The Dead Town

After turning off the closet light, he stood for a moment with one ear to the door, listening for activity in the bedroom. All was silent, but he knew it might be the silence of something waiting for him to emerge.

He eased open the door. The master bedroom was black except for two rectangular windows barely revealed by the snow-veiled glow of streetlamps.

He crossed the threshold and after a moment identified the open doorway to the upstairs hall, which was slightly less dark than the black wall through which it cut.

If anything like the blonde in the blue robe had been waiting for him here, it would already have attacked. He vividly remembered the striking-snake speed with which she had gone after the people in the Trailblazer.

Bent forward, hands reaching out low to search for obstructing furniture, Rusty eased toward the doorway. He needed to get as far as possible from the master bedroom before calling attention to himself and drawing them away from Corrina. He felt around an armchair, past a tall chest of drawers, and reached the open door without making a sound.

His mouth was as dry as a salt lick. Stomach acid burned in the back of his throat, as it had not done since the war.

For a long moment, he stood in the doorway. The airless-moon hush suggested that the killers either had not entered the house or had already left it.

He took just two steps into the upstairs hallway and halted again, listening. No windows here. Dim light rising from the foyer windows and from a stairway-landing window below, revealing nothing.

Silence. Silence. A distant clink-clink-clink. He thought the sound had come from the lower floor. Clink-clink-clink. Wrong. Not downstairs. It issued from the farther end of the pitch-black hallway in which he stood. Clink-clink-clink, clink-clink. This time he got a better fix on the source: to his left, an arm’s length away.

Chapter 62

Nummy O’Bannon listened to radio sometimes, but he never before was inside where they made it. There were none of the musicians or singers he expected. The rooms were just mostly offices except for the spaceship controls where Mr. Ralph Nettles worked, and the desks were all stacked with stuff, not neat at all.

Mr. Lyss was watching over the broken monster, the Xerox Boze, in one of these offices, and Nummy was watching over them both. He was afraid the Xerox Boze would start doing the usual nasty monster stuff now that there wasn’t an upright piano to play, so he kept an eye on the thing. He kept an eye on Mr. Lyss, too, because the old man was always doing something interesting, even if it wasn’t something Grandmama would have approved.

For a few minutes, things were quieter than they had been since Nummy met Mr. Lyss, and then the biggest thing of the whole strange day happened. In fact, it was the second most important thing of Nummy’s life, the first being when Grandmama died and he was left alone.

A man came into the room, the biggest man Nummy had ever seen, not fat-big but tall and with a lot of muscles, which you could tell were there even though he was wearing a hooded coat. He was bigger than Buster Steelhammer, the wrestler, and his hands were so large he might have been able to do disappearing tricks with apples the way magicians did with coins. Half his face was tattooed, but it was his eyes that made him the second most important thing ever to happen to Nummy.

When the giant looked at Nummy, light moved through his eyes sort of the way that the moving light on the machine in the hospital kept dancing across the screen that showed Grandmama’s heartbeat, although this was somehow both softer and brighter than that light, not scary, either, but beautiful and calming. Nummy didn’t know why the light in the man’s eyes didn’t frighten him, like he would have expected, especially with the half-broken face and tattoo — and then he did know.

Grandmama said there were angels on earth, guardian angels, but they worked in secret and weren’t easy to tell from other people because they didn’t have wings or halos. She said the only way you sometimes could know them was when you saw the light of love in their eyes. They were so full of love, Grandmama said, that sometimes they couldn’t hold it all inside, and they gave themselves away by the light in their eyes.

Nummy never before saw an angel, and now here was one, and he said to Nummy, “Don’t be afraid, son. You’ll live through this night. Fifty days from now, all will change for the better.”

The angel turned his eyes toward Xerox Boze, stared at him a long moment, and then said to Mr. Lyss, “You claim this replicant is broken.”

Mr. Lyss must not have seen the angel light in the big man’s eyes — or if he did see it, maybe he didn’t know what it was. To the old man, the most important thing was one little word the angel used. His eyes bugged out, and his hair seemed to stand on end more than usual, like a cartoon animal sticking its paw in an electric socket and all its fur going bzzzz.

“Claim?” Mr. Lyss said. “Claim? Is that a weasel word so you don’t have to say to my face you think I’m a lying sonofabitch? You walk in here like you own the joint, your fancy face tattooed more than some rock star’s butt, and you make smarmy suggestions Conway Lyss is a liar? I’ve done worse things to people who call me a liar than Stalin did to kittens, and believe me, Stalin hated kittens. He ripped out their throats with his teeth if he caught one. This thing that was supposed to call itself Barry Bozeman is broken so plain any fool but you can see it. Look at his hangdog face, his whipped-dog posture in that chair. He’s programmed not to kill himself, wants me to kill him, but I won’t do it until I’m damn good and ready to kill him. Nobody tells me when to kill him, not even some pathetic broken Frankenstein monster!”

Nummy saw the angel react to the name Frankenstein, but he didn’t ask if Mr. Lyss was crazy or call him a liar. He didn’t say anything more at all to the old man, but he went to stand over Xerox Boze, staring down at him. Xerox Boze asked the angel to kill him, and Nummy thought the angel would say that he couldn’t, that it wasn’t something an angel could do. Instead, he said in the most tender way, “I am your brother. Two hundred years separate our … births. Do you recognize me?”

Xerox Boze stared up into the angel’s eyes for a long time and then said softly, “I … don’t know.”

Mr. Lyss became upset about the brother thing and wanted to know if this was some kind of hellish monster convention. Nobody, not even Nummy, paid attention to the old man’s rant.

The angel asked Xerox Boze, “What is your life?”

“Misery.”

“Shall we stop him forever?”

“I can’t lift a hand against my maker.”

“I think I can. And will. Where is he?”

“The Hive.”

“Perhaps you’re not broken.”

“But I am.”

“Perhaps you’re here to lure me into a trap.”

“No.”

“Help me to believe I can trust you,” the angel said.

“How?” Xerox Boze asked.

“He didn’t name it the Hive.”

“No. It’s our word.”

“What does he call the place, the front organization behind which he works?”

Xerox Boze said, “Progress for Perfect Peace.”

After a silence, the angel asked, “Do you know where that is?”

“Yes.”

“Show me.”

Xerox Boze got up from his chair, and the angel led him into the hallway. Nummy followed, interested in anything an angel might do, and Mr. Lyss tagged along behind, grumping about something. They went to a map on a wall in another office, and the angel said it showed KBOW’s broadcast reach, whatever that was. He pointed out