Dean Koontz's Frankenstein 4-Book Bundle

by Dean Koontz

  The hospital maintenance staff called this space the lid-service room. From outside on the roof, it looked like a shed.

  Bryce opened a supply cabinet. On the top shelf, he tucked away the pillowcase that now contained Travis’s pajamas and slippers.

  “We’ll wait here until dark,” he told the boy.

  “Will they really think we climbed down from your window? What if they realize the bedsheet is a fakeout?”

  “We could what-if ourselves into paralysis, son. Anyway, in this situation, we can’t have contingency plans. There’s one way out.”

  Although unheated, the service room had to be warmer than the open roof. Yet within minutes Bryce felt a chill. He remained on his feet because the soles of his slippers provided better insulation between him and the floor than would the seat of his pajamas.

  Among the maintenance supplies, he found twine. He fashioned a strap for his blanket roll, so he could carry it over his shoulder.

  “How did you know this was here?” Travis asked.

  “When Rennie, my wife, was hospitalized for the last time, they allowed me to stay with her 24/7 during her last few days. Sometimes when she was sleeping, I’d come up to the roof, especially at night, with all the stars. When you stand there with your head tipped back, at first each star seems to be on the same plane as the others, some brighter than others but equally distant. Then slowly your perception improves, so you see that some are nearer, some farther, and some very far away indeed. You see how the stars go on forever, out there to eternity, and you know then, if for a moment you doubted it, that going on forever is the fundamental way of things.”

  “There won’t be any stars tonight,” Travis said.

  “The stars are always there, whether we can see them or not,” Bryce assured him.

  The boy worried that his mother might not be safe, out there in the suddenly unknown streets of this long-familiar town. In spite of what Bryce had said about what-ifs, Travis Ahern shuffled through a deck of them, waiting for nightfall.

  After a while, Bryce steered the boy from worries to shining memories. His mother was his hero. When he recounted their good times together, his eyes were bright with love, his voice tender.

  Jean-Anne Chouteau came to the hospital to visit her sister, Mary-Jane Vergelle. She arrived with Julian, Mary-Jane’s husband.

  As president of the VFW Auxiliary, the lay chaplain of her church, and the founder of the Rainbow Falls Red Hat Society, she visited Memorial at least once each week, to sit a spell with one afflicted friend or another.

  Jean-Anne carried a Tupperware container filled with miniature homemade muffins, some walnut-carrot and some pecan-zucchini. Julian clutched a bouquet from Fantasy Floral and a paperback book wrapped in kitten-patterned paper.

  Even before they went through the glass door, Jean-Anne saw Chief Jarmillo and four deputies, and she said, “Oh, Julian, some poor soul must’ve been shot.”

  “Police don’t always mean gunplay,” Julian said as the automatic door slid open in front of them.

  But three years earlier, when Jean-Anne was leaving the hospital after paying a visit to a friend recovering from an encounter with a drunk driver, an ambulance followed by three squad cars came racing along the approach road to the ER entrance. Don Scobey—the Don Scobey of Don Scobey’s Steakhouse—had been shot by a stickup artist. Ever since, when from time to time Jean-Anne saw a police officer at Memorial, she steeled herself for the news that someone had been gunned down.

  As they stepped into the lobby, Officer John Martz—who was married to Anita, a Red Hat lady, and who always took the microphone as auctioneer at the annual charity auction for the hospital—came toward them, smiling.

  In spite of John’s smile, Jean-Anne said, “Who’s been shot?”

  “Shot? Oh, no, Jean-Anne. It’s nothing like that. There’s been a contamination problem. Nothing serious but—”

  “What kind of contamination?” Julian asked.

  “Nothing serious. But anyone who’s been to the hospital the last few days, and anyone who has a friend or family member currently here as a patient—we need you to give us a blood sample.”

  “Is Mary-Jane all right?” Jean-Anne asked.

  “Yes, yes, she’s fine.”

  “Is she infected with something, after what she’s already been through?”

  “No, Jean-Anne,” John Martz said. “She’s already been tested, and she’s fine. We don’t need much blood, just a drop, a thumb prick will do it. If you’ll follow me … ”

  Moving with the officer as he crossed the lobby to the elevator alcove, Jean-Anne said, “Her gallbladder wasn’t just inflamed and full of stones, poor thing. She said on the phone it was abscessed.”

  And Julian said, “I hope this contamination thing isn’t going to lead to complications for her.”

  “No, like I said, she’s fine,” John Martz assured them. “She tested negative.”

  “What do the police have to do with any kind of contamination?” Jean-Anne wondered. “Where are the doctors and nurses?”

  “They have their hands full. They asked us for assistance. By law, we’re obligated to help in a health emergency.”

  “Emergency?” Jean-Anne frowned. “But you said it was nothing serious.”

  “It’s not that serious,” John Martz said, escorting them into the elevator. “They’re short on staff because of the flu, and when this situation came up, they had to declare it an emergency for us to be able to assist.”

  As the doors closed, Julian said, “What kind of contamination? You still haven’t said.”

  “I’m no medical scientist, Julian. If I tried to explain it, I’d only make an idiot of myself. Dr. Lightner will lay it out for you.”

  The elevator was already descending when Jean-Anne said, “John, I think the blood lab is on the main floor.”

  “Yes, it is. But Dr. Lightner has set up a second testing station in the basement to speed things along.”

  The elevator doors opened, and they stepped into the corridor. John Martz turned right, with Jean-Anne at his side and Julian a step behind.

  A strikingly handsome young man came out of a room on the left. His looks were so singular that Jean-Anne thought he must be someone famous, perhaps someone she had seen on TV.

  She glimpsed a few peculiar objects in the room beyond him: what seemed to be bags made of a silvery fabric, hanging from the ceiling, approximately pear-shaped and evidently filled with something heavy.

  Then the young man closed the door behind him, and John Martz led them farther along the corridor as he said, “It only takes a few minutes to get the test results. And they’re gentle with the needle.” He held up a thumb. “Can’t even see where they pricked me.”

  Jean-Anne thought she might have seen the young man on American Idol. She glanced back, but he had disappeared.

  John Martz ushered them into an unfurnished room in which sat five patients in wheelchairs. Closing the door and remaining beside it, he said, “It’ll only be a minute.”

  Of the patients, three were strangers to Jean-Anne. The others were Lauraine Polson and Susan Carpenter.

  Lauraine, a waitress at the Andy Andrews Café, had been admitted on Monday with a severely prolapsed uterus. She was supposed to have had a hysterectomy this morning. The previous evening, Jean-Anne visited her, bringing a book of crossword puzzles, to which Lauraine was addicted, and a small basket of fresh fruit.

  “Dear, you didn’t have surgery?”

  Lauraine grimaced. “It’s annoying, but there’s nobody to blame. There’s a shortage of surgical nurses because of the flu. I’ve been rescheduled for tomorrow.”

  “Until tonight, I haven’t heard anything about the flu going around,” Julian said.

  “It’s hit a few of our guys in the department,” John Martz said.

  Susan Carpenter, a beautician at Rosalie’s Hair and Nails, indicated the semitransparent Tupperware container in Jean-Anne’s hands. “Are those your mini mu
ffins, Jean-Anne, like you brought us at the shop last Christmas? I usually don’t like muffins but they were fabulous.”

  “These are for my sister, dear, and low-fat. She’s held over from gallbladder surgery for intravenous antibiotics, since it was badly abscessed. I didn’t know you were here, or I’d have brought you some.”

  “They just checked me in this afternoon.” Susan pointed to the wrapped paperback that Julian held. “I love that giftwrap.”

  “Mary-Jane is crazy for cats,” Julian said.

  “I know she is,” Susan said. “I didn’t think she’d ever get over losing Maybelle.”

  “I don’t think she really has,” Julian said.

  The door opened, and into the room came a different young man from the one in the corridor a minute earlier. Remarkably, he was even more handsome than the first, his face so compelling that again Jean-Anne felt sure he was somebody.

  In the service room at the top of the stairs to the hospital roof, Travis consulted his wristwatch and said, “It must be dark enough now.”

  Bryce Walker wasn’t yet chilled to the bone, but he was cold enough that he wanted to get moving.

  From a wall hook, he took down a broom. Before opening the outer door, he switched off the lights.

  Because of the overcast, the bleak October heavens appeared nearly as dark at the start of twilight as they would be at the end. In the stillness of the evening, the low cloud cover was as motionless as a painted sky.

  Travis stepped out onto the roof. Bryce followed him, laying the broom handle across the threshold to prevent the door from falling completely shut.

  The outer door would lock automatically. Although the hospital might be enemy territory, Bryce wanted the option of retreat.

  Here and there across the vast flat roof stood several shedlike structures similar to the one they had just left, some with slatted and screened walls, others with solid walls. A couple of them housed head mechanisms for the elevators and provided service access. Bryce didn’t know what the others were.

  Hooded vent pipes and ducts of different sizes rose one or two feet above the roof. In the fading light, they resembled clusters of mushrooms.

  Each of Memorial Hospital’s three wings featured a sturdy steel ladder bolted to the brick wall, to provide firemen with access to the roof by other means than the hydraulic tower ladder on their truck. Descent along the north wing or the main wing would be too public, but the third ladder, which was the farthest from their current position, allowed a discreet escape down the relatively secluded southern face of the building.

  As long as they traveled close to the center line of the building, the width of the roof and the three-foot-high parapet wall would prevent them from being seen by anyone on the grounds below or out on the street.

  Bryce said to the boy, “The attic is directly underfoot, with no one there to hear, but let’s be light-footed anyway. Stay close.”

  “All right.”

  “Be careful of the vent pipes.”

  “I will.”

  The handsome young man moved with the grace of a dancer and the self-confidence of a star. He stopped at the center of the room. The five patients in wheelchairs waiting for their blood tests, Jean-Anne Chouteau, and Julian Vergelle were in a semicircle around him.

  When he smiled at them, his beauty seemed otherworldly. Jean-Anne saw that she was not the only one whom he enchanted. Even Julian stared as if transfixed.

  Although she didn’t know this man and although she would be disappointing Mary-Jane, Jean-Anne wanted to give him the Tupperware container full of her admired mini muffins.

  Before she could offer the baked goods, the young man said, “I am your Builder.”

  She had no idea what this meant, but his voice was mellifluous, of such a pleasing timbre and so sweetly flowing that she wished that she could hear him sing.

  He turned to Lauraine Polson and stepped closer to her.

  When he extended his right hand toward the waitress in the wheelchair, she smiled uncertainly but then reached out to him, almost as if he were inviting her to dance and she intended to accept.

  Something happened to the young man’s hand before Lauraine could take it. First the fingers and then everything up to the wrist seemed to dissolve, as if his hand were composed of thousands, maybe millions, of gnats that had conspired to imitate a hand but that were no longer able to do so convincingly. They maintained the shape of a hand, but the skin was gone and the fingernails, and the wrinkles at the knuckles. The hand was smooth and silvery, yet the substance of it seemed to be a ceaselessly swarming mass of tiny insects, their thousands of iridescent wings glittering as they furiously beat, beat, beat against the air and one another, though they were nothing as ordinary or as innocuous as insects.

  Lauraine reeled back in her wheelchair, but the young man leaned forward to place his hand atop her head, as if she were a supplicant and he a tent revivalist, a faith healer calling down the power of God to make her whole.

  But then at once his hand sank into her head, through her skull, as if her bone were butter, onward into her brain, whereupon she violently kicked the foot braces of the wheelchair, her arms flailed spastically, but only for a moment before she went limp. Her eyes fell backward in her sockets, out of sight, a silver horde swarming where her eyes had been, and her mouth dropped open to spew forth not blood—as Jean-Anne expected—but a buzzless hive of minute wasps, though not wasps, and this devouring multitude churned upward, dissolving the shell of her face, still with not a spurt or spot of blood.

  Jean-Anne didn’t realize that she had moved until she backed into the wall, knocking a sharp shivering pain from the nerve that transited her left elbow.

  Julian threw down the flowers, the kitten-wrapped paperback, and bolted past her toward the door.

  She wanted to flee with him, but she seemed pinned to the wall by her elbow pain, nailed to the floor by the heels of her shoes.

  John Martz had a nightstick, and he swung it at Julian’s head, landing a blow of such power that the sound of it was like a baseball bat cracking a home run out of the park. Julian dropped in a heap, and John Martz bent over him, hammering his head with the nightstick, John Martz whose wife was a Red Hat lady, John Martz who was so funny as the auctioneer at the annual hospital gala, hammering, hammering with a gleeful ferocity.

  The handsome young man’s face was a mask of fierce rapture as he seemed to reach his right hand down into the stump of Lauraine Polson’s neck, like a magician reaching into a top hat to pull forth a rabbit. He thrust his arm down into her as far as his elbow, her body began to collapse inward as if deflating, the young man began to swell as if Lauraine’s substance was now part of him, his head grew misshapen, his face ballooning into a leering demonic apparition. All over his body, a shimmering silver haze arose, the whole of him churning as his hand had churned, as if he were entirely composed of billions of tiny winged piranha mimicking the human form.

  One of the patients Jean-Anne didn’t know, a bald man with a red mustache, had leaped up from his wheelchair, had staggered toward the door. He tried to fend off John Martz, but the nightstick broke his fingers and then broke his face. Looking up from the dead or dying man, John Martz grinned at Jean-Anne from across the room and shook the club at her, saying, “You want some of this? Come get it. You want some?”

  Having abandoned her wheelchair, Susan Carpenter huddled in a corner, and the two other patients were in a different corner, all of them screaming or crying out for help.

  Jean-Anne wanted to scream, she kept trying, she couldn’t make a sound, she couldn’t move, she could only stand there holding the container of mini muffins, holding it in front of her, gripping the Tupperware with such force that her fingers dimpled it, presenting it as if the muffins were an offering to appease the savage god that had abruptly manifested from the young man, but this malevolent deity wasn’t satisfied with prizewinning muffins, he wanted more than what had pleased the judges at the county fair, he w
anted much more from her, he wanted everything.

  As if mocking the screams of his waiting victims, the greatly deformed young man, no longer handsome by any standard, opened his mouth wide, and from within him rippled forth thick silvery ribbons. As they lapped across Jean-Anne’s face and she went blind in an instant, she remembered the large silvery fabric bags, pear-shaped, filled with something heavy, hanging from the ceiling, and now she thought, as her last thought: Not bags. Cocoons.

  Nearing the southern end of the roof on the main wing, Bryce heard faint cries like those he had listened to at the return-air grille in the bathroom.

  Travis heard them, too. He grabbed the sleeve of Bryce’s robe. “Wait. What’s that?”

  “What I heard before.”

  “It’s coming from over there.”

  “There’s no one on the roof but us.”

  “Over there,” the boy repeated.

  “Don’t let it into your head, son. Come on.”

  “No, wait. Just wait.”

  The boy wove through an obstacle course of vent pipes, cocking his head this way and that until he identified the source. He dropped onto his knees to listen.

  The voices rose from such a distance, through fibrous filters and past the slowly rotating blades of exhaust fans, through so many turns of insulation-wrapped duct that they were thin and faltering. Yet the misery and terror they expressed were so affecting that Bryce shivered more because of those faraway cries than because of the cold air.

  The boy said, “It’s not a TV.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “They’re real. They’re real people.”

  “Don’t listen. Come on.”

  “Are they being killed?” Travis asked.

  “Don’t listen. You’ll never stop hearing them.”

  “We’ve got to help them. Can’t we help them?”

  “We don’t know where they are,” Bryce said, “except probably in the basement.”

  “There must be a way down there, past the guards.”