Koontz Dean-2004-Life Expectancy Read online

  Life Expectancy

  By: Dean R. Koontz

  "Koontz [is] working at his pinnacle, providing terrific entertainment

  that deals seriously with some of the deepest themes of human

  existence: the nature of evil, the grip of fate and the power of love.

  "Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  With his best selling blend of nail-biting intensity, daring artistry,

  and storytelling magic, Dean Koontz returns with an emotional roller

  coaster of a tale filled with enough twists, turns, shocks, and

  surprises for ten ordinary novels. Here is the story of five days in

  the life of an ordinary man born to an extraordinary legacy-a story

  that will challenge the way you look at good and evil, life and death,

  and everything in between.... Life Expectancy

  Jimmy Tock comes into the world on the very night his grandfather

  leaves it. As a violent storm rages outside the hospital, Rudy Tock

  spends long hours walking the corridors between the expectant fathers'

  waiting room and his dying father's bedside. It's a strange vigil made

  all the stranger when, at the very height of the storm's fury, Josef

  Tock suddenly sits up in bed and speaks coherently for the first and

  last time since his stroke.

  What he says before he dies is that there will be five dark days in the

  life of his grandson- five dates whose terrible events Jimmy will have

  to prepare himself to face. The first is to occur in his twentieth

  year; the second in his twenty-third year; the third in his

  twenty-eighth; the fourth in his twenty-ninth; the fifth in his

  thirtieth.

  Rudy is all too ready to discount his father's last words as a dying man's

  delusional rambling.

  But then he discovers that Josef also predicted the time of his

  grandson's birth to the minute, as well as his exact height and weight,

  and the fact that Jimmy would be born with syndactyly-the unexplained

  anomaly of fused digits-on his left foot. Suddenly the old man's

  predictions take on a chilling significance.

  What terrifying events await Jimmy on these five dark days? What

  nightmares will he face? What challenges must he survive? As the

  novel unfolds, picking up Jimmy's story at each of these crisis points,

  the path he must follow will defy every expectation. And with each

  crisis he faces, he will move closer to a fate he could never have

  imagined. For who Jimmy Tock is and what he must accomplish on the

  five days when his world turns is a mystery as dangerous as it is

  wondrous-a struggle against an evil so dark and pervasive, only the

  most extraordinary of human spirits can shine through.

  "Koontz is a superb plotter and wordsmith. He chronicles the hopes and

  fears of our time in broad strokes and fine detail, using popular

  fiction to explore the human condition. "USA Today

  "The Dean of Suspense. "People

  DEAN KOONTZ is the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers. He

  lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Trixie, in southern

  California.

  A Main Selection of The Literary Guild, Mystery Guild, Doubleday Book

  Club, and Doubleday Large Print Book Club

  Cover art Tom Hallman

  Visit Bantam's website at www.bantamdell.com.

  Visit Dean Koontz at www.deankoontz.com.

  Bantam Books

  LIFE EXPECTANCY.

  ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ

  The Taking

  Odd Thomas

  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

  Dark fall

  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 ofDarkhess

  Shadowfires

  Winter Moon

  The Door to December

  Dark Rivers of the Heart

  Icebound

  Strange Highways

  Intensity

  Sole Survivor

  Ticktock

  The Fun house

  Demon Seed

  LIFE EXPECTANCY

  A Bantam Book / December 2004

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are the product of the author's imagination or are used

  fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright 2004 by Dean Koontz

  Book design by Virginia Norey

  A signed, limited edition has been privately published by Charnel

  House. Charnelhouse.com

  Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc." and the

  colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Koontz, Dean R. Life

  expectancy / Dean Koontz.

  p. cm. ISBN: 0-553-80414-6

  1. Cerebrovascular disease-Patients-Fiction. 2. Fathers and

  sons-Fiction. 3. Terminally ill-Fiction. 4. Grandfathers-Fiction. 5.

  Forecasting-Fiction.

  PS3561.O55L49 2004b 813'.54dc-22 2004059476

  Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in

  Canada www.bantamdell.com

  BVG 10 987654321

  To Laura Albano,

  who has such a good heart.

  Strange brain, but good heart.

  But he that dares not grasp the thorn Should never crave the rose.

  -Anne Bronte, "The Narrow Way"

  Here's a sigh to those who love me, And a smile to those who hate; And,

  whatever sky's above me, Here's a heart for every fate.

  -Lord Byron, "To Thomas Moore"

  PART ONE

  Welcome to the World,

  Jimmy Tock

  in the night that I was born, my paternal grandfather, Josef Tock, made

  ten predictions that shaped my life. Then he died in the very minute

  that my mother gave birth to me.

  Josef had never previously engaged in fortune-telling. He was a pastry

  chef. He made eclairs and lemon tarts, not predictions.

  Some lives, conducted with grace, are beautiful arcs bridging this

  world to eternity. I am thirty years old and can't for certain see the

  course of my life, but rather than a graceful arc, my passage seems to

  be a herky-jerky line from one crisis to another.

  I am a lummox, by which I do not mean stupid, only that I am biggish

>   for my size and not always aware of where my feet are going.

  This truth is not offered in a spirit of self-deprecation or even

  humility. Apparently, being a lummox is part of my charm, an almost

  winsome trait, as you will see.

  No doubt I have now raised in your mind the question of what I in

  tend to imply by "biggish for my size." Autobiography is proving to be

  a trickier task than I first imagined.

  I am not as tall as people seem to think I am, in fact not tall at all

  by the standards of professional-or even of high school-basketball. I

  am neither plump nor as buff as an iron-pumping fitness fanatic. At

  most I am somewhat husky.

  Yet men taller and heavier than I am often call me "big guy." My

  nickname in school was Moose. From childhood, I have heard people joke

  about how astronomical our grocery bills must be.

  The disconnect between my true size and many people's perception of my

  dimensions has always mystified me.

  My wife, who is the linchpin of my life, claims that I have a presence

  much bigger than my physique. She says that people measure me by the

  impression I make on them.

  I find this notion ludicrous. It is bullshit born of love.

  If sometimes I make an outsized impression on people, it's as likely as

  not because I fell on them. Or stepped on their feet.

  In Arizona, there is a place where a dropped ball appears to roll

  uphill in defiance of gravity. In truth, this effect is a trick of

  perspective in which elements of a highly unusual landscape conspire to

  deceive the eye.

  I suspect I am a similar freak of nature. Perhaps light reflects oddly

  from me or bends around me in a singular fashion, so I appear to be

  more of a hulk than I am.

  On the night I was born in Snow County Hospital, in the community of

  Snow Village, Colorado, my grandfather told a nurse that I would be

  twenty inches long and weigh eight pounds ten ounces.

  The nurse was startled by this prediction not because eight pounds ten

  is a huge newborn-many are larger-and not because my grandfather was a

  pastry chef who suddenly began acting as though he were a crystal-ball

  gazer. Four days previously he had suffered a massive stroke that left

  him paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak; yet

  from his bed in the intensive care unit, he began making

  prognostications in a clear voice, without slur or hesitation.

  He also told her that I would be born at 10:46 p.m. and that I would

  suffer from syndactyly.

  That is a word difficult to pronounce before a stroke, let alone after

  one.

  Syndactyly-as the observing nurse explained to my father-is a

  congenital defect in which two or more fingers or toes are joined. In

  serious cases, the bones of adjacent digits are fused to such an extent

  that two fingers share a single nail.

  Multiple surgeries are required to correct such a condition and to

  ensure that the afflicted child will grow into an adult capable of

  giving the F-you finger to anyone who sufficiently annoys him.

  In my case, the trouble was toes. Two were fused on the left foot,

  three on the right.

  My mother, Madelaine-whom my father affectionately calls Maddy or

  sometimes the Mad One-insists that they considered forgoing the surgery

  and, instead, christening me Flipper.

  Flipper was the name of a dolphin that once starred in a hit TV

  show-not surprisingly titled Flipper-in the late 1960s. My mother

  describes the program as "delightfully, wonderfully, hilariously

  stupid." It went off the air a few years before I was born.

  Flipper, a male, was played by a trained dolphin named Suzi. This was

  most likely the first instance of transvestism on television.

  Actually, that's not the right word because transvestism is a male

  dressing as a female for sexual gratification. Besides, Suzi-alias

  Flipper-didn't wear clothes.

  So it was a program in which the female star always appeared nude and

  was sufficiently butch to pass for a male.

  Just two nights ago at dinner, over one of my mother's infamous

  cheese-and-broccoli pies, she asked rhetorically if it was any wonder

  that such a dire collapse in broadcast standards, begun with Flipper,

  should lead to the boring freak-show shock that is contemporary

  television.

  Playing her game, my father said, "It actually began with Lassie. In

  every show, she was nude, too."

  "Lassie was always played by male dogs," my mother replied.

  "There you go," Dad said, his point made.

  I escaped being named Flipper when successful surgeries restored my

  toes to the normal condition. In my case, the fusion involved only

  skin, not bones. The separation was a relatively simple procedure.

  Nevertheless, on that uncommonly stormy night, my grandfather's

  prediction of syndactyly proved true.

  If I had been born on a night of unremarkable weather, family legend

  would have transformed it into an eerie calm, every leaf motionless in

  breathless air, night birds silent with expectation. The Tock family

  has a proud history of self-dramatization.

  Even allowing for exaggeration, the storm must have been violent enough

  to shake the Colorado mountains to their rocky foundations. The

  heavens cracked and flashed as if celestial armies were at war.

  Still in the womb, I remained unaware of all the thunderclaps. And

  once born, I was probably distracted by my strange feet.

  This was August 9, 1974, the day Richard Nixon resigned as President of

  the United States.

  Nixon's fall has no more to do with me than the fact that John Denver's

  "Annie's Song" was the number-one record in the country at the time. I

  mention it only to provide historical perspective.

  Nixon or no Nixon, what I find most important about August 9, 1974, is

  my birth-and my grandfather's predictions. My sense of perspective has

  an egocentric taint.

  Perhaps more clearly than if I had been there, because of vivid

  pictures painted by numerous family stories of that night, I can see my

  father, Rudy Tock, walking back and forth from one end of County

  Hospital to the other, between the maternity ward and the I.C.U,

  between joy at the prospect of his son's pending arrival and grief over

  his beloved father's quickening slide into death.

  With blue vinyl-tile floor, pale-green wainscoting, pink walls, a

  yellow ceiling, and orange-and-white stork-patterned drapes, the

  expectant-fathers' lounge churned with the negative energy of color

  overload. It would have served well as the nervous-making set for a

  nightmare about a children's-show host who led a secret life as an ax

  murderer.

  The chain-smoking clown didn't improve the ambience.

  Rudy stood birth watch with only one other man, not a local but a

  performer with the circus that was playing a one-week engagement in a

  meadow at the Halloway Farm. He called himself Beezo. Curiously, this

  proved not to be his clown name but one that he'd been born with:

  Kon-rad Beezo.

  Some say there is no such thing as destiny, that what happens ju
st

  happens, without purpose or meaning. Konrad's surname would argue

  otherwise.

  Beezo was married to Natalie, a trapeze artist and a member of a

  renowned aerialist family that qualified as circus royalty.

  Neither of Natalie's parents, none of her brothers and sisters, and

  none of her high-flying cousins had accompanied Beezo to the hospital.

  This was a performance night, and as always the show must go on.

  Evidently the aerialists kept their distance also because they had not

  approved of one of their kind taking a clown for a husband. Every

  subculture and ethnicity has its objects of bigotry.

  As Beezo waited nervously for his wife to deliver, he muttered unkind