by Dean Koontz
As the program director, promotion director, and community-affairs director of KBOW, Sammy was the most senior company officer on the scene. With Warren Snyder dead—dead twice if you counted his replicant—Sammy was certain to remain the big bear as long as this crisis continued. By his standards, this required that he take for himself the most difficult role in the station’s defense: rooftop sniper and guardian of the broadcast tower.
At 130 pounds, he would find many shotguns difficult to control, but he could handle the low-recoil Beretta Xtrema2 12-gauge, which some well-trained shotgunners could even fire with a one-hand grip. He also—and primarily—wanted the Bushmaster Adaptive Combat Rifle, which was a gas-operated semiauto with a thirty-round magazine with Trijicon optics.
He didn’t think he would need a pistol, but he took one anyway.
Ralph Nettles had brought three spare loaded magazines for the Bushmaster. Sammy filled a waterproof ammo bag for the other guns, collected additional gear that he needed, and piled everything in the break room, off the kitchenette, where a set of spiral stairs in one corner led up to the roof door.
The areas of the studio directly associated with the broadcast were kept cooler than other rooms, and Sammy tended to chill easily. He had come to work wearing insulated longjohns, blue jeans, and a wool sweater, so he wasn’t underdressed for rooftop work.
When he went into his office to snatch his ski jacket from the hook on the back of the door, Sammy realized that the station feed coming through the wall speaker was no longer the recorded material that had been running. Mason had gone live again, although not with advice to the lovelorn and dysfunctional families. Sammy turned up the volume.
“… this town that I love, the wonderful people of both this town and the county beyond, and perhaps the people of Montana and of the entire United States are in grave peril tonight. Many who are listening might have turned on their radios to find out why they have no telephone or Internet service. Others may have tuned in to KBOW because they’ve seen something strange or inexplicable, and they’re seeking information that might make sense of it to them.”
It’s begun, Sammy thought, and for the first time he began to feel the true momentous nature of these events. So much had happened so fast, so much of such a fantastical nature, that his ability to absorb it, believe it, and react properly to it had required all of his energy and had prevented him from grasping the more profound implications of events. The danger had initially seemed primarily personal, to himself and his coworkers, to his plans for KBOW. Now he had a chilling sense of the full existential nature of the threat: to the town, the county, the state, and to all of humanity.
“Others of you may be missing family members,” Mason continued, “some for a short enough time that you attribute it to bad weather, delays because of road conditions. Others may know people who have been missing for the larger part of the day and are puzzled as to why the police seem to dismiss your concern. Folks, you’ve been listening to me for two years, you know I tell people truths that they need to hear, no matter how difficult it is for me to say it or for them to hear it. And what I tell you now is truth of a very hard kind, hard both to say and believe: You cannot trust the Rainbow Falls police. They aren’t who they appear to be. Your missing friends and family members may be dead. An unknown number of people in this town have been killed. The killing continues as I speak.”
Sammy ran to the spiral stairs in the break room. He needed to get to the roof. Mason had blown the lid off the conspiracy, and the blowback would be coming.
chapter 32
On the stairs, leaning against the railing, making not a sound, Frost warily watched the thing in the foyer, seething swarm or Blob like in the movies, machine or animal, terrestrial or alien from a far world, he didn’t know which, didn’t care which, at least not now, not until he got out of this house and away and was somewhere safe, where he could think.
After the table and the three vases were dissolved, the thing became less active. The arches, loops, and whorls formed by apparent currents in its substance were fewer and churning slower than before.
Frost’s initial impression was that the beast must be resting, but after a couple of minutes, he decided that it might be thinking. Something about its attitude—if the Blob was capable of having an attitude—suggested deliberation, a pondering of the situation and a consideration of its options.
Options? Based on what he had seen of the thing’s capabilities, its options were virtually unlimited. It was a shape-changer, it could fly, bullets had no effect on it, it was fearless and aggressive to an extent that suggested it was invulnerable, and instantaneously it could incorporate into itself people and objects of all kinds. Why would such a creature have any need to brood about its options? It could do anything it wanted, with no mortal consequence to itself but with plenty of mortal consequences for everyone who got in its way.
The idea of this thing meditating, musing, reflecting somberly upon its destiny almost teased a laugh from Frost, but he didn’t give in to the impulse because the laugh would have been a dark, despairing giggle.
Besides, he remained convinced that if he made a sound, the creature would be reminded of its pursuit of him and in an instant would be upon him in one hideous form or another. The wisest thing he could do for the time being was remain still, silent, and wait for some development that he might be able to use to his advantage.
He didn’t have to wait long before something happened. The thing began to act once more like a pool of thick liquid, washing back and forth in the foyer, its whorling currents returning to their previous level of activity.
Frost tensed. He put a hand under his open jacket, on the grip of the pistol in his shoulder rig, but then withdrew his hand without the weapon. Going for a gun was a reflex action. An agent’s reflexes were usually reliable, the result of experience, but in this case reflexive responses would get him killed.
The living pool, whether its life was that of an animal or an intelligent machine, or both, or neither, slopped against the bottom step, lapped at the front door and the walls. The patterns of the currents within it were for the most part as liquid and sinuous as before—but here and there the currents twitched, stuttered briefly, before spiraling smoothly once more.
Suddenly a woman’s hand rose out of the pool, a hand in various shades of gray with veins of black, as if carved from stone and yet animated, clutching at the air in search of something to which it could secure itself. After a moment, other hands reached through the surface of the pool, or rather formed from the substance of it. A second female hand, slender and beautifully shaped, had skin like brass, like the shiny brass of the fallen chandelier that had been incorporated into the swarm. A man’s hand, then a second, one with skin the color of the glazed vases that had stood upon the foyer table, the other with normal flesh.
All the hands receded, melted into the pool, but then the gray surface glistened like water, and an immense face appeared in it, as if just below the surface, perhaps five feet from the point of the chin to the top of the brow. This countenance was at first as blank as that of a stone-temple god, with pale limestone eyes. But then it swelled from the surface, taking dimension and acquiring the color of skin, and Frost saw that it was becoming Dagget’s face. The eyes opened, but they weren’t eyes, were instead ovals of what seemed to be amber glass like the cups that contained the flame-shaped bulbs on the chandelier.
Frost waited for the glass eyes to shift toward him, but they did not. The Dagget face dissolved to be at once replaced by another immense countenance, that of the beautiful woman who had emerged from the cocoon in the bathroom. Her eyes looked real but had a fixed gaze like that of a blind person. The enormous face formed more completely than Dagget’s had done, and the woman seemed to be struggling against invisible bonds, trying to free herself from the pool. Her mouth went wide, as if in a scream, but no sound escaped her.
Frost remembered what she had said upstairs, after the teeth had fall
en out of her mouth and she had grown new ones, as she gazed at herself in the mirror above the bathroom sinks: I think my builder built this builder wrong. As he watched the huge face strain to scream and form further out of the pool, he began to suspect that everything this creature had done since taking down the chandelier had been evidence of malfunction.
Abruptly the face disintegrated back into the pool or the swarm, whichever or whatever it was, and the whole of the abomination became highly agitated, roiling as though a school of eels thrashed in it, serpentine forms slithering across the surface, wriggling, twisting. From it issued both the grumbling bumblebee drone and the zeeeeee of angry wasps that Frost had heard before.
The sounds swelled in volume and seemed to promise violence greater than any thus far committed, so that Frost dared to take a step backward and then another, even if movement might still make a target of him. He retreated cautiously to the landing, ready to run but also mesmerized by the spectacle in the foyer below.
Simultaneously, the pool stopped thrashing and the two insect voices fell silent. The creature became very still, exhibiting none of its previous spiraling currents. Its color began to change. Instead of many shades of gray from charcoal to mouse-skin with patches of glittering silver, it grew dull, with no sheen anywhere, and swiftly paled to a uniform concrete-gray.
It looked as dead as any dead thing Frost had ever seen.
Minutes earlier, he had thought that it must be invulnerable and therefore immortal. Now he imagined that if he descended the stairs and stepped on that gray mass, it would prove to have petrified, to have turned to hardest stone underfoot, a strange slab there in the foyer. Perhaps if sliced with a high-powered mason’s saw, it would appear to have the grain of granite, allowing no clue that it had ever been anything else, certainly not anything more.
But he did not descend to test the accuracy of his perceptions. He backed quietly off the landing and onto the upper flight of the open staircase, all the while watching the stone-but-not-stone through the railing.
He found a bedroom with a window that opened onto the front-porch roof. He climbed out of the house, crept toward the edge of the snow-covered roof. The slope was gradual, and he did not slip. He jumped to the yard below, tucked and rolled as he landed, and sprang to his feet, covered in snow, turning fearfully in a circle, certain that something must be coming at him.
Nothing pursued him. He was alone. No neighbors seemed to have heard Dagget’s ten shots. Maybe no one remained alive to hear them. No traffic passed in the street.
The silence could have been no deeper if he had been sealed in the vacuum of a snow globe.
Behind the wheel of the Land Rover, he realized that Dagget, who had been driving, had the key. The key was not a key anymore. It was whatever Dagget had become, part of the granite-like mass in the foyer.
If it had been an older vehicle, he might have tried to hot-wire it. But it was too new for that, with an electronic ignition.
He got out of the Land Rover and stood in snow that fell so thickly it seemed to be something other than snow. It seemed to be the whole world coming apart around him.
chapter 33
In the offices of the Rainbow Falls Gazette on Beartooth Avenue, Addison Hawk, the editor-in-chief and publisher, worked late. He was alone, and aside from the noises he made at his cluttered desk, the only sound was the tick-tock of the silver-plated pendulum in the grandfather clock.
Among the original furnishings of these premises, the handsome clock dated back to the late 1800s, when Elsworth Hawk, Addison’s great-grandfather, founded the Gazette. It had stood in the reception lounge for decades until he moved it into his private office upon ascending to the editorship. Many people these days had no patience for the monotonous counting of such a clock, but to Addison it was lovely background music. He would no more have disposed of it than he would have ripped out the stained-oak beadboard wainscoting and the ornate decorative tin ceiling. He was an advocate for tradition in a world that had gone mad for change, that valued destructive and constructive change equally, and in fact seemed unable to tell the difference between the two.
He generally put in long hours, but it never seemed like work because he treasured this town, its history, its people. Chronicling life in Rainbow Falls was a work of love, and therefore his writing and editorial duties were really play. This evening, he might have left earlier, but he was slowed in his work by the loss of phone service and Internet connection.
And his mind wandered repeatedly to the California detectives, Carson and Michael, who had paid him a visit in the late afternoon. They told him a patently false story about working on an inheritance case, searching for an heir. He had known they were stonewalling him, and they had known that he knew, but he had liked them anyway.
In spite of the couple’s personable nature and, at times, even lighthearted demeanor, Addison had been aware that they were tense and worried, even though they were hiding it well. Worried might be an inadequate word. His newsman’s sixth sense told him that they were scared, which had been most evident when they had talked about the End Times Highway. If something frightened two former homicide detectives who had worked a tough city like New Orleans, perhaps Addison needed to be concerned, too, for the people of this town.
These thoughts kept distracting him—until suddenly he wondered if there might be some connection between the detectives’ case and the failure of phone and Internet service. The weather could not be responsible. At most, two inches of snow were on the ground, which most locals would dismiss as flurries. Full-scale blizzards rarely disrupted services because everyone here was prepared for extreme winters.
The Gazette’s receptionist, Katie Ormond, kept a radio on her desk. Addison went out there to switch it on and see if KBOW might be reporting anything about the phone problems.
Mason Morrell seemed to have lost his mind. Or not. While the talk-show host’s usual material held no interest for Addison, he knew the man was not one of the tinfoil-hat crowd. The media community in Rainbow Falls was arguably the smallest social circle in town; he and Mason often found themselves at the same functions. Never had Mason said a word about alien abductions or black helicopters, or anything else to suggest that for him reality and the Syfy channel were one and the same. He wasn’t a conspiracy theorist who thought Osama bin Laden was secretly a Zionist and that the Holocaust was all a lie invented by the same crowd that faked the moon landing.
Besides, Sammy Chakrabarty, who lived for the radio station and would have slept there if permitted, would never allow Mason to rant like this if the talk-show host had come to work stoned. Sammy had big plans and, given his intellect and drive, he had a good shot at fulfilling them. Sammy would pull the plug on Mason rather than let him ruin both their careers.
Something else chilled Addison: Mason sounded sober, afraid, and sincere. Indeed, there was almost something Churchillian in the force of his delivery—but no faintest note of hysteria or inebriation.
But mass murder? Brain probes? Replicants? Monsters among us? It defied belief.
“… collecting people in these big blue-and-white panel trucks and taking them to warehouses where they’re killed, having been replaced by their replicants.…”
Still listening, Addison put on his Stetson, coat, and neck scarf. He lived near the heart of town and always walked to work. Now he intended to go home, get his SUV, and drive out to KBOW to discover firsthand whether this was some kind of ill-advised stunt to promote the radio station or an inexplicable descent into madness by the talk-show host.
He clicked off the radio, switched off the lights room by room, stepped outside, and locked the front door behind him. As he turned toward the street, before he stepped onto the lamplit sidewalk, he saw an approaching panel truck—blue cab, white cargo section—just as in Mason Morrell’s warning.
In the lightless recessed entryway, Addison shrank back against the door. The truck was the sole vehicle on Beartooth, which usually wouldn’t be thi
s deserted even in the early stages of a snowstorm. He could discern two people through the windshield, but he doubted that they would spot him in this dark pocket.
Maybe his imagination had been overheated by what he’d heard on the radio, but the night felt wrong, the only sound being the engine of the truck, no pedestrians passing even though the hour was not yet late. The street hadn’t been plowed or salted, although the town’s maintenance department always hit the pavement by the time the first inch was down, to stay ahead of the storm. The wrongness wasn’t in those details alone. There was also an eerie atmosphere that Addison felt but could not easily define.
Because he was intensely watching the suspicious truck, he saw the tall hooded figure, immense across the chest and the shoulders, appear out of thin air on the running board on the passenger side of the vehicle.
Magically.
Materializing like an apparition.
Gripping the assist bar at the back of the cab, the giant smashed the side window with his fist and wrenched open the door as the truck braked, skidded slightly in the snow, and came to a halt.
chapter 34
One second Papa Frankenstein’s prodigal son wasn’t there, the next second he was very there, and fragments of the shattered window cascaded in upon Michael without harming him. The door came open, and Michael shouted his name—“Michael, Michael, me, me, it’s me!”—so that the big guy wouldn’t break his neck, although even as he cried out and even as Carson braked, he saw that he had been recognized.
