I hadn't shot her in the head, just then . . . if I'd been a second
or two slower, I think that damn thing, that probe, whatever it was, it
would have bored right through my skull and sunk into my brain, and
she'd have connected with me the way she was connected with that
computer."
Her toga forsaken in favor of dry jeans and blouse, Chrissie stood just
inside the bathroom, white-faced but wanting to hear all.
Harry had pulled his wheelchair into the doorway.
Moose was lying at Sam's feet, rather than at Harry's. The dog seemed
to realize that at the moment the visitor needed comforting more than
Harry did.
Sam was colder to the touch than could be explained by his time in the
chilly rain. He was trembling, and periodically the shivers that passed
through him were so powerful that his teeth chattered.
The more Sam talked, the colder Tessa became, too, and ill time his
shivers were communicated to her.
His right wrist had been cut on both sides, when Harley Coltrane had
gripped him with a powerful bony hand. No major blood vessels had been
severed; neither gash required stitches, and Tessa quickly stopped the
bleeding there. The bruises, which had barely begun to appear and would
not fully flower for hours yet, were going to be worse than the cuts. He
complained of pain in the joint, and his hand was weak, but she did not
think that any bones had been broken or crushed.
as if they'd somehow been given the ability to control their physical
form," Sam said shakily, "to make anything they wanted of themselves,
mind over matter, just like Chrissie said when she told us about the
priest, the one who started to become the creature from that movie.
The girl nodded.
"I mean, they changed before my eyes, grew these probes, tried to spear
me. Yet with this incredible control of their bodies, of their physical
substance, all they apparently wanted to make of themselves was . . .
something out of a bad dream."
The wound on his abdomen was the least of the three. As on his
forehead, the skin was stripped away in a dime-sized circle, though the
probe that had struck him there seemed to have been meant to burn rather
than cut its way into him. His flesh was scorched, and the wound itself
was pretty much cauterized.
From his wheelchair Harry said, "Sam, do you think they're really people
who control themselves, who have chosen to become machinelike, or are
they people who've somehow been taken over by machines, against their
will?"
"I don't know," Sam said.
"It could be either, I guess."
"But how could they be taken over, how could this happen, how could such
a change in the human body be accomplished?
And how does what's happened to the Coltranes tic in with the
Boogeymen?"
"Damned if I know," Sam said.
"Somehow it's all related to New Wave. Got to be. And none of us here
knows anything much about the cutting edge of that kind of technology,
so we don't even have the basic knowledge required to speculate
intelligently. It might as well be magic to us, SUPERNATURAL. The only
way we'll ever really understand what's happened is to get help from
outside, quarantine Moonlight Cove, seize New Wave's labs and records,
and reconstruct it the way fire marshals reconstruct the history of a
fire from what they sift out of the ashes."
"Ashes?" Tessa asked as Sam stood up and as she helped him into his
shirt.
"This talk about fires and ashes-and other things you've said-make it
sound as if you think whatever's in Moonlight Cove is building real fast
toward an explosion or something."
"It is," he said.
At first he tried to button his shirt with one hand, but then he allowed
Tessa to do it for him. She noticed that his skin was still cold and
that his shivers were not subsiding with time.
He said, "All these murders they've got to cover up, these things that
stalk the night . . . there's a sense that a collapse has begun, that
whatever they tried to do here isn't turning out like they expected, and
that the collapse is accelerating.
" He was breathing too quickly, too shallowly. He paused, took a deeper
breath.
"What I saw in the Coltranes' house . . . that didn't look like
anything anyone could have planned, not something you'd want to do to
people or that they'd want for themselves. It looked like an experiment
out of control, biology run amok, reality turned inside out, and I swear
to God that if those kinds of secrets are hidden in the houses of this
town, then the whole project has to be collapsing on New Wave right now,
coming down fast and hard on their heads, whether they want to admit it
or not. It's all blowing up now, right now, one hell of an explosion,
and we're in the middle of it."
From the moment he'd stumbled through the kitchen door, dripping rain
and blood, throughout the time Tessa had cleaned and bandaged his
wounds, she had noticed something that frightened her more than his
paleness and shivering. He kept touching them. He had embraced Tessa
in the kitchen when she gasped at the sight of the bleeding hole in his
forehead; he'd held her and leaned against her and assured her that he
was okay. Primarily he seemed to be reassuring himself that she and
Harry and Chrissie were okay, as if he had expected to come back and
find them . . . changed. He hugged Chrissie, too, as if she were his
own daughter, and he said, "It'll be all right, everything'll be all
right," when he saw how frightened she was. Harry held Out a hand in
concern, and Sam grasped it and was reluctant to let go. In the
bathroom, while Tessa dressed his wounds, he had repeatedly touched her
hands, her arms, and had once put a hand against her cheek as if
wondering at the softness and warmth of her skin. He reached out to
touch Chrissie, too, where she stood inside the bathroom door, patting
her shoulder, holding her hand for a moment and giving it a reassuring
squeeze. Until now he had not been a toucher. He had been reserved,
self-contained, cool, even distant. But during the quarter of an hour
he'd spent in the Coltrane house, he had been so profoundly shaken by
what he had seen that his shell of self-imposed isolation had cracked
wide open; he had come to want and need the human contact that, only a
short while ago, he had not even ranked as desirable as good Mexican
food, Guinness Stout, and Goldie Hawn films. " When she contemplated the
intensity of the horror necessary to transform him so completely and
abruptly, Tessa was more frightened than ever because Sam Booker's
redemption seemed akin to that of a sinner who, on his deathbed,
glimpsing hell, turns desperately to the god he once shunned, seeking
comfort and reassurance. Was he less sure now of their chances of
escaping? Perhaps he was seeking human contact because, having denied
it to himself for so many years, he believed that only hours remained in
which to experience the communion of his own kind before the great, deep
/>
endless darkness settled over them.
Shaddack awoke from his familiar and comforting dream of human and
machine parts combined in a world-spanning engine of, incalculable power
and mysterious purpose. He was, as always-refreshed as much by the
dream as by sleep itself.
He got out of the van and stretched. Using tools he found in the
garage, he forced open the connecting door to the late Paula - 345
parkins's house. He used her bathroom, then washed his hands and face,
Upon returning to the garage, he raised the big door. He pulled the van
out into the driveway, where it could better transmit and receive data
by microwave.
Rain was still falling, and depressions in the lawn were filled with
water. Already wisps of fog stirred in the windless air, which probably
meant the banks of fog that rolled in from the sea later in the day
would be even denser than those last night.
He took another ham sandwich and a Coke from the cooler and ate while
using the van's VDT to check on the progress of Moonhawk- The 600 A.M.
to 600 P.m. schedule for four hundred and fifty conversions was still
under way. Already, at 1250, slightly less than seven hours into the
twelve-hour program, three hundred and nine had been injected with
full-spectrum micro spheres. The conversion teams were well ahead of
schedule.
He checked on the progress of the search for Samuel Booker and the
Lockland woman. Neither had been found.
Shaddack should have been worried about their disappearance. But he was
unconcerned. He had seen the moonhawk, after all, not once but three
times, and he had no doubt that ultimately he would achieve all of his
goals.
The Foster girl was still missing too. He didn't trouble himself about
her either. She had probably encountered something deadly in the night.
At times regressives could be useful.
Perhaps Booker and the Lockland woman had fallen victim to those same
creatures. It would be ironic if the regressives-the only flaw in the
project, and a potentially serious one-should prove to have preserved
the secret of Moonhawk.
Through the VDT, he tried to reach Tucker at New Wave, then at his home,
but the man was at neither place. Could Watkins be correct? Was Tucker
a regressive and, like Peyser, un able to find his way back to human
form? Was he out there in the woods right now, trapped in an altered
state?
Clicking off the computer, Shaddack sighed. After everyone had been
converted at midnight, this first phase of Moonhawk Would not be
finished. Not quite. They'd evidently have a few messes to mop up.
In the cellar of the Icarus Colony, three bodies had become one. The
resultant entity was without rigid shape, boneless, featureless, a mass
of pulsing tissue that lived in spite of lacking a brain and heart and
blood vessels, without organs of any kind. It was" primal, a thick
protein soup, brainless but aware, eyeless but seeing, earless but
hearing, without a gut but hungry.
The agglomerations of silicon microspheres had dissolved within it. That
inner computer could no longer function in the radically altered
substance of the creature, and in turn the beast had no use any more for
the biological assistance that the microspheres had been designed to
provide. Now it was not linked to Sun, the computer at New Wave. If
the microwave transmitter. .
there sent a death order, it would not receive the command-, and would
live.
It had become the master of its physiology by reducing itself, to the
uncomplicated essence of physical existence. Their three minds also had
become one. The consiousness now dwelling in that darkness was as
lacking in complex form as the amorphous, jellied body it inhabited.
It had relinquished its memory because memories were recordings of
events and relationships that had consequences, and consequences-good or
bad-implied that one was responsible for one's actions. Flight from
responsibility had driven the creature to regression in the first place.
Pain was another shedding memory-the pain of recalling what had been
lost.
Likewise, it had surrendered the capacity to consider the future, to
plan, to dream.
Now it had no past of which it was aware, and the concept of a future
was beyond its ken. It lived only for the moment, Unthinking,
unfeeling, uncaring.
347 It had one need. To survive.
And to survive, it needed only one thing. To feed.
The breakfast dishes had been cleared from the table while Sam was at
the Coltranes' house, battling monsters that apparently had been part
human and part computer and part zombies-and maybe, for all they knew,
part toaster oven. After Sam was bandaged, Chrissie gathered with him
and Tessa and Harry around the kitchen table again, to listen to them
discuss what action to take next.
Moose stayed at Chrissie's side, regarding her with soulful brown eyes,
as if he adored her more than life itself. She couldn't resist giving
him all the petting and scratching-behind-the-ears that he wanted.
"The greatest problem of our age," Sam said, "is how to keep
technological progress accelerating, how to use it to improve the
quality of life-without being overwhelmed by it. Can we employ the
computer to redesign our world, to remake our lives, without one day
coming to worship it?" He blinked at Tessa and said, "It's not a silly
question."
Tessa frowned.
"I didn't say it was. Sometimes we have a blind trust in machines, a
tendency to believe that whatever a computer tells us is gospel-TO
forget the old maxim," Harry injected, "which says 'garbage in, garbage
out."
" Exactly," Tessa agreed.
"Sometimes, when we get data or analyses from computers, we treat it as
if the machines were all infallible. Which is dangerous because a
computer application Can be conceived, designed, and implemented by a
madman, Perhaps not as easily as by a benign genius but certainly as
effectively.
Sam said, "Yet people have a tendency-no, even desire-to want to depend
on the machines." a deep "Yeah," Harry said, "that's our sorry damn
need to shift responsibility whenever we possibly can. A spineless
desire to get out from under responsibility is in our genes, I swear it
is, and the only way we get anywhere in this world is by constantly
fighting our natural inclination to be utterly irresponsible. Some.
times I wonder if that's what we got from the devil when Eve listened to
the serpent and ate the apple-this aversion to responsibility. Most
evil has it roots there.
" Chrissie noticed this subject energized Harry. With his one good arm
and a little help from his half-good leg, he levered himself higher in
his wheelchair. Color seeped into his previously pale face. He made a
fist of one hand and stared at it intently, as if holding something
precious in that tight grip, as if he held the idea there and didn't
want to let go of it until he had fully explored it.
He s
aid, "Men steal and kill and lie and cheat because they, feel no
responsibility for others. Politicians want power, and they want
acclaim when their policies succeed, but they seldom T stand up and take
the responsibility for failure. The world's full of people who want to
tell you how to live your life, how to make heaven right here on earth,
but when their ideas turn out half-baked, when it ends in Dachau or the
Gulag or the mass murders that followed our departure from Southeast
Asia, they turn their heads, avert their eyes, and pretend they had no
responsibility for the slaughter."
He shuddered, and Chrissie shuddered too, though she was not entirely
sure that she entirely understood everything he was, saying.
"Jesus," he continued, "if I've thought about this once, I've thought
about it a thousand times, ten thousand, maybe because, of the war."
"Vietnam, you mean?" Tessa said.
Harry nodded. He was still staring at his fist.
"In the war, to; survive, you had to be responsible every minute of
every day, unhesitatingly responsible for yourself, for your every
action You had to be responsible for your buddies, too, because survival
wasn't something that could be achieved alone. That was maybe the one
positive thing about fighting in a war-it clarifies - 349 your thinking
and makes YOU realize that a sense of responsibility is what separates
good men from the damned. I don't regret the war, not even considering
what happened to me there. I learned that great lesson, learned to be
responsible in all things, and I still feel responsible to the people we
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 46
