rushing into the world that Sam knew and — suddenly — loved.
One of the snakelike cables had reached his chest and found its way under his sweater to bare skin. He felt as if he'd been touched by a white-hot brand, and the pain broke his trance.
He fired two rounds into the computer, shattering the screen first, which was the second face of Coltrane's into which he'd pumped a.38 slug. Though Sam half expected it to absorb the bullet without effect, the cathode-ray tube imploded as if still made of glass. The other round scrambled the guts of the data-processing unit, at last finishing off the thing that Coltrane had become.
The pale, oily tentacles fell away from him. They blistered, began to bubble, and seemed to be putrefying before his eyes.
Eerie electronic beeps, crackles, and oscillations, not ear — torturingly loud but uncannily piercing, still filled the room.
When Sam looked toward the woman who had been seated at the other computer, against the east wall, he saw that the mucus-like cables between her and the machine had lengthened, allowing her to turn in her chair to face him. Aside from those semiorganic connections and her nakedness, she was in a different but no less hideous condition from her husband. Her eyes were gone, but her sockets did not bristle with a host of sensors. Rather, two reddish orbs, three times the size of ordinary eyes, filled enlarged sockets in a face redesigned to accommodate them; they were less eyes than eye-shaped receptors, no doubt designed to see in many spectrums of light, and in fact Sam became aware of an image of himself in each red lens, reversed. Her legs, belly, breasts, arms, throat, and face were heavily patterned with swollen blood vessels that lay just beneath her skin and that seemed to stretch it to the breaking point, so she looked as if she were a design board for branch-pattern circuitry. Some of those vessels might, indeed, have carried blood, but some of them throbbed with waves of radium-like illumination, some green and some sulfurous yellow.
A segmented, wormlike probe, the diameter of a pencil, erupted from her forehead, as if shot from a gun, and streaked toward Sam, closing the ten feet between them in a split second, striking him above the right eye before he could duck. The tip bit into his skin on contact. He heard a whirring sound, as of fan blades spinning at maybe a thousand revolutions a minute. Blood ran down his brow and along the side of his nose. But he was squeezing off the last two rounds in his gun even as the probe came at him. Both shots found their mark. One slammed into the woman's upper body, and one took out the computer behind her in a blaze of sparks and crackling electrical bolts that jumped to the ceiling and snaked briefly across the plaster before dissipating. The probe went limp and fell away from him before it could link his brain to hers, which evidently had been its intention.
Except for gray daylight that entered through the paper-thin cracks between the slats of the shutters, the room was dark.
Crazily, Sam remembered something a computer specialist had said at a seminar for agents, when explaining how the Bureau's new system worked:
Bleeding from the forehead and the right wrist, he stumbled backward to the door and flicked the light switch, turning on a floor lamp) He stood there — as far as he could get from the two grotesque corpses and still see them — while he began to reload the revolver with rounds he dug out of the pockets of his jacket.
The room was preternaturally silent.
Nothing moved.
Sam's heart was hammering with such force that his chest ached dully with each blow.
Twice he dropped cartridges because his hands were shaking. He didn't stoop to retrieve them. He was half convinced that the moment he wasn't in a position to fire with accuracy or to run, one of the dead creatures would prove not to be dead, after all, and like a flash would come at him, spitting sparks, and would seize him before he could rise and scramble out of its way.
Gradually he became aware of the sound of rain. After losing half of its force during the morning, it was now falling harder than at any time since the storm had first broken the previous night. No thunder shook the day, but the furious drumming of the rain itself — and the insulated walls of the house — had probably muffled the gunfire enough to prevent it being heard by neighbors. He hoped to God that was the case. Otherwise, they were coming even now to investigate, and they would prevent his escape.
Blood continued to trickle down from the wound on his forehead, and some of it got into his right eye. It stung. He wiped at his eye with his sleeve and blinked away the tears as best he could.
His wrist hurt like hell. But if he had to, he could hold the revolver with his left hand and shoot well enough in close quarters…
When the.38 was reloaded, Sam edged back into the room, to the smoking computer on the worktable along the west wall, where Harley Coltrane's mutated body was slumped in a chair, trailing its bone-metal arms. Keeping one eye on the dead man-machine, he took the phone off the modem and hung it up. Then he lifted the receiver and was relieved to hear a dial tone.
His mouth was so dry that he wasn't sure he'd be able to speak clearly when his call got through.
He punched out the number of the Bureau office in Los Angeles.
The line clicked.
A pause.
A recording came on 'We are sorry that we are unable to complete your call at this time.'
He hung up, then tried again.
'We are sorry that we are unable to complete—'
He slammed the phone down.
Not all of the telephones in Moonlight Cove were operable. And evidently, even from those in service, calls could be placed only to certain numbers. Approved numbers. The local phone company had been reduced to an elaborate intercom to serve the converted.
As he turned away from the phone, he heard something move, behind him. Stealthy and quick.
He swung around, and the woman was three feet away. She, was no longer connected to the ruined computer, but one of those organic-looking cables trailed across the floor from the base of her spine and into an electrical socket.
Free-associating in his terror, Sam thought: So much for your flimsy kites, Dr. Frankenstein, so much for the need for storms andd lightning; these days we just plug the monsters into the wall, them a jolt of the juice direct, courtesy of Pacific Power & Light.
A reptilian hiss issued from her, and she reached for him. Instead of fingers, her hand had three multiple- pronged plugs similar to the couplings with which the elements of a home computer were joined, though these prongs were as sharp as nails.
Sam dodged to the side, colliding with the chair in which Harley Coltrane still slumped, and nearly fell, firing at the woman-thing as he went. He emptied the five-round.38.
The first three shots knocked her backward and down. The other two tore through vacant air and punched chunks of plaster out of the walls because he was too panicked to stop pulling the trigger when she fell out of his line of fire.
She was trying to get up.
Like a goddamn vampire, he thought.
He needed the high-tech equivalent of a wooden stake, a cross, a silver bullet.
The artery-circuits that webbed her naked body were still pulsing with light, although in places she was sparking, just as the computers themselves had done when he had pumped a couple of slugs into them.
No rounds were left in the revolver.
He searched his pockets for cartridges.
He had none.
An electronic wail, not deafening but more nerve-splintering than a thousand sharp fingernails scraped simultaneously down a blackboard, shrilled from her.
Two segmented, wormlike probes burst from her face and flew straight at him. Both fell inches short of him — perhaps a sign of her waning energy — and returned to her like splashes of quicksilver streaming back into the mother mass.
But she
