WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz

traced back to me. Now, I got Danny’s energy in me, along with a lot of others.”

The gun was in the glove box.

Some small hope could be taken from the knowledge that the gun was in the glove

box.

While Nora was visiting Dr. Weingold, Travis whipped up and baked a double batch

of chocolate cookies with peanut-butter chips. Living alone, he

had learned to cook, but he had never taken pleasure in it. During the past few

months, however, Nora had improved his culinary skills to such an extent that he

enjoyed cooking, especially baking.

Einstein, who usually hung around dutifully throughout a baking session, in the

anticipation of receiving a sweet morsel, deserted him before he had finished

mixing the batter. The dog was agitated and moved around the house from window

to window, staring out at the rain.

After a while, Travis got edgy about the dog’s behavior and asked if something

was wrong.

In the pantry, Einstein made his reply.

I FEEL A LITTLE STRANGE.

“Sick?” Travis asked, worried about a relapse. The retriever was recovering

well, but still recovering. His immune system was not in condition for a major

new challenge.

NOT SICK.

“Then what? You sense . . . The Outsider?”

NO. NOT LIKE BEFORE.

“But you sense something?”

BAD DAY.

“Maybe it’s the rain.”

MAYBE.

Relieved but still edgy, Travis returned to his baking.

The highway was silver with rain.

The daytime fog grew slightly thicker as they drove south along the coast,

forcing Nora to slow to forty miles an hour, thirty in some places.

Using the fog as an excuse, could she slow the truck enough to risk throwing

open her door and leaping out? No. Probably not. She would have to let their

speed drop below five miles an hour in order not to hurt herself or her unborn

child, and the fog simply was not dense enough to justify reducing speed that

far. Besides, Vince kept the revolver pointed at her while he talked, and he

would shoot her in the back as she turned to make her exit.

The pickup’s headlamps and those of the few oncoming cars were refracted by the

mist. Halos of light and scintillate rainbows bounced off the shifting curtains

of fog, briefly seen, then gone.

She considered running the truck off the road, over the edge in one of the few

places where she knew the embankment to be gentle and the drop endurable. But

she was afraid she would misjudge where she was and, by mistake, drive off the

brink into a two-hundred-foot emptiness, crashing with terrible force into the

rocky coastline below. Even if she went over at the right point, a calculated

and survivable crash might knock her unconscious or induce a miscarriage, and if

possible she wanted to get out of this with her life and the life of the child

within her.

Once Vince started talking to her, he could not stop. For years he had husbanded

his great secrets, had hidden his dreams of power and immortality from the

world, but his desire to speak of his supposed greatness evidently had never

diminished after the fiasco with Danny Slowicz. It was as if he had stored up

all the words he had wanted to say to people, had put them on reels and reels of

mental recording tape, and now he was playing them back at high speed, spewing

out all this craziness that made Nora sick with dread.

He told her how he had learned of Einstein—the killing of the research

scientists in charge of various programs under the Francis Project at Banodyne.

He knew of The Outsider, too, but was not afraid of it. He was, he said, on the

brink of immortality, and gaining ownership of the dog was one of the final

tasks he had to complete in order to achieve his Destiny. He and the dog were

destined to be together because each of them was unique in this world, one of a

kind. Once Vince had achieved his Destiny, he said, nothing could stop him, not

even The Outsider.

Half the time, Nora didn’t understand what he was saying. She supposed that if

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