SOLE SURVIVOR（ISBN=） 英文原版

　　A catastrophic, unexplainable plane crash leaves three hundred
and thirty dead — no survivors. Among the victims are the wife and
two daughters of Joe Carpenter, a Los Angeles Post crime reporter.
A year after the crash, still gripped by an almost paralyzing
grief, Joe encounters a woman named Rose, who claims to have
survived the crash. She holds out the possibility of a secret that
will bring Joe peace of mind. But before he can ask any questions,
she slips away. Driven now by rage (have the authorities withheld
information?) and a hope almost as unbearable as his grief (if
there is one survivor, are there others?), Joe sets out to find the
mysterious woman. His search immediately leads him into the path of
a powerful and shadowy organization hell-bent on stopping Rose
before she can reveal what she knows about the crash. Sole Survivor
unfolds at a heart-stopping pace, as a desperate chase and a
shattering emotional odyssey lead Joe to a truth that will force
him to reassess everything he thought he knew about life and death
— a truth that, given the chance, will rock the world and redefine
the destiny of humanity. “From the Trade Paperback edition.”

　　When he was a senior in college, Dean Koontz won an
Atlantic Monthly fiction competition. He has been writing
ever since. His books are published in 38 languages; worldwide
sales are over 300 million copies.
　　Ten of his novels have risen to number one on the New York
Times hardcover best-seller list (The Husband, One Door Away
From Heaven, From The Corner Of His Eye,
Midnight, Cold Fire, Hideaway, Dragon Tears, The
Bad Place, Intensity, and Sole Survivor).
Thirteen of his books have risen to the number one position in
paperback.
　　Several of his books have been adapted into feature films and TV
miniseries, including the highly rated “Intensity” on the Fox
Network. The Husband is currently in development as a major
motion picture by Focus Features/Random House Films.
　　The New York Times has called his writing “psychologically
complex, masterly and satisfying.” The New Orleans
Times-Picayune said Koontz is “lyrical without ever being naive
or romantic. [He creates] a grotesque world, much like that of
Flannery O’Connor or Walker Percy … scary, worthwhile reading.”
The London Times called him “a literary juggler,” and
Publishers Weekly recently stated in a starred review that
Koontz “gives readers bright hope in a dark world. He is a true
original.”
　　Dean Koontz was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He graduated
from Shippensburg State College (now Shippensburg University), and
his first job after graduation was with the Appalachian Poverty
Program, where he was expected to counsel and tutor underprivileged
children on a one-to-one basis. His first day on the job, he
discovered that the previous occupier of his position had been
beaten up by the very kids he had been trying to help and had
landed in the hospital for several weeks. The following year was
filled with challenge but also tension, and Koontz was more highly
motivated than ever to build a career as a writer. He wrote nights
and weekends, which he continued to do after leaving the poverty
program and going to work as an English teacher in a suburban
school district outside Harrisburg. After he had been a year and a
half in that position, his wife, Gerda, made him an offer he
couldn’t refuse: “I’ll support you for five years,” she said, “and
if you can’t make it as a writer in that time, you’ll never make
it.” By the end of those five years, Gerda had quit her job to run
the business end of her husband’s writing career. Dean and Gerda
Koontz live in southern California with their golden retriever,
Trixie, who herself has written two successful books—Life Is
Good and Christmas Is Good.

　　“Koontz at his haunting, page-turning best.”—The
Philadelphia Inquirer
　　 “Dean Koontz is one of the best suspense writers operating
today, with unfailing narrative drive.”—The Dallas Morning
News
　　 “[A] fast-paced masterpiece . . . impossible to put
down.”—Lansing State Journal
　　 “Taut plotting, stark terror, and sweet redemption.”—The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

　　Chapter Two
　　Later Saturday morning, driving to Santa Monica, Joe Carpenter
suffered an anxiety attack. His chest tightened, and he was able to
draw breath only with effort. When he lifted one hand from the
wheel, his fingers quivered like those of a palsied old man.
　　He was overcome by a sense of falling, as from a great height, as
though his Honda had driven off the freeway into an inexplicable
and bottomless abyss. The pavement stretched unbroken ahead of him,
and the tires sang against the blacktop, but he could not reason
himself back to a perception of stability.
　　Indeed, the plummeting sensation grew so severe and terrifying
that he took his foot off the accelerator and tapped the brake
pedal.
　　Horns blared and skidding tires squealed as traffic adjusted to
his sudden deceleration. As cars and trucks swept past the Honda,
the drivers glared murderously at Joe or mouthed offensive words or
made obscene gestures. This was Greater Los Angeles in an age of
change, crackling with the energy of doom, yearning for the
Apocalypse, where an unintended slight or an inadvertent trespass
on someone else’s turf might result in a thermonuclear
response.
　　His sense of falling did not abate. His stomach turned over as if
he were aboard a roller coaster, plunging along a precipitous
length of track. Although he was alone in the car, he heard the
screams of passengers, faint at first and then louder, not the
good-humored shrieks of thrill seekers at an amusement park, but
cries of genuine anguish.
　　As though from a distance, he listened to himself whispering,
“No, no, no, no.”
　　A brief gap in traffic allowed him to angle the Honda off the
pavement. The shoulder of the freeway was narrow. He stopped as
close as possible to the guardrail, over which lush oleander bushes
loomed like a great cresting green tide.
　　He put the car in Park but didn’t switch off the engine. Even
though he was sheathed in cold sweat, he needed the chill blasts of
air conditioning to be able to breathe. The pressure on his chest
increased. Each stuttering inhalation was a struggle, and each hot
exhalation burst from him with an explosive wheeze.
　　Although the air in the Honda was clear, Joe smelled smoke. He
tasted it too: the acrid mélange of burning oil, melting plastic,
smoldering vinyl, scorched metal.
　　When he glanced at the dense clusters of leaves and the deep-red
flowers of the oleander pressing against the windows on the
passenger side, his imagination morphed them into billowing clouds
of greasy smoke. The window became a rectangular porthole with
rounded corners and thick dual-pane glass.
　　Joe might have thought he was losing his mind—if he hadn’t
suffered similar anxiety attacks during the past year. Although
sometimes as much as two weeks passed between episodes, he often
endured as many as three in one day, each lasting between ten
minutes and half an hour.
　　He had seen a therapist. The counseling had not helped.
　　His doctor recommended anti-anxiety medication. He rejected the
prescription. He wanted to feel the pain. It was all he had.
　　Closing his eyes, covering his face with his icy hands, he strove
to regain control of himself, but the catastrophe continued to
unfold around him. The sense of falling intensified. The smell of
smoke thickened. The screams of phantom passengers grew
louder.
　　Everything shook. The floor beneath his feet. The cabin walls.
The ceiling. Horrendous rattling and twanging and banging and
gong-like clanging accompanied the shaking, shaking, shaking.
　　”Please,” he pleaded.
　　Without opening his eyes, he lowered his hands from his face.
They lay fisted at his sides.
　　After a moment, the small hands of frightened children clutched
at his hands, and he held them tightly.
　　The children were not in the car, of course, but in their seats
in the doomed airliner. Joe was flashing back to the crash of
Flight 353. For the duration of this seizure, he would be in two
places at once: in the real world of the Honda and in the
Nationwide Air 747 as it found its way down from the serenity of
the stratosphere, through an overcast night sky, into a meadow as
unforgiving as iron.
　　Michelle had been sitting between the kids. Her hands, not Joe’s,
were those that Chrissie and Nina gripped in their last long
minutes of unimaginable dread.
　　As the shaking grew worse, the air was filled with projectiles.
Paperback books, laptop computers, pocket calculators, flatware and
dishes—because a few passengers had not yet finished dinner when
disaster struck–plastic drinking glasses, single-serving bottles
of liquor, pencils, and pens ricocheted through the cabin.
　　Coughing because of the smoke, Michelle would have urged the
girls to keep their heads down. Heads down. Protect your
faces.
　　Such faces. Beloved faces. Seven-year-old Chrissie had her
mother’s high cheekbones and clear green eyes. Joe would never
forget the flush of joy that suffused Chrissie’s face when she was
taking a ballet lesson, or the squint-eyed concentration with which
she approached home plate to take her turn at bat in Little League
baseball games. Nina, only four, the pug-nosed munchkin with eyes
as blue as sapphires, had a way of crinkling her sweet face in pure
delight at the sight of a dog or cat. Animals were drawn to her—and
she to them—as though she were the reincarnation of St. Francis of
Assisi, which was not a far-fetched idea when one saw her gazing
with wonder and love upon even an ugly garden lizard cupped in her
small, careful hands.
　　Heads down. Protect your faces.
　　In that advice was hope, the implication that they would all
survive and that the worst thing that might happen to them would be
a face-disfiguring encounter with a hurtling laptop or broken
glass.
　　The fearsome turbulence increased. The angle of descent grew more
severe, pinning Joe to his seat, so that he couldn’t easily bend
forward and protect his face.
　　Maybe the oxygen masks dropped from overhead, or maybe damage to
the craft had resulted in a systems failure, with the consequence
that masks had not been deployed at every seat. He didn’t know if
Michelle, Chrissie, and Nina had been able to breathe or if,
choking on the billowing soot, they had struggled futilely to find
fresh air.
　　Smoke surged more thickly through the passenger compartment. The
cabin became as claustrophobic as any coal mine deep beneath the
surface of the earth.
　　In the blinding blackdamp, hidden sinuosities of fire uncoiled
like snakes. The wrenching terror of the aircraft’s uncontrolled
descent was equaled by the terror of not knowing where those flames
were or when they might flash with greater vigor through the
747.
　　As the stress on the airliner increased to all but intolerable
levels, thunderous vibrations shuddered through the fuselage. The
giant wings thrummed as though they would tear loose. The steel
frame groaned like a living beast in mortal agony, and perhaps
minor welds broke with sounds as loud and sharp as gunshots. A few
rivets sheered off, each with a piercing screeeeek.
　　To Michelle and Chrissie and little Nina, perhaps it seemed that
the plane would disintegrate in flight and that they would be cast
into the black sky, be spun away from one another, plummeting in
their separate seats to three separate deaths, each abjectly alone
at the instant of impact.
　　The huge 747-400, however, was a marvel of design and a triumph
of engineering, brilliantly conceived and soundly constructed. In
spite of the mysterious hydraulics failure that rendered the
aircraft uncontrollable, the wings did not tear loose, and the
fuselage did not disintegrate. Its powerful Pratt and Whitney
engines screaming as if in defiance of gravity, Nationwide Flight
353 held together throughout its final descent.
　　At some point Michelle would have realized that all hope was
lost, that they were in a dying plunge. With characteristic courage
and selflessness, she would have thought only of the children then,
would have concentrated on comforting them, distracting them as
much as possible from thoughts of death. No doubt she leaned toward
Nina, pulled her close, and in spite of the breath-stealing fumes,
spoke into the girl’s ear to be heard above the clamor: It’s okay,
baby, we’re together, I love you, hold on to Mommy, I love you,
you’re the best little girl who ever was. Shaking down, down, down
through the Colorado night, her voice full of emotion but devoid of
panic, she had surely sought out Chrissie too: It’s all right, I’m
with you, honey, hold my hand, I love you so much, I’m so very
proud of you, we’re together, it’s all right, we’ll always be
together.
　　In the Honda alongside the freeway, Joe could hear Michelle’s
voice almost as if from memory, as though he had been with her as
she had comforted the children. He wanted desperately to believe
that his daughters had been able to draw upon the strength of the
exceptional woman who had been their mother. He needed to know that
the last thing the girls heard in this world was Michelle telling
them how very precious they were, how cherished.
　　The airliner met the meadow with such devastating impact that the
sound was heard more than twenty miles away in the rural Colorado
vastness, stirring hawks and owls and eagles out of trees and into
flight, startling weary ranchers from their armchairs and early
beds.
　　In the Honda, Joe Carpenter let out a muffled cry. He doubled
over as if he had been struck hard in the chest.
　　The crash was catastrophic. Flight 353 exploded on impact and
tumbled across the meadow, disintegrating into thousands of
scorched and twisted fragments, spewing orange gouts of burning jet
fuel that set fire to evergreens at the edge of the field. Three
hundred and thirty people, including passengers and crew, perished
instantly.
　　Michelle, who had taught Joe Carpenter most of what he knew about
love and compassion, was snuffed out in that merciless
mome…