The Dead Town f-5

by Dean R. Koontz

  The o in Victor. Watching. Impossible. But Victor could do anything. Victor was omniscient.

  Bad. Very bad. Terrible. Catastrophe! Jocko suddenly became supercharged with negative energy. Nerves wound tight. Heart swelling with fear. Work it off, work it off. Dance! Dance! Jocko sprang to his feet on the chair. He danced desperately. The chair spun. Victor watched through the o in his name, somehow, some way, watched.

  Dancing, spinning, watched by Victor, Jocko was as good as dead. Jocko was a dead monster dancing.

  Chapter 7

  Behind the wheel of his Land Rover, Dagget followed a serpentine course through Rainbow Falls, hoping his lawman’s intuition inspired the many turns he made. He suspected that he was probably guided by nothing more than whim.

  In the passenger seat, Frost studied his laptop. On the screen, a blinking red dot on a partial map of the town revealed the current location of the patrol car driven by Rafael Jarmillo, the chief of police. The day before, they had secretly affixed a transponder to Jarmillo’s vehicle, and thereafter they had monitored his movements. Since the previous morning, the chief had visited a lot of places around town, only one of them with any apparent law-enforcement connection.

  “Yeah,” Frost said, “he’s not just paused at Montana Power and Light. It’s a full stop.”

  The Land Rover was fitted out with a police scanner, but Dagget and Frost no longer bothered to listen to it. More than twelve hours earlier, Chief Jarmillo and his men stopped using a common ten-code that any cop anywhere might understand, and began to use a code of their own creation. Frost had tried to crack it with his computer, but he had failed. The portions of the police transmissions that weren’t in this code were crisp statements, revelatory of nothing.

  “You want to go to the power company?” Frost asked. “See what’s happening?”

  “What I’m thinking is, while the chief is out and about, maybe we stop by his house, have a little chat with his wife.”

  Dagget and Frost, who had been in town three days, were agents with a unit of the FBI so secret that it was unknown even to the director of the bureau. They believed something was badly wrong in Rainbow Falls, but they didn’t have any clue what it might be. The whistle-blower who had alerted them to the situation knew only that during the past couple of years, enormous money had gone into some operation in this burg, channeled to a nonprofit named Progress for Perfect Peace. The sum was so huge — the funds laundered through so many accounts before arriving here — that it suggested a criminal enterprise of extraordinary proportions.

  And this past afternoon, from their unit boss, Maurice Moomaw in D.C., they had learned that the Moneyman, source of those funds, was scheduled to arrive somewhere in the Rainbow Falls area the following day. Weather permitting, he would come in by helicopter from Billings. The Moneyman was a high-profile individual. If he was making a personal appearance, the conspiracy — whatever the hell it might entail — must be approaching one critical point or another.

  “Talk to Jarmillo’s wife?” Frost didn’t like the idea. “I’m not ready yet to drop our cover.”

  “I didn’t say we’d flash bureau ID. We snow her with some story just to see what she might say, just to get a look in the house.”

  Frost shook his head. “I’m not a good bullshit artist.”

  “You’ve seen me in action. I can produce more than a herd. You just stand there smiling and nodding, leave the rest to me.”

  Frost considered the blinking light on the laptop map and then gazed through the windshield at the falling snow. All day, the atmosphere in Rainbow Falls had been strange, disquieting. He could not say why. The behavior of the police suggested they were engaged in some secret and perhaps illegal activity, but that alone wasn’t what made him so deeply uneasy. For the past several hours, he had sensed that the apparent normalcy of Rainbow Falls was a deception, as though the quaint and pretty town were only a hyper-realistic painting on a stage curtain, which at any moment would be swept aside to reveal a different municipality of strange and hideous structures in a state of advanced decay, narrow twisted streets, and in every shadow some creeping feral thing without a name.

  Now, as the town succumbed to the bleaching snow, it seemed not to be vanishing beneath a shroud that would later be drawn aside by the restorative sun, but seemed instead to be fading entirely from the world. As if, when the snow eventually melted away, Rainbow Falls would be gone as though it had never existed.

  Frost was not a man who spooked easily. Until now, he’d never had the kind of imagination that made hobgoblins out of shadows and sensed boogey-men around every corner. The problem wasn’t him. The problem was Rainbow Falls. Something was very wrong with this place.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go have a chat with Jarmillo’s wife.”

  Chapter 8

  In addition to the guy in the Stetson and the greatcoat, two other men materialized out of the night and snow. They were also armed with shotguns.

  Carson and Michael had their Urban Snipers as well as pistols, but seated in the Grand Cherokee, they were not in a position to survive an exchange of fire.

  To Michael, she said, “I could shift gears, tramp the gas.”

  “Bad idea. I didn’t take my invincibility pill this morning.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “Whatever they want us to do,” Michael said.

  “That’s pussy talk. We’re not pussies.”

  He said, “Sometimes you’re too macho for your own good.”

  The guy with the walrus mustache rapped on her window again with his gun barrel. He looked as if he had been constipated since birth. When she smiled at him, his scowl curdled into a glower.

  Carson thought of Scout, her baby, not seven months old, back in San Francisco, in the expert care of Mary Margaret Dolan, housekeeper and nanny. Her little daughter had a smile that could melt glaciers. With Scout in her mind’s eye, Carson was overcome by a dread that she would never see the girl again.

  Switching off the engine, she said, “They’ll make a mistake. We’ll get an opening.”

  “ ‘All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.’ ”

  “Who said that?”

  “I don’t know. One of the Muppets. Maybe Kermit.”

  They opened their doors and got out of the SUV, raising their hands to show that they were not armed.

  The cowboy with the walrus mustache warily stepped back from Carson, as if she were the biggest and meanest piece of work that he had ever seen. His face suggested fearlessness, but his quick shallow inhalations, revealed by rapid frosty exhalations, further belied his fierce expression. He directed her toward the front of the Grand Cherokee.

  One of the other gunmen shepherded Michael from the passenger door and told him to stand beside Carson. This one wore a Stetson, too, and a leather coat with sheepskin collar. The cold air revealed his breathing to be less agitated than that of the other man. But his restless eyes, shifting from Carson to Michael and to various points in the night, revealed the fear that he was striving not to disclose.

  These were not Victor’s creations. They were real men with some reason to know that horrific events were occurring behind the scenes in this apparently peaceful Montana night.

  The third man, who quickly searched the SUV, appeared with both his shotgun and one of the Urban Snipers. “They have another of this here. Never seen its like before. Pistol grip. And it seems to be loaded with big slugs, not buckshot. They have two pistols and a satchel full of spare magazines and shotgun ammo.”

  The second cowboy looked to the one with the mustache. “What you want to do, Teague?”

  Teague indicated the Urban Sniper and said to Michael, “You want to explain that cannon Arvid is holding?”

  “It’s police-issue. Not available to just anyone.”

  “You’re police?”

  “We used to be.”

  “Not around here.”

  “New Orleans,” Michael said.


  “Used to be — but you still have a police-only gun.”

  “We’re sentimental,” Michael said.

  Teague said, “Ma’am, you handle a weapon that powerful?”

  “I can handle it,” Carson said. “I can handle you.”

  “What kind of police were you?”

  “The best. Detectives. Homicide.”

  “You come right at folks, don’t you?”

  “Fewer misunderstandings that way,” Carson said.

  Teague said, “I have a wife like you.”

  “Get on your knees and thank God for that lady every night.”

  Most people weren’t as bold at eye-to-eye contact as Teague. His stare was scalpel-sharp. Carson could almost hear her stare ringing off his with a steely sound.

  “What’re you doing, anyway, riding around all gunned up?” Arvid asked.

  Carson glanced at Michael, he raised his eyebrows, and she decided to go with a little bit of the truth, to see how it played. “We’re on a monster hunt.”

  The three cowboys were quiet, weighing her words, glancing at one another. The soft silent snow coming down, breath smoking in the cold air, the great dark trees slowly fading to white all along the street … Their quiet reaction to her strange statement suggested they had experienced something that made a monster hunt seem as reasonable as any other activity.

  “What have you seen?” she asked.

  To his pals, the nameless cowboy said, “They have guns. That means they must be like us. They need guns.”

  “Clint’s right,” Arvid said. “Those killing machines don’t need guns. We saw what they can do without guns.”

  Michael said, “Machines?”

  Unlike Arvid and Clint, Teague hadn’t lowered his shotgun. “They looked like real people, but they weren’t. There was a Terminator feel to them but even weirder.”

  “Space aliens,” Arvid declared.

  “Worse than that,” Carson said.

  “Don’t see what could be worse.”

  Teague said, “Ma’am, are you telling us you know what they are?”

  “We should get off the street to discuss it,” Carson suggested. “We don’t know what might come along at any time. Clint’s right — you and us, we’re on the same side.”

  “Probably,” Teague said.

  She indicated the house set deep in the trees and all the parked cars in the driveway, their headlights aimed in different directions. “Seems you expect to have to defend the place. The wife you mentioned — is she over there?”

  “She is.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Calista.”

  “I bet Calista would make up her mind about Michael and me five times faster than you. She must want to kick your butt sometimes, how long you take to make up your mind.”

  “I’m deliberate. She likes that.”

  “She’d have to.”

  They engaged in another staring contest, and after a half smile jacked up one corner of his mouth, Teague lowered his shotgun. “Okay, arm yourselves. Come with me, let’s swap information, see if we can all come out of this thing alive.”

  Arvid returned the Urban Sniper.

  Michael settled into the passenger seat of the Grand Cherokee as Carson climbed behind the steering wheel again. By the time she switched on the headlights, Arvid and Clint had returned to their sentry posts, vanishing into the snow and shrubbery.

  She drove forward along the shoulder of the road and turned right into the driveway, following Teague, who had already walked halfway to the house.

  As she parked behind the last SUV in the caravan, Carson realized there were more vehicles ahead of her than she had first thought, at least a dozen. The property was bigger than it appeared from the street. The single lane of blacktop curved past the house to a low building, perhaps a combination garage and workshop.

  When she got out of the Jeep, she heard the engines of some of the other vehicles idling, those that brightened the snowy night with their headlights. Here and there, in the shadows between the cars, men stood in pairs, quiet and vigilant.

  Crossing the yard to the front porch, Carson said to Teague, “Are these people your neighbors?”

  “No, ma’am,” Teague said. “We belong to the same church. We were at our family social, which we hold once a month out at the roadhouse Mayor Potter owns, when these aliens — or whatever they are — attacked us. We lost three good people. No kids, though, thank the Lord.”

  “What church?” Michael asked.

  “Riders in the Sky Church,” Teague said as they reached the porch steps. “Our folks who died earlier — we reckon they all rode heavenly horses through the gates of Paradise tonight, but that’s not as fully consoling as it ought to be.”

  Chapter 9

  Nancy Potter, wife of the mayor of Rainbow Falls, was at first displeased by the arrangement of twenty-six porcelain figurines that stood on three shelves in a glass display case in the Potter living room. Over the period of an hour, her displeasure became annoyance, which grew into anger, which escalated into rage. If the porcelain figurines had been real people, she would have killed them all; she would have gutted them and torn their heads off and set their remains on fire.

  If the real Nancy Potter had not been dead, this Nancy Potter would have beaten her to death just for having bought the figurines in the first place. Three shelves with twenty-six porcelains simply could not be balanced and pleasing to the eye. For one thing, the closest she could come to having the same number on each shelf was nine, nine, eight. For another thing, the ideal number per shelf, to ensure that the display case would look neither too empty nor too crowded, was twelve. She could make it look acceptable with eleven per shelf, but that still left her seven figurines short. The real Nancy Potter clearly had no awareness of the necessity for symmetry in all things, for order and balance.

  Every Communitarian understood that perfect symmetry, absolute order, balance, and conformity were important principles. There were numerous important principles, none more important than the others: undeviating focus, efficiency, unconditional equality, uniformity, obedience to the Community’s Creator, the embrace of cold reason and the rejection of sentimentality.…

  The real Nancy Potter had been a typical human being, poorly focused, inefficient. And talk about sentimental! These twenty-six porcelain figurines were angels. During the hour that the replicant Nancy spent striving to bring symmetry to the display, she had become increasingly disgusted not only with the disorder, but also with all these mawkish, maudlin, insipid, inane angels in their infuriatingly stupid poses of stupid simpering adoration and stupid self-righteous piety. They were an affront to reason, an insult to intelligence, and an offense against efficiency. If the real Nancy Potter had been here, Communitarian Nancy would have beaten her to death but not until she crammed every one of these stupid porcelain angels down the stupid woman’s throat or in some other stupid orifice.

  Exasperated, she dropped two of the angels on the floor and stomped on them until they were worthless debris. This left twenty-four figurines, eight per shelf: balance. They were still angels, however, and the shelves looked too empty to please the eye. She plucked two more porcelains from the display and threw them on the floor and stomped on them, stomped, and then two more, and yet two more. Destroying these schmaltzy gimcracks gave her intellectual satisfaction, immense satisfaction, smashing such crass symbols of blithering ignorance. She despised them, these loathsome little winged totems, she hated them, and she hated the foolish human being who had collected them. They needed to die, every last clueless human being needed to be exterminated, because with them would die their idiot fantasies, their moronic, witless, irrational, dull, obtuse, foolish, imbecilic, puerile beliefs and ideas and hopes. Every last preening, self-deluded man, woman, and child needed to die — especially the children, they were the worst, those filthy excretions of an unthinkably messy biological process — they all needed to be stomped, stomped, smashed, pulverize
d, GROUND INTO MEAT PASTE!

  From the archway between the living room and the downstairs hall, Ariel Potter said, “You aren’t obsessing, are you?”

  This was not the real Ariel, who had been fourteen years old. That Ariel was dead. This Ariel was blond and blue-eyed like the other; but she had been programmed and extruded little more than nine days earlier.

  “Because if you’re obsessing, I have to report you to our Creator. He’ll have to recall you.”

  Members of the Community were as efficient and as focused as machines. Efficiency equaled morality; inefficiency was the only sin their kind could commit. The sole thing that could render one of them inefficient was obsession, to which a few of their kind were prone. Not many. The tendency to obsession was easily recognized by Hive technicians within three days of a Communitarian’s extrusion. The techs identified 99.9 percent of these flawed specimens and dissolved them back into the mother mass from which all of their kind were created. After each crop of Communitarians was tested, the chances of an obsessive making it out of the Hive were virtually nil.

  Nevertheless, a single such individual, operating in the world beyond the Hive, might malfunction to such an extent that it would not pass for human. Therefore, each undetected obsessive might expose the existence of the Communitarian race and might alert humanity to the secret war being waged against them.

  “I’m not obsessing,” Nancy said.

  Ariel regarded her with a bland, nonjudgmental expression, for they were absolute equals. “Then what are you doing?”

  “I’m eliminating clutter and bringing order to this hideously disordered house.”

  Ariel surveyed the shattered porcelains littering the floor. “This doesn’t look like order to me. Where am I mistaken?”

  With a sweeping gesture, Nancy indicated the remaining angels on the shelves, and then her open hand became a tightly clenched fist that she shook at them. “First I have to destroy these stupid icons. That’s only logical. They’re insipid symbols of unreason and disorder. After I utterly and finally and forever destroy these repulsive, despicable, detestable icons, I will of course sweep up every shard, scrap, splinter, every trace of dust, and the living room will then be ordered, serene, immaculate.”