Chapter 40
At first, with three flashlight beams sweeping this way and that, revealing only portions of the glistening contours, causing shadows to swell and shrink, Bryce Walker couldn’t understand what these things might be that hung from the twelve-foot-high ceiling of the school kitchen. Most were suspended over the prep tables, huge and greasy-looking and somehow obscene, but a few hung in the wide aisles.
The surface of each of these objects was mottled shades of gray. But among all the grays were silvery patches and veins that glittered like diamond dust.
Young Travis, being a reader of genres different from and darker than the Westerns that Bryce wrote, was quicker to identify these mysterious sacks. “Cocoons.”
As if the word triggered a response, a slithering noise arose from the sack nearest the boy. And then the creatures gestating in the other cocoons grew restless, as well, and raised a chorus of susurrant sounds, either the friction of countless snakes coiling among one another or their hissed threats, as if this were not the Meriwether Lewis Elementary School, as it appeared to be, but was instead the bottom of the pit of the world, where the oldest serpent of them all waited golden-eyed and hungry.
“Be very still,” Sully York whispered.
Bryce and Travis took the seasoned adventurer’s advice, in part because, in spite of the noise, nothing appeared to move within the cocoons. The surfaces of them didn’t ripple or show any strain of imminent birth.
As the slithery noise gradually quieted, Bryce looked at Travis, whose features glowed with the flashlight beam reflected back from the glimmering sack. The boy’s face — his furrowed brow, his haunted eyes, his grimly set mouth — revealed his thoughts as clearly as an e-book reader presented a page on its screen. Sometimes insects spun cocoons around themselves
Bryce shuddered and longed to be in an armchair, with a mug of spiked coffee and a book by Louis L’Amour or Elmer Kelton, in which the villains were nothing worse than hired gunmen or a sheriff gone bad, or stagecoach- robbing highwaymen.
When silence reigned once more, Sully York whispered, “Nice and easy … stay together … look around.”
Because the kitchen was at the back of the school, the overhead lights would not have been seen from the street. Sully didn’t propose turning them on, however, and Bryce supposed that might be because he feared that the residents of the cocoons would become agitated by the brightness. Or maybe he worried the shotgun blast that had taken out the door lock would have been heard by the wrong people — who were not really people — who would cruise around the building to have a look. In unspoken agreement, they kept the three flashlights low and away from the windows.
Throughout the big institutional kitchen were signs of violence. Overturned equipment, scattered pots and pans, broken crockery. The culinary staff evidently had put up a fight.
Near a double-wide bank of stacked ovens, Bryce’s flashlight revealed a severed hand. He almost turned the beam away from it in revulsion, but subconsciously he was aware that something about this chopped-off extremity was more shocking than the mere fact of its existence. He needed a moment to recognize that instead of a thumb, the hand was equipped with a big toe, not one that had been stapled to the hand by some psychotic jokester, but a toe that appeared to grow naturally where a thumb should have been.
Many hours earlier, this day had jumped off the rails of reality, and he no longer expected that two plus two would always equal four. Nevertheless, this severed hand marked a sharp turn into an even stranger realm than the one that he had been exploring ever since he had heard, in the hospital, faint distant screams of terror and pain rising from the basement to his bathroom through the heating-system ductwork.
And now he realized that the misplaced toe was not the only bizarre feature of the hand. In the meatiest part of the palm was a half-formed nose: the columella, the tip, a single nostril from which bristled a few hairs, and a small length of the bridge. The partial nose was so well detailed that he expected to see the hairs quiver in an exhalation.
He was too old for this. He was seventy-two. His wife, Renata, had died eighteen months earlier, and he was an immeasurably older man now than he had been then, ancient, exhausted. Life without her was in a way no less wearing than life without food; this was just a different kind of starvation. Finding this macabre hand, he wanted to return home, curl up in bed, lying on his side so that he could see the framed photograph of Rennie on his nightstand, go to sleep, and let the world plunge all the way to Hell if that’s where it was bound.
One thing prevented him from taking that course of action — or inaction: Travis Ahern. He believed that he saw in this boy someone like young Bryce Walker had been, back in the day. He wanted Travis to live to find his own Renata, to discover the work that he was born to do and to know the satisfaction of doing it well. He and Rennie never were able to have children, but now by a twist of fate he was responsible for one.
Bryce hesitated so long over the four-fingered mutation that both Travis and Sully saw it and stood with him to wonder about it. None of them commented on the hand, not because their whispers might agitate the residents of the cocoons, but because no words were adequate to the moment.
At the end of the kitchen farthest from the point at which they entered, a door led to what Travis, having been here often with his mother, identified as a spacious walk-in pantry. A tall, heavy steel cabinet, which had stood against the wall opposite the door, had toppled into the pantry entrance during whatever melee had occurred, acting as a large angled brace that prevented the door from being opened.
“We have to look,” Travis murmured. “We have to.”
Bryce and Sully set aside their shotguns and together muscled the cabinet upright, against the wall where it belonged. Its safety-latched doors didn’t come open, but Bryce could hear the broken contents clattering around inside.
When Travis reached for the lever-style door handle, Sully quietly cautioned the boy to wait until he had his shotgun in both hands.
Bryce held two flashlights as Travis, standing to one side and out of Sully’s line of fire, opened the door and pushed it aside. The two beams played across the back-wall shelves of the deep pantry and then down to the woman sitting on the floor.
Travis said, “Mom?”
She stared at them, astonished or uncomprehending, her eyes bright with fear.
Bryce didn’t know what the silvery bead was, gleaming liquidly like a drop of mercury on her left temple, but he thought it couldn’t be anything good.
Chapter 41
In the snow on the nearly flat roof of KBOW, Sammy Chakrabarty took up a position at the front of the building, behind the three-foot-high parapet. Between four-foot lengths of that roof-encircling wall were two-foot- wide crenellations from which a defender could, in relative safety, fire down upon attackers. He sat with his right side against the parapet, head craned forward to peer through one of the crenels, looking east toward the entry to the parking lot, where the bad guys would turn in from the street — if they came.
Sammy took some comfort in that
Sometimes a cold night in Rainbow Falls was a fine thing, the chill invigorating and the town pretty in the clear, crisp air, but this was the ugly side of cold, a mean little troll of a night that had sharp teeth and a bite sufficiently venomous to numb his nose. He sat on a plastic garbage bag to keep his bottom from getting wet. For the most part, he was warm, his clothes adequate to the conditions.
But he worried about his hands. He had worn a simple pair of knitted gloves to work, the kind that didn’t hamper driving, but that were not bitter-weather gear. If the replicants arrived in significant numbers, if there was a
