Final Hour (Novella) by Dean Koontz Page A

two legs, Bob dog behind, boy dog in front and grappling for the gun, girl barking
Pogo, Pogo!
Undine smells his blood. His hands slick with blood, so he can’t tear the gun away from her. Kill him. Trigger it. The sound is huge, the pain huge, and everything is wrong. The white pain is brighter than the white blindness of pepper spray. Gun is gone. Vertigo. Going round, going down. Going, going…How happy she is with all of them dead. Father, Mother, Ursula dead, dead. How happy, but how brief has been her happiness, how brief, how—

12
The Final Hour
    Pogo had been shot.
Undine fired two rounds as Pogo squirted her with the Sabre 5.0, and the second bullet tore through him.
    Makani couldn’t believe he stayed on his feet, but he launched himself at Undine, struggled with her for possession of the pistol, as Bob attacked her from behind. The gun fired again, and the sound seemed to pierce Makani’s heart, arrested her breathing, for she was certain he was dead, shot at such close range. But it was the woman who dropped, still holding the weapon, as Bob skittered out of the way and as Pogo staggered backward.
    In life, the dazzling blue eyes of both twins had appeared luminous, though the glow had been demonic. Their depthless stares were lightless now, their eyes as flat as buttons in the cold fluorescent glare.
    Pogo sat on the straight-backed chair, breathing hard, his left hand pressed lightly against the wound in his right shoulder. There was an exit wound, too. He said that was good. The bullet wasn’t in him. He said that made everything easier.
    Makani wanted to call 911, but he refused to let her, even spoke sharply to her, which he had never done before—
“No!”
—because there was too much at stake.
    She said, “Your
life
is at stake, damn it. You’re
bleeding.
”
    “Exactly. My life, your life, our future. We have to be smart about how we deal with this.”
    How they dealt with it was so scary, so stressful, that Makani found herself talking aloud to herself, which rattled her each time she realized that she was doing it.
    She had to wipe clean whatever they might have touched. The picnic cooler contained, among other things, foil packets of moist towelettes. She used those, pocketing each of the empty foil squares lest she inadvertently leave a thumbprint on one of them.
    She wiped down the door handle to the death room, though she had no memory of touching it. Fingers wrapped in a towelette, she switched off the lights in each area from which they retreated, the darkness flowing in behind, swelling toward them like a tide.
    Pogo needed her help to climb the stairs. Bob dashed ahead of them, but kept pausing to look back, clearly worried.
    Makani didn’t douse the lights on the ground floor. She would be returning.
    The brightness of the day surprised her. She knew that night was still hours away, but for some reason she expected a menacing coagulum of dark clouds, although there had been none earlier, and bleak light that belied the California promise of a golden life.
    Although Pogo didn’t need to lean on her to get to the Honda, the distance seemed greater than it had earlier. He settled in the front passenger seat, looking nearly as gray as the primer coat on the car.
    “I can’t just leave you here alone.”
    “I have Bob,” he said, and from the backseat, the dog chuffed. “But hurry.”
    She closed the door and returned to the factory. With each step she took away from Pogo, she felt as if she were stepping out of her life, this life, and into another, meaner world where she would be someone different—and less than—who she had been until now.
    In the factory again, she ran to the south end. Here, in more prosperous days, an enormous roll-up door had allowed trucks to pull partway into the structure to load or unload. Most likely, it had not been used in years. Maybe it would work; maybe it wouldn’t. She found the control box. Groaning and creaking, the big segmented door