This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2019 by The Koontz Living Trust

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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eISBN: 9781542016261

Cover design by Phantom City Creative

1

On this August day in Indiana, in a confusion of past and future, catastrophes will and will not be averted. Many innocent people will be spared from certain death, but others will remain dead.

The morning begins for the man without a name when he wakes at six fifteen from a deep sleep on a motel bed in the town of Corydon. Each night he falls asleep within one minute of resting his head on a pillow; each morning he awakens at the time that he predetermined when he went to bed the night before. This is one of his gifts.

An unknown benefactor has given him other, more impressive gifts, including the erasure of his memory. Many would consider amnesia a curse or an affliction. Nameless intuitively knows that having no past is, in his case, a blessing, for he can remember no cause for regret or remorse, or guilt, or sorrow, or despair.

He is thirtysomething; but his life began little more than two years earlier, when he woke in a seat aboard a Gulfstream V jet, the only passenger, fully aware of—and comfortable with—his amnesia. On waking, he knew that his destiny was henceforth to be a defender of the innocent who are ill served—or not served at all—by the current justice system, especially when their tormentors are among the empowered. His task is to visit appropriate consequences upon murderers, and bring truth into the lives of those who thrive on lies and deceit. On that aircraft, back in the day, he woke fully aware of the details of his first mission, which he completed with success and satisfaction.

Maybe this suggests that he is programmed, and perhaps in a way he is, but that doesn’t mean he’s a machine. If cut, he bleeds. If tickled, he laughs. If poisoned, he’ll die. He has eyes, dimensions, senses, affections, passions. If wronged, he will have his revenge.

This morning, after he showers, he opens a locked suitcase that was in the motel room closet when he arrived the previous evening. It contains a Kimber Pro Carry 9 mm with two eight-round magazines, a Galco shoulder rig for the gun, a combat knife in a leather sheath, the latest generation night-vision goggles, the clothes he’ll need today and tomorrow, an electronic key to a Lincoln SUV, thirty thousand dollars in cash, his favorite make of electric razor, a toothbrush, toiletries, and a driver’s license in the name of Alan Grofield.

In the interest of traveling fast, he travels light. Everything he needs is always waiting when he arrives at his destination. When he moves on, he leaves everything behind for others to collect.

The rental Ford sedan that he drove from the private-aircraft terminal in Indianapolis to this motel in the town of Corydon has been taken away during the night by whoever left the Lincoln for him. The less continuity regarding the vehicles he uses, the more missing links there will be in the chain of evidence if ever one law-enforcement agency or another recognizes a connection between these missions and seeks to investigate him.

He has no idea who provides him with private jets, train and bus tickets, vehicles, weapons, money, clothing, or anything else. Whoever it may be, obviously deep pockets are involved.

No sooner has he finished dressing in hiking boots, jeans, long-sleeve T-shirt, and sport coat than he receives a brief text message on the smartphone he just received, which he will smash at the end of this assignment. Ace advises: RECORDER UNDER ARMCHAIR.

As far as Nameless knows, the supernaturally efficient and all-knowing Ace could be a man, a woman, an artificial intelligence, or even an extraterrestrial. If Ace were to fill out a questionnaire meant to determine his/her/its identity, the handler might well check three of those four boxes. Or one. Or none at all.

Nameless upends the only armchair and finds the microrecorder in a plastic bag glued to the underside. He sits on the bed and listens to the twelve-minute explanation of the case and the purpose of this mission. This assignment is different from most. For some reason he can’t entirely explain, he finds it profoundly disturbing.

Because the recorder’s chip self-erases as it disgorges its content, he can’t listen to it twice. That doesn’t matter, for he has total recall of everything he’s seen and heard during the past two years and two months, since his new life began.

With the 9 mm pistol snug in the rig under his sport coat, which is cut for concealed carry, he lugs the suitcase out to the Lincoln. The SUV bears the same license plate number that is taped to the electronic key. He loads the suitcase through the tailgate, puts the combat knife in the console box, and lays the special goggles on the passenger seat.

He drives to a nearby diner for a hearty breakfast. He always eats well and takes time to enjoy his meals, for he never knows when he might be eating his last one.

He tips the waitress two hundred dollars, almost sixteen times the total of the check, not because she’s cute or friendly—she is the latter—but instead because . . . Well, because someone wants him to do it. Someone who once said, It’s not about the money, it’s the kindness, the way it makes the recipient feel special. Life is hard and lonely for many people. If all of us would just make one another feel special now and then—not just with money, but however we can—wouldn’t that be lovely?

In his mind’s ear, he can hear her voice, and it is familiar, a voice from the past, penetrating the wall of amnesia, though he has no idea who she might be.

Because he’s had orange juice and three cups of coffee, he visits the men’s room before leaving the diner. As he’s at the sink, washing his hands, he looks in the mirror and is overcome with the peculiar feeling that something is wrong with his face. He can’t say what the wrongness might be, and as he studies his features, the sensation passes.

Outside the diner, he stands by the Lincoln, his face turned to the sky, basking in the sun. Clouds are creeping in from the west.

Before the morning is done, he’ll be going underground, perhaps to a significant depth, where there is no light but what he brings with him, in search of a man who has no mercy, and a boy who might have lost all hope.

2

He drives out of Corydon, the first state capital of Indiana, until the politicians took their business to Indianapolis in 1825, and he heads west on State Road 62. This two-lane highway at first leads through farmland with clusters of houses, through forested hills, but after he crosses the Blue River, the woods grow thicker, reminiscent of Appalachia, crowded with oak, hickory, black walnut, sassafras, and dogwood, so deeply shaded even in summer sunlight that they darkle with an ominous quality.

Walls of limestone rise above the winding road, evidence of complex geological structures underlying this entire territory. During the Ice Age, the glaciers never quite reached this far, but when the time of melting eventually arrived, they released torrents that over millennia carved a hilly landscape and left behind broad lakes, but also a world hidden from view.

The quarry whom Nameless seeks is Chilton Cutter, a weekend spelunker with a passion for caves. He was an engineer before he became a murderer and kidnapper.

When he was thirty-six, Cutter married a widow, Amy Forester, who had a three-year-old son, Jamie. Over the ensuing few years, the engineer underwent a serious personality change, perhaps because a prescription for opioids led him to other drugs, a pharmaceutical cocktail, that swept him along a path of paranoia. Certain that his wife and her parents were scheming to commit him to an institution, determined to have custody of Jamie even though the child wasn’t of his blood, Chilton Cutter shotgunned Amy and her parents and went on the run with the six-year-old boy.

When no trace of the fugitive and his captive could be found, authorities became convinced that Cutter had “gone below.” After two weeks, when search parties turned up no leads whatsoever, law-enforcement resources had to be redirected to other urgent matters.

Over millions of years, the sediment laid down by a vanished inland sea had formed into limestone of great depth in what was now southern Indiana. Thousands of millennia later, at the end of the Ice Age, the great melt of miles-thick glaciers sculpted uncounted caverns and passageways that formed a maze beyond exploring.

Thanks to Ace’s crew, Nameless knows what the police do not: approximately where to find Chilton Cutter and his stepson Jamie.

Cutter’s vicious crimes weren’t acts of sudden passion. They were planned with mad-engineer cunning. He evidently prepared a refuge and took steps to prevent being followed to it.

Every vehicle with a GPS is tracked by satellite, and the history of its travels is archived in the million-square-foot Utah Data Center of the National Security Agency, in its ever-growing cloud. The NSA is a jealous guardian of the knowledge that it has acquired, and police agencies do not have routine access to it.

Indeed, agencies of the state are more insular and potentially more corrupt because of that insularity than are private-sector companies. Corporations must answer to stockholders and customers and defend against lawsuits of wide variety, but government agencies seldom have to answer to anyone other than sympathetic congressional committees and are largely immune from lawsuits filed by citizens whom they fail to serve or actively damage. Each agency becomes a little kingdom and builds formidable encircling walls, which often inhibits the efforts of law-enforcement officers.

In this brave new digital age, however, dedicated white-hat hackers can penetrate those institutional walls and find the truth that might lead to at least a semblance of justice, as surely as black-hat hackers can wreak great damage.

In the service of truth, Ace’s digital buccaneers installed a rootkit in the NSA system, as they have in others. They can sail undiscovered across its vast sea of data and dive into its deepest trenches. Ordinarily, they would have conjured Cutter’s journey from those archives—except that Cutter was clever enough to strip the GPS out of his all-wheel-drive Range Rover before killing his wife and in-laws. He also removed the license plates, so that none of law enforcement’s ubiquitous plate scanners could tag him at any point along the route to his hideout.

Other ways exist to find the fugitive if you have a team of brilliant hackers and data analysts. The NSA also archives the video from weather and spy satellites, not merely those in the inventory of the United States, but also the orbiting surveillance platforms belonging to other nations, which it has hacked without those countries’ knowledge. Much of the planet is under observation from space 24/7. Computer enhancement of that telescopic video can’t quite allow the reading of the time on a Rolex thousands of miles below, but it can reveal whether the wrist in question does or doesn’t bear a watch.

Such detail is not obtainable from night-shot video, but in rural areas, such as southern Indiana, infrared-camera footage can in some instances facilitate the tracking of a vehicle by its heat signature. Using satellite video, Ace’s team located the farm owned by Amy’s parents, whom she and Jamie were visiting on the fateful night. They zeroed in on the signature of a vehicle that arrived shortly before the time of the murders and that departed at high speed minutes later. They tracked it west on State Road 62, all the way past the town of Leavenworth, before it switched to an unpaved forest-service road. A few miles later, it went off-road, whereupon its heat signature was effectively masked by the canopy of trees.

Now, guided by the Lincoln’s GPS, which has been programmed with the precise longitude and latitude at which Cutter’s vehicle entered the woods, Nameless drives along the forest-service road until the disembodied female voice of his guide says he has arrived.

On the west side of the dirt lane, an opening exists where an SUV can be driven in among the trees, their branches arcing over it to form a tunnel. He pilots the Lincoln as far down the slope as terrain and undergrowth easily allow, into gloom pierced here and there by thin shards of light, as if the sun were shattering and falling to the forest floor in bright, brittle pieces.

He suspects that there is a tortuous winding route all the way to the vale below. However, according to Ace, the cave isn’t far from here. It’s best to approach quietly on foot.

He retrieves the combat knife from the console box, plucks the night-vision goggles from the passenger seat, and gets out of the SUV. He strips off his sport coat and tosses it through the open door, no longer needing it to conceal the shoulder rig, pistol, and spare magazine case. He clips the knife sheath to his belt, so that the weapon depends from his right hip.

The birds and other creatures of the forest have for the moment been silenced by his intrusion into their domain. In August heat, this green realm is as still as if it lies deep underwater. The air moves so sluggishly that it can’t stir even a soft rustle from the trees, raising only faint whispers, as though hostile wood sprites are conspiring against him under the arcing fronds of the ferns.

He puts on the cumbersome goggles but flips the lenses up to his forehead. He won’t need them until he ventures into a cave. Even then, they might not provide the clarity of vision that he requires.

As he proceeds on foot down the slope while at the same time moving laterally across it, wading through the undergrowth, he sees that indeed there is a rugged route by which he could have driven all the way down the incline and into the vale below.

He’s almost to the bottom when the vision slams him. Occasional moments of clairvoyance are his final gift, glimpses of moments in the past or of things to come, always disturbing but not always as helpful as he wishes they would be.

This one is a repeat, the only recurring vision he’s ever had, and this is the third time he’s endured it, a confusing and rapid montage of images, perhaps sequential but maybe not, ending in a horror that always leaves him shaken. For the duration, the forest disappears as he is overwhelmed by swiftly changing images of vivid color.

A dimpled little girl with a ponytail, holding a floppy-eared plush-toy rabbit (the scent of peppermint); pale early light, a great blue heron, four feet tall, foraging in shallow water, long neck craning up from a search for a fingerling or a frog, one yellow eye with large black pupil regarding him with foreboding (from it, a rapid, throaty kok-kok-kok); a young blond waitress in a white uniform with blue trim, smiling as she places a menu on the table before him (the aroma of coffee); a sullen-looking bearded man, glancing at him, his stare poisonous, green eyes like distilled venom; some kind of stone or concrete tower, tall and arched, seen through a rain-spattered windshield, wipers sweeping back and forth (thump-thump, thump-thump); a swarm of vehicles, trucks and cars, sliding-colliding on rain-slick blacktop, sliding-colliding-tumbling (blaring horns); the floppy-eared toy rabbit lying in the rain, still in the grip of a child’s severed hand (screaming).

When the clairvoyant moment passes, Nameless is leaning against the trunk of a tree, bathed in a sweat too cold to have anything to do with the warm day. He is shaking violently.

As when he experienced this vision twice before, he’s oppressed by a sense of responsibility coupled with feelings of inadequacy. If the event he’s seen is one that occurred long ago, perhaps he is somehow to blame for it. If this is a horror yet to come, maybe he will be given a chance to prevent it, though it seems too great a calamity for one man to avert, even a man with his gifts.

Fragments of a shattered sun are no longer falling through gaps in the canopy of branches. The clouds that were earlier creeping in from the west have fully crept. If the blue sky hasn’t entirely surrendered, it’s far to the east and retreating toward Kentucky.

A demon named Cutter waits in a dark and barren hell, holding with him a young and innocent soul to whom hell has no lawful claim.

Nameless moves down the slope, among the trees, taking a direct path to the vale below, but more than once crossing the serpentine route that might have accommodated Cutter’s Range Rover. He finds places where the underbrush appears to have been broken by something of great weight.

A distant roll of thunder scares up a breeze. The hickory and hemlock tremble. The breeze grows stronger. The flowering dogwoods—some white, some pink—shed petals that, like fairies fleeing darker spirits, vanish eastward through the forest shadows.

3

Jamie sits on his folded sleeping bag, listening to the soft hissing.

The Coleman lantern hisses as the gas burns. The sound slithers around and around and around the smooth stone walls, as if snakes must be coiling somewhere.

There are stalactites and stalagmites, like upper and lower teeth, like fangs, as if he and Chilton are living in the mouth of something that’s asleep. A dragon, maybe.

The light throbs a little. The shadows of the upper and lower ’tites and ’mites shiver against the lesser dark, like maybe they’re not shadows, after all, but things that live here far below the sun and stars.

Jamie is not afraid of shadows. He’s not afraid of pretend snakes. He is afraid of his stepfather.

Jamie is six, not yet halfway to seven, but he isn’t a baby anymore. He is done with crying. No more tears.

He cried every day for the first week, not so much the second week, and now not at all. He is sad, but he is not forever broken.

Chilton Cutter is forever broken. Something is very wrong with him. He talks to himself. He sings songs that make no sense. He says that when it’s safe, they will follow the caves through the center of the earth and come out in China, where no damn Indiana police can ever touch them.

Jamie doesn’t want to go to China. Especially not with Chilton, but really not with anyone.

He wants to escape, but that seems impossible. They have gone through many rooms and passageways from the first cave they entered.

Jamie doesn’t know the way out.

And he has no light of his own.

Chilton has the Coleman lantern and the cans of fuel for it.

Every time that Chilton decides the time has come to sleep, he moves off far away among the ’tites and ’mites, taking the lantern with him. After he shuts it off, the darkness is everywhere and there is no tiniest beam of light.

Sometimes Jamie can hear Chilton snoring in the distance. But the snoring echoes in weird ways, and you can go crazy trying to locate the man.

Jamie wants to locate him while he’s sleeping and steal the lantern and the fuel and the matches. He has watched Chilton light it on camping trips in the past. He knows how to do that.

He has a rock. It’s smooth, bigger than his hand, and shaped for an easy grip. A weapon.

The next time Chilton sleeps, if Jamie can find him in the deep and terrible dark, maybe he can bash him on the head and take the lantern and the fuel and try to find his way out.

But Chilton also has a flashlight. He doesn’t need to take time to strike a match and fire up the Coleman. If he hears Jamie trying to find him, he can switch on the flashlight in a second.

Chilton also has two guns. A shotgun and a pistol.

And he has a humongous knife. He has a name for it. The knife is called Old Bloody Mac.

Chilton says he’ll slash Jamie’s throat if his ungrateful son gives him the slightest reason, after all I’ve done for you.

Jamie is not Chilton’s son. He remembers the father he lost to cancer years earlier, remembers only a little, but enough to know.

I thought you was different from your faithless mother, but maybe you’re not worth the effort. You have one chance, boy. One chance only. I’ll teach you the right way to be, and if you refuse to be taught, I’ll take Old Bloody Mac and rip you ear to ear.

Now Jamie sits in shadows, with nothing to do but worry and wonder. And hope that vampire bats might come out of deeper caves and kill Chilton, but only Chilton.

The bats that they have seen are not vampires, but maybe worse things live farther below.

Chilton sits in the brightness of the lantern. He wears earbuds and listens to an audio book on a battery-powered recorder.

Sometimes he rocks back and forth. Sometimes he rocks side to side. He nods and makes faces.

Now and then he speaks, but not to Jamie, to whoever’s reading the book to him. “Damn right,” he says, and “You tell the bastards,” and “They’re rotten through and through, they’re all assholes, kill all the sonsofbitches.”

Jamie unfolds his sleeping bag and lies full length on it. Facing Chilton. He doesn’t like to turn his back on Chilton.

He whispers, “Are you there, Mom?”

She’s dead. He knows she’s dead. She’s in Heaven now.

Jamie remembers a time, after his dad was gone, when he was scared that his mother would leave him, too.

She said, I’ll always be with you, and even if something happens to me, even if I die, I’ll be with you. I’ll come back as your guardian angel.

She’s been in Heaven more than two weeks now. She should be here with him. Unless there’s some guardian angel school she has to go to or a license she has to get.

“Are you there, Mom?” Jamie whispers again, but as before there is no reply.

In the hissing lantern light, listening to his book, Chilton sways and mutters, “Shake them, break them, grind the bastards to dust.”

4

The cave is largely concealed by cascading masses of Halliana growing on the bank above the opening and by tall grass.

The grass has for the most part sprung back from having been flattened by tires nearly three weeks previously. The curtain of Halliana seems to have suffered only minor damage when the Range Rover passed through it.

The tire prints are the giveaway. Although a storm is pending now, no rain has fallen since Cutter passed this way. In his wake, he left a two-yard-long set of tread patterns in what must have been a patch of mud on that night of shotgun murder, and the dry weather has preserved this spoor. The tire tracks lead toward the Halliana.

At this point, Nameless could report his finding to the local authorities. However, he agrees with Ace that, for two reasons, this is not an option.

First, in this bucolic area, law enforcement isn’t experienced in hostage-rescue operations using special weapons and tactics. In fact, they don’t maintain a skilled SWAT team. If the police rush the cave, the boy will die at his stepfather’s hand. If they call Chilton Cutter out, demand he release the boy and surrender, he’ll flee deeper into the limestone maze and perhaps depart by a distant exit that only he knows, where he’s left another vehicle.

Second, the police will want to know who Nameless is, how he came to be here and found this cave. The Alan Grofield driver’s license will pass for genuine up to a point, as in a standard traffic stop. It’s a phantom insert in the DMV files, placed there by Ace’s team. The address is a real house, on a real street. But no one named Alan Grofield actually lives there, and whoever does live there surely looks nothing like Nameless. Even the best fake ID will pass scrutiny only as long as the officer to whom it’s shown assumes it is genuine and doesn’t take exceptional measures to verify it.

Ace’s team, Nameless, and whatever organization supports their missions are all working outside the law. Their purpose is moral, their actions justified. However, if they are discovered, they are not going to be treated like high-tech knights-errant engaged in acts of chivalry, but instead like common criminals.

He alone must find the boy and bring him out alive.

Cutter hasn’t set up camp in the first cave. He’s surely gone much deeper, into a place harder to find. There is little or no need to approach this entrance with great caution.

Nameless wades through the tall grass and parts the cascades of flowering Halliana and steps into the first cave.

The initial room is about seven feet high and half again as wide as a Range Rover. The vehicle isn’t present, and too little light penetrates for him to see more than ten feet ahead.

He has a flashlight tethered to his belt. He can’t use it at this stage because the probing beam might alert Chilton Cutter.

Putting his back to a limestone wall, he flips down the lenses of the electronic goggles. In the underground realm ahead, where there will be no visible-spectrum ambient light to amplify, the night-vision gear will be less useful than if there were at least starlight. But these are the newest generation goggles, which are supposed to be able to function well even in the presence of only infrared radiation on the invisible end of the spectrum. Molecular vibration in the very stone around him and molecular rotation in the gases present in the air result in the emission of infrared “light.” Optical lenses and mirrors collect this radiation and concentrate it into an infrared detector; high-gain low-noise amplifiers increase the weak signal from the detector.

Voilà! A subterranean world as dark as death suddenly becomes an eerie kingdom revealed in shades of green, which is the portion of the spectrum that the human eye reads with greatest clarity. What was blind to him is made manifest by all the light we cannot see.

Without armor, without Excalibur, but with magical goggles that would dazzle even Merlin, pistol in hand, Nameless proceeds into the world below southern Indiana.

In forty feet, the first cave opens into a wider second room where the ceiling varies from perhaps nine feet to twelve. The Range Rover is parked to the left.

He walks the perimeter of the space, quiet on his rubber-soled boots, searching for ways by which he can continue forward. He finds two. The first is a cramped passage through which a grown man must sidle. The second is more generous and therefore more promising.

5

Jamie is hungry. They have plenty of food for a month. Chilton stocked the cave with canned goods, PowerBars, jars of peanuts, almonds, packages of raisins, beverages, everything they need.

But Jamie knows better than to ask for food. He is to speak only when spoken to.

This is one of the rules he is expected to obey as Chilton teaches him “the right way to be.”

If he speaks out, even just one word, he’ll be forced to skip a meal and watch Chilton eat with a lot of lip smacking.

Chilton also has pills. Bottles and bottles of pills. He says they’re for his nerves. But sometimes the more of them he swallows, the more nervous he gets. And angrier.

Sometimes Chilton gets angry quicker than at other times. He can be scarier than anything on Halloween.

When he’s really furious, Chilton presses Old Bloody Mac to Jamie’s throat and says one quick slice is all it’ll take. Or he puts the point of the blade in one of Jamie’s nostrils. Or touches it to a lower eyelid and says, You piss me off, kid, and I’ll pop out both your peepers, play marbles with them.

So Jamie is hungry but says nothing.

Just lies on his side, watching Chilton.

Chilton rocking back and forth, listening to his audio book.

Chilton muttering, “That’s right, that’s true, I been under the boot heel, that’s how it is, that’s how it feels.”

Whatever he’s listening to, it’s making him angrier.

6

Green cave leads to green cave, steadily descending. He marks his route with a bar of motel soap, leaving an X on the wall at each exit he takes from a room or branching passageway. Smooth pale walls of stone seem to ripple downward in velvety folds, patiently shaped by moving water flowing for hundreds of thousands of years, though the way is dry now.

It’s dry until Nameless comes to the underground falls, which he hears two galleries before he sees. Southern Indiana is a land of disappearing streams. They follow carved courses through fields and forests, only to drop suddenly out of sight, into a flue, down into darkness, chuckling like evil spirits homeward bound after working their wickedness in the upper world.

Seen through the special goggles, the water is black, arcing out of the damp, eerily glistening green ceiling, like ink flowing from an infernal pen, writing maledictions on the air, splashing into a black pool from which a four-foot-wide black stream crosses the chamber through an aqueduct worn by its endless currents. The swift water slides through a fracture in a pale-green wall and vanishes from this level as it disappeared from the one above.

When he leaps across the stream, he finds evidence that man and boy must bathe here from time to time. Beside the pool are sponges and a bottle of liquid soap. Farther away, beyond the mist from the waterfall, white towels are draped to dry on limestone formations like large misshapen urns.

Nameless moves with greater caution into a narrow downsloping corridor of smooth flowstone. He is acutely aware that a man using a shotgun, stationed at the far end, could hold off a battalion.

7

Lying on his side, curled around his hunger, Jamie watches the crazy man talking to his audio book in the lantern light.

Then Chilton switches off the recorder and takes out the earbuds. He has big ears. They hang on his head like jug handles.

He looks at his wristwatch. It tells him the time and the day. “You need a bath,” he says.

They don’t need a bath as often as they take one. They don’t do anything to get dirty. This deep in the caves, the air is cool, so they don’t sweat. But every two or three days, they have to go up through the passageways and higher rooms, to the pool.

“You need a bath,” Chilton repeats, clambering to his feet. “We’ll climb to the pool. Get up, boy.”

The water in the pool will be chilly. The towels were soft when all this started. Now they’re stiff and scratchy.

Jamie doesn’t dare refuse. Chilton hasn’t used Old Bloody Mac yet, but sometimes he slaps Jamie across the face, slaps hard. And then another meal is withheld.

Coming close, Chilton inhales deeply, smelling his captive. “You stink, boy. You stink like everyone else in your mama’s family. You people develop a unique stink when you don’t bathe regularly. I swear to God, you people could compete with skunks.”

Jamie always bathes first. After he dries off and dresses, Chilton will use zip ties to bind his hands together and then his ankles, so he can’t run for it when the man takes his own bath.

Chilton never says that he himself stinks. It’s always only Jamie who is supposed to stink.

Yet Chilton takes maybe ten times longer in the pool. He soaps himself and rinses, soaps himself and rinses, again and again in the dark cold water.

It’s like there’s something filthy on him that only he can see. Something as hard to wash off as paint.

8

In the green light of a nightmare, the passageway angles left, right, left, ever downward. This is the route along which the ancient melt shaped its way through stone when the miles-deep ice relented to warmer times: thousands of centuries of most patient sculpting.

Another cavern, and then yet another below that. And at last the susurration of the falling water far above no longer echoes off the surrounding walls.

The current bell-shaped chamber has a floor in which bedding planes shifted, perhaps during a quake before any creature of the earth walked on two legs. A narrow crevasse, about six feet wide, cracked open long after the ice melt, so that its edges are not water-smoothed. Two planks lay across this daunting gap, a simple bridge.

Abruptly, the crevasse seems to widen drastically before him, as if the earth is splitting under some new stress, and a fragment of the repeating vision slams him harder than before: a swarm of vehicles, trucks and cars, sliding-colliding on rain-slick blacktop, sliding-colliding-tumbling. But this time a continuation of the montage reveals something new: The highway is a bridge, which has broken open, a great slab of pavement canting down, a ramp to ruin, off which the tumbling vehicles fall away into a gorge.

The clairvoyant revelation passes, and he stands in the green cave, before the green planks that bridge the black crevasse, which is only six feet wide, as first he found it. The vision of scores of vehicles crashing violently into one another and then falling away into an abyss, carrying their passengers to certain death below, is so horrific, so emblematic of the human condition—one moment safe, the next moment plummeting to a bloody end, the safety having been, as always, an illusion—that for a long moment he can’t breathe, and his heart seems as if it will hammer itself apart.

There is a boy in peril.

He must not fail the boy. Must not fail a child. Not in this new life, as perhaps he failed one in his forgotten past.

He crosses the bridge. The knotholed planks creak underfoot.

At widespread points, three narrow passageways lead from this chamber, one ascending, two descending. As he leans into the opening at the second downward path to assess its potential, he hears the faint voice of a man rising from far below, the words unclear but the tone hostile.

Pistol in hand, he moves downward with utmost care, for this is either the voice of a man who has killed three people, or it rises from some demonic outer dark. One possibility is no less chilling than the other.

By the time the words become clearer, the tone of the speaker is hectoring, and there can be no doubt that the object of his meanness is the missing boy.

At a sharp turn in the passageway, the goggles flare full of green light that blurs away all detail. Nameless flips up the lenses and discovers visible-spectrum light ahead, no need any longer to rely on translated infrared.

He arrives in a vast cavern different from those above, a wilderness of stalactites and stalagmites, some having met in the middle like clenched fangs. It’s a stone forest, the forest of the night, shot through with shadows throbbing subtly in time with the ever-so-slightly pulsing light of a bag-type wick in a gas lantern.

He slips off the night-vision goggles and puts them down and moves among the branchless, leafless stone trees, silently through shadows and quickly through light, until he sees his quarry in the lantern glow: the man ahead and off to the right, hulking over the boy. Cutter isn’t outwardly a monster, but the eerie venue and dire circumstances conspire to make him seem grotesque, a threatening figure from some fairy tale grimmer than the work of the Brothers Grimm, in which the children end up baking in the oven and the witch lives to cook another day.

In a different, parallel alley of the stone forest through which Nameless is moving, Chilton Cutter is talking about a bath, bullying the boy, harassing him to get to his feet, then to move along.

The murderer bends down to pick up the lantern.

The boy looks past his kidnapper and sees Nameless between the columns of stone, more than thirty feet away.

9

The man is taller and a lot stronger than Chilton. At any other time, any other place, he might look dangerous, even scary.

However, the moment Jamie sees the guy, he knows help is here. In his surprise, maybe he inhales sharply. Or makes some small sound of relief.

Bending down to pick up the lantern, Chilton reacts. He snaps his head toward Jamie, who is staring off into the ’tites and ’mites.

Chilton left his shotgun and pistol beside the recorder with his audio book, several steps away. But he carries Old Bloody Mac in a sheath at his hip.

In an instant, Jamie is snared, pulled tight against the crazy man. The razor-sharp edge of the blade is cold against his throat.

But it’s okay. It’ll be okay. Help is here.

Nothing bad can happen now.

10

Quivering glare of gaslight, shivering shadows beyond, thirty feet for a pistol shot, Jamie in the way . . .

The boy sees Nameless and to whatever small extent reveals his excitement. Cutter is attuned to his captive, reacts at once, grabs the boy, pivots toward where he assumes the threat to be.

As much a totem of evil as it is a weapon, the knife seems to draw to itself the light of the lantern, the big blade curving to a point in a sinister sneer.

Cutter will cut, live up to his name, face wrenched in a hyena grin of vindication by blood sacrifice, drug-addled, with nothing to lose and thrilled by the prospect of losing it.

There is no time for, no hope for, no sense in negotiation. Even as the killer pivots, even as he grins his Joker grin, in spite of the distance and the light and the circumstances, Nameless opens fire, aiming for upper chest, throat, head. In quick succession, he squeezes off one round, two, three, tempted to empty the magazine. But he’s got to concentrate on countering the recoil, on keeping the muzzle from pulling up, get off four shots in two seconds, nail the bastard quick before the blade can slash. With ricochets to worry about, smooth dripstone everywhere, the less lead flying the better.

The second round rips Cutter’s throat, the fourth is a face punch. The knife clatters to the floor, and the boy is screaming. The shots are deafening in that confined space, echoing off the ancient walls, echoes of echoes receding along passageways and shuddering in far caverns.

The screaming boy runs from the falling corpse, and Nameless drops to his knees, and the boy comes into his arms. There’s blood on his face, but his throat isn’t cut. The blood isn’t his. It’s spray, the blood of his kidnapper, of his mother’s murderer.

11

The dead man lies in shadow and penumbral light. The lantern hisses softly. Stalagmites stand silent sentinel in a cavern that’s become a catacomb.

Nameless sweeps the way ahead with the beam of his flashlight.

At his rescuer’s side, the boy says, “Sometimes these bats fly through, like a gajillion of them, but they won’t hurt you.” He’s being brave because his scream, when Chilton Cutter was shot, embarrasses him. He is tired and hungry, but he insists on getting out of here on his feet.

Jamie carries the night-vision gear, and Nameless carries the boy’s suitcase, which Cutter packed to take on the run with them before he shotgunned his wife and in-laws.

Killing even a murderer is never exhilarating. In this case no less than others, death is still death—and solemn. However, there is usually a degree of satisfaction in surviving when the bad guy doesn’t. At the moment, that satisfaction eludes Nameless.

He thinks he knows why. Intuition tells him that although Cutter is dead, this isn’t over yet. The day wears a coat of many pockets, with another nasty surprise in one of them.

In the chamber with the waterfall, they stop so that Jamie can kneel by the pool and wash the blood off his face, out of his hair. He strips out of his spattered shirt and puts on another taken from the suitcase.

As the boy is buttoning the fresh shirt, Nameless says, “Was there anyone else?”

Jamie is puzzled. “Anyone else who?”

“Here in the caves. With Cutter.”

“Me.”

“Just you?”

“Yeah. Who else could there be?”

“I just wanted to be sure,” says Nameless.

The boy leaves his bloody shirt behind, and they ascend through the serpentine engineering of the long-melted glaciers, following the X marks made with motel soap on the gray stone walls, into the cavern where the Range Rover is parked, and then through the first cave. They part the curtain of Halliana and, at last, step into a day that lies expectant under a dark-gray glowering sky.

Part of the way up the slope on which the Lincoln is parked among hickory and hemlock and dogwood, the boy drops to his knees, exhausted. He is frightened by the prospect of remaining here alone even for a few minutes while his rescuer carries the suitcase to the SUV and returns for him.

In fact, Nameless is afraid to leave Jamie here. His sense of impending trouble has not abated.

The breeze has grown into a wind. The trees toss, and the sky is devoid of birds, which have fled to shelter.

He puts down the suitcase and carries the boy. Jamie clings to him and doesn’t want to let go when they reach the Lincoln.

The boy’s trust is endearing and resonates with Nameless on a deep level, as if this moment is reminiscent of another that is lost beyond the barrier of amnesia.

He opens the door with one hand, and the boy allows himself to be settled in the passenger seat.

After closing and locking the door, Nameless surveys the forest, but he can see nothing amiss.

When he returns with the suitcase and the night-vision gear, the boy has engaged his safety harness.

Nameless reverses up the slope, onto the unpaved forest-service road, and returns to State Road 62, heading east.

“Are you a policeman?” the boy asks.

“Yes,” Nameless lies, for there is no explanation of himself that a six-year-old will understand.

“Chilton was a bad man.”

“Yes, he was.”

“He killed my mom.”

“She’d be very proud of you.”

“I think she’s here now.”

“You think so?”

“She said if she ever died, she’d come back to be my guardian angel. It just took her a while. But now she’s here.”

“I think you’re right.”

They ride in silence for a minute, and then Jamie says, “I don’t have nowhere to go. Am I going home with you?”

“Someplace better,” Nameless assures him. “You love your aunt Patricia, your dad’s sister, don’t you?”

The boy nods. “Oh, yeah. I forgot. She’s real nice.”

“She’s your next of kin. She’ll take good care of you.”

“Aunt Patty has a great dog. Brandy. She’s a really great dog.”

Patricia lives in Scottsburg. The drive will take maybe an hour and a half.

“Can we eat something somewhere?” Jamie asks. “Chilton wouldn’t always let me eat three times a day. Can we have ice cream?”

They stop at a supermarket in Corydon and go inside together. The boy chooses a pint of peanut-butter-and-chocolate ice cream. Nameless buys a packet of plastic picnic utensils, which includes spoons.

Still the storm has not broken as they head east and then north to Scottsburg.

The boy puts away the entire pint of ice cream.

The resilience of children humbles Nameless. At first, he glances often at his passenger, but then his eyes blur with tears, and he needs clear vision to drive safely.

He remains convinced that the day holds yet another unpleasant surprise. He trusts his hunches. If he didn’t, he would long ago have been bones in a box or ashes in an urn.

12

The house in Scottsburg is clean and orderly and furnished with charm. Patricia Geary—thirty-four, auburn hair, hazel eyes, more than her share of freckles—wears jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, as if she is always prepared to get down to work. Nameless likes her and feels sure the boy will be loved and nurtured here.

They are at the kitchen table, having coffee.

Exhausted, Jamie is sleeping on the big dog bed in a corner, a resting place on which he insisted. Brandy, a golden retriever, is curled contentedly around him, as though he is her whelp, to be protected with tooth and claw.

Although Patricia is overjoyed to have her nephew here and safe, her cup sometimes rattles against her saucer, and her voice now and then breaks with emotion.

Nameless tells her to think of him as one of a team of well-funded mercenaries who secretly seek the truth in cases that law enforcement has, for whatever reason, failed to pursue or solve. He has given her the thirty thousand dollars that Ace provided him to defray the cost of raising Jamie. He promises that years from now, if money is needed for education, Jamie will receive a scholarship. She is bewildered by his claim of knight-errantry, but she is too grateful to press him for more details.

He dictates directions to the complex of caves where Chilton Cutter’s corpse can be found. She will give them to the police.

Having coached her in what to say to authorities, he suggests that they walk through it one more time. “What was I driving?”

“A Jeep. I didn’t think to look at the license plate.”

“How old was I?”

“Maybe twenty-three, twenty-four,” she says, though he is at least in his midthirties.

She says that he is five feet ten, when in fact he is six feet two, that his eyes are brown, though they are blue, that he claimed to be a cave hobbyist, a spelunker, who found the kidnapper quite by accident. Because there are strange people in the woods these days, he carries a pistol, for which he has no license, and he doesn’t want to get in trouble for what happened to Chilton Cutter. That’s the story, and she intends to stick to it.

“But maybe, after you leave, I better wipe down everything you’ve touched. What if they don’t believe me and want to find you one way or another?”

Smiling, he holds up his hands. “Save yourself the work. I don’t have fingerprints.”

She stares wonderingly at the smooth pads of his fingertips, as though this is evidence of his supernatural nature.

Then she says, “But what about Jamie?”

“We had a nice chat during the drive here. He’ll back you up on the description you give the police. I trust him. The boy is a real toughie. Just don’t let the cops badger him, and he’ll be fine.” He rises from the table. “I better be going.”

Patricia gets to her feet. “Will we ever see you again?”

“No. You wouldn’t want to. I only go where there’s trouble.”

After a hesitation, she says, “May I hug you?”

He smiles, and for a minute they hold each other. It feels good to hold her, to know that the boy has her in a lonely world.

As they part, she kisses Nameless on the cheek. “You’re real,” she says, as if she has come to think she’s imagining his presence.

“The boy might need therapy,” he says. “If he does, we’ll know. You’ll get help with that.”

She stands on the porch, watching him get into the Lincoln. She waves as he drives away.

He continues to feel that the day is not finished with him. But whatever trouble is coming, it will not be in this place.

13

His instructions are to spend the night in Fort Wayne. A room is prepaid for him at a three-star motor inn.

The drive from Scottsburg will take a little more than three hours. But he hasn’t eaten lunch, and dinnertime is almost past. He leaves Interstate 65 at a truck stop, a sprawling and busy facility that includes all manner of services and accommodations for long-haul truckers, including a twenty-four-hour diner.

One parking area is for cars and SUVs, another for numerous eighteen-wheel Peterbilts and Macks and the like. In the borderland between, he finds a vacant slot.

As he steps from the Lincoln, canker after canker of lightning issues from the malignant clouds. Something in the distance explodes, and for a moment an aureole of blue light quivers around whatever has been struck and destroyed, as the lingering bolt spends all its energy in the contact. Shadows leap across the blacktop, and the wind abruptly rises, and with a trailing crack of thunder, the long-pending storm at last breaks. Fat raindrops rattle across the parked vehicles and shatter in a silvery spume on the pavement.

By the time Nameless reaches the front door of the diner, the drops have grown smaller, more numerous, have become a drenching downpour. He takes refuge in the warmth of the diner, which welcomes him with the rich aroma of good coffee.

As is often the case in enormous truck stops, the diner can seat maybe two hundred, and yet it is a cozy place: calculated lighting; country music loud enough to hear but not intrusive; a long counter with chromed stools upholstered in red vinyl; pies and tall cakes and glazed muffins on display plates covered with glass-bell lids; lots of red vinyl booths.

The hostess seats him in a booth, at a window overlooking the parking lot.

Within a minute, the waitress brings him a menu and asks for his drink order. She is young, blond, and perky, favoring him with a smile as she puts a four-page plastic-sleeve-protected menu in front of him.

He orders coffee, black, and she is moving away from the table before a frisson of fear wells within him. She is wearing a white uniform with blue trim. Golden-haired and young. Like the waitress in the vision.

He has a photographic memory of every image in that clairvoyant montage. This young woman’s hair, her youth, and her uniform are all a match for those of that other waitress, but her face isn’t the same. She is as pleasant-looking as the attractive girl in the vision, but her features are different. That girl had blue eyes; this girl’s eyes are brown.

When she returns with a mug of coffee, Nameless realizes that she isn’t wearing a name tag. The waitress in the vision wore a tag bearing the name Beverly.

This isn’t the beginning of the event he has foreseen. His fear subsides, though he remains gripped by a deep disquiet as he orders a cheeseburger and fries.

The restaurant is busy, all the counter stools and more than half the booths and tables are occupied.

He scans the customers, but he sees nothing to fuel concern.

Lightning and the roll of thunder draw his attention to the window beside him. In the clairvoyant montage, the catastrophe on the highway occurred in a hard-driving rain like this.

But there has been no dimpled little girl with a plush-toy rabbit, no great blue heron foraging for fingerling or frog.

On the other hand, no previous visions before this most recent one have been montages. He can’t know if the images that he saw were ordered in the sequence they will occur. The little girl and the heron might come after the waitress.

The coffee is hot and good. The caffeine won’t settle his nerves; however, after the day that he’s been through, perhaps nothing can fully calm him.

When the waitress returns with his dinner on a tray, she also brings a pot of coffee to refresh his mug.

As she pours, Nameless says, “I used to come this route more often. There was a waitress reminded me of my sister. She looked kind of like you, name of Beverly. She still work here?”

“There’s no Beverly here now, but I only been on the job six months. My name’s Sandy. What route are you haulin’ these days?”

“Chicago to Nashville on I-65, then Nashville to Memphis on I-40, and after that Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Albuquerque, all the way out to Bakersfield, California. Two days to unwind and then do the whole thing backward.”

“You’re a long time from home, runnin’ that route.”

“Would’ve been smarter of me to’ve been born rich.”

“I made the same mistake,” she says.

The cheeseburger is delicious and the fries are extra crispy.

Rain beats on the window, and worry beats on his mind, and he wishes he were abed in Fort Wayne.

Of all his gifts, clairvoyance is the one that makes him most wonder what strange science must be behind his transformation from whoever he once was into who he has become.

He is nearly finished eating when the dimpled boy comes to the table. The kid is maybe four or five, with a mop of brown hair and big eyes as dark as the coffee in Nameless’s mug. He holds up his ragged teddy bear and says, “Paddington and I had the rice pudding. It was great. You should have some.”

In the vision, the dimpled girl with ponytail was at least nine years old.

“Thanks for the recommendation. I recognize Paddington, but what’s your name?”

“Nicky.”

“Tell me, Nicky, do you have a sister?”

“Yeah. She’s old.”

Nameless scans the restaurant but sees no young girl. “Does your sister have a toy rabbit? A rabbit with floppy ears?”

“Sheesh, no,” the boy says with some disdain, “she has frilly dolls.”

Just then the sister arrives. She isn’t anything like the child in the vision. She’s perhaps ten years old, with curly hair and gray eyes instead of blue. “Nicky, you goof, you’re always running off. Get your butt into our booth before Mom comes back from the ladies’ room, or you’re toast.” She gives Nameless a long-suffering look. “Sorry about this. He’s such an infant.”

When brother and sister are gone, Nameless tells himself that all this is coincidence. But he is restless now and eager to be on the road.

When the waitress brings the check, he asks her to save him the trouble of waiting at the cashier’s station, gives her two hundred dollars, and tells her to keep the change.

Startled, she says, “What’s the joke?”

“I was born rich,” he lies. “I own the trucking company, and I drive a route now and then just for the fun of it.”

He leaves her agape.

In the lobby, he detours to the nearby men’s lavatory, which features ten stalls, ten urinals, ten sinks. After he’s done his business, he washes his hands and turns toward the paper-towel dispenser—where a sullen-looking bearded man finishes drying his hands and tosses the crumpled towel in the trash can.

The guy glances at Nameless.

His green-eyed stare is venomous.

He leaves the men’s room.

In every detail, this is the intense man from the clairvoyant vision.

Nameless wipes his wet hands on his sport coat and goes to the door. He hesitates, not wanting to be on the other man’s heels. Then he hurries into the lobby.

The green-eyed stranger is gone.

To the hostess at her podium, he says, “Did a guy with a beard just pass through here?”

“I didn’t like the look of that one,” she says, frowning and pointing to the front door. “He just left.”

Outside, the storm has temporarily exhausted itself. Rain is still falling, but lightly, and the wind whistles rather than howls.

Big rigs and cars are filling their tanks at the many pumps. On the service lanes, traffic moves to and from the interstate.

He turns away from the fueling islands and heads toward the parking area, splashing through puddles, looking for the bearded man and for anything else that seems wrong about the night. Even in this lighter rain, no one is afoot at the moment.

The lightning is farther away than earlier, miles to the west, closer to the horizon, like the flash of weapons on a battlefield, and thunder rolls in cannonades.

He reaches his Lincoln SUV and is compelled to keep moving.

His intuition is not quite like that with which all men and women are born. Sometimes, not often, but at crucial moments, it speaks to him, as now. Just ahead. Not far.

Two rows past his vehicle, he comes to a Honda Civic parked where the tall pole lamps reveal little of it. A man seems to be sleeping in the passenger seat.

Here, now, this man.

When Nameless raps on the window and the sleeper fails to respond, he pulls a penlight from his sport coat and switches it on.

Nature, with her singular sense of drama, chooses that moment to press the wind hard through the night, wring a downpour from the clouds, and spark celestial fireworks once more. Nevertheless, in spite of the water sheeting down the glass, Nameless sees that the passenger’s head is lolling to the right, revealing a pale face. Wide and sightless eyes. Mouth open, chin wet with blood.

Movement that isn’t born of wind and rain, glimpsed out of the corner of his eye, causes Nameless to pivot to the left. Here comes the bearded man, drenched, eyes glistering with reflected lightning, hand under his jacket, like some elemental spirit who is an agent of the storm and will draw thunderbolts rather than a gun, casting them to blister the flesh off his adversary’s bones.

Nameless is reaching to the shoulder rig under his coat, too, and the stranger is the slower of them. Two shots at a distance of fifteen feet proves superior to thunderbolts, and the man goes down dead, a crumpled dark mass on the blacktop.

Vehicles are moving here and there in the distance, and still no one seems to be afoot in the vicinity. If anyone heard the shots, banshee wind and drumming rain and thunder resurgent will make it difficult if not impossible to determine from where they came.

He tries the door to the Honda, and it isn’t locked. He opens it for a closer look at the corpse in the passenger seat.

The dead man is wearing a rain-soaked gray uniform with the logo of an oil company on the pocket of his waist-length jacket.

This moment of the storm gives way to a moment yet to come, and Nameless is struck by a glimpse of the future: a rain-swept highway, but not the one in the vision that he has feared is now playing out; no mysterious stone or concrete tower ahead as in the other montage; cars and trucks sliding-colliding on rain-slick blacktop; frantic drivers desperate to avoid something that doesn’t appear in the earlier vision, a huge tanker truck with a famous logo, going too fast for highway conditions, shuddering-swerving-jackknifing; the rolling tanker, sliding in a shower of sparks that even the rain can’t damp; a fireball, a wave of flames spilling across the road, a sea of fire; ten, fifteen, twenty vehicles caught in the fiery tide, the occupants screaming as one by one their fuel tanks explode under them.

As the vision ends, he stands stricken immobile by horror.

For years, some of the most vicious Mexican gangs have tapped into gasoline pipelines in that country, boldly pirating hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of fuel, and the government has often been powerless to stop them. From time to time, this reckless crime has resulted in fierce explosions in which scores of citizens living in the area have perished. Perhaps now those gangs have crossed the border intent on hijacking tanker trucks, or maybe these hijackers are homegrown. In either case, they lack the skills and the judgment to commit their crimes without collateral damage.

Nameless is on the move once more, hurrying through the wind-whipped rain, from the car park to the larger lot reserved for the trucks, scores lined up like an army of land leviathans. He finds the oil-company tanker in mere moments. Its engine is running, soft light glowing in the driver’s compartment.

He holsters the pistol, draws the combat knife from the sheath on his right hip, which he has worn under his coat since the caves. Killing with a knife is the worst. Profoundly, sickeningly personal. Nothing disturbs him more than using a blade, but he isn’t going to risk gunfire in the cab of a gasoline tanker.

He rushes along the starboard side, hoping that no one in the cab is checking the rearview mirrors. He reaches up to the door. It isn’t locked. He yanks it open, pulls himself up onto the boarding step with his left hand, and confronts a startled man with a silver ring in his nose and a tattoo of a snake around his neck.

The guy grabs for Nameless’s face, maybe to gouge his eyes and shove him away, but the combat knife pierces clothing as if it’s paper, slides between two ribs, gouges a lung, maybe severs the inferior vena cava, and all the fight goes out of the guy with an explosive exhalation ripe with halitosis.

Nameless pulls the bleeder off the seat, tumbles him to the pavement, and enters the cab. The driver should be at least half-smart enough to surrender. Instead, he releases the hand brake and means to shift the truck into drive, as if somehow the invader can be defeated just by determined forward motion. A knife through the neck brings the truth of the situation to his attention. His hands slip off the gearshift and steering wheel. When the carotid arteries supplying blood to the brain are severed, confusion is immediate, blindness close behind, and death does not malinger. As the driver settles out of this life, Nameless reaches across him and sets the hand brake. He switches off the engine, douses the lights, and takes the key with him when he exits through the starboard door.

The man with the snake tattooed around his neck is spasming feebly on the pavement and making thin, desperate noises. Nameless finishes him and sheathes the blade.

He makes his way back to the Lincoln SUV.

Rain descends in torrents so thick that the wind can’t move them far off the perpendicular, sizzling down like molten silver in the light of the tall lampposts. He risks standing in the downpour when he should be in flight, hoping that the deluge will sluice from him most of the blood. The heavens flare and quake. Sheets of shadow and light are flung through the night, making strange everything that should be familiar. Nameless is shuddering, shaking violently, terrified of himself.

After a minute or two, he gets in the Lincoln and drives out to the interstate. He heads north toward Indianapolis and a different night entirely from the one he had planned.

14

He is shivering now with a chill, his clothing heavy with rainwater. The heater is turned up, the vents are directed at him, he is slowly drying out, and still he shivers.

The vision that he first received weeks earlier, involving the little girl and the floppy-eared toy rabbit—the one that ended with the toy lying on the rain-wet pavement in the grip of her severed hand—concerns not a single monstrous event, but two events with similar elements. Some of the images refer to one calamity, some to another. In the first there is a collapsing bridge. In the latter, a jackknifing gasoline tanker.

His clairvoyance gives him glimpses of horrors to come, but it also occasionally makes him a witness to things that have happened in the past. When he initially endured this vision, he was oppressed by a sense of responsibility for something he had failed to do in the years now walled behind ramparts of amnesia. Nevertheless, he had been sure that he was being shown some catastrophe to come.

Now he is profoundly shaken by a suspicion that the girl with the rabbit belongs to the past, along with the blue heron and the mysterious stone or concrete tower—a bridge tower—half glimpsed in the rain of another long-ago storm.

South of Taylorsville, he exits the interstate for a rest area. He parks and uses his smartphone, which he has not disposed of yet, to send a message to Ace of Diamonds. He cites the location of the truck stop and then types, MURDERED DRIVER OF GASOLINE TANKER DEAD IN HIJACKER’S HONDA CIVIC. ONE HIJACKER DEAD WITH HIM. TWO MORE DEAD WITH TANKER. POLICE SHOULD SECURE TRUCK.

The hard rain seems eternal.

Stormlight splits the sky, but for all its power can’t make the darkness relent.

A man in a black rain slicker and a couple huddling under one umbrella hurry between the parking area and the lavatories, and then back again.

A vehicle arrives as if materializing out of the rain, and another departs, vanishing into the downpour as if it never existed.

After a few minutes, Ace responds, and a dialogue ensues in a flurry of urgent text messages.

Instead of continuing to Fort Wayne, Nameless will drive to Merrillville, Indiana, just southwest of Chicago. From his current position, allowing for the bad weather, he should arrive there in approximately two and a half hours. By then, members of Ace’s crew will be ready at Clarion Inn on Rhode Island Avenue. A man calling himself Parker will be waiting in a black Mercedes Sprinter, a luxury van, in the motor-inn parking lot; he will escort Nameless to the suite they have booked.

A wet work of storm cells overlays much of Indiana. He drives in and out of hard rain, but even between the downpours, clouds shroud the sky and deny him stars. The low and lowering overcast oppresses, as if he is in a lidded box.

He is not an agent of justice, for there can be little or no real justice in this broken world, where culture and politics are forever redefining the word.

Instead, he is an agent of truth, which can’t be endlessly redefined, which simply is, though often difficult to uncover. His task is to bring the truth to those who live by lies and deception, and deliver unto them the rightful consequences of their deceit.

But what if the amnesia imposed on him, with his assent, means he, too, is living a lie . . . ?

If ever the authorities begin to connect his missions, the erasure of his past makes it extremely hard for them to work up a profile of him, draw a bead on him, and track him down. Likewise, without fingerprints or memories of a former life, with the past scrubbed away, he can’t be tied to friends or loved ones from that previous existence or to Ace and others in the organization that supports him so well; therefore, he can’t endanger them by making enemies of vicious people, or put them at risk of being charged as accomplices. He’s convinced himself that those are the reasons for the engineered amnesia.

But, again: What if? What if another—maybe even the primary—reason for surrendering to amnesia is to wall himself off from a truth in the past that he would find intolerable if it were revealed to him? How ironic if the agent of truth is, himself, on the run from truth.

To Indianapolis, to Lebanon, to Lafayette, to Remington, past Rensselaer, and at last to Merrillville. He arrives at Clarion Inn in an absence of rain, still without stars.

As he cruises through the parking lot, the headlights of the Mercedes Sprinter flash once. He parks a few spaces from it.

He has never before seen the man who gets out of the Sprinter to greet him. “I’m Parker, sir.”

The two-room suite is on the second floor. A man and a woman are waiting there. He calls himself Howard and appears as though he might have a significant military past: that freshly barbered look, direct stare, and the self-composure of a special forces veteran. The woman calls herself Beth and is a lovely soft-spoken brunette with an air of efficiency, competence.

Nameless sits with Parker, Howard, and Beth in the living room of the suite.

“I think holes are opening in the amnesia,” he tells them. “I had this vision a couple weeks ago. I thought it was of an event to come. Now I think it’s something from the past.”

“Is this new?” Beth asks. “This unanticipated clairvoyance—hasn’t it involved visions of things that have happened long ago as often as things that will happen?”

“Yes. But when I’ve glimpsed a piece of the past before, it’s been an event in someone else’s life, in the past of the killer I’m stalking or in the past of one of his intended victims. I think this is an event in my past.”

“You think. But you aren’t sure.”

“No, I’m not sure. But I know. The feel of it. The horror it evokes in me, the sorrow . . . I know that I’ve lived through it sometime, somewhere. And if the wall of amnesia is cracking . . . then it might collapse entirely at the most damn inconvenient moment.”

Howard says, “So then . . . what do you want to do, sir?”

“Ace enforces the protocols,” Nameless says, “you work for Ace. What do the protocols require? Just tell me, and let’s do it.”

The three of them exchange looks that he can’t interpret.

Beth says, “This is your decision. It isn’t a matter of any protocols. It’s a matter of the heart.”

With her last six words, she has told him something that makes him close his eyes and take deep breaths and listen for a while to his heavy heartbeat.

When he opens his eyes, he says, “Let’s do it. Rebuild the wall. Build it twice as thick.”

“You’re sure?” she asks.

“Very sure. I’m a coward, Beth.”

“Sir,” Howard says, rising from his chair, “that’s one thing you’re for damn sure not.”

Getting to his feet, Nameless says, “It depends on how you define the word.”

In the bedroom of the suite, they have already unpacked trunks of equipment, an ominous array of machines and instruments including two computer workstations. The bed has been prepared.

At Parker’s instruction, Nameless strips to his briefs. He lies on the bed, his head propped on three pillows.

Parker pulls the sheet up to Nameless’s waist.

Howard produces a rubber cap fitted with many electrodes, but Beth says, “We can wait to put that on him until he’s asleep.”

At bedside stands an IV rack, a full bag of glucose suspended from it, a drip line dangling from the bag.

Parker settles at one of the computers.

Beth uses a length of rubber tubing as a tourniquet, swabs the crook of her patient’s arm with alcohol, and painlessly inserts a cannula in the target vein.

The gift and curse of clairvoyance is in essence like being able to remember things that haven’t happened yet and things that happened to others in their past. The clairvoyant part of his most recent vision involved the tanker truck, but the rest of it wasn’t clairvoyance at all, only memories of his own leaking through the barrier between his two lives. He cannot endure memories of his past, only memories of the future.

Something he said a moment ago to Beth disturbs him: I’m a coward, Beth.

If he is indeed a coward, too weak to face up to his worst failures, fundamentally flawed, he will surely fail others in the future, and he should not continue in this role. If instead he is not running from responsibility, only from a black grief too great to be borne, he isn’t a coward, after all, and his amnesia is only in the service of efficiency, of staying focused on his mission.

For the sake of those whose lives may one day be in his hands, he needs to know which it is.

Beth uses a hypodermic syringe to draw a pale-blue drug from an ampule and inserts the needle in the drug port of the drip line.

Before she presses the plunger, Nameless says, “Could you hold my hand?”

There is kindness in her gentle face and brown eyes. She holds the syringe with her left hand, fulfills his request with her right.

“You’ll be fine,” she promises.

“Will you tell me some things I’ve forgotten—so that I can forget them again?”

“You’re the boss. What do you want to know?”

“Who pays for all of this?”

“You do.”

“Me? I’m just a field agent.”

“You’re worth over twenty billion dollars. You and your wife, Regina, built a great company together.”

The memory of all that does not return to him. Rather, it’s like a story that Beth’s telling him. He can only assume it’s true.

“And Regina is . . . ?”

“Gone,” says Beth, and tears well unspent in her eyes. “She and your daughter were traveling in a car when these terrorists blew a bridge.”

Anguish binds his heart so that every beat is a painful labor.

“There was a boy.”

Parker and Howard have come close. The older of the two men puts a hand on Nameless’s shoulder.

Beth says, “Your unborn son. Regina was pregnant with him. He would be five years old now.”

“And where was I when . . . ?”

“In the limo behind theirs. You had business to do en route. Phone calls. You didn’t want to ride with them. You said . . .”

A cold blade of memory stabs him. He had ridden in a different limo because he’d said Regina and his daughter would be a distraction from the business he had to do.

His pregnant wife, his child. A distraction.

The room is too bright with the light of truth. He cannot keep his eyes open in such terrible brightness.

“Your wife and daughter were killed in a collision with a big rig. They didn’t go into the gorge like so many did.”

Behind his closed eyes: the severed hand holding the floppy-eared toy rabbit.

“The terrorists?”

“Never solved. No arrests. No one ever took credit for it. There’ve been a couple events since where no one takes credit. They might be linked. If so, these people are a different kind of crazy.”

His hand still on Nameless’s shoulder, Howard says, “You’re not a coward, son. You’re an obsessive, you’ve always been, and you’re sick with guilt beyond all reason, sick with guilt and crazy with grief, and you’ve found this thing to do, these missions, to give your life meaning.”

A crack in the wall of amnesia. Son. Nameless looks up into his father’s face.

Indicating the syringe with a nod of her head, Beth says, “You really are the boss. Do you still want me to administer this and put you under?”

He hesitates. “What will I remember? There’s a family in Worstead, Texas. Mother, daughter, son. I killed the sheriff, a child molester, who would have murdered the mother and son to get possession of the daughter.”

Parker says, “Jenny Demeter, a widow. Her daughter Seraphina. The son’s name is Max. Yes, you’ll remember them and everything else that’s happened since we’ve begun these missions. But you’ll forget everything you were made to forget before—and what we’ve said here tonight.”

“The past is never past,” Nameless says. “Without forgetting, there is no future for me. But I don’t want to forget Jenny Demeter and her kids. She reminds me . . . of Regina.” He shifts his gaze to Beth. “When you push the plunger, tell me my daughter’s name.”

After a hesitation, Beth says, “Alice. Her name was Alice,” and she injects the drug.

“Alice,” he says. “Oh, God, yes, Alice.”

As a deep, dreamless sleep overcomes him, he knows that when he wakes, her precious name will be forgotten, as his own has been, and that he will spend the rest of his life doing for others in jeopardy what he failed to do for her. This is the cold, hard truth he brings now to himself: that at least for the moment, he lacks the strength to live with the past and wants only the future, no memories of days gone by, only memories of tomorrow.

MORE FROM DEAN KOONTZ

If you enjoyed the Nameless collection from Amazon Original Stories, look for Dean Koontz's next novel, Devoted, available Spring 2020.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dean Koontz is the author of more than a dozen New York Times number one bestsellers. His books have sold over five hundred million copies worldwide, and his work is published in thirty-eight languages. He was born and raised in Pennsylvania and lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Elsa, in Southern California.

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Ashley Bell

The City

Innocence

77 Shadow Street

What the Night Knows

Breathless

Relentless

Your Heart Belongs to Me

The Darkest Evening of the Year

The Good Guy

The Husband

Velocity

Life Expectancy

The Taking

The Face

By the Light of the Moon

One Door Away from Heaven

From the Corner of His Eye

False Memory

Seize the Night

Fear Nothing

Mr. Murder

Dragon Tears

Hideaway

Cold Fire

The Bad Place

Midnight

Lightning

Watchers

Strangers

Twilight Eyes

Darkfall

Phantoms

Whispers

The Mask

The Vision

The Face of Fear

Night Chills

Shattered

The Voice of the Night

The Servants of Twilight

The House of Thunder

The Key to Midnight

The Eyes of Darkness

Shadowfires

Winter Moon

The Door to December

Dark Rivers of the Heart

Icebound

Strange Highways

Intensity

Sole Survivor

Ticktock

The Funhouse

Demon Seed

Jane Hawk

The Silent Corner

The Whispering Room

The Crooked Staircase

The Forbidden Door

The Night Window

Odd Thomas

Odd Thomas

Forever Odd

Brother Odd

Odd Hours

Odd Interlude

Odd Apocalypse

Deeply Odd

Saint Odd

Frankenstein

Prodigal Son

City of Night

Dead and Alive

Lost Souls

The Dead Town

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