Odd Thomas

Hell on Earth with a series of well-planned horrors, with the cold intention of ultimately destroying it entirely. They checked out numerous communities and decided that Pico Mundo was ideal, neither too large to be beyond ruination nor too small to be uninteresting.
        Green Moon Mall was their first target. They intended to murder the chief and parlay the mall disaster - and a list of other complex and Machiavellian moves - into firm control of the police department. Thereafter, the steady destruction of the town would be their sport and their form of worship.
        Bob Robertson moved into Camp's End because the neighborhood offered him a low profile. Besides, he wanted to manage his money wisely, to ensure that he could buy as much fun as possible.
        By the time Chief Porter got around to telling me and Stormy how he was going to protect me and help me to keep the secret of my sixth sense, his face had grown haggard, and I imagine I looked worse. Through Karla, I'd gotten word to him about Robertson's body out there at the Church of the Whispering Comet, so he'd been able to work that bizarre detail into his cover story. He'd always done well by me in the past, but this Porter-spun narrative left me in stunned admiration.
        Stormy said it was a work of genius. Clearly, the chief had not been spending all his time recuperating.
        

CHAPTER 65
        
        MY WOUNDS PROVED TO BE NOT AS BAD AS I had feared in the ICU, and the doctor discharged me from County General the following Wednesday, one week to the day after the events at the mall.
        To foil the media, they had been told that I'd be in the hospital another day. Chief Porter conspired to have me and Stormy conveyed secretly in the department's beige undercover van, the same one from which Eckles had watched Stormy's apartment that night.
        If Eckles had seen me leaving, he would have arranged to have me caught in my apartment with the body of Bob Robertson. When I had slipped out the back, he had figured that I must be staying the night with my girl, and eventually he had given up the stakeout.
        Leaving the hospital, I had no desire to return to my apartment above Mrs. Sanchez's garage. I'd never be able to use the bathroom there without remembering Robertson's corpse.
        The chief and Karla didn't think it was wise to go to Stormy's place, either, because the reporters knew about her, too. Neither Stormy nor I was of a mind to accept the Porters' hospitality. We wanted to be alone, just us, at last. Reluctantly, they delivered us to her place through the alley.
        Although we were besieged by the media, the next few days were bliss. They rang the doorbell, they knocked, but we didn't respond. They gathered in the street, a regular circus, and a few times we peeked at these vultures through the curtains, but we never revealed ourselves. We had each other, and that was enough to hold off not merely reporters but armies.
        We ate food that wasn't healthy. We let dirty dishes stack up in the sink. We slept too much.
        We talked about everything, everything but the slaughter at the mall. Our past, our future. We planned. We dreamed.
        We talked about bodachs. Stormy is still of the opinion that they are demonic spirits and that the black room was the gate to Hell, opening in Robertson's study.
        Because of my experiences of lost and gained time related to the black room, I have developed a more disturbing theory. Maybe in our future, time travel becomes possible. Maybe they can't journey to the past in the flesh but can return in virtual bodies in which their minds are embodied, virtual bodies that can be seen only by me. Me and one long-dead British child.
        Perhaps the violence that sweeps our world daily into greater darkness has led to a future so brutal, so corrupt, that our twisted descendants return to watch us suffer, charmed by festivals of blood. The appearance of the bodachs might have nothing to do with what those travelers from the future really look like; they probably pretty much resemble you and me; instead, the bodachs may be the shape of their deformed and diseased souls.
        Stormy insists they are demons on a three-day pass from Hell.
        I find her explanation less frightening than mine. I wish that I could embrace it without doubt.
        The dirty dishes stacked higher. We finished most of the truly unhealthy food and, not