Frankenstein: The Dead Town (28 page)

chapter
53

The Xerox Boze parked in the KBOW lot where Mr. Lyss told him to stop, not near the other vehicles and back a little ways from the building, just in case, he said, they were being lured here by some sneaky sonofabitch monsters who weren’t the Paul Reveres they were pretending to be.

They all climbed out of the car, and Mr. Lyss got his long gun from the backseat, which was when the two SUVs roared in from the street, one close behind the other. They raced past the car, braked hard nearer the building, and their doors flew open. Six men jumped out of one, six out of the other, and though Nummy couldn’t usually tell whether people were good or bad from just looking at them, he knew right away that these twelve were up to no good.

Nine of them went toward the front door of KBOW, and three of them came this way, and Mr. Lyss asked
Xerox Boze if they were his people, and Xerox Boze said, “Yes. Communitarians,” which of course meant monsters.

The old man fired the long gun three times fast, and it was so loud Nummy put his hands over his ears. Each shot seemed almost to lift Mr. Lyss off his feet and jump him backward an inch or two. But he must have had some practice with a gun like that, or else he was really lucky, so lucky that you could see why he was so sure the lottery ticket in his wallet would be a big winner. Each shot hit a monster and knocked him down, and Mr. Lyss hurried forward to put the gun close on one of them, at the throat, and fired a fourth time, and Nummy gagged.

The two shot-bad-but-not-dead monsters were getting to their feet, and Mr. Lyss backed off, grabbing shells from one of his deep coat pockets and reloading as he moved. No sooner were they up than Mr. Lyss shot them down again, and it looked like they would probably stay down this time.

But the other nine, who had been walking toward the building, stopped and looked back this way. Any monster Nummy had seen, while going up and down the TV channels, was always either growling and angry or flat-out furious. It didn’t matter whether they came out of a flying saucer or out of a cave from the center of the earth, or out of the black waters of a swamp, they were either ticked off or totally crazy-furious. They didn’t seem to know any other way to
be, and these nine coming now were no different, they sure weren’t broken like Xerox Boze.

Mr. Lyss reloaded two shells even while the last two shots were echoing across the parking lot, and now he fired four times, faster than ever. Four shots did more damage than Nummy expected, but then he remembered that each shot wasn’t just one bullet, it was a lot of little lead balls that could hit more than one monster at a time. Five went down, and two more staggered off balance, but there were nine, so two more kept coming.

Nummy wanted to run, but there was nowhere he could go that they wouldn’t chase him right into the ground. Mr. Lyss didn’t have time even to
think
about reloading the long gun, that’s how close the two furious monsters were, so Nummy got ready to die and he said a speed prayer.

Some guy came out of nowhere and stepped up beside Mr. Lyss, holding a gun in two hands, and boy could he shoot. What seemed to happen was two shots in the head of the nearest monster, one shot in the head and one in the throat of the next one.

This gave Mr. Lyss a chance to put down his long gun and draw the two pistols from his coat pockets, and he started shooting the wounded monsters that were getting up for another try at him, they just didn’t know when to quit. And the new guy was blasting them, too. It was like July Fourth, all the noise. When at last the twelve were on the ground, not moving, looking as dead as any roadkill on the highway,
Mr. Lyss and the new guy walked among them, looking them over, shooting three or four of them who were maybe not as dead as they ought to be.

By now Nummy saw where the new guy came from. Behind Mr. Lyss’s stolen car stood an old Chevrolet, engine running, driver’s door open wide.

Although his ears were still ringing, Nummy could hear Mr. Lyss say, “You shoot so precise, you must be some kind of lawman from one of the more determined agencies, but I won’t hold that against you.”

“Frost,” the new guy said, “FBI.”

“Kill me,” Xerox Bose said.

“Don’t kill him,” Mr. Lyss said. “He’s one of them but special.”

“One of them?” Mr. Frost said, alarmed, and backed away a couple of steps. “One of them chewed through my partner, Dagget, like it was a wood-chipper and he was nothing but balsa.”

“That’s a Builder,” Mr. Lyss said. “This is a different kind of them. He’s a Communitarian. He’s bad but not as bad as them bastards, he doesn’t eat people.”

A hard shot cracked, and the windshield of one of the dead monsters’ SUVs exploded.

On the roof of KBOW, huddled against the parapet and watching through the open crenel, Sammy Chakrabarty held his fire as the three got out of the car, waiting to see what they would do, which might tell him whether they were human or not.

One was in a police uniform, which was problematic. If the cops were co-opted, then this wouldn’t be a friendly listener inspired to visit by Mason Morrell’s stirring rhetoric. He seemed oddly placid, standing by the car in the snow, arms slack at his sides. He wasn’t wearing a coat or hat.

One of the other two was a dumpy little guy. Something seemed odd about him, too, although Sammy couldn’t see what it was through the sheeting snow.

The third was a grizzled old guy in a long coat. He fetched a shotgun from the backseat, which didn’t make him either a villain or a hero in the current situation, though his hair was wild and from a distance he looked a little crazy.

When the two SUVs burst onto the scene and twelve men bailed out of them, Sammy was pretty sure they had mayhem in mind, but he couldn’t be certain of their alien nature. He couldn’t fire down on them until they attempted to force the front door. They never got a chance. The number of shots required to kill them proved they weren’t human.

Sammy didn’t know if man-made men might kill one another the same way human beings did, but he was inclined to think they wouldn’t. So most likely the three that got out of the first car and the shooter who showed up in the Chevy were his kind of people, with real blood in their veins.

Nevertheless, he wanted to have a dialogue with them before he let them into the station. He got their
attention with a single rifle round through the windshield of one of the dead men’s SUVs, and then he shouted down, “Who are you people?”

When the guy on the roof asked them who they were, Mr. Frost shouted that he was from the FBI and waved some ID, but Mr. Lyss right away took offense.

“ ‘Who are you people?’ ” the old man said, repeating the roof guy’s question but making it sound as if it had been said in a snotty way, which it hadn’t. “ ‘
Who are you people?
’ You going to let in only fancy people who went to universities where every fool wears a tuxedo and spats, only people drink tea with their damn pinkies raised? This town’s falling apart worse even than Detroit, and you have your nose in the air? You’re not going to let in some funky old hobo because just maybe he stinks a little—
which he damn well doesn’t!
—because he’s not wearing a top hat?”

Nummy thought that Mr. Lyss would wait for an answer to his question, but instead the old man sort of snorted a deep breath that puffed out his chest and lifted him taller, and he went on in his most angry voice. His face was so hot-red in the parking-lot lights that he ought to have melted the snow that stuck in his eyebrows. He talked right over the poor man on the roof, who started to say something:

“Who we are is the very people who might save this miserable jerkwater from the plague of monsters your fruity announcer’s been jabbering about on the air.
I’m a hobo, this one here beside me is a dummy by anyone’s reckoning, and one look at us would tell any fool we’re as human as human gets. Go on boy, do your part, tell him you’re a dummy.”

Nummy said, “He’s right. I am. I’m a dummy and always been one. I don’t mind him saying it. He don’t mean it in a mean way.”

Mr. Lyss said to the guy on the roof, “This creature that looks like Officer Bozeman is one of the two kinds of monsters your town let overrun it. He’s not one of the people-eating kind, and anyway he’s broken, he’s no threat to anyone, though he’ll test your sanity if you let him near a piano. All this morbid bastard wants is for me to kill him because his program won’t allow him to kill himself, but damn if I’ll kill him until he tells us everything we need to know to find what nest these sonsofbitches come from so we can go in and burn it out. That’s
who we are
, and if
who we are
isn’t good enough for you, then you can just get in your Mercedes-Benz and drive yourself straight to Hell.”

Nummy realized that Mr. Lyss must have had his feelings hurt about a lot of things over the years, maybe since he was a little boy. That was really something to think about.

chapter
54

The seeming void silent and dark above, the snow materializing out of that inverted abyss, the houses bright or dark but each as still as a mausoleum, and the deserted white street from which this swaddling winter might have robbed all dimension if not for evenly spaced streetlamps dwindling toward other neighborhoods …

As the band and collet and prongs of a ring existed to display the gemstone, so it seemed to Rusty Billingham that everything his senses perceived in this glittering scene existed to display the jewel of a woman at the center of the intersection. From a distance of seventy feet, as he approached her, walking the middle of the street, she promised to be extraordinarily beautiful, and when he was still sixty feet from her, he knew that promise would be kept, perhaps more fully than he could imagine. Although it must be but a trick of
lamplight and diamonded threads of snow, she appeared radiant, luminous from within.

Rusty was certain now that she’d been the one who screamed, because she was clearly in a state of shock. Standing there with snow well above her ankles, perhaps barefoot, wearing a short silk robe that offered no protection against the night, she seemed to be oblivious of the piercing cold. She had fled from something, out of a house into the street, but now she didn’t run to him as a frightened woman seeking protection ought to have done. He asked her again what was wrong, and this time she didn’t even ask him to help her, just stared at him as if in a trance.

As he closed to within fifty feet of her, Rusty realized that his reaction to her was as unusual as was her catatonic stare. Seeing a woman in distress, whether she was beautiful or not, he would have ordinarily hurried to her, but he moved not slowly but deliberately. Unconsciously, some experience cautioned him, some reference to the past that he could not in the instant recall—and when the engine sound of a fast-moving vehicle rose from the west, Rusty came to a halt, still more than forty feet from the woman.

She turned her head to her right, peering along the cross street toward the approaching vehicle, suddenly bathed in its headlights. She made no attempt to get out of its way, seemed rooted or perhaps frozen to the pavement.

Braking, snow chains stuttering, a Chevy Trailblazer appeared and came to a stop beside the
woman, its headlights now past her. Four or five people were in the SUV.

The front passenger window purred down, and a grandmotherly figure leaned out. “Honey, are you all right, you need some help?”

Suddenly Rusty knew why he’d been inexplicably cautious. Four years back. Afghanistan. A woman in a burka, only her eyes revealed. She approached a checkpoint with U.S. Army security. He happened to be at a window half a block away when she detonated the bomb strapped to her body, out of the danger zone but witness to the horror.

The blonde’s silk robe revealed the contours of her voluptuous body so completely that no bomb could have been concealed under it—but in some way that Rusty could not comprehend,
she
proved to be a bomb. The grandmother in the Trailblazer leaned out of the passenger window, asked the courteous question, and a thick, silvery jet of … something like molten metal shot out of the flaxen-haired beauty, into the older woman’s face, and the face seemed to dissolve as she toppled over in her seat. The blonde and the silvery something were one and the same, and as the jet continued spewing into the SUV, she evaporated up from the street, leaving footprints in the snow, transforming entirely into that corrosive stream and fully invading the Trailblazer.