by Dean Koontz
Nummy felt kind of bad about riding in this car because Mr. Lyss stole it, and stealing was never good. Mr. Lyss said the keys were in the ignition, so the owner wanted anyone to use it who might need it. But they had hardly gone a mile before Nummy realized that was a lie.
“Grandmama she used to say, if you can’t buy what somebody else has or either make it for your own self, then you shouldn’t keep on always wanting it. That kind of wanting is called envy, and envy can make you into a thief faster than butter melts in a hot skillet.”
“Well, excuse me for being too damn stupid to build us a car from scratch,” Mr. Lyss said.
“I didn’t say you was stupid. I don’t call nobody names. That’s
not nice. I been called enough myself.”
“I like calling people names,” Mr. Lyss said. “I get a thrill out of it. I delight in calling people names. I been known to make little children cry, the names I call them. Nobody’s going to tell me I can’t do something that gives me so much innocent pleasure.”
Mr. Lyss wasn’t as scary as he looked earlier in the day. His short-chopped gray hair still stood out every which way, like it was shocked by all the mean thoughts in his head. His face was squinched as if he just bit hard into a lemon, his eyes were as dangerous-blue as gas flames, shreds of dry skin curled on his cracked lips, and his teeth were gray. He seemed like he could get along fine without food or water, just so he had his anger to feed on. But some of the scary had gone out of him. Sometimes you could almost like him.
Nummy was never angry. He was too dumb to be angry. That was one of the best things about being really dumb, so dumb they didn’t even make you go to school: You just couldn’t think about anything hard enough to get angry over it.
He and Mr. Lyss were an odd couple, like odd couples in some movies that Nummy had seen. In those kind of movies, the odd-couple guys were always cops, one of them calm and nice, the other one crazy and funny. Nummy and Mr. Lyss weren’t cops at all, but they were really different from each other. Mr. Lyss was the crazy and funny one, except that he wasn’t that funny.
Nummy was thirty, but Mr. Lyss must be older than anyone else who was still alive. Nummy was pudgy and round-faced and freckled, but Mr. Lyss seemed to be made mostly of bone and gristle and thick skin with a million creases in it like some beat-up old leather jacket.
Sometimes Mr. Lyss was so interesting you couldn’t stop looking at him, kind of like in a movie when the little red numbers were counting down on the bomb clock. But at other times, staring at him too much could wear you out, and you had to turn away to give your eyes a rest. The snow was soft and cool to look at, floating down through the dark like tiny angels all in white.
“The snow’s real pretty,” Nummy said. “It’s a pretty night.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mr. Lyss said, “it’s a magical night, breathtaking beauty everywhere you look, prettier than all the prettiness in all the pretty Christmas cards ever made—except for the ravenous monster Martians all over town eating people faster than a wood-chipper could chew up a damn potato!”
“I didn’t forget them Martians,” Nummy said, “if that’s what they are. But the night’s pretty anyway. So what do you want to do, you want to drive out to the end of town, maybe see are the cops and the roadblock still there?”
“They’re not cops, boy. They’re monsters pretending to be cops, and they’ll be there till they’ve eaten everyone in town.”
Although Mr. Lyss drove slowly, sometimes the back end of the car fishtailed or it slid toward one curb or the other. He always got control again before they hit anything, but already they needed a car with tire chains or winter tires.
If Mr. Lyss stole another car, one with tire chains, and if Nummy went with him, knowing from the start it was stealing, he would probably be a thief himself. Grandmama raised him, so the bad things he did would bring shame on her in front of God, where she was now.
Nummy said, “You don’t really know the monster cops are still there till you go look.”
“I know, all right.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m a freaking genius,” Mr. Lyss said, spraying spit, gripping the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles looked as sharp as knives. “I just know things, my brain is so damn big. Back there in jail this morning, we hadn’t known each other two minutes till I knew you were a dummy, didn’t I?”
“That’s true,” Nummy admitted.
On the cross street ahead of them, a police car passed south to north, and Mr. Lyss said, “This is no good. We’ll never get out of town in a car. We’ve got to find another way.”
“Maybe we could go out the same way you come in. I always wanted to take me a ride on a train.”
“A cold, empty boxcar isn’t the glamorous fun it sounds like. Anyway, they’ll have the train yard covered.”
“Well, we can’t fly.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Lyss said. “If your skull is as hollow as it seems to be, I could tie a basket to your feet, blow hot air up your nose, and ride you out of here like you were a big old balloon.”
For a block or so, Nummy thought about that as the old man switched on the defroster and as the windshield, which had started to cloud at the edges, became clear once more. Then he said, “That don’t make no sense unless it was just you being mean.”
“You may be right.”
“I don’t know why you have to be mean.”
“I do it well. A man likes to do something if he’s good at it.”
“You aren’t as mean to me now as you was at first, back when we just met.”
After a silence, Mr. Lyss said, “Well, Peaches, I have my ups and downs. Nobody can be a hundred percent good at something 24/7.”
Mr. Lyss sometimes called him Peaches. Nummy wasn’t sure why.
“A couple times,” Nummy said, “I even sort of thought maybe we was getting to be friends.”
“I don’t want any friends,” Mr. Lyss said. “You take a Kleenex and blow that thought out of your head right now. Blow it out like the snot it is. I’m a loner and a rambler. Friends just weigh a man down. Friends are nothing but enemies waiting to happen. There’s nothing worse in this world than friendship.”
“Grandmama she always said friendship and love is what life is all about.”
“You just reminded me there is one thing worse than friendship. Love. Nothing will bring you down faster than love. It’s poison. Love kills.”
“I don’t see no way that’s true,” Nummy said.
“Well, it is true.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Don’t you call me a liar, boy. I’ve torn the throats out of men who called me a liar. I’ve cut their tongues out and fried them with onions for breakfast. I’m a dangerous sonofabitch when I’m riled.”
“I didn’t say liar. You’re just wrong about love, just wrong is all. Grandmama loved me, and love never killed me.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Love didn’t kill her, it was the sickness. If I could’ve took her cancer into me and then died for her, I’d be dead now, and she’d be alive here with you.”
They rode in silence for a minute, and then Mr. Lyss said, “You shouldn’t always listen to me, boy, or take what I say too seriously. Not everything I say is genius.”
“Probably most of it is, but not what you said just now. You know what? Maybe we could skidoo.”
“Could what?”
“You know, like a snowmobile.”
Mr. Lyss steered the car carefully to the curb and stopped. “We could go overland. But is there enough snow for that? It’s like an inch on the ground.”
“Deeper than an inch,” Nummy said, “and lots more coming fast.”
“Where would we get a snowmobile?”
“People they have them all over town. And then there’s the snowmobile place they sell them over on Beartrack.”
“Another damn street with bear in its name. Whoever named the streets in
this godforsaken jerkwater had about as much imagination as a stump.”
“Like I said, there’s a bunch of bears in the general area. We don’t got no tigers or zebras to name our streets after.”
The old man sat quietly for maybe two minutes, just watching the snow fall, as if he decided it was pretty, after all. This was a long silence for Mr. Lyss, who always had something to say about everything. Nummy was usually okay with people being silent with each other, but this much quiet from Mr. Lyss was worrisome because it made Nummy wonder what he was scheming.
Finally, Mr. Lyss said, “Peaches, you actually know anyone who has a snowmobile?”
“I know a couple.”
“Like who?”
“Like the Boze.”
“Boze?”
“Officer Barry Bozeman. People call him the Boze. He races off-road all year ’round in one or another thing.”
“Officer?”
“He’s a policeman. He laughs a lot. He makes you feel you’re as good as anyone.”
“He’s dead,” Mr. Lyss said bluntly. “If he’s a cop, they killed him and replaced him with one of their lookalikes.”
Nummy should have known the Boze was dead, because even the police chief, Rafael Jarmillo, was one of the aliens, so every cop was for sure one of them, too. All the real police were dead and eaten like happened that morning to all the people in the jail cells next to the one from which Nummy and Mr. Lyss escaped.
Grandmama always said no matter how sad something was, still you needed to keep in mind that you would be happy again someday, and you needed to go on. Going on was important, she said, going on and being happy and doing the right thing, because if you went on long enough and were happy enough and did the right thing often enough, you would get to go live with God. But God really didn’t like quitters.
“Is he married?” Mr. Lyss asked.
“Is who?”
“Tarnation, boy, there’s so much vacant space in your head, you should rent it out, there’s a whole damn warehouse full of empty racks between your ears. The Boze! Who else would I be asking about? Is the Boze married?”
“Kiku her head blowed up, she went to quiet, and it just buzzed away, so you never know.”
Mr. Lyss made a big bony fist, and Nummy flinched because he thought Mr. Lyss was going to hit him. But then the old man took a deep breath, opened the fist, patted Nummy’s shoulder, and said, “Maybe you could say that again but in English this time.”
Puzzled, Nummy said, “That there was English.”
“Tell it to me in different English.”
“I only know but one kind of English.”
Mr. Lyss’s knobby hand fisted again, but he still didn’t hit Nummy. He brought the fist to his mouth, and he chewed on a knuckle for a while, and then he said, “What is Kiku?”
“That’s Mrs. Bozeman, like I said. She was a nice Japanese lady.”
“What did you mean—her head blew up?”
“From the bee sting on her neck. She had the allergies but never knew till the sting. Her face they say it blowed up like a balloon.”
“What do you mean—‘she went to quiet’?”
“Quiet Meadows. The cemetery up on Brown Bear Road. The bee it stung and just buzzed away, but Kiku she died, so you never know.”
“They have any kids?”
“The Boze and Kiku? No. That’s good because now Boze is dead, too, the kids would be orphans, all sad and everything.”
“No, they’d be monster food, just like the Boze was. And since he’s a cop, now a monster cop,” Mr. Lyss continued, “we’ll be able to get at his snowmobile, because he won’t be home to stop us. All the cops will be out and busy, killing people and building those cocoons like we saw and doing whatever other filthy stuff their stinking alien kind does.”
“I didn’t notice they stink,” Nummy said.
“Oh, they stink. They stink big-time.”
“Must be something wrong with my nose.”
chapter 4
Behind the wheel of the Jeep Grand Cherokee, squinting through the snow, Carson O’Connor-Maddison—with Michael Maddison—cruised Rainbow Falls on a monster hunt.
Earlier, Deucalion had told them about the large unmarked panel trucks with midnight-blue cabs and white cargo sections, which were essentially on an Auschwitz mission, collecting citizens who had been forcibly subdued and delivering them to an extermination facility in a warehouse. They had found one of the trucks and had tried to take the two-man crew captive for interrogation by pretending also to be Victor’s creations. But the driver quickly recognized the deception, said “You’re not Communitarians,” and then it was just kill or be killed.
From an earlier encounter, Carson had learned that these newest golems of Victor’s were harder to take down than an ordinary man or woman but were far less tough than his previous creatures in New Orleans. She didn’t know why he had stopped producing the nearly invincible specimens that he had called the New Race, unless perhaps his failure to be able to control them completely and at all times had instilled in him some fear of his own creations.
Because they couldn’t think of anything else to do, they were looking now for another blue-and-white truck with the hope of being able to wound rather than kill the crew. With the right techniques of enhanced interrogation, maybe the wounded could be persuaded to reveal Victor’s current center of operations.
The snow complicated the search, diminishing visibility and hampering mobility even for a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Carson was a need-for-speed driver, but these road conditions inhibited her. Snow sucked.
Carson had been born on the Bayou. She was a Louisiana girl who loved Cajun food and danced to zydeco. As a New Orleans homicide detective, she had chased down Victor Helios, aka Frankenstein, and once he and all his creations in the Big Easy were dead, she had been able to look back on the case as an exhilarating adventure. In fact, even at the height of the terror, she and her partner, Michael, now her husband, had been having fun. Police work was always fun. Taking down bad guys was the best fun there was. Guns were fun. Even being shot at was fun as long as the shooters kept missing.
They were no longer cops, they were private investigators, and they lived in San Francisco. Here in Montana, they were out of their element and without authority, though not without big guns, including Urban Sniper shotguns that fired slugs capable of dropping a grizzly bear. A weapon of this power was its own kind of authority. In spite of the guns and even though they were decked out in ultracool black Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suits, the situation in Rainbow Falls was so desperate that they hadn’t had a laugh since before sundown, and the prospects for fun seemed bleak.
“Snow sucks,” Carson said.
“That’s like the tenth time you’ve made that observation,” Michael noted.
“Am I boring you? Is our marriage over? Do you want some woman who has nothing but good things to say about snow?”
“Actually, boring turns me on. I’ve had enough excitement for a lifetime. The more boring you are, the hotter I get.”
“You’re just barely walking the line, Johnny Cash. Better watch your ass.”
In this residential neighborhood on the south side of town, the properties were half acres or larger. The evergreens soared so high that their upper branches seemed to weave into the substance of the sky, and the houses under them appeared, by contrast, to be smaller than they were. There was a Black Forest feeling here, the atmosphere of a fairy tale but one in which a troll with sinister appetites might appear at any moment. Seen through the tremulous curtain of densely falling snow, the lights of every home seemed to twinkle with a promise of mystery and magic.
One house, set farther back from the street than many of the others, on at least an acre, was the locus of considerable activity. Several pickups and SUVs were on the driveway, near the house, parked at different angles from one another, engines running and headlights set high. Exhaust vapors smoked up through the snow and pairs of bright beams t
unneled the dark, pierced the storm, and revealed at various distances the fissured trunks of trees.
As there were no sidewalks or streetlamps in this neighborhood, Carson pulled onto the shoulder of the roadway and stopped to better assess the activity. A few people were standing around the cars, and a man—a mere silhouette from this distance—stood at the head of the front-porch steps as if guarding entrance to the house. The rooms were bright behind every window, and bustling figures could be glimpsed beyond those panes.
“Us or them?” Michael wondered.
Looking past him at the house, Carson said, “Hard to tell.”
A sharp tap on the window in the driver’s door redirected her attention. A man with a walrus mustache, wearing a Stetson and a greatcoat, had rapped the glass with the muzzle of a shotgun, which was aimed at Carson’s face.