Free Odd Interlude by Dean Koontz Page B

possess these people to force them to do what it wants. However many Harmonys there might be—six big houses full of them, surely no fewer than thirty, most likely forty or more—the puppeteer can alert them that they are required to guard against my escape. They will obey out of fear that it will flip from one to another of them, disfiguring or killing at random to punish the slightest thought of rebellion. If they love one another,none will flee and allow an unknown number of others to be killed as revenge for he who escapes. Freedom at that price isn’t freedom at all, but instead an endless highway of guilt from which perhaps there is no exit but suicide.
    They will hunt me down, and I will have to escape with Annamaria or kill them all. I can’t bear to kill so many, or even one of them. The ten-round magazine of my pistol contains only seven cartridges. But the shortage of ammunition isn’t what prevents me from shooting my way out of the Corner. My past and my future constrain me. By past I mean my losses, and by future I mean the hope of regaining what has been lost.
    With dawn mere minutes away, I can imagine no certain hiding place once morning light floods down through the hills. I need to hide because I need time to think. Before I know what I’m doing, I find myself running across the dark lawn and to the rutted track littered with broken shells.
    In the absence of the moon, the ocean is as black as oil and the foam in the breaking surf is now the fungal gray of soap suds in which dirty hands have been washed and washed again. The beach lies starlit, and although the galactic whorls overhead contain as many suns as any shore has grains of sand, this strand is as dim as badly tarnished silver, for our Earth is remote, rotating far from the stars and farther every night.
    As I reach the end of the unpaved track, underfootthe shell fragments slide with a sound like the scattered coins of a pirate treasure, and suddenly she rushes past me, having followed me from the house. Without the moon to honor it, her flag of hair is less bright than before, but she is certainly the blond child whom I glimpsed previously, Jolie, daughter of Ardys. If earlier she followed me to the house and then listened to my conversation with her mother on the porch, that explains why, as she passes, she speaks to me as if I am her confirmed conspirator: “Follow me! Hurry!”

Seven
    Jolie is a shadow but as quick as light, and although she gets well ahead of me, she stops to wait at the mouth of the big culvert.
    As I arrive there, I hear a man shout not from the beach behind me but perhaps from the houses that stand ten feet above the sea, and another man answers him. Their words are distorted by distance and by being filtered through the sounds of my drumming heart and my rapid breathing, but the meaning of them is nonetheless clear. Those men are in the hunt.
    I hear also the engine of some vehicle, perhaps an SUV or a large pickup. From somewhere above and inland, light flares, fades, swells again, and sweepsacross the top of the embankment, over our heads, moving north to south. A searchlight. Mounted on a vehicle.
    The puppetmaster can marshal its army with shocking speed, because it needs no telephone. And perhaps it doesn’t have to possess its subjects one by one to convey the threat that I pose. Maybe it is able to broadcast an instruction to all of them simultaneously, which they are not compelled to obey—as they are compelled when their oppressor enters intimately into one of them—but which they obey nevertheless because the consequences of disobedience are so dire.
    Jolie says, “Hold tight to me. We can’t risk a light for a while, and the way is very dark.”
    Her hand is small and delicate in mine, but strong.
    We push through the overhanging vines. They are cold ropy creepers that conjure in my mind the strange image of dead snakes dangling from the head of a lifeless Medusa.
    As before, the drainage tunnel is