The Dead Town

Chapter 11

Sammy Chakrabarty never stood around waiting for someone else to get things done. He was always moving, doing, thinking, dealing with the task of the moment but simultaneously planning ahead. He stood five ten, weighed only 130 pounds, ate enough for two men, but couldn’t gain an ounce because he was so active and his metabolism was always revving.

He had been helping to adapt the current broadcast to the failure of all phone service and Internet access, which seemed to be a crisis when it happened in the middle of a talk show. Now it wasn’t a crisis anymore, wasn’t even a problem, considering that two men had just been killed, men or something passing for men, and KBOW had plunged into the Twilight Zone.

Sammy ran from the engineer’s control room to the kitchenette, which featured a refrigerator, microwave oven, ice-maker, and coffee machine. Sammy yanked open the cabinet drawer that contained flatware and various utensils, including a few knives, and he selected the biggest and sharpest blade.

At twenty-three, Sammy was already the radio station’s program director, promotion director, and community-affairs director. He lived in an inexpensive two-room apartment, drove an ancient Honda, and invested half his after-tax income, doing his own online stock trading with considerable success. His plan was to become general manager by the age of twenty-six, purchase KBOW by the time he was twenty-nine, and use it as a platform to develop groundbreaking programming that might have enough appeal to be syndicated across the country.

The extraordinary events of the past few minutes might have ramifications that would set back his plan as much as a year, perhaps even eighteen months. But Sammy Chakrabarty could not conceive of any circumstances that might delay him longer than that or thwart him altogether.

Carrying the knife, he hurried back through the building toward the engineer’s nest, where the station personnel and the giant with the half-smashed face, who called himself Deucalion, stood over the bodies that looked like Warren and Andy Snyder but perhaps were not.

Ralph Nettles, their engineer, was a rock-solid guy, known for his reliability, truthfulness, and common sense. So it must be true that Warren and Andy had tried to kill him, that this tattooed stranger saved his life and was their ally, and that pale blue vapor gushed from Warren’s nostrils during his death throes, as though he might be less a man than a machine in which some reservoir of coolant had been ruptured. It must be true, but everyone preferred to have a bit more confirming evidence.

In the control room, in addition to Ralph and the giant, there were Burt Cogborn, the station’s advertising salesman and ad-copy writer, and Mason Morrell, their weekday-evening talk-show host, who had switched from live chatter to a prerecorded segment that he kept on hand for emergencies like this. Well, not exactly like this. The kind of emergency Mason had in mind was an unexpected attack of on-air diarrhea. Everyone but the stranger looked anxious and confused.

In Sammy’s absence, the body of Warren Snyder had been stripped to the waist, and his pants had been pulled down far enough to reveal his entire abdomen, sternum to groin.

“I don’t know exactly what you’ll see,” Deucalion said, “but I’m confident it will be enough to prove this wasn’t the real Warren Snyder.”

The giant knelt beside the corpse and plunged the knife into it, just below the breastbone.

Mason Morrell gasped, probably not because the mutilation of the corpse shocked or dismayed him, but only for effect, to suggest that he, an on-air talent, was by nature more sensitive than those who labored behind the scenes of his show. Sammy liked Mason, though the guy was always performing to one degree or another, whether at the microphone or not, and he was sometimes exhausting.

A thin serpent of blood slithered from the haft of the buried knife and along the pale abdomen, and for a moment the cadaver seemed human, after all. But then Deucalion slashed to the navel and beyond, and the illusion of humanity was cut away. The lips of the wound sagged apart, and the blood — if it was blood — proved to be confined to the surface tissues.

Deeper, all was strange, not the viscera of a human body. Some of the organs were the color of milk glass, others were white tinted unevenly with faint streaks of gray like the flesh of certain fish, and a smaller number were white with the merest suggestion of green, some smooth and slick, others textured like curds of cottage cheese, all of them bizarre in shape and asymmetrical. A double helix of opalescent tubes twined through the body trunk, and a creamy fluid leaked from those that had been nicked or severed. Throughout the body cavity lay a fine web of luminous filaments that seemed less biological than electronic, and they glowed softly even though this replicant of Warren Snyder was surely as dead as the real man that he had replaced.

Leaving the knife protruding from the body, Deucalion rose to his full height.

With a quiver of revulsion and with fear in his voice that dismayed him, Sammy Chakrabarty asked, “What is that thing?”

“It was made in a laboratory,” the giant said. “Hundreds or even thousands of them are in the process of taking control of this town.”

“What laboratory?” Ralph Nettles wondered. He shook his head in disbelief. “Our science isn’t far enough advanced to do this.”

“The proof is before your eyes,” Deucalion reminded him.

Burt Cogborn stared not at the cadaver but at his wristwatch, as if his world of radio-spot sales allowed no room for a development of this magnitude, as if he might announce that he had a deadline looming and needed to return to his office to write ad copy.

“Maybe a laboratory,” Ralph acceded. “But not on this planet.”

“On this planet, in this state, this county,” Deucalion assured them with unsettling certainty. “Who I am, who made these creatures, I’ll explain soon. But first, you’ve got to prepare to defend the station, and warn others, both in Rainbow Falls and beyond, what’s happening here.”

“Defend it with what?” Mason Morrell asked. “A couple of kitchen knives? Against hundreds — maybe thousands — of these … these things? And they’re stronger than us? Man, this isn’t a movie, there’s no big-screen superstar to make everything right in the third act. I can’t save the world. I can’t save anything but my own ass, split this place, get out of town, way out, leave it to the army.”

“You won’t get out,” Deucalion said. “They’ve taken over the police, all authorities. Roads are blocked at both ends of town. They’re seizing key utilities — telephones, the power company. The weather helps them because people will tend to stay at home, where their replicants can more easily find them.”

“Without phones or any text-messaging devices,” Sammy said, “without the Internet, KBOW is the only efficient way to warn a lot of people.”

Ralph Nettles said, “I’ve got guns. I … collect.”

Sammy had always thought that the even-tempered, responsible, detail-obsessed engineer probably had a plan for every contingency from falling in love to Armageddon. Although he’d never heard Ralph say a word to suggest that he collected guns, he wasn’t surprised by this disclosure, and he suspected that the collection would prove to be extensive, though just short of a quantity that would justify the use of the word paranoid.

“I have enough to defend this place,” Ralph said. “My house is less than a mile away. I could be back here with arms and ammo to spare in … twenty minutes or so.”

Deucalion said, “I’ll go with you, and we’ll be much quicker than twenty.”

The front-door buzzer sounded. KBOW was locked to visitors after the reception lounge closed at five-thirty.

“That’ll be Transport Number One,” Deucalion said. “They think they have four zombies to collect. Wait here. I’ll deal with them.”

Sammy could never have imagined that the stunning revelation of the existence of the replicants and the sight of their alien innards would prove to be less startling than Deucalion’s departure from the room. He, Ralph, Mason, and even half-catatonic Burt all cried out in surprise, however, when Deucalion, turning away from them, did not merely walk out of the room but vanished from it.