The Dead Town

“Trust me, big guy. Listen, if you were doing one of those shows about flying saucers and parallel worlds and secret civilizations under the sea — well, then you’d be all wrong for what we’ve got to do tonight. Everyone would think it was just the usual shtick. But your show is intimate, people let you into their lives, all the way in, they trust you, they take your advice, they admire you. They love you, Mason. You’re a friend to your listeners. They think of you as family. If you tell your listeners that monsters made in some laboratory, capable of passing for human, are taking over Rainbow Falls, they’ll believe you. They wouldn’t believe my voice. I sound like a skinny kid.”

The talk-show host closed his eyes and hung — or clung — upside down in silence for a long moment, like a big frightened bat. Then he said, “They love me?”

“They adore you.”

“I try to do my best. I really try to help them.”

“That’s why they adore you.”

“It’s a terrible responsibility, giving advice.”

“It is. I know. I think it would be exhausting. But you’re a very giving man.”

“I’m always afraid one of them will take something I say the wrong way.”

“They won’t, Mason. You express yourself with great clarity.”

“I’m afraid some wife will like, you know, misunderstand my advice and go shoot her husband.”

“That only almost happened once,” Sammy counseled. “And almost happened. It didn’t really happen.”

Eyes still closed, Mason chewed on his lower lip. Finally he said, “Orson Welles sold that crazy Jules Verne thing, back in the 1930s. He had half the country believing it was true when it was just a stupid sci-fi story.”

“The War of the Worlds,” Sammy said, and didn’t correct Jules Verne to H. G. Wells.

“He got famous from that. It was just a silly sci-fi thing, but he got famous. This is real.”

Sammy smiled and nodded even though Mason’s eyes were closed. “By the time this is over, you’ll be huge. An international star. Not just a star, Mason. Not just a star — a hero.”

Mason shook his head. “I’m not hero material. I’m not a hero just because you say I am, like you can make me a doctor.”

Sammy was freezing, so cold that his voice trembled in time to his shivering. He wanted to grab the talk- show host by the ears and shake a sense of urgency into him, but he remained calm.

“Yes, you are a hero, Mason. It’s even easier to make you a hero than to make you a doctor. Some people might want to see a college degree to prove you’re a doctor, and we’d have to go to the trouble of buying you a PhD from some online university. But if we say you not only saved the world but at the same time you fought off a horde of violent clones trying to seize KBOW — remember, we already have the bodies of four — who’s to say you’re not what we claim you are.”

“Burt and Ralph. They’d know.”

“Burt and Ralph become part of the Mason Morrell team. Their careers soar with yours. They’ll play along.”

“I don’t think they will.”

“They will.”

“I don’t think so.”

“THEY WILL!” Sammy shouted, and immediately added, “Sorry. I just get frustrated that you keep underestimating yourself. You’re always so confident on the air.”

“That’s on the air. This is life.” At last he opened his eyes. “But I guess I’ll do it, what you want.”

“You won’t try to run away again?”

“No. I can’t run away from this. There’s nowhere to run. I see that now.”

Sammy said, “My hero.”

“I think this door might be buckled. If you back out, I’ll crawl over the console and come through the passenger door.”

Grinning, Sammy said, “Let’s do radio.”

“Yeah. Let’s do great radio.”

“Immortal radio!” Sammy declared.

Mason hanging upside down, Sammy kneeling on the ceiling, they tried to high-five each other, but the weird perspective defeated them. Mason boxed Sammy’s left ear, and Sammy blew the Sequoia’s horn.

Chapter 19

Pistols ready, flanking the partially open door to the master bathroom, Frost and Dagget listened to the voices whispering in the darkness beyond the threshold. They sounded conspiratorial and eager and sinister, but if anything being said had a scintilla of meaning, the conspirators were speaking in a foreign tongue. Frost couldn’t understand a word.

This sounded like a language entirely of sibilants, hissing and sissing and snuffling and fizzing, which seemed highly unlikely. Then, after a moment, the whispering no longer struck him as being conspiratorial, but instead restless and agitated. When he began to think of it that way, he realized he wasn’t listening to whispering voices, after all, but to friction of some kind. One thing sliding against another. Or a horde of small things swarming over one another, all their carapaces and quivering antennas and brittle legs rubbing together.

The door was hinged on the left, and Frost stood to the right. He reached around the jamb with his left hand, found the switch in there, and flipped light into the bathroom. Dagget moved even as the doorway brightened, crossed the threshold, said a word that Frost had never heard him — or any other Mormon — say before, and backed into the bedroom so fast that Frost hadn’t yet moved in behind him.

The large bathroom featured white ceramic tile with blue tile accents, a pair of sinks in a long counter, a shower stall directly ahead, and to the left a soaking tub spacious enough to accommodate husband and wife at the same time. Over the bathtub, depending partway into it, hanging from the ceiling on a thick and lumpy organic rope that looked like the umbilical cord of the Antichrist, was a greasy-looking sack larger than a man, glistening in a variety of shades of silver and gray.

The teardrop shape suggested pregnancy. The slithering noise that arose from the sack — the whispering he’d heard through the open doorway — perhaps indicated a restless fetus of an unthinkable nature. And the overall impression was of a cocoon. The movement within that ominous incubator did not distort it; the surface neither bulged nor rippled.

Farther from the doorway, beyond the tub, in the shower stall, behind a glass door hung another cocoon. It virtually filled that space.

Foreboding had gripped Frost upon the discovery of the eye in the severed tongue. Now that feeling ripened fully into dread. He tried to reassure himself that these things were preternatural, beyond the ordinary course of nature, strange and inexplicable, yes, but only because this was an expression of nature never seen before. An extraterrestrial life form. Natural to the universe, just not to this world. Or the consequence of some mutation of an earthly animal. Intuitive knowledge, however, trumped what he had been taught to know. He could not reason himself out of the recognition that behind this scene, at the bottom of this situation, a supernatural force was at work.

Adjusting to the shock of his first sight of the cocoons, Dagget entered the bathroom again. Frost stepped onto the threshold behind his partner. They had never before fled from any threat, not because they were fearless but because once they took the coward’s way out, they would take it again, and again, until they would be forever incapable of fulfilling their duties.

With evident uneasiness, Dagget approached the cocoon that hung over the bathtub, and Frost cautioned him, and Dagget said, “There’s something strange about the surface of this thing.”

“Not just the surface,” Frost said.

The continuous slithering noise didn’t grow louder, but Frost found it increasingly sinister. He thought of