Book Read Free

Dean Koontz - (1989)

Page 29

by Midnight(Lit)


  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

 

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