by Dean Koontz
It wasn’t just strangling him but trying to bite him as it had tried to bite Paige, striking snakelike, hissing. Growling in the back of its throat. Teeth snapped shut on empty air an inch from Marty’s face. Breath sour and thick. The stench of decay. He had the feeling it would devour him if it could, rip out his throat and take his blood.
Reality outstripped imagination.
All reason fled.
Nightmares were real. Monsters existed.
With his good hand, he got a fistful of its hair and pulled hard, jerking its head back, frantic to keep its flashing teeth away from him.
Its eyes glittered and rolled. Foaming spittle flew when it shrieked.
Heat poured off its body, and it was as hot to the touch as the sun-warmed vinyl of a car seat in summer.
Letting go of Marty’s throat but still pinning him against the parapet, The Other reached back and seized the hand with which he had clutched its hair. Bony fingers. Inhuman. Hard talons. It seemed fleshless, brittle, yet increasingly fierce and strong, and it almost crushed his hand before he let go of its hair. Then it whipped its head to the side and bit his forearm, ripped the sleeve of his jacket but not his flesh. Tore at him again, sank teeth into his hand, he screamed. It grabbed his ski jacket, pulling him off the parapet as he tried to lean into the void to escape it, snapped at his face, teeth clashing a fraction of an inch short of his cheek, rasped out a single tortured word, “Need,” and snapped at his eyes, snapped, snapped at his eyes.
“Be at peace, Alfie.”
Marty registered the words but initially wasn’t clear-headed enough either to realize what they meant or to grasp that the voice was one he had never heard before.
The Other reared its head back, as if about to make its final lunge for his face. But it held that posture, eyes wild, skeletal face as softly luminous as the snow, teeth bared, rolling its head from side to side, issuing a thin wordless sound as if it wasn’t sure why it was hesitating.
Marty knew that he should use the moment to ram a knee into the thing’s crotch, try to rush it backward across the platform, to the opposite parapet, up, out, and over. He could imagine what to do, see it in his writer’s eye, a fully realized moment of action in a novel or movie, but he had no strength left. The pain in his gunshot wound, throat, and bitten hand swelled anew, dizziness and nausea overwhelmed him, and he knew he was on the verge of a blackout.
“Be at peace, Alfie,” the voice repeated more firmly.
Still holding Marty, who was helpless in its ferocious grip, The Other turned its head toward the speaker.
A flashlight winked on, directed at the creature’s face.
Blinking toward the light source, Marty saw a bearlike man, tall and barrel-chested, and a smaller man in a black ski suit. They were strangers.
They showed a little surprise but not the shock and horror that Marty would have expected.
“Jesus,” the smaller man said, “what’s happening to him?”
“Metabolic meltdown,” said the larger man.
“Jesus.”
Marty glanced toward the west wall of the belfry, where Paige was crouched with the kids, sheltering them, holding their heads against her breast to prevent them from seeing too much of the creature.
“Be at peace, Alfie,” the smaller man repeated.
In a voice tortured by rage, pain, and confusion, The Other rasped, “Father. Father. Father?”
Marty was still tightly held, and his attention was again drawn to the thing that had once looked like him.
The flashlight-illuminated face was more hideous than it had appeared in the gloom. Wisps of steam were rising off it in some places, confirming his sense that it was hot. Scores of shotgun wounds pocked one side of its head, but they were not bleeding and, in fact, seemed more than half healed. As Marty stared, a black lead pellet squeezed out of the creature’s temple and oozed down its cheek in a thin trail of yellowish fluid.
The wounds were its least repulsive features. In spite of the physical strength it still possessed, it was as meagerly padded with flesh as something that had crawled out of a coffin after a year underground. Skin was stretched tightly over its facial bones. Its ears were shriveled into hard knots of cartilage and lay flat against the head. Desiccated lips had shrunk back from the gums, giving the teeth greater prominence, creating the illusion of a nascent muzzle and the wicked bite of a predator.
It was Death personified, the Grim Reaper without his voluminous black robes and scythe, on his way to a masquerade ball in a costume of flesh so thin and cheap that it was not for a moment convincing.
“Father?” it said again, gazing at the stranger in the black ski suit. “Father?”
Insistently: “Be at peace, Alfie.”
The name “Alfie” was so unsuited to the grotesque apparition still clutching Marty that he suspected he was hallucinating the arrival of the two men.
The Other turned away from the flashlight beam and glared at Marty once more. It seemed uncertain of what to do next.
Then it lowered its graveyard face to his, cocking its head as if with curiosity. “My life? My life?”
Marty didn’t know what it was asking him, and he was so weak from loss of blood or shock or both that he could only push at it feebly with his right hand. “Let me go.”
“Need,” it said. “Need, need, need, need, NEED, NEEEEEEEEED.”
The voice spiraled into a shrill squeal. Its mouth cracked wide in a humorless grin, and it struck at Marty’s face.
A gunshot boomed, The Other’s head jerked back, Marty sagged against the parapet as the creature let go of him, and its scream of demonic fury drew muffled cries of terror from Emily and Charlotte.
The Other clamped its skeletal hands to its shattered skull, as if trying to hold itself together.
The flashlight beam wavered, found it.
The fissures in the bone healed, and the bullet hole began to close up, forcing the lead slug out of the skull. But the cost of this miraculous healing became obvious as The Other’s skull began to change more dramatically, growing smaller and narrower and more lupine, as if bone was melting and reforming under the tight sheath of skin, borrowing mass from one place to rebuild damage in another.
“Cannibalizing itself to close the wound,” said the big man.
More ghostly wisps of vapor were rising from the creature, and it began to tear at the clothes it wore as if it could not tolerate the heat.
The smaller man shot it again. In the face.
Still holding its head, The Other reeled across the bell-tower platform and collided with the south parapet. It almost tipped over and out into the void.
It crumpled to its knees, shedding its torn clothing as if the garments were the tatters of a cocoon, squirming forth in a darker and utterly inhuman form, twitching, jittering.
It was no longer shrieking or hissing. It sobbed. In spite of its increasingly monstrous appearance, the sobbing rendered it less threatening and even pitiable.
Relentless, the gunman stepped toward it and fired a third shot.
The sobbing chilled Marty, perhaps because there was something human and pathetic about it. Too weak to stand, he slid down to the floor, his back against the waist-high parapet, and had to look away from the thrashing creature.
An eternity passed before The Other was entirely motionless and quiet.
Marty heard his daughters weeping.
Reluctantly he turned his eyes to the body which lay directly across the platform from him and which was bathed in the mercilessly revealing beam of the flashlight. The corpse was a puzzle of black bones and glistening flesh, the greater part of its substance having been consumed in its frantic attempts to heal itself and stay alive. The twisted and jagged remains more resembled those of an alien life form than those of a man.
Wind blew.
Snow fell.
A greater cold came down.
After a while, the man in the black ski suit turned away from the remains and spoke to th
e bearish man. “A very bad boy indeed.”
The larger man said nothing.
Marty wanted to ask who they were. His grip on consciousness was so tenuous, however, that he thought the effort of speaking might cause him to pass out.
To his partner, the smaller man said, “What’d you think of the church? As weird as anything Kirk and the crew have turned up, isn’t it? All those obscenities Day-Gloing on the walls. It’ll make our little scenario all the more convincing, don’t you think?”
Though he felt as lightheaded as if he had been drinking, and though he was having difficulty keeping his thoughts focused, Marty now had confirmed what he’d suspected when the two men first arrived: they were not saviors, merely new executioners, and only marginally less mysterious than The Other.
“You’re going to do it?” the larger of the two asked.
“Too much trouble to haul them back to the cabin. You don’t think this weird church is an even better setting?”
“Drew,” the big man said, “there are a number of things about you I like.”
The smaller man seemed confused. He wiped at the snow that the wind stuck to his eyelashes. “What’d you say?”
“You’re damned smart, even if you did go to Princeton and Harvard. You’ve got a good sense of humor, you really do, you make me laugh, even when it’s at my expense. Hell, especially when it’s at my expense.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“But you’re a crazy, sick son of a bitch,” the big man said, raised his own handgun, and shot his partner.
Drew, if that was his name, hit the tile floor as hard as if he had been made of stone. He landed on his side, facing Marty. His mouth was open, as were his eyes, though he had a blind man’s gaze and seemed to have nothing to say.
In the center of Drew’s forehead was an ugly bullet hole. For as long as he could hold fast to consciousness, Marty stared at the wound, but it didn’t appear to be healing.
Wind blew.
Snow fell.
A greater cold came down—along with a greater darkness.
7
Marty woke with his forehead pressed to cold glass. Heavy snow churned against the other side of the pane.
They were parked next to service station pumps. Between the pumps and through the falling snow, he saw a well-lighted convenience store with large windows.
He rolled his head away from the glass and sat up straighter. He was in the back seat of a truck-type station wagon, an Explorer or Cherokee.
Behind the steering wheel sat the big man from the bell tower. He was turned around in his seat, looking back. “How you doing?”
Marty tried to answer. His mouth was dry, his tongue stuck to his palate, and his throat was sore. The croak that escaped him was not a word.
“I think you’ll be all right,” the stranger said.
Marty’s ski jacket was open, and he raised one trembling hand to his left shoulder. Under the blood-damp wool sweater, he felt an odd bulky mass.
“Field dressing,” the man said. “Best I could do in a hurry. We get out of these mountains, across the county line, I’ll clean the wound and rebandage it.”
“Hurts.”
“Don’t doubt it.”
Marty felt not merely weak but frail. He lived by words and never failed to have the right ones when he needed them, so it was frustrating to find himself with barely enough energy to speak. “Paige?” he asked.
“In there with the kids,” the stranger said, indicating the combination service station and convenience store. “Girls are using the bathroom. Mrs. Stillwater’s paying the cashier, getting some hot coffee. I just filled the tank.”
“You’re . . . ?”
“Clocker. Karl Clocker.”
“Shot him.”
“Sure did.”
“Who . . . who . . . was he?”
“Drew Oslett. Bigger question is—what was he?”
“Huh?”
Clocker smiled. “Born of man and woman, but he wasn’t much more human than poor Alfie. If there’s an evil alien species out there somewhere, marauding through the galaxy, they’ll never mess with us if they know we can produce specimens like Drew.”
Clocker drove, and Charlotte occupied the front passenger seat. He referred to her as “First Officer Stillwater” and assigned her the duty of “handing the captain his coffee when he needs another sip of it and, otherwise, guarding against catastrophic spillage that might irreparably contaminate the ship.”
Charlotte was uncharacteristically restrained and unwilling to play.
Marty worried about what psychological scars their ordeal might have left in her—and what additional trouble and trauma might be ahead of them.
In the back seat, Emily sat behind Karl Clocker, Marty behind Charlotte, and Paige between them. Emily was not merely quiet but totally silent, and Marty worried about her too.
Out of Mammoth Lakes on Route 203 and south on 395, progress was slow. Two or three inches of snow were on the ground, and the blizzard was in full howl.
Clocker and Paige drank coffee, and the girls had hot chocolate. The aromas should have been appealing, but they increased Marty’s queasiness.
He was allowed apple juice. From the convenience store, Paige had purchased a six-pack of juice in cans.
“It’s the only thing you might be able to hold in your stomach,” Clocker said. “And even if it makes you gag, you’ve got to take as much of it as you can because, with that wound, you’re sure as hell dehydrating dangerously.”
Marty was so shaky that, even with his right hand, he couldn’t hold the juice without spilling it. Paige put a straw in it, held it for him, and blotted his chin when he dribbled.
He felt helpless. He wondered if he was more seriously wounded than they had told him or than they realized.
Intuitively, he sensed he was dying—but he didn’t know if that was an accurate perception or the curse of a writer’s imagination.
The night was filled with white flakes, as if the day had not merely faded but shattered into an infinitude of pieces that would drift down forever through an unending darkness.
Over the chittering of the tire chains and the grumble of the engine, as they descended from the Sierras in a train of cars behind a snowplow and cinder truck, Clocker told them about the Network.
It was an alliance of powerful people in government, business, law-enforcement, and the media, who were brought together by a shared perception that traditional Western democracy was an inefficient and inevitably catastrophic system by which to order society. They were convinced that the vast majority of citizens were self-indulgent, sensation-seeking, void of spiritual values, greedy, lazy, envious, racist, and woefully ignorant on virtually all issues of importance.
“They believe,” Clocker said, “that recorded history proves the masses have always been irresponsible and civilization has progressed only by luck and by the diligent efforts of a few visionaries.”
“Do they think this idea’s new?” Paige asked scornfully. “Have they heard of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tsetung? ”
“What they think’s new,” Clocker said, “is that we’ve reached an age when the technological underpinnings of society are so complex and so vulnerable because of this complexity that civilization—in fact, the planet itself—can’t survive if government makes decisions based on the whims and selfish motivations of the masses that pull the levers in the voting booths.”
“Crap,” Paige said.
Marty would have seconded her opinion if he’d felt strong enough to join the discussion. But he had only enough energy to suck at the apple juice and swallow it.
“What they’re really about,” Clocker said, “is brute power. The only thing new about them, regardless of what they think, is they’re working together from different extremes of the political spectrum. The people who want to ban Huckleberry Finn from libraries and the people who want to ban books by Anne Rice may seem to be motivated by different concerns but they’r
e spiritual brothers and sisters.”
“Sure,” Paige said. “They share the same motivation—the desire not merely to control what other people do but what they think.”
“The most radical environmentalists, those who want to reduce the population of the world by extreme measures within a decade or two, because they think the planet’s ecology is in danger, are in some ways simpatico with the people who’d like to reduce the world’s population drastically just because they feel there are too many black and brown people in it.”
Paige said, “An organization of such extremes can’t hold together for long.”
“I agree,” Clocker said. “But if they want power badly enough, total power, they might work together long enough to seize it. Then, when they’re in control, they’ll turn their guns on each other and catch the rest of us in the cross-fire.”
“How big an organization are we talking about?” she asked.
After a hesitation, Clocker said, “Big.”
Marty sucked on the straw, exceedingly grateful for the level of civilization that allowed for the sophisticated integration of farming, food-processing, packaging, marketing, and distribution of a product as self-indulgent as cool, sweet apple juice.
“The Network directors feel modern technology embodies a threat to humanity,” Clocker explained, switching the pounding windshield wipers to a slower speed, “but they aren’t against employing the cutting edge of that technology in the pursuit of power.”
The development of a completely controllable force of clones to serve as the singularly obedient police and soldiers of the next millennium was only one of a multitude of research programs intended to help bring on the new world, though it was one of the first to bear fruit. Alfie. The first individual of the first—or Alpha—generation of operable clones.
Because society was riddled with incorrect thinkers in positions of authority, the first clones were to be employed to assassinate leaders in business, government, media, and education who were too retrograde in their attitudes to be persuaded of the need for change. The clone was not a real person but more or less a machine made of flesh; therefore, it was an ideal assassin. It had no awareness of who had created and instructed it, so it couldn’t betray its handlers or expose the conspiracy it served.