Final Hour (Novella) by Dean Koontz

whore.”
    The girl says, “If you only get an allowance…”
    “I went to see her in that tasteless mansion with its thousand tons of garish furniture, supposedly to do a little dickering for an increase in my allowance, the two of us over dinner. But I didn’t go there to dicker. That was bullshit. I went there to kill the vicious leech.”
    “But obviously you didn’t kill her then. Why didn’t you kill her?” the pretty boy asks, proving her suspicion that he is a moron.
    “Obviously,” Undine says, “the selfish sack of pus had a plan of her own.”
    “Starving you to death,” the girl says.
    “Your children will surely be geniuses,” Undine declares scornfully.
    She needs these two and shouldn’t be cross with them, but she loathes stupidity.
    She is swaying on her feet, and her arms are shaking, and the boy sees this. “That gun is heavy.”
    “It won’t be as heavy if I put two bullets in your head. I may look shaky, but don’t think you can screw with me.”
    Undine feels as if she’s tilting. Or the room is tilting. She tells herself that neither is the case.
    The girl says, “He isn’t going to screw with anyone who can make us rich. Chill, Pogo.”
    Undine says, “My plan was to kill her, chop her up, put the pieces through an industrial Cuisinart, take the sludge far out into the desert, pour it out for the snakes and bugs and rats to eat, then take her identity.”
    “Become Ursula,” the boy says.
    “You
are
lightning-quick on the uptake. But now I’ll need to lie low for a few weeks, gain some weight, get my looks back, before I can pass for that disgusting parasite.”
    “So what do you need us to do?” the girl wonders.
    Indicating the corpse, Undine says, “Chop, Cuisinart, dispose of the sludge.”
    “All that for just a million?”
    “A million each,” Undine reminds them. “Two million total, for just a few hours of manual labor.”
    They stand there, thinking about it.
    “What the hell is there to think about?” Undine demands.
    “How do we know you won’t kill us after we do it?” the girl asks.
    The girl is stupid. Undine will not kill them until weeks from now, when she is restored.
    Undine says, “Kill you? Are you crazy paranoid? If I killed you, I’d have to chop, Cuisinart, and dispose of you two,
and I don’t have the strength for it, Bob
!”
    The girl regards her with what might be pity when she says, “Bob is the dog.”
    “The dog is Bob,” the boy agrees.
    Bob is the dog, the dog is Bob:
Something about those lines, spoken one after the other, affects Undine negatively, summons the vertigo that she has repressed, no doubt because she is a poet and therefore highly sensitive to the way that words resonate with one another, to subtle rhythms that ordinary people are not capable of appreciating. She tilts, tilts, and the room turns.
Bob is the dog, the dog is Bob, Bob is the dog is the dog is Bob, Bob-Bob-Bob, Bob is the dog.
    Although the girl has spoken no command, the dog bolts, Bob bolts, Bob the dog bolts. Bolts into the slowly revolving room. Not toward Undine. Away from her. Which is confusing as she tilts. She’d shoot him if he leaped at her. Now boy and girl are between her and Bob the dog, the dog is Bob is the dog, as the floor undulates. If she shoots, she might hit them. She needs boy and girl. Desperately, she needs them as, with the power of twins in one body, she commands the room to be still. The dog barks in alarm—or is it the girl?—barks
Pogo, no!
as the boy drops to the undulant floor and bounces up again with something in his hand, bounces up like a leaping Bob,
pepper spray
in hand, and Undine fires twice just as the stinging, blinding, suffocating stream defines a
Z
by splashing from eye to eye, slanting across nose, from one corner of mouth to the other. Bob dog did a circle, Bob dog behind her, teeth in her slacks, Bob dog pulling, Undine tilting. The blur of a boy as the world goes white, the boy at her like a dog on