Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz
gate fast, swiveling the 12-gauge to cover the area behind the counter. No Harker.
A door stood ajar behind the clerical pen. She pushed it open with the shotgun barrel.
Enough light came from behind her to reveal a short hallway. No Harker. Deserted.
She stepped inside, flicked on the hall light. She listened but heard only the thunder and the insistent crash of rain on the roof.
To each side stood a door. Signs identified them as men’s and women’s lavatories.
Harker wouldn’t have stopped to take a pee, wash his hands, or admire himself in a mirror.
Assuring herself that he would have no desire to get behind her and take her by surprise, that he only wanted to escape, Carson went past the lavatories toward another door at the end of the hall.
She glanced back twice. No Harker.
The end door featured a traffic-check window through which she saw darkness beyond.
Conscious that she was a backlit target as long as she lingered on the threshold, Carson cleared it fast and low, scanning left and right in the flush of light that accompanied her. No Harker.
The door fell shut, leaving her in darkness. She backed up against the wall, felt the switches pressing into her back, slid aside, held the 12-gauge with one hand, snapped on the lights.
Suspended from the thirty-foot ceiling, a series of lights in cone-shaped shades revealed a large warehouse with goods stacked on pallets to a height of twenty feet. A maze.
She turned right across the open ends of the aisles, looking into each. No Harker. No Harker. No Harker. Harker.
Thirty feet from the mouth of the aisle, moving away from her, Harker hobbled as if in pain, bent forward, cradling his torso with both arms.
Thinking of the people he’d sliced open, thinking of the makeshift autopsy table in his bedroom, where he had been prepared to dissect Jenna Parker, Carson went after him with no intention of cutting him any slack. Closing to within twenty feet before shouting his name, she brought up the shotgun, finger on the trigger rather than on the guard.
If he dropped like he should, she’d cover him, use her cell phone to get Michael, get backup.
Harker turned to face her. His wet hair hung over his face. The shape of his body seemed … wrong.
The son of a bitch didn’t drop. From him came the eeriest sound that she had ever heard: part a cry of agony, part excited laughter, part an expression of brute rage.
She fired.
The pellets hit him in a tight group, where his cradling arms crossed his abdomen. Blood sprayed.
So fast that it seemed as if he were not a real figure but one in a time-lapse film, Harker clambered up a wall of crates, out of the aisle.
Carson chambered another round, tracked him as if he were a clay disk in a skeet shoot, and blew a chunk off the top crate, missing him as he vanished over the palisade.
SAYING A PRAYER for the family jewels, Michael jammed Carson’s pistol into his waistband, scaled the fence at the mouth of the alleyway, wincing as an ax of lightning chopped the night, figuring it would whack the steel chain-link and electrocute him.
He got over the fence, into the alley, unfried, and ran through drenching rain and the rolling echoes of thunder to the rear of the warehouse.
A concrete ramp led up to the loading dock at the back. A big roll-up door and a man-door served that deep platform. Harker would come out of the smaller door.
He drew Carson’s pistol but left his own holstered. He was not literally going to two-gun the fugitive, one pistol in each hand. For the best possible placement of shots, he needed a two-hand grip on the weapon.
If as advertised Harker proved to be as hard to bring down as a charging rhino, Michael might empty a magazine trying to pop both his hearts. If after that Harker was still on the move, there would not be time to eject a magazine and slap in a fresh one. He’d drop Carson’s piece, draw his own, and hope for the kill with the next ten rounds.
Embracing this strategy, Michael realized that although the Frankenstein story seemed like a can of Spam, he had gone for it as eagerly as if it had been filet mignon.
Inside, the 12-gauge boomed. Almost at once, it boomed again.
Thrusting one hand into his jacket pocket, he felt spare shotgun shells. He’d forgotten to give them to Carson. She had one round in the breach, three in the magazine. Now only two left.
The 12-gauge boomed again.
She was down to one round, with no backup handgun.
Waiting for Harker on the loading dock wasn’t a workable plan any longer.
Michael tried the man-door. It was locked, of course, but worse, it was steel plate, resistant to forced entry, with three deadbolts.
Movement startled him. He reeled back and discovered Deucalion at his side – tall, tattooed, totemic in the lightning.
“Where the hell—”
“I understand locks,” Deucalion interrupted.
Instead of applying the finesse his words implied, the huge man grabbed the door handle, wrenched it so hard that all three of the lock assemblies pulled out of the steel frame with a pop-crack-shriek of tortured metal, and threw the torqued door onto the loading dock.
“What the hell,” Michael asked, “was that?”
“Criminal trespass,” Deucalion said, and disappeared into the warehouse.
WHEN MICHAEL FOLLOWED Deucalion into the warehouse, the giant wasn’t there. Whatever he might be, the guy gave new meaning to the word elusive.
Calling out to Carson would alert Harker. Besides, the storm was louder in here than outside, almost deafening: Rain roared against the corrugated metal roof.
Crates of various sizes, barrels, and cubes of shrink-wrapped merchandise formed a labyrinth of daunting size. Michael hesitated only briefly, then went searching for the minotaur.
He found hundreds of hermetically sealed fifty-gallon drums of vitamin capsules in bulk, crated machine parts, Japanese audio-video gear, cartons of sporting equipment – and one deserted aisle after another.
Frustration built until he thought maybe he would shoot up a few boxes that claimed to contain Kung Fu Elmo dolls, just to relieve the tension. If they had been Barney the Dinosaur dolls, he would more likely have acted on the impulse.
From overhead, louder than the rain, came the sound of someone running along the top of the stacked goods. The crates and barrels along the right side of the aisle shuddered and creaked and knocked together.
When Michael looked up, he saw something that was Harker but not Harker, a hunched and twisted and grotesque form, vaguely human but with a misshapen trunk and too many limbs, coming toward him along the top of the palisade. Maybe the speed with which it moved and the play of shadow and light fooled the eye. Maybe it was not monstrous at all. Maybe it was just old pain-in-the-ass Jonathan, and maybe Michael was in such a state of paranoid agitation that he was mostly imagining all the demonic details.
Pistol in a two-hand grip, he tried to track Harker, but the fugitive moved too fast, so Michael figured the first shot he would get would be when Harker leaped toward him and was airborne. At the penultimate moment, however, Harker changed directions and sprang off the right-hand stacks, across the ten-foot-wide aisle, landing atop the left-hand palisade.
Gazing up, in spite of the extreme angle, Michael got a better look at his adversary. He could no longer cling to the hope that he had imagined