Dean Koontz - (1989)
Page 32
"It better not be. Because if anything happens to me, Sun is programmed
to broadcast a command that'll be received by the clusters of
microspheres inside you and--will instantly kill us all," Loman
finished.
"Yeah, I know. You've told me. If you go, we all go with you, just
like people down there at Jonestown years ago, drinking their poisoned
KoolAid and biting the big one right along with Reverend Jim. You're our
Reverend Jim Jones, a Jim Jones for the high-tech age, Jim Jones with a
silicon heart and tightly packed semiconductors between the ears. No,
I'm not threatening you, Reverend Jim, because 'threat' is too dramatic
a word for it. A man making a threat has to be feeling something
powerful, has to be hot with anger. I'm a New Person. I'm only afraid.
That's all I can be. Afraid. So it's not a threat. No such a thing.
It's a promise."
Shaddack stepped through the bedroom doorway, into the hall. A drought
of cold air seemed to come with him. Maybe it was Loman's imagination,
but the hall seemed chillier with Shaddack in it.
They stared at each other for a long moment.
At last Shaddack said, "You'll continue to do what I say."
"I don't have a choice," Loman noted.
"That's the way you made me-without a choice. I'm right there in the
palm of your hand, Lord, but it isn't love that keeps me there-it's
fear.
"Better," Shaddack said.
He turned his back on Loman and walked down the hall, into the living
room, out of the house, and into the night, the rain.
1P,.Qrt Two DAYBREAK IN HADES I could not stop something I knew was
wrong and terrible. I had an awful sense of powerlessness.
-ANDREI SAKHAROV Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the
guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.
-WILL AND ARIEL DURANT Before dawn, having slept less than an hour,
Tessa Lockland was awakened by a coldness in her right hand and then the
quick, hot licking of a tongue. Her ann was draped over the edge of the
mattress, hand trailing just above the carpet, and something down there
was taking a taste of her.
She sat straight up in bed, unable to breathe.
She had been dreaming of the carnage at Cove Lodge, of half-seen beasts,
shambling and swift, with menacing teeth and claws like curved and
well-honed blades. Now she thought that the nightmare had become real,
that Harry's house had been invaded by those creatures, and that the
questing tongue was but the prelude to a sudden, savage bite.
But it was only Moose. She could see him vaguely in the dim glow that
came through the doorway from the night-light in the second-floor hall,
and at last she was able to draw breath. He put his forepaws on the
mattress, too well trained to climb all the way onto the bed. Whining
softly, he seemed only to want affection.
She was sure that she had closed the door before retiring. But she had
seen enough examples of Moose's cleverness to suppose that he was able
to open a door if he was determined. In fact she suddenly realized that
the interior doors of the Talbot house were fitted with hardware that
made the task easier for Moose not knobs but lever-action handles that
would release the latch when depressed either by a hand or a paw.
"Lonely?" she asked, gently rubbing the Labrador behind the ears.
The dog whined again and submitted to her petting.
Fat drops of rain rattled against the window. It was falling %A,with
such force that she could hear it slashing through the trees outside.
the wind pressed insistently against the house.
"Well, as lone!y as you are, fella, I'm a thousand times that sleepy, so
you're going to have to scoot."
When she stopped petting him, he understood. Reluctantly he dropped to
the floor, padded to the door, looked back at her for a moment, then
went into the hall, glanced both ways, and turned left.
The light from the hall was minimal, but it bothered her. She got up
and closed the door, and by the time she returned to bed in the dark,
she knew she would not be able to go back to sleep right away.
For one thing, she was wearing all her clothes-jeans and T-shirt and
sweater-having taken off only her shoes, and she was not entirely
comfortable. But she hadn't the nerve to un.dress, for that would make
her feel so vulnerable that she wouldn't sleep at all. After what had
happened at Cove Lodge, Tessa wanted to be prepared to move fast.
Furthermore, she was in the only spare bedroom-there was another, but
unfurnished-and the mattress and quilted spread had a musty odor from
years of disuse. It had once been Harry's father's room, as the house
had once been Harry's father's house, but the elder Talbot had died
seventeen years ago, three years after Harry had been brought home from
the war. Tessa had insisted she could do without sheets and just sleep
on top of the spread or, if cold, slip under the spread and sleep on the
bare mattress. After shooing Moose out and closing the door, she felt
chilled, and when she got under the spread, the musty odor seemed to
carry a new scent of mildew, faint but unpleasant.
Above the background patter and hiss of the rain, she heard the hum of
the elevator ascending. Moose probably had called it. Was he usually
so peripatetic at night?
Though she was grindingly weary, she was now too awake to shut her mind
off easily. Her thoughts were deeply troubling.
Not the massacre at Cove Lodge. Not the grisly stories of dead bodies
being shoveled like so much refuse into crematoriums. Not the Parkins
woman being torn to pieces by some species unknown. Not the monstrous
night stalkers. All of those macabre images no doubt helped determine
the channel into which her thoughts flowed, but for the most part they
were only - 239 a somber background for more personal ruminations about
her life and its direction.
Having recently brushed against death, she was more aware than usual of
her mortality. Life was finite. In the business and the busyness of
daily life, that truth was often forgotten.
Now she was unable to escape thinking about it, and she wondered if she
was playing too loose with life, wasting too many years. Her work was
satisfying. She was a happy woman; it was damned hard for a Lockland to
be unhappy, predisposed as they were to good humor. But in all honesty
she had to admit she was not getting what she truly wanted. If she
remained on her current course, she'd never get it.
What she wanted was a family, a place to belong. That came, of course,
from her childhood and adolescence in San Diego, where she had idolized
her big sister, Janice, and had basked in the love of her mother and
father. The tremendous amount of happiness and security she'd known in
her youth was what allowed her to deal with the misery, despair, and
terror that she sometimes encountered when working on one of her more
ambitious documentaries. The first two decades of her life had been so
full of joy, they balanced anything that followed.
The elevator had arrived on the s
econd floor, and now, with a soft thump
and a renewed hum, it descended. She was intrigued that Moose, so
accustomed to using the elevator for and with his master, used it
himself at night, though the stairs would have been quicker. Dogs, too,
could be creatures of habit.
They'd had dogs at home when she was a kid, first a great golden
retriever named Barney, then an Irish Setter named Mickey Finn. . . .
Janice had married and moved away from home sixteen years ago, when
Tessa was eighteen, and thereafter entropy, the blind force of
dissolution, had pulled apart that cozy life in San Diego. Tessa's dad
died three years later, and soon after his funeral Tessa hit the road to
make her industrials and documentaries and travel films, and although
she had remained in touch with her mother and sister on a regular basis,
that golden time had passed.
Janice was gone now. And Marion wouldn't live forever, not even if she
actually gave up skydiving. More than anything, Tessa wanted to
re-create that home life with a husband of her own and children. She had
been married, at twenty-three, to a man who wanted kids more than he
wanted her, and when they had learned that she could never have
children, he had left. Adoption wasn't enough for him. He wanted
children that were biologically his. Fourteen months from wedding day
to divorce. She had been badly hurt.
Thereafter she had thrown herself into her work with a passion she'd not
shown previously. She was insightful enough to know that through her
art she was trying to reach out to all the world as if it were one big
extended family. By boiling down complex stories and issues to thirty,
sixty, or ninety minutes of film, she was trying to pull the world in,
reduce it to essences, to the size of one family.
But, lying awake in Harry Talbot's spare bedroom, Tessa knew she was
never going to be fully satisfied if she didn't radically shake up her
life and more directly seek the thing she so much wanted. It was
impossible to be a person of depth if you lacked a love for humankind,
but that generalized love could swiftly become airy and meaningless if
you didn't have a particular family close to you; for in your family you
saw, day to day, those specific things in specific people that
justified, by extension, a broader love of fellow men and women. She
was a stickler for specificity in her art, but she lacked it in her
emotional life.
Breathing dust and the faint odor of mildew, she felt as if her
potential as a person had long been lying as unused as that bedroom. But
not having dated for years, having sought refuge from heartbreak in hard
work, how did a woman of thirty-four begin to open herself to that part
of life she had so purposefully sealed off? Just then she felt more
barren than at any time since first learning that she would never have
children of her own. And at the moment, finding a way to remake her
life seemed a more important issue than learning where the Boogeymen
came from and what they were.
A brush with death could stir up peculiar thoughts.
In a while her weariness overcame her inner turmoil, and she drifted
into sleep again. Just as she dropped off, she realized that Moose
might have come to her room because he sensed something wrong in the
house. Perhaps he had been trying to alert her. But surely he would
have been more agitated and would have barked if there was danger.
Then she slept.
From Peyser's, Shaddack returned to his ultramodern house on the north
point of the cove, but he didn't stay long. He made three ham
sandwiches, wrapped them, and put them in a cooler with several cans of
Coke. He put the cooler in the van along with a couple of blankets and
a pillow. From the gun cabinet in his study he fetched a Smith Wesson
.357 Magnum, a Remington 12-gauge semiautomatic pistol-grip shotgun, and
plenty of ammunition for both. Thus equipped, he set out in the storm
to cruise Moonlight Cove and immediate outlying areas, intending to keep
on the move, monitoring the situation by computer until the first phase
of Moonhawk was concluded at midnight, in less than nineteen hours.
Watkins's threat unnerved him. Staying mobile, he wouldn't be easy to
find if Watkins regressed and, true to his promise, came after him. By
midnight, when the last conversions were performed, Shaddack would have
consolidated his power. Then he could deal with the cop.
Watkins would be seized and shackled before he transformed. Then
Shaddack could strap him down in a lab and study his psychology and
physiology to find an explanation for this plague of regression.
He did not accept Watkins's explanation. They weren't regressing to
escape life as New People. To accept that theory, he would have to
admit that the Moonhawk Project was an unmitigated disaster, that the
Change was not a boon to mankind but a curse, and that all his work was
not only misguided but calamitous in its effect. He could admit no such
thing.
As maker and master of the New People, he had tasted godlike power. He
was unwilling to relinquish it.
The rainswept, pre-dawn streets were deserted except for cars-some
police cruisers, some not-in which pairs of men patrolled in the hope of
spotting either Booker, Tessa Lockland the Foster girl, or regressives
on the prowl. Though they could not see through his van's heavily
smoked windows, they surely knew to whom the vehicle belonged.
Shaddack recognized many of them, for they worked at New Wave and were
among the contingent of one hundred that he had put on loan to the
police department only a few hours ago. Beyond the rain-washed
windshields, their pale faces floated like disembodied spheres in the
dark interiors of their cars, so expressionless that they might have
been mannequins or robots.
Others were patrolling the town on foot but were circumspect, keeping to
the deeper shadows and alleyways. He saw none of them.
Shaddack also passed two conversion teams as they went quietly and
briskly from one house to another. Each time a conversion was
completed, the team keyed in that data on one of their car VDTs so the
central system at New Wave could keep track of their progress.
When he paused at an intersection and used his own VDT to call the
current roster onto the screen, he saw that only five people remained to
be dealt with in the midnight to-six-o'clock batch of conversions. They
were slightly ahead of schedule.
Hard rain slanted in from the west, silvery as ice in his headlights.
Trees shook as if in fear. And Shaddack kept on the move, circling
through the night as if he were some strange bird of prey that preferred
to hunt on storm winds.
With Tucker leading, they had hunted and killed, bitten and torn,
clawed and bitten, hunted and killed and eaten the prey, drunk blood,
blood, warm and sweet, thick and warm, sweet and thick, blood, feeding
the fire in their flesh, cooling the fire with food. Blood.
Gradually Tucker had discovered that the longer they stayed in their
altered state, the less intensely the fire burned and the easier it was
to remain in subhuman form. Something told him that he should be
worried that it was increasingly easy to cling to the shape of a beast,
but he could not raise much concern partly because his mind no longer
seemed able to focus about it, pa on complex thoughts for more than a
few seconds.
So they had raced over the fields and hills in the moonlight, raced and
roamed, free, so free in moonlight and fog, in fog and wind, and Tucker
had led them, pausing only to kill and eat, or to couple with the
female, who took her own pleasure with an aggressiveness that was
exciting, savage and exciting.
Then the rains came.
Cold.
Slashing.
Thunder, too, and blazing light in the sky.
Part of Tucker seemed to know what the long, jagged bolts of sky-ripping
light were. But he could not quite remember, and he was frightened,
dashing for the cover of trees when the light caught him in the open,
huddling with the other male and the female until the sky went dark
again and stayed that way for a while.
Tucker began to look for a place to lake shelter from the storm. He knew
that they should go back to where they had started from, to a place of
light and dry rooms, but he could not remember where that had been
exactly. Besides, going back would mean surrendering freedom and
assuming their born identities. He did not want to do that. Neither
did the other male and the female. They wanted to race and roam and
kill and rut and be free, free. If they went back they could not be