Life Expectancy. Dean Koontz
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March. Camping, hiking, boating, and whitewater rafting pull in almost as many the rest of the year.
Autumn weather arrives early in the Rocky Mountains; but that day in September was not one of our refreshingly crisp afternoons. Pleasantly warm air, as still as the greatly compressed fathoms at the bottom of an ocean, conspired with golden afternoon sunlight to give Snow Village the look of a community petrified in amber.
Because my parents’ house is in a perimeter neighborhood, I drove rather than walked into the heart of town, where I had a few errands to undertake.
In those days I owned a seven-year-old Dodge Daytona Shelby Z. Other than my mother and grandmother, I’d not yet met a woman I could love as much as I loved that sporty little coupe.
I have no mechanical skills, and I lack the talent to acquire any. The workings of an engine are as mysterious to me as is the enduring popularity of the tuna casserole.
I loved that peppy little Dodge sheerly for its form: the sleek lines, the black paint job, the harvest-moon-yellow racing stripes. That car was a piece of the night, driven down from the sky, with evidence of a lunar sideswipe on its flanks.
Generally speaking, I do not romanticize inanimate objects unless they can be eaten. The Dodge was a rare exception.
Arriving downtown, thus far having been spared from a head-on collision with an ironic speeding hearse, I passed several minutes in a search for the perfect parking spot.
Much of Alpine Avenue, our main street, features angle-to-the-curb parking, which I avoided in those days. The doors of flanking vehicles, if opened carelessly, could dent my Shelby Z and chip its paint. I took its every injury as a personal wound.
I much preferred to parallel park, and found a suitable place across the street from Center Square Park, which is in fact square and in the center of town. We Rocky Mountain types sometimes are as plainspoken as our magnificent scenery is ornate.
I curbed the Shelby Z behind a yellow panel van, in front of the Snow Mansion, a landmark open to the public eleven months of the year but closed here in September, which falls between the two main tourist seasons.
Ordinarily, of course, I would have stepped from the car on the driver’s side. As I was about to exit, a pickup truck exploded past, dangerously close and at twice the posted speed. Had I opened the door seconds sooner and started to get out, I would have spent the autumn hospitalized and would have met the winter with fewer limbs.
On any other day, I might have muttered to myself about the driver’s recklessness and then opened the door in his wake. Not this time.
Being cautious—but I hoped not too cautious—I slid over the console into the passenger’s seat and got out on the curb side.
At once I looked up. No falling safe. So far, so good.
Founded in 1872 with gold-mining and railroad money, much of Snow Village is an alfresco museum of Victorian architecture, especially on the town square, where an active preservation society has been most successful. Brick and limestone were the favored building materials in the four blocks surrounding the park, with carved or molded pediments over doors and windows, and ornate iron railings.
Here the street trees are larches: tall, conical, and old. They had not yet traded their green summer wardrobe for autumn gold.
I had business at the dry cleaner’s, at the bank, and at the library. None of those establishments was on the side of the park where I’d found a suitable place for my car.
Of the three, the bank most concerned me. Occasionally people robbed banks. Bystanders were sometimes shot.
Prudence suggested that I wait until the following day to do my banking.
On the other hand, though no dry cleaner has ever been charged with causing a catastrophe in the course of Martinzing a three-piece wool suit, I was pretty sure they used caustic, toxic, perhaps even explosive chemicals.
Likewise, with all the narrow aisles between wooden shelves packed full of highly combustible books, libraries are potential firetraps.
Halted by indecision, I stood on the sidewalk, dappled with larch shadows and sunlight.
Because Grandpa Josef’s predictions of five terrible days lacked specificity, I had not been able to plan defensively for any of them. All my life, however, I had been preparing psychologically.
Yet all that preparation afforded me no comfort. My imagination had hatched a crawling dread that crept down my spine and into every extremity.
As long as I had not ventured out of the house, the comfort of home and the courage of family had insulated me from fear. Now I felt exposed, vulnerable, targeted.
Paranoia may be an occupational hazard of spies, politicians, drug dealers, and big-city cops, but bakers rarely suffer from it. Weevils in the flour and a shortage of bitter chocolate in the pantry do not at once strike us as evidence of cunning adversaries and vast conspiracies.
Having led a fortunate, cozy, and—after the night of my birth—happily uneventful life, I had made no enemies of whom I was aware. Yet I surveyed the second-and third-story windows overlooking the town square, convinced I would spot a sniper drawing a bead on me.
Until that moment, my assumption had always been that whatever misfortune befell me on the five days would be impersonal, an act of nature: lightning strike, snakebite, cerebral thrombosis, incoming meteorite. Or otherwise it might be an accident resulting from the fallibility of my fellow human beings: a runaway concrete truck, a runaway train, a faultily constructed propane tank.
Even stumbling into the middle of a bank robbery and being shot would be a kind of accident, considering that I could have delayed my banking errand by taking a walk in the park, feeding squirrels, getting bitten, and contracting rabies.
Now I was paralyzed by the possibility of intent, by the realization that an unknown person might consciously select me as the object upon which to visit mayhem and misery.
He didn’t have to be anyone I knew. Most likely he would be a crazed loner. Some homicidal stranger with a grudge against life, a rifle, plenty of hollow-point ammunition, and a supply of tasty high-protein power bars to keep him alert during a long standoff with the police.
Many windowpanes blazed with orange reflections of the afternoon sun. Others were dark, at angles that didn’t take the solar image; any of those might have been open, the gunman lurking in the shadows beyond.
In my paralysis I became convinced that I possessed the talent for precognition that Grandpa Josef had displayed on his deathbed. The sniper was not just a possibility; he was here, finger on the trigger. I had not imagined him, but had sensed him clairvoyantly, him and my bullet-riddled future.
I tried to continue forward and then attempted to retreat, but I couldn’t move. I felt that a step in the wrong direction would take me into the path of a bullet.
Of course as long as I stood motionless, I made a perfect target. Rational argument, however, couldn’t dispel the paralysis.
My gaze rose from windows to rooftops, which might provide an even more likely roost for a sniper.
So intense was my concentration that I heard but didn’t respond to the question until he repeated it: “I said—are you all right?”
I lowered my attention from the search for a sniper to the young man standing on the sidewalk in front of me. Dark-haired, green-eyed, he was handsome enough to be a movie star.
For a moment I felt disoriented, as though I had briefly stepped outside the flow of time and now, stepping in again, could not adjust to the pace of life.
He glanced toward the rooftops that had concerned me, then fixed me with those remarkable eyes. “You don’t look well.”
My tongue felt thick. “I … just … I thought I saw something over there.”
This statement was peculiar enough to tweak an uncertain smile from him. “You mean