Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

Though he wished that he could be driven by a hunger for revenge, could

  be consumed by anger, and could take satisfaction in bludgeoning

  Shaddack to death, that depth of feeling was denied him. His son's

  death had not melted the ice in his heart. He couldn't feel grief or

  rage.

  Instead he was driven by fear. He wanted to kill Shaddack before the

  madman made them into something worse than they'd already become.

  By killing Shaddack-who was always linked to the supercomputer at New

  Wave by a simple cardiac telemetry device Loman would activate a program

  in Sun that would broadcast a microwave death order. That transmission

  would be received by all the microsphere computers wedded to the

  innermost tissues of the New People. Upon receiving the death order,

  each biologically interactive computer in each New Person would

  instantly still the heart of its host. Every one of the converted in

  Moonlight Cove would die. He too would die.

  But he no longer cared. His fear of death was outweighed by his fear of

  living, especially if he had to live either as a regressive or as that

  more hideous thing that Denny had become.

  In his mind he could see himself in that wretched condition gleaming

  mercurial eyes, a wormlike probe bursting bloodlessly from his forehead

  to seek obscene conjugation with the computer. If skin actually could

  crawl, his own would have crept off his body.

  u When he could not find Shaddack at home, he set out for New Wave,

  where the maker of the new world was no doubt in his office busily

  designing neighborhoods for this hell that he called Paradise.

  Shortly after eleven o'clock, as Sam was leaving, Tessa stepped out onto

  the back porch with him and closed the door, leaving-,' Harry and

  Chrissie in the kitchen. The trees at the rear of the property were

  just tall enough to prevent neighbors, even those uphill, from looking

  into the yard. She was sure they could not be seen in the deeper

  shadows of the porch.

  " Listen, " she said, " it makes no sense for you to go alone.

  "It makes perfect sense."

  The air was chilly and damp. She hugged herself.

  She said, "I could ring the front doorbell, distract anyone inside,

  while you went in the back."

  " I don't want to have to worry about you."

  "I can take care of myself."

  "Yeah, I believe you can," he said.

  'Well?

  'But I work alone."

  "You seem to do everything alone."

  He smiled thinly.

  "Are we going to get into another arguments about whether life is a tea

  party or hell on earth?"

  "That wasn't an argument we had. It was a discussion."

  Well, anyway, I've shifted to undercover assignments for the ve very

  reason that I can pretty much work alone. I don't want a partner any

  more, Tessa, because I don't want to see any moro of them die."

  She knew he was referring not only to the other agents WhO had been

  killed in the line of duty with him but also to his late wife.

  "Stay with the girl," he said.

  "Take care of her if anything happens. She's like you, after all."

  "What?"

  - 321 -,She's one of those who knows how to love life. How to deeply

  love it, no matter what happens. It's a rare and precious talent."

  You know too," she said.

  -'No. I've never known."

  "Dammit, everyone is born with a love of life. You still have it, Sam.

  You've just lost touch with it, but you can find it again -'Take care of

  her," he said, turning away and descending the porch steps into the

  rain.

  ,You better come back, damn you. You promised to tell me what you saw

  at the other end of that tunnel, on the Other Side.

  you just better come back.

  " Sam departed through silver rain and thin patches of gray fog.

  As she watched him go, Tessa realized that even if he never told her

  about the Other Side, she wanted him to come back for many other reasons

  both complex and surprising.

  The Coltrane house was two doors south of the Talbot place, on

  Conquistador. Two stories. Weathered cedar siding. A covered patio

  instead of a rear porch.

  Moving quickly along the back of the house, where rain drizzled off the

  patio cover with a sound exactly like crackling fire, Sam peered through

  sliding glass doors into a gloomy family 'room and then through French

  windows into an unlighted kitchen. When he reached the kitchen door, he

  withdrew his revolver from the holster under his leather jacket and held

  it down at his side, against his thigh.

  He could have walked around front and rung the bell, which Might have

  seemed less suspicious to the people inside. But that Would mean going

  out to the street, where he was more likely to be seen not only by

  neighbors but by the men Chrissie said were patrolling the town.

  He knocked on the door, four quick raps. When no one responded, he

  knocked again, louder, and then a third time, lo still. If anyone was

  home, the knock would have been answered Harley and Sue Coltrane must be

  at New Wave, where they worked.

  The door was locked. He hoped it had no dead bolt.

  Though he had left his other tools at Harry's, he had brought a thin,

  flexible metal loid. Television dramas had popularized the notion that

  any credit card made a convenient and uninc minating loid, but those

  plastic rectangles too often got wedged in the crack or snapped before

  the latch bolt was slipped. He preferred time-proven tools. He worked

  the loid between door and frame, below the lock, and slid it up,

  applying pressure when he met resistance. The lock popped. He tried

  the door and there was no dead bolt; it opened with a soft creak.

  He stepped inside and quietly closed the door, making sure that the lock

  did not engage. If he had to get out fast, he did NOTwant to fumble

  with a latch.

  The kitchen was illuminated only by the dismal light of the

  rain-darkened day that barely penetrated the windows. Evidently the

  vinyl flooring, wall-covering, and tile were of the palest hues for in

  that dimness everything seemed to be one shade of green or another.

  He stood for almost a minute, listening intently.

  A kitchen clock ticked.

  Rain drummed on the patio cover.

  His soaked hair was pasted to his forehead. He pushed it aside, out of

  his eyes.

  When he moved, his wet shoes squished.

  He went directly to the phone, which was mounted on the wall above a

  corner secretary. When he picked it up, he got no dial tone, but the

  line was not dead, either. It was filled with strange sounds clicking,

  low beeping, soft oscillations-all of which blended into mournful and

  alien music, an electro threnody.

  The back of Sam's neck went cold.

  Carefully, silently, he returned the handset to its cradle.

  He wondered what sounds could be heard on a telephone that was - 323

  being used as a link between two computers, with a modern.

  was one of the Coltranes at work elsewhere in the house, tied in by a

  home computer to New Wave?

  Somehow he sensed that what he had hea
rd on the line was not as simply

  explained as that. It had been damned eerie.

  A dining room lay beyond the kitchen. The two large windows were

  covered with gauzy sheers, which further filtered the ashen daylight. A

  hutch, buffet, table, and chairs were revealed as blocks of black and

  slate-gray shadows. Again he stopped to listen. Again he heard nothing

  unusual.

  The house was laid out in a classic California design, with no

  downstairs hall. Each room led directly to the next in an open and airy

  floorplan. Through an archway he entered the large living room,

  grateful that the house had wall-to-wall carpeting, on which his wet

  shoes made no sound.

  The living room was less shadowy than any other part of the house that

  he had seen thus far, yet the brightest color was a pearly gray. The

  west windows were sheltered by the front porch, but rain streamed over

  those facing north. Leaden daylight, passing through the panes,

  speckled the room with the watery-gray shadows of the hundreds of beads

  that tracked down the glass, and Sam was so edgy that he could almost

  feel those small ameboid phantoms crawling over him.

  Between the lighting and his mood, he felt as if he were in an old

  black-and-white movie. One of those bleak exercises in film noir.

  The living room was deserted, but abruptly a sound came from the last

  room downstairs. At the southwest corner. Beyond the foyer. The den,

  most likely. It was a piercing trill that made his teeth ache, followed

  by a forlorn cry that was neither the voice of a man nor that of a

  machine but something in between, a semi-metallic voice wrenched by fear

  and twisted with despair. That was followed by low electronic pulsing,

  like a massive heartbeat.

  Then silence.

  He had brought up his revolver, holding it straight out in front of him,

  ready to shoot anything that moved. But everything was as still as it

  was silent.

  The trill, the eerie cry, and the base throbbing surely could not be

  associated with the Boogeymen that he'd seen last night outside of

  Harry's house, or with the other shape-changers Chrissie described.

  Until now, an encounter with one of them had been the thing he feared

  most. But suddenly the unknown entity in the den was more frightening.

  Sam waited.

  Nothing more.

  He had the queer feeling that something was listening for his movements

  as tensely as he was listening for it.

  He considered returning to Harry's to think of some other way to send a

  message to the Bureau, because Mexican food 3 Guinness Stout and Goldie

  Hawn movies-even Swing Shift, now seemed precious beyond value, not

  pathetic reasons to live, but pleasures so exquisite that no words

  existed to adequately' describe them.

  The only thing that kept him from getting the hell out of there was

  Chrissie Foster. The memory of her bright eyes. Her innocent face. The

  enthusiasm and animation with which she had, recounted her adventures.

  Perhaps he had failed Scott, and perhaps it was too late for the boy to

  be hauled back from the brink. But Chrissie was still alive in every

  vital sense of the wordl' physically, intellectually, emotionally-and

  she was dependent on him. No one else could save her from conversion.

  Midnight was little more than twelve hours away.

  He edged through the living room and quietly crossed the, foyer. He

  stood with his back against the wall beside the half, open door to the

  room from which the weird sounds had come; Something clicked in there.

  He stiffened.

  Low, soft clicks. Not the tick-tick-tick of claws like those he had

  heard tapping on the window last night. More like a long series of

  relays being tripped, scores of switches being closed dominoes falling

  against one another click-click-click-clicke

  clickety-click-click-clickety. . . .

  Silence once more.

  Holding the revolver in both hands, Sam stood in front of the door and

  pushed it open with one foot. He crossed the threshold and assumed a

  shooter's stance just inside the room the windows were covered by

  interior shutters, and the only light was from two computer screens.

  Both were fitted with monitors that resulted in black text on an amber

  background. - 325 Everything in the room not wrapped in shadows was

  touched by that golden radiance.

  - Two people sat before the terminals, one on the right side of the

  room, the other on the left, their backs to each other.

  -,Don't move," Sam said sharply.

  They neither moved nor spoke. They were so still that at first he

  thought they were dead.

  The peculiar light was brighter yet curiously less revealing from the

  half-burnt-out daylight that vaguely illuminated the other rooms. As his

  eyes adjusted, Sam saw that the two people at the computers were not

  only unnaturally still but were not really people any more. He was

  drawn forward by the icy grip of horror.

  oblivious of Sam, a naked man, probably Harley Coltrane, sat in a

  wheeled, swivel-based chair at the computer to the right of the door,

  against the west wall He was connected to the VDT by a pair of

  inch-thick cables that looked less metallic than organic, glistening

  wetly in the amber glow. They extended from within the bowels of the

  data-processing unit-from which the cover plate had been removed-and

  into the man's bare torso below his rib cage, melding bloodlessly with

  the flesh. They throbbed.

  "Dear God," Sam whispered.

  Coltrane's lower arms were utterly fleshless, just golden bones. The

  meat of his upper arms ended smoothly two inches above the elbows; from

  those stumps, bones thrust out as cleanly as robotic extrusions from a

  metal casing. The skeletal hands were locked tightly around the cables,

  as if they were merely a pair of clamps.

  When Sam stepped nearer to Coltrane and looked closer, he saw the bones

  were not as well differentiated as they should have been but had half

  melted together. Furthermore, they were veined with metal. As he

  watched, the cables pulsed with such vigor that they began to vibrate

  wildly. If not held fast by the clamping hands, they might have torn

  loose either from the man or the machine.

  Get out.

  A voice spoke within him, telling him to flee, and it was his own voice,

  though not that of the adult Sam Booker. It was the voice of the child

  he had once been and to which his fear was P, I 1 encouraging him to

  revert. Extreme terror is a time machine thousand times more efficient

  than nostalgia, hurtling us backward through the years, into that

  forgotten and intolerable condition of helplessness in which so much of

  childhood is spent.

  Get out, run, run, get out!

  Sam resisted the urge to bolt.

  He wanted to understand. What was happening? What had, these people

  become? Why? What did this have to do with the Boogeymen who prowled

  the night? Evidently through micro.

  technology Thomas Shaddack had found a way to alter, radically and

  forever, human biology. That much was clear to Sam, but knowing
just

  that and nothing else was like sensing that something lived within the

  sea without ever having seen a fish. so much more lay beneath the

  surface, mysterious.

  Get out.

  Neither the man before him nor the woman across the room seemed remotely

  aware of him. Apparently he was in no imminent danger.

  Run, said the frightened boy within.

  Rivers of data-words, numbers, charts and graphs of myriad types-flowed

  in a flood-like rampage across the amber screen, while Harley Coltrane

  stared unwaveringly at that darkly flickering display. He could not have

  seen it as an ordinary man would have, for he had no eyes. They'd been

  torn from his sockets and replaced by a cluster of other sensors tiny

  beads of ruby glass, small knots of wire, waffle-surfaced chips of some

  ceramic material, all bristling and slightly recessed in the deep black

  holes in his scull.

  Sam was holding the revolver in only one hand now. He kept his finger

  on the trigger guard rather than on the trigger itself, for he was

  shaking so badly that he might unintentionally let off a shot.

  The man-machine's chest rose and fell. His mouth hung open, and

  bitterly foul breath rushed from him in rhythmic waves.