Dean R. Koontz
Sole Survivor
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 humor
taught me everything I ever needed to know
about what a man should be.
EPIGRAPH
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?
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
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.
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 consisted of one large room with a kitchenette, a closet, and a cramped bathroom, all 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 sacred to him. 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 pajamas, 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 pooclass="underline" 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.
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?”