The Dead Town

Page 24

He was not accustomed to delighting children. He liked it.
After Deucalion assured the kids that they would not have to endure the dark in the back of the truck for more than a few minutes, he closed the doors and said to Carson, “Why do the sentries call me Christopher?”
“Among other things, he’s the patron saint of travelers, especially of children. They say he was a Canaanite of gigantic stature. Seems to me, Christopher fits you better than your current handle.”
In a time when he was bitter about having been brought to life, when he was full of rage and had not yet realized what his mission must be, he named himself Deucalion as an expression of his self-loathing. Mary Shelley titled her book Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus. In classical mythology, Prometheus was a Titan, brother of Atlas. He shaped human beings from clay and endowed them with the spark of life. Made by Victor, the modern Prometheus, Deucalion was in effect his son, and he felt, back then, that he should carry the name to remind himself that he shared the shame of Victor’s rebellion against all of nature.
Now he knew that the lightning of his birth pulsed in his eyes as he said to Carson, “I haven’t earned a better name than the one I have now.”
“Earned? Back in Louisiana, you presided over Victor’s death in the landfill.”
“But now he’s back. Version 2.0.” He started forward toward the driver’s door, then stopped and turned to them. “Where did his clone get the money for this? He left New Orleans with only a fraction of my maker’s fortune.”
“He’s like a Broadway producer,” Michael said. “He found some backers.”
“Backers with deep pockets,” Carson said. “So deep they might as well be bottomless.”
Deucalion said, “Even if these new creations can be defeated, and even if he can be killed, perhaps we ought to be worried about the reaction of his backers when they get no return for their investment.”
He got behind the wheel of the truck. As he pulled out of the driveway and turned left, he tapped the horn—and it sounded as he braked to a stop at Erika’s place. By the time he opened the back door and the children began to disembark, Erika and Addison appeared on the front porch to greet them.
Chapter 50
Frost on foot, urgently seeking transportation, was not sure where he would go when he had wheels. If Chief Rafael Jarmillo, out there bringing a hard new kind of law to this hellish town, was not the real Jarmillo, if the real Jarmillo and his family had been ground up like Dagget, then roads out of Rainbow Falls were probably blockaded. This was the War of the Worlds or something like it, and restricting the movement of people in a captured town was always a priority in a war. To be seen approaching the roadblock and then turning away from it would invite pursuit. Frost wanted to avoid pursuit. After what he had seen, he didn’t think he’d survive being chased by whatever the things were that pretended to be local cops.
As he prowled this residential neighborhood, wading along snow-mantled sidewalks, drawing steadily closer to the business district, he saw shadows moving behind drawn curtains in some houses, and he wondered what might be casting them. He definitely wasn’t going to indulge his curiosity by ringing a doorbell or two. At a few houses, he saw faces at windows, people seeming to study the night, but he kept moving because maybe they weren’t people any more than the brunette from the cocoon had been the beauty queen that she first appeared to be.
A car turned the corner a block away, and as its headlights swung in his direction, Frost crouched on the sidewalk beside a Lexus SUV. Maybe the driver of the approaching vehicle was someone coming home from shopping or from dining out, human and trustworthy. But if the police were not really police, and if they were patrolling with the determination to limit citizens’ ability to move freely about, they might be assisted by others of their kind driving ordinary vehicles instead of marked squad cars, on the lookout for pedestrians and unauthorized motorists. Under the grumble of the car’s engine, Frost heard the muted clinking of snow chains as it cruised past without slowing.
Driving might make him a more obvious target than if he remained on foot, but he continued to seek transportation. Instead of cruising around at random, he would drive directly to some parking spot where he could keep a watch on all approaches, yet where the crystallized exhaust of the idling engine would not attract attention, so that he could stay warm and gain time to think. Perhaps in the last row of for-sale vehicles in a closed car dealership, far back from passing traffic in the street. Or the big supermarket on Ursa Avenue. It would be closed now, the lot deserted, and a dark corner there might be just the place.
When he found the old Chevy—winter tires but no snow chains—in front of a house in the next block, he tried the driver’s door. He dared to think that he might have some luck left, after all, when the car proved not to be locked. He had a penlight and a multifunction penknife, but luck was indeed with him; he didn’t need to hot-wire the Chevy when he found the keys under the floor mat.
In spite of the cold, the car started at once. The engine sounded tuned and well maintained. He boldly switched on headlights, popped the hand brake, and shifted into drive, half expecting to hear a shout and see the angry owner rushing down the front-porch steps. But he pulled into the street and drove away without a protest being raised.
The vintage car needed time to warm up before the heater would work. As he drove, Frost anticipated the first wash of hot air with no less relish than he had ever looked forward to a filet-mignon dinner—or to sex, for that matter. Earlier, he’d been daydreaming of a time fifteen or twenty years ahead, when he might retire on some tropical shore or in a desert resort where they didn’t sell gloves or winter coats because no one ever needed them. Now he dared only think ahead fifteen or twenty minutes, and his goal was simple survival.
Of the choices available to him, the supermarket parking lot was the closest, and he remained watchful street after street, leery of an encounter with a patrol car. As the heat at last breathed from the vents, he realized that the Chevy offered more than mobility and heat. He turned on the radio—and discovered that the alien invasion was not as secret as he feared it might be and that it wasn’t an alien invasion.
Chapter 51
Nummy put his foot down. He said no to Mr. Lyss, who didn’t like anyone saying no to him. Nummy said no, no, no, the monster couldn’t come with them in the car. It happened right there in the living room, with the piano player standing beside the piano and Mr. Lyss holding the long gun. Grandmama taught Nummy always to be kind to people. But she also taught him not to let people take advantage of him, to put his foot down in the nicest way he could when someone insisted that he do something he knew wasn’t right.
The Xerox Boze said he wasn’t one of those things that gobbled up people. He said he wasn’t born out of a cocoon but instead out of a machine in a laboratory. Those cocoon things were called Builders, and he was called a Communitarian, and he couldn’t eat someone any more than he could kill himself.
Nummy didn’t believe a word of it. Monsters were monsters, they always did what monsters did, always disgusting, never anything nice, which was why Nummy wouldn’t watch their movies. If monsters killed people and ate people and did even worse things to people, then of course they would lie. Lying would be no big deal. Even a dummy knew that.
Mr. Lyss was no dummy, but he believed the monster. He said the monster saw what the Boze saw when the Boze died, and now the monster was broken somehow and couldn’t do monster things anymore. Mr. Lyss said you might call it a spiritual conversion, except the monster didn’t have a spirit and so couldn’t be converted. He said you also might call it a born-again experience, except the monster was never born in the first place, only manufactured, so he couldn’t be born again, only broken.
Nummy asked if the monster had seen the Lord, and Mr. Lyss said maybe not the Lord, maybe just Heaven, or maybe the Fiery Pit, depending on what the Boze saw. But maybe nothing like any of that, just something amazing on the other side.
So then Nummy wanted to know what the old man meant by the other side. The other side of what? Mr. Lyss said the other side of life, over where the dead go. Nummy said that was called either Heaven or Hell, it wasn’t called the Other Side. And Mr. Lyss said different people have different ideas about that. The Other Side might be far different from either Heaven or Hell. It might be this world again but you’re a new person, or even sometimes you’re an animal, what they called reincarnation. Nummy said that was silly, nobody would believe that, Mr. Lyss must be making it up. People couldn’t be animals, and they certainly couldn’t be a carnation, which was just a flower. Mr. Lyss said that if he was being called a liar, he would fry Nummy’s nose with some onions and fix him so he had to pee out of his left ear.
At that point, the piano player again asked Mr. Lyss to kill him, and right away. Xerox Boze begged for death so hard that Nummy found himself pitying him. Monsters probably couldn’t cry, crying wasn’t in their nature, and this one didn’t shed any tears, but he sounded really miserable. Nummy felt sorry for him. He wondered if maybe he put his foot down too hard.
Nummy said to Mr. Lyss, “I don’t want to be mean to him, not even a monster. Lots of meanness has come my way, so I know how bad it feels.”
“There’s an attitude Grandmama would admire,” Mr. Lyss said.
“But I’m scared,” Nummy said.
“Well, Peaches, haven’t you been scared pretty much all this dreadful day, and haven’t you come through all right? I’ve got my faults, one or two, but I’ve taken good care of you, haven’t I?”
“We’ve stolen a lot of stuff.”
“Tarnation, I did just say I have a fault or two. I didn’t make any claim to shining perfection. All I said is I’ve kept you safe. Haven’t I?”
“I guess so.”
“Guess so? You’ve got both feet to walk on, don’t you? You’ve got both hands to eat with. Your big dumb head is still on your shoulders, isn’t it?”
“I guess it is,” Nummy admitted.
“All right, then,” said Mr. Lyss. “Let’s go.”
Nummy had put his foot down, but now he found himself picking it up and doing just what he didn’t want to do, which was walk out to the stolen car with Mr. Lyss and the monster.
And when they got to the car, Nummy discovered that Mr. Lyss wanted the monster to drive.
As Xerox Boze got in behind the wheel, Mr. Lyss led Nummy around to the passenger side, where he opened both doors.
“It’ll be all right, Peaches. If I drove, I couldn’t keep him covered. This way, I’ll have a pistol aimed at him the whole time, though it won’t be necessary.”
“I don’t know what it is we’re doing,” Nummy worried.
“First it was alien bugs, which is just blind fate, no meaning to it. Then it was Frankenstein, which isn’t fate, it’s about how we try to tear apart the way things are, just to prove we can. It’s still Frankenstein, Nummy, but it’s something a lot bigger, too. Even a useless old hobo like me can see signs in the sky if they’re big and bright enough.”
Nummy looked at the sky, but he didn’t see any signs, just snow coming down.
Mr. Lyss smiled, which was a surprising thing to see, and he put a hand on Nummy’s shoulder in a way that made him think of Grandmama. “There’s big Evil in this town tonight, son, bigger than most people will ever admit exists. When it’s all over, they’ll just say it was these people machines, science run amok, which is true enough but not the whole truth. Anyway, there’s not just big Evil in Rainbow Falls tonight, there’s something else, too.”
“What else?” Nummy asked.
“From the start, things have gone our way when they never should have. We ought to be dead ten times over.”
“That’s because of you you’re so smart.”
“I’m smart enough for a hobo, but I wouldn’t be a hobo if I was as smart as I said I am. Things have gone our way for a reason, and I think I know what it is. I’ll explain that part later. But things went our way big-time when we found this broken monster, especially when you think about what broke him. He knows things about the monster-making machine only one like him could know, and in this war, that’s invaluable information. We have to find someone who knows how to use what this broken monster knows.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. But I’m going to look after you, and I’m going to do the smartest thing I know how, but I’m also going to say ‘Show me’ now and then, and just do what intuition tells me. Intuition is the little voice inside you that tells you what’s right and wrong, wise or foolish—which is different from dumb and smart. Do you feel better about this now?”
“No,” Nummy said. “Well, maybe a little better. But the Xerox Boze he’s still a monster.”
Mr. Lyss told Nummy to get into the backseat and slide over behind the driver. Then he put the long gun on the seat, barrel away from Nummy, and he said, “Don’t get it in your head to take that and go hunting rabbits.”
“I don’t hunt ever,” Nummy said.
“And remember it’s a stolen gun.”
“You stole it out of the preacher’s house.”
“That’s right. You don’t want to be part of that crime, too, considering all the other banditry you’re guilty of lately.”
“I’ll never touch it.”
Mr. Lyss closed the back door, got in front, closed that door, too, and handed the key to the Xerox Boze.
The monster started the car and said, “Where are we going?”
“Nummy,” Mr. Lyss said, “this right now is a show-me moment if ever there was or will be one.”
Mr. Lyss was quiet for a while. There was just the sound of the idling engine, and outside the snow sliding down the night, down and down, slanting in the wind.
Nummy sat staring at the back of the monster’s head, and the monster didn’t start humming sad music or anything, he just waited like Nummy.
After half a minute or more, Mr. Lyss leaned forward and clicked on the car radio.
A man on the radio was talking about a war somewhere. Then he said Rainbow Falls. Then he said people that weren’t people.
Mr. Lyss said, “Thank you very much.”
Chapter 52
The cocoon split. She was liberated. She came forth into the courthouse basement.
A mist of millions rose from her skin. An illusion of clothes formed and clung to her as the mist clarified.