80 Relentless by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Horror
ISBN: 9780553807141
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2009-06-08T05:00:00+00:00

At the eastern end of Orange County, many of the canyons are still home to more coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, and deer than people. Carved into the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, some are mere ravines, others less narrow, all thick with trees and brush, a refuge for the contemplative, for those who dislike urban and suburban life, and for various eccentrics.

The serpentine, undulatory tossed-ribbon of a road unraveled as if it were the last feeble construction of the declining civilization that had built it. Huge California live oaks overhung the pavement, trunks and limbs char-black in our headlights.

The houses were well separated even at the civilized end of the road. They grew farther apart the deeper we penetrated the canyon, the name of which I will not provide, for reasons soon obvious.

With isolation came a different mood. Geological details seemed more dramatic, slopes steeper and rock formations more suggestive of violence. The woods thrust at us and the brush bristled aggressively, as though we had passed through a membrane, leaving benign Nature, entering a preternatural place in which a malevolent consciousness lived in the darkness, was the darkness, watched, and waited.

When I saw lamplit windows back among the trees, they no longer appeared warm and welcoming, but eerie and forbidding, as though the unseen structures were not houses but abattoirs, temples of torture, and fiery forges in which were cast images of strange gods.

The two-lane blacktop continued, but we turned onto a narrower gravel road that looped a few miles before rejoining the paved route. This one-lane track, which climbed the lower slopes of the canyon wall, was used largely by agents of the state forestry department.

Wet weeds swished against the sides of the Mountaineer, and some semitropical plant, with pale leaves as large as hands, slid its many palms across the passenger-side windows.

After some distance—for reasons soon obvious, I will not say how far—we came to a lay-by, where I could park alongside the track. When I switched off the engine and headlights, the darkness was as absolute as if we were in a windowless building. Only the drumming of the rain proved we remained outdoors.

The Boom house faced the paved road that we had departed. But we were not entering by the front door.

“We’ll be eaten alive, going in this way,” Milo predicted.

“No mountain lion will attack a group of people,” Penny assured him. “They stalk what’s smaller than they are—and what’s alone.”

“Lassie and me are smaller,” Milo said, and the dog whined.

“But neither of you is alone,” I said.

Milo was not a fan of wilderness. He embraced civilization and all its charms, regardless of its humongous carbon footprint.

Hoods up, with two flashlights, we got out into the rain, and I locked the Mountaineer.

Moving away from the gravel track, we waded through weeds and between trees until we came to a small low rock formation from which, in daylight, you could look down a gentle slope, through woods to the canyon floor, although not quite as far as the paved road.

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