Frankenstein: The Dead Town (10 page)

The hands floated across the keys like they were searching for something. To the left together, then apart, then together in the middle, then both to the right, like they lost something important, they were trying to find it, and the music was just something that happened during the search, the way music just happened in movies when the actors needed it. Whatever the hands were searching for, they were sad because they couldn’t find it, and that was why the music was sad.

The Xerox Boze still didn’t look up from the keyboard. He said, “When he died, our minds were twined. I saw exactly what he saw in the moment.”

“In the moment?” Mr. Lyss asked impatiently. “In the moment?
What
moment?”

“In the moment between.”

“Damn it all and damn it twice!”
Mr. Lyss exploded. “Are you a Martian
dummy
? Do I have two dummies to contend with, neither of you able to speak so that more than other half-wits can understand you? The moment between what and what?”

“Between life and death,” the Xerox said. “Except it wasn’t death.”

“More double-talk! I could just pull this trigger and blow your head clean off your body, and maybe that would kill you or maybe it wouldn’t, but it would for sure at least be a big inconvenience for a while.”

Usually music itself couldn’t make Nummy cry, it needed to be music in a certain kind of movie, but this music was getting sadder and sadder, and he was worried that he was going to cry. He knew—he just
knew—
that if he cried, Mr. Lyss would make fun of him and say really mean things, call him “sissy boy” and worse.

“The moment between life and life,” the Xerox said.

Now his hands looked as sad as the music sounded, but beautiful, too, beautiful sad hands floating back and forth on the music.

The Xerox piano player said, “For just a moment, as he slipped away, I saw the world beyond the world, where he was going, where my kind can never go.”

Mr. Lyss was silent. Watching Mr. Lyss be silent was almost as hypnotizing as the hands floating on the music. He was silent for a long time, too, longer than seemed possible in a situation like this.

Finally the old man said, “Your kind. What kind are you? Not a Martian, I know.”

“A Communitarian.”

“And what might that be?”

“Not born of man and woman,” said the piano player, and now the soft notes came as sad as drizzling
rain in a graveside-funeral scene in a movie where good people die in spite of being good.

“If not from man and woman,” the old man said, “then from what?”

“From laboratory and computer, from genetically engineered flesh combined with silicon nerve paths, from inert materials programmed with something that pretends to be life, and then programmed further with something that resembles consciousness, something that imitates free will but is in fact obedient slavery. From nothing into the pretense of something and from there … eventually to nothing again.”

Those words were to Nummy what his conversation sometimes was to Mr. Lyss: gibberish. Yet his heart must have understood part of what was said even if his brain couldn’t make sense of it, because a big feeling came into him, a feeling so enormous that he seemed to swell with it. Nummy couldn’t give a name to the feeling, but it was like sometimes when he was walking through a meadow with trees along one side, and suddenly there was a break in the trees so he could see the mountains in the distance, mountains so big and yet he had forgotten they were there, mountains so big that the tops of them poked through a layer of clouds and reappeared above, mountains so high and beautiful and strange that for a moment he couldn’t get his breath. This feeling was like that but many times more powerful.

Mr. Lyss was silent again, as if he was remembering mountains of his own.

The sad music played into the silence, and after a while, the Xerox Boze said, “Kill me.”

Mr. Lyss said nothing.

“Be merciful and kill me.”

Mr. Lyss said, “I’ve never been a man known for his mercy. If you want to be dead, be merciful to yourself.”

“I’m what I am, and have no mercy in me. But you’re human, so you possess the capacity.”

After another silence, Mr. Lyss said, “Whose laboratory?”

“Victor’s.”

“Victor who?”

“He calls himself Victor Leben. And Victor Immaculate. But his real name, of which he’s proud, is Frankenstein.”

Nummy knew that name. He shivered. Those were the kind of movies he never watched. He’d seen part of one some years earlier, turned it on not knowing what trouble he was getting into, and it so upset him that Grandmama came in the room to see what was wrong, and she turned it off. She hugged him, kissed him, made him his favorite dinner, and told him over and over that none of that stuff was real, it was just a
story
, the same way that a nice and happy story like
Charlotte’s Web
was just a story, what Grandmama called fiction, and no fiction story could ever be real.

If the Xerox Boze wasn’t lying, Grandmama was wrong. She had never been wrong about anything before. Not any blessed thing. The possibility that
Grandmama could have been wrong about even one thing was so disturbing that Nummy decided never to think about it again.

“Frankenstein? You think I’m a fool?” Mr. Lyss asked, but he didn’t sound angry, just curious.

“No. You asked. I told you. It’s the truth.”

“You said you’re an obedient slave. You were made that way. Why would you betray him?”

“I’m broken now,” said the Xerox Boze. “When I saw what Bozeman saw in the moment between, something broke in me. I’m like a car and the engine runs all right but the gears won’t shift anymore. Please kill me. Please do it.”

The piano player still didn’t lift his gaze from the keys, and Mr. Lyss watched those floating hands as if they fascinated him as much as they hypnotized Nummy.

The tune sort of slipped into a new tune, which was even sadder than the first. Grandmama said great composers could build mansions with music, mansions so real that you could see the rooms in your mind. Nummy could see the room that was this one song. It was a big empty space without furniture, and the walls were dull gray, and the windows were gray because they looked out on nothing.

“Frankenstein,” Mr. Lyss said. “If men from outer space, then why not this. But I won’t kill you. I don’t know why. It just doesn’t feel right.”

Surprisingly, the old man lowered the long gun.

Nummy worriedly reminded him, “Sir, he killed the Boze. He’ll kill us. He’s a monster.”

“He was,” Mr. Lyss said. “Now he’s just what he is. He saw too much through Bozeman’s eyes, too much … beyond. It finished him. I’m just damn glad I didn’t see it. At least he’s got the piano. If I’d have seen it, whatever it was, I’d probably be lying on the floor, just talking baby talk and sucking on my toes. Come on, Peaches, let’s find that snowmobile.”

The old man turned away from the piano and crossed the room toward the hallway.

Nummy backed out of the room, keeping his eyes on the Xerox.

chapter
16

Mason Morrell’s evening talk show centered around advice about relationships between husbands and wives, between parents and their children, between spouses and their in-laws, between siblings, between young romantics seeking their ideal mates.… He was not married, had no children, had no brothers or sisters, and had burned through six women in the past eighteen months. But he was a successful talk-show host because he had extraordinary confidence in his opinions, could subtly browbeat his callers while seeming to be their best friend, was able to fake compassion exceptionally well, was a fearless host who would not shy from any topic no matter how outrageous, and had a baritone voice that was both masculine and silky.

Mason was a fraud, but a likable and amusing fraud now carried on five other stations in Montana and
Wyoming, and he might prove to be one of those talents whom Sammy Chakrabarty could build into a nationally syndicated money machine. Therefore, the talk-show host’s reaction to the gutted replicant on the floor and to Deucalion’s disappearance was deeply dismaying to Sammy not only because their survival might depend on a united front against an imminent assault on the building but also because losing Mason might have a negative impact on his plan to own KBOW by the age of twenty-nine.

The moment the tattooed giant vanished to deal with whatever contingent of lab-born monsters was pressing the door buzzer, Mason lost all of his trademark confidence and fearlessness. In a voice that soared two octaves, he said, “I’m not dying like a cornered rat in a crappy, tank-town, AM noise shop.”

The first step he took put his foot in some of the pale spilled guts of the thing that had looked like Warren Snyder, which inspired an almost girlish shriek of horror. Scrubbing his shoe on the carpet in disgust, Mason shuffled across the room, went through the open door to the hallway, and turned left, away from the broadcast booth.

Ralph Nettles said, “He’s going to unlock the front door. He could get us all killed,” and Burt Cogborn, whose usual ad-salesman glibness had deserted him, said, “Uh.”

Sammy Chakrabarty began to move on the word
front
. He entered the hall in time to see Mason pull
open the door to the reception lounge. He cried out, “Mason, don’t!” but the talk-show host kept going.

At the front door, Sammy caught up with his quarry as Mason twisted the thumbturn on the deadbolt. Sammy grabbed him by the belt and tried to pull him backward, off his feet. But Sammy stood five ten and weighed 130, Mason stood six two and weighed 200, and even the most desperate effort of a determined radio entrepreneur could not compensate for the talk-show host’s advantage of size. With Sammy trying to climb his back, Mason flung open the door and plunged into the snowy night.

Sammy had dreamed of becoming a radio-made multimillionaire for as long as he could remember. He never wanted to be a rodeo cowboy, but a little experience in that field might have helped as now he clung to his star talker’s broad back like a buckaroo riding a bull. Mason snorted in rage and panic, shrugged his big shoulders, heaved hard and twisted.

In the light of the parking-lot lamps, from his continuously pitching and spinning perspective, Sammy glimpsed a large white panel truck with a dark blue cab. He saw an apparently dead man sprawled on the snow-covered pavement, which was probably not really a man but instead a replicant like the Warren Snyder duplicate with the abdomen full of something like fish parts in alfredo sauce. He saw Deucalion lifting another man off the ground, above his head, which seemed an impossible feat, something that even the great Buster Steelhammer, superstar wrestler, wouldn’t
dare pretend to be able to do even in an extravagantly choreographed performance. But then Sammy briefly lost sight of the giant, and when next he could see him, the tattooed wonder slammed the second replicant down on the radiator cap of the truck, surely shattering the creature’s spine.

Mason’s shirt tore. Sammy flew off his mount, landed facedown, slid through the snow, came to a halt against a lumpy something, and found himself face-to-face with one of the dead replicants. From the nostrils of the thing streamed a noxious blue gas that plumed into Sammy’s mouth.

Spitting in revulsion, rolling away from the fiendish creature and onto his knees, Sammy wondered for the first time in his life if his mom and dad had been wise to emigrate from New Delhi. Maybe contemporary America was too wild for anyone to ride, not just an angry bull of a country but a
crazy
bull of a country, all hooves and horns and bucking muscle.

Sammy’s doubt lasted only as long as he took to get to his feet. Mason was climbing behind the wheel of his Toyota Sequoia, which was the last in the line of parked vehicles, and Sammy was the only alternative for the on-air voice that would warn Rainbow Falls and the county at large about the invasion (or whatever it was) of the Stepford people (or whatever they were). An hour from now poor Burt Cogborn would probably still be able to say nothing but “Uh, uh, uh,” and though Ralph Nettles was a good man, a solid man, he was far from a silver-tongued orator. Sammy
didn’t sound like a geek or a snark or a weasel, but he didn’t have a trained voice. He wasn’t radio talent, he was radio executive. He wouldn’t be half as convincing as Mason. Suddenly Sammy was energized once more by his particular American dream.

Not only for the people of Rainbow Falls (who were evidently being slaughtered), and not only for the future of humanity (which might hang in the balance), but also for Chakrabarty Syndication (which had not yet been incorporated but which would one day
dominate
the AM landscape), Sammy staggered toward the Sequoia. He intended to drag Mason Morrell out of the SUV or be clubbed senseless in the attempt.

Fortunately, Deucalion got to the Sequoia not only first but in time. The doors of the SUV were locked, but before Mason could start the engine, the giant thrust both big hands under the flank of the vehicle, gripped the frame, and with an effort that made him roar in agony or rage, or both, he lifted the passenger side off the ground. Deucalion heaved, heaved again, and he rolled the Sequoia onto its roof.

chapter
17

In the foyer of Chief Rafael Jarmillo’s house, the portion of the hand on the floor consisted of the thumb, the forefinger, the connecting span that was called the anatomical snuffbox, and a piece of the fleshy thenar eminence. The tips of the thumb and finger were pressed together as if in the OK sign.

Frost had no way of knowing if someone had arranged the digits in that fashion or if instead the macabre gesture occurred by chance. In either case, he was not amused.

Most cops lacked a sharp sense of black humor when they entered law enforcement, but they quickly developed one as a psychological-defense mechanism. Nevertheless, Frost suspected that nothing he encountered in this house would tickle the dark side of his funnybone.

The eaten edges of the flesh had the same appearance
as the stump of the foot in the living room. Bloodless. Glazed but pitted. And the flesh was unnaturally pale.