Free Final Hour (Novella) by Dean Koontz Page A

hand, clattered across the concrete.
    Makani moved fast and kicked the pistol farther from the woman’s reach.
    When the blonde looked up, her expression was demented in a most peculiar way, so that she appeared almost to be a child again, furious that her dignity had been assaulted and that she had been denied something she wanted, as if she had never been denied before.
    Makani pressed the firing mechanism on the canister of pepper spray, and the one-second stream spattered Ursula’s eyes, her nose, eliciting from her a shriek of pain and fury.
    When in an instant her pupils contracted, when at once her vision blurred, when the cold fluorescent light became a blinding whiteness, when she could not draw a breath that didn’t burn, Ursula should have collapsed in defeat, but she did not. Her rage was that of a wounded boar, her energy demonic, and she scrambled toward the pistol with an uncanny instinct for its location.
    Makani dropped upon the crazed woman, pinning her against the floor, reading in her a desire to
kill, kill, kill.
She seized a fistful of thick golden hair, twisted it ruthlessly. Into Ursula’s screams of outrage, Makani shouted,
“Be still, damn you!”
Cursing, spitting, the blonde tried to heave her off, thrashed and squirmed.
    Riding the widow of Proctor Norquist as if taking on a storm wave, Makani amazed herself as she pushed the woman’s face to the floor and twisted the fistful of hair again, twisted and pulled with brutal intent, with the consequence that her adversary’s power to resist quickly diminished. From her earliest days on Oahu, she had been a tomboy; until this moment, however, she hadn’t known that, confronted by a wild and evil hellcat, she could play a game of tough cop with some authority.
    * * *
    The brave dog leaped, Makani followed through as if she’d taken down a thousand nasty perps before, and Pogo stood astonished for a moment, feeling as if he were a useless goob, one of those gutless ducks, one of those wish-was surfers who floated in the lineup with everyone else but never rose on his board to ride a wave.
    He saw the gun fly out of Ursula’s grasp. He saw light winking off the little key as it arced onto the dirty mattress, and saw the starving sister break into tears at the sight of it.
    “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she exclaimed, snatching up the key with hands shaking so badly that she kept dropping it.
    Pogo bent down, seized Ursula by one arm, and held her cruelly tight, giving Makani a chance to climb off the woman. The blonde wheezed and coughed, choked on the air that she so urgently inhaled. Even secondhand, he found the super-hot pepper fumes distressing. She probably felt as if she were suffocating, though she wasn’t. Every effect of pepper spray was temporary; there would be no permanent damage from it.
    Together, he and Makani dragged her to her feet and forced her onto the chair beside the picnic cooler. “You make so much as half of one wrong move,” Pogo warned her, “and I’ll empty this entire canister in your face. You hear me?” When Ursula only wheezed and blew her nose into her hand, he said again,
“You hear me?”
She said she did, she heard him. In a voice cracked and raw with hot-pepper fumes, she choked out a series of expletives that defined him as one part of the human anatomy after another, both male and female; she showed no gender prejudice in her choice of words.
    When Makani turned away from Ursula to retrieve the pistol, the imprisoned but now freed twin sister had already plucked the weapon from the floor and stood with it in a two-hand grip. Although weak and shaky, Undine proved to be an excellent shot, at least at that close range, when she pumped two rounds into Ursula’s perfect chest, killing her instantly.

11
Happy Families Are All Alike
    Undine never imagined she could be this happy.
    She is famished, starving,
aching
for food, but she is no less ecstatic because of her hunger.
    Tolstoy once said,
Happy