Saint Odd by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

that you wouldn’t even feel the cuts they made. People were rarely bitten by vampire bats, which mostly drank the blood of chickens, cattle, horses, and deer.
    I didn’t find the word
rarely
as comforting as the word
never
.
    In the corridor beyond the closed door, the voices of the three cultists had faded completely away. Their silence didn’t mean that they had given up their search for me and had gone back to their usual activities, like strangling babies and torturing kittens. No offense intended to the satanists who might be reading this, but I have found that those who worship the devil tend to be sneaky, more deceitful by far than your average Methodist—and proud of it. They might still be in the mall basement or garage,standing silently in the darkness, waiting for me to show myself, whereupon my life would be worth spit, and in fact less than spit.
    Some people believe that a vampire bat is attracted by the smell of blood, that you have to be bleeding, even if from a tiny puncture or a scratch, before the little beasts will be drawn to you in a feeding frenzy. That is not true. Instinctively, bats know that any creature that sweats also bleeds. If a molecule or two of sweat, floating on the air, found its way into the folds of their nostrils, they would twitch their whiskers and bare their razor-edged teeth and lick their thin lips and, in the current situation, be pleased by the realization that someone had ordered takeout and it had been delivered.
    I was perspiring.
    Something crawled off my shirt and onto my throat and explored the contours of my Adam’s apple. Over the years, after numerous shocks and horrific encounters, my nerves had become as steady as solid-state circuitry. I figured one of the beetles that had been eating the dead bats in the dung pile had found its way up my body, too light to have been felt through my clothes. Instead of shrieking like Little Miss Muffet, I reached up to my throat and captured the insect in my fist.
    Because of the ick factor, I didn’t want to crush the bug. But when I attempted to throw it back toward the dung pile from which it had come, the vicious little thing stuck to my hand with the tenacity of a tick.
    Ozzie Boone had written a novel in which the villain threw one of his victims, an IRS agent, into a pit seething with carnivorous beetles. In spite of the tax man’s flailing, stomping, and desperate attempts to climb out of that hellhole, the voracious swarm killedhim in six minutes and stripped his bones of every last scrap of flesh in three hours and ten minutes, not as rapidly as piranhas might have done the job, but impressive nonetheless.
    Sometimes I wished that my mentor had been Danielle Steel.
    I opened my right hand, in which the beetle had gotten a death grip on my palm, made a catapult of the forefinger and thumb of my left hand, and flung the noxious little bugger back into the reeking darkness.
    I hadn’t heard a sound from the three cultists in a few minutes, and as I listened intently to the occasional bat rearrange its wings around itself as though adjusting its blanket, I wondered if the castaway beetle had been an outlier, more adventurous than others of its kind. Or even now were numerous others exploring my shoes and climbing the legs of my jeans?
    If I have machinelike steady-state nerves, I unfortunately also have the imagination of an acutely sensitive, hyperactive four-year-old on a sugar high, a four-year-old with an understanding of death equal to that of a war veteran.
    Although I felt certain I would die here in Pico Mundo within days, I told myself that the fatal moment had not yet arrived, and that it was not my fate to be beetled to death. I would have been reassured if I hadn’t lied to myself often in the past.
    I was about to bolt from beetles real and imagined, from bats sleeping or not, when I heard a door slam in some far region of the basement, and I concluded that the cultists must still be searching for me.
    I