The Dead Town

preacher’s house that they burned down because it was full of the giant cocoons growing monsters inside. Mr. Lyss said he was going to pay for the guns with his lottery winnings — he had a ticket in his wallet with what he knew would be the right number — but Nummy had the bad feeling that Mr. Lyss really just stole them. Mr. Lyss seemed like his folks had never churched him when he was growing up.

The snow made a soft crunching sound under their feet as they walked around the house to the back porch, where they couldn’t be seen from the street. Mr. Lyss didn’t need his set of lock picks, because when he tried the kitchen door, it opened inward, hinges creaking.

Suddenly Nummy didn’t want to go into Officer Barry Bozeman’s house, not because it was wrong to go into a house when you weren’t invited, but because something bad waited for them in there. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. A sick, sliding feeling in his stomach. A tightness in his chest that prevented him from drawing deep breaths.

“Let’s leave now,” Nummy whispered.

“Nowhere to go,” said Mr. Lyss. “And not enough time to go there.”

The old man crossed the threshold, slid one hand along the wall beside the door, and switched on the lights.

When Nummy reluctantly followed Mr. Lyss, he saw the Boze in his underwear and open bathrobe, sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. The Boze’s head was tipped back, his mouth hanging open, his eyes rolled back in their sockets.

“Dead,” said Mr. Lyss.

Nummy knew dead when he saw it.

Even though Officer Bozeman was dead, Nummy was uncomfortable, seeing him in his underwear. He was also uncomfortable because it seemed wrong to stare at a dead person when he didn’t know you were there and he couldn’t tell you to get out or even make himself more presentable.

You couldn’t look away from a dead person, either. Then it would seem you were embarrassed for him, as though it must be his fault he died.

When the dead person was someone you knew, like the Boze — or like Grandmama — you felt a little like you wanted to die yourself. But you just had to look at him anyway, because this was the last time you would see him except in photos, and photos were just photos, they weren’t the person.

A silver bead glistened on the Boze’s left temple, just like the beads on the faces of those zombie people in the jail cells.

All the people in jail had waited like good dogs told “Stay.” And then the handsome young man had arrived and turned into an angel, but then not an angel, and then he had torn them all apart and had taken them into himself.

Nummy hoped the handsome young man didn’t show up here anytime soon.

Mr. Lyss closed the back door and crossed the room, leaving clumps of snow on the vinyl floor. He peered closely at the corpse but didn’t touch it.

“He’s been dead awhile. At least eight or ten hours, probably longer. Probably it happened before dawn.”

Nummy didn’t have any idea how you could know when a person must have died, and he didn’t want to learn. To learn such a thing, you’d have to see a lot of dead people and most likely examine them close, but what Nummy wanted most was never to see another dead person as long as he lived.

From the table, Mr. Lyss picked up a sort of gun made of shiny metal. He turned it this way and that, studying it.

On the table stood a bowl of fresh fruit: a few bananas, a pear, a couple of big apples that didn’t look quite ripe. Mr. Lyss pointed the strange-looking gun at an apple and pulled the trigger. Thhuuup! Suddenly on the apple appeared a gleaming silvery bead just like the one on Officer Bozeman’s face.

Mr. Lyss pulled the trigger again, but nothing happened. When he fired the gun a third time— Thhuuup! — the second apple now had a silver bead, too. The fourth time, nothing happened again.

“A two-cycle mechanism. What’s it do on the second cycle?” Mr. Lyss asked.

There wasn’t any kind of cycle in the kitchen, not a bicycle or a tricycle, or a motorcycle. Nummy didn’t know how to answer the old man’s question, and he didn’t want to be snarled at again and told that he was dumb. They both knew he was dumb, he always had been, so neither of them needed to be reminded of it all the time. Nummy kept silent.

As Mr. Lyss returned the silver-bead gun to the table where he’d found it, piano music rose from the living room. The Boze had a piano. He called it an upright, so Nummy figured it originally must have been in a church or somewhere clean and holy like that, not in some barroom. Kiku played the upright, and she taught the Boze to play it, but neither of them could be playing it now, both being dead.

“Let’s get out of here,” Nummy said.

“No. We’re in it now, boy.” The old man raised his long gun. “Cowardice is often a fine thing, but there’s times when it can get you killed.”

Mr. Lyss went to the hallway door, which stood open. He found the light switch, and the dark hall brightened.

As Mr. Lyss stepped out of the kitchen, Nummy decided it was scarier to be alone with a dead person than it was to go see who was at the piano. He followed the old man.

The music was pretty but sad.

At the end of the hall, the living room remained dark. Nummy wondered how anyone could play a piano so well in total darkness.

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