The Dead Town

The music prevented her from hearing the sounds of rising chaos outside.

As she opened the door, she said, “Our special tonight is pot roast—” She read his face at first glance, and her smile froze. “What? What’s happened?”

Rusty glanced back at the street. Deserted. For now.

He didn’t strip off his boots, but instead reached for her hand, crossed the threshold, closed the door, and locked it. He switched off the porch lamp, the overhead foyer fixture. “Turn out the lights. Every room. They might think no one’s here, they might not come in.”

Bewildered, she said, “Who?”

He went into the living room, extinguishing lamps. “First the lights, then I’ll explain.”

“Rusty, you’re scaring me.”

“Damn it, I mean to. Hurry!”

He never raised his voice to her. She knew him too well to take offense, and she hurried off to do as he wanted.

Rusty clicked off the CD player and made his way through the gloom to stand beside an open panel of drapery, to one side of a living-room window. He had an angled view of the street, looking south, the direction from which he had come.

Nothing out there. No vehicles. No women who weren’t women. No fleeing dogs.

Corrina returned through the dark house, into the living room. “Where are you?”

“Here,” he said and guided her to stand on the opposite side of the window from him, so they faced each other with the width of it between them, neither of them directly in front of glass.

He could see her as a shadow and a pale face barely illuminated by the weak influx of the street lighting.

“I tried to call 911,” she said. “The phone doesn’t work.”

“Keep a watch north on the street. I can see south all right.”

“You’ve given me goose pimples. What am I watching for?”

“Anything. Tell me the moment you see anything. There was this woman, standing in the street, just standing there, like in a trance. She asked for help. That’s what she said—‘Help me’—and I started toward her. These people drove up in a Trailblazer, rolled down a window to ask her if something was wrong, and she killed them all.”

“Oh, my God.”

“If I’d been closer, she would have killed me.”

“Shot them?” Corrina asked. “What? She just shot them?”

Rusty’s mind was spinning, thinking what else he ought to do. “My footprints in the snow. Up the walkway and onto the porch. Maybe they won’t come right away, maybe there’ll be enough time for wind and snow to erase the prints on the walkway.”

“They? You said a woman.”

“Keep a watch on the street. Don’t look away from the street. There’s more than one. They’re killing people all over town. Outside, you can hear it. Screams. Gunshots. Something’s on fire way over to the east. But no sirens, no one seems to care, maybe because there aren’t any firemen to respond.”

“Rusty, you don’t joke like this.”

“No, I don’t.” The aroma of pot roast and parsley potatoes alerted him to another danger. “If they come in here, dinner nearly on the table, they’ll know we’re in the house. No matter where we hide, they’ll keep looking until they find us. Listen, we can’t hole up here. Our best chance might be to stay on the move, like the dogs, till we can find help.”

“Dogs?”

“I’ve never seen dogs so terrified.”

She said, “Here come some people, walking right up the middle of the street.”

Rusty couldn’t see them from his angle, but he had no illusions that the cavalry had arrived. This was moving as fast as a firefight, except this enemy didn’t need guns, and Rusty didn’t have one. “How many?”

“Eight. They’re strange.”

“Strange how?”

“Walking two by two, just staring ahead, walking but it’s almost as if they’re marching. Five women, three men. None of them dressed for the weather.”

Leaning forward, Rusty dared to expose his face at the window and peer north.

Corrina said, “What’re they, performers or something, the way they look?”

He leaned away from the window again, his heart hammering as hard as when he’d been running in the street. “They aren’t human. They … change. I don’t know what the hell they are.”

Something she saw in the behavior of the eight so disconcerted Corrina that she didn’t question his bizarre assertion.

“Come on,” he said, “quick, we gotta get out of here, back door.”

Entering the foyer behind him, jerking open the closet door, Corrina said, “I need a coat, boots.”

“Grab a coat. No time for boots.”

She shrugged into the coat as they followed the hall toward the back of the house.

Rusty led the way. As he crossed the threshold into the dark kitchen, he saw a figure looming on the back porch, a half-seen face at a window. He retreated into the hallway, pulling her with him. “One already out there.”

As they followed the hallway toward the foyer, the door chimes sounded. One of the things must be on the front porch.

“Upstairs,” he whispered, holding her hand to prevent her from falling if she lost her footing on the un-lighted staircase.

Chapter 59

At the Snyder house, Chief Rafael Jarmillo and his Communitarian equal, Deputy Kurt Nevis, found Warren Snyder, general manager of KBOW radio, in an armchair in his living room. The wife, Judy Snyder, and their nineteen-year-old son, Andrew, sat on the sofa. They were still because they had been told to remain so, though their eyes jittered with terror. Much earlier, they should have been picked up and taken away to be rendered by a Builder at one of the warehouses. But here they were. The son appeared to have urinated on the sofa.

Judy Snyder’s replicant had been left here to oversee these three, but she was not with them. Jarmillo and Nevis found her nude in the kitchen.

The unclothed replicant was on her hands and knees beside a bucket of pine-scented cleaning solution, scrubbing the floor with a brush and various sponges. She did not look up at them but remained focused on the floor tiles.

“What’re you doing?” Jarmillo asked.

She said, “There was no neatness in this house. Where there is no neatness, there can be no order. They have a cat. It sheds enough for a dozen cats. Hair, hair, hair everywhere. I’m glad we’re killing all the cats, too. I swept and I swept, and finally there wasn’t any more hair, though I haven’t looked on the upper floor yet. I’m sure it’s a mess. I threw the litter box in the trash, it was disgusting. But cat hair and kitty litter isn’t the half of it. These kitchen counters needed to be scrubbed. Especially the grout. The grout was filthy. And the refrigerator, and now these floors. I’m going to be hours on these floors. Especially the grout.”

“Why are you nude?” Jarmillo asked.

“I noticed my clothes were wrinkled. It really bothered me. I couldn’t get my mind off my wrinkled clothes. I couldn’t think, so I stripped out of them and ironed them, made them perfect, and put them back on. But you know what happened then? I hardly did anything, just a little more sweeping, and I could see a few wrinkles in them again. I had to take them off and iron them, and then they were wrinkled again, so I took them off and ironed them and didn’t put them on, just hung them so they’ll stay wrinkle-free.”