by Dean Koontz
The lunch trays were inexcusably late. The orderly and nurse who delivered them offered no apologies or explanations.
After convincing the shift supervisor, Doris Makepeace, that he was Travis Ahern’s uncle by marriage—a lie—Bryce Walker received his lunch in the boy’s room.
The food was indifferently presented on the plate. The soup was lukewarm in spite of being served in a capped, insulated cup. Neither Bryce nor Travis had much of an appetite.
Every fifteen minutes or so, Bryce tried to call Travis’s mother at Meriwether Lewis Elementary, but each time the recorded voice told him that the hospital phones were temporarily out of service.
The dead phones, the confiscated BlackBerry, the demeanor and behavior of the staff, and the voices in the ductwork were evidence for the case that something had gone wrong at Memorial Hospital, that possibly some kind of conspiracy was being carried out, that violence had occurred, and that more violence must be impending.
Try as he might, however, Bryce could not imagine for what purpose the entire staff of the institution would turn against the patients—who were in many cases friends and neighbors—or what could cause the personality changes that they seemed to have undergone. He couldn’t explain why previously peaceful people might abruptly turn to senseless violence.
After hearing about the voices in the duct, young Travis didn’t have to imagine; he knew the answer. As a product of contemporary culture, having seen scores of science-fiction films and having read hundreds of comic books, he harbored no doubt that Rainbow Falls had been invaded by aliens, extraterrestrials who could masquerade as the human beings they killed and replaced.
Bryce had been shaped by far different fiction from the stories to which Travis had turned for entertainment. The Westerns he spent a long lifetime reading—and writing—were about good and evil of the human kind, about courage and conviction in response to danger and hardship. Westerns taught him a love of place, of home and family and truth, taught him how to live honorably. The genre hadn’t prepared him to cope with otherworldly shape-changers intent on exterminating the human race; indeed, it hadn’t prepared him even to imagine such a threat.
Although he could develop no theory of his own that made sense, Bryce resisted the boy’s fantastic explanation, even as he pretended to consider it seriously. Gazing out the window, across the roofs of the town to the foothills and mountains, he didn’t believe that a flying saucer had landed in the Treasure State, and he doubted that one ever would.
Turning to the boy again, he said, “I need to poke around some more, see what else might be amiss, talk to another patient or two and find out if they have stories to tell.”
Sitting up straighter in bed, hands fisted against his chest, Travis said, “Don’t leave me here.” He was obviously embarrassed to admit his fear of being alone; he was nine, after all, and thought himself almost grown.
“I’m not leaving you,” Bryce assured him. “I’ll be back. I just need to scout the territory some.”
The drowned sun pressed its smothered glow through fathoms of clouds, but no longer had the strength to penetrate the windows and brighten the room. Energy-efficient bulbs produced hard light that made everything appear flat and cheerless.
Without the more nuanced sunlight, the boy seemed to have turned a whiter shade of pale. When his face had swollen during the episodes of anaphylactic shock, the tissue around his eyes had sustained light bruises that now lent him a gaunt quality. He said, “We can scout the territory together.”
“No, son, that won’t work. If it’s just me, I appear to be a restless and lonely old man hoping to find some cordial company. If it’s the two of us, we’ll look like what we are—a suspicious pair nosing about in search of proof to support our worst fears. And if your worst fear is true, then the last thing we want them to think is that we’re suspicious.”
Travis thought about that, and nodded. “Don’t be gone long.”
“I won’t.”
“And when you come back—”
“I will come back.”
“—how will I know it’s you?”
“It’ll be me, Travis. Don’t you worry.”
“But how will I know?”
“You knew I was real when I first came in here. You’ll know the next time, too.”
Bryce crossed the room to the door. He glanced back at Travis and gave him two thumbs up.
The boy did not return the gesture. He looked grim.
chapter 36
After maybe two minutes, standing at the window in the LaPierre house and watching Nummy’s house through binoculars, Mr. Lyss said, “Both squad cars are leaving, but there’s only one cop in each. Two of them have holed up in your place.”
“What do they want in my place?” Nummy wondered.
“They want you, Peaches. They want to haul you back to the jail and throw you in the cell with that thing, so it can crunch you into mush.”
“That’s not fair, is it? I never done nothing to them.”
Turning away from the window and putting aside the binoculars, Mr. Lyss said, “It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you’ve seen. They can’t let you run around loose after what you saw happen in that cell.”
“I don’t know what it was I seen. What happened to them people was ugly, scary, but I couldn’t tell nobody because I don’t know how to tell it. Anyway, people they wouldn’t believe me because of how I am. I’m a dummy, you know.”
“I had my suspicions that you are,” Mr. Lyss said as he returned to the bureau to select a sweater.
Nummy sat on the edge of Poor Fred’s bed. “I keep seeing the lady.”
“What lady?”
“The one she reached through the bars, asked me could I save her. I feel sad I didn’t.”
“You’re a dummy. Dummies aren’t smart enough to save people. Don’t worry about it.”
“You’re not a dummy.”
“No, I’m not. But I couldn’t save her, either. I’m a bad man. I’m the worst of bad men. Bad men don’t save people.” He turned from the bureau, holding up a red sweater with orange and blue stripes. “What about this one?”
“It’s awful bright, sir.”
“You’re right. I don’t want to attract attention.” He threw the sweater on the floor.
“Why are you a bad man?” Nummy asked.
“Because that’s what I’m really good at being,” Mr. Lyss said, throwing more clothes on the floor.
“How did you get good at it?”
“Natural talent.”
“Is your whole family bad people?”
Mr. Lyss showed him a light-brown sweater with checkers that were a little darker brown. “You think I’ll look good in this?”
“I told you true how I can’t lie.”
Frowning at the sweater, Mr. Lyss said, “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing wrong with it, sir.”
“Ah. I see. So you’re saying I’m such an ugly lump I won’t look good in anything.”
“I don’t want to say that.”
Mr. Lyss put the sweater on a chair. From the closet, he took a pair of khaki pants and put them with the sweater.
“What are we doing next?” Nummy asked.
Taking socks and underwear from another drawer, the old man said, “If we go out the front or back door, there’s a risk one of the cops at your place will look this way. So we either go out a window, keeping this place between us and them, or we wait till dark.”
“What about Norman?”
“I’m still thinking about you. It makes no sense bringing you, but I’m thinking. Don’t push me about it.”
“I mean my dog, Norman.”
“Don’t worry about him. He’s fine.”
“He’s over there alone with them.”
“What’re they going to do, take him to the pound and gas him? He’s a toy dog. You’re as dumb as dumb gets, but don’t be stupid.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t sa
y you’re sorry all the time. What’ve you got to be sorry about? Tell me—do I stink?”
“It’s not nice telling people their faults.”
“Take a walk on the wild side. Go ahead. Tell me if I stink.”
“Some people they might like the way you smell.”
“Who? What people? What the hell kind of people would like the way I smell?”
“You must like it. So other people like you, they’d like it.”
Gathering the clothes he had chosen, Mr. Lyss said, “I’m going to take a shower before I change. Don’t try to talk me out of it.”
Nummy followed the old man into the hallway, to the door of the bathroom. “What if you’re showering, the doorbell rings?”
“Don’t answer it.”
“What if the phone rings?”
“Don’t answer it.”
“What if Mrs. Trudy LaPierre comes back?”
“She won’t.”
“What if—”
Mr. Lyss turned on Nummy, and his face twisted up so he looked every bit like the worst kind of bad man that he claimed to be. “Stop badgering me! Stay away from the windows and sit somewhere with your head up your butt till I tell you to take it out, you clueless, useless, fumbling, flat-footed retard!”
The old man stepped into the bathroom and slammed shut the door.
For a moment, Nummy stood there, wanting to ask a couple of questions through the door, but he decided that would be a bad idea.
Instead, he went into the kitchen. He circled the room, studying everything.
He said aloud, “Faster is disaster. Easy and slow makes it all go just so. Think it through double, you’ll stay out of trouble.”
The phone didn’t ring.
Nobody rang the doorbell.
Everything was going to be all right.
chapter 37
When Bryce came out of Room 218, no one manned the nurses’ station. Her back to him, Doris Makepeace proceeded to the farther end of the main wing and disappeared into a patient’s room.
No other nurse, orderly, or maintenance person could be seen. Even for a hospital, the long hallway struck him as uncannily quiet. Especially for a hospital. The impression of serious understaffing seemed to confirm that the remaining nurses were making a pretense of normalcy to conceal some unpleasant and perhaps alarming truth.
With the nurses’ station unattended, the moment had come for Bryce to get to a staircase without being noticed. He wanted to check out lower floors to learn if the conditions here were universal.
The building was shaped like a squared-off C, with three wings of equal length, one running north-south and two running east-west. The main wing offered central stairs and elevators, and the east-west wings each provided a staircase. The hallway at the south end of the building was the nearer of the two, and he headed for it.
As he passed rooms where doors stood open wide, he glanced at the patients. For this time of day, an unusual number appeared to be asleep. Few TVs were on. He saw a couple of visitors sitting at bedsides, waiting for the sleepers to wake.
He should have told Travis to pretend to take any pill a nurse might bring, to hold it under his tongue and spit it out the moment she left the room.
In the south hall, he went to the west end, where an exit sign identified the emergency stairs. He descended two flights to the ground floor.
This was the main level, with the lobby and gift shop, with the labs and surgeries. It also provided additional patient rooms.
Bryce cracked the door, peered out. As he remembered, before him lay the technical wing, where MRIs, X-rays, and other tests were performed. To meet requirements of the hospital’s liability insurance, a patient here would always be in a wheelchair, being taken to and from his room by a member of the staff.
If Bryce was going to risk being stopped and escorted back to his room, he preferred first to have a glimpse of the lowest floor, the basement. The voices that he’d heard in the return-air duct had seemed to come from a distance even greater than the basement, but they had certainly originated below the main floor.
He eased the door shut and descended two flights to the bottom of the stairwell. The basement door bore the same stern notice that had appeared on upper doors—THIS FIRE EXIT MUST REMAIN UNLOCKED AT ALL TIMES—but it would not open. He tried the lever again, with no success.
Then he heard someone insert a key in the lock.
With the instinct of a rabbit stalked by a wolf, Bryce turned and bounded up the stairs two at a time to the landing. Out of sight of anyone who might enter below, he snatched off his slippers because they made too much noise.
As the lower door opened, Bryce continued climbing, soundlessly now, to the ground-floor landing, where he paused with one hand on the lever of the exit door.
He heard no footsteps ascending, but neither did he hear the basement door close. The person down there must be holding it open.
Whoever ordered the door to be illegally locked had not trusted in the lock alone. A guard apparently had been stationed on the other side.
Bryce held his breath, listening to the sentinel who listened for movement in the silent stairwell.
From somewhere in the basement came a stifled cry as miserable and despairing as any of the tortured voices that had risen through the return-air duct.
The door at the bottom of the stairwell at once fell shut, and Bryce could no longer hear the muffled scream.
Bryce didn’t know whether the guard had returned to the basement or lingered this side of the door. If someone still listened for him, he dared not make any noise.
Although an entirely internal sound, his thunderous heartbeat hampered his hearing. He focused on the landing between the ground floor and the basement, waiting to see a shadow move, a hand appear on the railing. The concrete was cold under his bare feet.
chapter 38
Patient Brian Murdock, in Room 108, saw something he wasn’t supposed to see or overheard something he wasn’t supposed to hear. Nobody knew what alarmed him. He was sufficiently frightened to change out of his pajamas into the street clothes he’d been wearing upon admission, and to try to leave the hospital without drawing attention to himself.
Nurse Ginger Newbury encountered Murdock, recognized him, and told him that it was against the rules for him to self-release. He shoved her aside and ran, and she shouted for security.
Ordinarily, security didn’t cover every exit from the hospital, and in the past, Cory Webber, a maintenance man, served no security function. This was a new day, however, and a new Cory Webber. He was dressed in his janitorial uniform, and he had a mop and a bucket and a rack of supplies on wheels, as usual. Secreted among his supplies, however, were a can of Mace and a nightstick. Although he pretended to be intent on his cleaning chores, his only responsibility was to prevent any unauthorized exits along the personnel-only hallway that served the staff lunchroom and the nurses’ lounge and led to the door to the employee parking lot.
When Brian Murdock burst into that corridor, running, with an orderly named Vaughn Nordlinger in pursuit, Cory Webber dropped his mop and snatched the can of Mace from his supply rack.
Murdock carried a weapon in each hand, heavy casters that he somehow removed from his hospital bed, and he threw them, surprising Cory. The first hit the janitor in the chest, the second in the face, and he stumbled backward against the wall.
At the end of the corridor, Murdock slammed through the door, which wasn’t locked because it was the primary door by which various members of the Community came and went during this momentous day. He was out, free, but not for long, as both Vaughn and Cory were close on his heels.
From behind, Vaughn snared the escapee’s jacket and yanked hard, pulling him off his feet. Murdock hit the pavement with bone-breaking force. But he was a strong young man. He rolled onto his hands and knees and launched himself at the orderly.
Cory stepped in, swung the nightstick at the back of Murdock’s head. He struck him across the shoul
ders instead, but the blow was enough to make the escapee lose his grip on Vaughn and drop onto his back on the blacktop.
Murdock started to shout for help, and Cory responded in the most efficient fashion, hammering at his throat with the nightstick. The escapee tried to protect his throat with his hands, but Cory was an irresistible force, intent upon putting an end to the cries, and the man fell silent almost at once.
Suddenly, others of the Community were gathered around Murdock, and some of them were restraining Cory, though there was no need for them to do so. Someone asked for his nightstick, and of course he relinquished it.
Only then did he realize that Murdock was dead and that not only his throat but also his face had been shattered. Cory Webber had no memory of striking the escapee in the face.
Waiting for Mr. Walker to return, worrying that he might not see the old man again or that if the old man returned he wouldn’t be himself anymore, Travis Ahern restlessly roamed the hospital room. From time to time he tried the telephone, which remained out of service, and checked the hallway, which remained deserted.
He was at one of the windows when the man came running out of the hospital with two guys chasing him. The first man wore street clothes, but one of the pursuers was dressed in medical whites and the other in the gray uniform of a hospital janitor.
The two from the hospital attacked the first man. The janitor had some kind of club. He knocked the man down with it and then hit him, hit him, hit him.
Travis didn’t want to watch, but he couldn’t look away. Nobody could be clubbed that hard, that often, and still be alive. Travis had never seen a man killed before, and even from a distance, it was so terrible that he had to lean against the windowsill to keep his trembling legs from failing him.
Nurses, a security guard, and other hospital workers rushed into the parking lot. They took the club away from the janitor, and they gathered around the beaten man as though they were concerned about him, but they were really just blocking him from the sight of anyone who, like Travis, might be at a window.