by Dean Koontz
“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, pulverized, 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 technicia
ns 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.”
Ariel studied Nancy in silence for half a minute and then said, “Isn’t using excessive adjectives and adverbs an indication of an obsession disorder?”
Nancy mulled over the question. Intellectual vigor and honesty were expected of Communitarians in relationships with one another. Smashing the angels had made her feel quite vigorous. “In this case it’s only an indication of the intensity of my focus on the task. I am totally focused more sharply than an astronomical telescope, than a laser.”
After a moment of consideration, Ariel said, “I’ve eaten almost everything in the refrigerator and half of what’s in the pantry. I’m still hungry. I think the problem is that I’m hungry to begin. I want to go out to the barn and become what I am.”
“But you’re phase two,” Nancy said. “You aren’t scheduled to begin your work until Saturday, when all the humans in town are dead and we have full, unchallenged control.”
Ariel nodded. “But I think I’m like you. I’m so focused like a laser, so dedicated to the mission, so eager to proceed efficiently, that it makes no sense to wait. Logic tells me to act with reason, reason tells me to proceed only with good cause, and I’ve got a good cause, which is that I can’t wait any longer, I just can’t, I can’t, it’s sheer torture to wait, excruciating, I’ve got to do it, got to become what I am meant to be, tonight, now, right now!”
For twelve seconds, Nancy deliberated over Ariel’s presentation of her case. Like all Communitarians, a thousand-year calendar and clock were part of her program, and she always knew the precise time to the second, without need of a wristwatch.
Nancy said, “Timeliness is part of efficiency. If you’re able to perform your duties earlier than scheduled, that just means you’re even more efficient than you were designed to be.”
“My readiness, ahead of schedule,” Ariel said, “is proof of our Creator’s genius.”
“He is the greatest genius who ever lived. And my inability to tolerate these stupid, stupid, stupid freaking angels is proof of my commitment to the Community.”
“For the Community,” Ariel said.
Nancy replied, “For the Community.”
“Will you come with me to the barn now?”
“Let me smash the rest of these first.”
“All right, if you have to.”
“I have to. I really need this. Then I’ll assist you with your becoming.”
“Just hurry,” Ariel said. “I have my needs, too. I need to be in the barn, becoming. I need it so bad I feel like I’ll explode if I don’t get it really soon.”
The Communitarians were produced asexually, manufactured rather than conceived. They had no sexual capacity or desire. But Nancy was pretty sure that what she was feeling now must be similar to what great sex was like for human beings: a powerful tidal rush of energy that shuddered through her entire body, and with the energy came a pure black hatred of all humanity and of all living things not made in the Hive, a hatred so intense and so hot that she half thought she would burst into a pillar of fire, and with the energy and the hatred came a beautiful vision of a dead world that was scourged and silent and stripped of meaning.
Nancy swept the remaining porcelain figurines from the glass display shelves. She stomped on them, one after the other, stomped and ground them under her heels and kicked at the fragments. She snatched up an angel head and threw it across the room with such force that a sharp piece of the broken neck lodged in the Sheetrock. The glazed and haloed head, big as a plum, stared down at her as if with astonishment, like the head of a trophy deer mounted on a hunter’s wall. Stomping, grinding, kicking, Nancy suddenly became aware that she was shrieking with a kind of furious delight, her shrill cries echoing off the living-room walls, and the wild sound empowered her, thrilled her.
Ariel must have been thrilled, too, because she took a single step past the archway, into the room, and stood shrieking along with Nancy. She raised her fists and shook them, and she threw her head back and forth, whipping her shoulders with her long blond hair. Her eyes were bright with intelligence and reason. Her voice was strong and clear with intelligence and reason. She wasn’t usurping Nancy’s moment, but rather encouraging her; this was a you-go-girl shriek.
chapter 10
Mr. Lyss parked at the curb and switched off the headlights, and all the bright tumbling snowflakes came down dimmer in the dark, as if the light that was turned off had been in each of them.
“You positive this is Bozeman’s house?”
Nummy said, “Yes, sir. This here’s just one block over from Grandmama’s place, where I lived before the Martians come.”
The cozy brick house was one story with white shutters at the windows. The front porch had a white painted-iron railing and white iron corner posts and what they called a baked-aluminum roof. Nummy always wondered where they found an oven to bake something as big as that roof.
“You sure he lives alone, Peaches?”
“Kiku she’s dead and the kids was never born.”
“How long ago did Kiku buy the farm?”
“She didn’t buy no farm, it was a grave plot.”
“I guess I misunderstood. How long’s she been dead?”
“It might be like two years. Longer than Grandmama.”
“Maybe Bozeman doesn’t live alone.”
“Who would he live with?” Nummy wondered.
“A girlfriend, a boyfriend, one of each, his grandmama, a damn pet alligator. How the hell should I know? The sonofabitch could live with anybody. If you used what brain you have, boy, you wouldn’t ask so many dumb questions.”
“The Boze lives alone. I’m pretty sure. Anyway, there’s no lights on in there, so nobody’s home.”
“Alligators can see in the dark,” Mr. Lyss said. “But come on, let’s go. I want that snowmobile, and I want out of this village of the damned.”
The house next door was dark, too, and there were no streetlamps. The blacktop and the lawns were covered with snow, but although that white blanket seemed like it was giving off light, it really didn’t. And the falling flakes were so thick they were almost like a fog, so you couldn’t see far. Even if someone might be looking out a window somewhere, he wouldn’t be able to see that Mr. Lyss carried a long gun held down at his right side.
Mr. Lyss had two pistols and all kinds of extra bullets in the pockets of his big coat. He found the guns in the preacher’s house that they burned down because it was full of the giant cocoons growing monsters inside. Mr. Lyss said he was going to pay for the guns with his lottery winnings—he
had a ticket in his wallet with what he knew would be the right number—but Nummy had the bad feeling that Mr. Lyss really just stole them. Mr. Lyss seemed like his folks had never churched him when he was growing up.
The snow made a soft crunching sound under their feet as they walked around the house to the back porch, where they couldn’t be seen from the street. Mr. Lyss didn’t need his set of lock picks, because when he tried the kitchen door, it opened inward, hinges creaking.
Suddenly Nummy didn’t want to go into Officer Barry Bozeman’s house, not because it was wrong to go into a house when you weren’t invited, but because something bad waited for them in there. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. A sick, sliding feeling in his stomach. A tightness in his chest that prevented him from drawing deep breaths.
“Let’s leave now,” Nummy whispered.
“Nowhere to go,” said Mr. Lyss. “And not enough time to go there.”
The old man crossed the threshold, slid one hand along the wall beside the door, and switched on the lights.
When Nummy reluctantly followed Mr. Lyss, he saw the Boze in his underwear and open bathrobe, sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. The Boze’s head was tipped back, his mouth hanging open, his eyes rolled back in their sockets.
“Dead,” said Mr. Lyss.
Nummy knew dead when he saw it.
Even though Officer Bozeman was dead, Nummy was uncomfortable, seeing him in his underwear. He was also uncomfortable because it seemed wrong to stare at a dead person when he didn’t know you were there and he couldn’t tell you to get out or even make himself more presentable.
You couldn’t look away from a dead person, either. Then it would seem you were embarrassed for him, as though it must be his fault he died.
When the dead person was someone you knew, like the Boze—or like Grandmama—you felt a little like you wanted to die yourself. But you just had to look at him anyway, because this was the last time you would see him except in photos, and photos were just photos, they weren’t the person.