Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

They were in a long hallway. It was full of the cedar-pine smell that

  came from the crumbly green disinfectant and di attractor that for years

  the janitors had sprinkled on the floor and then swept up, until the

  tiles and walls had become impregnated with the scent. The aroma was

  familiar to her from Thomas Jefferson Elementary, and she was

  disappointed to find it here. She had thought of high school as a

  special, mysterious place but how special or mysterious could it be if

  they used the same disinfectant as at the grade school?

  Tessa quietly closed the outside door behind them.

  They stood listening for a moment.

  The school was silent.

  They moved down the hall, looking into classrooms an laboratories and

  supply closets on both sides, searching for the computer lab. In a

  hundred and fifty feet they reached a junction with another hall. They

  stood in the intersection for a moment heads cocked, listening again.

  The school was still silent.

  And dark. The only light in any direction was the flashlight which Sam

  still held in his left hand but which he no longer hooded with his

  right. He had withdrawn his revolver from his holster and needed his

  right hand for that.

  After a long wait, Sam said, "Nobody's here."

  - 413 which did seem to be the case.

  Chrissie felt better, safer.

  briefly go on the Other hand, if he really believed they were the only

  people in the school, why didn't he put his gun away?

  Shaddackdrove through his domain, impatient for midnight, which was

  still five hours away, Thomas Shaddack had largely reached a childlike

  condition. Now that his triumph was at hand he could cast off the

  masquerade of a grown man, which he had long sustained, and he was

  relieved to do so. He had not been an adult, really, but a boy whose

  emotional development had been forever arrested at the age of twelve,

  when the image of the moonhawk had not only come to him but been in him;

  he had thereafter faked emotional ascension to match his physical

  growth.

  Now it was no longer necessary to pretend.

  On one level, he had always known this about himself, and had considered

  it to be his great strength, an advantage over those who had put

  childhood behind them. A boy of twelve ,could harbor and nurture a

  dream with more determination than an adult, for adults were constantly

  distracted by conflicting needs and desires. A boy on the edge of

  puberty, however, had the single-mindedness to focus on and dedicate

  himself only to a single Big Dream. Properly bent, a twelve-year-old

  boy was the perfect monomaniac.

  The Moonhawk Project, his Big Dream of godlike power, would not have

  reached fruition if he had matured in the usual way. He owed his

  impending triumph to arrested development, a boy again, not secretly any

  more

  but openly, eager for his every whim, to take whatever he wanted, to do

  things that broke the rules. twelve-year-old boys reveled in breaking

  the rules, challenging authority. At their worst, twelve year-old boys

  were naturally lawless, on the verge of hormonal induced rebellion.

  But he was more than lawless. He was a boy flying on cotton candy that

  had been eaten long ago but that had left a psychic not a physical

  residue. He was a boy who knew that he was god. Any boy's potential

  for cruelty paled in comparison to the cruelty of the gods.

  To pass the time until midnight, he imagined what he would do with his

  power when the last of Moonlight Cove had fallen under his command. Some

  of his ideas made him shiver in a strange mixture of excitement and

  disgust.

  He was on Iceberry Way when he realized the Indian was with him. He was

  surprised when he turned his head and saw Runningdeer sitting in the

  passenger seat. Indeed he stopped the the middle of the street and

  stared in disbelief, Shocked and afraid.

  But Runningdeer did not menace him. In fact the Indian didn't even

  speak to him or look at him, but stared straight ahead through the

  windshield. Slowly understanding came to Shaddack. The Indian's spirit

  was his now, his possession as surely as was the van. The spirits had

  given him the Indian as an advisor, as a reward for having made a

  success of Moonhawk. But he, not Runningdeer, was in control this time,

  and the Indian would speak only when spoken to.

  "Hello, Runningdeer," he said.

  The Indian looked at him.

  "Hello, Little Chief."

  "You're mine now."

  "Yes, Little Chief."

  For just a brief flicker of time, it occurred to Shaddack that he was

  mad and that Runningdeer was an illusion coughed up by a sick mind. But

  monomaniacal boys do not have the capacity for an extended examination

  of their mental condition, and the thought passed out of his mind as

  quickly as it had entered.

  th To Runningdeer, he said, "You'll do what I say."

  "Always."

  Immensely pleased, Shaddack let up on the brake pedal and drove on. The

  headlights revealed an amber-eyed thing Of fantastic shape, drinking

  from a puddle on the pavement. He - 415 to regard it as a thing of

  consequence, and when it loped away he let it vanish from his memory as

  swiftly as it disappeared from the night-mantled street.

  Sliding a sly glance at the Indian, he said, "You know one I'M going to

  do some of these days?"

  "What's that, Little Chief?" When I've converted everyone, not just the

  people in moonlight Cove but everyone in the world, when no one stands

  against me then I'll spend some time tracking down your family, all of

  your remaining brothers, sisters, even your cousins, and I'll find of

  their children, and all their wives and husbands, and all their

  children's wives and husbands . . . and I'll make them pay your

  charges, I'll really, really make them pay." A whining Wance had

  entered his voice. He disapproved of the tone he himself was using, but

  he could not lose it.

  "I'll kill all them hack them to bloody bits and pieces, I'll do it

  myself. I'll let them know that it's because of their relation to you

  that they have to suffer, and they'll despise you and curse your name,

  they'll be sorry you ever existed. And I'll rape all the women and hurt

  them, hurt them all, really bad, and then I'll kill them too. What you

  think of that? Huh?"

  "if it's what you want, Little Chief."

  "Damn right it's what I want."

  ."Then you may have it."

  "Damn right I may have it."

  Shaddack was surprised when tears came to his eyes. He stopped at an

  intersection and didn't move on.

  "It wasn't right what you did to me.

  The Indian said nothing.

  "Say it wasn't right!"

  "It wasn't right, Little Chief. It wasn't right at all."

  "it wasn't right."

  Shaddack pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He

  blotted his eyes. Soon his tears dried up.

  He smiled at the nightscape revealed through the windshield.

  He glanced at Runningdeer.

  The indian was staring forward, silent.

  He sa
id, "Of course, without you, I might never have heard of the

  moonhawk."

  The computer lab was on the ground floor, in the center of the building,

  near a confluence of corridors. Windows looked on a courtyard but could

  not be seen from any street, which allowed Sam to switch on the overhead

  lights.

  It was a large chamber, laid out like a language lab, with each VDT in

  its own three-sided cubicle. Thirty computers-at the upper end,

  hard-disk systems-were lined up along three walls and a back-to-back row

  down the middle of the room.

  New Wave logo appeared in the center of the screen.

  With no telephones, no modems, maybe the computers really had been given

  to the school for student training, without additional intention of

  tying the kids to New Wave during this stage of the Moonhawk Project.

  The logo blinked off, and a menu appeared on the screen. Because they

  were hard-disk machines with tremendous capacity, their programs were

  already loaded and ready to go as soon as the system was powered up. The

  The menu offered him choices A. TRAINING 1 B. TRAINING 2 - 417 word

  PROCESSING ACCOUNTING C)THER Sam hesitated, not because he couldn't

  decide what letter to choose but because he was suddenly afraid of using

  the machine.

  avidly remembered the Coltranes. Though it had seemed to him that they

  had elected to meld with their computers, that their rination began

  within them, he had no way of knowing then that it had not been the

  other way around. Maybe the computers had somehow reached out and

  seized them. That was impossible. Besides, thanks to Harry's

  observations, they knew that people in Moonlight Cove were being

  converted by injection, not by some insidious force that passed through

  computer keys into the pads of their fingers. He was hesitant

  nevertheless.

  Finally he pressed E and got a list of school subjects until he finally

  got a menu on which the final selection was NEw WAVE. When he keyed in

  that choice, words began moving across the screen.

  HELLO. STUDENT.

  YOU ARE NOW IN CONTACT with THE SUPERCOMPUTER AT new WAVE

  MICROTECHNOLOGY.

  MY NAME IS SUN.

  I'M HERE TO SERVE YOU.

  The school machines were wired directly to New Wave. Modems now were

  unnecessary.

  Looking around at the wealth of hardware, Tessa said, "No. ALL

  LANGUAGES New Wave sure was generous, huh?" MATH "Maybe 'thorough' is a

  better word," Sam said. ALL SCIENCES He walked along a row of VDTS,

  looking for telephone lines and modems, but he found none. History

  ENGLISH Tessa and Chrissie stayed back by the open lab door, peering out

  at the dark hallway.

  Sam sat down at one of the machines and switched it on. He pressed F. A

  third menu appeared, and the process continued. would YOU LIKE TO SEE

  MENUS?

  OR WILL YOU SPECIFY INTEREST?

  Considering the wealth of menus in the police department system alone,

  which he had reviewed last night in the patrol car he figured he could

  sit here all evening just looking at menu after menu after submenu

  before he found what he wanted.

  He typed in MOONLIGHT COVE POLICE DEPARTMENT THIS FILE RESTRICTED.

  PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PROCEED WITHOUT THE ASSISTANCE OF YOUR TEACHER.

  He supposed that the teachers had individual codes that, depending on

  whether or not they were allow them to access otherwise restricted data

  To hit on one of their codes was to begin trying combinations of digits,

  but since he didn't even know how many were in a code, there were

  millions if not billions of possibilities. He could sit there until his

  hair turned white and his teeth fell out, and not luck into a good

  number.

  Last night he had used Officer Reese Dorn's personal computer-access

  code, and he wondered whether it worked only on a designated

  police-department VDT or whether any Computer tied to Sun would accept

  it. Nothing lost for trying.

  He typed in 2B2699.

  The screen cleared. Then HELLO, OFFICER DORN.

  Again he requested the police-department data system.

  This time it was given to him.

  CHOOSE ONE A. DISPATCHER B. CENTRAL FILES C. BULLETIN BOARD 0.

  OUTSYSTEM MODEM He pressed 0.

  He was shown a list of computers nationwide with which SUN could link

  through the police-department's modern.

  - 419 His hands were suddenly damp with sweat. He was sure something

  was going to go wrong, if only because nothing had thus far, not from

  the minute he had driven into town.

  He glanced at Tessa.

  "Everything okay?"

  She squinted at the dark hallway, then blinked at him.

  "Seems ok. Any luck?"

  ... maybe." He turned to the computer again and y, "Please....

  He scanned the long roster of possible outsystem links. He found FBI

  KEy, which was the name of the latest and most sophisticated of the

  Bureau's computer networks-a highly secure, interoffice Storage,

  -retrieval, and -transmission system housed at headquarters in

  Washington, which had been installed only within the year. Supposedly

  no one but approved agents at the home office in the Bureau's field

  offices, accessing with their own special codes, were able to use FBI

  KEY.

  So much for high security.

  expecting trouble, Sam selected FBI KEY. The menu disappeared. The

  screen remained blank for a moment. Then, the display, which proved to

  be a full-color monitor, the FBI i appeared in blue and gold. The word

  KEY appeared bet.

  at, a series of questions was flashed on the screen-WHAT IS YOUR BUREAU

  ID NUMBER? NAME? DATE OF BIRTH? DATE OF BUREAU INDUCTION? MOTHER'S

  maden NAME?-and when he answered those, he was rewarded with access.

  "Bingo!" he said, daring to be optimistic.

  Tessa said, "What's happened?"

  "I'm in the Bureau's main system in D.C."

  "You're a hacker," Chrissie said.

  "I'm a fumbler. But I'm in."

  "Now what?" Tessa asked.

  "I'll ask for the current operator in a minute. But first I want to

  send greetings to every damned office in the country, make um all sit up

  and take notice."

  "Greetings?

  " Prom the extensive FBI KEY menu, Sam called up item G IMMEDIATE

  INTEROFFICE TRANSMISSION. He intended to send a message to every Bureau

  field office in the country, not just to San Francisco, which was the

  closest one from which he hoped to obtain help. There was one chance in

  a million that the night operator in San Francisco would overlook the

  message among reams of other transmisions, in spite of the ACTION ALERT

  heading he would put on to it. If that happened, if someone was asleep

  at the wheel att this most inopportune of moments, they wouldn't be for

  long, because every office in the country would be asking HQ for more

  details about the Moonlight Cove bulletin and requesting an explanation

  of why they had been fed an alert about a situation outside their

  regions.

  He did not understand half of what was happening in this town. He could

  not have explained, in the shorthand
of a Bureau bulletin, even as much

  as he did understand. But he quickly crafted a summary which he

  believed was as accurate as it had to be-and which he hoped would get

  them off their duffs and running.

  ACTION ALERT MOONLIGHT COVE, CALIFORNIA * SCORES DEAD. CONDITION

  DETERIORATING.

  hundreds MORE COULD DIE WITHIN HOURS.

  * NEW WAVE MICROTECHNOLOGY engaged IN ILLICIT EXPERIMENTS ON Human

  SUBJECTS, WITHOUT their knowledge. conspiracy OF wide SCOPE.

  thousands OF PEOPLE contaminated.

  * REPEAT, ENTIRE population OF TOWN CONTAMINATED.

  * * SITUATION EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.

  CONTAMINATED CITIZENS SUFFER LOSs OF FACULTIES, EXHIBIT TENDENCY To

  extreme VIOLENCE.

  * * REPEAT, EXTREME VIOLENCE.

  REQUEST IMMEDIATE QUARANTINE by - 421 ARMY SPECIAL FORCES. ALSO REQUEST

  IMMEDIATE, MASSIVE, ARMED BACKUP BY Bureau PERSONNEL.

  He Gave his position at the high school on Roshmore, so incoming support

  would have a place to start looking for him, though he was not certain

  that he, Tessa, and Chrissie could safely continue to take refuge there