Dean Koontz - (1989)
Page 29
Letting go of his shotgun with one cramped hand, Loman reached down to
Penniworth and took him by the hand.
"Come on, let's get out of here, boy, let's get away from this smell."
Penniworth understood and got laboriously to his feet. He leaned
against Loman and allowed himself to be led out of the T - 213 room,
away from the two dead regressives, along the hallway into the living
room.
Here, the stink of urine completely smothered what trace of the blood
scent might have ridden the currents of air outward from the bedroom.
That was better. It was not a foul odor at all, as it had seemed
previously, but acidic and cleansing.
Loman settled Penniworth in an armchair, the only upholstered item in
the room that had not been torn to pieces.
"You going to be okay?"
Penniworth looked up at him, hesitated, then nodded. All signs of the
beast had vanished from his hands and countenance, though his flesh was
strangely lumpy, still in transition. His face appeared to be swollen
with a disabling case of the hives, large round lumps from forehead to
chin and ear to ear, and there were long, diagonal welts, too, that
burned an angry red against his pale skin. However, even as Loman
watched, those phenomena faded, and Neil Penniworth laid full claim to
his humanity.
To his physical humanity, at least.
"You sure?" Loman asked.
"Yes.
"Stay right there."
"Yes.
" Loman went into the foyer and opened the front door. The deputy
standing guard outside was so tense because of all the shooting and
screaming in the house that he almost fired on his chief before he
realized who it was.
"What the hell?" the deputy said.
"Get on the computer link to Shaddack," Loman said.
"He has to come out here now. Right now. I have to see him now."
Sam drew the heavy blue drapes, and Harry turned on one bedside lamp.
Soft as it was, too dim to chase away more than half the shadows, the
light nevertheless stung Tessa's eyes, which were already tired and
bloodshot.
For the first time she actually saw the room. It was sparely furnished
the stool; the tall table beside the stool; the telescope; a long,
modern-oriental, black lacquered dresser; a pair of matching
nightstands; a small refrigerator in one corner; and an adjustable
hospital-type bed, queen-size, without a spread but with plenty of
pillows and brightly colored sheets patterned with splashes and streaks
and spots of red, orange, purple, green, yellow, blue, and black, like a
giant canvas painted by a demented and color-blind abstract artist.
Harry saw her and Sam's reaction to the sheets and said, "Now, that's a
story, but first you've got to know the background. My housekeeper,
Mrs. Hunsbok, comes in once a week, and she does most of my shopping
for me. But I send Moose on errands every day, if only to pick up a
newspaper. He wears this set of . . . well, sort of saddlebags
strapped around him, one hanging on each side. I put a note and some
money in the bags, and he goes to the local convenience store-it's the
only place he'll go when he's wearing the bags, unless I'm with him. The
clerk at the little grocery, Jimmy Ramis, knows me real well. Jimmy
reads the note, puts a quart of milk or some candy bars or whatever I
want in the saddlebags, puts the change in there, too, and Moose brings
it all back to me. He's a good, reliable service dog, the best. They
train them real well at Canine Companions for Independence. Moose never
chases after a cat with my newspaper and fresh milk in his backpack."
- 215 The dog raised his head off Tessa's lap, panted and grinned, as if
acknowledging the praise.
"One day he came home with a few items I'd sent him for, and he also had
a set of these sheets and pillow cases. I call up jimmy Ramis, see, and
ask him what's the idea, and Jimmy says he doesn't know what I'm talking
about, says he never saw any such sheets. Now, Jimmy's dad owns the
convenience store, and he also owns Surplus Outlet, out on the county
road. He gets all kinds of discontinued merchandise and stuff that
didn't sell as well as the manufacturers expected, picks it up at ten
cents on the dollar sometimes, and I figure these sheets were something2
he was having trouble unloading even at Surplus Outlet. Jimmy no doubt
saw them, thought they were pretty silly, and decided to have some fun
with me. But on the phone Jimmy says, 'Harry, if I knew anything about
the sheets, I'd tell you, but I don't." And I says, 'You trying to make
me believe Moose went and bought them all on his own, with his own
moneys' And Jimmy says, 'Well, no, I'd guess he shoplifted them
somewhere,' and I says, 'And just how did he manage to stuff them in his
own backpack so neat,' and Jimmy says, 'I don't know, Harry, but that
there is one hell of a clever dog-though it sounds like he doesn't have
good taste."
" Tessa saw how Harry relished the story, and she also saw why he was so
pleased by it. For one thing the dog was child and brother and friend,
all rolled into one, and Harry was proud that people thought of Moose as
clever. More important, Jimmy's little joke made Harry a part of his
community, not just a homebound invalid but a participant in the life of
his town. His lonely days were marked by too few such incidents.
"And you are a clever dog," Tessa told Moose.
Harry said, "Anyway, I decided to have Mrs. Hunsbok put them on the bed
next time she came, as a joke, but then I sort of liked them."
After drawing the drapes at the second window, Sam returned to the
stool, sat down, swiveled to face Harry, and said, "They're the loudest
sheets I've ever seen. Don't they keep you awake at night?
" Harry smiled.
"Nothing can keep me awake. I sleep like a baby. What keeps people
awake is worry about the future, about what might happen to them. But
the worst has already happened to me. Or they lie awake thinking about
the past, about what might have been, but I don't do that because I just
don't dare."
His smile faded as he spoke.
"So now what? What do we do next? " Gently removing Moose's head from
her lap, standing and brushing a few dog hairs from her jeans, Tessa
said, "Well, the phones aren't working, so Sam can't call the Bureau,
and if we walk out of town we risk an encounter with Watkins's patrols
or these Boogeymen. Unless you know a ham radio enthusiast who'd let us
use his set to get a message relayed, then so as far as I can see, we've
got to drive out."
"Roadblocks, remember," Harry said.
She said, "Well, I figure we'll have to drive out in a truck, something
big and mean, ram straight through the damn roadblock, make it to the
highway, then out of their jurisdiction. Even if we do get chased down
by county cops, that's fine, because Sam can get them to call the
Bureau, verify his assignment, then they'll be on our side."
"Who's the federal agent here, anyway?" Sam asked.
Tessa felt herself blush.
/> "Sorry. See, a documentary filmmaker is almost always her own producer,
sometimes producer and director and writer too. That means if the art
part of it is going to work, the business part of it has to work first,
so I'm used to doing a lot of planning, logistics. Didn't mean to step
on your toes.
"Step on them any time."
Sam smiled, and she liked him when he smiled. She realized she was even
attracted to him a little. He was neither handsome nor ugly, and not
what most people meant by "plain," either. He was rather . . .
nondescript but pleasant-looking. She sensed a darkness in him,
something deeper than his current worries about events in Moonlight
Cove-maybe sadness at some loss, maybe long-repressed anger related to
some injustice he had suffered, maybe a general pessimism arising from
too much contact in his work with the worst elements of society. But
when he smiled he was transformed.
"You really going to smash out in a truck?" Harry asked.
"Maybe as a last resort," Sam said.
"But we'd have to find a rig big enough and then steal it, and that's an
operation in itself. Besides, they might have riot guns at the
roadblock, loaded - 217 with magnum rounds, maybe automatic weapons. I
wouldn't want to run that kind of flak even in a Mack truck. You can
ride into hell in a tank, but the devil will get his hands on you
anyway, so it's best not to go there in the first place."
"So where do we go?" Tessa asked.
"To sleep," Sam said.
"There's a way out of this, a way to get through to the Bureau. I can
sort of see it out of the corner of my eye, but when I try to look
directly at it, it goes away, and that's because I'm tired. I need a
couple of hours in the sack to get fresh and think straight."
Tessa was exhausted, too, though after what had happened at Cove Lodge,
she was somewhat surprised that she not only could sleep but wanted to.
As she'd stood in her motel room, listening to the screams of the dying
and the savage shrieks of the killers, she wouldn't have thought she'd
ever sleep again.
Shaddack arrived at Peyser's at five minutes till four in the
morning. He drove his charcoal-gray van with heavily tinted windows,
rather than his Mercedes, because a computer terminal was mounted on the
console of the van, between the seats, where the manufacturer had
originally intended to provide a built-in cooler. As eventful as the
night had been thus far, it seemed a good idea to stay within reach of
the data link that, like a spider, spun a silken web enmeshing all of
Moonlight Cove. He parked on the wide shoulder of the two-lane rural
blacktop, directly in front of the house.
As Shaddack walked across the yard to the front porch, distant rumbling
rolled along the Pacific horizon. The hard wind that had harried the
fog eastward had also brought a storm in from the west. During the past
couple of hours, churning clouds had clothed the heavens, shrouding the
naked stars that had burned briefly between the passing of the mist and
the coming of the thunderheads. Now the night was very dark and deep.
He shivered inside his cashmere topcoat, under which he still wore a
sweat suit.
A couple of deputies were sitting in black-and-whites in the driveway.
They watched him, pale faces beyond dusty car windows, and he liked to
think they regarded him with fear and reverence, for he was in a sense
their maker.
Loman Watkins was waiting for him in the front room. The place had been
wrecked. Neil Penniworth sat on the only undamaged piece of furniture;
he looked badly shaken and could not meet Shaddack's gaze. Watkins was
pacing. A few spatters of blood marked his uniform, but he looked
unhurt; if he'd sustained injuries, they had been minor and had already
healed. More likely, the blood belonged to someone else.
"What happened here?" Shaddack asked.
Ignoring the question, Watkins spoke to his officer "Go out to the car,
Neil. Stay close to the other men."
"Yes, sir," Penniworth said. He was huddled in his chair, bent forward,
looking down at his shoes.
"You'll be okay, Neil."
"I think so."
"It wasn't a question. It was a statement You'll be okay. You have
enough strength to resist. You've proven that already.
Penniworth nodded, got up, and headed for the door.
Shaddack said, "What's this all about?"
Turning toward the hallway at the other end of the room, Watkins said,
"Come with me." His voice was as cold and hard as ice, informed by fear
and anger, but noticeably devoid of the grudging respect with which he
had spoken to Shaddack ever since he had been converted in August.
Displeased by that change in Watkins, uneasy, Shaddack frowned and
followed him back down the hall.
The cop stopped at a closed door, turned to Shaddack.
"You told me that what you've done to us is improve our biological
efficiency by injecting us with these . . . these biochips. A
misnomer, really. They're not chips at all, but incredibly small
microspheres.
" In spite of the regressives and a few other problems that had
developed with the Moonhawk Project, Shaddack's pride of achievement was
undiminished. Glitches could be fixed. Bugs could be worked out of the
system. He was still the genius of his age; he not only felt this to be
true, but knew it as well as he knew in which direction to look for the
rising sun each morning.
Genius . . .
The ordinary silicon microchip that made possible the computer
revolution had been the size of a fingernail, and had contained one
million circuits etched onto it by photo lithography. The smallest
circuit on the chip had been one-hundredth as wide as a human hair.
Breakthroughs in X-ray lithography, using giant particle accelerators
called synchrotrons, eventually made possible the imprinting of one
billion circuits on a chip, with features as small as one-thousandth the
width of a human hair. Shrinking dimensions was the primary way to gain
computer speed, improving both function and capabilities.
The microspheres developed by New Wave were one fourth ous and the size
of a microchip. Each was imprinted with a quarter-million circuits.
This had been achieved by the application of a radically new form of
X-ray lithography that made it possible to etch circuits on amazingly
small surfaces and without having to hold those surfaces perfectly
still.
Conversion of Old People into New People began with the injection of
hundreds of thousands of these microspheres, in solution, into the
bloodstream. They were biologically interactive in function, but the
material itself was biologically inert, so the immune system wasn't
triggered. There were different kinds of microspheres. Some were
heart-tropic, meaning they moved through the veins to the heart and took
up residence there, attaching themselves to the walls of the blood
vessels that serviced the cardiac muscle. Some spheres were
liver-tropic, lung-tropic, kidney-tropic, bowel-tropi
c, brain-tropic,
and so on. They settled in clusters at those sites and were designed in
such a way that, when touching, their circuits linked.
Those clusters, spread throughout the body, eventually provided about
fifty billion usable circuits that had the potential for data
processing, considerably more than in the largest supercomputers of the
1980s. In a sense, by injection, a super-supercomputer had been put
inside the human body.
Moonlight Cove and the surrounding area were constantly bathed in
microwave transmissions from dishes on top of the main building at New
Wave. A fraction of those transmissions involved the police computer
system, and another fraction could be drawn upon to power-up the
microspheres inside each of the New People.
A small number of spheres were of a different material and served as
transducers and power distributors. When one of the Old People received
his third injection of microspheres, the power spheres at once drew on
those microwave transmissions, converting them into electrical current
and distributing it throughout the network. The amount of current
needed to operate the system was exceedingly small.
Other specialized spheres in each cluster were memory units. Some of
those carried the program that would operate the system; that program
was loaded the moment power entered the network.
To Watkins, Shaddack said, "Long ago I became convinced that the basic
problem with the human animal is its extremely emotional nature. I've