Dean Koontz - (1989)
Page 58
a close range that it finished him instead, make him hurt, make the
woman and the girl watch, show what a tough customer they had in Tommy
Shaddack, what a bad tough customer, make them grateful for being st
they'd get on their knees and let him do thing the things he had wanted
to do for thirty years denied himself, let off thirty years of steam
right here, right tonight. . . .
6 29 beyond the house, filtering into the attic through vents in the
eaves came eerie howling, point and counterpoint, first solo n then
chorus. It sounded as if the gates of hell had been open, letting
denizens of the pit pour forth into moon Cove.
Harry worried about Sam, Tessa, and Chrissie.
Below him, the unseen conversion team locked the collapsible ladder in
place. One of them began to climb into the attic.
Harry wondered what they would look like. Would they be just ordinary
men-old Doc Fitz with a syringe and a couple of de*es to assist him? Or
would they be Boogeymen? Or some of the machine-men Sam had talked
about?
The first one ascended through the open trap. It was Dr. Worthy, the
town's youngest physician.
Harry considered shooting him while he was still on the ladder. But he
hadn't fired a gun in twenty years, and he didn't want to waste his
limited ammunition. Better to wait for a closer shot.
Worthy didn't have a flashlight. Didn't seem to need one. He looked
straight toward the darkest corner, where Harry was Propped, and said,
"How did you know we were coming, "Cripple's intuition," Harry said
sarcastically.
Along the center of the attic, there was plenty of headroom to allow
Worthy to walk upright. He rose from a crouch as he came Out from under
the sloping rafters near the trap, and when he had taken four steps
forward, Harry fired twice at him.
The first shot missed, but the second hit low in the chest. Worthy was
flung backward, went down hard on the bare boards of the attic floor. He
lay there for a moment, twitching then sat up, coughed once, and got to
his feet.
Blood glistened all over the front of his torn white shirt. He had been
hit hard, yet he had recovered in seconds.
The Coltranes had refused to stay dead. Go for the data processor.
He aimed for Worthy's head and fired twice again, but at that
distance-about twenty-five feet-and at that angle, shooting from the
floor, he couldn't hit anything. He hesitated with four rounds left in
the pistol's clip.
Another man was climbing through the trap.
Harry shot at him, trying to drive him back down.
He came on, unperturbed.
Three rounds in the pistol.
Keeping his distance, Dr. Worthy said, "Harry, we're not here to harm
you. I don't know what you've heard or how you heard about the project,
but it isn't a bad thing.
His voice trailed off, and he cocked his head as if to listen to the
unhuman cries that filled the night outside. A peculiar imm of longing,
visible even in the dim wash of light from the stairway with bone, and
his fingers lengthened, all in a couple of seconds. When he took his
hands from his face, his jaw was thrusting forward like that of a
werewolf in midtransformation.
His shirt tore at the seams as his body reconfigured itself. He Harry
remembered what Sam had said about how the cOI.W'Soed, and teeth
flashed.
I . . . need, " Vanner said, need, need, want, need.
"No!" Worthy shouted.
to The third man, who had just come out of the trap, rolled onto the
floor, changing as he did so, flowing into a vaguely insectile but
thoroughly repulsive form.
Before he quite knew what he was doing, Harry emptied the .38 at the
insect-thing, pitched it away, snatched the .45 revolver off the board
floor beside him, also fired three rounds from that, evidently striking
the thing's brain at least once. It kicked, trap, crossed Worthy's
face.
He shook himself, blinked, and remembered that he had been trying to
sell his elixir to a reluctant customer.
"Not a bad at all, Harry. Especially for you. You'll walk again, Harry,
as well as anyone. You'll be whole again. Because of this Change,
you'll be able to heal yourself. You'll be free from your paraysis.
"No, thanks. Not at that price."
"What price, Harry?" Worthy asked, spreading his arms palms up. "Look
at me. What price have I paid'?"
"Your soul?" Harry said.
A third man was coming up the ladder.
The second man was listening to the ululant des that came in through the
attic vents. He gritted his teeth, ground them together forcefully, and
blinked very fast. He raised his hands and covered his face with them,
as if he were suddenly anguished.
Worthy noticed his companion's situation.
"Vanner, are all right?"
Vanner's hands . . . changed. His wrists swelled and twitched, he
fell back down through the trap, and did not clamber upward again.
Vanner had undergone a complete lupine metamorphosis and seemed to have
patterned himself after something that he had seen in a movie, because
he looked familiar to Harry, as if he had seen that same movie, though
he could not quite remember it. Vanner shrieked in answer to the
creatures whose cries pealed through the night outside.
Tearing frantically at his clothes, as if the pressure of them against
his skin was driving him mad, Worthy was changing into a beast quite
different from either Vanner or the third man. Some grotesque physical
incarnation of his own mad desires.
Harry had only three rounds left, and he had to save the last one for
himself.
30 after surviving the ordeal in the culvert, Sam had promised himself
that he would learn to accept failure, which had been all well and good
until now, when failure was again at hand.
He could not fail, not with both Chrissie and Tessa depending on him. If
no other opportunity presented itself, he would at least leap at
Shaddack the moment before he believed he was ready to pull the trigger.
Judging that moment might be difficult. Shaddack looked and sounded
insane. The way his mind was short-circuiting, he might pull the
trigger in the middle of one of those high, quick, nervous, boyish
laughs, without any indication that the moment had come.
"Get off your stool," he said to Sam.
"What?
"You heard me, dammit, get off your stool. Lay on the floor, over
there, or I'll make you sorry, I sure will, I'll make you very sorry."
He gestured with the muzzle of the shotgun.
"Get off your stool and lay on the floor now.
Sam didn't want to do it because he knew Shaddack was separating him
from Chrissie and Tessa only to shoot him.
He hesitated, then slid off the stool because there was nothing else he
could do. He moved between two lab benches, to d open area that
Shaddack had indicated.
"Down," Shaddack said.
"I want to see you down there on the floor, groveling."
Dropping to one knee, Sam slipped a hand into an inner poc
ket of his
leather jacket and fished out the metal loid that he had used to pop the
lock at the Coltranes' house, and flicked it away from himself, with the
same snap of his wrist that he would used to toss a playing card at a
hat. The loid sailed low across the floor, toward the window until it
clattered through the rungs of a stool and clinked off the base of a
marble lab bench.
The madman swung the Remington toward the sound.
With a shout of rage and determination, Sam came up fast and threw
himself at Shaddack.
31 Tessa grabbed Chrissie and hustled her away from the struggling men,
to the wall beside the hall door. They crouched there, she hoped they
would be out of the line of fire.
Sam had come up under the shotgun before Shaddack could come back from
the distraction. He grabbed the barrel with his left hand and
Shaddack's wrist with his weakened right hand, he pressed him backward,
pushing him off balance, slamming him against another lab bench.
When Shaddack cried out, Sam snarled with satisfaction, as if he might
turn into something that howled in the night.
Tessa saw him ram a knee up between Shaddack's legs, hard into his
crotch. The tall man screamed.
"All right, Sam!" Chrissie said approvingly.
As Shaddack gagged and spluttered and tried to double over in an
involuntary reaction to the pain in his damaged privates, Sam tore the
shotgun out of his hands and stepped back -and a man in a police uniform
came into the room from the chemistry storage closet, carrying a shotgun
of his own.
"No!
Drop Your weapon. Shaddack is mine."
The thing that had been Vanner moved toward Harry, grown low in its
throat, drooling yellowish saliva. Harry struck it both times, but
failed to kill it. The gap seemed to close up before his eyes.
One round left.
". . . need, need .
Harry put the barrel of the .45 in his mouth, pressed the muzzle against
his palate, gagging on the hot steel.
The hideous, wolfish thing loomed over him. The swollen head was three
times as big as it ought to have been. out of proportion to its body.
Most of the head was mouth, and most of the mouth was teeth, not even
the teeth of a wolf but the inward-curving teeth of a shark. Vanner had
not been satisfied to model himself entirely after just one of nature's
predators he wanted to make himself something more murderous and el
ciently destructive than anything nature had contemplated.
When Vanner was only three feet from him, leaning in to him, Harry
pulled the gun out of his own mouth, said, "Hell, and shot the damn
thing in the head. It toppled back, with a crash, and stayed down.
Go for the data-processor.
Elation swept through Harry, but it was short-lived. Worthy had
completed his transformation and seemed to have been thrown into a
frenzy by the carnage in the room and the escalating shrieks that came
through the attic vents from the world beyond. He turned his lantern
eyes on Harry, and in them Was a look of unhuman hunger.
No more bullets.
33 Sam was squarely under the cop's gun, with no room to maneuver. He
had to drop the Remington that he'd taken off Shaddack.
"I'm on your side," the cop repeated.
"No one's on our side," Sam said.
Shaddack was gasping for breath and trying to stand up straight. He
regarded the officer with abject terror.
With the coldest premeditation Sam had ever seen, with no hint of
emotion whatsoever, not even anger, the cop turned his 20-gauge shotgun
on Shaddack, who was no longer a threat to anyone, and fired four
rounds. As if punched by a giant, Shaddack flew backward over two
stools and into the wall.
The cop threw the gun aside and moved quickly to the dead man. He tore
open the sweat-suit jacket that Shaddack wore under his coat and ripped
loose a strange object, a largish rectangular medallion, that had hung
from a gold chain around the man's neck.
Holding up that curious artifact, he said, "Shaddack's dead. His
heartbeat isn't being broadcast any more, so Sun is even BOW putting the
final program into effect. In half a minute or so we'll all know peace,
Peace at last."
At first Sam thought the cop was saying they were all going to die, that
the thing in his hand was going to kill them, that it Was a bomb or
something. He backed quickly toward the door and saw that Tessa
evidently had the same expectation. She had Picked Chrissie up from
where they'd been crouching, and had opened the door.
But if there was a bomb, it was a silent one, and the radius Of its
small explosion remained within the police officer. suddenly his face
contorted. Between clenched teeth, he said "God," It was not an
exclamation but a plea or perhaps an p inadequate description of
something he had just seen, for in a moment he fell down dead from no
cause that Sam could see. 34 When they stepped out through the back The
thing that had been Vanner moved toward Harry, grown low in its throat,
drooling yellowish saliva. Harry struck it both times, but failed to
kill it. The gap seemed to close up before his eyes.
One round left.
". . . need, need .
Harry put the barrel of the .45 in his mouth, pressed the muzzle against
his palate, gagging on the hot steel.
The hideous, wolfish thing loomed over him. The swollen head was three
times as big as it ought to have been. out of proportion to its body.
Most of the head was mouth, and most of the mouth was teeth, not even
the teeth of a wolf but the inward-curving teeth of a shark. Vanner had
not been satisfied to model himself entirely after just one of nature's
predators he wanted to make himself something more murderous and el
ciently destructive than anything nature had contemplated.
When Vanner was only three feet from him, leaning in to him, Harry
pulled the gun out of his own mouth, said, "Hell, and shot the damn
thing in the head. It toppled back, with a crash, and stayed down.
Go for the data-processor.
Elation swept through Harry, but it was short-lived. Worthy had
completed his transformation and seemed to have been thrown into a
frenzy by the carnage in the room and the escalating shrieks that came
through the attic vents from the world beyond. He turned his lantern
eyes on Harry, and in them Was a look of unhuman hunger.
No more bullets.
33 Sam was squarely under the cop's gun, with no room to maneuver. He
had to drop the Remington that he'd taken off Shaddack.
"I'm on your side," the cop repeated.
"No one's on our side," Sam said.
Shaddack was gasping for breath and trying to stand up straight. He
regarded the officer with abject terror.
With the coldest premeditation Sam had ever seen, with no hint of
emotion whatsoever, not even anger, the cop turned his 20-gauge shotgun
on Shaddack, who was no longer a threat to anyone, and fired four
rounds. As if punched by a giant, Shaddack flew backward over two
stools and into the
wall.
The cop threw the gun aside and moved quickly to the dead man. He tore
open the sweat-suit jacket that Shaddack wore under his coat and ripped
loose a strange object, a largish rectangular medallion, that had hung
from a gold chain around the man's neck.
Holding up that curious artifact, he said, "Shaddack's dead. His
heartbeat isn't being broadcast any more, so Sun is even BOW putting the
final program into effect. In half a minute or so we'll all know peace,
Peace at last."
At first Sam thought the cop was saying they were all going to die, that
the thing in his hand was going to kill them, that it Was a bomb or
something. He backed quickly toward the door and saw that Tessa
evidently had the same expectation. She had Picked Chrissie up from
where they'd been crouching, and had opened the door.
But if there was a bomb, it was a silent one, and the radius Of its
small explosion remained within the police officer. suddenly his face
contorted. Between clenched teeth, he said "God," It was not an
exclamation but a plea or perhaps an p inadequate description of
something he had just seen, for in a moment he fell down dead from no
cause that Sam could see. 34 When they stepped out through the back