by Dean Koontz
Rusty led the way. As he crossed the threshold into the dark kitchen, he saw a figure looming on the back porch, a half-seen face at a window. He retreated into the hallway, pulling her with him. “One already out there.”
As they followed the hallway toward the foyer, the door chimes sounded. One of the things must be on the front porch.
“Upstairs,” he whispered, holding her hand to prevent her from falling if she lost her footing on the un-lighted staircase.
chapter 59
At the Snyder house, Chief Rafael Jarmillo and his Communitarian equal, Deputy Kurt Nevis, found Warren Snyder, general manager of KBOW radio, in an armchair in his living room. The wife, Judy Snyder, and their nineteen-year-old son, Andrew, sat on the sofa. They were still because they had been told to remain so, though their eyes jittered with terror. Much earlier, they should have been picked up and taken away to be rendered by a Builder at one of the warehouses. But here they were. The son appeared to have urinated on the sofa.
Judy Snyder’s replicant had been left here to oversee these three, but she was not with them. Jarmillo and Nevis found her nude in the kitchen.
The unclothed replicant was on her hands and knees beside a bucket of pine-scented cleaning solution, scrubbing the floor with a brush and various sponges. She did not look up at them but remained focused on the floor tiles.
“What’re you doing?” Jarmillo asked.
She said, “There was no neatness in this house. Where there is no neatness, there can be no order. They have a cat. It sheds enough for a dozen cats. Hair, hair, hair everywhere. I’m glad we’re killing all the cats, too. I swept and I swept, and finally there wasn’t any more hair, though I haven’t looked on the upper floor yet. I’m sure it’s a mess. I threw the litter box in the trash, it was disgusting. But cat hair and kitty litter isn’t the half of it. These kitchen counters needed to be scrubbed. Especially the grout. The grout was filthy. And the refrigerator, and now these floors. I’m going to be hours on these floors. Especially the grout.”
“Why are you nude?” Jarmillo asked.
“I noticed my clothes were wrinkled. It really bothered me. I couldn’t get my mind off my wrinkled clothes. I couldn’t think, so I stripped out of them and ironed them, made them perfect, and put them back on. But you know what happened then? I hardly did anything, just a little more sweeping, and I could see a few wrinkles in them again. I had to take them off and iron them, and then they were wrinkled again, so I took them off and ironed them and didn’t put them on, just hung them so they’ll stay wrinkle-free.”
“Does Warren have spare keys to the radio station? Where does he keep them?”
Vigorously scrubbing the soiled grout between the floor tiles, Communitarian Judy said, “I don’t know. I didn’t download the stupid bitch’s memories. I didn’t need to because I didn’t have to pass for the stupid bitch except to set her idiot son up to be nailed by his replicant.”
Jarmillo returned to the living room while Deputy Nevis remained to watch Judy scrub the floor.
“Warren,” the chief said to the KBOW general manager, “do you have spare keys to the radio station?”
Warren Snyder’s mouth trembled, but he didn’t reply.
“You can’t avoid answering me,” Jarmillo said. “You have no will to resist.”
Haltingly, Warren told him where to find the keys. They were in a utility drawer in the kitchen.
When Chief Jarmillo returned to the kitchen, Deputy Nevis was on his hands and knees, using a sponge to help Judy clean the floors.
“What’re you doing?” Jarmillo asked.
“The only virtue is efficiency,” Nevis said. “The only sin is inefficiency. You can’t have efficiency in a disordered environment.”
“Yes, but this isn’t your environment. Get up and come with me.”
The utility drawer contained numerous keys. Fortunately they were labeled, although not in a consistent fashion. In forty-nine seconds, the chief found the KBOW keys. In an organized drawer, he would have snatched them up in one second, two at most. He was tempted to put things right here, but then he closed the drawer.
Deputy Kurt Nevis, being Chief Jarmillo’s equal in all ways as a Communitarian, decided not to accompany him to the radio station but instead to remain at the Snyder residence to scrub the baseboards. He had noticed they were in urgent need of attention.
chapter 60
When Deucalion drove out of the parking lot at St. Bartholomew’s Abbey and immediately into the driveway at the Samples house, Carson O’Connor was waiting. She stopped him from getting out of the truck and spoke to him through the open door.
“Only three new kids here. Michael’s keeping them entertained. Big news is the radio station. There was a failed attack against the place. They’ve got an FBI agent on air with Mason Morrell, some guy named Frost. And they say they’ve got one of Victor’s new people, he’s come over to our side.”
Deucalion’s eyes pulsed with the light of another place, another time.
She remembered when first she’d seen those eyes in New Orleans, in Bobby Allwine’s apartment, where everything was black—floor, walls, ceiling, furniture. She was wary of Deucalion back then but not afraid, because she would never give anyone the satisfaction of controlling her with fear. Into her suspicion, he had said, “I’m not the monster anymore. I’m your best hope.” He was right about that, and it was still true.
Looking down at her from the driver’s seat of the truck, he said, “This is the moment, Carson. We’ll finish it now, finish him. I’ve been given … reasons to believe this is his last day. And in case he finishes me or you and Michael—or all of us—as we take him out … it’s been an honor knowing the two of you, being your friend and ally.”
She reached up and took one of his enormous hands in both of hers. At first she could not speak, only hold fast to him. But then she said, “You will not die.”
“I’m long overdue for death. Every human being is born with the dead, but I was born from the dead and don’t fear my end. I love this world, its beauty, but there could be nothing better than to die in its defense.”
“Even if you die,” she said, “you will not die forever.”
He smiled, and the light pulsed in his eyes, and he said, “Give Scout a kiss for me.”
As she stepped back, he pulled shut the door. She watched the truck turn through a half circle—and vanish.
Arriving from the Samples driveway, the truck ran over dead men lying in the KBOW parking lot. They were not men, of course, but Victor’s newest race, who encountered a far better armed resistance than they could ever have anticipated.
Getting out of the truck, Deucalion realized that these foiled attackers hadn’t been dead for a long time, only minutes. Those over whom he had not driven were covered by just a thin dusting of fresh snow.
He stepped around a corpse and into the engineer’s nest in the building. “You’ve captured one of them?”
Ralph Nettles looked up from the control board not in surprise but with a what’s-taken-you-so-long expression. “Not me. Some cranky old guy. He’s in Sammy’s office with a replicant of a cop named Barry Bozeman.”
chapter 61
As Rusty Billingham reached the top of the dark staircase with Corrina, the door chimes sounded again. This carillon was pleasant in ordinary circumstances, two bars of something classic, perhaps a piece of Beethoven, but now each note was icy and sinister, vibrating through him as if his spinal column were a tubular bell. Pressing the bell push twice in rapid succession, at a dark house, seemed to be a taunt if not mockery. They were saying, We know you’re in there. If you won’t come out to play, we’ll bring the game to you.
Windows opened onto the back- and front-porch roofs. But one of these killers, whatever they might be, was on each porch. No way out, only farther up.
“You’ve got an attic?” Rusty asked.
“Yes, but—”
“Where’s the entrance to it?”
&
nbsp; “The master-bedroom closet.”
Glass shattered. The sound seemed to come from the back of the house.
“Show me the way,” Rusty said. “Quick.”
He had been on the second floor of her house only once, on a tour before dinner, each of them with a glass of good red wine, the evening thoroughly pleasant, the world so normal then. She knew the house better than he did, and even in the dark with only the ambient light of the night pressing at the windows, Corrina led him along a hallway, through a door, across the bedroom, and into the walk-in closet.
As more glass shattered downstairs, Rusty closed the door behind them and fumbled for the light switch. A cord hung from a ceiling trapdoor. He pulled, and the trap swung down on heavy-duty springs, revealing a folded ladder attached to it.
Corrina said, “But there’s no way out of the attic. We’ll be cornered up there.”
Unfolding the ladder, he whispered, “I’m not going up. Just you.” He loosened the simple knot that fixed the pull cord to a ring on the lower face of the trap. “Then I’ll distract them. As far as they know, I might be the only one in the house. They get me, they stop searching as hard.”
“No. I can’t let you.”
He whispered, “Stupid for both of us to die.” He grabbed her by both shoulders, kissed her as he had never kissed her before in their determinedly platonic romance, and said, “Go. Go!”
She climbed into the darkness.
As she reached the top, he called after her, “Stay quiet.”
She turned to look down, face as wan as a wafer of unleavened bread. “Until … when?”
“Until I come back for you.”
She didn’t ask what she should do if he never returned. If she had asked, he would have had no answer.
When Rusty folded up the ladder, the counter-weighted trap swung shut with a soft thump that made him wince, closing Corrina in the attic. He tucked the detached pull cord onto a shelf above her hanging clothes.
After turning off the closet light, he stood for a moment with one ear to the door, listening for activity in the bedroom. All was silent, but he knew it might be the silence of something waiting for him to emerge.
He eased open the door. The master bedroom was black except for two rectangular windows barely revealed by the snow-veiled glow of streetlamps.
He crossed the threshold and after a moment identified the open doorway to the upstairs hall, which was slightly less dark than the black wall through which it cut.
If anything like the blonde in the blue robe had been waiting for him here, it would already have attacked. He vividly remembered the striking-snake speed with which she had gone after the people in the Trailblazer.
Bent forward, hands reaching out low to search for obstructing furniture, Rusty eased toward the doorway. He needed to get as far as possible from the master bedroom before calling attention to himself and drawing them away from Corrina. He felt around an armchair, past a tall chest of drawers, and reached the open door without making a sound.
His mouth was as dry as a salt lick. Stomach acid burned in the back of his throat, as it had not done since the war.
For a long moment, he stood in the doorway. The airless-moon hush suggested that the killers either had not entered the house or had already left it.
He took just two steps into the upstairs hallway and halted again, listening. No windows here. Dim light rising from the foyer windows and from a stairway-landing window below, revealing nothing.
Silence. Silence. A distant clink-clink-clink. He thought the sound had come from the lower floor. Clink-clink-clink. Wrong. Not downstairs. It issued from the farther end of the pitch-black hallway in which he stood. Clink-clink-clink, clink-clink. This time he got a better fix on the source: to his left, an arm’s length away.
chapter 62
Nummy O’Bannon listened to radio sometimes, but he never before was inside where they made it. There were none of the musicians or singers he expected. The rooms were just mostly offices except for the spaceship controls where Mr. Ralph Nettles worked, and the desks were all stacked with stuff, not neat at all.
Mr. Lyss was watching over the broken monster, the Xerox Boze, in one of these offices, and Nummy was watching over them both. He was afraid the Xerox Boze would start doing the usual nasty monster stuff now that there wasn’t an upright piano to play, so he kept an eye on the thing. He kept an eye on Mr. Lyss, too, because the old man was always doing something interesting, even if it wasn’t something Grandmama would have approved.
For a few minutes, things were quieter than they had been since Nummy met Mr. Lyss, and then the biggest thing of the whole strange day happened. In fact, it was the second most important thing of Nummy’s life, the first being when Grandmama died and he was left alone.
A man came into the room, the biggest man Nummy had ever seen, not fat-big but tall and with a lot of muscles, which you could tell were there even though he was wearing a hooded coat. He was bigger than Buster Steelhammer, the wrestler, and his hands were so large he might have been able to do disappearing tricks with apples the way magicians did with coins. Half his face was tattooed, but it was his eyes that made him the second most important thing ever to happen to Nummy.
When the giant looked at Nummy, light moved through his eyes sort of the way that the moving light on the machine in the hospital kept dancing across the screen that showed Grandmama’s heartbeat, although this was somehow both softer and brighter than that light, not scary, either, but beautiful and calming. Nummy didn’t know why the light in the man’s eyes didn’t frighten him, like he would have expected, especially with the half-broken face and tattoo—and then he did know.
Grandmama said there were angels on earth, guardian angels, but they worked in secret and weren’t easy to tell from other people because they didn’t have wings or halos. She said the only way you sometimes could know them was when you saw the light of love in their eyes. They were so full of love, Grandmama said, that sometimes they couldn’t hold it all inside, and they gave themselves away by the light in their eyes.
Nummy never before saw an angel, and now here was one, and he said to Nummy, “Don’t be afraid, son. You’ll live through this night. Fifty days from now, all will change for the better.”
The angel turned his eyes toward Xerox Boze, stared at him a long moment, and then said to Mr. Lyss, “You claim this replicant is broken.”
Mr. Lyss must not have seen the angel light in the big man’s eyes—or if he did see it, maybe he didn’t know what it was. To the old man, the most important thing was one little word the angel used. His eyes bugged out, and his hair seemed to stand on end more than usual, like a cartoon animal sticking its paw in an electric socket and all its fur going bzzzz.
“Claim?” Mr. Lyss said. “Claim? Is that a weasel word so you don’t have to say to my face you think I’m a lying sonofabitch? You walk in here like you own the joint, your fancy face tattooed more than some rock star’s butt, and you make smarmy suggestions Conway Lyss is a liar? I’ve done worse things to people who call me a liar than Stalin did to kittens, and believe me, Stalin hated kittens. He ripped out their throats with his teeth if he caught one. This thing that was supposed to call itself Barry Bozeman is broken so plain any fool but you can see it. Look at his hangdog face, his whipped-dog posture in that chair. He’s programmed not to kill himself, wants me to kill him, but I won’t do it until I’m damn good and ready to kill him. Nobody tells me when to kill him, not even some pathetic broken Frankenstein monster!”
Nummy saw the angel react to the name Frankenstein, but he didn’t ask if Mr. Lyss was crazy or call him a liar. He didn’t say anything more at all to the old man, but he went to stand over Xerox Boze, staring down at him. Xerox Boze asked the angel to kill him, and Nummy thought the angel would say that he couldn’t, that it wasn’t something an angel could do. Instead, he said in the most tender way, “I am your brother. Two hundred years separate our … births. Do you recognize me?”
Xerox Boze stared up into the angel’s eyes for a long time and then said softly, “I … don’t know.”
Mr. Lyss became upset about the brother thing and wanted to know if this was some kind of hellish monster convention. Nobody, not even Nummy, paid attention to the old man’s rant.
The angel asked Xerox Boze, “What is your life?”
“Misery.”
“Shall we stop him forever?”
“I can’t lift a hand against my maker.”
“I think I can. And will. Where is he?”
“The Hive.”
“Perhaps you’re not broken.”
“But I am.”
“Perhaps you’re here to lure me into a trap.”
“No.”
“Help me to believe I can trust you,” the angel said.
“How?” Xerox Boze asked.
“He didn’t name it the Hive.”
“No. It’s our word.”
“What does he call the place, the front organization behind which he works?”
Xerox Boze said, “Progress for Perfect Peace.”
After a silence, the angel asked, “Do you know where that is?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
Xerox Boze got up from his chair, and the angel led him into the hallway. Nummy followed, interested in anything an angel might do, and Mr. Lyss tagged along behind, grumping about something. They went to a map on a wall in another office, and the angel said it showed KBOW’s broadcast reach, whatever that was. He pointed out what was Rainbow Falls and what was the county, and some land beyond the county, and he asked the Xerox Boze to point to the place called the Hive. The monster pointed. The angel said they would go there together, and if it was the place the monster said it was, then the angel would give him “the grace of a quick and painless death,” which sounded nice except for the death part.
Turning away from the wall map, looking hard at Mr. Lyss, the angel said, “Fifty days from now, you get your chance. Use it well.”
