Dean Koontz
 The Watchers
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This book is dedicated to
  Lennart Sane
  who is not only the best at what he does but who is also a nice guy.
  And to
  Elisabeth Sane
  who is as charming as her husband.
   
   
   
  PART ONE
  Shattering the Past
  The past is but the beginning of a beginning,
  and all that is and has been
  is but the twilight of the dawn.
  -H. G. Wells
  The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if 
there is any reaction, both are transformed.
  -C. G. Jung
   
  ONE
  1
  On his thirty-sixth birthday, May 18, Travis Cornell rose at five o'clock in the 
morning. He dressed in sturdy hiking boots, jeans, and a long-sleeved, blue-plaid cotton 
shirt. He drove his pickup south from his home in Santa Barbara all the way to rural 
Santiago Canyon on the eastern edge of Orange County, south of Los Angeles. He took only 
a package of Oreo cookies, a large canteen full of orange-flavored Kool-Aid, and a fully 
loaded Smith & Wesson .38 Chiefs Special.
  During the two-and-a-half-hour trip, he never switched on the radio. He never hummed, 
whistled, or sang to himself as men alone frequently do. For part of the drive, the 
Pacific lay on his right. The morning sea was broodingly dark toward the horizon, as hard 
and cold as slate, but nearer shore it was brightly spangled with early light the colors 
of pennies and rose petals. Travis did not once glance appreciatively at the sun-sequined 
water.
  He was a lean, sinewy man with deep-set eyes the same dark brown as his hair. His face 
was narrow, with a patrician nose, high cheekbones, and a slightly pointed chin. It was 
an ascetic face that would have suited a monk in some holy order that still believed in 
self-flagellation, in the purification of the soul through suffering. God knows, he'd had 
his share of suffering. But it could be a pleasant face, too, warm and open. His smile 
had once charmed women, though not recently. He had not smiled in a long time.
  The Oreos, the canteen, and the revolver were in a small green nylon backpack with 
black nylon straps, which lay on the seat beside him. Occasionally, he glanced at the 
pack, and it seemed as if he could see straight through the fabric to the loaded Chiefs 
Special.
  From Santiago Canyon Road in Orange County, he turned onto a much narrower route, then 
onto a tire-eating dirt lane. At a few minutes past eight-thirty, he parked the red 
pickup in a lay-by, under the immense bristly boughs of a big-cone spruce.
  He slipped the harness of the small backpack over his shoulders and set Out into the 
foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains. From his boyhood, he knew every slope, vale, narrow 
defile, and ridge. His father had owned a Stone cabin in upper Holy Jim Canyon, perhaps 
the most remote of all the inhabited canyons, and Travis had spent weeks exploring the 
wild land for miles around.
  He loved these untamed canyons, When he was a boy, black bears had
  roamed the woods; they were gone now. Mule deer could still be found, though not in the 
great numbers he had seen two decades ago. At least the beautiful folds and thrusts of 
land, the profuse and varied brush, and the trees were still as they had been: for long 
stretches he walked beneath a canopy of California live oaks and sycamores.
  Now and then he passed a lone cabin or a cluster of them. A few canyon dwellers were 
half-hearted survivalists who believed the end of civilization was approaching, but who 
did not have the heart to move to a place even more forbidding. Most were ordinary people 
who were fed up with the hurlyburly of modern life and thrived in spite of having no 
plumbing or electricity.
  Though the canyons seemed remote, they would soon be overwhelmed by encroaching 
suburbs. Within a hundred-mile radius, nearly ten million people lived in the 
interconnecting communities of Orange and Los Angeles counties, and growth was not 
abating.
  But now crystalline, revelatory light fell on the untamed land with almost as much 
substance as rain, and all was clean and wild.
  On the treeless spine of a ridge, where the low grass that had grown during the short 
rainy season had already turned dry and brown, Travis sat upon a broad table of rock and 
took off his backpack.
  A five-foot rattlesnake was sunning on another flat rock fifty feet away. It raised its 
mean wedge-shaped head and studied him.
  As a boy, he had killed scores of rattlers in these hills. He withdrew the gun from the 
backpack and rose from the rock. He took a couple of steps toward the snake.
  The rattler rose farther off the ground and stared intensely.
  Travis took another step, another, and assumed a shooter's stance, with both hands on 
the gun.
  The rattler began to coil. Soon it would realize that it could not strike at such a 
distance, and would attempt to retreat.
  Although Travis was certain his shot was clear and easy, he was surprised to discover 
that he could not squeeze the trigger. He had come to these foothills not merely to 
attempt to recall a time when he had been glad to be alive, but also to kill snakes if he 
saw any. Lately, alternately depressed and angered by the loneliness and sheer 
pointlessness of his life, he had been wound as tight as a crossbow spring. He needed to 
release that tension through violent action, and the killing of a few snakes-no loss to 
anyone-seemed the perfect prescription for his distress. However, as he stared at this