Brother Odd by Dean Koontz

summer of the previous year, when gunmen stormed the mall in Pico Mundo, I had heard so many screams that I hoped my ears would fail me thereafter. Forty-one innocent people had been shot. Nineteen perished. I would have traded music and the voices of my friends for a silence that would exclude for the rest of my life all human cries of pain and mortal terror.
    We so often hope for the wrong things, and my selfish hope was not fulfilled. I am not deaf to pain or blind to blood—or dead, as for a while I might have wished to be.
    Instinctively, I hurried around the nearby corner of the abbey. I turned north along the refectory, in which the monks take their meals, and no lights were aglow at one o’clock in the morning.
    Squinting through the screening snow, I scanned the night toward the western forest. If someone was out there, the storm hid him.
    The refectory formed an inner corner with the library wing. I headed west again, past deep-set windows beyond which lay a darkness of ordered books.
    As I turned the southwest corner of the library, I almost fell over a man lying facedown on the ground. He wore the hooded black habit of a monk.
    Surprise brought cold air suddenly into my lungs—a brief ache in the chest—and expelled it in a pale rushing plume.
    I dropped to my knees at the monk’s side, but then hesitated to touch him, for fear that I would find he had not merely fallen, that he had been beaten to the ground.
    The world beyond this mountain retreat was largely barbarian, a condition it had been striving toward for perhaps a century and a half. A once-glorious civilization was now only a pretense, a mask allowing barbarians to commit ever greater cruelties in the name of virtues that a truly civilized world would have recognized as evils.
    Having fled that barbaric disorder, I was reluctant to admit that no place was safe, no retreat beyond the reach of anarchy. The huddled form on the ground beside me might be proof, more solid than bodachs, that no haven existed to which I could safely withdraw.
    Anticipating his smashed face, his slashed face, I touched him as snow ornamented his plain tunic. With a shudder of expectation, I turned him on his back.
    The falling snow seemed to bring light to the night, but it was a ghost light that illuminated nothing. Although the hood had slipped back from the victim’s face, I could not see him clearly enough to identify him.
    Putting a hand to his mouth, I felt no breath, also no beard. Some of the brothers wear beards, but some do not.
    I pressed my fingertips to his throat, which was still warm, and felt for the artery. I thought I detected a pulse.
    Because my hands were half numb with cold and therefore less sensitive to heat, I might not have felt a faint exhalation, when I had touched his lips.
    As I leaned forward to put my ear to his mouth, hoping to hear at least a sigh of breath, I was struck from behind.
    No doubt the assailant meant to shatter my skull. He swung just as I bent forward, and the club grazed the back of my head, thumped hard off my left shoulder.
    I pitched forward, rolled to the left, rolled again, scrambled to my feet, ran. I had no weapon. He had a club and maybe something worse, a knife.
    The hands-on kind of killers, the gunless kind, might stave in with a club or strangle with a scarf, but most of them carry blades, as well, for backup, or for entertainment that might come as foreplay or as aftermath.
    The guys in the porkpie hats, mentioned earlier, had blackjacks and guns and even a hydraulic automobile press, and
still
they had carried knives. If your work is deathwork, one weapon is not enough, just as a plumber would not answer an urgent service call with a single wrench.
    Although life has made me old for my age, I am still fast in my youth. Hoping my assailant was older and therefore slower, I sprinted away from the abbey, into the open yard, where there were no corners in which to be cornered.
    I hurled myself through the snowfall,