In spite of their pretensions, they were meat. Just meat. Blood and bone and meat. And insane. Mad. They were mad meat and nothing more.
Communitarian Judy despised them. She loathed the way they lived, too, with no concern for the numerous imperfections of their surroundings.
The living-room carpet was only the most immediate example of their inferiority in this regard. Lint. She counted six bits of lint just in the area bordered by the two armchairs and the coffee table in front of the sofa. And not merely specks of lint. Cat hairs, as well. The cat had fled through a pet flap in the kitchen door, but its hairs were everywhere.
Order was an important principle, no less important than focus and efficiency. Indeed, efficiency was not achievable in a state of disorder. Order must be imposed before perfect efficiency could be achieved. This was a truth deeply programmed into her.
Waiting for the transport that would haul away the Snyders was not an efficient use of time. As Judy paced back and forth across the filthy carpet, stopping now and then to part the poorly hung draperies and search the street for a sign of the scheduled truck, she was acutely aware that progress waited to be made on countless fronts, that there was a world to be conquered and changed, and that she was at the moment contributing nothing to the heroic efforts of the Community.
She felt somewhat better when she got the vacuum cleaner out of the closet and swept all the exposed areas of carpet until she could see no lint, no stray thread, no single cat hair. But then, through the glass top of the coffee table, she glimpsed what might have been a peanut that had been dropped by one of the Snyders and had rolled under the furniture.
Agitated, she dragged the coffee table away from the sofa where two of her prisoners obediently waited, and she exposed the carpet under it for closer inspection. In addition to the peanut, she found a dead fly. The insect appeared to be dry, brittle, as if it had been under the table for days and would crumble to flakes and dust upon being touched.
The peanut and the fly were not the sum of it. There were cat hairs, too, and a crumb of something that she could not identify.
“Lift your feet! Lift them!” she ordered Andrew and his mother, and with no change of expression in their slack faces, they obeyed, raising their knees high and their feet off the floor.
With Communitarian fervor, Judy vacuumed the carpet in front of the sofa. When she saw that Warren, in the armchair, had raised his feet, she also swept that area.
Inevitably, she began to wonder what dust and debris might have built up on the baseboard behind the sofa and on the carpet under it. She had visions of extreme disorder.
She went to the window and parted the draperies, in which the folds had not been ironed with sufficient care to ensure that they would hang uniformly. She looked left and right along the wintry street. A patrol car cruised slowly past the house. All the police in town were already Communitarians, had been for the better part of the day, but that fact did not calm Judy in the least. Only one thing would assure her that the planned takeover of the town was proceeding in an efficient manner: the arrival of the transport and the crew that would collect the Snyder family.
Turning away from the window, she surveyed the room and judged the entire space a disaster.
chapter 2
Silent legions of snow marched softly through the night, laying siege to Rainbow Falls, Montana, conquering the black streets. Like clouds of battle smoke, the blizzard faded the red-brick buildings and the towering evergreens. Soon streetscapes and landscapes would be ghostly and bleak, apocalyptic visions of a dead future.
Oblivious of the cold, Deucalion roamed the snowswept town as only he, in all the world, could travel. The terrible lightning that shocked him to life in Victor’s original laboratory, more than two hundred years previously, also brought him other gifts, including a profound understanding of the quantum structure of reality, an intuitive awareness of the weave in the foundation fabric of all things. He knew that the universe was immeasurably vast and yet a strangely intimate place, that distance was both a fact and an illusion, that in truth every point in the universe was next door to every other point. A Tibetan monastery on the opposite side of the world from Rainbow Falls was in another sense only one step away, if you knew how to take that step.
Deucalion knew how, and in an instant he transitioned from an alleyway behind Jim James Bakery to the roof of the Rainbow Theater. This town of fifteen thousand souls had an Old West feel because many of its buildings dated to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they had flat roofs with parapets of the kind that bad guys and sheriffs hid behind during gunfights in old movies.
No building in town rose above four stories, and the theater ranked among the tallest structures. From this vantage point high in the falling snow, Deucalion could see east and west along Cody Street. Most businesses were closing early because of the storm, but the restaurants and bars remained brightly lighted. Only a few vehicles were parked along the curbs; and traffic had fallen to a fraction of what it had been just half an hour earlier.
The large panel truck with midnight-blue cab and white cargo section was one of only four vehicles moving along Cody Street. Other identical trucks operated elsewhere in the town. Earlier Deucalion had learned the nature of the task in which the hard-eyed, two-man crews were engaged: transporting subdued citizens of Rainbow Falls to facilities where they would be killed.
The victims had been replaced by lookalikes created in Victor’s facility somewhere along State Route 311, which locals called the End Times Highway, a twenty-four-mile loop of wide two-lane blacktop that dated back to the Cold War. That road apparently served nothing along its remote wooded route except for an array of missile silos that had been decommissioned after the fall of the Soviet Union and had been in some cases abandoned and in other cases sold off to corporations for use as low-humidity, high-security storage vaults for sensitive records. Many locals were convinced that the silos were but a small part of what lay hidden along the End Times Highway, that other secret subterranean facilities had been built deep to withstand multiple direct nuclear strikes. Finding Victor’s lair this time would not be easy.
No doubt the first people to be replaced by replicants and murdered had been those in the police department and in elected offices. Victor would take control of the town from the top and work down to the last unsuspecting citizen. Deucalion had already seen captive employees of the telephone company being herded into one of the blue-and-white transports, whereafter they were taken to a warehouse for disposal.
When the truck down on Cody turned north on Russell Street, Deucalion stepped off the roof of the theater and directly, boldly, magically onto the corrugated-steel step that served the passenger door of the vehicle. Surprised, the man riding shotgun turned his head. Holding fast to an assist bar on the wall of the cab, Deucalion wrenched open the door, which barely cleared his great bulk, reached inside with one hand, seized the passenger by the throat, crushed his windpipe, pulled him off the seat, and threw him into the snowswept street as if he weighed no more than a hollow plastic department-store mannequin.
“Always wear your seat belt,” he muttered.
Earlier this night, he discovered that the current generation of Victor’s creations were not as hardy as the New Race specimens that the would-be god produced years previously in New Orleans. Those individuals had been difficult to take down even with an Urban Sniper, a police-only shotgun that fired slugs instead of buckshot. These Montana replicants were nevertheless tougher than human beings, though they were easy prey for Deucalion, whose strength considerably exceeded theirs.
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 r
eached 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 numb
ers 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.”