Quicksilver

by Dean Koontz

Instead, the napkin fell out of her hands, and she went as still as if she’d been flash frozen, and her gaze fixed on something as distant as a moon of Saturn. Although Sparky didn’t put down his slider, he lowered it from his mouth without taking another bite. He said, “Uh-oh.” I didn’t ask, Uh-oh what? My brain had already downloaded too many weird and scary events for one day. Yeah, I had more storage capacity, but I wasn’t going to solicit additional freaky data. After maybe twenty seconds, Bridget unfroze. Her expression remained grim, but her stare shifted several million miles to her grandfather. “They’re going to kill a lot of people.” I didn’t ask, but Sparky seemed to think I had, so he said, “She means the Screamers.” “They’re heavily armed,” she said. “They’re waiting. As the dinner hour peaks and the restaurant gets full, they’re going to open fire. It’ll be a massacre.” We lived in a strange, dark time. Massacres were growing more common, and not all of them involved guns. Sometimes the weapon of choice was a bomb, sometimes Molotov cocktails thrown into a crowded church or synagogue. Now and then an airplane was flown into a building or a train of tanker cars was intentionally derailed and several square blocks of a town were set afire by the spilled petroleum. More often than not the perpetrators claimed a just and noble cause. Throughout history, whole societies that seemed stable have imploded when self-righteous narcissists, enflamed by insane ideologies...