Читать книгу Ashley Bell - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 9

THAT SECOND TUESDAY IN MARCH, WITH ITS terrible revelations and the sudden threat of death, would have been the beginning of the end for some people, but Bibi Blair, now twenty-two, would eventually call it Day One.

She woke at dawn and stood at the bedroom window, yawning and watching the still-submerged sun announce its approach with banners of coral-pink light, until at last it surfaced and cruised westward. She liked sunrises. Beginnings. Each day started with such promise. Anything good could happen. For Bibi the word disappointment was reserved for evenings, and only if the day had truly, totally sucked. She was an optimist. Her mother had once said that, given lemons, Bibi wouldn’t make lemonade; she would make limoncello.

Silhouetted against the morning blue, the distant mountains seemed to be ramparts protecting the magic kingdom of Orange County from the ugliness and disorder that plagued so much of the world these days. Across the California flatlands, the tree-lined street grids and numerous parks of south county’s planned communities promised a smooth and tidy life of infinite charms.

Bibi needed more than a mere promise. At twenty-two, she had big dreams, though she didn’t call them dreams, because dreams were wish-upon-a-star fantasies that rarely came true. Consequently, she called them expectations. She had great expectations, and she could see the means by which she would surely fulfill them.

Sometimes she was able to imagine her future so clearly that it almost seemed as if she had already lived it and was now remembering. To achieve your goals, imagination was almost as important as hard work. You couldn’t win the prize if you couldn’t imagine what it was and where it might be found.

Staring at the mountains, Bibi thought of the man she would marry, the love of her life now half a world away in a place of blood and treachery. She refused to fear too much for him. He could take care of himself in any circumstances. He was not a fairy-tale hero but a real one, and the woman who would be his wife had an obligation to be as stoic as he was about the risks he faced.

“Love you, Paxton,” she murmured, as she often did, as if that declaration were a charm that would protect him regardless of how many thousands of miles separated them.

After showering and dressing for the day, after snaring the newspaper from the doorstep, she went into the kitchen just as her programmed coffee machine drizzled the sixth cup into the Pyrex pot. The blend she preferred was fragrant and so rich in caffeine that the fumes alone would cure narcolepsy.

The vintage dinette chairs featured chrome-plated steel legs and seats upholstered in black vinyl. Very 1950s. She liked the ’50s. The world hadn’t gone crazy yet. As she sat at a chromed table with a red Formica top, paging through the newspaper, she drank her first coffee of the day, which she called her “wind-me-up cup.”

To compete in an age when electronic media delivered the news long before it appeared in print, the publisher of this paper chose to spend only a few pages on major world and national events in order to reserve space for long human-interest stories involving county residents. As a novelist, Bibi approved. Like good fiction, the best history books were less about big events than about the people whose lives were affected by forces beyond their control. However, for every story about a wife fighting indifferent government bureaucrats to get adequate care for her war-disabled husband, there was another story about someone who acquired an enormous collection of weird hats or who was crusading to be allowed to marry his pet parrot.

Like her first cup, her second coffee was black, and Bibi drank it as she ate a chocolate croissant. In spite of all the propaganda, she didn’t believe that oceans of coffee or a diet rich in butter and eggs was unhealthy. She ate what she wanted, almost in a spirit of defiance, remaining trim and healthy. She had one life, and she meant to live it, bacon and all.

As she ate a second croissant, she got a bite that tasted as rancid as spoiled milk. She spat it onto her plate and wiped her tongue with a napkin.

The bakery she frequented had always been reliable. She could see nothing wrong with the wad of pastry that she had spit out. She sniffed the croissant, but it smelled all right. No visible foreign substance tainted it.

Tentatively, she took another bite. It tasted fine. Or did it? Maybe the faintest trace of … something. She put down the croissant. She had lost her appetite.

That day’s newspaper was thick with weird-hat collectors and the like. She put it aside. Carrying a third cup of coffee, she went to her office in the larger of the apartment’s two bedrooms.

At her computer, when she retrieved the unfinished short story she’d been writing on and off for a few weeks, she stared for a while at her byline: Bibi Blair.

Her parents had named her Bibi, not because they were cruel or indifferent to the travails of a child saddled with an unusual name, but because they were lighthearted to a fault. Bibi, pronounced Beebee, came from the Old French beubelot, meaning toy or bauble. She was no one’s toy. Never had been, never would be.

Another name derived from beubelot was Bubbles. That would have been worse. She would have had to change Bubbles to something less frivolous or otherwise become a pole dancer.

By her sixteenth birthday, she was accustomed to her name. By the time she was twenty, she thought Bibi Blair had a quirky sort of distinction. Nevertheless, sometimes she wondered if she would be taken seriously, as a writer, with such a name.

She scrolled down the page from the byline and stopped at the second paragraph, where she saw a sentence that needed revision. When she began to type, her right hand served her well, but the left fumbled over the keys, scattering random letters across the screen.

Her surprise turned to alarm when she realized that she could not feel the keys beneath her spasming fingers. The sense of touch had deserted them.

Bewildered, she raised the traitorous hand, flexed the fingers, saw them move, but couldn’t feel them moving.

Although coffee had entirely rinsed away the rancid taste that earlier had spoiled her enjoyment of the second croissant, the same foulness filled her mouth again. She grimaced in disgust and, with her right hand, reached for the coffee. The rim of the cup rattled against her teeth, but the brew once more washed her tongue clean.

Her left hand slipped off the keyboard, onto her lap. For a moment, she couldn’t move it, and in panic she thought, Paralysis.

Suddenly a tingling filled the hand, the arm, not that vibratile numbness that followed a sharp blow to the elbow, but a crawling sensation, as if ants were swarming through flesh and bone. As she rolled her chair away from the desk and got to her feet, the tingling spread through the entire left side of her body, from scalp to foot.

Although Bibi didn’t know what was happening to her, she sensed that she was in mortal peril. She said, “But I’m only twenty-two.”