by Dean Koontz
At the gas cooktop, he lifted one of the burner grates, set it aside, hesitated, and wiped his fingertips over the stainless-steel drip pan. Grease.
Erskine Potter believed in cleaning a cooktop after each use, not just once or twice a week. A tool or a machine, or a system, would function better and last longer if it was clean and properly maintained.
In the sink, he found dishes waiting to be washed: plates, bowls, flatware standing in drinking glasses. At least everything seemed to have been rinsed.
He hesitated to look in the refrigerator, concerned that what he found might make him angry. Anger would make him less focused and less efficient.
Focus and efficiency were important principles. Few people in the world were focused and efficient. For the good of the planet, the unfocused and inefficient needed to be killed.
As the mayor of Rainbow Falls, Montana, he would never be in a position of sufficient power to exterminate millions of people, but he would do his small part. Regardless of the scope of his authority and the size of his assignment, each member of the Community—with a capital C—was as valuable as any other.
Absolute equality was an important principle.
The embrace of cold reason and the rejection of sentimentality was another important principle.
Unfailing cooperation with others of the Community was an important principle, too, as was keeping their existence secret from ordinary men and women.
There were other important principles, as well, but none was more important than any other. When no hierarchy of values existed, making decisions became easy. Confronted with any problem, snared in any difficult situation, Erskine Potter—like any member of the Community—just did the most efficient thing, took the most direct action, and was confident that what he had done was right.
The only morality was efficiency. The only immorality was inefficiency.
Testing his self-control, risking anger, Mayor Potter opened the refrigerator. What a mess.
Jars of olives and pickles stood on the same door shelf as a squeeze-bottle of chocolate syrup. Capers, mustard, ketchup, and salsa—which logically should have been with the olives and pickles—rested instead on a shelf with a pressurized can of whipped cream and a jar of maraschino cherries, which obviously belonged with the chocolate syrup. The items on the primary shelves were stored in an unspeakably disordered fashion.
Appalled, Potter hissed between clenched teeth. Although displeased, even indignant, he would not allow himself to be angry.
Determined to proceed briskly with the task at hand, he closed the refrigerator door.
Faint footsteps crossed the room above. Potter heard someone descending the front stairs.
Beyond the kitchen, the hallway brightened. A cut-crystal fixture on the ceiling cast geometric patterns of light across the walls and floor, as if reality were fracturing.
Erskine Potter did not flee. He did not hide. He remained by the refrigerator, waiting.
A silhouette appeared in the doorway. In the kitchen, from the overhead fluorescents, cool light suddenly fell through the air.
Wearing pajamas and slippers, evidently seeking a late-night snack, the current mayor of Rainbow Falls, Montana, entered the kitchen. Five feet ten, a hundred eighty pounds, fifty-two years old, with brown hair and a sweet round face, the son of Loretta and Gavin Potter, his name was Erskine.
The current Mayor Potter halted in stunned disbelief when he saw his duplicate.
The future Mayor Potter said, “Erskine. My dear brother, I’ve been searching for you half my life.”
This was a lie. Loretta and Gavin Potter weren’t the intruder’s parents. He had no mother or father. He had never been born. Instead, he was grown to maturity in mere months, programmed, and extruded.
He pretended to be the current Mayor Potter’s twin only because the claim would confuse and briefly disarm his prey.
As he talked, he moved, opening his arms as if to embrace his long-lost sibling. He gripped the mayor, drove a knee viciously into his crotch, and pinned him in a corner beside the double ovens with the incorrect clocks.
From under his jacket, he withdrew a pistol-like device. He pressed the muzzle to the mayor’s left temple and pulled the trigger.
Instead of a bullet, the gun fired a needle that pierced the skull and penetrated the brain to a precise depth.
Instantly, the mayor stopped convulsing around his crushed testicles, stopped gasping for breath. His eyes were as wide as the eyes of a child struck by wonder.
Because the needle chemically cauterized the tissue that it pierced, the victim did not bleed.
Like a nail, the needle had a head. It was not flat but rounded, resembling the head of a decorative upholstery tack.
The round form looked like a silvery beetle clinging to the mayor’s temple. The needle was a probe, and the head contained an abundance of electronics, intricate nanocircuitry.
The intruder led the docile mayor to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and said, “Sit.”
When the mayor settled in the chair, hands palms-up in his lap, the intruder went to the back door and opened it.
The woman and the girl entered from the porch. Nancy Potter was forty-four, attractive, with shaggy blond hair. The daughter, Ariel, was fourteen. In fact, they were replicants of the real Nancy and Ariel: grown, programmed, and extruded nine days previously.
Nancy quietly closed the back door. Ariel swept the kitchen with her gaze, then stared at the ceiling. Nancy focused on the ceiling, too, and then she and Ariel exchanged a glance.
As the replicant of Erskine Potter watched, the woman and the girl proceeded quietly out of the kitchen, into the hallway, toward the front stairs. He liked the way they moved, their swift grace and supreme efficiency. They were his kind of people.
He sat across the table from the real Erskine Potter, pointed the pistol at him, and pulled the trigger. The device contained only one round. The second shot was a telemetric command that switched on the embedded needle’s electronics, initiating transmission to a processing-and-storage module in the replicant’s brain.
Although the intruder remained aware of the kitchen, through his mind raced images extracted from the mayor’s gray matter, torrents of them, most of them connected and serial. Others were disconnected flashes, moments from a life.
With the images came data: names, places, experiences, scraps of dialogue, fears and hopes. He was downloading the mayor’s memories with all the distortions and the discontinuities that were a part of recollections.
At the end of this session, the intruder would be able to pass for the real Erskine Potter among even the mayor’s closest friends. He would recognize everyone in Potter’s life and be able to draw upon rich remembrances of each person.
The ninety-minute download left him with the need to pee. He did not know why this should be the case, but it was very much the case, and he barely made it to the half bath, off the downstairs hall, without wetting himself.
When the new—and much relieved—mayor returned to the kitchen, the former mayor still sat at the table, of course, hands palms-up in his lap, looking startled, unmoving except that his lips appeared to be continuously forming words that he didn’t vocalize.
The new mayor washed the dishes in the sink and put them away. He reorganized the contents of the refrigerator. He disposed of some moldy cheese and a pint of cream ten days past its expiration date.
The time was 4:08:24 A.M. His program included an awareness of time to the precise second, an internal thousand-year clock that made timepieces and calendars superfluous.
Before he could adjust the oven clocks, the new Nancy and the new Ariel returned from upstairs. Behind them shambled the real Nancy and Ariel, barefoot and in pajamas, small silver scarabs bright on their left temples.
From outside came the sound of an approaching truck, no more than a minute ahead of schedule.
To the real Mayor Potter, his replicant said, “Erskine, get to your feet and come o
ut to the back porch.”
When the mayor rose from the chair, his gaze was no longer either distant or startled, not mesmerized, but terror-stricken. Nevertheless, he obeyed, as did his wife and daughter when commanded by their replicants.
On the porch, as the big paneled truck braked to a stop in the driveway, Erskine raised one hand to his temple and tentatively touched the rounded head of the needle, which glowed like a jewel in the headlights. But he proved powerless to extract it.
In the cold night, warm breath steamed from everyone. The plumes from the real Potters were more forcefully expelled and more rapidly repeated than the exhalations of those who had usurped their lives.
The house stood on two forested acres on the outskirts of town. No neighbors were near enough to see the three former residents being dispatched to their fates.
Two members of the Community got out of the cab of the unmarked truck and opened the rear doors.
While the new Nancy and Ariel waited on the porch, the new mayor led the former Potter family to the back of the truck. “Get in.”
Along both sides of the cargo area, benches were bolted to the walls.
Five people in nightclothes were seated on the right, two on the left. The Potters joined the two on the left.
Like animals paralyzed by fright, the ten stared out at the new mayor. None of them could cry out or move unless told to move.
The truck was big enough to carry ten more. The driver and his teammate had other stops on their schedule.
With the Potter family aboard, the driver closed and bolted the doors. He said, “For the Community.”
“For the Community,” the new Erskine Potter replied.
He had no idea where the individuals in the truck would be taken or when they would be killed. He wasn’t curious. He didn’t care. They were the spoilers of the world. They would get what they deserved.
chapter 3
For Carson O’Connor-Maddison and her husband, Michael Maddison—she the daughter of a homicide cop, he the son of industrial-safety engineers—the past two years were the busiest of their lives, with considerable homicide and little safety. As New Orleans police detectives, they discovered that a supercilious biotech billionaire named Victor Helios was in fact Victor Frankenstein, still rockin’ at the age of 240. In league with the 200-year-old Deucalion, who sought his maker’s destruction, Carson and Michael survived numerous violent encounters with members of Victor’s New Race, saw horrors beyond anything Poe might have hallucinated in an opium fever, did a significant amount of chasing and being chased, shot a lot of big noisy guns, and ate mountains of fine Cajun food at establishments like Wondermous Eats. Carson drove numerous vehicles at very high speeds, and Michael never kept his promise to vomit if she didn’t slow down. They destroyed Victor’s laboratory, put him on the run, ate even better Cajun takeout from Acadiana, attended Victor’s death, and witnessed the destruction of his entire New Race. They acquired a German shepherd named Duke after saving him from monsters, and they were present when the enigmatic and strangely talented Deucalion cured Carson’s then twelve-year-old brother, Arnie, of autism. Seeking a fresh start, they turned in their badges, got married, moved to San Francisco, and considered opening a doughnut shop. But they wanted work that allowed them legally to carry concealed firearms, so instead of running a doughnut shop, they obtained licenses as private investigators and soon launched the O’Connor-Maddison Detective Agency. They busted some bad guys, learned to use chopsticks, ate a lot of superb Chinese food, spoke wistfully about the doughnut shop that might have been, and had a baby whom Carson wanted to name Mattie, after the spunky girl in the movie True Grit. But Michael insisted he wanted to call her Rooster or at least Reuben, in honor of Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn, the character played by John Wayne in that film. Eventually, they named her Scout, after the splendidly spunky girl in To Kill a Mockingbird.
An hour before dawn, just over four weeks before Halloween, and less than two years prior to the end of the world—if you believed the most recent doomsday scare being advanced by the media—Carson and Michael were sitting in the cab of a delivery truck, in a row of fourteen identical trucks, in a dark parking lot between two huge warehouses, near the docks. They were conducting surveillance in an industrial-espionage case, and talking about, among other things, baby wipes.
“They aren’t too caustic,” Carson disagreed. “They aren’t caustic at all.”
“I’ve read the ingredients.”
“I’ve read the ingredients, too. Aloe vera, lanolin, herbal extract—”
“What herbs did they get the extracts from?” Michael asked.
“An herb’s an herb. They’re all natural. Herbal extracts clean without leaving harmful residues.”
“So they say. But they don’t tell you the specific herbs. When they don’t tell you the specific herbs, the cop in me smells a rat.”
“For heaven’s sake, Michael, no company’s going to set out to make dangerously caustic baby wipes.”
“How do you know? Anybody could own the company. Do you know who owns the company?”
“I’m pretty sure it isn’t owned by al-Qaeda.”
“‘Pretty sure’ isn’t good enough when we’re talking about our little girl’s bottom.”
She sighed. Michael was still adorable, but fatherhood sometimes brought out a paranoia in him that she had not seen before. “Listen, sweetie, I care about Scout’s bottom just as much as you do, and I’m comfortable with using baby wipes.”
“They contain baking soda.”
“Pure baking soda. It eliminates odors.”
“There’s baking soda in fire extinguishers,” he said.
“Good. Then we don’t have to worry about Scout’s bottom catching on fire.”
“Baking soda,” Michael repeated, as if it were a synonym for rattlesnake venom. “I think we should use cotton cloth, water, and soap.”
She pretended horror. “Soap? Do you know what’s in soap?”
“Soap is in soap.”
“Read the label and then tell me about soap.”
“What’s in soap that’s so terrible?”
Carson didn’t know what might be in soap, but she figured at least half a dozen ingredients would alarm Michael and make baby wipes a lot more acceptable to him.
“Just check out the label—but don’t expect ever to be able to sleep again once you’ve read it.”
Out there in the unlighted parking lot, a dark figure moved.
Leaning toward the windshield, Michael said, “I knew this was the place.”
From the seat between them, Carson picked up a camera with night-vision technology.
“What do you see?” Michael asked.
Eye to the viewfinder, she said, “It’s Beckmann. He’s got an attaché case. This is the swap, all right.”
“Here comes someone else,” Michael said. “Pan left.”
Carson panned and saw another man approaching Beckmann from behind a warehouse. “It’s Chang. He’s carrying a shopping bag.”
“Is there a store name on the bag?”
“What does it matter? It’s just something to carry the money.”
“Chang wears cool clothes,” Michael said. “I’ve been wondering where he shops.”
Zooming in with the camera, clicking off a series of shots, Carson said, “He’s talking to Beckmann. Beckmann is putting down the attaché case. Chang is taking something from the bag.”
“Make sure you get a clear shot of the bag. We can enhance it till the store name is readable. Hey—something just happen?”
“Yeah. Chang pulled a gun from the bag and shot Beckmann.”
“I didn’t see that coming.”
“He just shot him again. Beckmann’s down.”
“I don’t hear any shots.”
“Silencer,” Carson reported.
“This is so not right.”
“Chang just knelt, shot him a third time, back of the head.”
“Now what?”
Putting down the camera, Carson said, “You know what.”
“I’m too dad for this stuff.”
Drawing the pistol from her shoulder rig, she said, “And I’m too mom. But baby needs new shoes.”
chapter 4
The truck departed, carrying the real Erskine, Nancy, and Ariel to their doom. The new Mayor Potter, his efficient wife, and his focused daughter returned to the house.
Energetic, industrious, and sagacious, the three thoroughly cleaned the kitchen. They reordered the contents of the cabinets, the refrigerator, and the pantry to ensure that every meal could henceforth be prepared as quickly as possible.
They exchanged not a single word as they worked. Yet they did not duplicate one another’s efforts. Neither did they at any time crowd one another.
When the kitchen had been put right, they prepared an early breakfast. Erskine cracked, scrambled, and fried a dozen eggs while Nancy fried a pound of bacon.
Spots of green mold marked the bread. Like every member of the Community, Ariel was loath to waste anything. She prepared twelve browned slices in the four-slot toaster.
A squeeze-bottle of liquid butter—actually a butter substitute—was thrillingly efficient.
Erskine plated the eggs. Nancy added the bacon. Ariel poured three glasses of orange juice.
As Erskine put the plates on the table, Nancy set out the flatware and Ariel put a paper napkin at each place setting.
With night still pressing at the windows, they sat at the table. They ate.
Because conversation inhibited the efficient consumption of a meal, they initially dined in silence.
Eventually, Erskine said, “As mayor, it has been my habit to take my family at least twice a week to restaurants owned by some of my constituents.”
“Eating at home takes less time,” said Nancy.
“Yes. But until the Community replaces the current population of Rainbow Falls, we must follow the habits and traditions of the Potter family to avoid arousing suspicion.”