When Carson stood up from the table after an intense battle-to-a-draw with a man named Glenn Botine, a full-time car mechanic and part-time quarter-horse breeder, he said, “Thank you, ma’am, for a lesson in humility. Now as ex-police, what do you and your husband think we should be doing here that we’re not doing?”
“Instead of just preparing to defend this place, we need to go door-to-door in the neighborhood,” Michael said, “alert as many people as possible. You’ve got the cell-phone videos. You’re locals. They’ll believe you. Make the entire square block a garrison and defend it, falling back to individual houses only if the larger perimeter can’t be held.”
Carson thought of her brother, Arnie, and little Scout in San Francisco, safe for now if perhaps not for long, and she asked, “How many children do you have here?”
The women conferred and quickly agreed that there were seven teenagers and twelve younger children among the forty-four Riders at the Samples house. Eighty-some other Riders had either gone to their individual homes from the roadhouse or, like these folks, were gathered at one or two other more defendable locations elsewhere in Rainbow Falls.
“Making a garrison of the entire block, with fallback positions — that’s a good idea,” Carson said. “But I think we also need to get the twelve younger kids out of town, to a safe house, just in case everything goes badly here.”
The sudden anxiety among the Riders was palpable. They knew what she suggested was the right thing to do, but they were loath to be separated from their young ones.
Glenn Botine said, “But how? Both highways out of town are roadblocked. Maybe we could get hold of some snowmobiles. But one adult could only drive out with one kid at a time. That’ll either take all night or a caravan so big it’ll draw attention we don’t want.”
Carson said, “There may be a way.”
Chapter 21
In the basement of Memorial Hospital, the replicant of John Martz, a Rainbow Falls policeman and the husband of a member of the local Red Hat Society, was greatly enjoying the slaughter. He had witnessed the killing and processing of scores of people, but he was not in the least bored. In fact, he delighted in each new murder more than the one before it.
Communitarians were granted no free will. They possessed no capacity for any kind of sexual activity. They were engineered to have no appreciation for music and the arts because such interests were an impediment to efficient function. But in the interest of motivating them to carry out their mission with enthusiasm, they were programmed to take great pleasure in the destruction of each despicable, world-polluting, self-important, grubbing, grasping human being.
In John Martz’s case, pleasure had grown into something like delight, and each killing that he witnessed gratified him more than the one before it. Genocide proved to be addictive.
Four more patients had been brought to this unfurnished basement room under the pretense that they needed to give blood samples to be sure they had not been contaminated by an unspecified toxic material supposedly released by accident in the building. The four were in wheelchairs, three women and one man, but only two of the women were actually too incapacitated to walk.
The replicant of Nurse Ginger Newbury was present to assist John Martz with the management of the patients. Managing these people was enormous fun.
A number of hospital visitors had been dispatched, as well. They couldn’t be permitted to leave after they arrived and discovered that friends and loved ones were missing from their rooms. Because the visitors were not ill, they were more difficult to manage than the patients, which was why John had a nightstick and why Nurse Newbury kept a Taser clipped to her uniform belt, under a white cardigan sweater.
Three Builders were busy here on the basement level, first reducing their victims to various component molecules and then using those resources to create another generation of gestating Builders in the suspended cocoons. Builders produced only others of their kind; Communitarians were extruded and programmed only in the labs of the Hive.
Several rooms were now filled with cocoons that hung from the ceiling, which was a sight that profoundly pleased John Martz. Gestation required not fewer than twelve hours but not more than thirty-six. As new Builders emerged, fed on more useless human beings, and created ever more of their industrious kind, their numbers would increase geometrically. Within a week, they would be traveling to other towns with support teams of Communitarians, and by then they would be an unstoppable force, a rapidly growing army of exquisitely lethal biological machines, a nanotide of death.
The pajama-clad patients in the wheelchairs expressed their worries and confusions in that whiny way that was a hallmark of humanity, but Nurse Newbury coddled them with what seemed to be genuine sympathy until the Builder arrived. This one was a young woman designed to the highest standards of human beauty. Whether a Builder looked like a man or woman, it was always crafted to be so striking in appearance that the people who were its potential victims would be at first sight enchanted by it.
Beauty disarms. Beauty lures.
All of the patients, regardless of gender, were riveted by this blond and blue-eyed vision who wore ordinary hospital greens, as if she were an intern or an orderly. She stood in front of them, their wheelchairs arranged in a semicircle of which she was now the focal point.
“I am your Builder,” she told them, her voice seductively musical and smoky.
She first approached the male patient, who smiled at her and no doubt entertained the last lascivious thoughts that he would ever have. She reached toward him, right palm turned up, and he seemed as charmed as he was confused by her apparent invitation. He reached out and put his hand in hers.
In the instant, the details of her hand — skin, fingernails, knuckles — seemed to dissolve up to the wrist. The shape of a hand remained, but her flesh appeared to have magically transformed into countless millions of extremely tiny insects with iridescent wings, swarming among one another while maintaining the basic shape of a hand.
The patient cried out in surprise, tried to snatch his hand back, but could not break free of her grip. Her hand, the teeming horde that it had become, bloodlessly consumed his flesh and bones to his forearm and then, in a mere two seconds, all the way to his shoulder.
Terror broke the hold of paralytic shock, and the patient began to scream, but she silenced him. Her generous mouth widened until it became grotesque, and she vomited another silver swarm into his face, which collapsed inward. The nanoanimals invaded his skull, consumed it from within, and surged downward through his neck stump into his body, continuously feeding the essence of him back along the stream into the Builder’s mouth in a kind of reverse regurgitation.
The only ambulatory patient among the three women bolted up from her wheelchair, but Nurse Newbury Tasered her into submission. The twitching woman fell at the feet of the Builder.
The other women were screaming, too, while the hollowed-out body of the male patient withered inward, as though he were a deflating balloon, and disappeared altogether. These women were old and sick, but nevertheless they wanted to live. John Martz loathed them. They were avaricious for life even in their decrepitude, because the cancer that was humanity would accept no restraints on its greed.
The Builder had become weirdly misshapen from the incorporation of the man’s body mass. As she redirected her attention to one of the wheelchair-bound prey, her clothes seemed to effervesce into a mist that she absorbed into herself, for they had never been clothes but instead an aspect of her amorphous body. In her nakedness, she was no longer beautiful by any human standard, and abruptly she ceased to be human in any aspect of her appearance. She became a furious fluid mass of mottled gray-and-silver matter, ribboned through with ugly streaks of red that rapidly darkened to fungal gray, a churning storm of living tissue that seemed to revel in chaos and required no structured organs or skeletal system to function.
From out of this seething mass came a thick silvery corkscrew composed of perhaps billions of nanoanimals, which bored into the chest of one of the women in the wheelchairs, at once silencing her. The turning motion of the corkscrew changed direction and appeared to draw the reducted substance of the dissolving patient into the
