He generally put in long hours, but it never seemed like work because he treasured this town, its history, its people. Chronicling life in Rainbow Falls was a work of love, and therefore his writing and editorial duties were really play. This evening, he might have left earlier, but he was slowed in his work by the loss of phone service and Internet connection.

And his mind wandered repeatedly to the California detectives, Carson and Michael, who had paid him a visit in the late afternoon. They told him a patently false story about working on an inheritance case, searching for an heir. He had known they were stonewalling him, and they had known that he knew, but he had liked them anyway.

In spite of the couple’s personable nature and, at times, even lighthearted demeanor, Addison had been aware that they were tense and worried, even though they were hiding it well. Worried might be an inadequate word. His newsman’s sixth sense told him that they were scared, which had been most evident when they had talked about the End Times Highway. If something frightened two former homicide detectives who had worked a tough city like New Orleans, perhaps Addison needed to be concerned, too, for the people of this town.

These thoughts kept distracting him — until suddenly he wondered if there might be some connection between the detectives’ case and the failure of phone and Internet service. The weather could not be responsible. At most, two inches of snow were on the ground, which most locals would dismiss as flurries. Full-scale blizzards rarely disrupted services because everyone here was prepared for extreme winters.

The Gazette’s receptionist, Katie Ormond, kept a radio on her desk. Addison went out there to switch it on and see if KBOW might be reporting anything about the phone problems.

Mason Morrell seemed to have lost his mind. Or not. While the talk-show host’s usual material held no interest for Addison, he knew the man was not one of the tinfoil-hat crowd. The media community in Rainbow Falls was arguably the smallest social circle in town; he and Mason often found themselves at the same functions. Never had Mason said a word about alien abductions or black helicopters, or anything else to suggest that for him reality and the Syfy channel were one and the same. He wasn’t a conspiracy theorist who thought Osama bin Laden was secretly a Zionist and that the Holocaust was all a lie invented by the same crowd that faked the moon landing.

Besides, Sammy Chakrabarty, who lived for the radio station and would have slept there if permitted, would never allow Mason to rant like this if the talk-show host had come to work stoned. Sammy had big plans and, given his intellect and drive, he had a good shot at fulfilling them. Sammy would pull the plug on Mason rather than let him ruin both their careers.

Something else chilled Addison: Mason sounded sober, afraid, and sincere. Indeed, there was almost something Churchillian in the force of his delivery — but no faintest note of hysteria or inebriation.

But mass murder? Brain probes? Replicants? Monsters among us? It defied belief.

“… collecting people in these big blue-and-white panel trucks and taking them to warehouses where they’re killed, having been replaced by their replicants.…”

Still listening, Addison put on his Stetson, coat, and neck scarf. He lived near the heart of town and always walked to work. Now he intended to go home, get his SUV, and drive out to KBOW to discover firsthand whether this was some kind of ill-advised stunt to promote the radio station or an inexplicable descent into madness by the talk-show host.

He clicked off the radio, switched off the lights room by room, stepped outside, and locked the front door behind him. As he turned toward the street, before he stepped onto the lamplit sidewalk, he saw an approaching panel truck — blue cab, white cargo section — just as in Mason Morrell’s warning.

In the lightless recessed entryway, Addison shrank back against the door. The truck was the sole vehicle on Beartooth, which usually wouldn’t be this deserted even in the early stages of a snowstorm. He could discern two people through the windshield, but he doubted that they would spot him in this dark pocket.

Maybe his imagination had been overheated by what he’d heard on the radio, but the night felt wrong, the only sound being the engine of the truck, no pedestrians passing even though the hour was not yet late. The street hadn’t been plowed or salted, although the town’s maintenance department always hit the pavement by the time the first inch was down, to stay ahead of the storm. The wrongness wasn’t in those details alone. There was also an eerie atmosphere that Addison felt but could not easily define.

Because he was intensely watching the suspicious truck, he saw the tall hooded figure, immense across the chest and the shoulders, appear out of thin air on the running board on the passenger side of the vehicle.

Magically.

Materializing like an apparition.

Gripping the assist bar at the back of the cab, the giant smashed the side window with his fist and wrenched open the door as the truck braked, skidded slightly in the snow, and came to a halt.

Chapter 34

One second Papa Frankenstein’s prodigal son wasn’t there, the next second he was very there, and fragments of the shattered window cascaded in upon Michael without harming him. The door came open, and Michael shouted his name—“Michael, Michael, me, me, it’s me!”—so that the big guy wouldn’t break his neck, although even as he cried out and even as Carson braked, he saw that he had been recognized.

Deucalion dropped off the access step as the truck came to a stop, and Michael clambered out. “Thanks for not killing me.”

“Anytime.”

Michael didn’t know why Deucalion should look even bigger in the falling snow than he had looked in other environments, but he seemed to be a lot bigger. Maybe it was because heavy snow at night created a magical mood in any circumstance, which emphasized Deucalion’s nearly supernatural appearance. Maybe it was because this was the start of Armageddon, they were in the quick of it, and Michael was so happy that Deucalion was on their side that he imagined the giant to be even bigger than he was.

“I’m babbling,” Michael declared.

Deucalion frowned. “You only said five words.”

“In my head. I’m babbling to myself in my head.”

Carrying her Urban Sniper, Carson hurried around from the driver’s door to the giant. “What have you learned?”

“Does the truck have a radio?” Deucalion asked. “Have you been listening?”

“We haven’t really had time to be diggin’ any tunes,” Michael said.

“I convinced the radio-station staff. They’re warning anyone who might be listening.”

“Convinced them how?” Carson wondered.

“Killed the replicant of their general manager, slashed open his gut to show them what was inside.”

“Vivid,” Michael said.

“I get the feeling this thing is coming down faster than we can form a resistance to it,” Carson worried.

“Why do you say that?”

“Listen.”

She had switched off the truck engine. The silence of Rainbow Falls was the silence of an arctic outpost a thousand miles from any human habitat.

“Significant but not decisive,” Deucalion decided. “The weather keeps some inside. And anyone listening to KBOW will be fortifying their homes to better defend them. We’ve told them the roads out of town are blockaded, so it would be foolish to try to drive out.”

Carson shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m no quitter. The way of the world is you kick ass or you die, and I’m always going to kick. But we’ve got to be real. A lot of people are dead already, and a lot more are going to die. I don’t want to see children dying. Not any that we might just save.”

Michael thought of Arnie and Scout, back in San Francisco. He wondered if the day would come when he and Carson, if they survived Rainbow Falls, would find themselves on the shore of that western bay, with nowhere left

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