Free Seize the Night by Dean Koontz Page A

there,” Bobby said at once.
    “Cool.”
    “Where’s
there?”
    Wings thrummed, and another bird or possibly two joined the one already roosting in the laurel.
    “Dead Town,” I told him.
    “Oh, man. You never listen.”
    “I’m a bad boy. Come in by the river.”
    “The river?”
    “There’s a Suburban parked there. Belongs to a mondo psycho, so be careful. The fence is cut.”
    “Do I have to creep or can I strut?”
    “Sneaky doesn’t matter anymore. Just watch your ass.”
    “Dead Town,” he said disgustedly. “What am I going to do with you, young man?”
    “No TV for a month?”
    “Kak,” he called me again. “Where in D Town?”
    “Meet me at the movies.”
    He didn’t know Wyvern a fraction as well as I did, but he would be able to find the movie theater in the commercial area adjacent to the abandoned houses. As a teenager, not yet so religiously devoted to the seashore that it had become his monastery, he had for a while dated a military brat who lived on-base with her parents.
    Bobby said, “We’ll find them, bro.”
    I was on a perilous emotional ledge. The threat of my own death troubles me far less than you might expect, because from the earliest days of childhood, I’ve lived with an awareness of my mortality that is both more acute and more chronic than what most people experience; but I’m crushed flat by the loss of someone I love. Grief is sharper than the tools of any torturer, and even the prospect of such a loss now seemed to have severed my vocal cords.
    “Hang loose,” Bobby said.
    “I’m just about untied,” I said thinly.
    “That’s too loose.”
    He hung up and so did I.
    More wings beat a tattoo through the dark air, and feathers rattled leaves as another bird settled with the growing flock in the upper branches of the laurel.
    None of them had yet raised a voice. The cry of the nighthawk, as it jinks through the air, snapping insects in its sharp beak, is a distinctive
peent-peent-peent
. The nightingale sings in lengthy performances, weaving harsh and sweet piping notes into enchanting phrases. Even an owl, mostly taciturn lest it alarm the rodents on which it feeds, hoots now and then to please itself or to assert its continued citizenship in the community of owls.
    The quiet of these birds was eerie and disturbing, not because I believed they were gathering to peck me to pieces in an homage to the Hitchcock film, but because this sounded too much like the brief but deep stillness that often settles upon the natural world in the wake of sudden violence. When a coyote catches a rabbit and snaps its spine or when a fox bites into a mouse and shakes it to death, the dying cry of the prey, even if nearly inaudible, brings a hush to the immediate area. Though Mother Nature is beautiful, generous, and comforting, she is also bloodthirsty. The never-ending holocaust over which she presides is one aspect of her that isn’t photographed for wall calendars or dwelt upon at loving length in Sierra Club publications. Every field in her domain is a killing field, so in the immediate wake of violence, her multitudinous children often fall silent, either because they have an instinctive reverence for the natural law under which they exist—or because they’re reminded of the old girl’s murderous personality and hope to avoid becoming the next object of her attention. Consequently, the mute birds worried me. I wondered if their silence was in witness to slaughter—and if the shed blood had been that of a small boy and a dog.
    Not a peep.
    I left the night shade of the Indian laurel and sought a less disturbing place, from which to make another telephone call. Except for the birds, I continued to feel that I was unobserved, yet I was suddenly uneasy about remaining in the open.
    The feathered sentinels didn’t leave their perches to pursue me. They didn’t even rustle the leaves around them.
    I was being truthful when I said that I didn’t believe they were going to