Breathless by Dean Koontz Page B

insatiable, and he would feed them, feed them as no glutton ever born had ever fed. The first woman in the potato cellar would not be thelast, and if he lived long enough, the fields of his brother’s farm would be a six-acre cemetery without headstones.
    Henry challenged himself to acknowledge the fear in his eyes, and he saw it clearly. He was not afraid of any variety of authority. He feared only others like himself, monsters in the making or already made. He knew that legions of them stalked the world. He knew of what they were capable, because he knew of what he was capable: anything.
    He saw nothing exalted about the human animal, nothing elevated or dignified, or exceptional. Only two roles existed for any human being: prey or predator. Rule or be ruled. Act or be acted upon.
    Somewhere nearby, a predator intended to prevent Henry from establishing a survivalist retreat on this property. The unknown adversary could have but one motivation: to seize the property for himself and live there to ride out the coming storm.
    If that was the case—and it
had
to be the case—then he must be someone
who knew the storm was coming
, someone who traveled the same Washington circles in which Henry had once moved. He must have discovered that Henry had stolen a fortune from the operation, and he must have put Henry under observation to discover what further intentions he might have.
    Those circles were infested with people who possessed limitless resources for investigating and tracking a subject of interest. Henry had taken great care to conceal his theft and to cover his trail when he came west, but evidently he had not been careful enough.
    He didn’t for a moment believe that his brother, Jim, might be stalking him. Jim was dead. Shot three times. The third time in theface. Even if Jim survived—which he had not—he would be blind and brain-damaged.
    After picking up the last of the broken mirror, Henry carried the bag to the kitchen and put it in the trash can. He took the shotgun with him.
    At the cellar door, the chair remained wedged securely under the knob.
    Putting one ear to the space between door and jamb, he held his breath and listened. No sound rose from below.
    Perhaps some people would have been superstitious enough to wonder if Jim might have returned from the dead for revenge. Henry didn’t believe in life after death of either the spiritual or the zombie-movie kind.
    The missing bodies, the bloody handprint, and the smear on the bedspread were just theater. Somebody out there had an adolescent sense of humor. He wanted to torment Henry.
    Whoever the sonofabitch might be, he was evidently a sadist. No surprise. Most people in Henry’s Washington circles were sadists. In a certain kind of personality, sadism and a craving for power were entwined character traits.
    Henry put the shotgun on the dinette table. Still standing, he poured another glass of the wine that he had tolerated with dinner.
    A year previously, Henry had become aware of a sadistic streak in himself. He first recognized it when, while watching a woman chef on the Food Network for half an hour, he imagined sixteen violent and grotesque things he wanted to do to her. At the end of the show, he had no memory of a single dish that she had prepared.
    He then switched to Home and Garden Television, where he found a program hosted by a cute interior designer. By the end ofthe show, in Henry’s vivid imagination, the woman sagged naked and broken against a limestone column to which she had been lashed with lengths of barbed wire.
    For the past year, no woman on television was safe when Henry picked up the remote control. Certain celebrities inspired in him such extravagantly savage fantasies that he bought the largest flat-screen TV on the market.
    Jim and Nora didn’t have a TV. No cable service existed in these boondocks, and they refused to spring for satellite service.
    If Henry Rouvroy’s plans were fulfilled, he would have no time for