by Dean Koontz
Clocker downshifted as the train of vehicles slowed on a particularly snowswept incline.
He said, “Because it isn’t burdened by religion, philosophy, any system of beliefs, a family, or a past, there isn’t much danger that a clone assassin will begin to doubt the morality of the atrocities it commits, develop a conscience, or show any trace of free will that might interfere with its performance of its assignments.”
“But something sure went wrong with Alfie,” Paige said.
“Yeah. And we’ll never know exactly what.”
Why did it look like me? Marty wanted to ask, but instead his head lolled onto Paige’s shoulder and he lost consciousness.
A hall of mirrors in a carnival funhouse. Frantically seeking a way out. Reflections gazing back at him with anger, envy, hatred, failing to mimic his own expressions and movements, stepping out of one looking-glass after another, pursuing him, an ever-growing army of Martin Stillwaters, so like him on the outside, so dark and cold on the inside. Now ahead of him as well, reaching out from the mirrors past which he runs and into which he blunders, grasping at him, all of them speaking in a single voice: I need my life.
The mirrors shattered as one, and he woke.
Lamplight.
Shadowy ceiling.
Lying in bed.
Cold and hot, shivering and sweating.
He tried to sit up. Couldn’t.
“Honey?”
Barely enough strength to turn his head.
Paige. In a chair. Beside the bed.
Another bed beyond her. Shapes under blankets. The girls. Sleeping.
Drapes over the windows. Night at the edges of the drapes. She smiled. “You with me, baby?”
He tried to lick his lips. They were cracked. His tongue was dry, furry.
She took a can of apple juice from a plastic ice bucket in which it was chilling, lifted his head off the pillow, and guided the straw between his lips.
After drinking, he managed to say, “Where?”
“A motel in Bishop.”
“Far enough?”
“For now, it has to be,” she said.
“Him?”
“Clocker? He’ll be back.”
He was dying of thirst. She gave him more juice.
“Worried,” he whispered.
“Don’t. Don’t worry. It’s okay now.”
“Him.”
“Clocker?” she asked.
He nodded.
“We can trust him,” she said.
He hoped she was right.
Even drinking exhausted him. He lowered his head onto the pillow again.
Her face was like that of an angel. It faded away.
Escaping from the hall of mirrors into a long black tunnel. Light at the far end, hurrying toward it, footsteps behind, a legion in pursuit of him, gaining on him, the men from out of the mirrors. The light is his salvation, an exit from the funhouse. He bursts out of the tunnel, into the brightness, which turns out to be the field of snow in front of the abandoned church, where he runs toward the front doors with Paige and the girls, The Other behind them, and a shot explodes, a lance of ice pierces his shoulder, the ice turns to fire, fire—
The pain was unbearable.
His vision was blurred with tears. He blinked, desperate to know where he was.
The same bed, the same room.
The blankets had been pulled aside.
He was naked to the waist. The bandage was gone.
Another explosion of pain in his shoulder wrung a scream from him. But he was not strong enough to scream, and the cry issued as a soft, “Ahhhhhh.”
He blinked away more tears.
The drapes were still closed over the windows. Daylight had replaced darkness at the edges.
Clocker loomed over him. Doing something to his shoulder.
At first, because the pain was excruciating, he thought Clocker was trying to kill him. Then he saw Paige with Clocker and knew that she would not let anything bad happen.
She tried to explain something to him, but he only caught a word here and there: “sulfa powder . . . antibiotic . . . penicillin . . .”
They bandaged his shoulder again.
Clocker gave him an injection in his good arm. He watched. With all of his other pains, he couldn’t feel the prick of the needle.
For a while he was in a hall of mirrors again.
When he found himself in the motel bed once more, he turned his head and saw Charlotte and Emily sitting on the edge of the adjacent bed, watching over him. Emily was holding Peepers, the rock on which she had painted a pair of eyes, her pet.
Both girls looked terribly solemn.
He managed to smile at them.
Charlotte got off the bed, came to him, kissed his sweaty face.
Emily kissed him, too, and then she put Peepers in his good right hand. He managed to close his fingers around it.
Later, drifting up from dreamless sleep, he heard Clocker and Paige talking:
“. . . don’t think it’s safe to move him,” Paige said.
“You have to,” Clocker said. “We’re not far enough away from Mammoth Lakes, and there are only so many roads we could’ve taken.”
“You don’t know anyone’s looking for us.”
“You’re right, I don’t. But it’s a safe bet. Sooner or later someone will be looking—and probably for the rest of our lives.”
He drifted out and in, out and in, and when he saw Clocker at the bedside again, he said, “Why?”
“The eternal question,” Clocker said, and smiled.
Refining the eternal question, Marty said, “Why you?”
Clocker nodded. “You’d wonder, of course. Well . . . I was never one of them. They made the serious mistake of thinking I was a true believer. All my life I’ve wanted adventure, heroics, but it never seemed in the cards for me. Then this. Figured if I played along, the day would come when I’d have a chance to do serious damage to the Network if not vaporize it, pow, like a plasma-beam weapon.”
“Thank you,” Marty said, feeling consciousness slip away and wanting to express his gratitude while he still could.
“Hey, we’re still not out of the woods yet,” Clocker said.
When Marty regained consciousness, he wasn’t sweating or shivering, but he still felt weak.
They were in a car, on a lonely highway at sunset. Paige was driving, and he was belted in the front passenger seat.
She said, “Are you okay?”
“Better,” he said, and his voice was less shaky than it had been for a while. “Thirsty.”
“There’s some apple juice on the floor between your feet. I’ll find a place to pull over.”
“No. I can get it,” he said, not really sure that he could.
As he bent forward, reaching to the floor with his right hand, he realized that his left arm was in a sling. He managed to get hold of a can and yank it loose of the six-pack to which it was connected. He braced it between his knees, pulled the ring-tab, and opened it.
The juice was barely chilled, but nothing ever tasted better—partly because he had managed to get it for himself without help. He finished the entire can in three long swallows.
When he turned his head, he saw Charlotte and Emily slumped in their seatbelts, snoozing in the back.
“They’ve hardly gotten any sleep for the last couple of nights,” Paige said. “Bad dreams. And worried about you. But I guess being on the move makes them feel safer, and the motion of the car helps.”
“Nights? Plural?” He knew they had fled Mammoth Lakes Tuesday night. He assumed it was Wednesday. “What sunset is that?”
“Friday’s,” she said.
He had been out of it for almost three days.
He looked around at the vast expanse of plains swiftly fading into the nightfall. “Where are we?”
“Nevada. Route Thirty-one south of Walker Lane. We’ll pick up Highway Ninety-five and drive north to Fallon. We’ll stay at a motel there tonight.”
“Wyoming, if you’re up to it.”
“I’ll be up to it. I guess there’s a reason for Wyoming?”
“Karl knows a place we can stay there.” When he asked her about the car, which he had never seen before, she said, “Karl again. Like the sulfa powder and the penicillin I’ve been treating you with. He seems to know where to get whatever he needs. He’s some character.”
“I don’t even really know him,” Marty said, reaching down for another can of apple juice, “but I love him like a brother.”
He popped open the can and drank at least one-third of it. He said, “I like his hat too.”
Paige laughed out of all proportion to the feeble humor of the remark, but Marty laughed with her.
“God,” she said, driving north through gray, unpopulated land, “I love you, Marty. If you had died, I’d never have forgiven you.”
That night they took two rooms at the motel in Fallon, using a false name and paying cash in advance. They had a dinner of pizza and Pepsi in the motel. Marty was starved, but two pieces of pizza filled him.
While they ate, they played a game of Look Who’s the Monkey Now, in which the purpose was to think of all the words for foods that began with the letter P. The girls weren’t in their best playing form. In fact, they were so subdued that Marty worried about them.
Maybe they were just tired. After dinner, in spite of their nap in the car, Charlotte and Emily were asleep within seconds of putting heads to pillows.
They left the door open between the adjoining rooms. Karl Clocker had provided Paige with an Uzi submachine gun which had been illegally converted for full automatic fire. They kept it on the nightstand within easy reach.
Paige and Marty shared a bed. She stretched out to his right, so she could hold his good hand.
As they talked, he discovered that she had learned the answer to the question he’d never had a chance to ask Karl Clocker: Why did it look like me?
One of the most powerful men in the Network, primary owner of a media empire, had lost a four-year-old son to cancer. As the boy lay dying at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, five years ago, blood and bone-marrow samples had been taken from him because it was his father’s emotional decision that the Alpha-series clones should be developed from his lost boy’s genetic material. If functional clones could be made a reality, they would be a lasting monument to his son.
“Jesus, that’s sick,” Marty said. “What father would think a race of genetically engineered killers might be a suitable memorial? God Almighty.”
“God had nothing to do with it,” Paige said.
The Network representative assigned to obtain those blood and marrow samples from the lab had gotten confused and wound up with Marty’s samples instead, which had been taken to determine whether he would be a suitable donor for Charlotte if she proved in need of a transplant.
“And they want to rule the world,” Marty said, amazed. He was still far from recuperated and in need of more sleep, but he had to know one more thing before he drifted off. “If they only started engineering Alfie five years ago ... how can he be a grown man?”
Paige said, “According to Clocker, they ‘improved’ on the basic human design in several ways.”
They had given Alfie an unusual metabolism and tremendously accelerated healing power. They also engineered his phenomenally rapid maturation with human growth hormone and raised him from fetus to thirtyish adult with nonstop intravenous feeding and electrically stimulated muscle development over a period of less than two years.
“Like a damned hydroponic vegetable or something,” she said.
“Dear Jesus,” Marty said, and glanced at the nightstand to make sure the Uzi was there. “Didn’t they have a few doubts when this clone didn’t resemble the boy?”
“For one thing, the boy had been wasted by cancer between the ages of two and four. They didn’t know what he might have looked like if he’d been healthy during those years. And besides, they’d edited the genetic material so extensively they couldn’t be sure the Alpha generation would resemble the boy all that much anyway.
“He was taught language, mathematics, and other things largely by sophisticated subliminal input while he was asleep and growing.”
She had more to tell him, but her voice faded gradually as he surrendered to a sleep filled with greenhouses in which human forms floated in tanks of viscous liquid . . .
... they are connected to tangles of plastic tubing and life-support machines, growing rapidly from fetuses to full adulthood, all doubles for him, and suddenly the eyes click open on a thousand of them at once, along rows and rows of tanks in building after building, and they speak as with a single voice: I need my life.
8
The log cabin was on several acres of woodlands, a few miles from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which had yet to enjoy its first snow of the season. Karl’s directions were excellent, and they found the place with little difficulty, arriving late Saturday afternoon.
The cabin needed to be cleaned and aired-out, but the pantry was stocked with supplies. When the rust had been run out of the pipes, the water from the tap tasted clean and sweet.
On Monday, a Range Rover turned off the county road and drove to their front door. They watched it tensely from the front windows. Paige held the Uzi with the safety off, and she didn’t relax until she saw that it was Karl who got out of the driver’s door.
He had arrived in time to have lunch with them, which Marty had prepared with the girls’ help. It consisted of reconstituted eggs, canned sausages, and biscuits from a tin.
As the five of them ate at the large pine table in the kitchen, Karl presented them with their new identities. Marty was surprised by the number of documents. Birth certificates for all four of them. A high school diploma for Paige from a school in Newark, New Jersey, and one for Marty from a school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. An honorable discharge from the United States Army for Marty, issued after three years of service. They had Wyoming driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, and more.
Their new name was Gault. Ann and John Gault. Charlotte’s birth certificate said her name was Rebecca Vanessa Gault, and Emily was now Suzie Lori Gault.
“We got to choose our own first and second names,” Charlotte said with more animation than she’d shown in days. “I’m Rebecca like in the movie, a woman of beauty and mystery, haunting Manderley forever.”
“We didn’t exactly get to pick what names we wanted,” Emily said. “We didn’t get first choice, for sure.”
Marty had been deep in wounded sleep back in Bishop, California, when the names had been selected. “What was your first choice?” he asked Emily.
“Bob,” she said.
Marty laughed, and Charlotte giggled explosively.
“I like Bob,” Emily said.
“Well, you have to admit it isn’t really appropriate,” Marty said.
“Suzie Lori is cute enough to puke over,” Charlotte said.
“Well, if I can’t be Bob,” Emily said, “then I want to be Suzie Lori, and everyone has to always use both names, never just Suzie.”
While the girls washed the dishes, Karl brought in a suitcase from the Range Rover, opened it on the table, and discussed the contents with Marty and Paige. There were scores of computer discs containing Network files, which Karl had secretly copied over the years, plus at least a hundred microcassette tapes of conversations that he had recorded, including one at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Dana Point that involved Oslett and a man named Peter Waxhill.
“That one,” Karl said, “will explain the entire clone crisis in a nutshell.” He began returning the items to the suitcase. “These are all copies, the discs and the cassettes. You’ve got two full sets. And I’ve got other duplicates besides.”
Marty didn’t understand. “Why do you want us to have these?”
“You’re a good writer,” Karl said. “I’ve read a couple of your books since Tuesday night. Take all this, write up an ex
planation of it, an explanation of what happened to you and your family. I’m going to leave you the name of the owner of a major newspaper and a man high in the FBI. I’m confident that neither of them is part of the Network—because both of them were on Alfie’s list of future targets. Send your explanation and one set of discs and tapes to each of them. Mail it blind, of course, no return address, and from another state, not Wyoming.”
“Shouldn’t you do this?” Paige asked.
“I’ll try again if you don’t get the kind of reaction I expect you will. But it’s better coming from you first. Your disappearance, the action in Mission Viejo, the murders of your parents, the bodies I’ve made sure they found in that bell tower near your folks’ cabin—all of that has kept your story hot. The Network has made sure it’s kept hot, ’cause they’re desperate for someone to find you for them. Let’s use your notoriety to make it all backfire on them if we can.”
The day was cool but not cold. The sky was a crystalline blue.
Marty and Karl went for a walk along the perimeter of the woods, always keeping the cabin in sight.
“This Alfie,” Marty said.
“What about him?”
“Was he the only one?”
“The first and only operative clone. Others are being grown.”
“We have to stop that.”
“We will.”
“Okay. Suppose we blow the Network apart,” Marty wondered. “Their house of cards collapses. Afterward . . . can we ever go back home, resume our lives?”
Karl shook his head. “I don’t intend to. Don’t dare. Some of them will slip the noose. And these are people who hold a grudge from Sunday to Hell and back. Good haters. You ruin their lives or even just the lives of people in their families, and sooner or later they’ll kill all of you.”
“Then the Gault name isn’t just temporary cover?”
“It’s the best ID you can get. As good as real paper. I got it from sources the Network doesn’t know about. No one will ever see through this ID . . . or track you down by it.”
“My career, income from my books . . .”
