Final Hour (Novella) by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

photos with the collection, no doubt at her husband’s insistence. The way she dressed, few men who came across the article would pay much attention to the cars.
    “Simon said this was how we could pretty much know where she was at all times,” Makani said. “That app he loaded on your phone.”
    Pogo took his smartphone from a pocket and gave it to her. “See if you can find her.”
    “Cool,” she said, accepting the phone.
    Again Bob nosed open the pizza box.
    It remained empty.
    As the lid fell into place again, the Labrador sighed.
    Although the dog’s persistent hope should have amused Pogo, it did not.
    For some reason, he thought of Makani’s hope of living a normal life in spite of her terrible gift.
    More often than not, whenever she touched someone, she was in a sense opening a box. But she could have no expectation of something good, like a three-cheese pizza with crab and black olives.
    Each box she opened had the potential to be a coffin. Her own.
    Pogo almost wished he didn’t love her.
    He was good at surfing, at pretending to be intellectually stunted, at house-sitting, at making friends, at reading books and
getting
them on many levels.
    But one of the things he wasn’t good at was loss. He couldn’t handle losing people. He
stank
at that. He was pathetic when it came to accepting that death was natural, a part of life.
    He almost wished he didn’t love Makani, but he did. Profoundly.
    Again, Bob nosed open the pizza box. Empty. He turned his gaze to Pogo.
    Neither disappointment nor entreaty colored Bob’s eyes. Dogs were uncannily intuitive. The Labrador’s steady stare was solemn, even grave, and lit with sympathy, as if he knew that Pogo was no good at dealing with loss—and pitied him.

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