Dean Koontz 2-Book Thriller Collection: Innocence, The City. Dean Koontz

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       Thirty-three

      I KNEW WHAT A SEAT BELT WAS, AND I KNEW THAT the law required its use. I had never before trusted my life to one, however, and though it sounded simple enough when I read about someone belting up in a novel, I took so long figuring it out that Gwyneth said she wished she could help me. She said it with sweet forbearance, not with impatience or scorn. But if she tried to assist me, we’d almost certainly touch, which she couldn’t tolerate.

      At last I got it done, though I felt no safer in the belt than out of it. I did feel dangerously trammeled. I wondered which was the greater risk: being thrown through the windshield when not wearing a belt or being trapped in a burning car because the belt buckle would not release.

      I said, “Does it have air bags, too?”

      “Yes, of course.”

      “What do I need to do about that?”

      “Nothing,” she said. “Air bags are automatic.”

      “I guess that’s nice.”

      “Well, it’s easy. Anyway, I’m not going to crash into anything.”

      “Have you ever?”

      “No. But I don’t drive much, hardly at all.”

      She switched on the headlights, released the brake, and piloted that monster SUV across the picnic meadow to the service lane as easy as if it were an amusement-park ride gliding on a rail, the steering wheel just for show.

      Let me tell you, it was quite a sensation: sitting up in a warm capsule and moving smoothly through the cold night, across the land and then the blacktop, windows all around so you could have a good look at anything you wanted to see. Lots of books have thrilling scenes involving cars or trucks, but none of them prepared me for the sheer delight of that ride, for the magic-carpet quality.

      As Gwyneth turned out of the park onto the avenue, I said, “With your social phobia, how did you learn to drive?”

      “Daddy taught me. When I turned thirteen, we went way out in the country a few times, just the two of us. He worried that when he was eventually gone, something might happen that I would need to leave the city.”

      “Something like what?”

      “Like just about anything. Anything can happen.”

      “But if you left the city, where would you go?”

      “There’s a place. But that doesn’t matter right now.”

      The streets were busy, cars crowding all around us. Delivery trucks. Buses. Well-bundled people on the sidewalks hurried through the wintry night.

      I said, “When you got your driver’s license, you must have had to be around a lot of people at the DMV or somewhere.”

      “I don’t have a driver’s license.”

      I can’t say that I was shocked, but I was a little dismayed. “It’s against the law to drive without a license.”

      “It’s illegal,” she said, “but it’s not immoral.”

      “What if you’re in an accident and hurt someone?”

      “With or without a license, an accident can happen. The fault wouldn’t be in the lack of a license. The fault would be driving inattentively or recklessly, or drunk.”

      “You don’t drive drunk, do you?”

      “No. And not inattentively or recklessly, either.”

      I considered all of that for a minute, and I guess she wondered what my silence meant.

      She said, “Well?”

      “Well, I guess it’s okay then.”

      “It’s okay,” she assured me.

      “All right. Good. You see what the snow’s doing?”

      “Snowing.”

      “No, I mean the way it floats over the front of the car and up and over the roof and never touches the glass.”

      “When we’re moving, we create a slipstream that floats the snow over us.” She pulled to a stop at a red traffic light, and right away the snow stuck and melted on the warm glass. “See?”

      “Neat,” I said.

      A Clear in hospital blues appeared out of the slanting snow and stepped into the street, indifferent to the foul weather. He stopped in the middle of the intersection and turned his head from side to side, the way they do, maybe looking for something but almost seeming to be listening more than looking.

      The traffic light changed, and Gwyneth ran down the Clear. I saw him pass through the SUV between our seats, but I didn’t turn to watch him recede out the tailgate.

      I didn’t say anything to her about him. What could I have said? She tolerated my hood and mask and gloves, my inexperience and what must have seemed to her to be my deeply paranoid conviction that most people, if not all, would respond to the sight of me with disgust and violence. If I told her about the Clears and the Fogs, she might decide that I was one kind of crazy too many for her taste, pull the Rover to the curb, and tell me to get out.

      Our relationship was delicate, perhaps no less so than the crystal intricacy of those first huge snowflakes that had spiraled around me in the Commons. We had at once accepted each other because we could accept no one else. I admired her brave attempts to cope with her phobia, and perhaps she admired the way that I had coped with what she assumed was my irrational paranoia. We were outcasts, she by election, I by the condition in which I was born, but that did not ensure our friendship. She didn’t want the world, and the world didn’t want me, and when you thought about that, it became clear that we were less alike than we seemed to be, that strains could easily develop that would lead to an irreconcilable parting.

      Already I loved her. I would be content to love her all of my life without touching her, but I saw no indication that she loved me in the same way, or at all. Considering her social phobia, if she were to suspect the depth of my feelings for her, she might recoil, retreat, and banish me. She might not be capable of loving me as I already loved her, let alone in the more profound way that I would surely come to love her over time. I drew hope from the fact that she had clearly loved her father, and I needed that hope because, after living my life with one loss after another, losing this СКАЧАТЬ