Sole Survivor by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

the side of the vehicle featured the name or logo of any enterprise.
    The engine was running. Both front doors stood open.
    He ran to the passenger side, skidded in a soggy patch of grass around a leaking sprinkler head, and leaned into the cab, hoping to find a cellular phone. If there was one, it wasn’t in plain sight.
    Maybe in the glove box. He popped it open.
    Someone in the cargo hold behind the front seats, mistaking Joe for one of the men in the Hawaiian shirts, said, “Did you get Rose?”
    Damn.
    The glove box contained a few rolls of Life Savers that spilled onto the floor—and a window envelope from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
    By law, every vehicle in California was required to carry a valid registration and proof of insurance.
    “Hey, who the hell are you?” the guy in the cargo hold demanded.
    Clutching the envelope, Joe turned away from the van.
    He saw no point in trying to run. This man might be as quick to shoot people in the back as were the other two.
    With a clatter and a
skreeeek
of hinges, the single door at the rear of the vehicle was flung open.
    Joe walked directly toward the sound. A sledge-faced specimen with Popeye forearms, neck sufficiently thick to support a small car, came around the side of the van, and Joe opted for the surprise of instant and unreasonable aggression, driving one knee hard into his crotch.
    Retching, wheezing for air, the guy started to bend forward, and Joe head-butted him in the face. He hit the ground unconscious, breathing noisily through his open mouth because his broken nose was streaming blood.
    Although, as a kid, Joe had been a fighter and something of a troublemaker, he had not raised a fist against anyone since he met and married Michelle. Until today. Now, twice in the past two hours, he had resorted to violence, astonishing himself.
    More than astonished, he was sickened by this primitive rage. He had never known such wrath before, not even during his troubled youth, yet here he was struggling to control it again as he had struggled in the public lavatory in Santa Monica. For the past year, the fall of Flight 353 had filled him with terrible despondency and grief, but he was beginning to realize that those feelings were like layers of oil atop another—darker—emotion that he had been denying; what filled the chambers of his heart to the brim was anger.
    If the universe was a cold mechanism, if life was a journey from one empty blackness to another, he could not rant at God, because to do so was no more effective than screaming for help in the vacuum of deep space, where sound could not travel, or like trying to draw breath underwater. But now, given any excuse to vent his fury on
people,
he had seized the opportunity with disturbing enthusiasm.
    Rubbing the top of his head, which hurt from butting the guy in the face, looking down at the unconscious hulk with the bleeding nose, Joe felt a satisfaction that he did not want to feel. A wild glee simultaneously thrilled and repulsed him.
    Dressed in a T-shirt promoting the videogame Quake, baggy black pants, and red sneakers, the fallen man appeared to be in his late twenties, at least a decade younger than his two associates. His hands were massive enough to juggle cantaloupes, and a single letter was tattooed on the base phalange of each finger, thumbs excluded, to spell out ANABOLIC, as in anabolic steroid.
    This was no stranger to violence.
    Nevertheless, although self-defense justified a preemptive strike, Joe was disturbed by the savage pleasure he took from such swift brutality.
    The guy sure didn’t look like an officer of the law. Regardless of his appearance, he might be a cop, in which case assaulting him ensured serious consequences.
    To Joe’s surprise, even the prospect of jail didn’t diminish his twisted satisfaction in the ferocity with which he had acted. He felt half nauseated, half out of his mind—but more alive than he had been in a year.
    Exhilarated yet fearful of the moral