Strange Highways by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

of the highway, and in their intense light, as if by a dark miracle of transubstantiation, the falling rain appeared to be a downpour of blood.
    The vehicle that he was following slowed, almost halted beside the Valiant, then accelerated again.
    Someone in a black, hooded raincoat stood beside the disabled Plymouth, holding a flashlight. The stranded motorist waved at him, imploring him to stop.
    Joey glanced at the dwindling taillights of the car that he had been pursuing. It would soon pass around a bend, over a rise, out of sight.
    Coasting past the Plymouth, he saw that the person in the raincoat was a woman. A girl, really. Arrestingly pretty. She appeared to be no older than sixteen or seventeen’
    Under the hood of the coat, her flare-tinted face reminded him, curiously, of the haunting countenance on the statue of the Virgin Mother at Our Lady of Sorrows, back in Asherville. Sometimes the Virgin’s serene ceramic face had just such a forlorn and spectral aspect in the crimson glow of the flickering votive candles arrayed in red glasses beneath it.
    As Joey rolled slowly past this girl, she stared entreatingly, and in her porcelain features he saw something that alarmed him: a disturbing premonition, a vision of her lovely face without eyes, battered and bloody. Somehow he knew that if he didn’t stop to help her, she would not live to see the dawn but would die violently in some black moment of the storm.
    He parked on the shoulder ahead of the Valiant and got out of the rental car. He was still soaked from having stood in the cleansing downpour outside Henry Kadinska’s office little more than twenty minutes ago, so the pounding rain didn’t bother him, and the cold night air wasn’t half as chilling as the fear that had filled him since he had learned of his inheritance.
    He hurried along the pavement, and the girl came forward to meet him at the front of her disabled Valiant.
    “Thank God, you stopped,” she said. Rain streamed off her hood, a glistening veil in front of her face.
    He said, “What happened?”
    “It just failed.”
    “While you were rolling?”
    “Yeah. Not the battery.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I’ve still got power.”
    Her eyes were dark and huge. Her face glowed in the flare light, and on her cheeks, raindrops glistened like tears.
    “Maybe the generator,” he said.
    “You know cars?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I don’t,” she said. “I feel so helpless.”
    “We all do,” Joey said.
    She gave him a peculiar look.
    She was just a girl, and at her age she was surely naive and not yet fully aware of the world’s cruelty. Yet Joey Shannon saw more in her eyes than he could comprehend.
    “I feel lost,” she said, evidently still referring to her lack of knowledge about cars.
    He unlatched and raised the hood. “Let me have your light.”
    At first she seemed not to know what he meant, but then she handed the flashlight to him. “I think it’s hopeless.”
    While rain pounded against his back, he checked the distributor cap to be sure that it was seated securely, examined the spark-plug leads, scrutinized the battery cables.
    “If you could just give me a ride home,” she said, “my dad and I can come back here tomorrow.”
    “Let me try it first,” he said, closing the hood.
    “You don’t even have a raincoat,” she worried.
    “Doesn’t matter.”
    “You’ll catch your death.”
    “It’s only water—they baptize babies in it.”
    Overhead, the branches of the mountain laurels clattered in a bitter gust of wind, shaking loose a flock of dead leaves that whirled briefly but then settled to the ground as spiritlessly as lost hopes sifting down through the darkness of a troubled heart.
    He opened the driver’s door, got behind the steering wheel, and put the flashlight on the seat beside him. The keys were in the ignition. When he attempted to start the engine, there was no response whatsoever. He tried the headlights, and they came on at full power.
    In front of