The Dead Town

Chapter 2

Silent legions of snow marched softly through the night, laying siege to Rainbow Falls, Montana, conquering the black streets. Like clouds of battle smoke, the blizzard faded the red-brick buildings and the towering evergreens. Soon streetscapes and landscapes would be ghostly and bleak, apocalyptic visions of a dead future.

Oblivious of the cold, Deucalion roamed the snowswept town as only he, in all the world, could travel. The terrible lightning that shocked him to life in Victor’s original laboratory, more than two hundred years previously, also brought him other gifts, including a profound understanding of the quantum structure of reality, an intuitive awareness of the weave in the foundation fabric of all things. He knew that the universe was immeasurably vast and yet a strangely intimate place, that distance was both a fact and an illusion, that in truth every point in the universe was next door to every other point. A Tibetan monastery on the opposite side of the world from Rainbow Falls was in another sense only one step away, if you knew how to take that step.

Deucalion knew how, and in an instant he transitioned from an alleyway behind Jim James Bakery to the roof of the Rainbow Theater. This town of fifteen thousand souls had an Old West feel because many of its buildings dated to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they had flat roofs with parapets of the kind that bad guys and sheriffs hid behind during gunfights in old movies.

No building in town rose above four stories, and the theater ranked among the tallest structures. From this vantage point high in the falling snow, Deucalion could see east and west along Cody Street. Most businesses were closing early because of the storm, but the restaurants and bars remained brightly lighted. Only a few vehicles were parked along the curbs; and traffic had fallen to a fraction of what it had been just half an hour earlier.

The large panel truck with midnight-blue cab and white cargo section was one of only four vehicles moving along Cody Street. Other identical trucks operated elsewhere in the town. Earlier Deucalion had learned the nature of the task in which the hard-eyed, two-man crews were engaged: transporting subdued citizens of Rainbow Falls to facilities where they would be killed.

The victims had been replaced by lookalikes created in Victor’s facility somewhere along State Route 311, which locals called the End Times Highway, a twenty-four-mile loop of wide two-lane blacktop that dated back to the Cold War. That road apparently served nothing along its remote wooded route except for an array of missile silos that had been decommissioned after the fall of the Soviet Union and had been in some cases abandoned and in other cases sold off to corporations for use as low-humidity, high-security storage vaults for sensitive records. Many locals were convinced that the silos were but a small part of what lay hidden along the End Times Highway, that other secret subterranean facilities had been built deep to withstand multiple direct nuclear strikes. Finding Victor’s lair this time would not be easy.

No doubt the first people to be replaced by replicants and murdered had been those in the police department and in elected offices. Victor would take control of the town from the top and work down to the last unsuspecting citizen. Deucalion had already seen captive employees of the telephone company being herded into one of the blue-and-white transports, whereafter they were taken to a warehouse for disposal.

When the truck down on Cody turned north on Russell Street, Deucalion stepped off the roof of the theater and directly, boldly, magically onto the corrugated-steel step that served the passenger door of the vehicle. Surprised, the man riding shotgun turned his head. Holding fast to an assist bar on the wall of the cab, Deucalion wrenched open the door, which barely cleared his great bulk, reached inside with one hand, seized the passenger by the throat, crushed his windpipe, pulled him off the seat, and threw him into the snowswept street as if he weighed no more than a hollow plastic department-store mannequin.

“Always wear your seat belt,” he muttered.

Earlier this night, he discovered that the current generation of Victor’s creations were not as hardy as the New Race specimens that the would-be god produced years previously in New Orleans. Those individuals had been difficult to take down even with an Urban Sniper, a police-only shotgun that fired slugs instead of buckshot. These Montana replicants were nevertheless tougher than human beings, though they were easy prey for Deucalion, whose strength considerably exceeded theirs.

The truck’s forward movement threw the door back against Deucalion, but he had a great capacity to endure pain. He pushed it open again and swung into the passenger seat, pulling the door shut behind him.

Taking out one of the two-man crew and boarding the vehicle required mere seconds, and the confused driver only half braked when he saw his partner snatched from the cab. Deucalion reached for the key, switched off the engine. Surprised but not afraid — these new replicants seemed fearless — the snarling driver swung his right fist, but Deucalion seized it in midstrike, twisted it, and broke the wrist.

The driver grunted but didn’t cry out in pain. As the truck coasted along the street, Deucalion clamped his left hand to the back of his adversary’s head, slamming the replicant’s face into the steering wheel. He slammed it again and again, and yet again, only twice sounding the horn.

The weaving truck swiftly lost momentum, the front tire on the port side met a curb that it barely managed to climb, and the driver stopped resisting. As the vehicle came to a full stop, the front bumper thumped gently against a lamppost. Deucalion was certain the replicant must be dead, but for insurance he got the man in a choke hold and broke his neck.

These two killings could not be called murder. True murder was strictly a crime against humanity. Except for outward appearances, these specimens from Victor’s current laboratory were not human in any sense. Abominations. Monsters. Lab rats.

Deucalion felt no guilt for having terminated them, because he was, after all, another monster, the earliest model in Victor’s product line. Perhaps he had been somewhat sanctified by contrition for his long-ago crimes and by his centuries of suffering. He might even be a monster on a sacred mission, although still in essence a monster, a product of Victor’s hubris, created from the bodies of hanged criminals as an affront to God.

He could be as brutal and ruthless as any of his maker’s newer creations. If the war against the natural world had begun, humanity would need a monster of its own to have any hope of survival.

Leaving the corpse behind the wheel, Deucalion got out of the truck. Even in the breathless night, the storm still seemed to qualify as a blizzard, so thickly did the snow fall.

Suddenly, it seemed to him that the flakes of falling snow did not take light from the streetlamp but, instead, were illuminated from within their crystalline structures, as if they were shavings of the lost moon, each filled with its measure of the lunar glow. The longer that Deucalion lived, the more magical he found this precious world.

Russell Street, a secondary thoroughfare, was deserted, free of both other traffic and pedestrians. No shops were open in this block. But a witness might appear at any moment.

Deucalion walked back along the tire tracks and stopped beside the individual whom he had thrown from the truck. In spite of its crushed throat, the lab rat still tried to draw breath and clawed at the tire-compacted snow in a feeble attempt to drag itself onto its knees. With the hard stamp of a boot to the back of its neck, he put an end to the creature’s suffering.

He carried the corpse to the truck and opened the rear door. The cargo space was empty; the next batch of luckless people destined for extermination had not yet been collected. He tossed the body into the truck.

He pulled the driver from the cab, carried him to the back of the vehicle, threw him into the cargo box with the other corpse, and closed the door.

Behind the steering wheel, he started the engine. He backed the truck away from the lamppost, off the curb, into the street.

The display screen in the dashboard brightened with a map of a small portion of Rainbow Falls. A blinking red GPS indicator showed the current position of the truck. A green line traced a route that the driver was evidently meant to follow. At the top of the screen were the words TRANSPORT #3 SCHEDULE. Beside those words, two boxes offered options, one labeled LIST, the other MAP. The second box was currently highlighted.

Deucalion pressed a forefinger to LIST. The map vanished from the screen, and an assignment list appeared in its place. The third address was highlighted — THE FALLS INN — at the corner of Beartooth Avenue and Falls Road. Evidently that would have been the truck’s next stop.

Along the right side of the touch screen, in a vertical line, were five boxes, each labeled with a number. The 3 was highlighted.

When Deucalion put a forefinger to the 1, the list on the screen was replaced with a different series of addresses. The legend at the top now read TRANSPORT #1 SCHEDULE.

Here, too, the third line was highlighted. The two-man crew of Transport #1 had evidently successfully collected the people at the first two addresses and perhaps conveyed them to their doom. Their next stop appeared to be KBOW, the radio station that served not only Rainbow Falls but also the entire surrounding county.

Having replaced the employees of the telephone company with identical replicants earlier in the evening, thereby seizing control of all land-line phones and cell-phone towers, Victor’s army would next take control of KBOW, preventing the transmission of a warning either to residents of the town or to the people in the smaller surrounding communities.

Deucalion switched to MAP and saw that the radio station was on River Road, toward the northeastern end of the city limits, about two miles from his current position. Transport #1 was scheduled to arrive there in less than four minutes to collect KBOW’s evening staff. This suggested that the assault on the radio station might already have begun. If the route he followed to KBOW was the one that the truck’s navigation system recommended, the show would be over by the time he arrived there.

He opened the driver’s door, swung out of the truck — and stepped from Russell Street onto the radio-station parking lot.