Free Final Hour (Novella) by Dean Koontz Page B

families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
    He was right, if by “happy families” he meant families in which all the members are dead but for one.
    They are all dead now: Mother, Father, and the greedy bitch-slut-pig sister.
    Undine has wanted them all dead since she was ten. She has a secret stash of drawings and paintings that depict them mutilated and dead in many grotesque positions and conditions.
    Twenty years of drawing them dead, wanting them dead. Patience pays off.
    She might call this a miracle if she believed in miracles, but she doesn’t believe in anything except herself. And money.
    The sexy but perhaps stupid white boy and his sexy but mongrel girlfriend look down in shocked disbelief at Ursula’s drilled body, which has slid off the blood-spattered chair and onto the floor.
    “Who the hell are you?” Undine asks.
    Staring at the corpse, they seem to have forgotten who they are.
    “Are you friends of that thieving pig?”
    “Does it appear like we were friends?” the boy asks.
    “I don’t know what it appears like. What’re you doing here?”
    The boy looks at the girl. The girl looks at the boy.
    “We were just following her,” the boy says at last.
    “Why?”
    The girl shrugs. “Why not?”
    They are both staring at the corpse again, still stunned.
    “So you were up to some kind of no good,” Undine says.
    The boy says, “It was just something to do.”
    “Following her was just something to do?”
    “Yeah.”
    Maybe for the moment it doesn’t matter who they are.
    A slight vertigo afflicts Undine. She wills herself to be steady. She is two twins in one now. She has the strength of two.
    “I need your help,” she says.
    They turn their full attention to her, bewildered but beginning to recognize the consequences of this event.
    The girl lost her pepper spray in the tussle with Ursula.
    The boy still has a little canister. Undine tells him to drop it, he hesitates, she thrusts the pistol toward him, and he drops the pepper spray on the floor.
    The black Labrador is slinking quietly to Undine’s right, no doubt with heroic intentions.
    “I’ll shoot your dog dead if you don’t control him.”
    “Here, Bob,” the girl says. “Here,
now.
”
    Reluctantly, the dog returns to her and sits at her side.
    Undine says, “What kind of name is Bob for a dog? Why not Blackie or Midnight or Ebony?”
    “Bob suits him best,” the girl says.
    “Bob is a stupid name for a dog,” Undine insists. She is, after all, a poet. She knows a thing or two about names and words and the way they resonate. “What’s
your
name?”
    “Makani.”
    “Is that a name? What kind of name is that?”
    “Hawaiian.”
    “
Hawaiian.
Jeez. Everyone wants to be exotic these days.”
    When asked, the boy says his name is Pogo, and Undine says that would be a better name for the dog, and then for half a minute or so, none of them seems to know what to say next.
    Undine breaks the silence. “I’m too weak to do what needs to be done all by myself. Help me, and I’ll make you rich.”
    The two look at each other, making whatever feeble calculations pass for their thinking.
    Their names are so improbable that Undine has already forgotten them and remembers only Bob.
    A little vertigo again. Less than before. She has the strength of two. She steadies her world.
    A line from Shakespeare reminds her of the stakes:
Some o’ their plants are ill-rooted already; the least wind i’ the world will blow them down.
    Undine is not only a poet who knows a lot of Shakespeare; she is also deeply rooted, safe from all winds.
    The girl says, “How rich will you make us?”
    “A million dollars each. In cash.”
    “You have that kind of money?” the boy asks.
    “I will. The fat bitch finagled our egg-sucking, shit-for-brains father into leaving it all to her, with just an allowance for me.”
    “She wasn’t fat,” the boy says.
    “She’s fat compared to me right now, the jealous little