A Werewolf Among Us

by Dean R. Koontz

  Teddy swung back on Hirschel just as the hunter gained his feet, struck his left hip and spun him violently around. Hirschel's knees caught on the arm of a chair and he went down hard, his head striking the back of the chair with a sickening dull thud. He did not move.

  Teddy swung in St. Cyr's direction, located him and started forward at top speed.

  St. Cyr shot, missed, shot again, fell to the side as the robot careened past.

  "Give me the gun," Tina said, holding out a slim, brown hand.

  St. Cyr pushed her rudely away as Teddy streaked back on them and passed within an inch of the spot where her head had been. He rolled, despite his throbbing shoulder, and fired again. The pulse of light, tattling on his bad shooting, passed two feet above the master unit.

  What in hell was wrong?

  For once, the bio-computer had no suggestion.

  Foolishly, Jubal had picked up a chair and was crossing the room in quick, heavy steps, brandishing the impossible weapon as if he could frighten the robot away with the threat of a severe beating.

  "Get back. Stay down!" St. Cyr called.

  Jubal could not hear him, or did not want to. Perhaps, in this useless display of bravery, he hoped to cancel out everything that St. Cyr had said to him in the last several hours; wipe out his wife's and his daughter's agreement with that judgment; prove that, after all, he could care about someone besides himself, something else besides his art.

  Teddy rose, dived, leveled out and smashed the chair from the old man's hands, sending him tumbling backwards. He landed in a heap at his wife's feet. Alicia bent over him and patted his face. She seemed almost too calm as she pointedly ignored the chaos around her — and when it was all over, if she were somehow still alive, she would most likely have some screaming to do.

  "Give me that gun!" Tina insisted.

  "Stay down," St. Cyr said. "Or get out of here." He ignored her reaching hand and got clumsily to his feet. He did not dare look at his shoulder. The pain was bad enough. He did not want to have to match the pain with the sight of all that blood from the opened wound. Somehow he twisted fast enough to avoid Teddy's next pass, turned and stumbled into the rows of ceiling-high bookshelves that paralleled the rear wall of the room and took up a third of the chamber's space. He leaned against a shelf of mystery novels and tried to regain his breath and at least some of his nerve. He had to be calm, because he simply had to shoot better.

  A moment later Teddy found him. The master unit soared into the far end of the aisle between the books, struck straight for St. Cyr's chest. When the cyberdetective fell to avoid being battered to death, the robot checked its forward speed with surprising rapidity, curved up and to the right to avoid ploughing disastrously into the stone wall behind the wood paneling, and smashed noisily through the shelving and bound volumes on that side. It burst into the second aisle, which paralleled the first, in a rain of torn paper and splintered wood.

  Tina appeared at the end of the first passage and shouted, "Baker!"

  "Get out of here."

  She started towards him.

  "For God's sake, run!"

  Teddy exploded through the books and shelving again, destroying a good portion of the library's collection of 20th-century American authors, oblivious of any possibility of damage to his own mechanisms, then dropped at St. Cyr like a stone.

  Tina screamed.

  St. Cyr tried to run.

  Instead of crushing his skull down to his kneecaps as it had intended, the master unit glanced off his good shoulder and sent him tumbling like a clown. Full-length on the floor of the aisle, both shoulders jammed full of intensely hot pins, St. Cyr wondered why he had not yet tried to shoot the robot while it was limited in its maneuvers by the dimensions of the aisle.

  A robot is harmless property.

  He's a killer.

  Illogical.

  St. Cyr rolled, trying to make up for lost time, and nearly ground his teeth down to the gums in a single instant as pain cascaded through him like a torrent through a suddenly opened sluice gate. He fired straight up at the machine as it dived like a hammer for his head, chewed on what was left of his teeth, and rolled again.

  He had missed.

  A robot is harmless, valuable property.

  Bullshit.

  Useless emotion.

  St. Cyr scrambled across the aisle, wriggled through the lowest shelf, pushing the books ahead of him into the next passageway. He crossed that and was into the third before Teddy smashed through the shelving after him.

  "Baker!"

  He looked around, could not see her.

  He ran to the end of the aisle as Teddy smashed through from the second and soared after him.

  "Baker, where are you?"

  "Get out, dammit!"

  He had forgotten Teddy, listening to her call. He sensed the imminence of disaster a second before it was to happen, threw himself to the left, screamed as his wounded shoulder caught the edge of a shelf. Teddy boomed through the place he had been standing.

  "Baker!"

  He pushed through the books into the fourth aisle, squirmed through another low shelf into the fifth and last passageway. He was not as upset by the blank wall facing him as he should have been; for a long moment there, he had wondered if there would be an end to the aisles or if he had accidentally entered some unimaginably subtle purgatory in which the books went on and on forever.

  No door here, though. Well, he had specified a room with only one entrance…

  Somewhere farther back, toward the front of the room, Teddy tore another hole in the neatly racked books. A weakened shelf sighed as nails pulled slowly free, screeched abruptly like a stepped-on cat, and collapsed with a roar of spilled knowledge.

  The house computer had referred to Teddy as a berserker. At the time, that had not been exactly true, for the master unit had been operating on a set of carefully laid plans. Now, however, when his plans had fallen through, he was indeed a berserker. Apparently, when Walter Dannery programmed the robot for murder, he thought to place in it a final directive to take precedence in a crisis: If all else fails, throw caution to the wind, attack and destroy.

  Three hundred and fifty pounds of master unit traveling at twenty miles an hour — say only ten or fifteen miles an hour in the confines of the room — generated how much force, how much impact, how much potential for destruction? Too goddamned much. Shortly, there would not be any aisles in which to hide.

  Books slapped to the floor again as shelving protested, splintered, and fell down before the robot.

  Tina screamed.

  Another crash.

  Books fluttering like birds.

  "Baker, help me!"

  St. Cyr ran to the end of the aisle and, keeping to the wall, ran past the succeeding passageways, looking quickly into each. He found both the girl and the robot in the second corridor. She had fallen in a mound of rumpled books and seemed to have twisted her ankle. The master unit was completing a turn, right in front of St. Cyr, that would take it back towards her in one last deadly plunge.

  "Baker!"

  She had seen him.

  He fired at the master unit, missed.

  He damned the bio-computer that was attached to him, knew that he had no time to stop, calmly deactivate it, wait for the filaments to leave his body, unplug it and put it down. She would be dead by then.

  "Here!" he shouted.

  He tossed the gun to her. It glanced off a shiny-backed book by her hand and clattered across the floor, stopping a dozen feet behind her.

  "Hurry!" he shouted.

  She turned and scrambled after the weapon, slipped, fell, pushed up, reached, had it.

  Teddy started after her.

  Suddenly St. Cyr knew that she would not have enough time to stop it. Teddy could take the vibra-beam long enough to slam brutally into her and pass on by her broken body. And as abruptly as that realization came, so came the breakdown in the wall of his psyche, the wall that had shielded him from certain porti
ons of the past for a long, long time now. In that instant he knew who the stalker in his nightmare was, remembered Angela, remembered her face in death, saw dark hair and dark eyes, saw her metamorphose into Tina… He screamed and lunged forward, leapt for the robot that had already begun to move away from him.

  Luckily, his hands caught under what would have been a chin if it were human; he tried to drag it backwards, like a child wrestling with a dog three times his size.

  Teddy swiveled his head, attempted to wrench free of the detective, his angle of approach to Tina shifting as he failed.

  Tina had turned and was holding the pistol before her in both hands. Like a caveman who thinks he can beat an armored tank with nothing more than a slingshot, thought St. Cyr as he rode the silver robot.

  A robot is harmless, valuable property.

  St. Cyr's weight sufficiently deflected the master unit, sent it into the shelves beside the girl, where books had already been spilled. It brushed her skirt, nothing more.

  Teddy tried to climb now; he rose a dozen feet, lifting the detective free of the floor.

  St. Cyr's battered arms were so strained and bleeding that they had gone numb. He just hoped that the paralysis did not creep into his hands and force him to relinquish his hold on the master unit. How long could the damn thing go on like this? It was feeding a good bit of energy into its gravplate mobility-system to be able to perform like this. Its batteries couldn't last forever without a recharge from the house generator. No matter what happened to his arms, he could surely hold out longer than Teddy…

  Smoothly, Teddy's arms raised, bent backwards in an impossibly complex movement that was no strain at all on the special ball joints and the double-elbow lever system. The steel fingers closed around St. Cyr's wrists and squeezed.

  He screamed, kicked, but held on.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Tina had moved and was sighting on the plate that covered the majority of the robot's control terminals.

  Teddy shifted his grip on St. Cyr's left hand and carefully broke that thumb in one clean jerk.

  Tina fired.

  Teddy methodically broke the little finger on the same hand, where the thumb hung like a rag. St. Cyr let go with that arm, blackness bubbling up inside of him. Yet he would not let go with his other arm.

  Tina fired again — three short, quick bursts.

  Teddy was slammed sideways into the bookshelves, dragging the detective with him. St. Cyr felt a sharp thrust of broken shelving pierce his thigh.

  Tina stepped closer and shot again.

  Teddy hissed, squawked as he changed voice tapes in a desperate attempt to put together a few last words, perhaps some last epithet that Dannery had programmed into him. He could not do it. The hiss died with a pop, like a balloon exploding under the sharp jab of a pin, and the robot fell to the floor twelve feet below, landing on top of the cyberdetective, who had not let go. Teddy was finished.

  And so am I, St. Cyr thought.

  Emotional nonsense.

  Blackness bubbled completely over him. This time, instead of a nightmare there was a pleasant warmth, soft light, Angela and Tina standing before him with their arms outstretched. He went to be with them forever.

  EIGHTEEN: A New Life

  Whirring.

  Clicking.

  Lights, no shapes.

  Warmth, the smell of honey, cold metal fingers—

  — terror, a sting, relaxation, sleep.

  Different lights.

  A woman's face: Angela? Tina?

  No nightmares.

  Sleep…

  No nightmares.

  Soft covers.

  A hand on his forehead…

  He opened his eyes and looked at Tina Alderban, smiled when she smiled, and tried to speak. His voice was not a voice, just the slide of stones down a rough plank.

  "Water?" she asked.

  He nodded.

  She brought a glass of water, watched him drink, took it out of his trembling hands when he was finished. "How do you feel?"

  "Okay." He settled back against the pillow, frowned and said, "No, not okay, pretty terrible."

  She leaned into him and, her voice intense, her words clipped and strained, she said, "I want to destroy your bio-computer shell. I want your permission to grind it into little pieces."

  He felt his chest and realized he was not wearing the shell.

  He said, "Costs money."

  "I'll buy it from you, whatever it costs."

  He seemed to remember something and, working his sour mouth, he said, "What happened to the others?"

  "Later," she insisted. "First, tell me if I can have the bio-computer."

  "Are they dead?"

  "The bio-computer," she said, setting her mouth in a tight line.

  He sighed, sank back. "Take it," he said.

  She leaned forward and kissed him, holding his face in her small hands, nicking her tongue along his lips.

  "My breath is awful," he said.

  She chuckled. "It's not bad at all."

  He smiled and yawned.

  "Sleepy?"

  He nodded.

  "Sleep, then."

  He did, drifting into a peaceful darkness where there were no nightmares anymore.

  The next time he woke, hours later, he was more himself than he had been the first time. Tina was sitting in a chair next to his bed, reading, and he sat up to have a better look at her.

  "Whoa, easy," she said, dropping the book and urging him to lie back and rest.

  "Have the police been here yet?" he asked.

  "Yesterday morning," she said.

  "How long have I been asleep?"

  "A day and a half."

  He rubbed at his eyes as if the events of those hours lay there in a colorful powder. 'The others?"

  "Dane had several broken ribs and a punctured lung. He's going to be all right now. Hirschel has a skull fracture and a broken hip, but he's coming along nicely thanks to the autodoc and the speedheal potions. Jubal — Father suffered a broken arm and was otherwise only bruised and cut." She sat on the edge of the waterbed, hooked the black wealth of her hair over her ears to keep it from falling across her face. "You had a dislocated shoulder, two broken fingers, two broken ribs, a broken ankle, and too many lacerations to properly count. A few more days in bed, with speedheal, and you ought to be up and around."

  He looked down at the lumpy bandages and nodded. "Dannery…?"

  "He's going to be arrested on Ionus tomorrow morning, when the light-telegram from Inspector Rainy can be acted on. I opened the packet of information you got from Talmud Associates. It's pretty thorough on Dannery. His wife was seriously ill. In fact, partly because of the transfer from Darma to Ionus, she died. That unhinged him the rest of the way, I suppose."

  "Has Jubal seen the information?"

  "Yes," she said. "I don't know how it affected him. He turned white and was very upset when he finished the part about Dannery's wife. But I don't know if he really understands what happened and how much of it is his responsibility."

  Then: silence.

  "Water?" he asked a few minutes later.

  She got it. When he had finished drinking, she said, "Can you tell me about Angela?" When he looked surprised, she said, "You were calling for her — and sometimes for me — just after we took you out of the autodoc." When he hesitated, she tried to help him find a place to start. She said, "Is she pretty?"

  "She was. She's dead."

  "I'm sorry."

  He said, "Not as sorry as I am. I killed her."

  "I don't believe that. You aren't a murderer."

  "Not directly, perhaps." Slowly, haltingly, he told her about the honeymoon, the leisurely tour of Earth, his refusal to use a master unit to drive their car, his own incompetence on the mountain road, on the slick pavement… the spin… rails breaking… the car rolling… metal screeching, popping, twisting up like rubber… her blood running down his hands as he pulled her through the shattered window… h
er unseeing eyes…

  When he was done, Tina said, "You must have loved her very much."

  "Too much to live with the memory."

  "I look like her, don't I?"

  "A little."

  "Is that the reason — you're interested in me?"

  "Not the sole reason," he said.

  "I destroyed the bio-computer shell."

  "How?"

  "I smashed its undersides with a hammer, then fed it down the garbage chute, where it'll be compressed into a tiny cube."

  He smiled and took her hand in his unbandaged hand. "That's quite violent for a demure young lady. I'm sure it must have been satisfying, but what am I going to do for a living now?"

  "You'll be my crutch," she said. "You'll make me care."

  "You once thought that was impossible."

  "Maybe I've changed my mind — and maybe I've already begun to care, just a little."

  He patted the waterbed. "Come here, lie down."

  "I don't think you're in any condition for that," she said.

  "Neither do I. I just want to have you beside me, to put my arm around — if I can."

  She stretched out on the mattress and turned against him, curled in the hollow under his shoulder and put her cheek against his chest. For a long while he lay like that, looking at her black hair, which starred with points of blue light from the ceiling lamp and became, in his mind, the deep and beautiful flow of space where suns and worlds and possibilities were limitless.

  * * *

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