Читать книгу Odd Thomas Series Books 1-5 - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 69

THE BIRTHDAY GIRL, LEVANNA, AND HER pink-infatuated little sister, Nicolina, were not at their mother’s side. I scanned the crowd of shoppers, but didn’t see the girls.

When I hurried to Viola and seized her by the shoulder from behind, she reacted with a start and dropped her shopping bag.

“What’re you doing here?” I demanded.

“Odd! You scared the salt off my crackers.”

“Where are the girls?”

“With Sharlene.”

“Why aren’t you with them?”

Picking up the shopping bag, she said, “Hadn’t done birthday shopping yet. Got to have a gift. Came here just quick for these Rollerblades.”

“Your dream,” I reminded her urgently. “This is your dream.”

Her eyes widened. “But I’m just in and out quick, and I’m not at the movies.”

“It’s not going to be at the theater. It’s happening here.”

For an instant her breath caught in her throat as terror cocked the hammers of her heart.

“Get out of here,” I said. “Get out of here now.”

She exhaled explosively, looked wildly around as if any shopper might be a killer, or all of them, and she started toward the exit to the promenade.

“No!” I pulled her close to me. People were looking at us. What did it matter? “It’s not safe that way.”

“Where?” she asked.

I turned her around. “Go to the back of this floor, through the athletic shoes, through sporting goods. There’s a stockroom not far from where you bought the Rollerblades. Go to the stockroom. Hide there.”

She started away, stopped, looked at me. “Aren’t you coming?”

“No.”

“Where are you going?”

“Into it.”

“Don’t,” she pleaded.

“Go now!”

As she moved toward the back of the department store, I hurried out into the mall promenade.

Here at the north end of the Green Moon Mall, the forty-foot waterfall tumbled over a cliff of man-made rocks, feeding the stream that ran the length of the public concourse. As I passed the base of the falls, the rumble and splash sounded uncannily like the roar of a crowd.

Patterns of darkness and light. Darkness and light as in Viola’s dream. The shadows were cast by palm trees that rose alongside the stream.

Looking up into the queen palms, up toward the second floor of the promenade, I saw hundreds upon hundreds of bodachs gathered along the balustrade above, peering down into the open atrium. Pressed one against the other, excited, eager, twitching and swaying, squirming like agitated spiders.

A throng of bargain-hunting shoppers filled the first floor of the promenade, browsing from store to store, unaware of the audience of malevolent spirits that was watching them with such anticipation.

My wonderful gift, my hateful gift, my terrifying gift led me along the promenade, farther south, faster, following the splash and tumble of the stream, in a frantic search for Simon Varner.

Not hundreds of bodachs. Thousands. I’d never seen such a horde as this, never imagined I ever would. They were like a celebratory Roman mob in the Colosseum, watching with delight as the Christians made unanswered prayers, waiting for the lions, for blood on the sand.

I had wondered why they had vanished from the streets. Here was the answer. Their hour had come.

As I passed a bed-and-bath store, the hard chatter of automatic gunfire erupted from the promenade ahead of me.

The first burst proved brief. For two seconds, three, after it ended, an impossible hush fell across the mall.

Hundreds of shoppers appeared to freeze as one. Although surely the water in the stream continued to move, it seemed to spill along its course without sound. I would not have been surprised if my watch had confirmed a miraculous stoppage of time.

One scream tore the silence, and at once a multitude answered it. The gun replied to the screamers with a longer death rattle than the first.

Recklessly, I pushed southward along the promenade. Progress wasn’t easy because the panicked shoppers were running north away from the gunfire. People ricocheted off me, but I stayed on my feet, pressing toward a third burst of gunfire.