The Dead Town

snakes, but he knew that it wouldn’t be snakes, wouldn’t be anything he had ever seen before.

Dagget’s face was hardly twelve inches from the sack when he said, “It looks greasy or wet, but I don’t think it is. It glistens because the surface is in constant motion, crawling with something silvery, like tiny specks of metal, but they can’t be metal because they seem … alive. Like fleas, only smaller than fleas, so small I can’t see what they are, thousands of them, maybe millions, all sort of shivering, ceaselessly dancing across the surface.”

Where the umbilical met the ceiling, the gray tissue appeared to have eaten through the plaster in order to anchor the cocoon to a joist.

“This is beyond our pay grade,” Frost said.

“Light-years beyond.”

“And we need backup.”

“Yeah,” Dagget said, “like maybe the National Guard.”

“Or a Vatican SWAT team.”

“Be ready to shoot the sonofabitch if it does anything,” Dagget said as he holstered his pistol in the rig under his ski jacket.

Although he knew his partner to be prudent, Frost’s dread was now sharpened with alarm. “What’re you doing?”

Snaring a hand towel from a wall rack and folding it into a thick pad, Dagget said, “When we call Moomaw about this, we better have all the details we can gather.” Maurice Moomaw, their boss, had the glower of a carved-stone god. “I’m not saying Moomaw is scarier than this thing. But when we’re three sentences into a report, if we aren’t convincing, he’s going to punch the speaker-phone button and start filling out a psychiatric-evaluation order for both of us.”

Frost took a two-hand grip on his pistol as Dagget wiped the folded towel down the side of the glistening sack.

Holding up the towel so Frost could see it, Dagget said, “It’s clean. All those tiny little things crawling over the surface — why didn’t some of them wipe off on the towel?”

He stroked the cocoon again, and as before, the cloth remained clean.

“I just realized,” Frost said. “Bacteria. Extraterrestrial viruses. We could be contaminated, infected.”

“Microbes are the last thing I’m worried about.”

“What’s the first thing you’re worried about?”

“Is the thing that spun this cocoon now curled up inside it?” Dagget wondered. “Or did it plant something in this, like inside a spider’s egg case, and then crawl away? And if maybe it crawled away, where is it?”

“Not in the house. We searched the house.”

“We didn’t search the attic.”

Frost glanced at the ceiling. He imagined some immense insect queen in the raftered space above them, attracted by their voices and homing in on them. He focused on the cocoon again, and it didn’t seem as ominous as it had a moment ago, considering other possible threats.

Dagget shook out the folded hand towel. With only one thickness of the cloth between his hand and the sack, he pressed his palm against the glistening surface.

Frost watched the front sight of his pistol jittering on the target. He took a slow deep breath, exhaled even more slowly than he had inhaled, imagined his hands perfectly still — and his tremors faded.

“Interesting,” Dagget said, towel-protected hand flat against the sack.

“What?” Frost asked.

“It’s very warm, even hot. The heat comes right through the towel, and yet I don’t feel any heat escaping from it into the air, none at all.”

Ever more disturbed by the slithering noise, Frost said, “Can you feel movement in it?”

Dagget shook his head. “Nothing moving. But do you smell that?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Very faint.…”

“What?” Frost asked.

“Sort of like burning insulation on a shorting electrical cord.”

“I don’t smell anything.”

Leaning closer to the sack and sniffing, Dagget said, “Yes, like burning insulation.”

“Maybe it’s the hand towel scorching.”

“No.” Dagget’s face was six inches from the glistening cocoon. “Not the hand towel. It’s hot but not that hot. Oh …”

“Oh, what?”

“The smell just changed. It’s like roses now.”

“From burning electrical cord to roses?”

“And I think …”

“What?” Frost asked.

“I’m not sure, but I think I just felt something moving in there.”

With a sound that was like two lengths of Velcro detaching from each other but also like the bloated belly of a cadaver parting wetly under the scalpel of an autopsist, the sack split.

Chapter 20

After pausing in the mud room to take off their snow-caked boots, the male parishioners of Riders in the Sky Church came to the kitchen in groups of four or five to listen to Carson and Michael sell them the alternative to the space-alien explanation. They knew their wives had already been persuaded, and they put a lot of store in their opinions. The Riderettes, as they were sometimes called, were women that the world could never confuse or make weary; they firmly held the reins of their lives and kept their feet in the stirrups.

Neither Carson nor Michael mentioned the name Frankenstein. Dolly and Hank Samples and their friends were remarkably open-minded. They had proved they could cope with developments that in an instant turned their world upside down. But Carson and Michael were outsiders in this community, and even the most welcoming and trusting and swayable of the Riders would at some point hit a wall of disbelief.

Nanotechnology, people-eating machine-animals, replicants, a scheme to kill all of humanity: The current situation was already over-the-top fantastical. Adding to it the revelation that at the root of this chaos was a 240- year-old scientist much farther off his nut than Colin Clive had played him in the movie and a 200-year-old monster who had made himself into a good man, even a hero … This was sensible rural Montana; this was not a place where people were conditioned to believe anything they were told.

Carson claimed she and Michael had been working on an industrial-espionage case that led them to the discovery of the replicants — and now the people-eating nanomachine-animals — and to the belief that these things were being produced in a federal facility buried deep along the End Times Highway. A thousand movies and books prepared the Riders to believe in evil extraterrestrials, but their daily lives prepared them to embrace the idea that their own government might want to replace them with obedient engineered citizens.

As Carson expected, fifteen-year-old Farley Samples proved to be a great help convincing the Riders that their enemies didn’t have to be from another planet, that nanotechnology was a real and rapidly advancing field on this world. His enthusiasm for science and for science fiction proved contagious, his deferential nature allowed adults to learn from him without feeling belittled, and he had absorbed a thing or two about effective storytelling from those novels of Robert Heinlein that he loved so much.

More than Carson’s and Michael’s private-investigator licenses, more than their expired photo IDs from the homicide division of the New Orleans Police Department, what gave them street cred were their weapons. The Riders revered guns nearly as much as they loved Jesus. They were impressed with Carson’s and Michael’s SIG Sauer P226 X-Sixes with 19-round magazines but especially with the Urban Sniper slug-firing shotguns.

Even though Carson proved, at the kitchen table, that she could hold her own in arm wrestling with men half again her weight, some were dubious that she could fire that hard-core shotgun without being knocked flat by the recoil. None of the doubters among the Riders were women.