by Dean Koontz
“We’ve got one minute to enter the code before the alarm goes off,” Travis said. The boy stepped into the receiving room, to which food and other kitchen supplies were regularly delivered, went to the lighted keypad, and entered 4-4-7-3. The tiny red indicator lamp turned green.
Without the lock or latch to hold it closed, the door was likely to drift open.
As Sully used an eye-and-hook bungee cord to link the door handles together, he said, “We’re far away from the nearest house, not much chance anyone could say for sure where that shot seemed to come from. Nevertheless, let’s be quick about this.”
From the receiving room, guided by three flashlights, they entered the large walk-in refrigerator. Beyond the walk-in lay the kitchen, where everything was weird.
chapter 37
Victor Immaculate’s mind races whether he is sitting as still as the heart of a stone or taking random walks through this windowless world of which he is the prince. Cloned from the DNA of the original Victor Frankenstein, he is Victor Purified, Victor Distilled, Victor to the nth degree, and therefore has the most brilliant mind in all of history.
The facility is hardly less immense than a dream labyrinth that the sleeping mind constructs as a metaphor of eternity. Sterile white corridors with polished gray concrete floors branch and branch again. Spacious rooms open into expansive laboratories, beyond which lay more chambers of daunting scale, some equipped with extrusion machines in the process of making Communitarians, others featuring towering mazes of supercomputers. Each silent stairwell earns the last four letters of its name, far below ground from even its highest level, boring down through the strata of the vast building as if through bedrock toward a perpetually dark subterranean lake.
Considering that civilization is being overthrown and the world is being unmade from this redoubt, there is little noise. Except for the soft treading of Victor’s rubber-soled shoes, he usually walks in silence. Constructed to sustain direct nuclear strikes and continue to function, the building is not only buried deep in the earth, under a deflecting steel-and-concrete cowl sixty feet thick, but every wall and every floor is made of massively thick steel-reinforced concrete. Few sounds can penetrate from room to room or from level to level, and Victor seldom hears anything but the voice of his own thoughts in the eleven-dimension nautilus of his intricate mind.
Two hundred twenty-two work here, replicants of the scientists who originally staffed the facility. Needing no sleep, they toil at all hours, every day.
Victor speaks only to a handful, key personnel, and never sees most of the others. Face-to-face encounters are distractions. His mind works most efficiently in solitude, for no one is a fraction as intelligent and insightful as he is, and no one exists who might inspire him to greater brilliance than that with which he already shines. The core computer tracks Victor and everyone else in the Hive, and by direct-to-brain messaging, as he approaches, they are warned to retreat to other rooms until he passes.
Victor is not a replicant, he’s a clone, and so he’s technically as human as the original Victor. Direct-to-brain messaging is not an option for him. Throughout the facility, at strategic points, hang plasma screens that are part of the communication system, and as he passes one of these, it brightens and sounds a three-note tone to attract his attention.
Across the screen unscrolls a message to the effect that one of the Builders has ceased to transmit its position in Rainbow Falls. It is one of the second generation, made from the rendered bodies of several police officers lured to Chief Rafael Jarmillo’s house.
This does not mean that the Builder has been killed. They cannot be killed. They are invulnerable to disease and injury.
Neither does it mean that this Builder is malfunctioning. Victor does not believe the Builders are capable of malfunctioning, for their design is perfect and their construction program without flaw.
He is certain that the fault lies in the mechanics of the equipment that receives the Builders’ telemetric signals. The Builder is still functioning efficiently, rendering people and building other Builders, still transmitting its position. But the tracking system is off-the-shelf equipment not of Victor’s design, and therefore it is not perfect. This is an annoying but insignificant detail, a gnat crossing the path of the Communitarian war machine.
Continuing his random walk, Victor Immaculate comes upon a small three-legged table that has been set out in anticipation of him. On the table stands a cold bottle of water. Next to the water is a pale blue saucer. In the saucer lies a white capsule. He holds the capsule between his teeth, opens the bottle, tongues the capsule into his mouth, and washes it down with two swallows of water.
He walks and thinks. Through his mind race torrents of ideas, theories, plans, models of complex entities constructed from unique molecules that the universe is incapable of creating but that he could create if he wished to do so. Now, as he routinely does, he engages in multitrack cognition, keenly following several completely different lines of thought simultaneously.
As he passes another plasma screen, it brightens, issues the three-note request for attention, and informs him that the first-generation Builder that went into the world as Ariel Potter has ceased to transmit its location. This is of course the same tedious problem, another failure of the tracking system, an argument for never using government-surplus equipment, but after all it is only another gnat.
As he is turning away from the screen, it issues the three notes once more. This time the scrolling message is in regard to the fleet of trucks efficiently collecting brain-probed people to be taken to extermination centers and rendered there by Builders. Three of the vehicles have fallen behind schedule.
Two of them have stopped at locations not on their manifests and have remained there for extended periods of time. This is certainly a consequence of mechanical failure, because Victor did not design the trucks and have them built at his facility. They, too, are off-the-shelf equipment.
The third truck is on the move again, but it is not proceeding to any of the addresses at which it is expected. One of several possible explanations will account for this, and contingency plans exist for all of them.
“Consult the master strategy-and-tactics program, apply the appropriate remedy, and press forward without delay,” he tells the screen.
Feeling the need for a change of atmosphere to refresh his eyes and mind, Victor rides an elevator down many floors and disembarks on one of the levels that he has not needed to occupy for his project. Because the building is hermetically sealed, impervious to water and insects, and receives its microbe-free, ideally humidified air through a filtration system that applies fourteen different processes of purification, these lower corridors and chambers are without dust and shelter not a single silverfish or spider.
The walls here are a pale shade of gray, and the floors are white, the reverse of the color scheme on higher levels. He does not know why, nor does he care to know. He has no interest in those things that are produced by talent: decor, fashion, art, literature, music, dance, craftsmanship. Every kind of talent is a human aptitude. Victor Immaculate despises and scorns humanity, and every gift that men and women possess only reminds him of the one thing that he hates more than them.
On this deeper level, the walls hold no plasma screens to nag him with three-note alerts; the higher floors have been retrofitted with that communication system to facilitate his work. These rooms are not only deserted but also without equipment and furnishings. Thermal sensors detect his presence and switch on the lights overhead as he progresses; therefore, he moves forward always toward a blackness of liquid density that retreats from him as though the very darkness fears him. Here he can walk in true solitude and enjoy without interruption the infinite genius of his ceaselessly laboring mind.
He is not concerned that he will miss being informed of some crisis, for there will be none. Whatever problem might arise in the conquest of Rainbow Falls, it will be but another gnat, and there will be numerous contingenc
y plans to cope with it and ensure the triumph of the Community.
Throughout the centuries, popes have claimed infallibility, only in matters of faith but infallibility nevertheless. Victor Immaculate knows with the certainty of genius that all popes are frauds, but he is not of their ilk. Victor Immaculate, Purified, Distilled, Victor to the nth degree, is infallible in all things. The war against this Montana town will inevitably proceed until every last man, woman, and child is slaughtered and processed into an army of new Builders who will be the shock troops of Armageddon.
chapter 38
Nummy thought a snowmobile trip would be fun. He never rode one before, but often he watched other people zoom around on them, and he figured it must be like the best carnival ride ever.
The first thing that went wrong was his seat, not his backside but his seat on the machine. Mr. Lyss drove, so Nummy had to perch behind him and hold on for dear life. Some machines, two people could ride real cozy. But this one had these saddlebags that you couldn’t take off without tools and time, so Nummy sat part on the seat and more on the saddlebags, which wasn’t comfortable, especially when they flew off a little hill and bounced down.
Another thing that went wrong was how cold it was, even colder because of the wind they made, how it stung Nummy’s face where the wool scarf didn’t cover, how it almost right away began to bite his ears even through the toboggan cap he pulled over them.
This neighborhood was Nummy’s, and it was near one edge of town, and he knew the fields all around, where to find the stream and where you would go if you followed it for a while and where you would go if you turned away from it near Bear Rock. Mr. Lyss didn’t know the land in these parts. Nummy was supposed to hold tight to the old man’s coat—which was really not his coat but stolen—and look around Mr. Lyss to keep an eye on where they were going. Then if Mr. Lyss should bear left, Nummy was supposed to pull on the left side of his coat, on the right side if he was to go right. Mr. Lyss said he would be the pilot, and Nummy would be the navigator, and if they got lost, he would cut off Nummy’s peewee with a blunt knife and tie it on the handlebars for decoration.
The thing that was most wrong with the wind they made and with the cold was that Nummy didn’t have a helmet like Mr. Lyss did, so the cold wind stung his eyes, made them water. Even with headlights showing the way, Nummy found it hard to tell what was what in all the whiteness and the dark. When his eyes watered too much, getting lost got so easy that even he could do it without trying.
Another thing that went wrong was that Mr. Lyss didn’t drive a snowmobile as well as he drove a car. Worse, he must have thought he was a better snow driver than he really was, and he went dangerous fast. Or maybe he was scared that the noise of the machine and the headlights would draw the attention of the monsters, and he wanted to get as far from town as quick as he could. Nummy bounced on those saddlebags so much, he was afraid he might come down just the wrong way so hard that one of the saddlebags would get stuck between his butt cheeks.
So there they were, running flat-out into snow and dark, Nummy pulling hard left when he wasn’t even sure left was right, Mr. Lyss shouting curses that Nummy was grateful he could only half hear, and they came to a place where the land changed. The land dropped maybe three feet, and they were flying. The snowmobile wasn’t an airplane, so it didn’t fly far before it dropped, too, and if Mr. Lyss wasn’t giving the machine more gas even while flying, it sure sounded like he was. They came down so hard they both fell off, and the snowmobile slid maybe a hundred feet across the field before it came to a stop, all the falling snow sparkling pretty in its headlights.
Nummy was first on his feet, ready to run if Mr. Lyss pulled a blunt knife from a coat pocket.
If the snowmobile was broken, this was maybe even worse than getting lost, but almost at once, an even worse thing happened. Just as Nummy got off the ground, a thing whooshed overhead, its tail of flames blue and orange, and a second later the snowmobile went boom and for a moment disappeared in a ball of fire.
Even Mr. Lyss was left speechless by this development, and after a few seconds Nummy heard the engine purring overhead. He looked up and saw the pale plane not far above, like a ghost plane, gliding through the storm, big but not as big as the airplanes that people flew in. When it passed over the burning snowmobile, firelight throbbed across its belly, and then it hummed away into the dark.
On his feet near Nummy, looking after the plane that he couldn’t see anymore, Mr. Lyss said, “That sonofabitch was like one of those drones, those drones they send off to kill hard-core terrorists in Afghanistan and other hellholes. Predators, they call them. Armed with missiles. Must’ve been drawn by the engine heat. If we hadn’t just fallen off, we’d be charred meat for a bear’s dinner. What the Sam Hill is a Predator doing here, blowing up snowmobiles?”
Nummy didn’t have an answer, but he didn’t think Mr. Lyss would hold that against him. Mr. Lyss knew Nummy wasn’t an answer man.
The more the old man thought about his question, the angrier he became. “Nobody has the right to chase us down and try to make toast out of us, just blow a valuable snowmobile to smithereens. Yes, yes, Peaches, I know it’s not my machine, I stole the damn thing from a dead man who might want to ride it to his funeral, and now he can’t because of me and my thieving ways. But I’ve still got a perfect right to be offended by such an arrogant assault. I’m a citizen in good standing of the United States, after all, I’ve got my rights. I’m no damn terrorist. You’re no terrorist. We’re just a peaceable hobo and a dummy, trying to save ourselves from monsters, and these bastards blow up our transportation.”
The flames were less bright than at first, but all around the broken-apart snowmobile, the falling snow seemed to catch fire, too, a million sparks whirling down. Reflections of firelight spread and fluttered like gold-and-red wings across the white land, as if there were angels in the night.
Mr. Lyss grew so angry he couldn’t even finish his sentences. Everything he started to say ended in sputtering and spitting, and one group of words didn’t seem to belong with the next group. He did a wild dance of anger in the meadow, around in circles, kicking at the snow, punching the air with his bony old fists, shaking them at the sky.
Nummy was reminded of one of the stories Grandmama read to him a long, long time ago, about a princess who spun straw into gold and a mean little man who taught her how if she would give him her firstborn baby. Nummy couldn’t remember the name of the princess, but the little man was Rumpelstiltskin, a name that stuck with you.
At the moment, Mr. Lyss wasn’t being mean. He was just being angry, but he sure did look like the man in the story. He said he was so mad he could spit. He said it over and over again, and every time he said it, he did spit. Nummy couldn’t make sense of any of that, so he just stood and waited until Mr. Lyss at last burned himself out, which took almost as long as the snowmobile.
When the old man stopped muttering, spitting, and kicking, Nummy said, “I really, really don’t want to say this, but I got to.”
“Say what?” Mr. Lyss asked.
“We’re lost. I don’t know where this place is, all this white and dark, but it’s not my fault because the cold wind it stung my eyes and blurred everything. I don’t want my peewee cut off. Anyway there’s no handlebars to decorate with it anymore.”
“Relax, Peaches. I don’t blame you for this.”
“You don’t?”
“Didn’t I just say I don’t?”
“I guess you did.”
“Besides, we’re not lost.”
“We’re not?”
“You are, as usual, a dazzling conversationalist. No, we aren’t lost. We’ve only come a mile or so, maybe a mile and a half. I have this flashlight that I stole from the dead Bozeman.” He switched it on. “We just have to follow the trail the snowmobile left until we get back to his house, where I hope to God that piano-playing monster has got sick of that morbid music and is pounding out some ragtime.”
N
ummy looked at the beam from the flashlight sliding over the snowmobile tracks, and he said, “Your being smart just saved us.”
“Well, saved might be too strong a word, considering that we’re going nowhere but back into the village of the damned.”
They trudged side by side along the tracks the snowmobile had left, and after a while, Nummy said, “I haven’t wished I was smart in a long, long time, but now I wish it.”
“Don’t,” Mr. Lyss said. “Being smart isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Besides, like I told you before, the world is full of educated smart people who are ten times dumber than you.”
Nummy’s nose watered from the cold, and the nose water half-froze on his upper lip. He wiped with his coat sleeve, but then he realized that was disgusting, so he just put up with the lip ice.
After another while, he said, “I wonder what it’s like to live with palm trees, a place like that.”
“It’s nice enough. I’ll take you someplace like that if we live through this.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Grandmama she’s buried here and all.”
“We can dig her up and take her with us, bury her where there’s sun and flowers year round.”
“I don’t know they’d let us do that.”
“Anything can be arranged for money.”
“I wouldn’t know how.”
“I would.”
“I guess you would.”
After another silence, Mr. Lyss said, “Good thing for us there’s no wind, or these tracks would smooth right over before we found our way back.”
“That’s another smart thing to figure out.”
“My brain is so big and still growing so fast, every couple years, they have to open my skull and take out a piece of brain so there’s room enough in there.”