by Dean Koontz
“We don’t even have their poor bodies to cremate,” Edna said. “They’re like sailors lost at sea.”
“Get a grip, dear.”
After some sniffling, Edna said, “I miss our lovely furniture.”
“We’ll get back to it.”
“Do you think we will?”
Martha watched the two puddles of gray sludge, and instead of answering the question, she said, “If they turn back into cats, do not pick them up.”
Silas Kinsley
Padmini and Tom retreated a few steps to allow Silas and Bailey to provide Dr. Kirby Ignis with the benefit of their flashlights as he knelt beside Julian Sanchez. The blind man seemed to be paralyzed yet rigid, but that was the least worrisome aspect of his condition.
Only recently Silas would have thought himself delirious or insane if he had witnessed such a thing, but he entertained no doubt that the current transformation of Julian from a man into a thing was real. The first and most obvious indications were in the wrists, moving forward toward the fingers, where the bones changed within the living flesh, elongating and rearticulating, both lengthening and broadening his hands. The metamorphosis wasn’t as fast as that of a man becoming a werewolf in the movies, but it was shockingly rapid nonetheless.
Daring to hold the wrist of one of the morphing hands, which Silas could never have brought himself to do, Kirby Ignis said, “His pulse must be almost two hundred per minute.”
“We’ve got to help him,” Padmini said, but the anguished tone of her voice suggested that she knew nothing could save Julian.
Kirby indicated the bloody bite on Sanchez’s cheek. “Its teeth evidently have hypodermic function, injecting a paralytic agent. Then that tubular tongue … it must be designed for esophageal intubation. Goes down the throat … the throat of the prey. Down the throat … to pump the swarm into his stomach.”
“Swarm?” Bailey asked. “What swarm?”
“That gray sludge. The nanomachines, nanocomputers, billions of tiny machines that convert the prey itself into a predator.”
Although he found it difficult to look away from the morphing fingers, Silas saw that the restructuring of the body was likewise under way, the full extent concealed by clothing. Julian’s slippers had come off and one sock had split as his feet, too, enlarged and changed shape.
“If that thing was part machine,” Bailey said, “then it was a weapon. And Julian is turning into a weapon.”
The familial tremors with which Silas was occasionally afflicted overcame him now, triggered by emotion as easily as they could be touched off by extreme weariness. Although he pressed his lips tight together, his mouth quivered as though with palsy. His right hand trembled to such an extent that he thought it wise to slip the pistol into a pocket of his raincoat.
He remembered the dream that Perry Kyser talked about in the bar at Topper’s: Everything torn down, every man for himself. Worse. It’s all against all.… Murder, suicide, everywhere, day and night, unrelenting.
Just as he returned his attention to Julian’s face, the false eyes, a pair of plastic hemispheres, popped out of the blind man’s sockets and rolled down his cheeks. Where they had been were not vacant holes but new eyes, all gray with black centers, like the eyes of the thing that had bitten him. The bitten would soon become the biter.
“Move back,” Bailey Hawks urged Dr. Ignis. “We can’t let this happen to him.”
Kirby Ignis moved, and Bailey knelt. He put the muzzle of his pistol against Julian’s head, said “God be with you,” and blew out the man’s brains, which appeared more human than those of the Sally Hollander thing had been.
Witness
The Pogrom occurred in two phases, the first planned and the second unanticipated. During the interim, certain alterations were begun to prepare the Pendleton for a new purpose. Due to the sudden reappearance of the Pogromites, who should have self-destructed after their mission was accomplished, most of those changes to the building were never made. Among the few completed were the construction of a series of secret passageways, through which the master of this realm could move discreetly to monitor his acolytes. By default, with all the believers dead, Witness became, so to speak, the reigning prince of this castle. He could move about the building by way of hidden stairs, blind corridors, and concealed doors.
From the gloom within what had once been the women’s lavatory, through the door that stood open on rusted hinges, Witness watched the tall man—someone had called him Bailey—destroy the Pogromite developing within the blind man’s body. He clearly regretted the need to kill the one they called Julian, but he acted with no less decisiveness and conviction than he had shown when he shot Julian’s attacker in the head.
Other residents from other periods of the building’s history had not been armed when they had arrived here. But at least four of the current journeyers had firearms on them when the transition occurred. Witness considered what this might reveal about the everyday violence of their time as compared to that of earlier eras, and he supposed they might be better prepared to survive than those who had come before them.
They had shot out a number of the security monitors that were still functioning. Although it violated his commission and the very purpose of his entire life to date, Witness used his wireless link to deactivate the remaining components of the security system. The Pogromite would still hunt them down, but perhaps less efficiently.
With this fourth mysterious transition, all within 114 days in Witness’s time, he had reason to believe that his ultimate role might be different from what it had been thus far. He had evidence—was staring at it right now—that the ninety minutes this transition would apparently endure could be the most important hour and a half in the history of the world. Seventy-one minutes remained, and his greatest fear was that he might not do the correct thing to ensure that this grim future never occurred.
Dr. Kirby Ignis
Standing over the tortured body of Julian Sanchez, who perished halfway through the lycanthropic transformation, Kirby Ignis was so profoundly alarmed by what he had seen thus far that for the first time in his fifty years, his mind outraced itself, leaping from induction to conclusion to deduction to a new induction, from a host of inferences to a few equally astonishing theories, flying along multiple routes of explanation with such speed that he could not adequately process his thoughts and arrive at a considered course of action. He wished that he could be alone in his simply furnished apartment with his aquarium, Italian opera sung in Chinese, and a cup of green tea. But wishes weren’t going to come true in this Pendleton, and he needed to get a bridle on his thoughts and rein them back from a gallop to a trot.
He could see the fear in Tom, Padmini, Silas, and Bailey, and it was a raw, visceral terror held in check in each case because all of them were people whose life experiences and accomplishments taught them the importance of self-control. Kirby’s fear was different in quality from theirs, emotional but less so than theirs, a sort of cold fear where theirs was hot, more intellectual than not, because he possessed the knowledge to understand more profoundly the meaning of this world in which they found themselves. There were things that he could tell them to help them comprehend the full potential of the threat they faced. But as much as he respected all of them, he felt certain that sharing too much with them would push some of them, if not all, from controlled terror to panic, which would put all of them at even greater risk.
Of Bailey, Tom Tran asked, “You said it was turning Mr. Sanchez into a weapon?”
Indicating the blind man’s mutant remains, Bailey said, “You can see for yourself.”
“Weapons are made. Who can make such a weapon?”
“No one in the time we come from. Someone between then and now.”
Tom shook his head. “What I mean is—why would anyone make such a weapon? Are there people in this world who would do such a thing?”
“What kind of people developed nuclear weapons?” Kirby asked. “They weren’t monster
s. They had good motives—an end to World War II, maybe make war so terrible that it would become unthinkable.”
“We know how well that worked,” Bailey said.
Kirby nodded. “I’m just saying, let’s not go off on some tangent like extraterrestrials. These creatures were born in our past, not on another planet.”
Padmini said, “The one that attacked poor Mr. Sanchez? Was that once … was it Miss Hollander?”
“I saw something of her in it,” Silas said. “I think it was.”
“I’m sure it was her. Used to be her,” Bailey agreed.
“Then there’s another in the building,” Padmini said. “The one that bit Miss Hollander, changed her. That one is still somewhere in the building.”
Winny
In Gary Dai’s apartment, when the thing flew through the room immediately below him, Winny almost froze on the second step from the bottom. Crawling, scuttling, squirming creepers were bad enough. Over the years he had pretty much gotten over his fear of bugs by picking them up, holding them in his hands, and studying them. Beetles, caterpillars, earwigs, spiders—but not the brown ones because they might be brown recluses with venom that dissolved your flesh. He had never been freaked out by things with wings, not even bats, but the swooping presence below, glimpsed only as a shadowy form, was a lot bigger than a bat, big enough to carry off a cocker spaniel if not even a German shepherd. Winny didn’t weigh nearly as much as your average shepherd. Something to think about.
On the other hand, he couldn’t spend his life standing on the next-to-the-last step. That wouldn’t be much of a life, no matter how long it lasted. He thought of the boys in some of the books he read, of how they were always ready for adventure. He thought about Jim Nightshade in Something Wicked This Way Comes, always quick into the night with or without his friend Will. Of course, if you had a name like Jim Nightshade, courage would come easy. When everyone called you Winny and you only recently—belatedly—discovered Santa Claus didn’t exist, you had to stand on that step, working up some spit in your punk-dry mouth, convincing yourself that you weren’t going to pee your pants, talking yourself into being brave.
Iris’s wordless singing at last brought Winny off the stairs and into the lower room. In addition to the qualities that he heard previously in this melodic but eerie voice—the lament of a dead girl with dirt in her teeth, the yearning of a ventriloquist’s dummy with knives in her hands—Winny now detected melancholy and a note that was almost despair. He owed it to Iris to buck up and do this. He didn’t quite know why he owed it to her, but he knew that he did. Maybe it was because they were the only two kids in this mess.
Moonlight flooded through the tall windows, much brighter than the glowing fungus here. His mom had written a really neat song about moonlight, which Winny could never admit he liked as much as he did because it was basically a girl’s song. The moonlight in his mom’s lyrics was a whole lot prettier than this stuff, which was the cold late-October light that made skeletons want to dance in deserted biology labs and called things out of mausoleums to prowl cemetery roads in search of young lovers doing whatever young lovers did in parked cars.
The shadow flew. It swooped, and Winny ducked. The wings made no sound, flung off no wind, and Winny realized almost as fast as Jim Nightshade would have done that the thing in the room was only a shadow and that the real action occurred beyond the windows. Out there in this Future World, which was no land they would ever feature at any Disney park, a thing as big as a backyard trampoline dove down out of the sky and past the window. It was more like a manta ray than like a bird, featherless and pale, with a long barbed tail.
Winny stood transfixed, in awe of the thing, because it was so huge and strange for any creature of the air. He could almost believe that the windows were the walls of an immense aquarium and that the manta thing swam past instead of flying. It arced up into the night, its fleshy wings as flowing, as supple as you imagined a blanket was when you threw it around your shoulders and ran through the apartment pretending to be Superman, which Winny had not done in a long time and would never do again, not since his father, with entourage, paid a surprise visit and caught him at it, thereafter calling him Clark Kent for the whole day and a half that the Barnett battalion hung around.
When the night flyer dove past the windows again, recklessly close this time, like a 747 buzzing a flight-control tower, Winny got a clear look at its face, which was too bizarre and disgusting to keep in his memory if he ever hoped to sleep again. Its mouth wasn’t a slit, but instead round and open like a drain, and the teeth reminded him of garbage-disposal blades. The eye on this side of the mouth rolled like the bulging eye of a big old frog spotting a tasty butterfly on a nearby blade of grass, and Winny had no doubt that the thing had seen him and was wondering how to get at him.
The French windows were bronze, but maybe they were corroded after all these years, and maybe they would collapse into the room if something big enough crashed against them. Rather than stand witness to the trustworthiness of the windows, Winny continued to follow the singing, which faded and then swelled, faded and swelled, until he found Iris.
The girl wasn’t the source of the song.
The room seemed to be singing to her.
Bailey Hawks
With Sally Hollander and Julian Sanchez dead, Bailey had accounted for everyone on the ground floor. Only Tom Tran lived in the basement, and he was already with them. The time had come to return to the Cupp apartment.
Remembering his experience during his morning swim, certain that the more they knew about this place the better prepared they would be to ride out their ordeal, Bailey wanted to go down to the basement and have a look at the pool as it was in this future. Kirby agreed to accompany him. Bailey thought the other three should go up to the third floor, but they insisted that the five of them remain together.
Descending the spiral stairs and then in the lower hall, outside the door to the lap pool, Silas succinctly explained about Mickey Dime in the HVAC vault, the great shaft of blue energy surging out of the lava pipe, and the well-armed skeletons of what might have been the members of the last homeowners’ association making their final stand in that deep redoubt at some unknowable time in the past.
The demon that Sally had seen in the pantry, the one that later must have attacked her, remained on the prowl. Therefore, any closed door had to be regarded as the lid of a jack-in-the-box from which something more deadly than a spring-bodied clown’s head might pop forth. The others stood aside while Bailey and Kirby effected a proper recon entry.
As his partner pushed open the door from the hinged side, Bailey went through low and fast. The room proved to be not as dark as he expected. Colonies of luminous fungus encrusted the walls, revealing that nothing lurked here, although the brightest light came from within the water.
This was not the welcoming glow by which he liked to swim, not the scintillation that traced patterns made by purling water on the walls and on the bottom of the lap pool. Just as he had glimpsed it that morning, the long rectangle was red, not opaque, clear enough but nonetheless disturbing because of the blood that it suggested. This pool had no bottom, or at least not one that could be seen. Beyond the coping were no ceramic tiles as there had once been, but instead rock walls that appeared to shear down hundreds of feet. The source of the queer incandescence emanated from irregularly spaced, luminous striations in the rock, dwindling into depths where the ruby water at last steadily darkened until it had the gravity and mystery of a black hole in space.
The five of them stood along the coping, gazing down into the watery abyss, saying nothing because there was nothing to be said, no explanation worth suggesting. Their faces glowed as if they were gathered at a fire.
After a moment, Padmini pointed. “Look!”
Perhaps thirty or forty feet below, a figure appeared as if out of a recess or a tunnel in the rock. Manlike in form, it swam with the muscular sinuosity of a shark, cruising one length of the pool, and t
hen again, before diving down, down, out of sight.
Bailey assumed that what swam below was the same thing that had grabbed his ankle as he’d escaped the pool earlier in the day. And it was perhaps the same creature that had effected Sally Hollander’s transformation, as she had then effected Julian’s.
Sparkle Sykes
Iris and Winny had not left the Cupp apartment by the front door. If they had gone that way, they would have passed between Sparkle and Twyla, past Martha and Edna. They would have been seen.
Twyla led the way through what had been the dining room, along a short hallway, into a kitchen with termite-eaten cabinetry and broken granite countertops. Twyla checked the pantry, Sparkle the broom closet.
For years she had lived fearlessly, afraid only of lightning, and now she had put that last fear behind her. She had given birth to Iris because to fail to do so would have been to surrender to fear. By the time that she discovered Iris’s condition, she’d had her first bestselling novel, not just a success but a phenomenon, and she was flush enough to put her daughter in the excellent care of others. That would have been an act of fear, a lack of faith in her own ability to cope. And now she would not give in to the fear of losing Iris because she would not lose her. Here in the future, there was no storm beyond the windows, no chance that she would be fried like her parents, and if a metaphorical bolt of some kind was even now on its way from the quiver of Fate, it would damn well be good lightning, like Iris had been good, like the lottery win, like the success of her first book. And if it wasn’t good, if it slammed her hard, she would take the blow and turn it into something good, take the bolt and bend it, reshape it. She was Sparkle Sykes, that magic name, she was Sparkle Sykes, many quick streams rushing always forward, clear and sweet and sparkling, with the power to dazzle and bewitch, and nothing was ever going to beat her into submission, no damn thing.