by Dean Koontz
Dog-nose Nick regretted only that the others felt the need to bathe before having at one another in various combinations. He loved the smell of Gunny Alecto, in particular, when she was incrusted with filth. After soap, she remained desirable, but not as much so.
As Gunny drove her garbage galleon toward the gone-wrongs, to plow a layer of concealing trash over them, the anticipated feast and orgy were thrust from Nick’s mind when abruptly something pale and many-limbed and strange beyond his experience shivered up out of the trash field. As quick as a spider, but like a huge assemblage of human limbs and heads and torsos in an illogical construct, it seized the three gone-wrongs and dragged them down, down and out of sight, and the trash field shuddered underfoot.
CHAPTER 75
IN THE MAIN LABORATORY at the Hands of Mercy, an Epsilon named Lester, a member of the janitorial team, performed daily maintenance at an industrious pace.
When Mr. Helios was in the facility, Lester could not clean in the lab. Mr. Helios did not like to be distracted by a mopping and dusting minion.
This suited Lester just fine. He always got nervous around his maker.
Because Mr. Helios spent more time than not within these walls and because he worked at irregular hours, whenever his great genius compelled him, Lester’s routine chores in this part of the building had to be done at different times every day. He liked the night best, like now, when none of the other staff members ventured into the main lab in their maker’s absence.
Perhaps the complex and fantastic machines, their purposes beyond his comprehension, should have made him fearful. The opposite was the case.
They hummed, burbled, ticked, whispered almost like voices imparting secrets, chuckled, occasionally beeped but not with the quality of alarm, sputtered, and murmured musically. Lester found these noises comforting.
He didn’t know why they should comfort him. He did not think about it or try to understand.
Lester didn’t try to understand much of anything, except what he needed to know to perform his work. His work was his life, as it should be for one such as him.
When not working, he found that time hung heavy. Sometimes he sat for hours, scratching his arm hard enough to make it bleed, and then watching it heal, scratching it open again, watching it heal, scratching it open…. At other times, he went down to a private place on the lowest level of the building, where there was rubble that his maker would not permit to be cleaned up, and he stood in front of a concrete wall, knocking his head rhythmically against it until the compulsion to do so had passed.
Compared to work, leisure time had little appeal. He always knew what to do with the hours when at work.
The only other thing in his life besides work and leisure was the occasional blackout, a recent phenomenon. Now and then he woke, as if he had been sleeping on his feet, and found himself in odd places, with no recollection of how he had gotten there or of what he had been doing.
Consequently, he tried to work most of the time, cleaning again what he had cleaned only an hour ago, to help the time pass.
This evening, as he mopped the floor around his maker’s desk, the dark screen of the computer suddenly brightened. The face of Annunciata appeared.
“Mr. Helios, Helios, I have been asked by Werner to tell you that he is in Randal Six’s room and that he is exploding, exploding.”
Lester glanced at the face on the screen. He didn’t know what to say, so he continued mopping.
“Mr. Helios, sir, Werner wishes to stress the urgency, urgency, urgency of the situation.”
This sounded bad, but it was none of Lester’s business.
“Mr. Helios, an Alpha has made an urgent, urgent, urgent request for a meeting with you.”
Growing nervous, Lester said, “Mr. Helios isn’t here.”
“Mr. Helios. I have become aware that Werner, that Werner, that Werner has been trapped in Isolation Room Number Two.”
“You’ll have to call back later,” said Lester.
“Instructions?” Annunciata asked.
“What?”
“May I have instructions, sir?”
“I’m just Lester,” he told her. “I don’t give instructions, I take them.”
“Coffee has been spilled in the main lab.”
Lester looked around worriedly. “Where? I don’t see any coffee.”
“Coffee exploding, exploding in the main lab.”
The machines were humming and burbling as always. Colorful gases and liquids were bubbling and glowing in glass spheres, in tubes, as always they bubbled and glowed. Nothing was exploding.
“Annunciata,” said Annunciata sternly, “let’s see if you can get anything right.”
“Nothing’s exploding,” Lester assured her.
Annunciata said, “Werner is coffee in Isolation Room Number Two. Analyze your systems, Annunciata, analyze, analyze.”
“I don’t follow you at all,” Lester told her. “You’re making me nervous.”
“Good morning, Mr. Helios. Helios.”
“I’m going to clean over at the other end of the lab,” Lester declared.
“Werner is trapped, trapped, trapped. Analyze. See if you can get anything right.”
CHAPTER 76
CARSON PULLED VICKY’S HONDA to the curb in front of Michael’s apartment building. She did not engage the parking brake or turn off the engine.
They sat staring at the place for a minute. A bland structure, slabs on slabs of apartments, it didn’t look menacing. It was a big, dumb, happy kind of building where nobody would be stalked and killed by relentless meat machines.
“What’s that thing they say about going home again?” Michael asked.
“You can’t.”
“Yeah. That’s it. You can’t go home again.”
“Thomas Wolfe,” she said.
“Whoever. I’m definitely getting a you-can’t-go-home-again vibe.”
“Me too.”
“I’m glad I put on my new white shoes this morning. I’d have felt bad about never having worn them.”
“They’re cool shoes,” Carson said as she pulled away from the curb. “You’ve always got the right look.”
“Do I?”
“Always.”
“That’s nice. That’s a nice thing to say. I’m sorry about earlier, when I said you were going female on me.”
“Water under the bridge.”
“You hungry?”
“That Red Bull gave me an appetite.”
“I’ve got a what-would-you-like-for-dinner-before-we-strap-you-down-in-the-electric-chair kind of appetite. I want to eat everything before the switch is pulled. I’m starved.”
“Want to get po-boys?”
“That’s a start.”
They rode for a longer while in silence than was customary for them, at least than was customary for Michael, and then she said, “You know that plan we had—shooting our way into Helios’s mansion, taking him out?”
“I’ve been revisiting that bit of strategy myself.”
“It took two of us to kill that guy in Arnie’s room, and it was a close thing. And then that pair at the house—”
“Fred and Ginger.”
“They did sort of look like dancers, didn’t they? Okay, Fred and Ginger. I’m not sure we could have held them off if Deucalion hadn’t shown up.”
“Everybody on staff at the mansion is going to be as hard to take down as those two.”
After another silence, Michael said, “Maybe we should drive up to Shreveport to visit Aunt Leelee.”
“Deucalion will have some idea when we meet at the Luxe.”
“He hasn’t called back. He doesn’t leave his phone on, and then he forgets to check his voice mail.”
“Cut him some slack on the telecom stuff,” Carson said. “He’s a late-eighteenth-century kind of guy.”
CHAPTER 77
THEY TOOK THE OIL LAMPS down from the tops of the two poles and brought them to the hole in the trash field out of which
the mother of all gone-wrongs had risen to snatch the three shrouded cadavers.
The light revealed the mouth of a tunnel, seven or eight feet in diameter, descending at an angle into the depths of the pit. The compacted trash that formed the walls of the passageway seemed to have been plastered over with a clear bonding material, like a glue, that glistened in the lamplight.
“That was something, huh, Nick?” Gunny Alecto asked. “Wasn’t that something?”
“It was something,” Nick Frigg agreed, “but I don’t know what.”
“What a night,” she said excitedly.
“Some night,” he agreed.
“Let’s go after it,” she said.
“Down there after it? I was thinking that myself.”
Life at Crosswoods was pretty good because of the ceremonies with the symbolic killings, more and more of them all the time, but the truth was they didn’t have much novelty in their lives. The sex, all of them at each other every night, and the dances of death, and now and then gone-wrongs always different from the things they’d seen before: But that was about it.
Even Epsilons, simple in their function and dedicated to their work—and especially a Gamma like Nick—could develop a yearning for variety, for something new. Here was something new, all right.
Two of the crew had run back to the supply trailer to get four long-handled flashlights with powerful beams. They returned now, and one of them, Hobb, said, “We going down, Nick?”
Instead of answering at once, Nick took one of the flashlights, switched it on, and knelt at the mouth of the tunnel. He probed with the beam and saw that about a hundred feet from its entrance—and at that point maybe ten feet below the surface of the trash field—the passageway took a turn to the left, curving down and out of sight.
He wasn’t afraid of what might be down there. He wouldn’t die easy, and he didn’t mind dying.
When he inhaled, he sure liked the rich smell rising out of the depths of the pit. Complex, familiar yet far more intense than the mélange at the surface. Nuanced.
In addition to the thousand odors of garbage, each of which he could identify separately and savor on its own, he detected a scent entirely new to him, a mysterious and alluring fragrance that he believed must be the mark of the colossal agglomeration of gone-wrongs that had too briefly revealed itself.
“We’re gonna go down,” he said. “But not all of us. Just four.”
“Pick me, Nick, pick me,” said Gunny Alecto.
“I already picked you,” he said. “You want to go, Hobb?”
Hobb’s eyes flared with excitement. “Oh, yeah. Count me in, Nick. There’s always screwin’ and eatin’, there’s always that, but there’s never been this.”
Hobb was a guy, so Nick picked a woman for the fourth. Azazel was hot, not as hot as Gunny, but she could take it and dish it out and leave you half broken and needing some time to heal.
Nick figured if they got down into the bottom of the pit and couldn’t find the mother of all gone-wrongs, then they could still go at one another, down there in all that stink, which would be something new, something better than ever.
Gunny, Azazel, and Hobb each took a flashlight.
The incline of the tunnel was steep, but not so steep they couldn’t handle it on foot.
“Let’s go find the rat eater,” Gunny said. “Let’s go see what it does down there.”
CHAPTER 78
BLOODSTAINED BUT NO LONGER bleeding, hair in disarray, clothes torn, unpresentable in the event of unexpected guests, bruised and sore but healing, Erika located the liquor cabinet. She took out a bottle of Rémy Martin.
She almost didn’t bother getting a glass. Then she decided that if Victor saw her drinking from the bottle, there would be trouble.
She went to the billiards room because while she knew now that she couldn’t eat dinner in any room she wished, she did believe that she could drink just about anywhere, as her downloaded etiquette did not say otherwise.
For something to do, she switched on the plasma TV and channel-surfed for a while. Bored, she was just about to click off when she came upon the last half-hour of a show called Desperate Housewives, which she found enthralling.
When the next show didn’t interest her, she killed the TV and went from the billiards room to an adjoining glassed-in porch, where she didn’t turn on any lights, but sat in the dark, gazing out at the expansive grounds, where the trees were dramatically revealed by exquisitely positioned landscape lighting.
As she worked on the cognac, she wished the superb metabolism that her brilliant husband had given her did not process alcohol so efficiently. She doubted that she would ever get the buzz on that she understood alcohol to provide and that she was hoping for. She wanted to…blur things.
Maybe she was more inebriated than she thought, however, because after a while she glimpsed what appeared to be a naked albino dwarf capering across the yard. It fled from the shadows under a magnolia tree to the gazebo, into which it disappeared.
By the time that Erika had thoughtfully consumed a few more ounces of cognac in an increasingly contemplative mood, the albino had appeared again, scampering this time from the gazebo to the trumpet-vine arbor through which one approached the reflecting pond.
One could not help but think, if one had been programmed with an encyclopedia of literary allusions, that there must be a maiden somewhere nearby spinning straw into gold, for here surely was Rumpelstiltskin come for his compensation.
CHAPTER 79
THE LUXE THEATER, a Deco palace long gone to seed, had been operating as a revival house, showing old movies on the big screen only three nights a week. As it was now his home and his base of operations, Deucalion had the previous day shut down the business entirely in the interest of saving the world.
They met at midnight in the lobby, where Jelly Biggs had set up a folding table near the concessions stand. In a huge bowl on the table, Jelly piled up Dum-Dums, NECCO wafers, Raisinets, Goobers, M&M’s, Sky Bars, bags of Planters, and other treats from the refreshments counter.
The choice of beverages seemed limited, as compared to the fare in a fully functioning theater. Nevertheless, Carson was able to have a vanilla Coke while Deucalion and Jelly had root beer; and Michael was delighted to be served two bottles of chocolate Yoo-hoo.
“If victory favors the army with the highest blood-sugar count,” Michael said, “we’ve won this war already.”
Before they got down to the discussion of strategy and tactics, Deucalion gave an account of Arnie’s circumstances in Tibet. Carson had many questions, but was considerably relieved.
Following this uplifting news, Deucalion reported his encounter with his maker in Father Duchaine’s kitchen. This development ensured Helios, alias Frankenstein, would be more alert to threats against him, thus making their conspiracy less likely to succeed.
The first question on the table came from Carson, who wanted to know how they could get at Victor with sufficient firepower that his praetorian guard could not save him.
“I suspect,” said Deucalion, “that no matter what planning we do, the opportunity will present itself in a way we cannot foresee. I told you earlier that his empire is collapsing, and I believe this to be more true by the day if not by the hour. He is as arrogant as he was two hundred years ago. But he is not—and this is key—he is not any longer fearful of failure. Impatient, yes, but not fearful. In spite of all his setbacks, he has progressed doggedly for so long that he believes in the inevitability of his vision. Therefore, he is blind to the rottenness of every pillar that supports his kingdom.”
Tearing open a bag of Good & Plenty, Jelly Biggs said, “I’m not fat enough anymore to qualify as a freakshow fat man, but I’m still a freak at heart. And one thing freakshow fat men are not known for is bravery under fire. There’s no way that you want me storming the citadel with you, and no way I would do it. So I’m not worried about how to feed ammo to a gun off a bandolier. What I worry about is…if his empire is fal
ling apart, if he’s losing control of his creations…what’s going to happen to this city with a few thousand superhuman things spinning out of control? And if you do manage to kill him, how much further do they spin out of control when he’s gone?”
“How terrible it will be, I can’t say,” Deucalion replied. “But more terrible than anything we can conceive. Tens of thousands will die at the hands of the New Race before they are destroyed. And of the four of us at this table, I expect that no more than one will be alive at the end of it, even if we triumph.”
They were silent for a moment, contemplating their mortality, and then Carson turned to Michael: “Don’t fail me, slick. Hit me with your smart-ass line.”
“For once,” Michael told her, “I don’t have one.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “We are in deep shit.”
CHAPTER 80
FOR SOME TIME, as Erika watched from the dark glassed-in porch and from the haze of Rémy Martin, the naked albino dwarf scurried this way and that across the grounds, a ghostly figure, mostly half seen except when he passed close to the brighter landscape lights.
He might have been searching for something, though because she had only completed her first day out of the tank, Erika did not have sufficient real-world experience to know what an albino dwarf could be seeking on a Garden District estate.
His purpose might have been to familiarize himself with the property in preparation for some scheme he intended to perpetrate. What such a scheme could be she could not guess, except that her trove of literary allusions regarding malevolent dwarfs suggested that it would involve a pot of gold or a first-born child, or an enchanted princess, or a ring that possessed magical power.
He might be looking for a place to hide before dawn. No doubt his kind were intolerant of sunlight. Besides, he was naked, and there were laws against indecent exposure.
After she had been watching the frantic dwarf for some time, he finally became aware of her. Because she sat in a dark porch and made no movement except to fill the glass of cognac or to raise it to her lips, she had not been easy to spot.
