something that’ll make you feel useful again.’
Instead of answering her, he said, ‘I don’t function alone. I just want to be with Michelle. I
want to be with Chrissie and Nina.’
‘Someday you will be,’ she said, for in spite of everything, she remained a woman of faith.
‘I want to be with them now.’ His voice broke, and he paused to put it back together. ‘I’m
finished here, but I don’t have the guts to move on.’
‘Don’t talk like that, Joe.’
He didn’t have the courage to end his life, because he had no convictions about what came after
this world. He did not truly believe that he would find his wife and daughters again in a realm of
light and loving spirits. Lately, when he gazed at a night sky, he Saw only distant stuns in a
meaningless void, but he couldn’t bear to voice his doubt, because to do so would be to imply that
Michelle’s and the girls’ lives had been meaningless as well.
Beth said, ‘We’re all here for a purpose.’
'They were my purpose. They’re gone.’
'then there’s another purpose you’re meant for. It’s your job now to find it. There’s a reason
you’re still here.’
‘No reason,’ he disagreed. ‘Tell me about the sky, Beth.’
After a hesitation, she said, ‘The clouds to the east aren’t gilded any more. The pink is gone
too. They’re white clouds, no rain in them, and not dense but like a filigree against the blue.’
He listened to her describe the morning at the other end of the continent. Then they talked about
fireflies, which she and Henry had enjoyed watching from their back porch the previous night.
Southern California had no fireflies, but Joe remembered them from his boyhood in Pennsylvania.
They talked about Henry’s garden, too, in which strawberries were ripening, and in time Joe grew
sleepy.
Beth’s last words to him were: ‘It’s full daylight here now. Morning’s going past us and heading
your way, Joey. You give it a chance, morning’s going to bring you the reason you need, some
purpose, because that’s what the morning does.’
After he hung up, Joe lay on his side, staring at the window, from which the silvery lunar light
had faded. The moon had set. He was in the blackest depths of the night.
When he returned to sleep, he dreamed not of any glorious approaching purpose but of an unseen,
indefinable, looming men-ace. Like a great weight falling through the sky above him.
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2
Later Saturday morning, driving to Santa Monica, Joe Carpenter suffered an anxiety attack. His
chest tightened, and he was able to draw breath only with effort. When he lifted one hand from the
wheel, his fingers quivered like those of a palsied old man.
He was overcome by a sense of falling, as from a great height, as though his Honda had driven off
the freeway into an inexplicable and bottomless abyss. The pavement stretched unbroken ahead of
him, and the tyres sang against the blacktop, but he could not reason himself back to a perception
of stability.
Indeed, the plummeting sensation grew so severe and terrifying that he took his foot off the
accelerator and tapped the brake pedal.
Horns blared and skidding tyres squealed as traffic adjusted to his sudden deceleration. As cars
and trucks swept past the Honda, the drivers glared murderously at Joe or mouthed offensive words,
or made obscene gestures. This was greater Los Angeles in an age of change, crackling with the
energy of doom, yearning for the Apocalypse, where an unintended slight or an inadvertent trespass
on someone else’s turf might result in a thermonuclear response.
His sense of falling did not abate. His stomach turned over as if he were aboard a roller coaster,
plunging along a precipitous length of track. Although he was alone in the car, he heard the
screams of passengers, faint at first and then louder, not the good-humoured shrieks of thrill
seekers at an amusement park, but cries of genuine anguish.
As though from a distance, he listened to himself whispering, ‘No, no, no, no.,
A brief gap in traffic allowed him to angle the Honda off the pavement. The shoulder of the
freeway was narrow. He stopped as close as possible to the guardrail, over which lush oleander
bushes loomed like a great cresting green tide.
He put the car in park but didn’t switch off the engine. Even
though he was sheathed in cold sweat, he needed the chill blasts of air-conditioning to be able to
breathe. The pressure on his chest increased. Each stuttering inhalation was a struggle, and each
hot exhalation burst from him with an explosive wheeze.
Although the air in the Honda was clear, Joe smelled smoke. He tasted it too: the acrid melange of
burning oil, melting plastic, smouldering vinyl, scorched metal.
When he glanced at the dense clusters of leaves and the deep-red flowers of the oleander pressing
against the windows on the pas-senger side, his imagination morphed them into billowing clouds of
greasy smoke. The window became a rectangular porthole with rounded corners and thick dual-pane
glass.
Joe might have thought he was losing his mind - if he hadn’t suffered similar anxiety attacks
during the past year. Although sometimes as much as two weeks passed between episodes, he often
endured as many as three in one day, each lasting between ten minutes and half an hour.
He had seen a therapist. The counselling had not helped.
His doctor recommended anti-anxiety medication. He rejected the prescription. He wanted to feel
the pain. It was all he had.
Closing his eyes, covering his face with his icy hands, he strove to regain control of himself,
but the catastrophe continued to unfold around him. The sense of falling intensified. The smell of
smoke thickened. The screams of phantom passengers grew louder.
Everything shook. The floor beneath his feet. The cabin walls. The ceiling. Horrendous rattling
and twanging and banging and gong-like clanging accompanied the shaking, shaking, shaking.
'Please,’ he pleaded.
Without opening his eyes, he lowered his hands from his face. They lay fisted at his sides.
After a moment, the small hands of frightened children clutched at his hands, and he held them
tightly.
The children were not in the car, of course, but in their seats in the doomed airliner. Joe was
flashing back to the crash of Flight 353. For the duration of this seizure, he would be in two
places at once:
in the real world of the Honda and in the Nationwide Air 747 as it found its way down from the
serenity of the stratosphere, through
overcast night sky, into a meadow as unforgiving as iron.
Michelle had been sitting between the kids. Her hands, not Joe’s, were those that Chrissie and
Nina gripped in their last long minutes of unimaginable dread.
As the shaking grew worse, the air was filled with projectiles.
Paperback books, laptop computers, pocket calculators, flatware and dishes - because a few
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