The Dead Town

Page 2

The truck’s forward movement threw the door back against Deucalion, but he had a great capacity to endure pain. He pushed it open again and swung into the passenger seat, pulling the door shut behind him.
Taking out one of the two-man crew and boarding the vehicle required mere seconds, and the confused driver only half braked when he saw his partner snatched from the cab. Deucalion reached for the key, switched off the engine. Surprised but not afraid—these new replicants seemed fearless—the snarling driver swung his right fist, but Deucalion seized it in midstrike, twisted it, and broke the wrist.
The driver grunted but didn’t cry out in pain. As the truck coasted along the street, Deucalion clamped his left hand to the back of his adversary’s head, slamming the replicant’s face into the steering wheel. He slammed it again and again, and yet again, only twice sounding the horn.
The weaving truck swiftly lost momentum, the front tire on the port side met a curb that it barely managed to climb, and the driver stopped resisting. As the vehicle came to a full stop, the front bumper thumped gently against a lamppost. Deucalion was certain the replicant must be dead, but for insurance he got the man in a choke hold and broke his neck.
These two killings could not be called murder. True murder was strictly a crime against humanity. Except for outward appearances, these specimens from Victor’s current laboratory were not human in any sense. Abominations. Monsters. Lab rats.
Deucalion felt no guilt for having terminated them, because he was, after all, another monster, the earliest model in Victor’s product line. Perhaps he had been somewhat sanctified by contrition for his long-ago crimes and by his centuries of suffering. He might even be a monster on a sacred mission, although still in essence a monster, a product of Victor’s hubris, created from the bodies of hanged criminals as an affront to God.
He could be as brutal and ruthless as any of his maker’s newer creations. If the war against the natural world had begun, humanity would need a monster of its own to have any hope of survival.
Leaving the corpse behind the wheel, Deucalion got out of the truck. Even in the breathless night, the storm still seemed to qualify as a blizzard, so thickly did the snow fall.
Suddenly, it seemed to him that the flakes of falling snow did not take light from the streetlamp but, instead, were illuminated from within their crystalline structures, as if they were shavings of the lost moon, each filled with its measure of the lunar glow. The longer that Deucalion lived, the more magical he found this precious world.
Russell Street, a secondary thoroughfare, was deserted, free of both other traffic and pedestrians. No shops were open in this block. But a witness might appear at any moment.
Deucalion walked back along the tire tracks and stopped beside the individual whom he had thrown from the truck. In spite of its crushed throat, the lab rat still tried to draw breath and clawed at the tire-compacted snow in a feeble attempt to drag itself onto its knees. With the hard stamp of a boot to the back of its neck, he put an end to the creature’s suffering.
He carried the corpse to the truck and opened the rear door. The cargo space was empty; the next batch of luckless people destined for extermination had not yet been collected. He tossed the body into the truck.
He pulled the driver from the cab, carried him to the back of the vehicle, threw him into the cargo box with the other corpse, and closed the door.
Behind the steering wheel, he started the engine. He backed the truck away from the lamppost, off the curb, into the street.
The display screen in the dashboard brightened with a map of a small portion of Rainbow Falls. A blinking red GPS indicator showed the current position of the truck. A green line traced a route that the driver was evidently meant to follow. At the top of the screen were the words TRANSPORT #3 SCHEDULE. Beside those words, two boxes offered options, one labeled LIST, the other MAP. The second box was currently highlighted.
Deucalion pressed a forefinger to LIST. The map vanished from the screen, and an assignment list appeared in its place. The third address was highlighted—THE FALLS INN—at the corner of Beartooth Avenue and Falls Road. Evidently that would have been the truck’s next stop.
Along the right side of the touch screen, in a vertical line, were five boxes, each labeled with a number. The 3 was highlighted.
When Deucalion put a forefinger to the 1, the list on the screen was replaced with a different series of addresses. The legend at the top now read TRANSPORT #1 SCHEDULE.
Here, too, the third line was highlighted. The two-man crew of Transport #1 had evidently successfully collected the people at the first two addresses and perhaps conveyed them to their doom. Their next stop appeared to be KBOW, the radio station that served not only Rainbow Falls but also the entire surrounding county.
Having replaced the employees of the telephone company with identical replicants earlier in the evening, thereby seizing control of all land-line phones and cell-phone towers, Victor’s army would next take control of KBOW, preventing the transmission of a warning either to residents of the town or to the people in the smaller surrounding communities.
Deucalion switched to MAP and saw that the radio station was on River Road, toward the northeastern end of the city limits, about two miles from his current position. Transport #1 was scheduled to arrive there in less than four minutes to collect KBOW’s evening staff. This suggested that the assault on the radio station might already have begun. If the route he followed to KBOW was the one that the truck’s navigation system recommended, the show would be over by the time he arrived there.
He opened the driver’s door, swung out of the truck—and stepped from Russell Street onto the radio-station parking lot.
Chapter 3
Mr. Lyss drove around going nowhere in the snow while he tried to think what to do next. Nummy O’Bannon rode with him, going to the same nowhere, because Nummy didn’t drive but he was good at riding.
Nummy felt kind of bad about riding in this car because Mr. Lyss stole it, and stealing was never good. Mr. Lyss said the keys were in the ignition, so the owner wanted anyone to use it who might need it. But they had hardly gone a mile before Nummy realized that was a lie.
“Grandmama she used to say, if you can’t buy what somebody else has or either make it for your own self, then you shouldn’t keep on always wanting it. That kind of wanting is called envy, and envy can make you into a thief faster than butter melts in a hot skillet.”
“Well, excuse me for being too damn stupid to build us a car from scratch,” Mr. Lyss said.
“I didn’t say you was stupid. I don’t call nobody names. That’s not nice. I been called enough myself.”
“I like calling people names,” Mr. Lyss said. “I get a thrill out of it. I delight in calling people names. I been known to make little children cry, the names I call them. Nobody’s going to tell me I can’t do something that gives me so much innocent pleasure.”
Mr. Lyss wasn’t as scary as he looked earlier in the day. His short-chopped gray hair still stood out every which way, like it was shocked by all the mean thoughts in his head. His face was squinched as if he just bit hard into a lemon, his eyes were as dangerous-blue as gas flames, shreds of dry skin curled on his cracked lips, and his teeth were gray. He seemed like he could get along fine without food or water, just so he had his anger to feed on. But some of the scary had gone out of him. Sometimes you could almost like him.
Nummy was never angry. He was too dumb to be angry. That was one of the best things about being really dumb, so dumb they didn’t even make you go to school: You just couldn’t think about anything hard enough to get angry over it.
He and Mr. Lyss were an odd couple, like odd couples in some movies that Nummy had seen. In those kind of movies, the odd-couple guys were always cops, one of them calm and nice, the other one crazy and funny. Nummy and Mr. Lyss weren’t cops at all, but they were really different from each other. Mr. Lyss was the crazy and funny one, except that he wasn’t that funny.
Nummy was thirty, but Mr. Lyss must be older than anyone else who was still alive. Nummy was pudgy and round-faced and freckled, but Mr. Lyss seemed to be made mostly of bone and gristle and thick skin with a million creases in it like some beat-up old leather jacket.
Sometimes Mr. Lyss was so interesting you couldn’t stop looking at him, kind of like in a movie when the little red numbers were counting down on the bomb clock. But at other times, staring at him too much could wear you out, and you had to turn away to give your eyes a rest. The snow was soft and cool to look at, floating down through the dark like tiny angels all in white.
“The snow’s real pretty,” Nummy said. “It’s a pretty night.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mr. Lyss said, “it’s a magical night, breathtaking beauty everywhere you look, prettier than all the prettiness in all the pretty Christmas cards ever made—except for the ravenous monster Martians all over town eating people faster than a wood-chipper could chew up a damn potato!”
“I didn’t forget them Martians,” Nummy said, “if that’s what they are. But the night’s pretty anyway. So what do you want to do, you want to drive out to the end of town, maybe see are the cops and the roadblock still there?”
“They’re not cops, boy. They’re monsters pretending to be cops, and they’ll be there till they’ve eaten everyone in town.”
Although Mr. Lyss drove slowly, sometimes the back end of the car fishtailed or it slid toward one curb or the other. He always got control again before they hit anything, but already they needed a car with tire chains or winter tires.
If Mr. Lyss stole another car, one with tire chains, and if Nummy went with him, knowing from the start it was stealing, he would probably be a thief himself. Grandmama raised him, so the bad things he did would bring shame on her in front of God, where she was now.
Nummy said, “You don’t really know the monster cops are still there till you go look.”
“I know, all right.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m a freaking genius,” Mr. Lyss said, spraying spit, gripping the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles looked as sharp as knives. “I just know things, my brain is so damn big. Back there in jail this morning, we hadn’t known each other two minutes till I knew you were a dummy, didn’t I?”
“That’s true,” Nummy admitted.
On the cross street ahead of them, a police car passed south to north, and Mr. Lyss said, “This is no good. We’ll never get out of town in a car. We’ve got to find another way.”
“Maybe we could go out the same way you come in. I always wanted to take me a ride on a train.”
“A cold, empty boxcar isn’t the glamorous fun it sounds like. Anyway, they’ll have the train yard covered.”
“Well, we can’t fly.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Lyss said. “If your skull is as hollow as it seems to be, I could tie a basket to your feet, blow hot air up your nose, and ride you out of here like you were a big old balloon.”
For a block or so, Nummy thought about that as the old man switched on the defroster and as the windshield, which had started to cloud at the edges, became clear once more. Then he said, “That don’t make no sense unless it was just you being mean.”
“You may be right.”
“I don’t know why you have to be mean.”
“I do it well. A man likes to do something if he’s good at it.”
“You aren’t as mean to me now as you was at first, back when we just met.”
After a silence, Mr. Lyss said, “Well, Peaches, I have my ups and downs. Nobody can be a hundred percent good at something 24/7.”
Mr. Lyss sometimes called him Peaches. Nummy wasn’t sure why.
“A couple times,” Nummy said, “I even sort of thought maybe we was getting to be friends.”
“I don’t want any friends,” Mr. Lyss said. “You take a Kleenex and blow that thought out of your head right now. Blow it out like the snot it is. I’m a loner and a rambler. Friends just weigh a man down. Friends are nothing but enemies waiting to happen. There’s nothing worse in this world than friendship.”
“Grandmama she always said friendship and love is what life is all about.”
“You just reminded me there is one thing worse than friendship. Love. Nothing will bring you down faster than love. It’s poison. Love kills.”
“I don’t see no way that’s true,” Nummy said.
“Well, it is true.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Don’t you call me a liar, boy. I’ve torn the throats out of men who called me a liar. I’ve cut their tongues out and fried them with onions for breakfast. I’m a dangerous sonofabitch when I’m riled.”
“I didn’t say liar. You’re just wrong about love, just wrong is all. Grandmama loved me, and love never killed me.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Love didn’t kill her, it was the sickness. If I could’ve took her cancer into me and then died for her, I’d be dead now, and she’d be alive here with you.”
They rode in silence for a minute, and then Mr. Lyss said, “You shouldn’t always listen to me, boy, or take what I say too seriously. Not everything I say is genius.”
“Probably most of it is, but not what you said just now. You know what? Maybe we could skidoo.”
“Could what?”
“You know, like a snowmobile.”
Mr. Lyss steered the car carefully to the curb and stopped. “We could go overland. But is there enough snow for that? It’s like an inch on the ground.”
“Deeper than an inch,” Nummy said, “and lots more coming fast.”
“Where would we get a snowmobile?”
“People they have them all over town. And then there’s the snowmobile place they sell them over on Beartrack.”
“Another damn street with bear in its name. Whoever named the streets in this godforsaken jerkwater had about as much imagination as a stump.”
“Like I said, there’s a bunch of bears in the general area. We don’t got no tigers or zebras to name our streets after.”
The old man sat quietly for maybe two minutes, just watching the snow fall, as if he decided it was pretty, after all. This was a long silence for Mr. Lyss, who always had something to say about everything. Nummy was usually okay with people being silent with each other, but this much quiet from Mr. Lyss was worrisome because it made Nummy wonder what he was scheming.