This one should be relatively short. Though it ends in death, the closing chapters of the book are written in a surprisingly comic tone. Ahriman is in his office, carrying a gun (.380 Beretta) just to be sure. Three things are occupying his mind -- the crime he has sent Eric to commit, the Keanuphobe and how he will control her, and the little blue bag of dog poop he still has with him. There is a story there. When Dusty and Skeet were boys, Skeet's father complained that his son's learning disability made him a worse student than a reeking pile of manure. He called his son "as erudite as excrement" and a variety of other alliterative and scatological epithets, any one of which sounds implausible, but all strung together are nothing any live human being would ever say. After their mother divorced him, they gathered up all the dog droppings they could find and mailed them to him anonymously, to see if he could make a better student out of it. Ahriman learned of this incident in one of his brainwashing sessions and is keeping the bag of poop to remind him of it. He has, in fact, ordered Eric to cut open Derek Lampton's skull and fill it with excrement -- his own, or a dog's as circumstances permit.
Meanwhile, the Keanuphobe, dressed in a pink suit, has arrived with a pistol and silencer. Skeet, carrying Eric's machine pistol, arrives and walks into the elevator with him. She addresses him with such a bizarre combination of hidden truth (she saw the shooting) and incoherent ranting ("If you die in the matrix, you die for real, unless you're a machine") that Skeet, although sure he has not taken any drugs in the last few days, wonders if he is having a flashback. They take the elevator up to Ahriman's floor (Dusty and Martie in pursuit), and she shoots him just outside Ahriman's door. Skeet staggers into the office and collapses on the floor. Ahriman's secretary Jennifer starts screaming. He is still not dead, but Ahriman (baffled as to how he could possibly be alive, let alone made it to his office) intends to finish him off. But first, a comic sequence ensues in which he tries to figure out what to do with his little blue bag. After all, the police will soon be there, and if they see a bag of dog poop on his desk, they will probably ask questions about it. It is not in any way incriminating, but it could be extremely difficult to explain. (My suggestion: Play on his credentials as a psychiatrist. When the police ask, indignantly answer that as a psychiatrist you are not allowed to discussed even your patients' oddest behavior). Furthermore, if he puts it in his drawer, the police might get a warrant and find it and, once again, he would have a lot of explaining to do. If he keeps it in his pocket, the police won't find it unless they arrest him, but what if it breaks? Finally, he draws his gun, hides the bag in the holster, looks out the door to investigate, and is shot dead by the Keanuphobe. Dusty and Martie arrive to find Ahriman dead, Skeet gravely wounded, Jennifer hysterical, and a mysterious woman in pink saying into her cell phone, "Will you stop babbling Kenneth? For an expensive attorney, you're something of a ninny."
The ending should take a page, or two at most. Koontz drags it on for seven and a half. Skeet is not dead, just badly wounded. Dusty and Martie are cleared by the testimony of both Jennifer and the unnamed woman in pink. Dusty is permitted to follow his brother to the hospital. Martie tells the police all about Ahriman. Dr. Closterman, who has seen the shooting on the news, shows up and gives confirmation. A search of Ahriman's house reveals enough videotapes to leave no doubt. The Bellon-Tockland Institute decides that Ahriman is a liability and writes him off. They do not come after Dusty and Martie. The pink lady settles Skeet's suit against her and he used the money, partnered with Fig, to start a tour business called Strange Phenomenon Tours. He marries a pretty nurse from the New Life Clinic and they have a son. Susan and her husband leave everything they own to Martie. She uses the proceeds to rebuild the house and go to veterinary school. So the novel ends on a happy note, except that we know the Bellon-Tockland Institute is still out there, doing who knows what.
My ultimate reaction the the novel is that I greatly enjoyed the parts where the suspense is building as to what is going on, felt let down when we found out and a lot of the clues were never explained, and HATED their portrayals of the bad guys.
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