Midnight

by Dean R. Koontz

  12

  Though Loman no longer was interested in the activities of the police department, he switched on the VDT in his car every ten minutes or so to see if anything was happening. He expected Shaddack to be in touch with members of the department from time to time. If he was lucky enough to catch a VDT dialogue between Shaddack and other cops, he might be able to pinpoint the bastard's location from something that was said.

  He didn't leave the computer on all the time because he was afraid of it. He didn't think it would jump at him and suck out his brains or anything, but he did recognize that working with it too long might induce in him a temptation to become what Neil Penniworth and Denny had become — in the same way that being around the regressives had given rise to a powerful urge to devolve.

  He had just pulled to the side of Holliwell Road, where his restless cruising had taken him, had switched on the machine, and was about to call up the dialogue channel to see if anyone was engaged in conversation, when the word ALERT appeared in large letters on the screen. He pulled his hand back from the keyboard as if something had nipped at him.

  The computer said, SUN REQUESTS DIALOGUE.

  Sun? The supercomputer at New Wave? Why would it be accessing the police department's system?

  Before another officer at headquarters or in another car could query the machine, Loman took charge and typed DIALOGUE APPROVED.

  REQUEST CLARIFICATION, Sun said.

  Loman typed YES, which could mean GO AHEAD.

  Structuring its questions from its own self-assessment program, which allowed it to monitor its own workings as if it were an outside observer, Sun said, ARE TELEPHONE CALLS TO AND FROM UNAPPROVED NUMBERS IN MOONLIGHT COVE AND ALL NUMBERS OUTSIDE STILL RESTRICTED?

  YES.

  ARE SUN'S RESERVED TELEPHONE LINES INCLUDED IN AFOREMENTIONED PROHIBITION? the New Wave computer asked, speaking of itself in third person.

  Confused, Loman typed UNCLEAR.

  Patiently leading him through it step by step, Sun explained that it had its own dedicated phone lines, outside the main directory, by which its users could call other computers all over the country and access them.

  He already knew this, so he typed YES.

  ARE SUN'S RESERVED TELEPHONE LINES INCLUDED IN AFOREMENTIONED PROHIBITION? it repeated.

  If he'd had Denny's interest in computers, he might have tumbled immediately to what was happening, but he was still confused. So he typed WHY? — meaning WHY DO YOU ASK?

  OUTSYSTEM MODEM NOW IN USE.

  BY WHOM?

  SAMUEL BOOKER.

  Loman would have laughed if he had been capable of glee. The agent had found a way out of Moonlight Cove, and now the shit was going to hit the fan at last.

  Before he could query Sun as to Booker's activities and whereabouts, another name appeared on the upper left corner of the screen — SHADDACK — indicating that New Wave's own Moreau was watching the dialogue on his VDT and was cutting in. Loman was content to let his maker and Sun converse uninterrupted.

  Shaddack asked for more details.

  Sun responded: FBI KEY SYSTEM ACCESSED.

  Loman could imagine Shaddack's shock. The beast master's demand appeared on the screen: OPTIONS. Which meant he desperately wanted a menu of options from Sun to deal with the situation.

  Sun presented him with five choices, the fifth of which was SHUT DOWN, and Shaddack chose that one.

  A moment later Sun reported: FBI KEY SYSTEM LINK SHUT DOWN.

  Loman hoped that Booker had gotten enough of a message out to blow Shaddack and Moonhawk out of the water.

  On the screen, from Shaddack to Sun: BOOKER'S TERMINAL?

  YOU REQUIRE LOCATION?

  YES.

  MOONLIGHT COVE CENTRAL SCHOOL, COMPUTER LAB.

  Loman was three minutes from Central.

  He wondered how close Shaddack was to the school. It didn't matter. Near or far, Shaddack would bust his ass to get there and prevent Booker from compromising the Moonhawk Project — or to take vengeance if it had already been compromised.

  At last Loman knew where he could find his maker.

  13

  When Sam was only six exchanges into his dialogue with Anne Denton in Washington, the link was cut off. The screen went blank.

  He wanted to believe that he had been disconnected by ordinary line problems somewhere along the way. But he knew that wasn't the case.

  He got up from his chair so fast that he knocked it over.

  Chrissie jumped up in surprise, and Tessa said, "What is it? What's wrong?"

  "They know we're here," Sam said. "They're coming."

  14

  Harry heard the doorbell ring down in the house below him.

  His stomach twisted. He felt as if he were in a roller coaster, just pulling away from the boarding ramp.

  The bell rang again.

  A long silence followed. They knew he was crippled. They would give him time to answer.

  Finally it rang again.

  He looked at his watch. Only 7:24. He took no comfort in the fact that they had not put him at the end of their schedule.

  The bell rang again. Then again. Then insistently.

  In the distance, muffled by the two intervening floors, Moose began barking.

  15

  Tessa grabbed Chrissie's hand. With Sam, they hurried out of the computer lab. The batteries in the flashlight must not have been fresh, for the beam was growing dimmer. She hoped it would last long enough for them to find their way out. Suddenly the school's layout — which had been uncomplicated when they had not been in a life-or-death rush to negotiate its byways — seemed like a maze.

  They crossed a junction of four halls, entered another corridor, and went about twenty yards before Tessa realized they were going the wrong direction. "This isn't how we came in."

  "Doesn't matter," Sam said. "Any door out will do."

  They had to go another ten yards before the failing flashlight beam was able to reach all the way to the end of the hall, revealing that it was a dead end.

  "This way," Chrissie said, pulling loose of Tessa and turning back into the darkness from which they'd come, forcing them either to follow or abandon her.

  16

  Shaddack figured they wouldn't have tried to break into Central on any side that faced a street, where they might be seen — and the Indian agreed — so he drove around to the back. He passed metal doors that would have provided too formidable a barrier, and studied the windows, trying to spot a broken pane.

  The last rear door, the only one with glass in the top, was in an angled extension of the building. He was driving toward it for a moment, just before the service road swung to the left to go around that wing, and from a distance of only a few yards, with all the other panes reflecting the glare of his headlights, his attention was caught by the missing glass at the bottom right.

  "There," he told Runningdeer.

  "Yes, Little Chief."

  He parked near the door and grabbed the loaded Remington 12-gauge semiautomatic pistol-grip shotgun from the van's floor behind him. The box of extra shells was on the passenger seat. He opened it, grabbed four or five, stuffed them in a coat pocket, grabbed four or five more, then got out of the van and headed toward the door with the broken window.

  17

  Four soft thuds reverberated through the house, even into the attic, and Harry thought he heard glass breaking far away.

  Moose barked furiously. He sounded like the most vicious attack dog ever bred, not a sweet black Lab. Maybe he would prove willing to defend home and master in spite of his naturally good temperament.

  Don't do it, boy, Harry thought. Don't try to be a hero. Just crawl away in a corner somewhere and let them pass, lick their hands if they offer them, and don't—

  The dog squealed and fell silent.

  No, Harry thought, and a pang of grief tore through him. He had lost not just a dog but his best friend.

  Moose, too, had a sense of duty.

  Si
lence settled over the house. They would be searching the ground floor now.

  Harry's grief and fear receded as his anger grew. Moose. Dammit, poor harmless Moose. He could feel the flush of rage in his face. He wanted to kill them all.

  He picked up the.38 pistol in his one good hand and held it on his lap. They wouldn't find him for a while, but he felt better with the gun in his hand.

  In the service he had won competition medals for both rifle sharpshooting and performance with a handgun. That had been a long time ago. He had not fired a gun, even in practice, for more than twenty years, since that faraway and beautiful Asian land, where on a morning of exceptionally lovely blue skies, he had been crippled for life. He kept the.38 and the.45 cleaned and oiled, mostly out of habit; a soldier's lessons and routines were learned for life — and now he was glad of that.

  A clank.

  A rumble-purr of machinery.

  The elevator.

  18

  Halfway down the correct hallway, holding the dimming flashlight in his left hand and the revolver in his other, just as he caught up with Chrissie, Sam heard a siren approaching outside. It was not on top of them, but it was too close. He couldn't tell if the patrol car was actually closing in on the back of the school, toward which they were headed, or coming to the front entrance.

  Apparently Chrissie was uncertain too. She stopped running and said, "Where, Sam? Where?"

  From behind them Tessa said, "Sam, the doorway!"

  For an instant he didn't understand what she meant. Then he saw the door swinging open at the end of the hall, about thirty yards away, the same door by which they had entered. A man stepped inside. The siren was still wailing, drawing nearer, so there were more of them on the way, a whole platoon of them. The guy who'd come through the door was just the first — tall, six feet five if he was one inch, but otherwise only a shadow, minimally backlighted by the security lamp outside and to the right of the door.

  Sam squeezed off a shot with his.38, not bothering to determine if this man was an enemy, because they were all enemies, every last one of them — their name was legion — and he knew the shot was wide. His marksmanship was lousy because of his injured wrist, which hurt like hell after their misadventures in the culvert. With the recoil, pain burst out of that joint and all the way back to his shoulder, then back again, Jesus, pain sloshing around like acid inside him, from shoulder to fingertips. Half the strength went out of his hand. He almost dropped the gun.

  As the roar of Sam's shot slammed back to him from the walls of the corridor, the guy at the far end opened fire with a weapon of his own, but he had heavy artillery. A shotgun. Fortunately he was not good with it. He was aiming too high, not aware of how the kick would throw the muzzle up. Consequently the first blast went into the ceiling only ten yards ahead of him, tearing out one of the unlit fluorescent fixtures and a bunch of acoustic tiles. His reaction confirmed his lack of experience with guns; he overcompensated for the kick, swinging the muzzle too far down as he pulled the trigger a second time, so the follow-up round struck the floor far short of target.

  Sam did not remain an idle observer of the misdirected gunfire. He seized Chrissie and pushed her to the left, across the corridor and through a door into a dark room, even as the second flock of buckshot gouged chunks out of the vinyl flooring. Tessa was right behind them. She threw the door shut and leaned against it, as if she thought that she was Super-woman and that any pellets penetrating the door would bounce harmlessly from her back.

  Sam shoved the woefully dim flashlight at her. "With my wrist, I'm going to need both hands to manage the gun."

  Tessa swept the weak yellow beam around the chamber. They were in the band room. To the right of the door, tiered platforms — full of chairs and music stands — rose up to the back wall. To the left was a large open area, the band director's podium, a blond-wood and metal desk. And two doors. Both standing open, leading to adjoining rooms.

  Chrissie needed no urging to follow Tessa toward the nearer of those doors, and Sam brought up the rear, moving backward, covering the hall door through which they had come.

  Outside, the siren had died. Now there would be more than one man with a shotgun.

  19

  They had searched the first two floors. They were in the third-floor bedroom.

  Harry could hear them talking. Their voices rose to him through their ceiling, his floor. But he couldn't quite make out what they were saying.

  He almost hoped they would spot the attic trap in the closet and would decide to come up. He wanted a chance to blow a couple of them away. For Moose. After twenty long years of being a victim, he was sick to death of it; he wanted a chance to let them know that Harry Talbot was still a man to be reckoned with — and that although Moose was only a dog, his was nevertheless a life taken only with serious consequences.

  20

  In the eddying fog, Loman saw the single patrol car parked beside Shaddack's van. He braked next to it just as Paul Amberlay got out from behind the wheel. Amberlay was lean and sinewy and very bright, one of Loman's best young officers, but he looked like a high-school boy now, too small to be a cop — and scared.

  When Loman got out of his car, Amberlay came to him, gun in hand, visibly shaking. "Only you and me? Where the hell's everybody else? This is a major alert."

  "Where's everybody else?" Loman asked. "Just listen, Paul. Just listen."

  From every part of town, scores of wild voices were lifted in eerie song, either calling to one another or challenging the unseen moon that floated above the wrung-out clouds.

  Loman hurried to the back of the patrol car and opened the trunk. His unit, like every other, carried a 20-gauge riot gun for which he'd never had use in peaceable Moonlight Cove. But New Wave, which had generously equipped the force, did not stint on equipment even if it was perceived as unnecessary. He pulled the shotgun from its clip mounting on the back wall of the trunk.

  Joining him, Amberlay said, "You telling me they've regressed, all of them, everyone on the force, except you and me?"

  "Just listen," Loman repeated as he leaned the 20-gauge against the bumper.

  "But that's crazy!" Amberlay insisted. "Jesus, God, you mean this whole thing is coming down on us, the whole damn thing?"

  Loman grabbed a box of shells that was in the right wheel-well of the trunk, tore off the lid. "Don't you feel the yearning, Paul?"

  "No!" Amberlay said too quickly. "No, I don't feel it, I don't feel anything."

  "I feel it," Loman said, putting five rounds in the 20-gauge — one in the chamber, four in the magazine. "Oh, Paul, I sure as hell feel it. I want to tear off my clothes and change, change, and just run, be free, go with them, hunt and kill and run with them."

  "Not me, no, never," Amberlay said.

  "Liar," Loman said. He brought up the loaded gun and fired at Amberlay point-blank, blowing his head off.

  He couldn't have trusted the young officer, couldn't have turned his back on him, not with the urge to regress so strong in him, and those voices in the night singing their siren songs.

  As he stuffed more shells into his pockets, he heard a shotgun blast from inside the school.

  He wondered if that gun was in the hands of Booker or Shaddack. Struggling to control his raging terror, fighting off the hideous and powerful urge to shed his human form, Loman went inside to find out.

  21

  Tommy Shaddack heard another shotgun, but he didn't think much about that because, after all, they were in a war now. You could hear what a war it was by just stepping out in the night and listening to the shrieks of the combatants echoing down through the hills to the sea. He was more focused on getting Booker, the woman, and the girl he'd seen in the hall, because he knew the woman must be the Lockland bitch and the girl must be Chrissie Foster, though he couldn't figure how they had joined up.

  War. So he handled it the way soldiers did in the good movies, kicking the door open, firing a round into the room before entering. No one scr
eamed. He guessed he hadn't hit anyone, so he fired again, and still no one screamed, so he figured they were already gone from there. He crossed the threshold, fumbled for the light switch, found it, and discovered he was in the deserted band room.

  Evidently they had left by one of the two other doors, and when he saw that, he was angry, really angry. The only time in his life that he had fired a gun was in Phoenix, when he had shot the Indian with his father's revolver, and that had been close-up, where he could not miss. But still he had expected that he would be good with a gun. After all, Jeez, he had watched a lot of war movies, cowboy movies, cop shows on television, and it didn't look hard, not hard at all, you just pointed the muzzle and pulled the trigger. But it hadn't been that easy, after all, and Tommy was angry, furious, because they shouldn't make it look so easy in the movies and on the boob tube when, in fact, the gun jumped in your hands as if it was alive.

  He knew better now, and he was going to brace himself when he fired, spread his legs and brace himself, so his shots wouldn't be blowing holes in the ceiling or bouncing off the floor any more. He would nail them cold the next time he got a whack at them, and they'd be sorry for making him chase them, for not just lying down and being dead when he wanted them to be dead.

  22

  The door out of the band room had led into a hall that served ten soundproofed practice rooms, where student musicians could mutilate fine music for hours at a time without disturbing anyone. At the end of that narrow corridor, Tessa pushed through another door and coaxed just enough out of the flashlight to see that they were in a chamber as large as the band room. It also featured tiered platforms rising to the back. A student-drawn sign on one wall, complete with winged angels singing, proclaimed this the home of The World's Best Chorus.