The Dead Town

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.

Chapter 12

Two extra cushions had been added to one of the kitchen chairs to elevate five-year-old Chrissy Benedetto, who otherwise would have been barely chin-even with the top of the table.

The girl needed both hands to lift her mug of hot chocolate, and each time that she drank, her eyes widened as if with delight at the taste.

“You make it different,” she said.

“I use almond milk,” said Erika, who sat across the table from the child.

“Almond like that nut almond?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“You must squeeze real hard to get milk out of one.”

“Other people do the squeezing. I just buy it at the store.”

“Can you get milk out of a peanut, too?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Can you get milk out of a ka-chew?”

“A cashew? No, I don’t think so.”

“You’re very pretty,” Chrissy said.

“Thank you, sweetie. You’re very pretty, too.”

“I was the Little Mermaid at preschool. You know, last time it was Halloween.”

“I’ll bet you charmed all the boys.”

Chrissy grimaced. “Boys. They all wanted to be scary. They were like ick.”

“Pretty is better than scary. Boys always figure that out, but it takes them a long time.”

“I’m gonna be a princess this year. Or maybe a pig like Olivia in those books.”

“I’d go with princess if I were you.”

“Well, Olivia is a pretty pig. And really funny. Anyway, Daddy says what you look like on the outside don’t matter. What matters is what you’re like inside. You make good different cookies, too.”