The Whispering Room

by Dean Koontz

  She didn’t ascend to the tenth floor, sure that it would have a door like that on the eighth. She descended from the ninth and came again to the target floor. She stood with her back to the wall beside a door as plain as any she had ever seen, and yet it was an entrance to Pandemonium, where the demons of past superstitions were made real, where there was no way but the way of violence, where the actions of even the righteous must be judged good only according to how much blood of others she spilled.

  The first enemy she met would be rayshaws. Bertold Shenneck, inventor of the nanotech command mechanism, had named them rayshaws after the brainwashed character, Raymond Shaw, in The Manchurian Candidate, the novel by Richard Condon. She had encountered their like before, on Shenneck’s seventy-acre ranch in Napa Valley, on the day that he and his hateful wife had been paid the death they’d earned.

  The rayshaws provided security at the ranch. They were the equivalent of the Aspasia girls, their memories and personalities dissolved by webs of control mechanisms woven through their brains, reduced to machines of blood and bone with one programmed purpose. The girls of Aspasia were as lithe and irresistible as succubi, every technique of seduction and sexual pleasure downloaded into them along with the command to be at all times submissive. The rayshaws were instead killing machines, heedless of their safety, fearless because the concept of their own mortal nature had been scrubbed from their minds even as they were encoded to slaughter whomever their masters wanted dead.

  According to Randall Larkin—and confirmed by the blueprints Wilson had reviewed with Jane—the eighth floor contained two small apartments and otherwise eight thousand square feet of undeveloped space. One apartment housed four rayshaws who never left this level of the building, who spent their days in exercise and simple games of cards in which they were programmed to find adequate stimulation.

  For the moment, Jane returned the pistol to its holster. From the Velcro attachment system of the Gould & Goodrich gun belt, she plucked a stun grenade, a flash-bang disabler that was a standard tool in a SWAT arsenal, which she had obtained in Reseda when she’d acquired the belt itself. She reached across the door and gripped the lever handle with her left hand.

  Travis in hiding, Nick in the grave, so make the bastards pay for that.

  She pushed open the door, which activated lights in the space beyond, popped the flash-bang, threw it hard toward the back of what the blueprints called “undeveloped space,” and retreated, pulling the door almost shut to shield herself from the effects of the grenade.

  The flash strobed through the crack between door and jamb, and the bang surely was heard by D.J. up on the ninth floor, if not by those on a couple floors below this one. As she swung the door inward in the aftermath and drew a pistol, Jane felt the residual vibrations in her teeth that must still be jittering in the bones of the four rayshaws and briefly disrupting their nerve-path messaging.

  She entered low and fast, undeveloped space to both sides, one of the two apartments far to her left—a long blank wall with what might have been a metal-slab door—and the other far to her right, where an ordinary door stood open. Between her and that apartment were three of the four rayshaws. They had come running when she first alerted them by opening the door from the stairs: one now on his side on the floor, having dropped his gun, another fallen to his knees and disoriented but still armed, the third staggering toward her. Ahead and behind her were windows looking out onto the balcony that encircled the building; beyond the balcony, the city thrust toward a dire sky clotted with the unspent storm.

  And overhead, suspended from the fourteen-foot-high ceiling, was a geometric orchestration of two-inch-diameter grab bars at various heights, extending the width of the building, on which the greater threat would come.

  23

  * * *

  Jane in a half crouch, scoping the situation on the move…

  She squeezed off three shots, targeting the kneeling man, giving him no chance because he was not a man but a kneeling thing that had once been a man, and he collapsed in a judgment of blood like a penitent whose confession was rejected by some angry god. No room here for empathy or pity, which would result only in her death. Even as the kneeler gave up his first gout of blood, Jane intuited the reaction of the staggering rayshaw, dropped flat as he sprayed bullets with a sound-suppressed fully automatic pistol, pumping out the contents of an extended magazine, maybe sixteen rounds, his aim thrown high and wide, screwed by his flash-bang disorientation. Slugs ricocheted off the brushed-steel grab bars overhead, slapped off thick bulletproof windows, leaving milky kiss marks on the glass, keened sharply off the concrete floor in sprays of chips: scores of near misses as the rounds spent their energy with each deflection. The staggering rayshaw staggered to a stop, fumbling with a fresh magazine. Maybe twenty seconds into it now. Jane up, moving boldly but not running, arms extended with the .45, focused on the front sight and the big man. No, he’s an it, a thing. Two of her four shots carved away part of its neck, broke its face open, and showered the life out of it, a horror that would rock forever her dreams to come. The rayshaw that had been sprawled flat by the stun grenade, that had dropped its weapon, became clearheaded enough to grab for the gun. Two rounds left in the Heckler. One miss. One was a score, a leg wound. The rayshaw gazed up at her, femur shattered by the hollow-point round, yet no expression on its broad pale face, neither pain nor rage, nor fear, but a terrible blankness, at best a robotic semblance of dumb determination. With the depleted Heckler in her left hand, she snatched up the thing’s gun with her right, finished it with three rounds, more than she needed for the job. She had been moving too fast for fear to catch up with her until this instant, but now she was in the grip of fright, spending bullets as if they were guarantors of survival. Three rayshaws dead, one remaining—but where was it?—the advantage given her by the flash-bang diminishing by the second, her heart slamming in expectation of its sudden stoppage.

  Outside the day flared as if with a Hiroshima moment, a flood of Armageddon light washing through the armored windows, seemingly bright enough to imprint her startled shadow forever on the wall. A doomcrack of thunder spoke shudders through the building, as if its voice had come from deep in the unstable earth, and in its grumbling wake, Jane heard a lesser rumble that iced her spine as the mere storm breaking over the city could never have done. She saw the fourth rayshaw then, in the doorway of their apartment, perhaps twenty yards away, six-feet-five and solid and grim and radiant of menace, as if it were a lunatic assemblage of body parts from myriad cadavers stitched together and animated by the storm, a pistol in one hand and some device in the other, maybe a remote control, that it pointed toward the farther end of the undeveloped space. The rayshaw seemed to be looking past Jane rather than at her, and she turned her head to see what it saw, the source of the lesser rumble. The door of the other apartment—which might more accurately be called a pen, a cage—was rolling aside in its metal tracks.

  24

  * * *

  Given a choice, Jane would have welcomed coyotes, rabid or not, in almost any number, rather than what came forth into the killing ground of the eighth floor.

  Weeks earlier, at Bertold Shenneck’s ranch in Napa Valley, in addition to the rayshaws, security also had been provided by coyotes with brain implants. An early experiment in the reliability of the technology, those prairie wolves could be controlled by microwave-broadcast commands. Although they lived most of the time as ordinary animals, they could be called to attack with great ferocity.

  D. J. Michael had been inspired to impress a different species into service on the eighth and tenth floors of his building. Several years earlier, the nation had been horrified and transfixed by the news story of a pet chimpanzee that, in a rage, had attacked the woman next door, biting off her fingers, tearing off her face, and disfiguring her further in ways unthinkable, leaving her grievously disabled and comatose, all in less than a minute. The chimpanzees of movie and TV fame, adored by the public for their cute ant
ics, were mostly pygmy chimps. A full-size male chimpanzee, weighing a hundred twenty pounds, with its long arms and athletic prowess, was far quicker than the quickest man and stronger than a human being more than twice its size. Unlike gorillas, chimpanzees were omnivores, eating everything from berries to insects to small animals. As Poe knew when he wrote “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—which featured an orangutan—a creature that had tasted blood was more likely to draw blood, and within certain primates, not just in human beings, there was a capacity for rage and violence and brutality that made the most vicious denizens of nightmares seem by comparison like cartoon villains.

  Perhaps the remote control used by the fourth rayshaw didn’t merely open the door to the cage but triggered an attack command in the chimpanzees’ programs. Their inborn capacity for violence was surely multiplied—how much?—by their implanted control mechanisms.

  Three shaggy beasts erupted into the long space, not with the raucous shrieks and squeals common to them but in an eerie silence, as though engaged in some ape pantomime the rules of which required them to be mute. They scampered to three vertical poles and rapidly ascended hand-over-hand into the jungle of grab bars suspended at three levels throughout the room.

  Having conjured forth the vicious trio, having tossed aside the remote control, the remaining rayshaw came toward Jane now from the doorway of its apartment, like a towering and indestructible golem risen from mud to its present form, its shadow repeatedly flying from it as multiple lightning bolts flared down the day. The rayshaw fired too many shots at too great a distance, but it closed fast and wore a bandolier of spare magazines, and this vast room offered nothing behind which she might take cover.

  Heart jumping to the erratic pulse of the stormlight, Jane held fast to the discipline learned at Quantico, returning fire with the weapon that belonged to one of the dead rayshaws, and she saw the golem take a hit in its right shoulder. She threw down the gun when the hammer fell on an empty chamber, plucked a spare magazine from her belt, and snapped it into the Heckler as overhead the grab bars thrummed and their fittings creaked from the impact and the weight of apes swinging and swooping, ascending and descending and ascending again.

  The animals were so fast, changing directions so impetuously and unpredictably, that she doubted she could kill one, let alone three. And though wounded, moving less assuredly, the remaining rayshaw still came toward her, its weapon now in its left hand. As Jane drew down on it, the golem shooter scored a hit. She wore no Kevlar. Too inhibiting when maximum maneuverability was required. A searing pain in her left side. Above the hip but below the rib cage. Hot sting of cut flesh. For a moment, pain robbed her of breath, and she took two, three shaky steps backward. An internal shadow faded her vision but then fell away. Reflexively, she reached under her sport coat with her right hand but at once withdrew it, wiping her bloody palm on the leg of her jeans. She was bleeding. So what? Not the first time. However bad the wound might be, it wasn’t mortal. She remained on her feet, for the moment able to endure the pain, both hands on the pistol again, which was when one of the chimpanzees swung down from the faux jungle.

  Perhaps any human form was a programmed target, no quarter given to allies, or perhaps the ape malfunctioned, or maybe the blood from the shoulder wound enfrenzied the animal. For whatever reason, the creature fell on the last rayshaw, face-to-face, its legs around the golem’s waist, hands clutching, seeming to bite and bite before springing away and ascending a nearby vertical pole. If the distance and the shuddering light did not deceive, Jane thought the rayshaw, collapsing in death, had been deprived of both its eyes.

  25

  * * *

  The apes in silence capering from bar to bar overhead, the absence of monkey-house chatter imbuing them with even more menace than otherwise would be the case, enrobed by long black hair, pale faces bearing watchful eyes that flared maroon in the room’s light, red in the sudden flashes of stormlight…

  The pressure of a leftward lean brought some small relief to the pain in Jane’s side as she backed away from the center of the big room, where she was vulnerable from every direction. She wanted her back to a wall, between two of the large windows. She was halfway there when another ape laddered down the three levels of grab bars and dropped at the side of the dead rayshaw that she had killed on first entering, the one taken in a kneeling posture. The ape jumped on the back of the corpse and slapped its head a couple times and jumped off. In great though silent agitation, the beast clutched the rayshaw and rolled it over, rolled it over again, as though furious that it would not respond. The ape seized the golem’s face and lifted the lifeless head and slammed the head against the floor, as though it was a demon arrived from sulfurous realms with an urgent commission to collect souls, but now found, to its bitter consternation, that no soul was attendant to this dead thing that looked like a man but was not a man. It seized the rayshaw’s hair and twisted and tore the mass out by the roots and with it a grisly flap of the skin and thin subcutaneous fat that sheathed the skull.

  That grotesque performance, on a nightmare stage of carnage, paralyzed Jane as nothing before had ever done, until abruptly she realized that as long as the ape stood vexed and furious over the corpse, it was an easy target. Clenching her teeth against the flush of pain that the recoil would incite from her wound, she raised the Heckler in both hands and squeezed off four shots, scoring at least three hits. The ape flailed its long arms as if striking out wildly at swarming bees, shrieked once as mortal pain perhaps stripped away its controlling program, and collapsed on the rayshaw that it had been tormenting.

  The thrumming and creaking of the grab bars at once swelled in volume as the two remaining chimps reacted to the death of the third by swinging faster through the steel jungle, dark forms that were at once antic and graceful. Their enormous strength and limberness, the certitude with which they flung themselves and reached for a grip and always found it was terrifying.

  Jane pressed her back to the wall between two windows, where the storm strobed at the glass. She had used four of the nine rounds in the .45. She ejected the magazine, dropped it in a coat pocket, snapped another one into the pistol.

  Sweating, trembling, silently cursing the pain, she wiped the sweat out of her eyes with one coat sleeve and tracked the apes as best she could, not always able to keep both of them in view at the same time. She wondered if they would ever exhaust themselves, and of course she knew the answer: They were controlled not by their own desires anymore but by their programs, and they would remain aloft at speed until their bodies failed or they conspired to distract her and then set upon her.

  She had known what she’d find on the eighth floor, but although she had read about the power and speed of these apes and understood their potential for extreme violence, she had underestimated them. And she had not foreseen how the chaos of the situation would limit her ability to move and react.

  Even if the bulletproof windows could be shot out with a long enough barrage, the apes would follow her onto the balcony, where she wouldn’t be able to reload fast enough. And if she tried to bolt across the open room for the door by which she’d entered, they would catch her. Besides, the stairwell was not an option, considering that they would be at her heels and able to descend the stairs far faster than she could.

  She stood with the pistol in both hands but close to her body, muzzle toward the ceiling, her mind racing through strategies. One existed that would work. There was an answer to this dilemma. The world was a maze of mysteries and puzzles, but it was a world of rational design that did not present puzzles without answers. There was always an answer. If only she could find it.

  Mere minutes old, the storm had not exhausted the bolts in its quiver. The sky blazed as bright as ever, and the thunder crashed as if the mantle of the planet had been cracked wide by some elemental rising force. The lights went out.

  26

  * * *

  In this morning that had been weathered to the gloom of dusk, dayligh
t came sickly under the overhang of the ninth-floor balcony and pressed with such weakness against the thick windows of the eighth floor that nothing of the enormous room was revealed, except that for ten or twelve feet, a paleness like the thinnest rime of frost lay on the concrete floor. The lightning, as long as it might last, fleetingly revealed the tiered grid of grab bars overhead, but with each flash, geometric shadows leapt from that steelwork, and in the flickering black-and-white kaleidoscope, Jane could not see where both apes were at any single moment.

  As each roll of thunder receded, she could better hear the slap of ape hands swinging to new grips, the vibration and creaking of the bar system, and she had no doubt that the animals were moving faster, faster, in a silent frenzy that strongly implied an imminent attack. She couldn’t afford a two-hand grip and wouldn’t be able to shoot according to her Quantico training. She drew the second Heckler and held one pistol in each hand and stared straight ahead into the darkness, thinking furiously.

  Perhaps she read the sounds of their passage better on some deeper level than she did consciously, but she decided that their animal simplicity must affect their strategy more than would the program that directed them to kill. The program was a macro control. Their instinct, however, worked on the micro scale, threaded as it was through every brain cell and every fiber of muscle and bone. The program told them to kill; instinct told them how. A sophisticated attack might involve one coming at her from the side with a sudden startling cry that broke their silence, while the other launched a frontal attack in the immediate wake of that distraction, pinning her to the wall as in an instant it tore off her face with sharp talons and strong hands. But they were not sophisticated.