Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  be expected-the demands on his metabolism were tremendous when he was in

  his altered state-but the fire was not wrong, not the inner fire, not

  the frantic and consuming need for nourishment. What was wrong was that

  he could not, he could not, he could not He could not change back.

  Thrilled by the exquisitely fluid movement of his body, by the way his

  muscles flexed and stretched, flexed and stretched, he came into the

  darkened house, seeing well enough without lights, not as well as a cat

  might but better than a man, because he was more than just a man now,

  and he roamed for a couple of minutes through the rooms, silent and

  swift, almost hoping he would find an intruder, someone to savage,

  someone to savage, savage, someone to savage, bite and tear, but the

  house was deserted. In his bedroom, he settled to the floor, curled on

  his side, and called his body back to the form that had been his

  birthright, to the familiar form of Mike Peyser, to the shape of a man

  who walked erect and looked like a man, and within himself he felt a

  surge toward normalcy, a shift in the tissues, but not enough of a

  shift, and then a sliding away, away, like an outgoing tide pulling back

  from a beach, away, away from normalcy, so he tried again, but this time

  there was no shift at all, not even a partial return to what he had

  been. He was stuck, trapped, locked in, locked, locked in a form that

  earlier had seemed the essence of freedom and inexpressibly desirable,

  but now it was not a desirable form at all because he could not forsake

  it at will, was trapped in it, trapped, and he panicked.

  He sprang up and hurried out of the room. Although he could see fairly

  well in the darkness, he brushed a floor lamp, and it fell with a crash,

  the brittle sound of shattering glass, but he kept going into the short

  hall, the living room. A rag rug spun out from under him. He felt that

  he was in a prison; his body, his own transformed body, had become his

  prison, prison, metamorphosed bones serving as the bars of a cell, bars

  holding him captive from within; he was restrained by his own

  reconfigured flesh. He circled the room, scrambled this way and that,

  circled, circled, frenzied, frantic. The curtains fluttered in the wind

  of his passage. He weaved among the furniture. An end table toppled

  over in his wake. He could run but not escape. He carried his prison

  with him. No escape. No escape. Never. That realization made his

  heart thump more wildly. Terrified, frustrated, he knocked over a

  magazine rack, spilling its contents, swept a heavy glass ashtray and

  two pieces of decorative pottery - 115 off the cocktail table, tore at

  the sofa cushions until he had shredded both the fabric and the foam

  padding within, whereupon a terrible pressure filled his skull, pain,

  such pain, and he wanted to scream but he was afraid to scream, afraid

  that he would not be able to stop.

  Food.

  Fuel.

  Feed the fire, feed the fire.

  He suddenly realized that his inability to return to his natural form

  might be related to a severe shortage of energy reserves needed to fuel

  the tremendous acceleration of his metabolism associated with a

  transformation. To do what he was demanding, his body must produce

  enormous quantities of enzymes, hormones, and complex biologically

  active chemicals; in mere minutes the body must undergo a forced

  degeneration and rebuilding of tissues equal in energy requirements to

  years of ordinary growth, and for that it needed fuel, material to

  convert, proteins and minerals, carbohydrates in quantity.

  Hungry, starving, starving, Peyser hurried into the lightless kitchen,

  clutched the handle on the refrigerator door, pulled himself up, tore

  the door open, hissed as the light stung his eyes, saw two-thirds of a

  three-pound canned ham, solid ham, good ham, sealed in Saran Wrap on a

  blue plate, so he seized it, ripped away the plastic, threw the plate

  aside, where it smashed against a cabinet door, and he dropped back to

  the floor, bit into the hunk of meat, bit and bit into it, bit deep,

  ripped, chewed feverishly, bit deep.

  He loved to strip out of his clothes and seek another form as soon after

  nightfall as possible, sprinting into the woods behind his house, up

  into the hills, where he chased down rabbits and raccoons, foxes and

  ground squirrels, tore them apart in his hands, with his teeth, fed the

  fire, the deep inner burning, and he loved it, loved it, not merely

  because he felt such freedom in that incarnation but because it gave him

  an overwhelming sense of power, godlike power, more intensely erotic

  than sex, more satisfying than anything he had experienced before,

  power, savage power, raw power, the power of a man who had tamed nature,

  transcended his genetic limits, the power of the wind and the storm,

  freed of all human limitations, set loose, liberated. He had fed

  tonight, sweeping through the woods with the confidence of an

  inescapable predator, as irresistible as the darkness itself, but

  whatever he had consumed must have been insufficient to empower his

  return to the form of Michael Peyser, software designer, bachelor,

  Porsche-owner, ardent collector of movies on video disk, marathon

  runner, Perrier-drinker.

  So now he ate the ham, all two pounds of it, and he snatched other items

  out of the refrigerator and ate them as well, stuffing them into his

  mouth with both tine-fingered hands a bowlful of cold, leftover rigatoni

  and one meatball; half of an apple pie that he'd bought yesterday at the

  bakery in town; a stick of butter, an entire quarter of a pound, greasy

  and cloying but good food, good fuel, just the thing to feed the fire;

  four raw eggs; and more, more. This was a fire that, when fed, did not

  burn brighter but cooled, subsided, for it was not a real fire at all

  but a physical symptom of the desperate need for fuel to keep the

  metabolic processes running smoothly. Now the fire began to lose some

  of its heat, shrinking from a roaring blaze to sputtering flames to

  little more than the glow of hot coals.

  Sated, Mike Peyser collapsed to the floor in front of the open

  refrigerator, in a litter of broken dishes and food and Saran Wrap and

  eggshells and Tupperware containers. He culled up again and willed

  himself toward that form in which the word would recognize him, and once

  more he felt a shift taking place in his marrow and bones, in his blood

  and organs, in sinews and cartilage and muscles and skin, as tides of

  hormones and enzymes and other biological chemicals were produced by his

  body and washed through it, but as before the change was arrested with

  transformation woefully incomplete, and his body eased toward its more

  savage state, inevitably regressing though he strained with all his

  will, all his will, strained and struggled to seek the higher form.

  The refrigerator door had swung shut. The kitchen was in the grasp of

  shadows again, and Mike Peyser felt as if that darkness was not merely

  all around him but also within him.

  At last he screamed. As he had feared, once he
began to scream, he

  could not stop.

  Shortly before midnight Sam Booker left Cove Lodge. He wore a brown

  leather jacket, blue sweater, jeans, and blue running shoes-an outfit

  that allowed him to blend effectively with the night but that didn't

  look suspicious, though perhaps slightly too youthful for a man of his

  relentlessly melancholy demeanor. Ordinary as it looked, the jacket had

  several unusually deep and capacious inner pockets, in which he was

  carrying a few basic burglary and auto-theft tools. He descended the

  south stairs, went out the rear door at the bottom, and stood for a

  moment on the walkway behind the lodge.

  Thick fog poured up the face of the bluff and through the open railing,

  driven by a sudden sea breeze that finally had disturbed the night's

  calm. In a few hours the breeze would harry the fog inland and leave

  the coast in relative clarity. By then Sam would have finished the task

  ahead of him and, no longer needing the cover that the mist provided,

  would be at last asleep-or more likely fighting insomnia-in his

  motel-room bed.

  He was uneasy. He had not forgotten the pack of kids from whom he'd run

  on Iceberry Way, earlier in the evening. Because their true nature

  remained a mystery, he continued to think of them as punks, but he knew

  they were more than just juvenile delinquents. Strangely, he had the

  feeling that he did know what they were, but the knowledge stirred in

  him far below even a subconscious plain, in realms of primitive

  consciousness.

  He rounded the south end of the building, walked past the back of the

  coffee shop, which was now closed, and ten minutes later, by a

  roundabout route, he arrived at the Moonlight Cove Municipal Building on

  Jacobi Street. It was exactly as the Bureau's San Francisco agents had

  described it a two-story structure-weathered brick on the lower floor,

  white siding on the upper-with a slate roof, forest-green storm shutters

  flanking the windows, and large iron carriage lamps at the main

  entrance. The municipal building and the property on which it stood

  occupied half a block on the north side of the street, but its

  anti-institutional architecture was in harmony with the otherwise

  residential neighborhood. Exterior and interior ground-floor lights

  were on even at that hour because in addition to the city-government

  offices and water authority, the municipal building housed the police

  department, which of course never closed.

  From across the street, pretending to be out for a late-night

  constitutional, Sam studied the place as he passed it. He saw no

  unusual activity. The sidewalk in front of the main entrance was

  deserted. Through the glass doors he saw a brightly lighted foyer.

  At the next corner he went north and into the alley in the middle of the

  block. That unlighted serviceway was bracketed by trees and shrubbery

  and fences that marked the rear property lines of the houses on Jacobi

  Street and Pacific Drive, by some garages and outbuildings, by groups of

  garbage cans, and by the large unfenced parking area behind the

  municipal building.

  Sam stepped into a niche in an eight-foot-tall evergreen hedge at the

  corner of the yard that adjoined the public property. Though the alley

  was very dark, two sodium-vapor lamps cast a jaundiced glow over the

  city lot, revealing twelve vehicles four late-model Fords of the

  stripped-down, puke-green variety that was produced for federal, state,

  and local government purchase; a pickup and van both beefing the seal of

  the city and the legend WATER Authority; a hulking street-sweeping

  machine; a large truck with wooden sides and tailgate; and four police

  cars, all Chevy sedans.

  The quartet of black-and-whites were what interested Sam because they

  were equipped with VDTs linking them to the police department's central

  computer. Moonlight Cove owned eight patrol cars, a large number for a

  sleepy coastal town, five more than other communities of similar size

  could afford and surely in excess of need.

  But everything about this police department was bigger and better than

  necessary, which was one of the things that had triggered silent alarms

  in the minds of the Bureau agents who'd come to investigate the deaths

  of Sanchez and the Bustamantes.

  - 119 Moonlight Cove had twelve full-time and three part-time officers,

  plus four full-time office support personnel. A lot of manpower.

  Furthermore, they were all receiving salaries competitive with

  law-enforcement pay scales in major West Coast cities, therefore

  excessive for a town as small as this. They had the finest uniforms,

  the finest office furniture, a small armory o' handguns and riot guns

  and tear gas, and-most astonishing of all-they were computerized to an

  extent that would have been the envy of the boys manning the

  end-of-the-world bunkers at the Strategic Air Command in Colorado.

  From his bristly nook in the fragrant evergreen hedge, Sam studied the

  lot for a couple of minutes to be sure no one was sitting in any of the

  vehicles or standing in deep shadows along the back of the building.

  Levolor blinds were closed at the lighted windows on the ground floor,

  so no one inside had a view of the parking area.

  He took a pair of soft, supple goatskin gloves from a jacket pocket and

  pulled them on.

  He was ready to move when he heard something in the alley behind him. A

  scraping noise. Back the way he'd come.

  Pressing deeper into the hedge, he turned his head to search for the

  source of the sound. A pale, crumpled cardboard box, twice the size of

  a shoebox, slid along the blacktop, propelled by the breeze that was

  increasingly rustling the leaves of the shrubs and trees. The carton

  met a garbage can, wedged against it, and fell silent.

  Streaming across the alley, flowing eastward on the breeze, the fog now

  looked like smoke, as if the whole town were afire. Squinting back

  through that churning vapor, he satisfied himself that he was alone,

  then turned and sprinted to the nearest of the four patrol cars in the

  unfenced lot.

  It was locked.

  From an inner jacket pocket, he withdrew a Police automobile lock

  Release Gun, which could instantly open any lock without damaging the

  mechanism. He cracked the car, slipped in behind the steering wheel,

  and closed the door as quickly and quietly as possible.

  Enough light from the sodium-vapor lamps penetrated the car for him to

  see what he was doing, though he was experienced enough to work

  virtually in the dark. He put the lock gun away and took an

  ignition-socket wrench from another pocket. In seconds he popped the

  ignition-switch cylinder from the steering column, exposing the wires.

  He hated this part. To click on the video-display mounted on the car's

  console, he had to start the engine; the computer was more powerful than

  a lap-top model and communicated with its base data center by

  energy-intensive microwave transmissions, drawing too much power to run

  off the battery. The fog would cover the exhaust fumes but not the


  sound of the engine. The black-and-white was parked eighty feet from

  the building, so no one inside was likely to hear it. But if someone

  stepped out of the back door for some fresh air or to take one of the

  off-duty cruisers out on a call, the idling engine would not escape

  notice. Then Sam would be in a confrontation that-given the frequency

  of violent death in this town-he might not survive.

  Sighing softly, lightly depressing the accelerator with his right foot,

  he separated the ignition wires with one gloved hand and twisted the

  bare contact points together. The engine turned over immediately,

  without any harsh grinding.

  The computer screen blinked on.

  The police department's elaborate computerization was provided free by

  New Wave Microtechnology because they were supposedly using Moonlight

  Cove as a sort of testing ground for their own systems and software. The

  source of the excess friends so evident in every other aspect of the

  department was not easy to pin down, but the suspicion was that it came

  from New Wave or from New Wave's majority stockholder and chief

  executive officer, Thomas Shaddack. Any citizen was free to support his

  local police or other arms of government in excess of his taxes, of

  course, but if that was what Shaddack was doing, why wasn't it a matter

  of public record? No innocent man gives large sums of money to a civic

  cause with complete self-effacement. If Shaddack was being secretive

  about supporting the local authorities with private funds, then the

  possibility of bought cops and in-the-pocket officials could not be

  discounted. And if the Moonlight Cove police were virtually soldiers in

  Thomas Shaddack's private army, it followed that the suspicious number

  of violent deaths in recent weeks could be related to that unholy

  alliance.

  Now the VDT in the car displayed the New Wave logo in the ' - 121 bottom