Ashley Bell: A Novel by Dean Koontz Page B

been through so much together that none of them needed conversation to know what the others must be thinking.
    They remained on the roof after sunrise, when the chill of night only half relented, though they stayed below the parapet. They would not execute a search on foot until they had given their quarry and his men twenty-four hours to inadvertently reveal their location. They had their periscopic cameras, their ears, and patience.
    Nothing had happened by 4:00 P.M. , when Pax raided his MREs for beef jerky, chicken-noodle slop, and a PowerBar. He ate sitting on the roof, his back against the parapet wall. He wore body armor, but his MOLLE-style web system with all the gear attached was a separate rig that could be taken off and set aside. His pistol lay on the roof a mere foot from him: a Sig Sauer P220 chambered for .45 caliber.
    Abruptly Bibi came into his mind with such force that, startled, he almost bit his lip along with the half-eaten PowerBar. He thought of his singular girl often every day, but this unbidden image of her lovely face bloomed vividly in his mind’s eye, as no memory had ever pressed itself upon him before. He recognized the moment: he and Bibi stand-up paddleboarding side by side in Newport Harbor on a sunny summer day. She’d said something funny, and his comeback had cracked her up so much that she had almost fallen off her board.
    The vision of her face, prettily contorted in laughter, so lifted his spirits that he tried to hold on to it, to freeze-frame the recollection in all its astonishingly sharp and poignant detail. But memory wanes even as it waxes; she faded and could be summoned back only in a less intense manifestation.
    Paxton glanced at his G-Shock watch. 4:14 P.M. local time. That would be 4:14 A.M. where Bibi lived half a world away. She should be home in bed, sound asleep. Worry wound its way through him, not just the usual worries he sometimes had when he thought about Bibi, but a deep disquiet unique to this moment. He wondered if he had gone on a blackout operation at the worst possible time.

This time, stilting in silence, the robed and hooded bearers of the
dead convey the corpse along a hospital corridor where the roof and ceiling have been scalped away, allowing moonlight to bathe the scene. They enter Bibi’s room, and the face of one so shocks and horrifies, as always before, that she rebels against consideration of it and sits up in bed, sits up and wakes not from the dream, but from one dream scene to another. Gone are Death’s two henchmen, or whatever they might be. In one of the chairs by the window, in the red radiance of a sunset, sits the corpse cocooned in a white shroud glowing with the reflection of the burning sky. The fabric masking its face stretches, and a shallow concavity appears as its mouth opens. From it comes the voice that she knows well: “The forms…the forms…things unknown.” Frightened of hearing more, she sits up once again, but this time not in another dream scene, this time—
    —in the real hospital room.
    Morning had come with a difference in it.
    The tingling in her left side had completely relented, head to foot. Not one prickle, tickle, shiver, no static in the nerve paths.
    Sitting in bed, she flexed her left hand, which had at times seemed to be the instrument of another Bibi than her, some other self who wished to use it to her own—and different—purposes. Now she had full control of it once more. No weakness. She closed it into a fist, and though her fist was small, she liked the look of it.
    No headache. No dizziness. No foul taste.
    With an exhilarating quickness, she said, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. She sells seashells by the seashore.” Each word escaped her perfectly formed, without a slur or slip of tongue.
    She put down one of the safety railings and sat on the edge of the bed, where for a moment she hesitated, warning herself that the cessation of symptoms didn’t mean that she was somehow