Strange Highways by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

Pittsburgh hospital to which he had been taken by air ambulance, Rudy DeMarco died of catastrophic burns.
    For sixteen years prior to the boy’s death, the people of Coal Valley had lived above a subterranean fire that churned relentlessly through a network of abandoned mines, eating away at untapped veins of anthracite, gradually widening those underground corridors and shafts. While state and federal officials debated whether the hidden conflagration would eventually burn itself out, while they argued about various strategies for extinguishing it, while they squandered fortunes on consultants and interminable hearings, while they strove indefatigably to shift the financial responsibility for the clean-up from one jurisdiction to another, Coal Valley’s residents lived with carbon-monoxide monitors to avoid being gassed in the night by mine-fire fumes that seeped, up through the foundations of their homes. Scattered across the town were vent pipes, tapping the tunnels below to release smoke from the fire and perhaps minimize the build-up of toxic gases in nearby houses; one even thrust up from the elementary-school playground.
    With the tragic death of little Rudy DeMarco, the politicians and bureaucrats were at last compelled to take action. The federal government purchased the threatened properties, beginning with those houses directly over the most hotly burning tunnels, then those over secondary fires, then those that were still only adjacent to the deep, combustible rivers of coal. During the course of the following year, as homes were condemned and the residents moved away, the reasonably pleasant village of Coal Valley gradually became a ghost town.
    By that rainy night in a long-ago October, when Joey had taken the wrong road back to college, only three families remained in Coal Valley. They had been scheduled to move out before Thanksgiving.
    In the year that followed the departure of those last residents, bulldozers were to knock down every building in the village. Every scrap of the demolished structures was to be hauled away. The streets, cracked and hoved from the pressures of the hidden fires below, would be torn up. The hills and fields would be seeded with grass, restoring the land to something resembling a natural state, and the mine fires would be left to burn—some said for a hundred or two hundred years—until the veins of coal were at last exhausted.
    Geologists, mining engineers, and officials from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources believed that the fire would eventually undermine four thousand acres—an area far greater than that encompassed by the abandoned village. Consequently, Coal Valley Road was likely to suffer sudden subsidence at numerous points along much of its length—a deadly danger to motorists. More than nineteen years ago, therefore, after the ghost town had been demolished and hauled away, Coal Valley Road had been torn up as well.
    It had not been there when he had driven into Asherville the previous day. Now it waited. Leading out of the rain-slashed twilight into an unknown night. The road not taken.
    Joey was holding the flask again. Although he had opened it, he had no memory of unscrewing the cap.
    If he drank what remained of the Jack Daniel’s, the road that led into the dark tunnel of trees might blur, fade, and finally vanish. Perhaps it was wise not to pin any hopes on miraculous second chances and supernatural redemption. For all he knew, if he put the Chevy in gear and followed that strange highway, he would be changing his life not for better but for worse.
    He brought the flask to his lips.
    Thunder rolled through a cold Heaven. The rataplan of rain swelled until he could not even hear the idling car engine.
    The whiskey fumes smelled as sweet as salvation.
    Rain, rain, torrential rain. It washed the last light out of the bleak day.
    Although he was beyond the touch of the rain, the heavy ,pall of descending darkness was inescapable. Night