The Dead Town

small man, but he felt like a child next to his driver, whose head touched the ceiling of the SUV.

Starting the engine, Deucalion said, “Your place — is it a house or an apartment?”

“House.” Ralph told him the address.

Deucalion said, “Yes, I know where it is. Earlier I memorized a map of the town laid out in fractional seconds of latitude and longitude.”

“Makes as much sense as anything else,” Ralph said.

Light pulsed through the giant’s eyes, and Ralph decided to look away from them.

As Deucalion popped the brake and put the Cadillac in drive, he said, “Do you live alone?”

“My wife died eight years ago. She was perfection. I’m not a big enough fool to think it can happen twice.”

Deucalion began a wide U-turn in the parking lot. “You never know. Miracles do happen.”

During the turn, for an instant, there was no falling snow and every source of brightness in the storm clicked off — the parking-lot lamps, station lights, headlights — and the night was more deeply dark than any night had ever been. Then snow again. And lights. But though they should have swung around toward the exit to the street, they had turned directly into Ralph’s driveway, five long blocks from KBOW.

Chapter 23

As the sack split, Dagget staggered backward into the counter that contained the bathroom sinks.

Pistol in both hands, covering the cocoon, Frost almost squeezed off a shot. He resisted the urge to fire when he saw what began to emerge.

Even in childhood Frost hadn’t been given to picturing monsters in his closet, but he had never before encountered a cocoon as big as a grown man, either. Now his pent-up imagination suddenly abandoned the usual mundane trail and galloped into grotesque territory. He expected something insectile to spring out of the splitting sack, nothing half as attractive as a Monarch butterfly, some strange hybrid cockroach with three heads or a spider with the face of an evil pig, or a ball of snakes because of all the slithering noise.

Instead, from the sack came a breathtakingly gorgeous, nude young woman, such a perfection of face and body as Frost had never seen before, such a flawless brunette that she seemed to have been airbrushed and photoshopped. Her complexion was not marred by even the smallest blemish. Her smooth and supple skin seemed to glow with good health. If she had not been so provocative in her nudity, even an atheist might have entertained the thought that an angel had appeared before him.

This lovely apparition, gliding gracefully from the cocoon, stepping out of the big Jacuzzi tub and onto the bathroom floor, did not seem surprised to discover two strangers in her house. Neither did she appear to be embarrassed by her nudity or concerned about their intentions, or the least bit alarmed by the pistol in Frost’s two-hand grip. She had an air of supreme confidence, as if she had been raised to believe that the world had been made just for her and, in the intervening years, never had a single reason to question that belief.

When this exquisite woman emerged from the silvery-gray sack, which now sagged like some immense leather raincoat hung on a hook, Frost wondered if the thing was not a cocoon, after all. Perhaps it might be a new invention, in this age when revolutionary products poured out of the cornucopia of high technology by the thousands every year. Maybe it was a luxury beauty appliance into which a woman could climb in order to be moisturized, depilated, toned, tanned, and oxygenated for better health.

When it was directed at Frost, the woman’s smile was spectacular and exhilarating and contagious, but when she smiled at Dagget, Frost filled with a simmering jealousy, which made no sense. He had no claim on this woman, didn’t even know who she was.

“Who are you?” Dagget asked. “What were you doing in that thing, what is that thing?”

She glanced at the deflated sack and frowned as if she had seen it now for the first time. She looked at Dagget again, and opened her mouth as if to speak. All her teeth spilled over her lips and rattled like thirty-two dice on the tile floor.

As though puzzled but not alarmed, she surveyed the scattered teeth until they had stopped bouncing. She looked up, exploring her toothless gums with her tongue — and new teeth sprouted in the empty sockets, bright white and as perfect as the rest of her.

Frost saw that Dagget’s pistol had gone from the shoulder rig under his jacket into his right hand almost as magically as the new teeth had materialized. He eased along the counter, away from the woman, toward the doorway that Frost occupied.

The teeth on the floor were related somehow to the severed foot in the living room, to the OK thumb and forefinger in the foyer, to the portion of jawbone with teeth on the bedroom floor, and to the tongue from which grew a lidless eye. But Frost couldn’t put it all together. Nobody could have put it together. It was crazy. This wasn’t like anything he’d expected to find, not just a criminal enterprise or a terrorist plot.

The woman wasn’t just a woman. She was something more, and her singular beauty was perhaps the least astonishing thing about her. But whatever else she might be, she was a woman, naked and seemingly defenseless, and he couldn’t shoot her just because she could grow teeth in an instant, apparently at will. Never in his career had he shot a woman.

As Dagget arrived at Frost’s side, the woman studied herself in the long mirror above the twin sinks. She cocked her head, frowned, and said not to them but to herself, “I think my builder built this builder wrong.”

On the floor, the thirty-two teeth abruptly became animated and rattled against the ceramic tiles, returning to the woman as if she produced an irresistible magnetic field. As each tooth drew within an inch or two of her bare feet, it ceased to be a tooth and became a cluster of tiny silvery specks, and all the clusters vanished into her skin as if she were a dry sponge and they were water.

Frost’s training had given him tactics and protocols for every situation that he had previously encountered in his career, but not for this. He could see nothing that he and Dagget could do other than wait, observe, and hope for understanding. The woman was more than a woman, and she was strange, and the pieces of bodies strewn here and there were proof that terrible violence had been committed in the house, but there was no proof that she committed it.

Traditional interrogation wouldn’t get them anywhere in these extraordinary circumstances. She seemed to be half in a trance, not much interested in them. Although Frost couldn’t make sense of what she’d said— I think my builder built this builder wrong—he detected in her tone the dismay of someone who had sustained a serious offense, suggesting that she was a victim rather than a victimizer.

As she regarded herself in the mirror again, a fine twinkling cloud of mist came off her skin, and for a moment she seemed to have the radiant aura of a supernatural being. And then the mist coalesced into a blue silk robe that clung to her body.

Dagget said, “Sonofabitch.”

“Yeah,” Frost agreed.

“Something is going to happen.”

“It just did.”

“Something worse,” Dagget said.

The woman raised her right hand to her face and stared at it in what appeared to be bafflement.

She turned her head to look at Frost and Dagget as if she had just remembered that she was not alone.

She reached out to them with her right hand, and when her arm was fully extended, she revealed to them her palm. In it was a mouth bristling with teeth.

Chapter 24

One-eyed, one-eared, with a steel-and-copper mechanical hand at the end of his left arm, Sully York could