Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

where Dad had folded it to fit in his wallet.
    On the blank reverse, Dad had taken dictation from Josef on his deathbed. The five dates.
    The front of the pass featured lions and elephants. ADMIT TWO it directed in black letters, and in red blazed the promise FREE .
    Toward the bottom were four words I had read uncounted times over the years: PREPARE TO BE ENCHANTED .
    Depending on my mood, sometimes that sentence seemed to betoken forthcoming adventure and wonder. At other times, I drew from it a more threatening interpretation: PREPARE TO BE SCARED SHITLESS .
    After returning the pass to the drawer, I lay awake for a while. I didn’t think I would sleep. Then I slept.
    Three hours later, I sat up in bed, instantly awake and alert. Trembling with fear.
    To the best of my knowledge, I hadn’t been awakened by a bad dream. No nightmare images lingered in memory.
    Nevertheless, I woke with a completely formed and terrifying thought so oppressive that my heart felt as if it were being squeezed in a vise, and I could draw only quick shallow breaths.
    If there were to be five terrible days in my life, I would not die on this one. In her inimitable way, however, Weena had pointed out that an exemption from death this September did not rule out severed limbs, mutilation, paralysis, and brain damage.
    Neither could I rule out the death of someone else. Someone dear to me. My father, my mother, my grandmother…
    If this were to be a terrible day because one of them would suffer a painful and violent death that would haunt me for the rest of my life, then I might wish that I had been the one to die.
    I sat on the edge of the bed, glad that I had gone to sleep with the nightstand lamp aglow. My hands were slick with sweat and shaking so badly that I might not have been able either to find the switch or to turn it.
    A close and loving family is a blessing. But the more people we love and the more deeply we love them, the more vulnerable we are to loss and grief and loneliness.
    I was finished with sleep.
    The bedside clock reported 1:30 P.M .
    Less than half the day remained, only ten and a half hours until midnight.
    In that time, however, a life could be taken, a world could end—and hope.

6
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    M illions of years before the Travel Channel existed to report the change, storms inside the earth had raised the land into serried waves, like a monsoon seascape, so any voyager in this territory is nearly always moving up or down, seldom on the horizontal.
    Evergreen forests—pine and fir and spruce—navigate the waves of soil and rock, docking along every shore of Snow Village, but also finding harbors deep within town limits.
    Fourteen thousand full-time residents live here. Most make their living directly or indirectly from nature as surely as do those who dwell in fishing ports in lower, balmier lands.
    Snow Village Resort and Spa, and its world-famous network of ski runs, along with other area hotels and winter-sport facilities, draw so many vacationers that the town’s population increases sixty percent from mid-October through March. Camping, hiking, boating, and whitewater rafting pull in almost as many the rest of the year.
    Autumn weather arrives early in the Rocky Mountains; but that day in September was not one of our refreshingly crisp afternoons. Pleasantly warm air, as still as the greatly compressed fathoms at the bottom of an ocean, conspired with golden afternoon sunlight to give Snow Village the look of a community petrified in amber.
    Because my parents’ house is in a perimeter neighborhood, I drove rather than walked into the heart of town, where I had a few errands to undertake.
    In those days I owned a seven-year-old Dodge Daytona Shelby Z. Other than my mother and grandmother, I’d not yet met a woman I could love as much as I loved that sporty little coupe.
    I have no mechanical skills, and I lack the talent to acquire any. The workings of an engine are as mysterious to me as is the enduring popularity of