Quicksilver

by Dean Koontz

“When did you end up in their sights?” “The day before yesterday,” Sparky said from the back seat. “We had a nice little house on five acres of pine forest in Flagstaff.”

Bridget sighed. “The property outside Flagstaff was our little paradise.” “Then the day before yesterday,” Sparky said, “Bridget and I were having breakfast when two black Suburbans pulled into our driveway, and eight men in black suits got out.”

“We just put down the automated window shades, so they couldn’t see into the house. They called our landline and told me they had a warrant. I said I wasn’t impressed with warrants when their kind have so many corrupt judges in their pocket. They were a little miffed at that, so I said maybe I’d open up for them if I knew what this was about, and the guy on the phone said they had some questions related to what Bridget ordered on the internet, which was when I knew we were in the soup.”

Sparky was silent for a long moment, and then he revealed that the Rainkings were not your typical family next door. “When I didn’t let those bad boys in, they started shouting through a bullhorn. They were rude. They threatened to break down the door if we didn’t disarm and come out. It would have been fun to watch them try. The front and back doors had a quarter-inch plate of steel sandwiched between layers of wood, and they were set in a steel frame with high and low deadbolts two inches long. So unless those fancy-dressed fascists could get a motorized battering ram, they were going to be a long time knocking it down. They might have been able to shoot out a window, but that would’ve taken a while, because the bulletproof glass would withstand everything but high-caliber armor-piercing rounds, not the kind of ammo in their sidearms. While they were jabbering their threats, Bridget and I went to the cellar, into the walk-in wine cooler, cycled open the secret door, and vamoosed into the escape tunnel.” I thought my amazement gland had been previously squeezed dry for at least a week, but I was wrong. “Wow. If the Dirty Harry Clean Now delivery van hadn’t been in the alley behind the diner, I’d be locked up in a prison for the criminally unique. I got through on luck. But you had bulletproof glass, a secret door, and an escape tunnel. Are you survivalists or something?” “No, no, no. Nothing silly like that,” Bridget said. “We stay as real as a stick in the eye. But Grand...

From the back seat, Sparky said, “She spit in a cup.” Because she didn’t seem like that kind of woman, I said with some skepticism, “You spit in a cup? Whose cup?” “My cup. It had a little screw top. It came with the kit after I signed up on the internet.” She was right. I had spit in one, too. “I spit in one, too,” I said, feeling connected to her by that ritual, hoping she would feel closer to me, feel a bond, even if it had to do with spit. “You spat in one,” she said. “My cup was from Getting to Know Me dot com.” “Mine, too!” Getting to Know Me was a competitor of Ancestry.com and of 23andMe. They read your genome and told you all about yourself: where you came from, who was a relative and who wasn’t, whether you had a tendency to develop a horrible disease, all kinds of useful stuff. Bridget said, “I wanted to learn who my father might’ve been.” “I was abandoned as an infant,” I reminded them. “I have no idea who either of my parents are. I was raised by nuns in an orphanage. But why should the ISA come down hard on us for wanting to know our ancestry? We have a right to know. What business is it of the government if we want to know?” “Did you get your genome report?” Sparky asked. “No. Not yet.” “Neither did I,” Bridget said. “But the company sent it to the ISA. Those two suits you killed at the ranch—they explained the situation to us. I’m sure you were targeted for the same reason.” “What reason?” When she turned those sea-green eyes on me, the instrument-panel lig...

8

“Do you like girls?” “Well, of course. Everyone I dated was a girl. It’s just that most girls these days—most guys, too—they’re about social media and what they saw on YouTube and what the influencers say about everything. I just don’t have much in common with most of them.” “You and Bridget have a lot in common. Wanted by government thugs, on the run, maybe alien DNA. Don’t you like her?” “Of course I like her. What’s not to like? I love her attitude. And she’s funny, witty.” “That’s it? Funny, witty, attitude?” “I’m talking to her grandfather.” “You’re blushing,” he said. “That’s sweet.” “Okay, all right, she’s a goddess. She’s so dazzling that I could maybe go blind looking at her.” He smiled broadly. “That’s better. That’s more like it.” “But we’ve hardly just met, and I don’t think she likes me.” “Of course she likes you. She’s been waiting two years for you to show up.” “What’re you talking about?” “She knew you’d have blue eyes and that you’d save her life with a car somehow, although she thought you’d be a lot taller and driving a Porsche rather than a Toyota.” “I’m not short,” I said. “I’m five eleven.” “Don’t fret about it,” Sparky said. “She’s five six, so you’re plenty tall enough.”

“Sparky and Jeanette couldn’t have children, so they adopted Corrine when she was four. Apparently Corrine’s mother either drank a lot or did drugs during her pregnancy, so Corrine was never right. She was a problem as a child, more of a problem as an adult. Very pretty. I have photos of her. But a week after I was born, she gave me to Sparky, and she split. He never saw her again. He reported her missing, but the authorities couldn’t find a trace of her. Neither could any of the three private detectives that Grandpa hired to chase her down during the first two years after she left. It was like she walked out of this world into another.”

Unfolding her napkin and smoothing it on her lap, Bridget said, “But I think Grandpa was torn up by it. In spite of all the trouble Corrine had been, he loved her. And he’d lost Jeanette to cancer not long before all this.” “He was so lucky to have you,” I said. “Having you would have made all the difference, such a blessing.” I heard myself again and said, “I mean, a widower with a thankless daughter—he needed someone to give him a sense of purpose.”

After Darlene departed with the promise to be back in ten, Sparky said, “So have you kids been hitting it off?” I said, “I’m sorry about Jeanette and Corrine.” “Well,” he said, “you can either do the wrong thing and let a loss like that destroy you, or you can do the right thing and be properly grateful for all that came before the loss. Grief should drive you to your knees, but if you stay there forever, you’re saying you know better than God how the world should work. And you don’t.” He looked at Bridget. “So he’s five feet eleven. Is that okay with you?” She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed affectionately. “He’s just right, Grandpa. Actually, I worried that he might be as tall as a basketball star, and people would stare at us everywhere we went.” She smiled at me. “I take it that Grandpa told you I’ve been expecting you for two years.”

9

These beasts were like menacing presences from those disturbing dreams that have their origins in generations long before our own, those dreams that boil up from the primordiality of our creation. They moved through the restaurant and settled into the booth near the entrance to the kitchen. They lacked anything that could be called a face. Screamer alert, Bridget had told her grandfather. I understood why she would call them Screamers. These things seemed to be perpetually straining to scream, although no sound escaped them. Where a face should have been, there were no apparent eyes or ears or nose, but only a pale-lipped mouth fixed open wide, as circular as a drain, like the mouth of a hookworm. At a distance, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that a repulsive organ slithered continuously within those disgusting orifices, as though they were greedy for sustenance.

Instead of explaining, she said, “Maybe they’re from another world, another dimension, another time. Whatever they are, my sense is they’re nothing new, that they’ve been among us for a long time.”

It is human nature to know we die and still to disbelieve it; otherwise, we might not carry on.

When Darlene left us to our meal, I said, “Screamers, huh?” “It isn’t just the open maw,” Bridget said. “First time I saw one, I thought of that painting, The Scream. These creatures terrify me, but I also think there’s something despairing about them. If a scream ever came out of one, it would be a howl of hatred but also of blackest insanity, like an entire asylum full of mad voices all shrieking at once.”

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...

I said, “What—you had a vision?” “I don’t have visions. It was a presentiment. A feeling, an impression. But pretty specific.” She pushed the empty plate aside and slid one of the fresh orders in front of herself. “We’ve got time to enjoy these, but we’ll have to split before we can tackle the banana cream pie.” As Sparky tucked into his food again, I said, “But.” “Yes, dear?” Bridget said. “But shouldn’t we call the police?” “That won’t do any good,” she said. “They’ll think it’s a crank call. And the minute they show up, the Screamers will open fire.” “Then shouldn’t we warn these people?” Sparky said, “Same situation, son. We’d only be precipitating the massacre. The moment we shout a warning, the Screamers will start blasting away.” “But.” “What is it, dear?” Bridget asked, though her mouth was full. “We can’t just walk out and let people die.” “Of course we can’t,” said Sparky. “Then what are we going to do?” I asked. “Kill the Screamers,” Bridget said. “They can be killed?” “Of course they can,” she said. “We’ve done it before.” “The incident,” I surmised. “There you go,” Sparky said.

10

As they reached the empty table toward which they had been headed, Bridget let go of the hostess and covered the last few steps to the booth beside the kitchen entrance. Sparky had been following her, but as she closed in on the Screamers, he quickly moved up to her side, drawing the pistol from under his coat as she drew hers from her handbag. One of the college boys slash monsters reached into the checkered tote on the banquette beside him and withdrew a pistol with an extended magazine that held maybe twenty rounds, and the other began to pull aside a panel of his topcoat to draw a weapon, but they were too late. The point-blank fusillade that Bridget and Sparky unloaded on the pair caused a sensation in the restaurant. Dishes and flatware rang off the floor, toppled chairs clattered, shrill cries erupted as people dived for cover or fled toward the nearest exit. Such is the temper of our strange times that the reaction was instantaneous and universal, as though everyone present had been anticipating such a moment for years.

I thought we’d never make it around the building to the parking lot without pursuit, would never make it to the Buick without being apprehended by truck-stop security. I was wrong. Sparky took the keys from me and said he would drive, and Bridget meant to ride up front. I plunged into the back seat and pulled the door shut and lay gasping for breath, at first staying below the windows lest more Screamers were in the vicinity and would open fire on us.

BACK IN THE DAY

THE BOY, THE FATHER, THE ANTS

Perhaps beginning with ants, I came to realize that everything in the world, regardless of how humble it might seem to be, is more complex and fascinating than it at first appears.

PART 2

DIRTY MONEY, ATTACK DOGS AND SPURTLES

11

12

As we passed the town of Cortaro, on the outskirts of Tucson, Bridget broke our mutual silence when she said, “Well, if my father came down out of the stars, I hope he was Luke Skywalker rather than Jabba the Hutt.”

13

“Guardians?” I said. The word unsettled me no less than had being scrutinized by the Screamer. “Guardians of what?” The traffic light changed to green, and Bridget motored on. When neither she nor Sparky answered my question, I repeated it. “Guardians of what?” “Maybe of everything,” she said. “‘Everything’ as in . . . ?” “Everything as in everything,” she said. “Now isn’t the time to discuss our theory of all this, Quinn.” “When will it be time?” “It’ll be time when it’s time, sweetheart.” “When will I know it’s time?” “When I tell you.” “That’s what I thought you’d say.” She smiled at me. “Maybe you’re becoming psychic yourself.” After we traveled awhile in silence, I said, “‘Guardians’ sounds like a full-time lifetime job. Maybe we’re not guardians. Maybe instead we’re just being sent on a quest.” “We’re guardians,” Bridget said.

14

“It’s down there,” Bridget said. “What is?” “What we need.” “It’s been a hard day. What I need is sleep. I’m not going to sleep down there.” Descending the stairs, she said, “The night is young, Quinn. It’s not even nine o’clock yet.”

I followed her down the stairs.

She went to the largest stack of trash, which was against the back wall, and she began to move item after item aside. “This is crazy,” I said. “They pile the trash highest in front of the thing they need to conceal.”

We uncovered a manhole-like cover, the bolted-down lid of a sump-pump pit. I viewed this as a disappointment, but Bridget was pleased. “It appears to be bolted in place, but it isn’t. They always want to get at a stash quickly if need be.” From among the items we’d moved out of the way, she retrieved a crowbar that had seemed like just more junk but that had in fact been left among the trash for exactly the purpose to which she put it. As she inserted the pry blade under the rim of the cast-iron cover, I said, “I can do that.” “So can I,” she said cheerily, and quickly levered the heavy lid out of the hole and to one side. In the pit was a thick mass of white fabric, which she pulled out and put to one side. “Fireproofing.” The sump pump had been removed and the pit expanded. The walls were of mortared firebrick. She directed the beam of the flashlight into the depository, revealing three duffel bags. After getting on my knees, I reached into the hole and withdrew one of the large canvas sacks. It was very heavy. Bridget zippered open the duffel and withdrew tight rolls of currency. “Hundreds and twenties. At least three hundred thousand.” “Drug money,” I said. “Dirty money.” “So we steal it and do good with it. Your nuns would approve.” “I’m not so sure. Why is it here, so much money, three bags?” “These gangs make hundreds of millions a year. Maybe they can use some banks in the third world, but they don’t really trust any institution that would deal with them. Anyway, i...

She hurried up the stairs, and I followed close behind, out of the stench that lay like a heavy fog below. When we stepped into the ground-floor hallway, the German shepherd attack dog growled and bared teeth that a vampire would have envied.

15

“Are they Screamers?” I asked. “Who?” Bridget wondered. “MS-13, other drug gangs like them.” “Could be, but probably not,” she said. Sparky said, “There are plenty of real people who’re eager to make a buck corrupting others with drugs. The wormheads don’t bother with stuff like that. They seem to have a unique agenda.”

“He’s an attack dog,” I said. Winston leaned against me and licked my neck. I said, “He could kill with his breath.” “Those creeps haven’t taken care of him,” Bridget said. “We’ll take him to a veterinarian as soon as we can, get him a bath, a teeth cleaning, make sure he has all his shots.” “We’re on the run for our lives,” I reminded her. “That doesn’t mean we won’t bathe and brush our teeth, Quinn.” “So you’re keeping him?” She looked back at me and smiled. “I’m keeping you, aren’t I?”

16

“So the peacemakers were bomb makers.” “A lot of people these days are the opposite of what they say they are, and a lot of them probably don’t even realize it. They’re opposed to racism even as they act like racists. They’re opposed to fascism, even as they act like fascists. The world’s gone weird.” “On the other hand, if you blow someone up, they rest in peace thereafter, so then you would be sort of a peacemaker. What happened in the bomb factory?” “We had an altercation.” “Which evidently you didn’t lose.” “We’re always prepared for trouble. It’s why we don’t fly, we do road trips instead.” “You always go everywhere with guns?” “Well, only since I was fifteen and Mr. Scuttler followed us home on parent-teacher night, clubbed Grandpa, and tried to rape me prior to killing us both.” I felt increasingly that I, an orphan abandoned at birth, had been so sheltered that I needed to apologize for having had such a cushy life to date. “Who was Mr. Scuttler?” “My English teacher. After that, I was homeschooled.” “Good idea. What happened to Mr. Scuttler?” “I held him off with a battery-powered carving knife until Grandpa pounded him silly with the debate-club gavel.” “Gavel?” “You know, a wooden mallet like a judge needs in a courtroom. Mr. Scuttler was adviser to the student debate club. He’d brought the gavel as a weapon.” “You said Sparky had been clubbed.” “Yes, with the gavel. This may sound odd, but it’s extremely difficult to knock Grandpa out. And even if he’s unconsci...

“Leave the talking to me,” Bridget said as she pressed the doorbell button. “Absolutely,” I agreed. The guy who answered the bell filled the open doorway from jamb to jamb and threshold to lintel. He must have been six feet five, at least two hundred sixty or seventy pounds, with the broad chest of a grizzly bear, the shoulders of an ox, and a neck thicker than the neck of any creature that Nature had otherwise ever produced. He was about fifty, with a shaved head, eyes as fiercely blue as a natural-gas explosion, and a thick salt-and-pepper mustache. His arms were so powerful that they would have made a young Arnold Schwarzenegger tremble with respect, his hands so big that he might have been able to strangle me with just a thumb and forefinger. He wore black engineer boots, blue jeans, and a black T-shirt emblazoned with a single word in white block letters—DON’T. Bridget said, “Mr. Butch Hammer, I presume?” His teeth were as white and even as piano keys when he smiled and said, “Yes, ma’am. And to whom might I be speaking on this fine May evening?” I expected her to invent new identities for us, but she said, “I’m Bridget Rainking. This is Quinn Quicksilver, an orphan who never knew the parents who saddled him with that name. Quinn is my fiancé, although there isn’t a ring yet. We’re interested in the Ford Explorer you want to sell, but we have an unconventional offer to make.” He regarded her, smiling and nodding. Then he looked at me and seemed to decide that, if it b...

17

Bridget and I sat on the sofa. She put the container of cash between us. I said, “I always wondered what Thor’s home might look like.” “Now you know.” “Why did you use our real names?” “He would have known if I didn’t, and he wouldn’t have bothered further with us.” “How would he have known you were lying?” “Because of who he is, what he is.” “What do you mean? What is he?” “I don’t know. He’s not one of us, and he’s not a Screamer, but he’s something.” “Something?” “Yes. There’s a secret war they never cover on the news. You and I and Grandpa and probably a lot of other people are on one side of it, and the wormheads are on the other side. And then there are people you meet, like Butch and Cressie, who seem to suspect the truth of the world but have no proof of it. They’re . . . righteous. They’re persuadable, and they’ll help you when you need help, if you respect them, if they know you’re telling the truth.”

Finally, Butch said, “So, the Explorer. I completely rebuilt that baby. She’s in tip-top condition. You’ll want to inspect her.” Bridget eased forward on the sofa. “Having gotten to know you, we’ll take your word for it. We have an unconventional offer.” “So you said earlier. I’m intrigued.” “We have an old Buick to trade. We don’t want anything for it.” “I like the deal so far,” Butch said. “We want you to dismantle it for parts or take it to a salvage yard and have it squashed into a cube, so no one will ever find it.” “So whoever’s looking for it,” Cressie said, “will continue to look for it.” “Yes, ma’am.”

“Even considering the risk factor, seventy-five thousand is too much,” Butch said. “On the run like you are, you need all the money you can get. Let’s split it at thirty-seven five.” Indicating the photographs of the Hammer kids, Bridget said, “All that education must have cost a fortune.” “They all got scholarships,” Cressie said. “But there were a slew of other bills.” “And one of them still in school,” Bridget said. “We can get money any time we need it, dirty money that we’ll make clean. Hard times might be coming for this country. Very hard. Take the seventy-five. It’s our final offer.” Reluctantly, the Hammers accepted it. When we said goodbye to Cressie and stepped outside with Butch Hammer, he said, “Time was that Tucson seemed far away from all the capitals of crazy in this world, but maybe nowhere’s far away anymore.” He drove the Explorer into the Quonset hut, and we brought the Buick in after him. Out of sight of the street, we transferred the license plate to the Ford.

18

This will sound weird, but I suppose no more so than everything that I have written to this point: I didn’t know myself anymore, and I found the new me a little scary. During the course of the day, I’d become a stranger to myself, a different person from the guy who had gotten out of bed to go to work at Arizona! magazine the previous morning. The path to the future that I long envisioned had withered away in the wild woods of recent experience, and I was unable to imagine where this new path might lead. I had killed two federal agents with a car, albeit in self-defense. I was on the run. I was engaged to be married. Sort of. I could see monsters. The world had not changed; however, my understanding of it had undergone a most radical revision, which in turn revised me. I was unsettled by the thought that I was destined to become a warrior. I didn’t see myself as a warrior. I didn’t want to be a warrior. I just wanted to avoid diarrhea, enjoy the health benefits of copper-infused underwear, and have my own little kitchen with a collection of spurtles. However, the mysterious forces at work in my life might give me no choice in the matter. I might have to become a warrior or die. Of course, if I became a warrior, I would almost surely die, because the role did not suit me.

Whatever else the vision might have been, it was an orientation film aimed at the new recruit—me—as well as a call to duty and an urgent warning that the secret war could soon erupt into conflict on a greater scale, perhaps evolving into Armageddon. My sense was that if I didn’t answer the call to battle, the war would come to me anyway. This was a matter of destiny. If I gave destiny the finger and walked away, that wouldn’t be the end of it. What would have happened would still happen. The malevolent beings that I’d had a chance to stand up against would crush me without resistance. That was how fate worked. It wasn’t pretty. I had no desire to pull the sword Excalibur from the stone, but if I didn’t, the stone and the sword would roll downhill and flatten me.

Sparky and I asked each other how we’d slept—like a stone in my case, like a baby in his case, both of us lying. Bridget said nothing at first, watching me intently as I loaded my suitcase along with their luggage and closed the tailgate. Then, as her grandfather went around to the driver’s door, she said quietly, “Bad dream?” “No. I just didn’t like what I saw in the mirror this morning.” “You too, huh?” Surprised, assuming that she had the same experience, I said, “What was that?” “Orientation. To let us know what our enemies want. The world as the Screamers and their acolytes will make it if given a chance.” “Acolytes?” “We have people like Butch and Cressida Hammer, and Grandpa. On the other side are fools who think a world of pure materialism will be a utopia. The Screamers will give them the world they want, a world of absolute indulgence—and rule it. Too late, they’ll realize their utopia is in fact an empire of suffering and death.” Sparky started the Explorer. “What you saw—you’re hiding it from your grandfather?” “Sparing him from it,” she corrected. “Why? He’s not a delicate flower.” She put her arms around me and held me very tight, and I held her, and she was silent for a moment before she said, “As I endured that . . . whatever that was this morning, I had a presentiment, a strong one. Not all of us are going to survive what lies ahead.”