Frankenstein: The Dead Town (36 page)

In his mind’s ear, Deucalion heard the storm—and more—on the night that he had been born from the dead: the escalating crashes of thunder that shook the heavens as if to bring them down like vaults of quake-shocked stone, the burr and buzz of arcane machines echoing off the walls of the old windmill,
his anguished cries as he resisted his creation, his maker’s shrieks of triumph, a mad cacophony. And in memory, he saw once more the first thing that he had seen when opening his eyes on that distant night: the colossal bolts of chain lightning turning the night to blazing day beyond the mill windows and crackling down the cables by which Victor induced it into his demonic machinery, not the usual lightning of an ordinary storm, but lightning of unprecedented explosiveness, light
alive
.

Now he felt that same raw power surging through him, along his arms and into his hands, into the body of this Victor Immaculate. The madman’s clothes smoked and burst into flames, but the flames didn’t burn Deucalion’s hands. Victor’s skin blackened and peeled, his eye sockets splashed full of fire, flames licked from his mouth, and in mere seconds, he collapsed out of Deucalion’s grip, reduced to ashes and fragments of charred bones.

More than two centuries of scheming toward utopia were at an end. The only thing of significance that Victor achieved was a death toll in the many thousands, and even that appeared insignificant when compared to the work of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others, who murdered in the tens of millions. Under all his names, Leben and Helios and Frankenstein, Victor was a small man of small ideas, large only on the silver screen in the theater of his demented mind.

On a nearby gurney, the naked body of a replicant struggled to rise as Victor burned, but shuddered and
fell back, dead. Until now, Deucalion had not realized that this particular Communitarian was a duplicate of the President of the United States.

As the three Builders approached the disabled Hummer, Sully York said, “Damn if I’ll let it end like this. Bryce, let’s me and you give these sonsofbitches such a case of indigestion that Grace and Travis will have time to run.”

He threw open the driver’s door and, issuing a muttered war cry, clambered out into the falling snow with his gun and with a lifetime of experience surviving hopeless situations. He heard Bryce getting out of the passenger door, and he thought,
By God, it’s always good to give the blighters what-for with a good man at your back
.

He was almost disappointed when, before the battle could begin, the Builders collapsed simultaneously into apparently inert piles of what appeared to be, but certainly wasn’t, gravel.

With the rattle of gunfire at the farther end of the building, Chief Jarmillo and Deputy Nelson Sternlagen reached the back door of KBOW, the two Builders immediately behind them. Jarmillo handed the key to Sternlagen—he wasn’t quite sure why—and Sternlagen handed it back to him, and they both stood for a
moment, staring at the key in the chief’s hand. They never did get it in the lock.

The face in the abdomen of the headless woman declared, “I am your Builder.” The mouth stretched wide, and from it came a jet of silvery gray sludge—that halted inches from Rusty’s face, quivered in the air, and fell to the floor, as did the headless woman. This once phantasmagoric and threatening figure was now an apparently harmless pile of … something.

Heart racing nonetheless, Rusty noticed that the fragments of the glass-faced man had continued fracturing until they now formed little mounds of what might have been sand but probably wasn’t. And the door chimes were not ringing.

He switched on the porch lamp and hesitantly put his face to the window. The porch seemed to be deserted.

When he opened the door, the handsome man with the I-can-sell-you-anything smile was gone. Nothing remained but another strange pile of … something.

Rusty stood in the cold, on the porch, listening to the night. He heard no gunshots. No screams. No cadres of models were marching in the street. The handsome pair of German shepherds appeared, no longer fleeing in terror, wandering aimlessly, smelling this and that. One of them abruptly dropped and
rolled onto its back in the freshly fallen snow, kicking its legs joyfully in the air.

As suddenly as the nightmare had begun, it was over.

Returning to the house, Rusty called, “Corrina, Corrina,” all the way up the stairs. By the time he reached the master bedroom, he was
singing
her name.

At the core computer in the Hive, in a room littered with the bodies of Victor’s people, for several hours Deucalion worked as a man possessed, which in a way he was. In his state of possession, he performed miracles with the trove of data, eliminating everything that revealed
how
Victor had created his Communitarians and Builders, while leaving ample proof of
what
he had done.

Unlike those in Rainbow Falls, the telephones in the Hive still functioned. With an ease that further suggested that he did not work unaided, Deucalion was able to make online contact with a trustworthy reporter at a major cable-news network, to whom he opened all the many digital files that he had just redacted.

Carson and Michael had to get out of that house of grief, in which four members of the Riders in the Sky Church had died—two men, one woman, and a child. Carson knew, as did Michael, that they could not have
saved the little girl, that no one could have, not when their enemies were two colonies of nanoanimals against which no weapon could defend.

They walked together in the post-dawn shadows under the immense evergreens that shrouded the Samples property. Early light, clear and golden, speared down here and there between the laden boughs of the trees, spotlighting those portions of the ground where falling snow had reached, leaving dark those areas carpeted with dead needles.

The storm ended before first light. Now the chattering rotors of a helicopter grew louder, louder, and passed overhead, out of sight above the trees. She supposed the aircraft must be from the Montana State Police or another state law-enforcement agency. Soon the sky would be full of helicopters and the highways into town choked with the vehicles of first responders and the media.

Carson was inexpressibly grateful to be alive, hand in hand with Michael, but as never before in her life of close calls, she felt to a degree guilty for having lived when so many perished. Her sweet and thoughtful husband, usually quick with a funny line, was unable to amuse her now; but she would have been lost entirely without him at her side.

They passed between the massive trunks of two alpine firs, and ahead Deucalion walked toward them where he had not been walking an instant earlier. They met in a shaft of light.

“It’s over forever this time,” the giant said.

“We thought so before,” Michael reminded him.

“But this time, there is no slightest doubt. None whatsoever. I feel myself being … called back. I should have realized after New Orleans that if it was really over, my journey on this world would have come to an end, as well.”

“And now it will?” Carson asked.

“It is ending even now,” he said. “I’ve only returned to put your minds at ease, to assure you that Frankenstein is history and that your lives will never again be braided into his. Be happy, be at peace. Now I must go.”

Michael reached out for Deucalion’s hand.

The giant shook his head. “I didn’t come to say good-bye. There is no such thing as parting forever.”

A cloud occluded the shaft of sunshine, and shadow fell upon them.

Deucalion said, “Until we meet again,” and turned away from Carson and Michael.

She expected him to vanish in the turn, but he didn’t take his leave in his customary fashion. He walked away into the early-morning gloom beneath the trees, although he did not fade as a shadow into shadows. Instead, as he receded through the woods, a luminosity rose in him, soft at first but then brighter, brighter, until he was a shining figure, an apparition of pure light. When he reached a shaft of sunshine in the distance, he melded with it—and was gone.

chapter
65

Nine nights after Deucalion delivered the truckload of children to St. Bartholomew’s Abbey, and five days after they were bused home, shortly before seven o’clock on that cold October evening, Brother Salvatore, also known as Brother Knuckles, went into the yard outside the guest wing and stood staring at the night sky, where no stars twinkled. Snow began to fall precisely on the hour. He stood in it for a while, feeling no chill.