The Dead Town

Chapter 34

One second Papa Frankenstein’s prodigal son wasn’t there, the next second he was very there, and fragments of the shattered window cascaded in upon Michael without harming him. The door came open, and Michael shouted his name—“Michael, Michael, me, me, it’s me!”—so that the big guy wouldn’t break his neck, although even as he cried out and even as Carson braked, he saw that he had been recognized.

Deucalion dropped off the access step as the truck came to a stop, and Michael clambered out. “Thanks for not killing me.”

“Anytime.”

Michael didn’t know why Deucalion should look even bigger in the falling snow than he had looked in other environments, but he seemed to be a lot bigger. Maybe it was because heavy snow at night created a magical mood in any circumstance, which emphasized Deucalion’s nearly supernatural appearance. Maybe it was because this was the start of Armageddon, they were in the quick of it, and Michael was so happy that Deucalion was on their side that he imagined the giant to be even bigger than he was.

“I’m babbling,” Michael declared.

Deucalion frowned. “You only said five words.”

“In my head. I’m babbling to myself in my head.”

Carrying her Urban Sniper, Carson hurried around from the driver’s door to the giant. “What have you learned?”

“Does the truck have a radio?” Deucalion asked. “Have you been listening?”

“We haven’t really had time to be diggin’ any tunes,” Michael said.

“I convinced the radio-station staff. They’re warning anyone who might be listening.”

“Convinced them how?” Carson wondered.

“Killed the replicant of their general manager, slashed open his gut to show them what was inside.”

“Vivid,” Michael said.

“I get the feeling this thing is coming down faster than we can form a resistance to it,” Carson worried.

“Why do you say that?”

“Listen.”

She had switched off the truck engine. The silence of Rainbow Falls was the silence of an arctic outpost a thousand miles from any human habitat.

“Significant but not decisive,” Deucalion decided. “The weather keeps some inside. And anyone listening to KBOW will be fortifying their homes to better defend them. We’ve told them the roads out of town are blockaded, so it would be foolish to try to drive out.”

Carson shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m no quitter. The way of the world is you kick ass or you die, and I’m always going to kick. But we’ve got to be real. A lot of people are dead already, and a lot more are going to die. I don’t want to see children dying. Not any that we might just save.”

Michael thought of Arnie and Scout, back in San Francisco. He wondered if the day would come when he and Carson, if they survived Rainbow Falls, would find themselves on the shore of that western bay, with nowhere left to run, only the sea at their backs and a city full of replicants coming for them.

“We’ve already got a dozen kids at this house, the Samples place,” Carson told Deucalion. “We’ll have more soon. Only you can drive them out, with that trick you have, take them to Erika.”

Deucalion agreed. “It’s strategically smart. The adults will put up a better fight if they don’t have their children at hand to worry about.”

“You can use this truck to transport them,” Michael said, “once we get rid of the dead replicants in the back.”

Something drew Deucalion’s attention to a nearby building. Carson saw it, too, and leveled the shotgun.

Following their lead, Michael recognized Addison Hawk as he stepped out of the recessed entryway to the offices of the Gazette. More than ever, he looked like a town sheriff in an old Jimmy Stewart Western.

Carson did not lower the shotgun. The publisher had evidently been alone in his office. Maybe the real Addison Hawk was sitting in there in the dark, a bead of silver face jewelry on his left temple.

“I heard the radio,” Hawk said, “but I didn’t think I could believe it.”

“Believe it,” Carson said, “and stop right there for a minute.”

“I want to help,” the publisher said. “What can I do to help? This can’t happen, not to this town, not to this town of all towns.”

“How can we be sure of him?” Carson asked Deucalion.

“You mean short of opening him up and looking inside? I don’t know. But we have to decide quickly. Not just about him. Everyone we encounter from here on.”

This night provided Michael’s first experience of snow. None in Louisiana, none in San Francisco. He expected it to be beautiful, which it was, but he didn’t expect it to be unsettling, which it also was. The millions of flakes whirling, movement everywhere, so much movement that you couldn’t trust your peripheral vision or your visual instinct to identify something hostile if it was approaching with any subtlety. In the windless dark, the graceful descent of the flakes, still fluffy although a little icier than before, was as lulling as it was alluring, fading the hard edges of things, by its beauty ceaselessly selling the lie that the world was a gentle place, soft, with no sharp edges.

Michael said, “Carson, you remember those guys who came into the restaurant to get Chrissy Benedetto’s mother? How they were?”

Denise Benedetto, muted and brain damaged, a silver bead on her temple, had somehow gotten away from her captors. Two policemen and one man in civilian clothes had come after her, into the restaurant where Carson and Michael were having dinner.

“They were bold,” Carson said. “Arrogant. Cold bastards.”

“I’ve lived my whole life here,” Addison Hawk said with some distress, “except when I was away in the service. My dad and mom are here. My aunt Brinna, she’s all alone now. Uncle Forrest and Aunt Carrie. What’re you telling me is going to happen to them? What’re you telling me?”

“Arrogant, cold,” Michael agreed, “and something almost dead in their eyes.”

After a hesitation, Carson lowered the shotgun. “I guess sometimes … we’ll just have to trust and hope.”