Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

that his eyebrows met over the bridge of his nose, closing the quarter-inch gap between them. “What’re you—stupid or something?”
    Sometimes, in a tight situation, I have found it wise to pretend to be intellectually disadvantaged. For one thing, it can be a useful technique for buying time. Besides, it comes naturally to me.
    I was willing to play dumb for this brute if that was what he wanted, but before I could give him a performance of Lennie from
Of Mice and Men
, he said, “The problem with the world is it’s full of stupid”—imagine an ugly word for the very end of the colon—“who screw it up for everyone else. Kill all the stupid people, the world would be a better place.”
    To suggest that I was too smart for the world to do without me, I said, “In Shakespeare’s
King Henry VI, Part 2
, the rebel Dick says, ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ ”
    The eyebrows knitted further together, and the green eyes looked as hot as methane fires. “What are you, some kind of smart-ass?”
    I just couldn’t win with this guy.
    Closing the space between us, poking my chest with the muzzle of the Uzi, he said, “Give me one reason I shouldn’t blow you away right now, you smart-ass trespasser.”

Six

    When some guy has a gun and I don’t, and he asks me for one good reason why he shouldn’t kill me, I assume that he has no intention of blowing my head off because otherwise he would just do it. He either wants a reason to stand down or he’s so sadly unimaginative that he’s playing the scene the way he’s watched it unfold on TV and in movies.
    Old Green Eyes, however, seemed like a different caliber of thug to me. His demeanor suggested that he didn’t need a reason to kill someone, only a strong desire, and his appearance argued that he was imaginative enough to think of a score of bloody ways to end this.
    I was acutely aware of how far away the stables were from any inhabited buildings in Roseland.
    Hoping there was nothing he would find incendiary in these nine words, I said, “Well, sir, I’m an invited guest, not a trespasser.”
    His expression was not that of a man convinced. “Invited guest? Since when do they let candy-ass punk boys through the gate?”
    I decided not to be offended by his unkind characterization of me. “I’m staying in the tower in the eucalyptus grove. Been there three nights, two days.”
    He pressed the muzzle of the Uzi into my chest. “Three days and nobody told me? You think I’m dumb enough to eat crap on toast?”
    “No, sir. Not on toast.”
    His nostrils flared so wide that I feared his brain might fall out through one nostril or the other. “What’s that mean, candy-ass?”
    “It means you’re way smarter than me, or otherwise I wouldn’t be on this end of the gun. But it’s true. I’ve been here almost three days. Of course, it wasn’t my charm that got us invited, it was the girl I’m with. Nobody can say no to her.”
    I believed that I saw a sudden sympathy in his expression at the mention of a girl. Maybe he thought that I meant a child. Even some of the most hard-case violence junkies can have a soft spot for children.
    “Now
that
makes sense,” he said. “You bring in some super-hot piece of tail, and nobody wants Kenny to know about her.”
    Instead of appealing to Kenny’s compassion gland, I had inflamed other glands best left unconsidered and undisturbed. “Well, sir, no. No, that’s not exactly the situation.”
    “What isn’t?”
    “She’s very sweet, kind of spiritual, not hot at all, kind of dowdy, seven months pregnant, not that much to look at, but everybody likes her, you know, because it’s such a sad case, a girl alone with nothing and a baby on the way, it tugs at your heart.”
    Kenny stared at me as if I had suddenly begun speaking in a foreign language. A foreign language, the sound of which offended him so much that he might shoot me just to shut me up.
    To change the subject, I put