between the table and the booth, planting his forepaws on young Mark’s lap.
The boy giggled delightedly as he was subjected to a vigorous face licking. “What’s his name?”
“Killer,” Ellie said.
Jean was worried. “He’s not dangerous, is he?”
Phil and Ellie exchanged glances and smiles. He said, “Killer’s our ambassador of goodwill. We’ve never had a diplomatic crisis since he graciously accepted the post.”
For the past eighteen months, Killer had not looked himself. He wasn’t tan and brown and white and black, as in the days when he had been Rocky, but entirely black. An incognito canine. Rover on the run. A mutt in masquerade. Fugitive furball. Phil had already decided that when he shaved off his beard (soon), they would also allow Killer’s coat to change gradually back to its natural colors.
“Bob,” Ron said, returning to the issue at hand, “we’re living in a time when the highest of high technology makes it possible for a relative handful of totalitarians to subvert a democratic society and control large sections of its government, economy, and culture — with great subtlety. If they control too much of it for too long, unopposed, they’ll get bolder. They’ll want to control it all, every aspect of people’s lives. And by the time the general public wakes up to what’s happened, their ability to resist will have been leached away. The forces marshaled against them will be unchallengeable.”
“Then subtle control might be traded for the blatant exercise of raw power,” Ellie said. “That’s when they open the ‘reeducation’ camps to help us wayward souls learn the right path.”
Bob stared at her in shock. “You don’t really think it could ever happen here, something that extreme.”
Instead of replying, Ellie met his eyes, until he had time to think about what outrageous injustices had already been committed against him and his family to bring them to this place at this time in their lives.
“Jesus,” he whispered, and he gazed down thoughtfully at his folded hands on the table.
Jean looked at her son as the boy happily petted and scratched Killer, then glanced at Ellie’s swollen stomach. “Bob, this is where we belong. This is our future. It’s right. These people have hope, and we need hope badly.” She turned to Ellie. “When’s the baby due?”
“Two months.”
“Boy or girl?”
“We’re having a little girl.”
“You picked a name for her yet?”
“Jennifer Corrine.”
“That’s pretty,” Jean said.
Ellie smiled. “For Phil’s mother and mine.”
To Bob Padrakian, Phil said, “We
“Though guns,” Ron said, “sometimes have their place.”
Bob considered Ellie’s swollen belly, then turned to his wife. “You’re sure?”
“They have hope,” Jean said simply.
Her husband nodded. “Then this is the future.”
Later, on the brink of twilight, Phil and Ellie and Killer went for a walk on the beach.
The sun was huge, low, and red. It quickly sank out of sight beyond the western horizon.
To the east, over the Atlantic, the sky became deep and vast and purple-black, and the stars came out to allow sailors to chart courses on the otherwise strange sea.
Phil and Ellie talked of Jennifer Corrine and of all the hopes that they had for her, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. They took turns throwing a ball, but Killer allowed no one to take turns chasing it.
Phil, who once had been Michael and the son of evil, who once had been Spencer and for so long imprisoned in one moment of a July night, put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. Staring at the ever-shining stars, he knew that human lives were free of the chains of fate except in one regard: It was the human destiny to be free.
About the Author
DEAN KOONTZ, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives with his wife, Gerda, and the enduring spirit of their golden retriever, Trixie, in southern California.
