Life Expectancy

by Dean Koontz

“I hid with your baby,” Charlene Coleman said. “I hid from that awful man. I knew he would be trouble when he first showed up with his wife, him wearing that ugly hat indoors and making no apology for it.”

3

Dad swears that her first words to me were these: “You better have been worth all the pain, Little Blue Eyes, ’cause if you turn out to be an ungrateful child, I’ll make your life a living hell.”

Natalie Beezo had received no prenatal care. She unknowingly suffered from preeclampsia. During labor she developed full-blown eclampsia and experienced violent convulsions that would not respond to treatment and that threatened not only her own life but the life of her unborn child.

Natalie delivered first. Dr. MacDonald tried everything to save her—an endotracheal tube to assist her breathing, injections of anticonvulsants—but soaring blood pressure and convulsions led to a massive cerebral hemorrhage that killed her.

When she left the delivery room and stepped into the hallway to hear Beezo more clearly, intuition told her to carry me with her, bundled in the thin blanket.

Lois made a fatal mistake. Against Charlene’s advice, she moved toward the closed door to the waiting room, believing that the sight of his infant son would quench Beezo’s hot anger and ameliorate the intense grief from which his rage had flared.

She retreated with me along the maternity ward’s internal hall to the neonatal care unit. As that door was swinging shut behind us, she heard the gunshot that killed Dr. MacDonald.

With the threat removed, she returned to the delivery room just as Dad’s thoughts were flashing from the Lindbergh baby tragedy to Rumpelstiltskin to Tarzan raised by apes, in time to assure him that I had not been kidnapped by a homicidal clown.

“Syndactyly,” Dad said.

My father only repeated, “Syndactyly,” as he gently, lovingly, and with amazement fingered my fused toes.

4

My family has never had an interest in sports.

Over the years, I have grown from twenty inches to six feet. My weight has increased from eight pounds ten ounces to one hundred eighty-eight pounds, which should prove my contention that I am at most husky, not as large as I appear to be to most people.

As I make these tape recordings with the hope that I may survive to transcribe and edit them, I have lived through four of the five terrible days about which Grandpa Josef warned my father. They were terrible both in the same and in different ways, each day filled with the unexpected and with terror, some marked by tragedy, but they were days filled with much else, as well. Much else.

Nevertheless, as the first of those five days relentlessly approached—Thursday, September 15, 1994—we worried.

Our worry was kept somewhat in check by the fact that Grandpa Josef had given Dad five “terrible days” in my life, not just one. Obviously, regardless of how grim September 15 might be, I would not die on that day.

And so, less than six weeks after my twentieth birthday, came the first of my five ordeals….

PART TWO

For perhaps an hour, we were silent, immersed in our various pursuits, and then Mom said, “Sometimes I worry that we’re becoming the Addams family.”

By 9:00 A.M., after more than the usual day’s-end hugs, we went to our bedrooms and hid beneath the sheets.

Less than half the day remained, only ten and a half hours until midnight.

6

In those days I owned a seven-year-old Dodge Daytona Shelby Z. Other than my mother and grandmother, I’d not yet met a woman I could love as much as I loved that sporty little coupe.

Founded in 1872 with gold-mining and railroad money, much of Snow Village is an alfresco museum of Victorian architecture, especially on the town square, where an active preservation society has been most successful.

As long as I had not ventured out of the house, the comfort of home and the courage of family had insulated me from fear. Now I felt exposed, vulnerable, targeted.

I couldn’t understand how I had so completely given myself to an irrational fear. Being shot by a sniper was no more likely than being abducted by extraterrestrials.

Our town isn’t named after the form in which most of its annual precipitation falls. It honors instead the railroad-and-mining magnate whose pre-income-tax fortune founded it: Cornelius Rutherford Snow.

I’d known Lionel Davis forever. He’d made a life of books to the same extent that I had made a life of baking. He was warm-hearted, kind, with enthusiasms ranging from Egyptian history to hard-boiled detective novels.

The handsome fellow with the porcelain-white teeth had already decided on a course of action the moment I entered. First, he shot Lionel Davis in the head.

7

“Lionel Davis. He had a name, you know. He had a life, friends, he was somebody.”

Fear of the unknown is the most purely distilled and potent terror.

He smiled and shrugged. “I wouldn’t have shot him if you hadn’t come in.”

“I might have shot you instead,” he said, “but having met you earlier in the street, I figured you’d be more interesting company than a boring old librarian.” “What do you need a hostage for?” “In case things go wrong.”

A young woman, a stranger to me, entered with a stack of books. She was prettier than a gâteau à l’orange with chocolate-butter icing decorated with candied orange peel and cherries.

I wouldn’t be able to endure seeing her shot, not her.

8

She was so dangerously appealing to the eye that under other circumstances, she could have reduced any guy to his most deeply stupid state of desire. Already, however, I found myself more interested in what she had to say than I was in her figure, more fascinated by her chutzpah than by her radiant face.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “Lorrie.” “Lorrie what?” “Lorrie Lynn Hicks,” she said. “And you are?”

“I’ve already killed the librarian,” he told her, as if murder were a resumé enhancement.

I cleared my throat. “My name is James.” “Hi, Jimmy,” she said, and though she smiled, I saw in her eyes a terrible sadness and desperate calculation. “Go stand beside him,” the maniac ordered.

9

The maniac prowled the archives and took what he wanted to a study table. He handled the yellowing newsprint with no more consideration for its preservation than he would have shown for the most current edition of USA Today.

This was adolescent wish fulfillment of the purest kind: being told by a beautiful woman that you have dangerous eyes.

“I’m not a pessimist. I’m a realist.” She sighed. “That’s what every pessimist says.” “You’ll see,” I said lamely. “I’m not a pessimist.”

“Stop his heart? Of course not. Second best would be to go for the neck, sever the carotid artery. First choice would be to put out an eye.” She looked like a dream and talked like a nightmare.

She frowned. “Keep your voice down. I’m a dance instructor.” “And teaching ballet prepares you to put out a man’s eye?”

Her stubborn resistance to terror scared me because it seemed so reckless, so irrational—and yet I loved her for it.

Whidding through me, like the spirit of Death’s black horse, came a premonition that she would be shot.