The Dead Town

Page 29

After turning off the closet light, he stood for a moment with one ear to the door, listening for activity in the bedroom. All was silent, but he knew it might be the silence of something waiting for him to emerge.
He eased open the door. The master bedroom was black except for two rectangular windows barely revealed by the snow-veiled glow of streetlamps.
He crossed the threshold and after a moment identified the open doorway to the upstairs hall, which was slightly less dark than the black wall through which it cut.
If anything like the blonde in the blue robe had been waiting for him here, it would already have attacked. He vividly remembered the striking-snake speed with which she had gone after the people in the Trailblazer.
Bent forward, hands reaching out low to search for obstructing furniture, Rusty eased toward the doorway. He needed to get as far as possible from the master bedroom before calling attention to himself and drawing them away from Corrina. He felt around an armchair, past a tall chest of drawers, and reached the open door without making a sound.
His mouth was as dry as a salt lick. Stomach acid burned in the back of his throat, as it had not done since the war.
For a long moment, he stood in the doorway. The airless-moon hush suggested that the killers either had not entered the house or had already left it.
He took just two steps into the upstairs hallway and halted again, listening. No windows here. Dim light rising from the foyer windows and from a stairway-landing window below, revealing nothing.
Silence. Silence. A distant clink-clink-clink. He thought the sound had come from the lower floor. Clink-clink-clink. Wrong. Not downstairs. It issued from the farther end of the pitch-black hallway in which he stood. Clink-clink-clink, clink-clink. This time he got a better fix on the source: to his left, an arm’s length away.
Chapter 62
Nummy O’Bannon listened to radio sometimes, but he never before was inside where they made it. There were none of the musicians or singers he expected. The rooms were just mostly offices except for the spaceship controls where Mr. Ralph Nettles worked, and the desks were all stacked with stuff, not neat at all.
Mr. Lyss was watching over the broken monster, the Xerox Boze, in one of these offices, and Nummy was watching over them both. He was afraid the Xerox Boze would start doing the usual nasty monster stuff now that there wasn’t an upright piano to play, so he kept an eye on the thing. He kept an eye on Mr. Lyss, too, because the old man was always doing something interesting, even if it wasn’t something Grandmama would have approved.
For a few minutes, things were quieter than they had been since Nummy met Mr. Lyss, and then the biggest thing of the whole strange day happened. In fact, it was the second most important thing of Nummy’s life, the first being when Grandmama died and he was left alone.
A man came into the room, the biggest man Nummy had ever seen, not fat-big but tall and with a lot of muscles, which you could tell were there even though he was wearing a hooded coat. He was bigger than Buster Steelhammer, the wrestler, and his hands were so large he might have been able to do disappearing tricks with apples the way magicians did with coins. Half his face was tattooed, but it was his eyes that made him the second most important thing ever to happen to Nummy.
When the giant looked at Nummy, light moved through his eyes sort of the way that the moving light on the machine in the hospital kept dancing across the screen that showed Grandmama’s heartbeat, although this was somehow both softer and brighter than that light, not scary, either, but beautiful and calming. Nummy didn’t know why the light in the man’s eyes didn’t frighten him, like he would have expected, especially with the half-broken face and tattoo—and then he did know.
Grandmama said there were angels on earth, guardian angels, but they worked in secret and weren’t easy to tell from other people because they didn’t have wings or halos. She said the only way you sometimes could know them was when you saw the light of love in their eyes. They were so full of love, Grandmama said, that sometimes they couldn’t hold it all inside, and they gave themselves away by the light in their eyes.
Nummy never before saw an angel, and now here was one, and he said to Nummy, “Don’t be afraid, son. You’ll live through this night. Fifty days from now, all will change for the better.”
The angel turned his eyes toward Xerox Boze, stared at him a long moment, and then said to Mr. Lyss, “You claim this replicant is broken.”
Mr. Lyss must not have seen the angel light in the big man’s eyes—or if he did see it, maybe he didn’t know what it was. To the old man, the most important thing was one little word the angel used. His eyes bugged out, and his hair seemed to stand on end more than usual, like a cartoon animal sticking its paw in an electric socket and all its fur going bzzzz.
“Claim?” Mr. Lyss said. “Claim? Is that a weasel word so you don’t have to say to my face you think I’m a lying sonofabitch? You walk in here like you own the joint, your fancy face tattooed more than some rock star’s butt, and you make smarmy suggestions Conway Lyss is a liar? I’ve done worse things to people who call me a liar than Stalin did to kittens, and believe me, Stalin hated kittens. He ripped out their throats with his teeth if he caught one. This thing that was supposed to call itself Barry Bozeman is broken so plain any fool but you can see it. Look at his hangdog face, his whipped-dog posture in that chair. He’s programmed not to kill himself, wants me to kill him, but I won’t do it until I’m damn good and ready to kill him. Nobody tells me when to kill him, not even some pathetic broken Frankenstein monster!”
Nummy saw the angel react to the name Frankenstein, but he didn’t ask if Mr. Lyss was crazy or call him a liar. He didn’t say anything more at all to the old man, but he went to stand over Xerox Boze, staring down at him. Xerox Boze asked the angel to kill him, and Nummy thought the angel would say that he couldn’t, that it wasn’t something an angel could do. Instead, he said in the most tender way, “I am your brother. Two hundred years separate our … births. Do you recognize me?”
Xerox Boze stared up into the angel’s eyes for a long time and then said softly, “I … don’t know.”
Mr. Lyss became upset about the brother thing and wanted to know if this was some kind of hellish monster convention. Nobody, not even Nummy, paid attention to the old man’s rant.
The angel asked Xerox Boze, “What is your life?”
“Misery.”
“Shall we stop him forever?”
“I can’t lift a hand against my maker.”
“I think I can. And will. Where is he?”
“The Hive.”
“Perhaps you’re not broken.”
“But I am.”
“Perhaps you’re here to lure me into a trap.”
“No.”
“Help me to believe I can trust you,” the angel said.
“How?” Xerox Boze asked.
“He didn’t name it the Hive.”
“No. It’s our word.”
“What does he call the place, the front organization behind which he works?”
Xerox Boze said, “Progress for Perfect Peace.”
After a silence, the angel asked, “Do you know where that is?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
Xerox Boze got up from his chair, and the angel led him into the hallway. Nummy followed, interested in anything an angel might do, and Mr. Lyss tagged along behind, grumping about something. They went to a map on a wall in another office, and the angel said it showed KBOW’s broadcast reach, whatever that was. He pointed out what was Rainbow Falls and what was the county, and some land beyond the county, and he asked the Xerox Boze to point to the place called the Hive. The monster pointed. The angel said they would go there together, and if it was the place the monster said it was, then the angel would give him “the grace of a quick and painless death,” which sounded nice except for the death part.
Turning away from the wall map, looking hard at Mr. Lyss, the angel said, “Fifty days from now, you get your chance. Use it well.”
Mr. Lyss was only grumbling under his breath through this map stuff, but now he got fired up again. “Damn it all, first you just about flat-out call me a liar the moment we meet. Now you insinuate—what?—that I don’t usually do things well? Considering I didn’t get half my face wrecked as bad as a runaway train and then try to hide it under some stupid psychedelic ink work, I suspect I take care of business a lot smarter than you do.”
Instead of answering Mr. Lyss, the angel looked at Nummy and smiled. He put a hand on Nummy’s head and smoothed his hair, almost exactly like Grandmama used to do, and Nummy’s eyes filled with tears, though he didn’t know why.
He was blinking away those tears when the next thing happened, so he couldn’t be sure he saw it like it really was. But it seemed that the angel took Xerox Boze by the arm, turned with him as if to leave the room, but vanished in the turning.
Mr. Lyss let out a terrible seven-word curse that it was good the angel couldn’t hear, and ran into the hallway looking for the vanished two. But he didn’t find anyone.
Nummy followed Mr. Lyss back to the room where they had been watching over the Xerox Boze. They settled in chairs, and Nummy watched the old man, who sat for a while, leaning forward with his head in his hands. Nummy wanted to ask if Mr. Lyss had a headache and if he could get him some aspirins, but he didn’t want to stir up the old man with a wrong word.
After a while, Mr. Lyss looked up at Nummy. “Peaches, you remember earlier when I told you this was a lot bigger than space aliens or Frankenstein, that there was a way bigger Evil in town tonight?”
Nummy nodded. “A bigger Evil and something else, too.”
“I told you we should have been dead ten times over, and I’m pretty sure I know why we aren’t.”
“You said you’d explain that part later.”
“Well, the reason we’re not dead—the reason I’m not dead—is because of you, and the way you are. I won’t explain more now. What I want to say here is … for a while I forgot what I said earlier. I forgot all that about something very big at work tonight, and I just went back to being me. Well, I’ve just been chastened. You know what that means?”
“No, sir,” Nummy said.
“I’ve been humbled. I’ve just been given to see myself as what I am, what I insist on being. Peaches, I’m going to try my best to do right by you, but when I slip back to being like what I’ve always been, don’t pay any attention to me. I’ll get better in a while. I’m a shiftless, irritable, intemperate sonofabitch and a world-class people-hater, and maybe I can change, but I can’t change easily or overnight.”
Surprised, Nummy said, “What people do you hate?”
“All of them. All of them I ever met. Except you.”
Chapter 63
When Carson returned to the house after seeing off Deucalion on what might be his final confrontation with Victor, Michael was in the living room, playing his where-have-I-hidden-your-nose game with the three young children waiting to be evacuated, and the kids were giggling with delight. She stood watching him, loving him, thinking about little Scout, about her brother, Arnie, back in San Francisco, until the screaming started.
Outside. The front of the property. The initial screams were followed rapidly by gunfire, a lot of it. Something had broken into the garrisoned neighborhood.
The Riders in the living room grabbed their weapons. One of them dashed to the bolted front door and dropped a length of four-by-six lumber into sturdy steel brackets that had been bolted into the jamb, providing extra resistance to an assault on that entrance.
Carson glanced into the adjoining dining room, where the ever-ready Riderettes were abandoning their culinary chores and picking up their guns.
She knew—maybe they all knew—that this war wouldn’t be won with firearms. Those Builders on the cell-phone videos, in mere seconds consuming Johnny Tankredo and other Riders at the Pickin’ and Grinnin’ Roadhouse, wouldn’t be stopped with bullets. They wouldn’t be defeated with anything that might have brought down an ordinary assailant. At this worst moment of the storm, she and Michael and all those with whom they gathered could not fight to win but only to delay.
If they could hold their position long enough, Deucalion might have time to find his maker’s rat hole and go into it after him. If the clone of Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein, was like his namesake unto a fault, which seemed to be the case, then he would not tolerate the possibility that his creations might live on after his death. As in Louisiana, killing Victor would ensure the death of every creature spawned in his laboratories.
The gunfire stopped. Screams gave way to shouts of confusion. Something slammed hard against the front door. The deadbolt and the bracing lumber held through the first impact, the second, the third.
To the left of the door, a window shattered. Backlit by a porch lamp, a young woman’s blond hair registered as an otherworldly nimbus around her head, and in the outflowing light of the living room, her exquisite face seemed to absorb the light and return it in a radiance twice as bright as the lumens she received. She was without doubt a Builder, but she didn’t appear calm and beatific like the Builders in the opening frames of the roadhouse videos. Her feverish blue eyes burned with hate. Her toothpaste-commercial-perfect teeth were bared in an unvoiced snarl. She appeared savage, eager, driven by some unthinkable need. The Riders had fortified the window with bars of two-by-four lumber; these infuriated her, and she clawed at them, tearing away splinters of wood. She opened her mouth as if in a scream, but what issued from her was a sound partly like a garbage disposal grinding up half-spoiled fruit and partly like a cackling animatronic witch in a carnival fortune-telling machine. From her mouth puffed a thin silvery plume, as though she had coughed out lungfuls of twinkling smoke, but then the small cloud raveled back between her lips.
One of the Riders stepped past Carson, thrust his shotgun between the two-by-fours, and pumped four rounds into the Builder’s face, the thunderous crashes echoing deafeningly around the room. She received the deadly pearls of buckshot with no more effect than they would have caused if fired down into a still pond: a froth of emulsified flesh, brief holes, turbulence in her tissues, and then the smoothness of the surface reasserted.
The Builder vomited what appeared to be a mass of wet ashes brightened with silver sequins, which flowed around the smoking barrel of the shotgun and tore it from the hands of the startled Rider, who fell back and scrambled out of the way. Like a tentacle, the repulsive gray mass retracted through the two-by-fours, taking the weapon with it, seeming to dissolve it even as the walnut stock clattered against those wooden bars and vanished into a sucking maw so grotesque that Carson would no longer be able to think of the creature as “she,” regardless of the form in which it might choose to manifest.