The Dead Town f-5 Read online

  Carson had been born on the Bayou. She was a Louisiana girl who loved Cajun food and danced to zydeco. As a New Orleans homicide detective, she had chased down Victor Helios, aka Frankenstein, and once he and all his creations in the Big Easy were dead, she had been able to look back on the case as an exhilarating adventure. In fact, even at the height of the terror, she and her partner, Michael, now her husband, had been having fun. Police work was always fun. Taking down bad guys was the best fun there was. Guns were fun. Even being shot at was fun as long as the shooters kept missing.

  They were no longer cops, they were private investigators, and they lived in San Francisco. Here in Montana, they were out of their element and without authority, though not without big guns, including Urban Sniper shotguns that fired slugs capable of dropping a grizzly bear. A weapon of this power was its own kind of authority. In spite of the guns and even though they were decked out in ultracool black Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suits, the situation in Rainbow Falls was so desperate that they hadn’t had a laugh since before sundown, and the prospects for fun seemed bleak.

  “Snow sucks,” Carson said.

  “That’s like the tenth time you’ve made that observation,” Michael noted.

  “Am I boring you? Is our marriage over? Do you want some woman who has nothing but good things to say about snow?”

  “Actually, boring turns me on. I’ve had enough excitement for a lifetime. The more boring you are, the hotter I get.”

  “You’re just barely walking the line, Johnny Cash. Better watch your ass.”

  In this residential neighborhood on the south side of town, the properties were half acres or larger. The evergreens soared so high that their upper branches seemed to weave into the substance of the sky, and the houses under them appeared, by contrast, to be smaller than they were. There was a Black Forest feeling here, the atmosphere of a fairy tale but one in which a troll with sinister appetites might appear at any moment. Seen through the tremulous curtain of densely falling snow, the lights of every home seemed to twinkle with a promise of mystery and magic.

  One house, set farther back from the street than many of the others, on at least an acre, was the locus of considerable activity. Several pickups and SUVs were on the driveway, near the house, parked at different angles from one another, engines running and headlights set high. Exhaust vapors smoked up through the snow and pairs of bright beams tunneled the dark, pierced the storm, and revealed at various distances the fissured trunks of trees.

  As there were no sidewalks or streetlamps in this neighborhood, Carson pulled onto the shoulder of the roadway and stopped to better assess the activity. A few people were standing around the cars, and a man — a mere silhouette from this distance — stood at the head of the front-porch steps as if guarding entrance to the house. The rooms were bright behind every window, and bustling figures could be glimpsed beyond those panes.

  “Us or them?” Michael wondered.

  Looking past him at the house, Carson said, “Hard to tell.”

  A sharp tap on the window in the driver’s door redirected her attention. A man with a walrus mustache, wearing a Stetson and a greatcoat, had rapped the glass with the muzzle of a shotgun, which was aimed at Carson’s face.

  Chapter 5

  Transport #1 had not yet arrived when Deucalion stepped out of distant Russell Street and into the KBOW parking lot. Four vehicles were in a row to the left of the building, and a Ford Explorer stood in a no-parking zone near the front door. Judging by the steam rising from the falling snow that melted on the hood of the Ford, the engine of the SUV had been switched off only a moment earlier.

  A single-story brick building housed the radio station. The open-girder transmission tower rose behind it, topped by an array of red lights blinking high in the snowy night.

  Two men, evidently from the Explorer, approached the front door. They had their backs to Deucalion, and they were unaware of him as he approached. Most likely they were Victor’s people, the advance team leading the assault on the station’s night staff. But he could not attack them without some evidence of their intent.

  In a single step, Deucalion transitioned from the parking lot to the reception lounge beyond the front door. The lights were low, and no one manned the desk.

  When he heard a key in the front door, Deucalion turned on his heel and, in the same instant, pivoted out of the lounge and into a hallway beyond a closed door. He was following the men by preceding them, which required that he guess correctly where they would go next.

  At low volume, ceiling speakers carried the voice of the current on-air personality. Judging by his words and by his slight Montana accent, he must be a local talk-show host in these lower-rated hours when a nationally syndicated program would be an unwise use of prime programming.

  The first door on the left was labeled MEN. Deucalion stepped into the small restroom, which smelled of pine-scented urinal cakes. He didn’t switch on the light but held the door ajar an inch to watch the corridor.

  He heard them enter from the reception lounge, and a moment later they passed him without glancing in his direction. They looked solemn and determined.

  Farther back in the building, they opened a door, and someone in that other room said, “Warren? Didn’t you go home?”

  Because the lavatory door had operated soundlessly when he entered, Deucalion boldly opened it now and stepped into the hallway behind Warren and the other man. They had already disappeared into a room farther along the corridor, where the door stood wide.

  The same voice that greeted Warren became suddenly alarmed—“Hey, hey, what the hell?”—and there were sounds of a struggle.

  Crossing the threshold, Deucalion saw two men dressed in snow gear — the pair from the Explorer — and a third who wore jeans and a sweatshirt. The guy in jeans sat in a chair at an L-shaped control board covered with indicator lights, gauges, and switches. One of his assailants pinned him down, pressing the right side of his face hard into the board as the other man withdrew a small pistol-like instrument from a pocket of his ski jacket. That device would no doubt fire one of those silvery, round-headed needles that robbed people of their free will and that perhaps had other functions no less horrifying.

  Shadow-silent, Deucalion moved, surprising this drone from Victor’s hive. He seized the wrist of the hand that held the brain probe, broke fingers as if they were breadsticks, twisted the weapon out of the other’s grip, jammed the muzzle to the replicant’s temple, and pulled the trigger.

  Face-to-face, Deucalion saw the drone’s pupils briefly widen, then shrink to pinpoints, as if the room lights had first dimmed and then flared brighter than the sun. He collapsed to the floor no less emphatically than if the glimmering bead on his temple had possessed the mass of a boulder, bearing him down.

  Reacting perhaps more quickly than would the average human being but as a tortoise to a hare when compared to Deucalion, the second drone released the engineer whose face he’d slammed into the control board. He reached into a pocket of his ski jacket. His confidence came from his programmed identity, which declared members of Victor’s newest race to be superior to anyone they would ever meet. But like any ideology based upon a lie, it would fail to sustain him in a confrontation with hard reality. The hardest reality this creature would ever face was the speed and power that Deucalion had received from the strange thunderbolt that had brought him life — and far more than life — out of the storm.

  Deucalion’s fists were the size of sledgehammers. Blow by brutal blow, the startled drone reeled backward. A flurry of punches to the throat crushed his airway. He gasped for breath, drew none. Without breath, he had no strength to escape a choke hold. In that vise grip, his cervical spine shattered, and he collapsed in his executioner’s embrace and then out of it to the floor, as loose and limp and inanimate as a knotted mass of rags.

  The first drone was not affected by the brain probe in the same way as were real people. He remained alive, twitching on the floor like a
beetle with a broken shell, clawing at the carpet with his hands. Tremors rattled his teeth together. His eyes rolled wildly in their sockets. Plumes of pale blue vapor issued from his nose, not in rhythmic exhalations but in continuous streams.

  Deucalion pressed one boot against the creature’s neck, pinning it in place. He bore down harder, with all his weight, until a snap and crunch of vertebrae, like the click of a switch, put an end to the spastic movements and to the plumes of vapor.

  When he looked up from the dead drone, he found the engineer regarding him with terror. Deucalion’s size was not the only thing about him that could inspire crippling fear in even the most fearless men.

  With one exception, his wounds healed rapidly, and he was never ill, but the ruined half of his face, ravaged in a confrontation with his maker centuries earlier, served as a constant reminder that he, too, was ultimately mortal. Perhaps only Victor, in all the world, had the power to destroy him, but that was a theory for which he avoided seeking proofs. The broken planes and grotesque concavities of that half of his countenance were partly concealed by an intricate tattoo in many colors, administered by a monk in a Tibetan monastery. The design was genius, distracting the eye from the grievous scars and the hideous contours over which the bright inks seemed to be in constant motion. Yet still Deucalion lived mostly in the night and shadows, because anyone could see through the tattoo to the truth if they stared long enough — just as this radio engineer saw through it.

  Periodically, as well, subtle pulses of light throbbed through his eyes, as if the lightning that had brought him to life remained within him, endlessly traveling the circuits of his nerves. He had seen this phenomenon in numerous mirrors over the centuries; and even he could be disturbed by it, although not for the same reason that it spooked others.

  Having been stitched together from cadavers, he sometimes wondered if the light within might be evidence that, when lightning animated him, he had been given not only his various powers but also a soul and perhaps a soul of a unique kind. Although he had come to love this intricately woven world with all its grace and beauty, he was weary of the strife that was as well an element in the weave. And he was weary of the loneliness unique to one who had not been born of man and woman. He hoped for a better world beyond this place, a realm of peace and charity … and perfect tenderness. But he was also disquieted by the possibility that he possessed a soul, because the rage and murderous violence of his early years, when he had been so bitter and confused, left him with a daunting weight of guilt from which he must be redeemed. Perhaps a realm of peace was not a reward that he could earn. His inner light might be an inevitable hellfire.

  Having risen from his chair, the engineer stood in the corner formed by the L-shaped control board, regarding Deucalion as if he were indeed a demon. His round face and rubbery features would more readily shape themselves to smiles and laughter. His expression of shock and terror was so at odds with the nature of his fundamental appearance that it seemed comic, like the exaggerated look of fright that a mime might wear as he strove mightily to sell his emotion to the audience without benefit of a voice.

  “They weren’t human,” Deucalion said. “And regardless of how I may appear, I’m not one of them. But more of them are coming, and they’ll be here soon.”

  The engineer’s mouth moved, though no sound issued from him. With both trembling hands, he gestured so aimlessly that no sign he made conveyed the slightest meaning.

  “Pull yourself together, man. You’ve got to fight or die. There is no other choice. How many of you are in the building?”

  The engineer clutched one hand with the other, as if to still them both, and when at last he spoke, his voice was unexpectedly calm. “Four. There’s just four of us.”

  Chapter 6

  Jocko on the brink of greatness. In the study of the pretty little house he shared with Erika Five. Beyond the town limits of Rainbow Falls. Snow at the window.

  Sometimes Jocko sat on the swiveling desk chair in front of the computer. Sometimes knelt on it. Sometimes stood on it. Stood on it and danced. Danced hard enough to make the chair spin. His red-and-green hat with silver bells jingled merrily.

  Sometimes Jocko typed with his feet. Long ugly toes. Ugly but flexible and limber. Good toes for typing.

  His fingers were ugly, too. Everything about his body was ugly. Even his bizarre tongue with its three hairs.

  Jocko was a tumor.

  Well, he started out as a tumorlike lump in the biologically chaotic flesh of one of Victor’s New Race in New Orleans. Then he became self-aware. A tumor with attitude. Hopes and dreams. And he grew fast. Later he burst out of that host body. Became something more than a tumor. Something better.

  He became a monster. Some people screamed when they saw Jocko. Others fainted. Birds dive-bombed him. Cats hissed and rats fled squeaking. Jocko was a very effective monster. Misshapen skull. Pale warty skin. Lipless slit of a mouth. Eerie yellow eyes, both too large for his head, one larger than the other.

  A monster was a more respectable thing to be than a mere tumor. Nobody liked a tumor. What was to like? But they wrote books about monsters. Made movies about them, too. People liked some monsters as much as they feared them.

  When you started out as a tumor with a brain, you had nowhere to go but up. Jocko was passionate about self-improvement. Although he had become a monster and harbored even greater aspirations, Jocko nevertheless remained humble. He never forgot where he came from. Once a tumor, always a tumor.

  Somewhat taller than a dwarf, Jocko secretly wished he were six foot two. And handsome. With hair on his head instead of on his tongue. In some dreams, Jocko was not himself. In dreams, he was a movie star. Often George Clooney. Sometimes Ashton Kutcher. Once he was Dakota Fanning and knew what it must be like to be loved by everyone. He wished that he really could be a handsome male movie star. He didn’t care which one, except not Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp scared Jocko.

  The thought of Johnny Depp made Jocko’s hands shake badly. Ugly fingers stuttered across the keys, and gibberish appeared on the screen. He took his hands off the keyboard. Slow deep breaths. Easy. Calm. Johnny Depp was at least a thousand miles away from Rainbow Falls.

  Jocko wasn’t just typing on the computer. Wasn’t playing games. Wasn’t working on Excel spreadsheets. He was hacking. His online path wasn’t through a phone or a cable company, but through the satellite dish on the roof. Jocko was a total firewall-busting, code-breaking, backdoor-building Internet wildcatter who could drill out more data than Exxon drilled oil.

  That was why he wore the red-and-green hat with silver bells. His hacking hat. He had thirteen other hats. Hats for different occasions. Jocko loved hats.

  Deucalion—monster of monsters, Victor’s first-made, mentor and maven, legend! — had entrusted Jocko with an important task. Hack into the department of motor vehicles’ secured files. Find out who owned a blue-and-white truck with a certain license-plate number.

  Jocko was part of the team. Needed. Maybe a hero.

  In the past, Jocko had sometimes been a screwup. Washout. Flop. Failure. Fool. Moron, idiot, ninny-hammer, dumb-bunny.

  But all that was behind him. Now he was going to make his mother proud of him.

  Erika wasn’t his biological mother. Former tumors didn’t have real moms. She adopted him unofficially.

  They didn’t take mother-child trips to the park. Or go into town for an ice-cream soda. On the rare occasions when people saw Jocko, they wanted right away to beat him with sticks. Sticks, umbrellas, canes, buckets, anything handy. So far, Jocko didn’t seem to be one of those monsters that most people feared but also liked. For his safety, Jocko was limited to this house and the forty acres that came with it.

  Erika Five, who lived now as Erika Swedenborg, was the fifth of five identical wives that Victor had grown in his creation tanks in New Orleans. The first four displeased him. They were terminated. Victor didn’t believe in divorce. Erika Five also displeased him. But she escaped
on the night that Victor’s evil empire in Louisiana collapsed. Took a bunch of his money, too. She was the only member of his New Race to survive that catastrophe.

  Suddenly Jocko peeled the final DMV passcode out of its security skin as easily as stripping a banana, and he was in.

  “Banzai!” he cried.

  He entered the truck’s license-plate number. Requested the owner’s ID. The information appeared on the screen.

  “Huzza! Hoorah! Hooray!”

  The truck was owned by a nonprofit corporation, Progress for Perfect Peace. That sounded nice. Warm and cuddly. Progress was a good thing. Perfect peace was a good thing. Even a monster with lemon-yellow eyes and virtually no proper moral upbringing could see what good things they were.

  Progress for Perfect Peace had an address. In Rainbow Falls. Jocko printed it.

  After he backed out of the DMV, he looked for a Progress for Perfect Peace website. Wasn’t one. That seemed peculiar. Suspicious. A charity ought to have a website. Everyone had a website.

  Even Jocko had a website: www.jockothinksaboutlife.com. When he had an important insight about life, he posted it there. Maybe his thoughts could help other people. Just a few days ago he had posted: All muffins are tasty, but some are tastier than others — which isn’t an insult to the lesser muffins, it’s just the way life is. I like mine with jelly.

  Jocko checked public records for Montana corporations. No need to hack them. Progress for Perfect Peace, Inc., had an address. It matched the one from the DMV.

  The CEO was Victor Leben. The name was no coincidence. Victor Frankenstein. Then Victor Helios. Now Victor Leben. Victor.

  “Holy moly!”

  On the screen, the o in Victor seemed to be an eye. Watching Jocko. Victor would know Jocko found him. Victor knew everything.

  Jocko was wearing a T-shirt bearing the image of Buster Steelhammer, the greatest star in the history of World Wrestling Entertainment. The shirt usually made him feel brave. Not now.