He made a decent living with carpentry and cabinetmaking, crafts he learned from his dad. He always had work, and there was nearly as much satisfaction to be had from doing good joinery and hand-rubbed finishes as from making music. And nobody cared what a cabinetmaker looked like. Currently he had a kitchen-remodel under way, only six blocks from home, so he could leave his tools there and walk back and forth.
As long as he could remember, he liked to walk this town, pretty as it was, but especially since he came home from war. Rusty knew men who returned with one leg or none. Every day he gave thanks for his legs, and he proved his gratitude by using them. He didn’t feel guilty that he walked away from war while others were carried, but he felt the iniquity of it, the gross injustice, and sorrowed sometimes late at night.
He was half a block past the old courthouse, nearing the corner, when he thought he heard a man scream. He stopped to listen, but the cry had been brief and muffled, as if it had come from inside one of the big old houses. It might have been less a scream than a shout.
Rusty turned in a circle, studying the street in the lamplight, the houses with their deep porches, the bare-limbed trees black where the snow had not painted them. The second scream, a woman’s, was not as brief, but also muffled. The snow played tricks with sound, too, and he couldn’t pinpoint the source of the cry before it abruptly cut off.
No traffic moved on the main street, as far as the falling snow allowed the eye to see. When he took three steps to the corner, he saw that the cross street was likewise deserted. The storm harried people home early and kept them there, but Montanans were a hardy lot and not easily deterred by inclement weather. With four inches accumulated, there would usually be a few people out on skis, poling along streets where the plows hadn’t yet scraped the pavement, not to mention kids building snow forts or dragging their sleds behind them toward the nearest open hill, laughing and calling excitedly to one another. Rusty saw no one, heard no children.
He realized that no snowplows growled in the distance, either. The city maintenance-department crews should have been hard at work. In and around the courthouse was one of the neighborhoods where they usually started in a storm.
When Rusty first came home from war, his nerves were frayed and taut, easily strummed but slow to quiet. The peace of small-town Montana had seemed illusory. Sometimes he found it easy to believe that stealthy assassins were at work in the night, slitting throats of sleepers. And at odd moments, for no apparent reason, he froze in expectation of explosions that never came. But those days were more than two years in the past. He didn’t suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. His nerves were knit, and even when he sat up in bed suddenly at three in the morning, unsure what had awakened him, they no longer throbbed with arpeggios of fear.
He took seriously, therefore, his sense of foreboding. Something was wrong. The two muffled cries — screams or shouts — had been real. The deserted streets, the childless yards, the quiet here and the stillness even into the distance, were unusual if not strange.
He turned left, walking slowly north on the cross street, alert for any sound and for any moving thing other than the gently driven snow. A few of the lovely old houses were dark, but most appeared warm and welcoming with lights in their windows. Indeed, the street was no less picturesque, no less charming than a winter painting by Thomas Kinkade, in which every French pane was a jewel and even trees and some expanses of snow seemed to be filled with inner light.
You could call it magical, this part of town at this moment, but it didn’t feel as good as it looked. He couldn’t understand how a sense of menace could arise from a scene that, in its every aspect, charmed the eye. He wondered about himself, about whether he might be sliding back into the perpetual uneasiness that troubled him during the six months immediately after he left the battlefield.
When he worked late, as he had this day, he walked home by this route because it brought him past the house of Corrina Ringwald. They became best friends their senior year in high school, when she lost her little sister to leukemia and fell into a depression that neither drugs nor counseling could cure. Rusty made her well with music. He wrote songs for her, recorded them, and put them in her mailbox. He wasn’t courting her, and she knew he wasn’t; it just hurt him to see her in such pain. They remained best friends all these years later. Both of them wanted a closer relationship, but both of them feared that if they failed as lovers, they would feel awkward with each other and would then be less close as friends. Their friendship was such an important part of their lives that they were loath to risk damaging it. As often as not, when he passed Corrina’s home at the end of the day, the porch light was on, which was a signal to him. If the light glowed, she didn’t have any prep work for the next day’s classes — she was a teacher — and wanted him to come in for dinner.
Rusty was still more than two blocks from Corrina’s place when he heard another scream, a woman’s. This one lasted longer than the previous two and couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than what it was: a cry of abject terror. He halted, turned, trying to home in on the voice, and just as the scream cut off, he decided it came from one of two houses, both with bright windows, on the farther side of the street.
He hurried across to the other sidewalk and stood there, under a streetlamp, looking back and forth from a white Victorian with pastel blue trim to a pale gray Victorian with black trim, waiting for another scream or a clue of any kind. The sole sound was the faintest oscillating shush of the gentle wind in the trees, a wind too weak to stir a bough or branch. Nothing moved except the snow unraveling from a sky unseen. This familiar street had become as enigmatic as any far, foreign place first glimpsed. So eerie was the mood that even his shadow on the lamplit snow seemed sinister, as if it might rise up against him.
In one of the first-floor rooms of the gray-and-black house, movement caught Rusty’s attention. Quick past a window, someone, something, a suggestion of violent action. He followed the front walk to the porch steps, not sure what he should do: ring the bell, just try the door and enter unannounced, look more closely through the window.… As he reached the top of the steps, a woman called out—“Can you help me?”—but her voice came from behind him and from a distance.
He turned and saw her in the street, in the center of the nearer intersection, perhaps seventy feet north of him. In the crosslight of the four corner lamps but at the farthest limit of each rather than in the direct glow of any of them, she looked lost. She wore what appeared to be a silk robe, short and sapphire-blue; the breeze molded it to her and riffled the hem.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Help me,” she replied, but only stood there in the middle of the intersection, as though oblivious of the biting cold and in a state of shock.
He glanced at the house where he had been about to ring the bell or try the door. Nothing moved past the windows. No sound arose from within.
Perhaps he had come to the wrong house. Perhaps the woman in the crosslight was the one who had screamed, and then had fled into the cold and snow.
Rusty descended the porch steps and followed the walkway to the street.
The thin wrap the woman wore revealed that she was shapely. The whispering breeze and the lamplight made a lambent flame of her long flaxen hair. He suspected that on closer inspection she would prove to be singularly beautiful. In the shower of snow like thrown rice, in the provocative silk robe, she might have been a vision of a bride on her wedding night.
Chapter 53
The Xerox Boze parked in the KBOW lot where Mr. Lyss told him to stop, not near the other vehicles and back a little ways from the building, just in case, he said, they were being lured here by some sneaky sonofabitch monsters who weren’t the Paul Reveres they were pretending to be.
They all climbed out of the car, and Mr. Lyss got his long gun from the backseat, which was when the two SUVs roared in from the street, one close behind the other. They raced past the car, braked hard nearer the buil
ding, and their doors flew open. Six men jumped out of one, six out of the other, and though Nummy couldn’t usually tell whether people were good or bad from just looking at them, he knew right away that these twelve were up to no good.
Nine of them went toward the front door of KBOW, and three of them came this way, and Mr. Lyss asked Xerox Boze if they were his people, and Xerox Boze said, “Yes. Communitarians,” which of course meant monsters.
The old man fired the long gun three times fast, and it was so loud Nummy put his hands over his ears. Each shot seemed almost to lift Mr. Lyss off his feet and jump him backward an inch or two. But he must have had some practice with a gun like that, or else he was really lucky, so lucky that you could see why he was so sure the lottery ticket in his wallet would be a big winner. Each shot hit a monster and knocked him down, and Mr. Lyss hurried forward to put the gun close on one of them, at the throat, and fired a fourth time, and Nummy gagged.
The two shot-bad-but-not-dead monsters were getting to their feet, and Mr. Lyss backed off, grabbing shells from one of his deep coat pockets and reloading as he moved. No sooner were they up than Mr. Lyss shot them down again, and it looked like they would probably stay down this time.
But the other nine, who had been walking toward the building, stopped and looked back this way. Any monster Nummy had seen, while going up and down the TV channels, was always either growling and angry or flat-out furious. It didn’t matter whether they came out of a flying saucer or out of a cave from the center of the earth, or out of the black waters of a swamp, they were either ticked off or totally crazy-furious. They didn’t seem to know any other way to be, and these nine coming now were no different, they sure weren’t broken like Xerox Boze.
Mr. Lyss reloaded two shells even while the last two shots were echoing across the parking lot, and now he fired four times, faster than ever. Four shots did more damage than Nummy expected, but then he remembered that each shot wasn’t just one bullet, it was a lot of little lead balls that could hit more than one monster at a time. Five went down, and two more staggered off balance, but there were nine, so two more kept coming.
Nummy wanted to run, but there was nowhere he could go that they wouldn’t chase him right into the ground. Mr. Lyss didn’t have time even to think about reloading the long gun, that’s how close the two furious monsters were, so Nummy got ready to die and he said a speed prayer.
Some guy came out of nowhere and stepped up beside Mr. Lyss, holding a gun in two hands, and boy could he shoot. What seemed to happen was two shots in the head of the nearest monster, one shot in the head and one in the throat of the next one.
This gave Mr. Lyss a chance to put down his long gun and draw the two pistols from his coat pockets, and he started shooting the wounded monsters that were getting up for another try at him, they just didn’t know when to quit. And the new guy was blasting them, too. It was like July Fourth, all the noise. When at last the twelve were on the ground, not moving, looking as dead as any roadkill on the highway, Mr. Lyss and the new guy walked among them, looking them over, shooting three or four of them who were maybe not as dead as they ought to be.
By now Nummy saw where the new guy came from. Behind Mr. Lyss’s stolen car stood an old Chevrolet, engine running, driver’s door open wide.
Although his ears were still ringing, Nummy could hear Mr. Lyss say, “You shoot so precise, you must be some kind of lawman from one of the more determined agencies, but I won’t hold that against you.”
“Frost,” the new guy said, “FBI.”
“Kill me,” Xerox Bose said.
“Don’t kill him,” Mr. Lyss said. “He’s one of them but special.”
“One of them?” Mr. Frost said, alarmed, and backed away a couple of steps. “One of them chewed through my partner, Dagget, like it was a wood-chipper and he was nothing but balsa.”
“That’s a Builder,” Mr. Lyss said. “This is a different kind of them. He’s a Communitarian. He’s bad but not as bad as them bastards, he doesn’t eat people.”
A hard shot cracked, and the windshield of one of the dead monsters’ SUVs exploded.
On the roof of KBOW, huddled against the parapet and watching through the open crenel, Sammy Chakrabarty held his fire as the three got out of the car, waiting to see what they would do, which might tell him whether they were human or not.
One was in a police uniform, which was problematic. If the cops were co-opted, then this wouldn’t be a friendly listener inspired to visit by Mason Morrell’s stirring rhetoric. He seemed oddly placid, standing by the car in the snow, arms slack at his sides. He wasn’t wearing a coat or hat.
One of the other two was a dumpy little guy. Something seemed odd about him, too, although Sammy couldn’t see what it was through the sheeting snow.
The third was a grizzled old guy in a long coat. He fetched a shotgun from the backseat, which didn’t make him either a villain or a hero in the current situation, though his hair was wild and from a distance he looked a little crazy.
When the two SUVs burst onto the scene and twelve men bailed out of them, Sammy was pretty sure they had mayhem in mind, but he couldn’t be certain of their alien nature. He couldn’t fire down on them until they attempted to force the front door. They never got a chance. The number of shots required to kill them proved they weren’t human.
Sammy didn’t know if man-made men might kill one another the same way human beings did, but he was inclined to think they wouldn’t. So most likely the three that got out of the first car and the shooter who showed up in the Chevy were his kind of people, with real blood in their veins.
Nevertheless, he wanted to have a dialogue with them before he let them into the station. He got their attention with a single rifle round through the windshield of one of the dead men’s SUVs, and then he shouted down, “Who are you people?”
When the guy on the roof asked them who they were, Mr. Frost shouted that he was from the FBI and waved some ID, but Mr. Lyss right away took offense.
“ ‘Who are you people?’ ” the old man said, repeating the roof guy’s question but making it sound as if it had been said in a snotty way, which it hadn’t. “ ‘Who are you people?’ You going to let in only fancy people who went to universities where every fool wears a tuxedo and spats, only people drink tea with their damn pinkies raised? This town’s falling apart worse even than Detroit, and you have your nose in the air? You’re not going to let in some funky old hobo because just maybe he stinks a little—which he damn well doesn’t! — because he’s not wearing a top hat?”
Nummy thought that Mr. Lyss would wait for an answer to his question, but instead the old man sort of snorted a deep breath that puffed out his chest and lifted him taller, and he went on in his most angry voice. His face was so hot-red in the parking-lot lights that he ought to have melted the snow that stuck in his eyebrows. He talked right over the poor man on the roof, who started to say something:
“Who we are is the very people who might save this miserable jerkwater from the plague of monsters your fruity announcer’s been jabbering about on the air. I’m a hobo, this one here beside me is a dummy by anyone’s reckoning, and one look at us would tell any fool we’re as human as human gets. Go on boy, do your part, tell him you’re a dummy.”
Nummy said, “He’s right. I am. I’m a dummy and always been one. I don’t mind him saying it. He don’t mean it in a mean way.”
Mr. Lyss said to the guy on the roof, “This creature that looks like Officer Bozeman is one of the two kinds of monsters your town let overrun it. He’s not one of the people-eating kind, and anyway he’s broken, he’s no threat to anyone, though he’ll test your sanity if you let him near a piano. All this morbid bastard wants is for me to kill him because his program won’t allow him to kill himself, but damn if I’ll kill him until he tells us everything we need to know to find what nest these sonsofbitches come from so we can go in and burn it out. That’s who we are, and if who we are isn’t good enough for you, then you c
an just get in your Mercedes-Benz and drive yourself straight to Hell.”
Nummy realized that Mr. Lyss must have had his feelings hurt about a lot of things over the years, maybe since he was a little boy. That was really something to think about.
Chapter 54
The seeming void silent and dark above, the snow materializing out of that inverted abyss, the houses bright or dark but each as still as a mausoleum, and the deserted white street from which this swaddling winter might have robbed all dimension if not for evenly spaced streetlamps dwindling toward other neighborhoods …
As the band and collet and prongs of a ring existed to display the gemstone, so it seemed to Rusty Billingham that everything his senses perceived in this glittering scene existed to display the jewel of a woman at the center of the intersection. From a distance of seventy feet, as he approached her, walking the middle of the street, she promised to be extraordinarily beautiful, and when he was still sixty feet from her, he knew that promise would be kept, perhaps more fully than he could imagine. Although it must be but a trick of lamplight and diamonded threads of snow, she appeared radiant, luminous from within.
Rusty was certain now that she’d been the one who screamed, because she was clearly in a state of shock. Standing there with snow well above her ankles, perhaps barefoot, wearing a short silk robe that offered no protection against the night, she seemed to be oblivious of the piercing cold. She had fled from something, out of a house into the street, but now she didn’t run to him as a frightened woman seeking protection ought to have done. He asked her again what was wrong, and this time she didn’t even ask him to help her, just stared at him as if in a trance.
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