“From burning electrical cord to roses?”
“And I think …”
“What?” Frost asked.
“I’m not sure, but I think I just felt something moving in there.”
With a sound that was like two lengths of Velcro detaching from each other but also like the bloated belly of a cadaver parting wetly under the scalpel of an autopsist, the sack split.
chapter 20
After pausing in the mud room to take off their snow-caked boots, the male parishioners of Riders in the Sky Church came to the kitchen in groups of four or five to listen to Carson and Michael sell them the alternative to the space-alien explanation. They knew their wives had already been persuaded, and they put a lot of store in their opinions. The Riderettes, as they were sometimes called, were women that the world could never confuse or make weary; they firmly held the reins of their lives and kept their feet in the stirrups.
Neither Carson nor Michael mentioned the name Frankenstein. Dolly and Hank Samples and their friends were remarkably open-minded. They had proved they could cope with developments that in an instant turned their world upside down. But Carson and Michael were outsiders in this community, and even the most welcoming and trusting and swayable of the Riders would at some point hit a wall of disbelief.
Nanotechnology, people-eating machine-animals, replicants, a scheme to kill all of humanity: The current situation was already over-the-top fantastical. Adding to it the revelation that at the root of this chaos was a 240-year-old scientist much farther off his nut than Colin Clive had played him in the movie and a 200-year-old monster who had made himself into a good man, even a hero … This was sensible rural Montana; this was not a place where people were conditioned to believe anything they were told.
Carson claimed she and Michael had been working on an industrial-espionage case that led them to the discovery of the replicants—and now the people-eating nanomachine-animals—and to the belief that these things were being produced in a federal facility buried deep along the End Times Highway. A thousand movies and books prepared the Riders to believe in evil extraterrestrials, but their daily lives prepared them to embrace the idea that their own government might want to replace them with obedient engineered citizens.
As Carson expected, fifteen-year-old Farley Samples proved to be a great help convincing the Riders that their enemies didn’t have to be from another planet, that nanotechnology was a real and rapidly advancing field on this world. His enthusiasm for science and for science fiction proved contagious, his deferential nature allowed adults to learn from him without feeling belittled, and he had absorbed a thing or two about effective storytelling from those novels of Robert Heinlein that he loved so much.
More than Carson’s and Michael’s private-investigator licenses, more than their expired photo IDs from the homicide division of the New Orleans Police Department, what gave them street cred were their weapons. The Riders revered guns nearly as much as they loved Jesus. They were impressed with Carson’s and Michael’s SIG Sauer P226 X-Sixes with 19-round magazines but especially with the Urban Sniper slug-firing shotguns.
Even though Carson proved, at the kitchen table, that she could hold her own in arm wrestling with men half again her weight, some were dubious that she could fire that hard-core shotgun without being knocked flat by the recoil. None of the doubters among the Riders were women.
When Carson stood up from the table after an intense battle-to-a-draw with a man named Glenn Botine, a full-time car mechanic and part-time quarter-horse breeder, he said, “Thank you, ma’am, for a lesson in humility. Now as ex-police, what do you and your husband think we should be doing here that we’re not doing?”
“Instead of just preparing to defend this place, we need to go door-to-door in the neighborhood,” Michael said, “alert as many people as possible. You’ve got the cell-phone videos. You’re locals. They’ll believe you. Make the entire square block a garrison and defend it, falling back to individual houses only if the larger perimeter can’t be held.”
Carson thought of her brother, Arnie, and little Scout in San Francisco, safe for now if perhaps not for long, and she asked, “How many children do you have here?”
The women conferred and quickly agreed that there were seven teenagers and twelve younger children among the forty-four Riders at the Samples house. Eighty-some other Riders had either gone to their individual homes from the roadhouse or, like these folks, were gathered at one or two other more defendable locations elsewhere in Rainbow Falls.
“Making a garrison of the entire block, with fallback positions—that’s a good idea,” Carson said. “But I think we also need to get the twelve younger kids out of town, to a safe house, just in case everything goes badly here.”
The sudden anxiety among the Riders was palpable. They knew what she suggested was the right thing to do, but they were loath to be separated from their young ones.
Glenn Botine said, “But how? Both highways out of town are roadblocked. Maybe we could get hold of some snowmobiles. But one adult could only drive out with one kid at a time. That’ll either take all night or a caravan so big it’ll draw attention we don’t want.”
Carson said, “There may be a way.”
chapter 21
In the basement of Memorial Hospital, the replicant of John Martz, a Rainbow Falls policeman and the husband of a member of the local Red Hat Society, was greatly enjoying the slaughter. He had witnessed the killing and processing of scores of people, but he was not in the least bored. In fact, he delighted in each new murder more than the one before it.
Communitarians were granted no free will. They possessed no capacity for any kind of sexual activity. They were engineered to have no appreciation for music and the arts because such interests were an impediment to efficient function. But in the interest of motivating them to carry out their mission with enthusiasm, they were programmed to take great pleasure in the destruction of each despicable, world-polluting, self-important, grubbing, grasping human being.
In John Martz’s case, pleasure had grown into something like delight, and each killing that he witnessed gratified him more than the one before it. Genocide proved to be addictive.
Four more patients had been brought to this unfurnished basement room under the pretense that they needed to give blood samples to be sure they had not been contaminated by an unspecified toxic material supposedly released by accident in the building. The four were in wheelchairs, three women and one man, but only two of the women were actually too incapacitated to walk.
The replicant of Nurse Ginger Newbury was present to assist John Martz with the management of the patients. Managing these people was enormous fun.
A number of hospital visitors had been dispatched, as well. They couldn’t be permitted to leave after they arrived and discovered that friends and loved ones were missing from their rooms. Because the visitors were not ill, they were more difficult to manage than the patients, which was why John had a nightstick and why Nurse Newbury kept a Taser clipped to her uniform belt, under a white cardigan sweater.
Three Builders were busy here on the basement level, first reducing their victims to various component molecules and then using those resources to create another generation of gestating Builders in the suspended cocoons. Builders produced only others of their kind; Communitarians were extruded and programmed only in the labs of the Hive.
Several rooms were now filled with cocoons that hung from the ceiling, which was a sight that profoundly pleased John Martz. Gestation required not fewer than twelve hours but not more than thirty-six. As new Builders emerged, fed on more useless human beings, and created ever more of their industrious kind, their numbers would increase geometrically. Within a week, they would be traveling to other towns with support teams of Communitarians, and by then they would be an unstoppable force, a rapidly growing army of exquisitely lethal biological machines, a nanotide of death.
The pajama-clad patients in the wheelchairs expressed the
ir worries and confusions in that whiny way that was a hallmark of humanity, but Nurse Newbury coddled them with what seemed to be genuine sympathy until the Builder arrived. This one was a young woman designed to the highest standards of human beauty. Whether a Builder looked like a man or woman, it was always crafted to be so striking in appearance that the people who were its potential victims would be at first sight enchanted by it.
Beauty disarms. Beauty lures.
All of the patients, regardless of gender, were riveted by this blond and blue-eyed vision who wore ordinary hospital greens, as if she were an intern or an orderly. She stood in front of them, their wheelchairs arranged in a semicircle of which she was now the focal point.
“I am your Builder,” she told them, her voice seductively musical and smoky.
She first approached the male patient, who smiled at her and no doubt entertained the last lascivious thoughts that he would ever have. She reached toward him, right palm turned up, and he seemed as charmed as he was confused by her apparent invitation. He reached out and put his hand in hers.
In the instant, the details of her hand—skin, fingernails, knuckles—seemed to dissolve up to the wrist. The shape of a hand remained, but her flesh appeared to have magically transformed into countless millions of extremely tiny insects with iridescent wings, swarming among one another while maintaining the basic shape of a hand.
The patient cried out in surprise, tried to snatch his hand back, but could not break free of her grip. Her hand, the teeming horde that it had become, bloodlessly consumed his flesh and bones to his forearm and then, in a mere two seconds, all the way to his shoulder.
Terror broke the hold of paralytic shock, and the patient began to scream, but she silenced him. Her generous mouth widened until it became grotesque, and she vomited another silver swarm into his face, which collapsed inward. The nanoanimals invaded his skull, consumed it from within, and surged downward through his neck stump into his body, continuously feeding the essence of him back along the stream into the Builder’s mouth in a kind of reverse regurgitation.
The only ambulatory patient among the three women bolted up from her wheelchair, but Nurse Newbury Tasered her into submission. The twitching woman fell at the feet of the Builder.
The other women were screaming, too, while the hollowed-out body of the male patient withered inward, as though he were a deflating balloon, and disappeared altogether. These women were old and sick, but nevertheless they wanted to live. John Martz loathed them. They were avaricious for life even in their decrepitude, because the cancer that was humanity would accept no restraints on its greed.
The Builder had become weirdly misshapen from the incorporation of the man’s body mass. As she redirected her attention to one of the wheelchair-bound prey, her clothes seemed to effervesce into a mist that she absorbed into herself, for they had never been clothes but instead an aspect of her amorphous body. In her nakedness, she was no longer beautiful by any human standard, and abruptly she ceased to be human in any aspect of her appearance. She became a furious fluid mass of mottled gray-and-silver matter, ribboned through with ugly streaks of red that rapidly darkened to fungal gray, a churning storm of living tissue that seemed to revel in chaos and required no structured organs or skeletal system to function.
From out of this seething mass came a thick silvery corkscrew composed of perhaps billions of nanoanimals, which bored into the chest of one of the women in the wheelchairs, at once silencing her. The turning motion of the corkscrew changed direction and appeared to draw the reducted substance of the dissolving patient into the Builder, which throbbed and swelled further, blistered and cankered and healed.
The other nonambulatory patient tried to turn her wheelchair around, intent on getting to the door, but John sprang into action, clubbing her hands with his nightstick. He pulled her to her feet, thrust her toward the now immense and looming Builder, and with savage glee cried, “Use her, use her, use her!”
The Builder took the weeping woman even more violently than it had taken the other patients and then rendered the Tasered woman on the floor with such brutality that John’s delight escalated into a kind of rapture. The nature of a Communitarian’s program made it impossible for him to know any joy other than the joy of efficient destruction. And so he gave himself completely to the experience and was transported as were certain members of some Pentecostal sects during worship, though the reasons for his vigorous jubilation were far different from theirs. He beat his chest with his fists, pulled at his hair, writhed, thrashed, and spoke in tongues, meaningless words gushing from him until he gagged himself by biting on his fisted right hand.
John became aware of Nurse Newbury watching him with what might have been disapproval, but he didn’t care. This was a joy that he was permitted, and he needed it, needed it. He felt justified in giving himself to it because the four patients were killed and processed, and there was no one for him to manage at the moment, in this brief point of stillness between the Builder’s destruction and its acts of creation.
Now a toothless, lipless orifice formed on the amorphous mass of the Builder, and from it spewed a stream of gray goo that struck the ceiling, penetrated the plaster, and at once firmed into a thick and gnarled rope. At the end of this anchor line, a cocoon spun into existence as billions of nanoanimals with various tasks, working in concert, formed the womb from which another processor of human debris would eventually emerge, and flooded it full of themselves and the reducted substance of the four patients, which was the raw material they would use to build another Builder.
As the current Builder began to hang another cocoon, John Martz’s rapture peaked and declined to a much quieter but delicious gladness. He stood motionless, overcome by awe, still biting on his fist, because biting better expressed his deepest desire more than did any of his previous frenetic motions or speaking in tongues. If he could have any wish fulfilled, he would wish to be a Builder, to bite into human flesh as if with a thousand chain saws, devour them, and transform their hateful kind into a killing machine that would destroy even more of them.
He wanted to eat people alive.
He realized that he should not express this desire to Nurse Newbury or to anyone else. Such a longing was an affront to Victor, who had made him what he was and to whom he must always be obedient and grateful. Besides, one of the principles of the Communitarian culture was that every one of them was absolutely equal to all the others, that no one was smarter or stronger or better in any way. That he could even dream of being a Builder, which was an infinitely more deadly and efficient killing machine than any Communitarian, meant that he aspired to being more than what he was and, therefore, must think that he had the capacity to be superior to others in the Community.
He wanted to eat people alive. Lots of them.
But that was okay as long as he didn’t think about it too much. If he allowed himself to dwell obsessively on what it might be like to be a Builder and process human flesh into human-killing machines, he could not be an efficient Communitarian. Inefficiency was the only sin.
When the current Builder finished the second cocoon, it returned to the form of a beautiful young woman, clothed once more, and walked out of the room. After glancing at John in what he believed to be disapproval, Nurse Newbury departed, too.
John remained there for a moment, admiring the pair of cocoons. As he was about to leave, he noticed something lying on the floor, under one of the wheelchairs, half hidden by the chair’s footplates. He rolled the chair aside, dropped to one knee, and saw a human ear lying concave-side-down on the vinyl tile. The convex back of the ear was smooth, with no torn tissue, as if it had never been attached to a head and therefore had never been cut off, though this peculiar detail didn’t mean much to him at first.
During all other jobs of rendering and processing to which he had been witness, John had not seen a Builder overlook even a tiny scrap of human tissue. To leave a portion of a body unused must surely qualify as inefficiency.<
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When he turned the ear over in his hand, he saw that it proved something worse than inefficiency. In the folds and curling down into the exterior auditory canal were human teeth, not loose but embedded, growing from the ear. This shell of flesh and cartilage was not a scrap of any of the four patients; it could only be a created object, manufactured by the Builder during the rendering and processing and then … spat out. Most likely the toothy ear had been created without conscious intent, just as the human urinary tract didn’t think about making a kidney stone before producing one. This was proof that the Builder was malfunctioning.
The only sin was inefficiency, and the ultimate inefficiency was malfunction. By comparison, John’s yearning to be a Builder and to eat lots of people seemed insignificant. After all, his desire could never be fulfilled. He was what he was and could be nothing else. He therefore could not malfunction by realizing his desire. But this Builder had badly malfunctioned by creating this macabre ear and spitting it out instead of using the tissue in its assigned work.
John felt better about himself.
He probably should report the transgressive Builder. But there was no rule requiring him to do so, most likely because Victor did not believe Builders could malfunction.
Throughout development, only the Communitarians had sometimes gone wrong by acquiring obsessions. And even that, too, had been resolved by identifying the potential obsessives and eliminating them before they left the Hive.
If John reported the Builder, Nurse Newbury would also be asked to provide a report. She might then make note of John’s rapturous reaction to the Builder’s work, whereupon he would be asked to explain his actions.
He turned the ear over and over in his hand. He ran his thumb along the curve of teeth within that fleshy shell.
He decided that he had better not report the Builder.
Before moving on to his next assignment, he bit off the lobe of the ear and chewed it. An interesting taste.