by Dean Koontz
Just outside of the walk-in pantry, Grace, a damn attractive woman, clung desperately to her son, Travis, who was proving himself to be a gallant lad. They wanted to get her out of there, away from the cocoons, but she refused, insisting instead that they had to understand—and act.
This display of fortitude and commitment made her markedly more attractive. Even in the severe and distorting shadows created by the upwash of flashlight beams, she could quicken a stout heart, and he knew she would be lovelier in any other ambiance. Sully found himself watching Bryce Walker as much as he watched this fine woman, trying to read whether the writer was smitten by her. Well, it didn’t matter if they were both charmed by Grace Ahern, because they were both too old for her, and it would be absurd to think otherwise. Of course, there were men in Sully’s family who had lived well past a hundred, still physically fit, active, and mentally sharp. Some of them even held jobs past the century mark. But that was neither here nor there. They were both too old to charm her as she charmed them, and that was the end of it.
Grace recounted how the culinary and janitorial staffs finished serving lunch the previous afternoon and were cleaning up the kitchen and the cafeteria when they were assaulted by police officers and by the principal, the assistant principal, the school nurse, and other people with whom they had worked for years. As they were overpowered, a gunlike stainless-steel device was pressed to their heads, the trigger pulled.
The others had become instantly docile, aware and alert but incapable of resistance, able to control only their eyes. Seeing her coworkers standing in attendance like zombies waiting for some hoodoo master to give them orders, Grace proved herself as quick-thinking and as iron-nerved as she was damn attractive. The controlling probe—if that was the word—had not affected her as it affected the others. A sharp flash of pain, and then a lingering dull headache. Perhaps it angled through the skull, through bone, and never reached the brain. Or—a more daunting thought, even if it was a thin needle—perhaps the thing pierced the brain but failed to function. In any event, she pretended to the same docility that the others displayed. She stood among them, waiting for an opportunity to bolt.
The principal, assistant principal, and other conspiring school employees departed, leaving only two policemen to guard the helpless zombies. Moments later, a radiantly beautiful young woman and equally radiant young man arrived in the kitchen, of such physical perfection that they appeared unearthly, from a higher realm. They moved like dancers, seeming to float across the floor. When they spoke, their voices were mellifluous. Each said only one thing, the same thing: I am your Builder. The rendering began. And when one of the Builders had churned through two people, it regurgitated the matter that had spun into the first cocoon.
If Grace had attempted to flee then, she would surely have been chased down and captured. But she was paralyzed by terror long enough for a lone trucker, making an unscheduled food delivery, to enter the kitchen through the receiving room and the walk-in refrigerator. He couldn’t have made much sense of what he saw, but Death was obviously in that kitchen even though the method of slaughter mystified. The deliveryman ran, and the police chased him out through the receiving room, leaving the standing zombies in the care of the busy Builders.
Grace couldn’t have fled to the parking lot, for the cops would have snared her as they would surely grab the deliveryman. Likewise, she knew that if she passed through other parts of the school, she would encounter one of her fellow workers who had participated in the assault on the culinary and janitorial staffs. Her hope was to hide out only until the Builders, whatever they were, finished their horrific work, whatever it might ultimately be.
The pantry was the only place in the kitchen where she could quickly get out of sight. The Builders weren’t people anymore, they were ravenous things, intent only on their rendering.
“But then,” she said, still holding fast to Travis, the two of them supporting each other, “maybe the deliveryman came back with reinforcements he found in the parking lot or other people arrived unexpectedly. I don’t know. But there was a struggle in the kitchen, I could hear it through the pantry door, shouts and things crashing. That cabinet fell against the door, trapping me … and then before long, everything got very quiet.”
Travis said, “Mom, we’ve got to get you to a doctor.”
“No, honey. I wouldn’t trust any doctors in this town, any more than I’d trust a policeman.”
“But what if you’re bleeding … in there, inside your head?”
“Then I wouldn’t have made it this long. Right now, what we’ve got to do is burn those cocoons, whatever’s in them, burn every one of them.”
By God, Sully liked her pluck. She had true grit. He liked her mettle. He wondered if she knew her guns. If not, he knew she could be taught to shoot, and after this mayhem, she’d want to be taught. Some martial-arts training, too. Throwing stars and chain bolos. She looked like she had the shoulder and arm strength for a crossbow.
Bryce Walker said to Grace, “An operation this size, you must have cooking oil in five-gallon cans. We could pour a pool of it under the cocoons. The gas ovens are nearby. But I think we’ll need something more flammable than vegetable oil to lead the flames down the front of the oven to the floor and to get the kind of flash fire we need. I imagine you use Sterno or some equivalent for the chafing dishes in the cafeteria. A can of that would be just the thing.”
Squinting at Bryce, Sully thought, Ah, so that’s how it is, you slyboots scribbler. Well, don’t think Sully York will surrender the prize easily.
He said, “Mix the Sterno with the cooking oil on the floor. But you can’t be in the room and pour it on open gas flames. The flash will take you down. With Sterno and a few ordinary cleaning supplies, I can make a Molotov cocktail, throw it from the door, and be out by the time it shatters and ignites the pool.”
“Let’s do it,” Grace said. “Burn all of these abominations. Then find out where others have been spun, locate every one we can, burn them like burning nests of gypsy moths out of infected trees, burn them back to Hell where they came from.”
By God, she was game. She knew how to nail her colors to the mast and stick fast to them. Sully had never seen intrepidity in quite so pretty a package.
chapter 46
Jocko in the study with the big guy. The monster of monsters! The legend! The big guy sitting in Jocko’s desk chair! Jocko standing beside him, not just a former tumor with hyperactivity disorder, not just a screwup with hardly any butt and toad feet too big for shoes, but now a comrade in arms! This was better than anything. Even better than eating soap.
Jocko had tried to show Deucalion the printouts. The stolen secrets. Depredated data. Plundered, pirated, purloined by Jammin’ Jocko, cyber cowboy, highwayman of the ether! But he had dropped them. Scooped them up, shuffled them into order. Dropped them again. When Jocko started shouting at the pages as if they were alive and in rebellion against him, Deucalion suggested that he hold the pages, review them himself, and ask questions if he had any.
Now Jocko stood ready. Waiting for questions. About Progress for Perfect Peace. Standing ready. Well, not just standing. Dancing from foot to foot. Sometimes pirouetting, but only five or maybe six revolutions at a time. Doing the boogaloo. A little bit of the funky chicken. Making propeller noises with his mouth flaps. Hat bells jingling. Sort of Christmasy.
He felt the need to talk, too. He said, “Jocko had it all done like an hour ago. Ripped it, zipped it, got it done. Then Jocko was Princess Josephine. Not the real one. Stand-in. Didn’t put on a dress or anything. Stand-in for teatime. With Princess Chrissy. Her dad, I don’t know. Maybe he chops off heads. Maybe he doesn’t. Jocko sweated from his ears. Otherwise did pretty well. Jocko hates tea. Tea sucks. Whoopie pies are good. Better than bugs, like Jocko ate back when. When he lived in a sewer. Way better. No whoopie pies in a sewer. Jocko likes Little Women, the movie. Jocko’s got every version. Poor sweet Beth. She always dies. It just rips Jocko up.
Jocko cries. Not ashamed. It’s a good cry. But they should remake. Little Women. Let Beth live. Jocko would watch it a thousand times. Unless Johnny Depp played Beth. You know Johnny Depp? Probably not. Different social circles. Jocko used to be afraid of Justin Bieber. Still is, a little. Then saw Depp. You have allergies? Jocko does. Raspberries. Face swells up. Lots of snot pours out. Well, not snot. Uglier than snot. Don’t know what. Never had it analyzed. Disgusting. Jocko can be disgusting. Not on purpose though. Do you like to pirouette? Jocko likes to pirouette.”
The big guy said, “You’ve done an excellent job here.”
Jocko almost died of delight.
“Progress for Perfect Peace. No doubt this Victor Leben is the clone of our Victor. I’ve been to the warehouse you discovered they own. It’s not where he’s located. It’s a center for liquidation of the people they’ve replaced with replicants. You found nothing that would pinpoint a location along the End Times Highway that’s related to Progress for Perfect Peace?”
Jocko shook his head. Adamantly. Proud of his thoroughness. “Nothing to find. Jocko shucked every ear of data corn. Popped it, buttered it, salted it, ate it up. Peeled the online onion down to its last layer. Bit every byte of the banana. Sliced, chopped, diced, minced, mashed—and what you see is what there is. Jocko would bet life on it. Jocko will kill himself if he missed something. Kill himself brutally. Savagely. Over and over again.”
“Progress for Perfect Peace,” Deucalion brooded. “Knowing this name is key. Knowing it, we’ll find him.”
chapter 47
A mild wind came up, and Mr. Lyss called it a devil wind, not because devils were blowing around in it, but because it started to smooth away the snowmobile tracks. Just as it seemed the trail would be erased before their eyes, they saw house lights through the snow and found their way back to the Bozeman place.
The sad music was still being played. After Mr. Lyss retrieved his long gun from the workbench in the garage, he went into the house, to the living room.
Nummy followed the old man, though he didn’t want to follow because he was afraid of the monster playing the piano. There was something about Mr. Lyss that made you have to follow him, though Nummy didn’t understand what it was. It wasn’t just that he sometimes threatened to cut your feet off and feed them to wolves if you didn’t follow him or if you resisted doing other things he wanted you to do. In fact, Nummy felt compelled to follow Mr. Lyss in spite of the threats. Maybe at the beginning the threats were part of what made Nummy stay with him, but now it was something else. If Grandmama was still alive, she would know what it was and would be able to explain it.
In the living room, Mr. Lyss said to the piano player, “Was Bozeman the most depressive sonofabitch who ever lived, or are you just not playing the livelier music he knew?”
“Kill me,” the piano man said, “and the music will stop.”
“I’d like nothing better than to kill you dead as anyone’s ever been,” Mr. Lyss said. “I’ve killed every damn monster I’ve ever met, and there have been more than a few. But I won’t be told to do it by the monster himself. I’m not a man who can be bossed around. Tell him that’s true, boy.”
Nummy said, “That’s true. Mr. Lyss can’t be bossed around. He gets his back up easy. If he was on fire and somebody told him jump in the water, he might not do it ’cause it wasn’t his idea first.”
“Hell’s bells,” the old man said, “where did that come from, boy?”
“It come from me, sir.”
“Well, I know it came from you, I heard you say it. But it came from somewhere deeper in you than most of your jabber and prattle comes from. Not that I’m encouraging more of the same. I didn’t ask you to psychoanalyze me. I asked you to confirm my simple statement for this gloomy sonofabitch.”
As before, Xerox Bozeman’s hands seemed to float back and forth across the keys, almost as if they weren’t taking the music from the piano, as if instead the music was in the hands and the piano was drawing it out of them, like the land draws lightning to it in a storm.
Nummy felt a little hypnotized by the floating hands, as before. Maybe Mr. Lyss was hypnotized, too, because he listened for a while without saying anything.
But then the old man said, “If you want to be dead because of what you saw when Bozeman died, why don’t you kill yourself?”
“I can’t. My program forbids self-destruction.”
“Your program.”
“The one installed in me in the Hive, in the laboratory where I was made.”
“By Frankenstein,” Mr. Lyss said with some scorn. “In the Hive.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re still sticking to that story.”
“It’s true.”
“And it’s not true that you’re a Martian or some murderous scum from some other planet?”
“It’s not true,” said the piano player.
“We burned some big cocoons earlier tonight. You make those cocoons?”
“No. I’m a Communitarian. The cocoons are made by Builders. We both come from the Hive.”
Mr. Lyss thought about that for a while before he said, “Earlier I wanted to kill you, but I knew for some reason it was a bad idea. I think it’s still a bad idea, damn if I know why, since I’d get plenty of satisfaction from it. So I’ll tell you what—I’ll kill you as dead as dead can be, as soon as I feel it’s right.”
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.