The Bad Weather Friend

by Dean Koontz

The enormous abstract expressionist paintings—spatters, streaks, whirls, and blocks of color thrown and squirted and spatulated onto the canvases—might have been produced by psychotic monkeys with access to a wide spectrum of acrylics, but in fact were the work of an acclaimed Los Angeles artist.

the millions who, in this culture, have trammeled themselves with infinite absurd bureaucracies, regulations, and rules to give their existence meaning after their ancestors declared no need for meaning two and a half centuries earlier. Shall we become termites in a colony, living for no purpose but to devour what little remains of our once glorious civilization, or shall we grow into men of responsibility?

Clouds piled up, dark gray with coaly veins, seeming as solid as charred timbers and soot-blackened masonry, as though this world existed under the ruins of another. The thunderheads were for the moment mute, the lightning sheathed, the wind pent up in preparation for a long and violent exhalation.