[AB0075] Final Hour by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz [Koontz, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781101965474
Amazon: B013NIF834
Barnesnoble: B013NIF834
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 2015-10-27T07:00:00+00:00

8

The Shooter and the Shot

Undine watches Ursula take one of the guns from the picnic cooler.

She appears to be unfazed, as though resigned to whatever punishment her sister wishes to mete out to her, even if it is a painful death.

Her indifference is a lie.

Undine cherishes the world for the beauty she sees everywhere in it. She always has. Still does. She wants desperately to live.

Undine cares less for her own beauty—and what it can do for her if well used—than she cares for the beauty of any flower or for that of a butterfly.

She is a fool. An impractical, childishly romantic, weak, and timid fool. But smart.

She entered college when just fifteen. Graduated at eighteen. Went off to that cottage on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, to write her treacle, her poetry, and to paint.

For six years, Daddy supported Undine before she was able to pay her own way.

What had she ever done to earn that money? Nothing. She is a leech.

Impractical Undine, foolish dreamer, did not deserve what Daddy had given her.

Ursula is a taker, though she takes only what others have but don’t deserve.

Now Undine is relieved to see which gun Ursula draws from the picnic cooler. She pretends indifference, but her relief is obvious.

Although she barely has the strength to stand, though her twin has all the power and she has none, Undine can’t resist taunting her jailer. She says what she has been forbidden to say, in spite of the pain that it will bring her.

She says, “I forgive you.”

The gun is an instrument of control, not of death. Compressed air propels bursts of hard rubber pellets, three at a time.

The first barrage plinks Undine’s throat. The pellets sting fiercely.

In fact, they sting so bad that they prick her voice as if it were a balloon, and she can speak no words, is able to issue only a brief whistle-hiss of escaping air.

The second barrage scores her upper lip and left cheek.

Undine drops to the mattress as if knocked down by a hammer.

How satisfying it would be to strike her with such a weapon. But not yet.

Fluorescent light lacks the warmth of sunshine, but Ursula knows that it finds a different beauty in her.

She steps closer to her sister, towering over the fallen woman in the hard white light.

She is an arctic goddess, deity of ice and snow and bone-chilling cold, the light revealing such an exquisite grace that no eye can look away even though the sight of her might freeze-blind anyone who stares too long.

This same light is not kind to Undine. Gaunt, pale, greasy, she lies like a broken hag, abashed at the glory of her twin.

Red welts mark the places where the pellets struck her face, swelling as would the work of wasps, her mouth misshapen as her upper lip distends.

The fallen woman raises her spread hands to protect her face, her eyes.

Two barrages bite her exposed palms.

Her stung fingers twitch and clutch wildly, as if they are the legs of albino spiders.

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