Frankenstein: The Dead Town (16 page)

“Nothing nice,” Nummy said.

chapter
27

The instant he saw it, Frost knew the mouth in the palm of her hand was real, but nevertheless he tried to tell himself that it was just an unusually dimensional tattoo or a joke decal, because if it was real, none of his training or experience would be worth spit in this situation. If it was real, this town didn’t need undercover FBI agents; it needed exorcists, a platoon of them.

When the tongue licked out of the mouth, fondling the teeth and fluttering obscenely, Frost looked to the woman’s eyes. Previously they were glazed, as if she were half in a trance, but they changed now. Her stare became bold and sharp, her eyes as fierce as the eyes of any bird of prey, although no bird’s gaze ever burned with the scorching hatred that informed this creature’s eyes.

The blue-silk robe that had materialized around
her became mist again, like the smoke that rises off dry ice, and the mist appeared to be absorbed into her skin. From her toes to the top of her head, she rippled like a heat mirage, and the ultimate-Playmate proportions of her body melted away as her flesh and bones flowed like soft wax. Some of the substance of her torso poured into her outstretched right arm, which swelled, the skin stretching like sausage casing being pumped full of liquified meat. Her hand thickened, and the tongue in the mouth of that hand unraveled toward them, now silvery-gray, as flat as a tapeworm, undulating through the air, the tip of it flaring like the hood of a cobra.

Dagget let out a cry of revulsion and terror that startled Frost but also prepared him for the deafening boom of his partner’s pistol, six quick shots that echoed off the tile floor and walls, off the glass shower door, off the mirror, like flying through the heart of storm clouds when thunder broke the sky. The range was point-blank and Dagget was a master marksman and Frost saw the bullets tear into the naked body, which was now as weird as someone reflected in one of those distorting mirrors in a carnival funhouse.

But no blood spilled, no wounds bloomed raw and red. The beast didn’t drop or reel backward from the impact of the high-power rounds, but instead absorbed them as a pond would absorb a dropped stone. The flesh didn’t even dimple with concentric ripples
as water would have done. The tissue received the bullets and at once closed around them, smooth and un-scarred.

Dagget’s next four shots had no greater effect than the first six, except that the undulating gray tongue abruptly grew thicker and shot at him with the lightning speed of a striking snake. It wasn’t a tongue anymore, it was an auger, and it bored into Dagget’s face. In an instant it was not a drill anymore, either, and it seemed to have become the hose of a vacuum cleaner, sucking out the contents of his head, his skull imploding like a papery husk, head gone in a blink.

Backing out of the bathroom doorway, Frost stumbled, almost fell, got his balance.

In the bathroom, beyond the open door, Dagget’s pistol clattered against the floor tiles, but his headless body didn’t collapse. The ravenous gray tentacle now seemed to be composed of a swarming mass of small somethings, millions of tiny silvery piranhas, and all of them schooled down through his neck, into his dead body, apparently holding him erect, his legs jittering and his feet seeming to dance on the bathroom floor. Looming beyond the headless marionette, the thing that had been a beautiful woman was now nothing that had a name, a mottled gray-and-silver mass, clotted with red that quickly darkened to veins of charcoal-gray, larger than it had been. It surged even larger as the substance of the corpse was drawn out like soda through a straw, until there were only empty
clothes flapping in the air like a scarecrow’s costume, but then the clothes wadded up and were sucked away into the vacuuming tentacle.

Dagget had been killed and devoured in five seconds.

Frost ran.

chapter
28

Sammy Chakrabarty always thought the old building that housed KBOW was an ugly pile, but the features that made it off-putting in the past were virtues in the current crisis.

Built in the 1870s by the local arm of the Patrons of Husbandry, otherwise known as the Grange, it served as the Grange Hall, offices and meeting rooms and a big space for community dinners and dances. The Granger movement was an organization of farmers who, in those days, wanted the government to confiscate and operate the railroads and the grain elevators as a public service, thus shifting some of the farmers’ costs from them to the taxpayers.

For most people in the Grange, the motivation was self-interest, but as in any such political organization, a minority of the members were also paranoids. When you were lobbying to have the government
seize some people’s property for your benefit, it wasn’t paranoid to think those on the losing end of that deal might take decisive action to halt your activities, might even come around one night with the intention of using more than words to persuade you to rethink your position. But the truest apostles of the paranoid faith spread wild stories, fevered fantasies of bloodbaths in distant states, fierce armies of railroad goons and brutal mercenaries in the employ of grain-elevator barons, entire units of the Grange shot in cold blood, hundreds of people at a time, shot and beaten and stabbed and set on fire and then shot again and then hung and then rehung, and subjected to verbal abuse, their farm animals sold into slavery, their dogs forced to wear humiliating costumes, their barns burned, their land salted and paprikaed.

As Sammy quickly walked the rooms and the hallways of KBOW, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of this fort, he figured that the head of the building committee for the Rainbow Falls Grange had been one of the squirreliest of the group, forcing a design that assumed any Grange supper-and-dance night could become a battleground and the building put under siege. The exterior walls, alternating layers of concrete and brick, were eighteen inches thick. The double-hung windows were kept to a minimum number, narrow and protected by decorative bronze grids that were essentially attractive prison bars. In respect of the building’s historical status, the decorative bronze doors remained, as well, one on each side of
the structure, but they were so heavy that they had been retrofitted with concealed ball-bearing hinges to make them easier to use.

By design, nothing in the construction materials was flammable. Yet the contents of the place would have made it a firetrap without the sprinkler system that had been added decades ago to meet the building-code requirements for KBOW to occupy the premises.

The parapeted, nearly flat roof featured glazed-brick paving sloped just enough to the perimeter scuppers to let rain drain off quickly. In snow season, maintenance men regularly shoveled the roof. But tonight would be the first time—at least in recent history—that a gunman would be stationed up there to defend the building.

Ralph Nettles and Deucalion were gone less than ten minutes, and they returned with enough firearms to delight the paranoid head of the Grange building committee if he had still been alive to see them. Six pistols, four assault rifles, three pistol-grip shotguns. They also brought several metal ammunition boxes with strap handles, packed with boxed ammo and with preloaded spare magazines for the various weapons.

In the conference room, which they had chosen to designate the armory, Sammy said to Ralph, “I know you’re not a gun nut in the negative sense.”

“How do you know?” Ralph asked, sweeping his arms wide to indicate the array of firearms on the conference
table. “This is like one-fifth of my collection—and none are antiques.”

“You’re not any kind of nut. You’re steady. So you have some good reason to gun-up like this.”

Ralph hesitated. He wasn’t a guy who talked much about himself. “I used to have only a single pistol for the nightstand drawer. Eight years ago this past September, I started the collection.”

Eight years earlier, Sammy had been just fifteen, a high-school student in Corona del Mar, California, where his parents lived.

Deucalion said to Ralph, “Your wife died eight years ago.”

Sammy knew this but hadn’t made the connection.

“Jenny couldn’t die that young. She was so good. So very alive. It was the most impossible thing that could ever, ever happen. But it happened. So I knew then everything else that seemed impossible might happen, too. All my life, I’ve been practical, prudent, prepared. The three P’s—that’s what my mother called them. There was no way I could have been prepared for Jenny dying, but the day I buried her, I swore to myself I’d be ready for every other impossible thing that could happen next. So maybe I am a nut, after all.”

Sammy glanced at Deucalion, saw pulses of strange light throb through the giant’s eyes, and looked at Ralph again. “Evidently not.”

chapter
29

Suddenly an ardent believer in everything that he previously disbelieved, from extraterrestrials to Satan, Frost sprinted across the room, past the eye-in-the-tongue still lying on the bed, and into the upstairs hallway. His heart galloped and he heard himself gasping for breath. He
knew
that he was sprinting as fast as he ever had, ever could, but he
felt
that he moved in slow motion, through air as resistant as water, his legs as leaden as those of a deep-sea diver in a pressure suit and a massive helmet, trudging across the ocean floor.

Even above the desperate bellows of his ragged breathing and the slamming of his feet, Frost heard his pursuer, a buzzing-hissing-sizzling-zippering that was all those things and yet none of them, nothing like the sly slithering noise that had come from the cocoon, a never-before-heard sibilation, now a wet
and clearly biological sound but
now
as dry as windblown sand.

At the midpoint of the hallway, he turned right toward the open staircase, and as he changed directions, he glanced back. The thing wasn’t giving chase in either its womanly form or as the amorphous mass of seething tissue that it had been when it sucked in the last of Dagget. Now it manifested as an airborne silvery-gray mass, as dense as smoke, a teeming and twinkling swarm that might have been insects so tiny that the eye could not discern any details of them, billions upon billions. But he knew in fact they were together the body of the woman who came from the cocoon, nothing as ordinary as insects, but the substance of the woman now a racing cloud of gray that, falling upon him, would render him as rapidly as Dagget had been rendered.

Pistol in hand but under no delusion that it would be effective, Frost plunged down the stairs. The swarm passed overhead, perhaps intending to swoop around and into his face and dissolve the eyes out of his skull as they entered and possessed him. In passing, however, they encountered the chandelier above, a many-armed brass affair with amber-glass cups containing flame-shaped bulbs. They sizzled through it, dissolving the chain from which it was suspended and the cord from which it drew power, leaving the foyer lit only by the staircase lights and a soffit light above the door.

The extinguished chandelier fell but only half as
fast as gravity demanded, borne by the boiling cloud of ravenous microscopic mites, descending toward the ground floor like a ship slowly sinking through the fathoms, diminishing as it went because it was being consumed in its fall. What reached the foyer below was in the end only the cloud, the swarm, no twist of metal or shard of glass remaining of the chandelier.

Just past the landing, on the lower of the two curving flights of stairs, Frost halted. Death waited below him. The swarm appeared less bright now, less silvery, darker shades of gray … and clotted. It looked more like dirty water than like smoke, slopping around in the foyer, lapping at the walls, seeming to build a tide toward the lower hallway that led back into the house, but then rolling toward the front door.

In spite of its watery appearance, the swarm didn’t make liquid sounds, still buzzed and hissed and sizzled, but the tone had become lower, less the furious
zeeeeee
of angry wasps, more the grumbling drone of bumblebees. Through the spiraling currents of this pool, which included numerous whorls that intersected and spun off new coils and curls, there bobbled what appeared to be lumpy forms more coherent than the rest, though they seemed to dissolve as new lumps formed elsewhere.

Frost might have fled back to the second floor, to leave the house by an upper window and a porch roof, if instinct had not said
Wait
. Weak-kneed and shaking on the stairs, he slipped his pistol in the shoulder rig under his jacket. He gripped the railing with his left
hand to steady himself, leaned against it. With his right sleeve, he wiped at the cold sweat that stippled his brow.

In the foyer below him, under a mirror, stood a narrow side table holding three ceramic vases of different sizes. The gray tide washed under it, around its legs. For a moment the table seemed to be of no interest to that voracious multitude, but then the slender legs began to dissolve. The table tipped forward, and the vases slid off. They didn’t shatter as they fell into the pool, but bobbled briefly before apparently dissolving. The table came apart and the pieces were briefly flotsam before deliquescing out of sight into the spiral currents.

Intuition needed a while to be heard through the roar of Frost’s terror, but finally he began to suspect that the swarm had lost track of him. There was something aimless in its motion as it swashed back and forth in the foyer, as though it had forgotten its purpose and quested this way and that, in search of some reminder of what it had been pursuing.

Frost suspected that if he moved or in any way drew attention to himself, he might inspire an attack. He leaned against the railing and quieted his breathing.

Dagget was dead. They had been not just partners but also best friends. Frost wanted revenge. But he knew there would be none. The best he could hope for was to survive. And with his sanity.

chapter
30