more confident that they could be trusted. Above the dull roar and
sizzle of the rain, through the closed window, she could hear only
snatches of their conversation. After a while, however, she determined
that they knew something was terribly wrong in Moonlight Cove. The two
strangers seemed to be hiding out in Mr. Talbot's house and were on the
run as much as she was. Apparently they were working on a plan to get
help from authorities outside of town.
She decided against knocking on the door. It was solid wood, - 311 'i
with no panes in the upper half, so they would not be able to see who
was knocking. She had heard enough to know they were all tense, maybe
not as completely frazzle-nerved as she was her self, but definitely on
edge. An unexpected knock at the door would give them all massive heart
attacks-or maybe they'd pick up guns and blast the door to smithereens,
and her with it.
Instead she rose up in plain sight and rapped on the window. Mr. Talbot
jerked his head in surprise and pointed, but even as he was pointing,
the other man and the woman flew to their feet with the suddenness of
marionettes snapped upright on strings. Moose barked once, twice. The
three people-and the dog-stared in surprise at Chrissie. From the
expression on their faces, she might have been not a bedraggled
eleven-year-old girl but a chainsaw-wielding maniac wearing a leather
hood to conceal a deformed face.
She supposed that right now, in alien-infested Moonlight Cove, even a
pathetic, rain-soaked, exhausted little girl could be an object of
terror to those who didn't know that she was still human. In hope of
allaying their fear, she spoke through the windowpane "Help me. Please,
help me."
The machine screamed. Its skull shattered under the impact of the
two slugs, and it was blown out of its seat, toppling to the floor of
the bedroom and pulling the chair with it. The elongated fingers tore
loose of the computer on the desk. The segmented wormlike probe snapped
in two, halfway between the computer and the forehead from which it had
sprung. The thing lay on the floor, twitching, spasming.
Loman had to think of it as a machine. He could not think of it as his
son. That was too terrifying.
The face was misshapen, wrenched into an asymmetrical real . mask by
the impact of the bullets as they'd torn through the cranium.
The silvery eyes had gone black. Now it appeared as if puddles of oil,
not mercury, were pooled in the sockets in the thing's' skull.
Between plates of shattered bone, Loman saw not merely the gray matter
he had expected but what appeared to be coiled wire, glinting shards
that looked almost ceramic, odd geometrical shapes. The blood that
seeped from the wounds was accompanied by wisps of blue smoke.
Still, the machine screamed.
The electronic shrieks no longer came from the boy-thing but from the
computer on the desk. Those sounds were so bizarre that they were as
out of place in the machine half of the organism as they had been in the
boy half.
Loman realized these were not entirely electronic walls. They also had
a tonal quality and character that were unnervingly." human.
The waves of data ceased flowing across the screen. One word was
repeated hundreds of times, filling line after line on the display NO NO
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO ...
He suddenly knew that Denny was only half dead. The part of the boy's
mind that had inhabited his body was extinguished, but another fragment
of his consciousness still lived somehow within the computer, kept alive
in silicon instead of brain tissue.
that part of him was screaming in this machine-cold voice. j On the
screen WHERE'S THE REST OF ME WHERE'S THE REST, OF ME WHERE'S THE REST
OF ME NO NO NO No NO NO NO NO....
Loman felt as if his blood was icy sludge pumped by a heart as jellied
as the meat in the freezer downstairs. He had never known a chill that
penetrated as deep as this one.
He stepped away from the crumpled body, which at last stopped twitching,
and turned his revolver on the computer. He emptied the gun into the
machine, first blowing out the screen. Because the blinds and drapes
were closed, the room was nearly dark.
He blasted the circuitry to pieces. Thousands of sparks flared in the
blackness, spraying out of the data-processing unit. But with a final
sputter and crackle, the machine died, and the gloom closed in again.
The air stank of scorched insulation. And worse.
Loman left the room and walked to the head of the stairs. He stood
there a moment, leaning against the railing. Then he descended to the
front hall.
He reloaded his revolver, holstered it.
He went out into the rain.
He got in his car and started the engine.
"Shaddack," he said aloud.
Tessa immediately took charge of the girl. She led her upstairs,
leaving Harry and Sam and Moose in the kitchen, and got her out of her
wet clothes.
"Your teeth are chattering, honey."
"I'm lucky to have any teeth to chatter."
"Your skin's positively blue."
"I'm lucky to have skin," the girl said.
"I noticed you're limping too."
"Yeah. I twisted an ankle."
"Sure it's just sprained?"
"Yeah. Nothing serious. Besides-I know," Tessa said, "You're lucky to
have ankles."
"Right. For all I know, aliens find ankles particularly tasty, the same
way some people like.pig's feet. Yuch." She sat on the edge of the bed
in the guest room, a wool blanket pulled around her nakedness, and
waited while Tessa got a sheet from the linen supplies and several
safety pins from a sewing box that she noticed in the same closet.
Tessa said, "Harry's clothes are much too big for you, so we'll wrap you
in a sheet temporarily. While your clothes are in the dryer, you can
come downstairs and tell Harry and Sam and me all about it."
It's been quite an adventure," the girl said.
'Yes, you look as if you've been through a lot."
"It'd make a great book."
'You like books?"
,Oh, yes, I love books."
hing but evidently determined to be sophisticated Chrissie threw back
the blanket and stood and allowed Tessa to drape the sheet around her.
Tessa pinned it in place, fashioning a toga of sorts.
As Tessa worked, Chrissie said, "I think I'll write a book about all of
this one day. I'll call it The Alien Scourge or maybe Nest Queen,
although naturally I won't title it Nest Queen unless it turns out there
really is a nest queen somewhere. Maybe they don't reproduce like
insects or even like animals. Maybe they're basically a vegetable
lifeform. Who knows? If they're basically a vegetable lifeform, then
I'd have to call the book something like Space Seeds or Vegetables of
the Void or maybe Murderous Martian Mushrooms. It's sometimes good to
use alliteration in titles. Alliteration. Don't you like that word? It
sounds so nice. I like words. Of course, you could always go with a
more poeti
c title, haunting, like Alien Roots, Alien Leaves. Hey, if
they're vegetables, we may be in luck, because maybe they'll eventually
be killed off by aphids or tomato worms, since they won't have developed
protection against earth pests, just like a few tiny germs killed off
the mighty Martians in War of the Worlds.
" Tessa was reluctant to disclose that their enemies were not from the
stars, for she was enjoying the girl's precocious chatter. Then she
noticed that Chrissie's left hand was injured. The palm had been badly
abraded; the center of it looked raw.
" I did that when I fell off the porch roof at the rectory," the girl
said.
"You fell off a roof. Yeah. Boy, that was exciting. See, the
wolf-thing was coming through the window after me, and I didn't have
anywhere else to go. Twisted my ankle in the same fall and then had to
, she - 315 run across the yard to the back gate before he caught me.
You know, Miss Lockland-Please call me Tessa."
A )patently Chrissie was unaccustomed to addressing adults by d their
Christian names. She frowned and was silent for a moment, evidently
struggling with the invitation to informality.
She decided it would be rude not to use first names when asked to do so.
"Okay . . . Tessa. Well, anyway, I can't decide what the aliens are
most likely to do if they catch us. Maybe eat our kidneys? Or don't
they eat us at all? Maybe they just shove alien bugs in our ears, and
the bugs crawl into our brains and take over. Either way, I figure it s
worth falling off a roof to avoid them.
Having finished pinning the toga, Tessa led Chrissie down the hall to
the bathroom and looked in the medicine cabinet for something with which
to treat the scraped palm. She found a bottle of iodine with a faded
label, a half-empty roll of adhesive tape, and a package of gauze pads
so old that the paper wrapper around each bandage square was yellow
with age. The gauze itself looked fresh and white, and the iodine was
undiluted by time, still strong enough to sting.
Barefoot, toga-clad, with her blond hair frizzing and curling as it
dried, Chrissie sat on the lowered lid of the toilet seat and submitted
stoically to the treatment of her wound. She didn't protest in any way,
didn't cry Out-or even hiss-in pain.
But she did talk "That's the second time I've fallen off a roof, so I
guess I must have a guardian angel looking over me. About a year and a
half ago, in the spring, I think these birds-starlings I think they
were-built a nest on the roof of one of our stables at home, and I just
had to see what baby birds looked like in the nest, so when my folks
weren't around, I got a ladder and waited for the mama bird to fly off
for more food, and then I real quick climbed up there to have a peek.
Let me tell you, before they get their feathers, baby birds are just
about the ugliest things You'd want to see-except for aliens, of course.
They're withered little wrinkled things, all beaks and eyes, and STUMPY
little wings like deformed arms. If human babies looked that bad when
they were born, the first people back a few million Years ago would've
flushed their newborns down the toilet if they'd had toilets-and
wouldn't have dared have any more of
them, and the whole race would've died out before it even really got
started."
Still painting the wound with iodine, trying without success to repress
a grin, Tessa looked up and saw that Chrissie was squeezing her eyes
tightly shut, wrinkling her nose, struggling very hard to be brave.
'i "Then the mama and papa bird came back," the girl said, and saw me at
the nest and flew at my face, shrieking. I Was so startled that I
slipped and fell off the roof. Didn't hurt myself at all that
time-though I did land in some horse manure. Which isn't a thrill, let
me tell you. I love horses, but they'd be ever so much more lovable if
you could teach them to use a litterbox like a cat."
Tessa was crazy about this kid.
Sam leaned forward with his elbows on the kitchen table and.
listened attentively to Chrissie Foster. Though Tessa had heard I the
Boogeymen in the middle of a kill at Cove Lodge and had glimpsed one of
them under the door of her room, and though Harry had watched them at a
distance in night and fog, and though Sam had spied two of them last
night through a window in Harry's living room, the girl was the only one
present who.
had seen them close up and more than once.
But it was not solely her singular experience that held Sam's attention.
He also was captivated by her sprightly manner, good humor, and
articulateness. She obviously had considerable inner strength, real
toughness, for otherwise she would not have survived the previous night
and the events of this morning. Yet she remained charmingly innocent,
tough but not hard. She was one of those kids who gave you hope for the
whole damn human race.
- 317 A kid like Scott used to be.
And that was why Sam was fascinated by Chrissie Foster. He saw in her
the child that Scott had been. Before he . . . changed, With regret
so poignant that it manifested itself as a dull] ache in his chest and a
tightness in his throat, he watched the girl and listened to her, not
only to hear what information she had to impart but with the unrealistic
expectation that by studying her he would at last understand why his own
son had lost both innocence and hope.
-21 Down in the darkness of the Icarus Colony cellar, Tucker and his
pack did not sleep, for they did not require it. They lay curled in the
deep blackness. From time to time, he and the other male coupled with
the female, and they tore at one another in savage frenzy, gashing flesh
that began to heal at once, drawing one another's blood simply for the
pleasure of the scent;immortal freaks at play.
The darkness and the barren confines of their concrete-walled burrow
contributed to Tucker's growing disorientation. By the hour he
remembered less of his existence prior to the past night's exciting
hunt. He ceased to have much sense of self. Individuality was not to
be encouraged in the pack when hunting, and in the burrow it was even a
less desirable trait; harmony in that windowless, claustrophobic space
required the relinquishment of self to group.
His waking dreams were filled with images of dark, wild shapes creeping
through night-clad forests and across moonwashed meadows. When
occasionally a memory of human form flickered through his mind, its
origins were a mystery to him; more than that, he was frightened by it
and quickly shifted his fantasies back to
running-hunting-killing-coupling scenes in which he was just a part of
the pack, one aspect of a single shadow, one extension of a larger
organism, free from the need to think, having no desire but to be.
At one point he became aware that he had slipped out of his wolflike
form, which had become too confining. He no longer wanted to be the
leader of a pack, for that position carried with; it too much
responsibility. H
e didn't want to think at all. Just be. Be. The
limitations of all rigid physical forms seemed insufferable.
He sensed that the other male and the female were aware of his
degeneration and were following his example.
He felt his flesh flowing, bones dissolving, organs and vessels
surrendering form and function. He devolved beyond the primal ape, far
beyond the four-legged thing that laboriously had crawled out of the
ancient sea millennia ago, beyond, beyond, until he was but a mass of
pulsing tissue, protoplasmic soup, throbbing in the darkness of the
Icarus Colony cellar.
Loman rang the doorbell at Shaddack's house on the north point, and
Evan, the manservant, answered.
"I'm sorry, Chief Watkins, but Mr. Shaddack isn't here."
"Where's he gone?"
"I don't know."
Evan was one of the New People. To be sure of dispatching him, Loman
shot him twice in the head and then twice in the chest while he lay on
the foyer floor, shattering both brain and heart. Or data-processor and
pump. Which was needed now biological or mechanical terminology? How
far had they progressed toward becoming machines?
Loman closed the door behind him and stepped over Evan's body. After
replenishing the expended rounds in the revolver's, - 319 cylinder, he
searched the huge house room by room, floor by floor, looking for
Shaddack.
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 42
