Free Shattered by Dean Koontz Page A

spaces on both sides of the highway. Initially, these crisp green vistas and the complex of irrigation pipelines that sprayed them proved moderately interesting. Before too long, however, the fields grew boringly repetitious.
        Despite his professed pessimism about the long morning which lay ahead of them, Colin was in a particularly garrulous mood, and he made their first two hours on the road pass most pleasantly and swiftly. They talked about what it would be like to live in California, talked about space travel, astronauts, science fiction, rock-and-roll, pirates, sailing ships, and Count Dracula-this last, chiefly because Colin was wearing a green-and-black Count Dracula T-shirt today, his narrow chest gruesomely decorated with a menacing fierce-eyed, fanged Christopher Lee.
        As they passed the Indiana-Illinois border, there was a lull in the conversation, at last. With Doyle's permission, Colin unbuckled his seatbelt long enough to slide forward and locate a new radio station.
        To make certain that nothing was coming up on them too fast while the boy was in such a vulnerable position on the edge of the seat, Alex looked in the rear-view mirror at the light flow of traffic on the broad throughway behind them.
        That was when he saw the Chevrolet van.
        He looked quickly away from it, looked at the road ahead.
        At first he did not want to believe what he had seen, he was sure it must be his imagination. Then he argued with himself that since there were thousands of Automovers on the roads of America, this was most likely another of them, not at all the same vehicle that had hung behind them on the first leg of the journey.
        Colin slid back onto his seat and buckled his seatbelt without argument. As he carefully smoothed down his T-shirt, he said, “Is that one okay?”
        “What one?”
        Colin tilted his head and stared curiously at Doyle. “The radio station, naturally. What else? “
        “Sure. It's fine.”
        But Alex was so distracted that he was not actually aware of what sort of music the boy had selected for them. Reluctantly he glanced at the rear-view mirror a second time.
        The Automover was still cruising in their wake, no mere figment of his overworked imagination to be lightly dismissed, hanging back there a little less than a quarter of a mile, well silhouetted in the morning sun, nevertheless darkly sinister.
        Unaccountably, Doyle thought of the service station attendant whom they had encountered near Harrisburg, and of the stout anachronism behind the desk of the Lazy Time Motel. That familiar and uncontrollable shudder, the embarrassment of his childhood which he had never fully outgrown, started in his stomach and bowels and seemed to generate, of itself, a quiet and possibly irrational fear. However, deep down inside, Doyle admitted to himself what he had been first forced to face up to more than twenty years ago: he was an unmitigated coward. His pacifism was not based on any real moral precepts, but on an abiding terror of violence. When you really thought about it, what danger did that van pose? What injury or threat of injury had it done? If it seemed sinister, the blame was in his own mind. His fear was not only irrational, it was premature and simple-minded. He had no more cause to be frightened by the Chevrolet than he had to be frightened by Chet or the woman at the Lazy Time.
        “He's back there again, isn't he?” Colin said.
        “Who?”
        “Don't play dumb with me,” the boy said.
        “Well, there is an Automover behind us.”
        “It's him, then.”
        “Could be another one.”
        “That's too coincidental,” Colin said, quite sure of himself.
        For a long moment Doyle was silent. Then: “Yes, I'm afraid you're right. That's too coincidental. He's behind us again, all right.”
        

    Five
        
        “I'm going to pull over and stop on the