The Dead Town

by Dean Koontz

  The music was very sad. Nummy thought a person might curl up like a pill bug and never uncurl, listening to that music too much.

  “In return,” Mr. Lyss said, “you come along with us, answer some questions.”

  “What questions?” the piano player asked.

  “Any damn question that pops in my head to ask. I’m not giving you a list of questions ahead of time so you can study them and just scheme up a bunch of lying answers. O’Bannon here is a dummy, but I’m not, and you better keep that in mind. If you lie to me, I’ll know it’s a lie, I can smell a lie better than a bloodhound can smell the nearest sausage. Then I’ll put you in a cage and feed you well and never kill you. You have to earn it. Is that understood?”

  “Yes,” the Xerox Bozeman said, and he stood up from the piano.

  chapter 48

  The Communitarian workers in the Hive are forbidden to descend to the vacant lower floors not used by Victor’s enterprise, through which he now walks in splendid isolation.

  In the early days of their creation, two had come down here, been lured into this realm by a scientist named Ehlis Shaitan, or so he claimed, who worked in the building back in the Cold War. Shaitan had gone mad in a most interesting way, had vanished while supposedly on vacation, but in fact had been living in the secret byways of the lower floors for almost thirty years, subsisting on immense stores of dehydrated, vacuum-packed foods intended to sustain thousands of government officials who would have been brought here in anticipation of imminent conflict, to ride out World War III and the radioactive aftermath.

  In certain ubersecret bunkers at the bottom of this supersecret installation, Ehlis Shaitan invented a colorful personal history that was mythological in nature. In scores of thick handwritten volumes, in elaborate bunker-wall paintings and carvings done with hand tools, he celebrated his supposedly supernatural powers and crowned himself the immortal ruler of this underworld. And acting as a prophet, he predicted his own ascension to the surface in a time of cataclysm, when he would take what riches he wanted, rape whomever he desired, kill more prolifically than any score of homicidal rulers had ever murdered their fellow men, and allow those to live who worshipped him and became his pliant and obedient servants.

  In his mid-seventies, Shaitan grew weary of waiting to ascend to rule a devastated Earth, and when Victor and his original team of scientists moved into the upper levels of the facility, the bearded old man monitored them secretly. Eventually he enticed two first-generation Communitarians into his lower world of obscene, violent, grotesque murals, into rooms in which the floors were as vividly decorated as the walls and ceilings, and he made an effort to enlist them in his cult.

  When Victor and his team found the two missing Communitarians, both had to be destroyed, so strange had they become. The weakness in their program was identified: certain lines of code that did not sufficiently embed and enforce the absolute need for total focus on efficiency. All subsequent Communitarians had functioned perfectly, of course.

  Victor had personally killed the lunatic old man and ordered his bunkers sealed. There was no room for an Ehlis Shaitan in the world to come, no need for his like or his opposite.

  Now Victor walks the lower floors, alone with his thoughts, his multiple cascades of scintillant theories and ideas, pleased by the prospect of witnessing the extermination of every thinking creature on the planet, down to the last finch and wren, to every smallest lizard. When his are the only eyes left to see the world, when his is the only mind left to appreciate it, how brilliant it will be to end his own existence as unhesitatingly as he had terminated Ehlis Shaitan.

  He would prefer to walk in this deep retreat for hours yet, for days. But although the solitude is invigorating, his time here is necessarily limited by the absence of Communitarians to see to his needs.

  He takes an elevator up to one of the floors of the Hive. In the corridor, as he approaches the first plasma screen, it sounds the three-note alert to request his attention. Scrolling up the screen comes the report that the employees at KBOW have not been entirely replaced with Communitarians as per the plan. They have become aware of the replicants among them, and they are broadcasting a warning to Rainbow Falls and, perhaps more worrisome, to communities beyond in that portion of Montana that the station serves.

  This is not a gnat in the path of the Communitarian war machine, as was the failure to properly track two of the Builders. This is admittedly a larger issue, a housefly rather than a gnat, but it is not a serious setback, because there can be no serious setback in the progress of the Community. Their triumph is inevitable; and to think otherwise would credit humanity with at least some significance, when it has none, not a minim.

  Victor says exactly what he said before, although he knows that his order has already been effectuated because of the well-programmed responses of the brutal Communitarian war machine. “Consult the master strategy-and-tactics program, apply the appropriate remedy, and press forward without delay.”

  With no destination in mind at the moment, still walking just to walk and think, he turns right at the next corridor, where the small three-legged table waits for him. On the table stands a cold bottle of water. Beside the water is a yellow saucer. In the saucer lies a shiny red capsule and a white tablet. He swallows the capsule first and then the tablet.

  When next he approaches a plasma screen, it sounds the three notes. The scroll informs him that, in addition to the problem at KBOW, pockets of organized resistance have formed in Rainbow Falls.

  This is expected. Resistance is futile. Even now, Builders by the score are emerging from their cocoons, and the next, more violent, phase of the conflict is beginning. Soon they will emerge by the hundreds. They are indestructible, unstoppable, and their rapidly increasing numbers will soon ensure victory in Rainbow Falls, after which they will spread out anonymously through the country and then the world, a plague of death growing geometrically in virulence day by day.

  chapter 49

  At the end of Erika’s driveway, Deucalion turned right, not onto the county road but instead directly into the driveway at the Samples house, under the spreading limbs of the towering evergreens. Through the broken-out passenger window, he heard the nearest sentry call quietly to a second who was farther removed, and the second to a third, passing the news like members of a fire line passing a pail of water. The name with which they announced his return wasn’t his own—“Christopher …” “Christopher …” “Christopher …”—and he wondered why they had adopted a code name for him.

  As Deucalion stepped down from the truck, Michael appeared in response to the sentries’ announcement. “The Riders don’t waste time. The effort to make a garrison of the neighborhood is moving fast. And expanding from one square block to two as they get people to join them. Those cell-phone videos make an impression on the skeptical. And now your work at KBOW. Some local talk-show guy is getting out the word with such passion he mostly sounds convincing. And even when he sounds like a raving nut, he sounds like a nut who’s telling the truth.”

  “More children?” Deucalion asked.

  “Carson’s assembling the next group in the living room.”

  “How many?”

  “I think fifteen. They’re coming over fences from neighboring houses, yard to yard to yard.”

  Opening the cargo doors, Deucalion said, “Jocko found a few things worth knowing. The most helpful might be the name of the organization Victor is using for cover. Progress for Perfect Peace.”

  “Interesting sense of irony. When all of us are dead, the peace will be perfect, I guess.”

  “It’s not irony,” Deucalion said. “It’s confidence.”

  “I hate that guy.”

  “Progress for Perfect Peace. Spread the name around. Maybe someone has heard it before. Maybe someone knows about a location other than the warehouse where they were liquidating those brain-damaged people.”

  Carson appeared on the front porch of the house. She led a group of well-bu
ndled youngsters down the steps and across the yard to the truck.

  The children must have been briefed about Deucalion, because they showed no fear of him. Their thin, pluming breath seemed to be a testament to their fragility, to how easily they could be snuffed out, but the plumes didn’t betray any terror of him. As they boarded the truck, some looked at him shyly, and other sweet, cold-pinked faces regarded him with an awe that seemed to have in it an element of delight.

  He was not accustomed to delighting children. He liked it.

  After Deucalion assured the kids that they would not have to endure the dark in the back of the truck for more than a few minutes, he closed the doors and said to Carson, “Why do the sentries call me Christopher?”

  “Among other things, he’s the patron saint of travelers, especially of children. They say he was a Canaanite of gigantic stature. Seems to me, Christopher fits you better than your current handle.”

  In a time when he was bitter about having been brought to life, when he was full of rage and had not yet realized what his mission must be, he named himself Deucalion as an expression of his self-loathing. Mary Shelley titled her book Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus. In classical mythology, Prometheus was a Titan, brother of Atlas. He shaped human beings from clay and endowed them with the spark of life. Made by Victor, the modern Prometheus, Deucalion was in effect his son, and he felt, back then, that he should carry the name to remind himself that he shared the shame of Victor’s rebellion against all of nature.

  Now he knew that the lightning of his birth pulsed in his eyes as he said to Carson, “I haven’t earned a better name than the one I have now.”

  “Earned? Back in Louisiana, you presided over Victor’s death in the landfill.”

  “But now he’s back. Version 2.0.” He started forward toward the driver’s door, then stopped and turned to them. “Where did his clone get the money for this? He left New Orleans with only a fraction of my maker’s fortune.”

  “He’s like a Broadway producer,” Michael said. “He found some backers.”

  “Backers with deep pockets,” Carson said. “So deep they might as well be bottomless.”

  Deucalion said, “Even if these new creations can be defeated, and even if he can be killed, perhaps we ought to be worried about the reaction of his backers when they get no return for their investment.”

  He got behind the wheel of the truck. As he pulled out of the driveway and turned left, he tapped the horn—and it sounded as he braked to a stop at Erika’s place. By the time he opened the back door and the children began to disembark, Erika and Addison appeared on the front porch to greet them.

  chapter 50

  Frost on foot, urgently seeking transportation, was not sure where he would go when he had wheels. If Chief Rafael Jarmillo, out there bringing a hard new kind of law to this hellish town, was not the real Jarmillo, if the real Jarmillo and his family had been ground up like Dagget, then roads out of Rainbow Falls were probably blockaded. This was the War of the Worlds or something like it, and restricting the movement of people in a captured town was always a priority in a war. To be seen approaching the roadblock and then turning away from it would invite pursuit. Frost wanted to avoid pursuit. After what he had seen, he didn’t think he’d survive being chased by whatever the things were that pretended to be local cops.

  As he prowled this residential neighborhood, wading along snow-mantled sidewalks, drawing steadily closer to the business district, he saw shadows moving behind drawn curtains in some houses, and he wondered what might be casting them. He definitely wasn’t going to indulge his curiosity by ringing a doorbell or two. At a few houses, he saw faces at windows, people seeming to study the night, but he kept moving because maybe they weren’t people any more than the brunette from the cocoon had been the beauty queen that she first appeared to be.

  A car turned the corner a block away, and as its headlights swung in his direction, Frost crouched on the sidewalk beside a Lexus SUV. Maybe the driver of the approaching vehicle was someone coming home from shopping or from dining out, human and trustworthy. But if the police were not really police, and if they were patrolling with the determination to limit citizens’ ability to move freely about, they might be assisted by others of their kind driving ordinary vehicles instead of marked squad cars, on the lookout for pedestrians and unauthorized motorists. Under the grumble of the car’s engine, Frost heard the muted clinking of snow chains as it cruised past without slowing.

  Driving might make him a more obvious target than if he remained on foot, but he continued to seek transportation. Instead of cruising around at random, he would drive directly to some parking spot where he could keep a watch on all approaches, yet where the crystallized exhaust of the idling engine would not attract attention, so that he could stay warm and gain time to think. Perhaps in the last row of for-sale vehicles in a closed car dealership, far back from passing traffic in the street. Or the big supermarket on Ursa Avenue. It would be closed now, the lot deserted, and a dark corner there might be just the place.

  When he found the old Chevy—winter tires but no snow chains—in front of a house in the next block, he tried the driver’s door. He dared to think that he might have some luck left, after all, when the car proved not to be locked. He had a penlight and a multifunction penknife, but luck was indeed with him; he didn’t need to hot-wire the Chevy when he found the keys under the floor mat.

  In spite of the cold, the car started at once. The engine sounded tuned and well maintained. He boldly switched on headlights, popped the hand brake, and shifted into drive, half expecting to hear a shout and see the angry owner rushing down the front-porch steps. But he pulled into the street and drove away without a protest being raised.

  The vintage car needed time to warm up before the heater would work. As he drove, Frost anticipated the first wash of hot air with no less relish than he had ever looked forward to a filet-mignon dinner—or to sex, for that matter. Earlier, he’d been daydreaming of a time fifteen or twenty years ahead, when he might retire on some tropical shore or in a desert resort where they didn’t sell gloves or winter coats because no one ever needed them. Now he dared only think ahead fifteen or twenty minutes, and his goal was simple survival.

  Of the choices available to him, the supermarket parking lot was the closest, and he remained watchful street after street, leery of an encounter with a patrol car. As the heat at last breathed from the vents, he realized that the Chevy offered more than mobility and heat. He turned on the radio—and discovered that the alien invasion was not as secret as he feared it might be and that it wasn’t an alien invasion.

  chapter 51

  Nummy put his foot down. He said no to Mr. Lyss, who didn’t like anyone saying no to him. Nummy said no, no, no, the monster couldn’t come with them in the car. It happened right there in the living room, with the piano player standing beside the piano and Mr. Lyss holding the long gun. Grandmama taught Nummy always to be kind to people. But she also taught him not to let people take advantage of him, to put his foot down in the nicest way he could when someone insisted that he do something he knew wasn’t right.

  The Xerox Boze said he wasn’t one of those things that gobbled up people. He said he wasn’t born out of a cocoon but instead out of a machine in a laboratory. Those cocoon things were called Builders, and he was called a Communitarian, and he couldn’t eat someone any more than he could kill himself.

  Nummy didn’t believe a word of it. Monsters were monsters, they always did what monsters did, always disgusting, never anything nice, which was why Nummy wouldn’t watch their movies. If monsters killed people and ate people and did even worse things to people, then of course they would lie. Lying would be no big deal. Even a dummy knew that.

  Mr. Lyss was no dummy, but he believed the monster. He said the monster saw what the Boze saw when the Boze died, and now the monster was broken somehow and couldn’t do monster things anymore. Mr. Lyss said you might call it a spiritual conversion
, except the monster didn’t have a spirit and so couldn’t be converted. He said you also might call it a born-again experience, except the monster was never born in the first place, only manufactured, so he couldn’t be born again, only broken.

  Nummy asked if the monster had seen the Lord, and Mr. Lyss said maybe not the Lord, maybe just Heaven, or maybe the Fiery Pit, depending on what the Boze saw. But maybe nothing like any of that, just something amazing on the other side.

  So then Nummy wanted to know what the old man meant by the other side. The other side of what? Mr. Lyss said the other side of life, over where the dead go. Nummy said that was called either Heaven or Hell, it wasn’t called the Other Side. And Mr. Lyss said different people have different ideas about that. The Other Side might be far different from either Heaven or Hell. It might be this world again but you’re a new person, or even sometimes you’re an animal, what they called reincarnation. Nummy said that was silly, nobody would believe that, Mr. Lyss must be making it up. People couldn’t be animals, and they certainly couldn’t be a carnation, which was just a flower. Mr. Lyss said that if he was being called a liar, he would fry Nummy’s nose with some onions and fix him so he had to pee out of his left ear.

  At that point, the piano player again asked Mr. Lyss to kill him, and right away. Xerox Boze begged for death so hard that Nummy found himself pitying him. Monsters probably couldn’t cry, crying wasn’t in their nature, and this one didn’t shed any tears, but he sounded really miserable. Nummy felt sorry for him. He wondered if maybe he put his foot down too hard.

  Nummy said to Mr. Lyss, “I don’t want to be mean to him, not even a monster. Lots of meanness has come my way, so I know how bad it feels.”