Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  A rapid pulse was visible in his temples and in the gruesomely swollen

  arteries in his neck. But other pulses throbbed where none should have

  been in the center of his forehead; along each jawline; at four places

  in his chest and belly; in his upper arms, where dark ropy vessels had

  thickened and risen above subcutaneous fat, sheathed now only by his

  skin. His circulatory system-.

  - 327 seemed to have been redesigned and augmented to assist new

  functions that his body was being called upon to perform. Worse Yet,

  those pulses beat in a strange syncopation, as if at least two hearts

  pounded within him.

  A shriek erupted from the thing's gaping mouth, and Sam twitched and

  cried out in surprise. This was akin to the unearthly sounds that he

  had heard while in the living room, that had drawn him here, but he had

  thought they'd come from the computer.

  Grimacing as the electronic wail spiraled higher and swelled into

  painful decibels, Sam let his gaze rise from the man-machine's open

  mouth to its "eyes." The sensors still bristled in the sockets. The

  beads of ruby glass glowed with inner light, and Sam wondered if they

  registered him on the infrared spectrum or by some other means. Did

  Coltrane see him at all?

  perhaps the man-machine had traded the human world for a different

  reality, moving from this physical plane to another level, and perhaps

  Sam was an irrelevancy to him, unnoticed.

  The shriek began to fade, then cut off abruptly.

  Without realizing what he'd done, Sam had raised his revolver and, from

  a distance of about eighteen inches, pointed it at Harley Coltrane's

  face. He was startled to discover that he also had slipped his finger

  off the guard and onto the trigger itself and that he was going to

  destroy this thing.

  He hesitated. Coltrane was, after all, still a man-at least to some

  extent. Who was to say that he didn't desire his current state more

  than life as an ordinary human being? Who was to say that he was not

  happy like this? Sam was uneasy in the role of judge, but an even

  uneasier executioner. As a man who believed that life was hell on

  earth, he had to consider the possibility that Coltrane's condition was

  an improvement, an escape.

  Between man and computer, the glistening, semiorganic cables thrummed.

  They rattled against the skeletal hands in which they were clamped.

  Coltrane's rank breath was redolent with both the stench of rotting meat

  and overheated electronic components.

  Sensors glistened and moved within the lidless eye sockets.

  Tinted gold by the light from the screen, Coltrane's face seemed to be

  frozen in a perpetual scream. The vessels pulsing in his jaws and

  temples looked less like reflections of his owl, heartbeat than like

  parasites squirming under his skin.

  With a shudder of revulsion, Sam squeezed the trigger. The blast was

  thunderous in that confined space. Coltrane's head snapped back with

  the impact of the point-blank shot, then dropped forward, chin on his

  chest, smoking and bleeding.

  The repulsive cables continued to swell and shrink and swell as if with

  the rhythmic passage of inner fluid.

  Sam sensed that the man was not entirely dead. He turned the gun on the

  computer screen.

  One of Coltrane's skeletal hands released the cable around which it had

  been firmly clamped. With a click-snick-snack of bare bones, it whipped

  up and seized Sam's wrist.

  Sam cried out. . The room filled with electronic clicks and snaps and

  beeps and warblings.

  The hellish hand held him fast and with such tremendous strength that

  the bony fingers pinched his flesh, then began to cut through it. He

  felt warm blood trickle down his arm, under his shirt sleeve. With a

  flash of panic he realized that the unhuman power of the man-machine was

  ultimately sufficient to crush his wrist and leave him crippled. At best

  his hand would swiftly go numb from lack of circulation, and the

  revolver would drop from his grasp.

  Coltrane was struggling to raise his half-shattered head.

  Sam thought of his mother in the wreckage of the car, face torn open,

  grinning at him, grinning, silent and unmoving but,.

  grinning. . . .

  Frantically he kicked at Coltrane's chair, hoping to send it" rolling

  and spinning away. The wheels had been locked The bony hand squeezed

  tighter, and Sam screamed. His vision blurred.

  Still, he saw that Coltrane's head was coming up slowly. slowly.

  Jesus, I don't want to see that ruined face!

  With his right foot, putting everything he had into the kick, Sam struck

  once, twice, three times at the cables between Coltrane and the

  computer. They tore loose from Coltrane, popping out of his flesh with

  a hideous sound, and the man slumped in, his chair. Simultaneously the

  skeletal hand opened and fell away from Sam's wrist. With a cold rattle

  it struck the hard plastic mat under the chair.

  electronic pulses thumped like soft drumbeats and echoed off the walls,

  while under them a thin bleat wavered continuously through three notes.

  Gasping and half in shock, Sam clamped his left hand around his bleeding

  wrist, as if that would still the stinging pain.

  Something brushed against his leg.

  He looked down and saw the semiorganic cables, like pale headless

  snakes, still attached to the computer and full of malevolent life. They

  seemed to have grown, as well, until they were twice the length they had

  been when linking Coltrane to the machine. One snared his left ankle,

  and the other curled sinuously around his right calf.

  He tried to tear loose.

  They held him fast.

  They twined up his legs.

  Instinctively he knew they were seeking bare flesh on the upper half of

  his body, and that upon contact they would burrow into him and make him

  part of the system.

  He was still holding the revolver in his blood-slicked right hand. He

  aimed at the screen.

  Data was no longer flowing across that amber field. Instead, Coltrane's

  face looked out from the display. His eyes had been restored, and it

  seemed as if he could see Sam, for he was looking directly at him and

  speaking to him . . . need . . . need . . . want, need.

  Without understanding a damned thing about it, Sam knew Coltrane was

  still alive. He had not died-or at least not all of him had

  perished-with his body. He was there, in the machine somehow.

  As if to confirm that insight, Coltrane influenced the glass screen of

  the VDT to relinquish the convex plane of its surface and adapt to the

  contours of his face. The glass became as flexible as gelatin,

  thrusting outward, as if Coltrane actually existed within the machine,

  physically, and was now pushing his face Out of it.

  This was impossible. Yet it was happening. Harley Coltrane seemed to

  be controlling matter with the power of his mind, a mind not even any

  longer linked to a human body.

  Sam was mesmerized by fear, frozen, paralyzed. His finger lay immovable

  against the trigger.

  Real
ity had been ripped, and through that tear a nightmare world of

  infinite malign possibilities seemed to be rushing into the world that

  Sam knew and-suddenly-loved.

  One of the snakelike cables had reached his chest and found its way

  under his sweater to bare skin. He felt as if he'd been touched by a

  white-hot brand, and the pain broke his trance.

  He fired two rounds into the computer, shattering the screen first,

  which was the second face of Coltrane's into which he'd pumped a .38

  slug. Though Sam half expected it to absorb the bullet without effect,

  the cathode-ray tube imploded as if still made of glass. The other

  round scrambled the guts of the data-processing unit, at last finishing

  off the thing that Coltrane had become.

  The pale, oily tentacles fell away from him. They blistered, began to

  bubble, and seemed to be putrefying before his eyes.

  Eerie electronic beeps, crackles, and oscillations, not ear-torturingly

  loud but uncannily piercing, still filled the room.

  When Sam looked toward the woman who had been seated at the other

  computer, against the east wall, he saw that the mucus-like cables

  between her and the machine had lengthened, allowing her to turn in her

  chair to face him. Aside from those semiorganic connections and her

  nakedness, she was in a different but no less hideous condition from her

  husband. Her eyes were gone, but her sockets did not bristle with a

  host of sensors. Rather, two reddish orbs, three times the size of

  ordinary eyes, filled enlarged sockets in a face redesigned to

  accommodate them; they were less eyes than eye-shaped receptors, no

  doubt designed to see in many spectrums of light, and in fact Sam became

  aware of an image of himself in each red lens, reversed. Her legs,

  belly, breasts, arms, throat, and face were heavily patterned with

  swollen blood vessels that lay just beneath her, skin and that seemed to

  stretch it to the breaking point, so she looked as if she were a design

  board for branch-pattern circuitry. Some of those vessels might,

  indeed, have carried blood, but some of them throbbed with waves of

  radium-like illumination, some green and some sulfurous yellow.

  ' - 331 A segmented, wormlike probe, the diameter of a pencil, erupted

  from her forehead, as if shot from a gun, and streaked toward Sam,

  closing the ten feet between them in a split second, striking him above

  the right eye before he could duck. The tip bit into his skin on

  contact. He heard a whirring sound, as of fan blades spinning at maybe

  a thousand revolutions a minute. Blood ran down his brow and along the

  side of his nose. But he was squeezing off the last two rounds in his

  gun even as the probe came at him. Both shots found their mark. One

  slammed into the woman's upper body, and one took out the computer

  behind her in a blaze of sparks and crackling electrical bolts that

  jumped to the ceiling and snaked briefly across the plaster before

  dissipating. The probe went limp and fell away from him before it could

  link his brain to hers, which evidently had been its intention.

  Except for gray daylight that entered through the paper-thin cracks

  between the slats of the shutters, the room was dark.

  Crazily, Sam remembered something a computer specialist had said at a

  seminar for agents, when explaining how the Bureau's new system worked

  "Computers can perform more effectively when linked, allowing parallel

  processing of data.

  " Bleeding from the forehead and the right wrist, he stumbled backward

  to the door and flicked the light switch, turning on a floor lamp) He

  stood there -as far as he could get from the two grotesque corpses and

  still see them-while he began to reload the revolver with rounds he dug

  out of the pockets of his jacket.

  The room was preternaturally silent.

  Nothing moved.

  Sam's heart was hammering with such force that his chest ached dully

  with each blow.

  Twice he dropped cartridges because his hands were shaking. He didn't

  stoop to retrieve them. He was half convinced that the moment he wasn't

  in a position to fire with accuracy or to run, one of the dead creatures

  would prove not to be dead, after all, and like a flash would come at

  him, spitting sparks, and would seize him before he could rise and

  scramble out of its way.

  Gradually he became aware of the sound of rain. After losing half of

  its force during the morning, it was now falling harder than at any time

  since the storm had first broken the previous night. No thunder shook

  the day, but the furious drumming of the rain itself-and the insulated

  walls of the house-had probably muffled the gunfire enough to prevent it

  being heard by neighbors. He hoped to God that was the case. Otherwise,

  they were coming even now to investigate, and they would prevent his

  escape.

  Blood continued to trickle down from the wound on his forehead, and some

  of it got into his right eye. It stung. He wiped at his eye with his

  sleeve and blinked away the tears as best he could.

  His wrist hurt like hell. But if he had to, he could hold the revolver

  with his left hand and shoot well enough in close quarters. .

  When the .38 was reloaded, Sam edged back into the room, to the smoking

  computer on the worktable along the west wall, where Harley Coltrane's

  mutated body was slumped in a chair, trailing its bone-metal arms.

  Keeping one eye on the dead man-machine, he took the phone off the

  modern and hung it up. Then he lifted the receiver and was relieved to

  hear a dial tone.

  His mouth was so dry that he wasn't sure he'd be able to speak clearly

  when his call got through.

  He punched out the number of the Bureau office in Los Angeles.

  The line clicked.

  A pause.

  A recording came on "We are sorry that we are unable to complete your

  call at this time."

  He hung up, then tried again.

  "We are sorry that we are unable to complete-" He slammed the phone

  down.

  Not all of the telephones in Moonlight Cove were operable. And

  evidently, even from those in service, calls could be placed only to

  certain numbers. Approved numbers. The local phone company had been

  reduced to an elaborate intercom to serve the converted. % As he turned

  away from the phone, he heard something move, behind him. Stealthy and

  quick.

  He swung around, and the woman was three feet away. She, was no longer

  connected to the ruined computer, but one 04, those organic-looking

  cables trailed across the floor from the base of her spine and into an

  electrical socket.

  - 333 Free-associating in his terror, Sam thought So much for your

  flimsy kites, Dr. Frankenstein, so much for the need for storms d

  lightning; -these days we just plug the monsters into the wall, them a

  jolt of the juice direct, courtesy of Pacific Power "O t.

  tigh A reptilian hiss issued from her, and she reached for him.

  instead of fingers, her hand had three multiple-pronged plugs similar to

  the couplings with which the elements of a home computer were joined,

  th
ough these prongs were as sharp as nails.

  Sam dodged to the side, colliding with the chair in which Harley

  Coltrane still slumped, and nearly fell, firing at the woman-thing as he

  went. He emptied the five-round .38.

  The first three shots knocked her backward and down. The other two tore

  through vacant air and punched chunks of plaster out of the walls

  because he was too panicked to stop pulling the trigger when she fell

  out of his line of fire.

  She was trying to get up.

  Like a goddamn vampire, he thought.

  He needed the high-tech equivalent of a wooden stake, a cross, a silver

  bullet.

  The artery-circuits that webbed her naked body were still pulsing with

  light, although in places she was sparking, just as the computers

  themselves had done when he had pumped a couple of slugs into them.

  No rounds were left in the revolver.

  He searched his pockets for cartridges.

  He had none.

  Get out.

  An electronic wail, not deafening but more nerve-splintering than a

  thousand sharp fingernails scraped simultaneously down a blackboard,

  shrilled from her.

  two segmented, wormlike probes burst from her face and flew straight at

  him. Both fell inches short of him-perhaps a sign of her waning

  energy-and returned to her like splashes of quicksilver streaming back