Midnight (35 page)

18

The machine screamed. Its skull shattered under the impact of the two slugs, and it was blown out of its seat, toppling to the floor of the bedroom and pulling the chair with it. The elongated fingers tore loose of the computer on the desk. The segmented wormlike probe snapped in two, halfway between the computer and the forehead from which it had sprung. The thing lay on the floor, twitching, spasming.

Loman had to think of it as a machine. He could not think of it as his son. That was too terrifying.

The face was misshapen, wrenched into an asymmetrical real mask by the impact of the bullets as they’d torn through the cranium.

The silvery eyes had gone black. Now it appeared as if puddles of oil, not mercury, were pooled in the sockets in the thing’s’ skull.

Between plates of shattered bone, Loman saw not merely the gray matter he had expected but what appeared to be coiled wire, glinting shards that looked almost ceramic, odd geometrical shapes. The blood that seeped from the wounds was accompanied by wisps of blue smoke.

Still, the machine screamed.

The electronic shrieks no longer came from the boy-thing but from the computer on the desk. Those sounds were so bizarre that they were as out of place in the machine half of the organism as they had been in the boy half.

Loman realized these were not entirely electronic walls. They also had a tonal quality and character that were unnervingly “human.”

The waves of data ceased flowing across the screen. One word was repeated hundreds of times, filling line after line on the display:

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO …

He suddenly knew that Denny was only half dead. The part of the boy’s mind that had inhabited his body was extinguished, but another fragment of his consciousness still lived somehow within the computer, kept alive in silicon instead of brain tissue.
That
part of him was screaming in this machine-cold voice.

On the screen:

WHERE’S THE REST OF ME WHERE’S THE REST, OF ME WHERE’S THE REST OF ME NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO….

Loman felt as if his blood was icy sludge pumped by a heart as jellied as the meat in the freezer downstairs. He had never known a chill that penetrated as deep as this one.

He stepped away from the crumpled body, which at last stopped twitching, and turned his revolver on the computer. He emptied the gun into the machine, first blowing out the screen. Because the blinds and drapes were closed, the room was nearly dark. He blasted the circuitry to pieces. Thousands of sparks flared in the blackness, spraying out of the data-processing unit. But with a final sputter and crackle, the machine died, and the gloom closed in again.

The air stank of scorched insulation. And worse.

Loman left the room and walked to the head of the stairs. He stood there a moment, leaning against the railing. Then he descended to the front hall.

He reloaded his revolver, holstered it.

He went out into the rain.

He got in his car and started the engine.

“Shaddack,” he said aloud.

19

Tessa immediately took charge of the girl. She led her upstairs, leaving Harry and Sam and Moose in the kitchen, and got her out of her wet clothes.

“Your teeth are chattering, honey.”

“I’m lucky to have any teeth to chatter.”

“Your skin’s positively blue.”

“I’m lucky to have skin,” the girl said.

“I noticed you’re limping too.”

“Yeah. I twisted an ankle.”

“Sure it’s just sprained?”

“Yeah. Nothing serious. Besides—”

“I know,” Tessa said, “You’re lucky to
have
ankles.”

“Right. For all I know, aliens find ankles particularly tasty, the same way some people like pig’s feet. Yuch.”

She sat on the edge of the bed in the guest room, a wool blanket pulled around her nakedness, and waited while Tessa got a sheet from the linen supplies and several safety pins from a sewing box that she noticed in the same closet.

Tessa said, “Harry’s clothes are much too big for you, so we’ll wrap you in a sheet temporarily. While your clothes are in the dryer, you can come downstairs and tell Harry and Sam and me all about it.”

“It’s been quite an adventure,” the girl said.

“Yes, you look as if you’ve been through a lot.”

“It’d make a great book.”

“You like books?”

“Oh, yes, I love books.”

Blushing but evidently determined to be sophisticated Chrissie threw back the blanket and stood and allowed Tessa to drape the sheet around her. Tessa pinned it in place, fashioning a toga of sorts.

As Tessa worked, Chrissie said, “I think I’ll write a book about all of this one day. I’ll call it
The Alien Scourge
or maybe
Nest Queen
, although naturally I won’t title it
Nest Queen
unless it turns out there really is a nest queen somewhere. Maybe they don’t reproduce like insects or even like animals. Maybe they’re basically a vegetable lifeform. Who knows? If they’re basically a vegetable lifeform, then I’d have to call the book something like
Space Seeds
or
Vegetables of the Void
or maybe
Murderous Martian Mushrooms
. It’s sometimes good to use alliteration in titles. Alliteration. Don’t you like that word? It sounds so nice. I like words. Of course, you could always go with a more poetic title, haunting, like
Alien Roots,
Alien Leaves
. Hey, if they’re vegetables, we may be in luck, because maybe they’ll eventually be killed off by aphids or tomato worms, since they won’t have developed protection against earth pests, just like a few tiny germs killed off the mighty Martians in
War of the Worlds
.”

Tessa was reluctant to disclose that their enemies were not from the stars, for she was enjoying the girl’s precocious chatter. Then she noticed that Chrissie’s left hand was injured. The palm had been badly abraded; the center of it looked raw.

“I did that when I fell off the porch roof at the rectory,” the girl said.

“You fell off a roof?”

“Yeah. Boy,
that
was exciting. See, the wolf-thing was coming through the window after me, and I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Twisted my ankle in the same fall and then had to run across the yard to the back gate before he caught me. You know, Miss Lockland—”

“Please call me Tessa.”

Apparently Chrissie was unaccustomed to addressing adults by their Christian names. She frowned and was silent for a moment, evidently struggling with the invitation to informality. She decided it would be rude not to use first names when asked to do so. “Okay … Tessa. Well, anyway, I can’t decide what the aliens are most likely to do if they catch us. Maybe eat our kidneys? Or don’t they eat us at all? Maybe they just shove alien bugs in our ears, and the bugs crawl into our brains and take over. Either way, I figure it’s worth falling off a roof to avoid them.”

Having finished pinning the toga, Tessa led Chrissie down the hall to the bathroom and looked in the medicine cabinet for something with which to treat the scraped palm. She found a bottle of iodine with a faded label, a half-empty roll of adhesive tape, and a package of gauze pads so old that the paper wrapper around each bandage square was yellow with age. The gauze itself looked fresh and white, and the iodine was undiluted by time, still strong enough to sting.

Barefoot, toga-clad, with her blond hair frizzing and curling as it dried, Chrissie sat on the lowered lid of the toilet seat and submitted stoically to the treatment of her wound. She didn’t protest in any way, didn’t cry out—or even hiss—in pain.

But she
did
talk: “That’s the second time I’ve fallen off a roof, so I guess I must have a guardian angel looking over me. About a year and a half ago, in the spring, I think these birds—starlings I think they were—built a nest on the roof of one of our stables at home, and I just
had
to see what baby birds looked like in the nest, so when my folks weren’t around, I got a ladder and waited for the mama bird to fly off for more food, and then I real quick climbed up there to have a peek. Let me tell you, before they get their feathers, baby birds are just about the ugliest things you’d want to see—except for aliens, of course. They’re withered little wrinkled things, all beaks and eyes, and stumpy little wings like deformed arms. If human babies looked that bad when they were born, the first people back a few million years ago would’ve flushed their newborns down the toilet—if they’d
had
toilets—and wouldn’t have
dared
have any more of them, and the whole race would’ve died out before it even really got started.”

Still painting the wound with iodine, trying without success to repress a grin, Tessa looked up and saw that Chrissie was squeezing her eyes tightly shut, wrinkling her nose, struggling very hard to be brave.

“Then the mama and papa bird came back,” the girl said, “and saw me at the nest and flew at my face, shrieking. I was so startled that I slipped and fell off the roof. Didn’t hurt myself at all that time—though I did land in some horse manure. Which isn’t a thrill, let me tell you. I love horses, but they’d be ever so much more lovable if you could teach them to use a litterbox like a cat.”

Tessa was crazy about this kid.

20

Sam leaned forward with his elbows on the kitchen table and listened attentively to Chrissie Foster. Though Tessa had heard the Boogeymen in the middle of a kill at Cove Lodge and had glimpsed one of them under the door of her room, and though Harry had watched them at a distance in night and fog, and though Sam had spied two of them last night through a window in Harry’s living room, the girl was the only one present who had seen them close up and more than once.

But it was not solely her singular experience that held Sam’s attention. He also was captivated by her sprightly manner, good humor, and articulateness. She obviously had considerable inner strength, real toughness, for otherwise she would not have survived the previous night and the events of this morning. Yet she remained charmingly innocent, tough but not hard. She was one of those kids who gave you hope for the whole damn human race.

A kid like Scott used to be.

And that was why Sam was fascinated by Chrissie Foster. He saw in her the child that Scott had been. Before he … changed. With regret so poignant that it manifested itself as a dull ache in his chest and a tightness in his throat, he watched the girl and listened to her, not only to hear what information she had to impart but with the unrealistic expectation that by studying her he would at last understand why his own son had lost both innocence and hope.

21

Down in the darkness of the Icarus Colony cellar, Tucker and his pack did not sleep, for they did not require it. They lay curled in the deep blackness. From time to time, he and the other male coupled with the female, and they tore at one another in savage frenzy, gashing flesh that began to heal at once, drawing one another’s blood simply for the pleasure of the scent—immortal freaks at play.

The darkness and the barren confines of their concrete-walled burrow contributed to Tucker’s growing disorientation. By the hour he remembered less of his existence prior to the past night’s exciting hunt. He ceased to have much sense of self. Individuality was not to be encouraged in the pack when hunting, and in the burrow it was even a less desirable trait; harmony in that windowless, claustrophobic space required the relinquishment of self to group.

His waking dreams were filled with images of dark, wild shapes creeping through night-clad forests and across moonwashed meadows. When occasionally a memory of human form flickered through his mind, its origins were a mystery to him; more than that, he was frightened by it and quickly shifted his fantasies back to running-hunting-killing-coupling scenes in which he was just a part of the pack, one aspect of a single shadow, one extension of a larger organism, free from the need to think, having no desire but to
be
.

At one point he became aware that he had slipped out of his wolflike form, which had become too confining. He no longer wanted to be the leader of a pack, for that position carried with it too much responsibility. He didn’t want to think at all. Just be.
Be
. The limitations of all rigid physical forms seemed insufferable.

He sensed that the other male and the female were aware of his degeneration and were following his example.

He felt his flesh flowing, bones dissolving, organs and vessels surrendering form and function. He devolved beyond the primal ape, far beyond the four-legged thing that laboriously had crawled out of the ancient sea millennia ago, beyond, beyond, until he was but a mass of pulsing tissue, protoplasmic soup, throbbing in the darkness of the Icarus Colony cellar.

22

Loman rang the doorbell at Shaddack’s house on the north point, and Evan, the manservant, answered.

“I’m sorry, Chief Watkins, but Mr. Shaddack isn’t here.”

“Where’s he gone?”

“I don’t know.”

Evan was one of the New People. To be sure of dispatching him, Loman shot him twice in the head and then twice in the chest while he lay on the foyer floor, shattering both brain and heart. Or data-processor and pump. Which was needed now biological or mechanical terminology? How far had they progressed toward becoming machines?

Loman closed the door behind him and stepped over Evan’s body. After replenishing the expended rounds in the revolver’s, cylinder, he searched the huge house room by room, floor by floor, looking for Shaddack.

Though he wished that he could be driven by a hunger for revenge, could be consumed by anger, and could take satisfaction in bludgeoning Shaddack to death, that depth of feeling was denied him. His son’s death had not melted the ice in his heart. He couldn’t feel grief or rage.

Instead he was driven by fear. He wanted to kill Shaddack before the madman made them into something worse than they’d already become.

By killing Shaddack—who was always linked to the supercomputer at New Wave by a simple cardiac telemetry device Loman would activate a program in Sun that would broadcast a microwave death order. That transmission would be received by all the microsphere computers wedded to the innermost tissues of the New People. Upon receiving the death order, each biologically interactive computer in each New Person would instantly still the heart of its host. Every one of the converted in Moonlight Cove would die. He too would die.

But he no longer cared. His fear of death was outweighed by his fear of living, especially if he had to live either as a regressive or as that more hideous thing that Denny had become.

In his mind he could see himself in that wretched condition gleaming mercurial eyes, a wormlike probe bursting bloodlessly from his forehead to seek obscene conjugation with the computer. If skin actually could crawl, his own would have crept off his body.

When he could not find Shaddack at home, he set out for New Wave, where the maker of the new world was no doubt in his office busily designing neighborhoods for this hell that he called Paradise.