Strange Highways by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

entered the car: a familiar companion with whom he had passed uncountable lonely hours in troubled contemplation of a life gone wrong.
    He and the night had finished many bottles of whiskey together, and eventually he had always been granted the surcease of sleep, if nothing else. All he had to do was put the flask against his lips, tip it, and drain the few ounces that it still contained, whereupon this dangerous temptation to embrace hope would surely pass. The mysterious highway would vanish, and then he could get on with a life that, although lacking hope, could be passed in a safe, blessed anesthetic haze.
    He sat for a long time. Wanting a drink. Not drinking.
    Joey wasn’t aware of the car approaching along the county road behind him until its headlights suddenly shot through the back window of the Chevy. A virtual explosion of light shattered over him, as though from an onrushing locomotive with one giant, blazing Cyclopean eye. He glanced at the rearview mirror but winced and looked away as the bright reflection stung his eyes.
    The car roared past him and hung a hard left onto Coal Valley Road. It cast up such a heavy plume of dirty water from the puddled pavement that it was impossible for Joey to see any details of it or get a glimpse of its driver.
    As the spray washed down the side window of the Chevy and the glass cleared again, the other vehicle slowed. Its taillights dwindled until it had gone perhaps a hundred yards along the colonnade of trees, where it came to a full stop on the roadway.
    “No,” Joey said.
    Out there on Coal Valley Road, the red brake lights were like the radiant eyes of a demon in a dream, frightening but compelling, alarming but mesmerizing.
    “No.”
    He turned his head and stared at the night-cloaked county road in front of him, the route that he’d taken twenty years ago. It had been the wrong highway then, but it was the right one now. After all, he wasn’t headed back to college as he had been that night; now he was forty years old and bound for Scranton, where he had to catch a commuter flight to Pittsburgh in the morning.
    On Coal Valley Road, the taillights glowed. The strange car waited.
    Scranton. Pittsburgh. Vegas. The trailer park. A shabby but safe little life. No hope … but no nasty surprises, either.
    Red brake lights. Beacons. Shimmering in the delude.
    Joey capped the flask without drinking from it.
    He switched on the headlights and put the Chevy in gear.
    “Jesus, help me,” he said.
    He drove across the intersection and onto Coal Valley Road.
    Ahead of him, the other car began to move again. It quickly picked up speed.
    Joey Shannon followed the phantom driver through a veil between reality and some other place, toward a town that no longer existed, toward a fate beyond understanding.
    8
     
    THE WIND AND THE RAIN SHOOK LEAVES FROM THE OVERHANGING TREES and hurled them onto the pavement. They smacked the windshield and clung briefly, batlike shapes that furled their wings and fell away when the wipers swept over them.
    Joey remained about a hundred yards behind the other car, not quite close enough to discern what make and model it was. He told himself that he still had time to turn around, drive to the county road, and go to Scranton as he had planned. But he might not have the option of turning back if he got a good look at the car ahead of him. Intuitively he understood that the more he learned about what was happening, the more thoroughly his fate would be sealed. Mile by mile he was driving farther away from the real world, into this otherworldly land of second chances, and eventually the intersection of the county route and Coal Valley Road would cease to exist in the night behind him.
    When they had gone only three miles, they came upon a white, two-door Plymouth Valiant—a car that Joey had admired as a kid but hadn’t seen in ages. It was stopped at the side of the road, broken down. Three sputtering red flares had been set out along the shoulder