The Dead Town f-5

by Dean R. Koontz

  There were a few pairs of gloves. For both of them, Mr. Lyss chose two pairs with what he called wrist and gauntlet straps. He could pull the straps to make the gloves fit nice and tight.

  “I’ll only borrow these, too,” Nummy said.

  “Me too,” Mr. Lyss said. “I’ll just borrow these gloves for the rest of my life, and when I’m dead like Bozeman, I’ll give them back to him.”

  Because the Boze had only one snowmobiler helmet, which Mr. Lyss would need because he was driving, Nummy had to settle for a toboggan cap. He could pull it down over his ears once they were moving fast and making cold wind.

  “But don’t you go thinking that cap is yours now,” Mr. Lyss said. “It’s only yours on loan.”

  “I know,” Nummy assured him.

  Mr. Lyss found a red-and-gray wool scarf for Nummy to wrap around his face later, when they were speeding through the snow. “You understand this is only on loan, too?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You lose it, I’ll make you pay for it, even if you have to work the rest of your life to earn the money.”

  “I won’t lose it,” Nummy said.

  From the Boze’s bedroom, Mr. Lyss went to stand in the living-room archway. He watched the Xerox Boze playing the piano.

  At last the old man said, “I don’t know why it doesn’t feel right, but it doesn’t. I just can’t kill him.”

  “Maybe you’re not a killer.”

  “Oh, I’m a killer sure enough. I’ve killed more men than you’ve ever met in your whole life. I’d as soon kill most people as look at them. I’ve killed some people just because they smiled and said hello to me.”

  Nummy shook his head. “I’m not sure you really did.”

  “You better not be calling me a liar. Somebody calls me a liar, I cut him open, rearrange his innards, sew him up, and for the rest of his life he has to pee out of his left ear.”

  “What you said before is you cut out his tongue and fried it with onions for breakfast.”

  “That’s right. I do that sometimes, and sometimes I make him pee out of his ear. Depends on my mood. So you better not be calling me a liar.”

  “I’m not. That wouldn’t be nice. People they should always be nice to each other.”

  In the garage again, the old man pushed a button to put up the big door. A little wind had come up, and snow blew in from the night.

  Putting his long gun on the workbench, he said, “I can’t see any way to take this. It won’t fit in the saddlebags. We’ll have to hope the pistols are enough.”

  The smaller guns were in the deep pockets of his long coat, and there were lots of bullets in other pockets, all borrowed from the preacher’s house that they burned down.

  Nummy had been with Mr. Lyss not even a day yet, but it seemed like a life’s worth of stuff had happened. You didn’t have time to be bored around Mr. Lyss.

  “We’ll pull the trailer into the driveway and drop the ramp in the snow,” the old man said. “But wait. Just let me put on this damn thing.”

  The damn thing was the helmet. It was silver and black with a clear window across the face.

  A circle of little holes in the helmet, in front of Mr. Lyss’s mouth, let out his voice. “How do I look?”

  “Like a spaceman.”

  “Scary-looking, am I?”

  “No. You look funny.”

  “You know what I’ve done to any snarky bastard who says I look funny?”

  “Nothing nice,” Nummy said.

  Chapter 27

  The instant he saw it, Frost knew the mouth in the palm of her hand was real, but nevertheless he tried to tell himself that it was just an unusually dimensional tattoo or a joke decal, because if it was real, none of his training or experience would be worth spit in this situation. If it was real, this town didn’t need undercover FBI agents; it needed exorcists, a platoon of them.

  When the tongue licked out of the mouth, fondling the teeth and fluttering obscenely, Frost looked to the woman’s eyes. Previously they were glazed, as if she were half in a trance, but they changed now. Her stare became bold and sharp, her eyes as fierce as the eyes of any bird of prey, although no bird’s gaze ever burned with the scorching hatred that informed this creature’s eyes.

  The blue-silk robe that had materialized around her became mist again, like the smoke that rises off dry ice, and the mist appeared to be absorbed into her skin. From her toes to the top of her head, she rippled like a heat mirage, and the ultimate-Playmate proportions of her body melted away as her flesh and bones flowed like soft wax. Some of the substance of her torso poured into her outstretched right arm, which swelled, the skin stretching like sausage casing being pumped full of liquified meat. Her hand thickened, and the tongue in the mouth of that hand unraveled toward them, now silvery-gray, as flat as a tapeworm, undulating through the air, the tip of it flaring like the hood of a cobra.

  Dagget let out a cry of revulsion and terror that startled Frost but also prepared him for the deafening boom of his partner’s pistol, six quick shots that echoed off the tile floor and walls, off the glass shower door, off the mirror, like flying through the heart of storm clouds when thunder broke the sky. The range was point-blank and Dagget was a master marksman and Frost saw the bullets tear into the naked body, which was now as weird as someone reflected in one of those distorting mirrors in a carnival funhouse.

  But no blood spilled, no wounds bloomed raw and red. The beast didn’t drop or reel backward from the impact of the high-power rounds, but instead absorbed them as a pond would absorb a dropped stone. The flesh didn’t even dimple with concentric ripples as water would have done. The tissue received the bullets and at once closed around them, smooth and un-scarred.

  Dagget’s next four shots had no greater effect than the first six, except that the undulating gray tongue abruptly grew thicker and shot at him with the lightning speed of a striking snake. It wasn’t a tongue anymore, it was an auger, and it bored into Dagget’s face. In an instant it was not a drill anymore, either, and it seemed to have become the hose of a vacuum cleaner, sucking out the contents of his head, his skull imploding like a papery husk, head gone in a blink.

  Backing out of the bathroom doorway, Frost stumbled, almost fell, got his balance.

  In the bathroom, beyond the open door, Dagget’s pistol clattered against the floor tiles, but his headless body didn’t collapse. The ravenous gray tentacle now seemed to be composed of a swarming mass of small somethings, millions of tiny silvery piranhas, and all of them schooled down through his neck, into his dead body, apparently holding him erect, his legs jittering and his feet seeming to dance on the bathroom floor. Looming beyond the headless marionette, the thing that had been a beautiful woman was now nothing that had a name, a mottled gray-and-silver mass, clotted with red that quickly darkened to veins of charcoal-gray, larger than it had been. It surged even larger as the substance of the corpse was drawn out like soda through a straw, until there were only empty clothes flapping in the air like a scarecrow’s costume, but then the clothes wadded up and were sucked away into the vacuuming tentacle.

  Dagget had been killed and devoured in five seconds.

  Frost ran.

  Chapter 28

  Sammy Chakrabarty always thought the old building that housed KBOW was an ugly pile, but the features that made it off-putting in the past were virtues in the current crisis.

  Built in the 1870s by the local arm of the Patrons of Husbandry, otherwise known as the Grange, it served as the Grange Hall, offices and meeting rooms and a big space for community dinners and dances. The Granger movement was an organization of farmers who, in those days, wanted the government to confiscate and operate the railroads and the grain elevators as a public service, thus shifting some of the farmers’ costs from them to the taxpayers.

  For most people in the Grange, the motivation was self-interest, but as in any such political organization, a minority of the members were also paranoids. When you were lobbying to h
ave the government seize some people’s property for your benefit, it wasn’t paranoid to think those on the losing end of that deal might take decisive action to halt your activities, might even come around one night with the intention of using more than words to persuade you to rethink your position. But the truest apostles of the paranoid faith spread wild stories, fevered fantasies of bloodbaths in distant states, fierce armies of railroad goons and brutal mercenaries in the employ of grain-elevator barons, entire units of the Grange shot in cold blood, hundreds of people at a time, shot and beaten and stabbed and set on fire and then shot again and then hung and then rehung, and subjected to verbal abuse, their farm animals sold into slavery, their dogs forced to wear humiliating costumes, their barns burned, their land salted and paprikaed.

  As Sammy quickly walked the rooms and the hallways of KBOW, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of this fort, he figured that the head of the building committee for the Rainbow Falls Grange had been one of the squirreliest of the group, forcing a design that assumed any Grange supper-and-dance night could become a battleground and the building put under siege. The exterior walls, alternating layers of concrete and brick, were eighteen inches thick. The double-hung windows were kept to a minimum number, narrow and protected by decorative bronze grids that were essentially attractive prison bars. In respect of the building’s historical status, the decorative bronze doors remained, as well, one on each side of the structure, but they were so heavy that they had been retrofitted with concealed ball-bearing hinges to make them easier to use.

  By design, nothing in the construction materials was flammable. Yet the contents of the place would have made it a firetrap without the sprinkler system that had been added decades ago to meet the building-code requirements for KBOW to occupy the premises.

  The parapeted, nearly flat roof featured glazed-brick paving sloped just enough to the perimeter scuppers to let rain drain off quickly. In snow season, maintenance men regularly shoveled the roof. But tonight would be the first time — at least in recent history — that a gunman would be stationed up there to defend the building.

  Ralph Nettles and Deucalion were gone less than ten minutes, and they returned with enough firearms to delight the paranoid head of the Grange building committee if he had still been alive to see them. Six pistols, four assault rifles, three pistol-grip shotguns. They also brought several metal ammunition boxes with strap handles, packed with boxed ammo and with preloaded spare magazines for the various weapons.

  In the conference room, which they had chosen to designate the armory, Sammy said to Ralph, “I know you’re not a gun nut in the negative sense.”

  “How do you know?” Ralph asked, sweeping his arms wide to indicate the array of firearms on the conference table. “This is like one-fifth of my collection — and none are antiques.”

  “You’re not any kind of nut. You’re steady. So you have some good reason to gun-up like this.”

  Ralph hesitated. He wasn’t a guy who talked much about himself. “I used to have only a single pistol for the nightstand drawer. Eight years ago this past September, I started the collection.”

  Eight years earlier, Sammy had been just fifteen, a high-school student in Corona del Mar, California, where his parents lived.

  Deucalion said to Ralph, “Your wife died eight years ago.”

  Sammy knew this but hadn’t made the connection.

  “Jenny couldn’t die that young. She was so good. So very alive. It was the most impossible thing that could ever, ever happen. But it happened. So I knew then everything else that seemed impossible might happen, too. All my life, I’ve been practical, prudent, prepared. The three P’s — that’s what my mother called them. There was no way I could have been prepared for Jenny dying, but the day I buried her, I swore to myself I’d be ready for every other impossible thing that could happen next. So maybe I am a nut, after all.”

  Sammy glanced at Deucalion, saw pulses of strange light throb through the giant’s eyes, and looked at Ralph again. “Evidently not.”

  Chapter 29

  Suddenly an ardent believer in everything that he previously disbelieved, from extraterrestrials to Satan, Frost sprinted across the room, past the eye-in-the-tongue still lying on the bed, and into the upstairs hallway. His heart galloped and he heard himself gasping for breath. He knew that he was sprinting as fast as he ever had, ever could, but he felt that he moved in slow motion, through air as resistant as water, his legs as leaden as those of a deep-sea diver in a pressure suit and a massive helmet, trudging across the ocean floor.

  Even above the desperate bellows of his ragged breathing and the slamming of his feet, Frost heard his pursuer, a buzzing-hissing-sizzling-zippering that was all those things and yet none of them, nothing like the sly slithering noise that had come from the cocoon, a never-before-heard sibilation, now a wet and clearly biological sound but now as dry as windblown sand.

  At the midpoint of the hallway, he turned right toward the open staircase, and as he changed directions, he glanced back. The thing wasn’t giving chase in either its womanly form or as the amorphous mass of seething tissue that it had been when it sucked in the last of Dagget. Now it manifested as an airborne silvery-gray mass, as dense as smoke, a teeming and twinkling swarm that might have been insects so tiny that the eye could not discern any details of them, billions upon billions. But he knew in fact they were together the body of the woman who came from the cocoon, nothing as ordinary as insects, but the substance of the woman now a racing cloud of gray that, falling upon him, would render him as rapidly as Dagget had been rendered.

  Pistol in hand but under no delusion that it would be effective, Frost plunged down the stairs. The swarm passed overhead, perhaps intending to swoop around and into his face and dissolve the eyes out of his skull as they entered and possessed him. In passing, however, they encountered the chandelier above, a many-armed brass affair with amber-glass cups containing flame-shaped bulbs. They sizzled through it, dissolving the chain from which it was suspended and the cord from which it drew power, leaving the foyer lit only by the staircase lights and a soffit light above the door.

  The extinguished chandelier fell but only half as fast as gravity demanded, borne by the boiling cloud of ravenous microscopic mites, descending toward the ground floor like a ship slowly sinking through the fathoms, diminishing as it went because it was being consumed in its fall. What reached the foyer below was in the end only the cloud, the swarm, no twist of metal or shard of glass remaining of the chandelier.

  Just past the landing, on the lower of the two curving flights of stairs, Frost halted. Death waited below him. The swarm appeared less bright now, less silvery, darker shades of gray … and clotted. It looked more like dirty water than like smoke, slopping around in the foyer, lapping at the walls, seeming to build a tide toward the lower hallway that led back into the house, but then rolling toward the front door.

  In spite of its watery appearance, the swarm didn’t make liquid sounds, still buzzed and hissed and sizzled, but the tone had become lower, less the furious zeeeeee of angry wasps, more the grumbling drone of bumblebees. Through the spiraling currents of this pool, which included numerous whorls that intersected and spun off new coils and curls, there bobbled what appeared to be lumpy forms more coherent than the rest, though they seemed to dissolve as new lumps formed elsewhere.

  Frost might have fled back to the second floor, to leave the house by an upper window and a porch roof, if instinct had not said Wait. Weak-kneed and shaking on the stairs, he slipped his pistol in the shoulder rig under his jacket. He gripped the railing with his left hand to steady himself, leaned against it. With his right sleeve, he wiped at the cold sweat that stippled his brow.

  In the foyer below him, under a mirror, stood a narrow side table holding three ceramic vases of different sizes. The gray tide washed under it, around its legs. For a moment the table seemed to be of no interest to that voracious multitude, but then the slender legs began to dissolve. The
table tipped forward, and the vases slid off. They didn’t shatter as they fell into the pool, but bobbled briefly before apparently dissolving. The table came apart and the pieces were briefly flotsam before deliquescing out of sight into the spiral currents.

  Intuition needed a while to be heard through the roar of Frost’s terror, but finally he began to suspect that the swarm had lost track of him. There was something aimless in its motion as it swashed back and forth in the foyer, as though it had forgotten its purpose and quested this way and that, in search of some reminder of what it had been pursuing.

  Frost suspected that if he moved or in any way drew attention to himself, he might inspire an attack. He leaned against the railing and quieted his breathing.

  Dagget was dead. They had been not just partners but also best friends. Frost wanted revenge. But he knew there would be none. The best he could hope for was to survive. And with his sanity.

  Chapter 30

  After Nancy Potter, replicant of the mayor’s wife, threw down the last of the angels and crushed them underfoot, shrieking with delight, she eventually grew somewhat calmer. But she was not able to keep her promise to hurry at once with Ariel to the barn to assist the girl in becoming what she was meant to be. All of the shattered figurines had left a mess on the living-room floor, and Nancy could not merely walk away from such appalling disorder. She was alarmed that by eliminating the porcelain icons, which in themselves were symbols of unreason and disorder, she had created this other chaos herself, and she was unable to remember the chain of reason by which she had justified such behavior. In a disordered environment, the highest efficiency could not be achieved, and she must at all times be efficient. She must vacuum the living room and restore order before going to the barn.

  Ariel was not a replicant. She was a Builder, although a much different kind of Builder from those at work elsewhere in Rainbow Falls. As a Builder, she lived by the same principles that were programmed in the replicants. Indeed, Builders had an appreciation for order and efficiency even greater than that of the replicants. Each replicant was a single organism, but each Builder was a colony of billions of nanoanimals each of which was mandated to destroy only for the purpose of efficiently constructing other things — new Builders — that were more finely ordered than those beings that they deconstructed. When the colony acted as one, either as a swarm or in the form of a single creature, the imperative to order things around them according to their programmed directives was an irresistible motivating force.