by Dean Koontz
After emptying the bag, he set it aside.
On the bed lay a thin but tough plastic raincoat, one of those that could be wadded up and stored in a zippered case no larger than a tobacco pouch. He intended to wear it over his T-shirt and jeans to minimize cleanup when he had finished with Jenna.
As Jonathan shook the raincoat to unfurl it, a familiar throb, a shifting and turning within him, made him gasp with surprise, with excitement.
He threw aside the raincoat. He pulled up his T-shirt, exposing his torso.
In his abdomen, the Other pressed against the caging flesh, as if testing the walls of its confinement. It writhed, it bulged.
He had no concern that it would burst out of him and perhaps kill him in the process. That was not how the birth would occur. He had studied various methods of reproduction, and he had developed a theory that he found convincing.
Seeing this movement within Jonathan, Jenna stopped crying in a blink—and started to scream into the rag, the duct tape.
He attempted to explain to her that this was nothing to fear, that this was his ultimate act of rebellion against Father and the start of the New Race's emancipation.
"He denies us the power to reproduce," Jonathan said, "but I am reproducing. It's going to be like parthenogenesis, I think. When the time comes, I'll divide, like an ameba. Then there will be two of me — I the father, and my son."
When Jenna thrashed, desperately but stupidly trying to wrench loose of her restraints, Jonathan worried that she would tear out the IV drip. Eager to proceed with her dissection, he didn't want to have to waste time reinserting the cannula.
He carefully pressed the plunger of the syringe in the drug port and delivered a couple ccs of the sedative.
Her thrashing quickly quieted to a trembling. She grew still. She slept.
Inside Jonathan, the Other grew still, as well. His stretched torso regained its natural shape.
Smiling, he slid one hand down his chest and abdomen. "Our time is coming."
CHAPTER 69
TURNING AWAY FROM the front door of Fullbright's Funeral Home, Michael wanted to sprint to the car and climb in behind the wheel. He would have done it, too, would have seized control—if he'd had a key.
Mere possession of the driver's seat would mean nothing to Carson. She wouldn't give him her key Unless she chose to ride shotgun, she'd walk before she'd give up the wheel.
The plainwrap came with two sets of keys. Carson had both.
Michael had frequently considered requisitioning another set from the motor pool. He knew she'd consider that betrayal.
So she drove again. Clearly, there were no safety engineers in her family.
At least he was distracted from consideration of their speed by the need to get his mind around the cockamamie story she wanted him to believe. "Man-made men? Science just isn't that far along yet."
"Maybe most scientists aren't, but Victor is."
"Mary Shelley was a novelist."
"She must've based the book on a true story she heard that summer. Michael, you heard what Jack Rogers told us. Not a freak. Bobby Allwine was designed."
"Why would he be creating monsters to be security guards like Bobby Allwine? Doesn't that seem goofy?"
"Maybe he creates them to be all kinds of things —cops, like Harker. Mechanics. Pilots. Bureaucrats. Maybe they're all around us."
"Why?"
"Deucalion says—to take our place, to destroy God's work and replace it with his own."
"I'm not Austin Powers, and neither are you, and it's hard to swallow that Helios is Dr. Evil."
Impatiently, she said, "What happened to your imagination? Have you watched so many movies, you can't imagine for yourself anymore, you have to have Hollywood do it for you?"
"Harker, huh? From homicide cop to homicidal robot?"
"Not robot. Engineered or cloned or grown in a vat—I don't know how. It's no longer parts of corpses animated by lightning."
"One man, even a genius, couldn't—"
She interrupted him: "Helios is an obsessed, demented visionary at work for two centuries, with a huge family fortune."
Preoccupied with a new thought, she let their speed fall.
After a silence, Michael said, "What?"
"We're dead."
"I don't feel dead."
"I mean, if Helios is who Deucalion says, if he has achieved all of this, if his creations are seeded through the city, we don't have much of a chance against him. He's a genius, a billionaire, a man of enormous power—and we're squat."
She was scared. He could hear fear in her voice. He had never known her to be afraid. Not like this. Not without a gun in her face and some dirtbag's finger on the trigger.
"I just don't buy this," he said, though he half did. "I don't understand why you buy it."
With an edge, she said, "If I buy it, homey, isn't that good enough for you?"
When he hesitated to reply, she braked hard and pulled to the curb. Pissed, she switched off the light and got out of the car.
In the movies, when they saw a body with two hearts and organs of unknown purpose, they knew right away it was aliens or something.
Even though he hadn't met Deucalion, Michael didn't know why he was resisting the usual movie conclusion to be made from what Jack Rogers had found inside Bobby Allwine. Besides, someone had stolen Allwine's corpse and the autopsy records, which seemed to indicate a vast conspiracy of some kind.
He got out of the car.
They were in a residential neighborhood, under a canopy of live oaks. The night was hot. The moon seemed to be melting down through the branches of the trees.
Michael and Carson regarded each other across the roof of the sedan. Her lips were tight. Usually they looked kissable. They didn't look kissable now.
"Michael, I told you what I saw."
"I've jumped off cliffs with you before—but this one's pretty damn high."
She said nothing at first. What might have been a wistful look came over her face. Then: "Some mornings it's hard to get up knowing Arnie will still be... Arnie."
Michael moved toward the front of the car. “All of us want things we maybe aren't ever going to get."
Carson remained at the driver's door, not giving an inch. "I want meaning. Purpose. Higher stakes. I want things to matter more than they do."
He stopped in front of the sedan.
Staring up through the oaks at the creamy moon, she said, "This is real, Michael. I know it. Our lives will never be the same."
He recognized in her a yearning for change so strong that even this—a trading of the world they knew for another that had even more terror in it-was preferable to the status quo.
"Okay, okay," he said. "So where's Deucalion? If any of this is real, then it's his fight more than ours."
She lowered her gaze from the moon to Michael. She moved toward the front of the car.
"Deucalion is incapable of violence against his maker," she said. "It's like the proscription against suicide. He tried two hundred years ago, and Victor nearly finished him. Half his face... so damaged."
They stood face to face.
He wanted to touch her, to place a hand on her shoulder. He restrained himself because he didn't know what a touch might lead to, and this was not a moment for even more change.
Instead, he said, "Man-made men, huh?"
"Yeah."
"You're sure?"
"Honestly? I don't know. Maybe I just want to be sure."
Heat, humidity, moonlight, the fragrance of jasmine: New Orleans sometimes seemed like a fever dream, but never more than now.
"Frankenstein alive," he said. "It's just a National Enquirer wet dream."
A harder expression pinched her eyes.
Hastily Michael said, "I like the National Enquirer Who in his right mind would believe the New York Times anymore? Not me."
"Harker's out there," she reminded him.
He nodded. "Let's get him."
CHAPTER 70<
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IN A MANSION as large as this, a severed hand had to do a lot of crawling to get where it wanted to go.
When previously it had scuttled unseen through the bedroom, the hand, judging by the sound of it, had moved as fast as a nervous rat. Not now.
The concept of a weary severed hand, exhausted from relentless creeping, made no sense.
Neither did the concept of a confused severed hand. Yet this one paused from time to time, as though it were not sure of the correct direction, and once it even retraced the path that it had taken and chose another route.
Erika persisted in the conviction that she was witnessing an event of supernatural character. No science she knew could explain this crawling marvel.
Although Victor had long ago trafficked in such parts as this, making jigsaw men from graveyard fragments, he had not used such crude methods in a long time.
Besides, the hand did not end in a bloody stump. It terminated in a round stub of smooth skin, as though it had never been attached to an arm.
This detail, if nothing else, seemed to confirm its supernatural origins.
In time, with Erika in patient attendance, the hand made its way to the kitchen. There it halted before the pantry door.
She waited for it to do something, and then she decided that it was in need of her assistance. She opened the pantry door, switched on the light.
As the determined hand crawled toward the back wall of the pantry, Erika realized that it must wish to lead her into Victor's studio. She knew of the studio's existence but had never been there.
His secret work space lay beyond the back wall of the pantry. Most likely, a hidden switch would cause the food-laden shelves to swing inward like a door.
Before she could begin to search for the switch, the shelves in fact slid aside. The hand on the floor had not activated them; some other entity was at work.
She followed the hand into the hidden room and saw on the center worktable a Lucite tank filled with a milky solution, housing a man's severed head. Not a fully realized head, but something like a crude model of one, the features only half formed.
Bloodshot blue eyes opened in this travesty of a human face.
The thing spoke to Erika in a low, rough voice exactly like that of the entity who, through the TV, had urged her to kill Victor: "Look at what I am... and tell me if you can that he's not evil."
CHAPTER 71
WHEN SHE PARKED in front of Harker's apartment house, Carson got out of the car, hurried to the back, and grabbed the pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun from the trunk.
Michael joined her as she loaded. "Hey. Wait. I don't pretend to be a SWAT team."
"If we try to take Harker into custody like he's an ordinary wack job, we'll be two dead cops."
A guy in a white van across the street had noticed them. Michael didn't want to make a scene, but he said, "Gimme the shotgun."
"I can take the kick," she assured him.
"We're not going in that way."
She slammed the trunk and moved toward the sidewalk.
Michael moved with her, trying reason where gimme didn't work. "Call for backup."
"How're you gonna explain to Dispatch why you need backup. You gonna tell them we've cornered a man-made monster?"
As they reached the front door of the building, he said, "This is crazy."
"Did I say it wasn't?"
The front door opened into a shabby-genteel lobby with sixteen brass mailboxes.
Carson read the names on the boxes. "Harker's on the fourth floor. Top of the building."
Not convinced of the wisdom of this but caught up in Carson's momentum, Michael went with her to a door beyond which lay stairs that led up through a shaft too long in need of fresh paint.
She started to climb, he followed, and she warned: "Deucalion says, in a crisis, wounded, they're probably able to turn off pain."
"Do we need silver bullets?"
"Is that some kind of sarcasm?" Carson asked, mimicking Dwight Frye.
"I've got to admit it is."
The stairs were narrow. The odors of mildew and disinfectant curdled together in the stifling air. Michael told himself he wasn't getting dizzy.
"They can be killed," Carson said. “Allwine was."
"Yeah. But he wanted to die."
"Remember, Jack Rogers said the cranium has incredible molecular density."
"Does that mean something in real words?" he asked.
"His brain is armored against all but the highest caliber."
Gasping not from exertion but from a need for cleaner air than what the fumy stairwell offered, Michael said, "Monsters among us, masquerading as real people—it's the oldest paranoia."
"The word impossible contains the word possible."
"What's that— some Zen thing?"
"I think Star Trek. Mr. Spock."
At the landing between the third and fourth floors, Carson paused and pumped the shotgun, chambering a shell.
Drawing his service piece from the paddle holster on his right hip, Michael said, "So what are we walking into?"
"Scary crap. What's new about that?"
They climbed the last flight to the fourth floor, went through a fire door, and found a short hallway serving four apartments.
The wood floor had been painted a glossy battleship gray. A few feet from Harker's door lay keys on a coiled plastic ring.
Michael squatted, snared the keys. Also on the ring was a small plastic magnetic-reader membership card in a supermarket discount club. It had been issued to Jenna Parker.
He remembered the name from the mailboxes in the public foyer on the ground floor. Jenna Parker lived here at the top of the building; she was one of Harker's neighbors.
Carson whispered, "Michael."
He looked up at her, and she pointed with the shotgun barrel.
Closer to Harker's door than where the keys had fallen, an inch from his threshold, a dark spot marred the glossy gray planks. The spot was glossy, too, approximately the size of a quarter but oval. Dark, glossy, and red.
Michael touched it with a forefinger. Wet.
He rubbed forefinger to thumb, smelled the smear. Rising to his feet, he nodded at Carson and showed her the name on the supermarket card.
Standing to one side of the door, he tried the knob. You never knew. Most killers were far short of a genius rating on the Stanford-Binet scale. If Harker had two hearts, he still had one brain, and if he was responsible for some of the murders attributed to the Surgeon, a lot of his synapses must be misfiring. All murderers made mistakes. Sometimes they did everything but post a sign inviting arrest.
This time the door proved to be locked. Michael felt enough play in it, however, to suggest that only the latch was engaged, not the deadbolt.
Carson could have destroyed the lock with one round from her 12-gauge. A shotgun is a pretty good residential-defense weapon because the pellets won't penetrate a wall and kill an innocent person in the next room as easily as will the rounds from high-power handguns.
Although a blast to the lock wouldn't risk deadly consequences to anyone inside, Michael wasn't keen to use the shotgun.
Maybe Harker wasn't alone in there. Maybe he had a hostage.
They had to use the minimum force necessary to effect entrance, then escalate as developments required.
Michael stepped in front of the door, kicked it hard in the lock zone, but it held, and he kicked it again, kicked it a third time, each blow booming almost as loud as a shotgun, and the latch snapped. The door flew open.
Quarter-crouched and fast, Carson went through the door first, the shotgun in front of her, sweeping the muzzle left and right.
Behind her, over her shoulder, Michael saw Harker crossing the far end of the room.
"Drop it!" Carson shouted because he had a revolver.
Harker squeezed off a shot. The door frame took it.
A spray of splinters peppered Michael's brow, his hair, as Carson fired at Harker.
The pr
imary force of the blast caught Harker in the left hip, the thigh. He reeled, crashed against the wall, but didn't go down.
As soon as she fired, still moving, Carson chambered another round and simultaneously sidestepped to the left of the door.
Coming behind her, Michael moved to the right as Harker fired a second shot. He heard the keening lament of a bullet cleaving the air, a near miss, inches from his head.
Carson fired again, and Harker staggered with the impact, but he kept moving, plunging into the kitchen, out of sight, as Carson chambered a third round.
CHAPTER 72
STANDING WITH HER BACK to the shared wall between the living room and the kitchen, Carson fished shotgun shells out of a jacket pocket.
She had the shakes. She handled the fat shells one at a time, afraid of fumbling them. If she dropped one, if it rolled under a piece of furniture....
Outside at the open trunk of the car, when she had loaded the 12-gauge, she almost hadn't pocketed any spare rounds. This was a finishing weapon, useful for bringing a quick end to a dangerous situation; it wasn't a piece you used for extended fire-fights.
Only twice before had she needed a shotgun. On each occasion a single shot—in one instance, just a warning; in the other incident, intended to wound—had put an end to the confrontation.
Apparently Harker would be as hard to bring down as Deucalion had predicted.
She only had three spare shells. She inserted them in the tube-style magazine and hoped she had enough to do the job.
Skull bone as dense as armor plating. She might blind him with a face shot, but would that matter, could he function anyway?
Two hearts. Aim for the chest. Two rapid-fire rounds, maybe three, point-blank if possible. Take out both hearts.
Across the room, Michael was staying low, using furniture for cover, moving deeper into the living room, angling for a line of sight into the kitchen, where Harker had taken cover.
Harker was only part of their problem, Jenna the other part. The blood in the hallway suggested she was in the apartment. Hurt. Maybe mortally wounded.
