what was Rainbow Falls and what was the county, and some land beyond the county, and he asked the Xerox Boze to point to the place called the Hive. The monster pointed. The angel said they would go there together, and if it was the place the monster said it was, then the angel would give him “the grace of a quick and painless death,” which sounded nice except for the death part.
Turning away from the wall map, looking hard at Mr. Lyss, the angel said, “Fifty days from now, you get your chance. Use it well.”
Mr. Lyss was only grumbling under his breath through this map stuff, but now he got fired up again. “Damn it all, first you just about flat-out call me a liar the moment we meet. Now you insinuate — what? — that I don’t usually do things well? Considering I didn’t get half my face wrecked as bad as a runaway train and then try to hide it under some stupid psychedelic ink work, I suspect I take care of business a lot smarter than you do.”
Instead of answering Mr. Lyss, the angel looked at Nummy and smiled. He put a hand on Nummy’s head and smoothed his hair, almost exactly like Grandmama used to do, and Nummy’s eyes filled with tears, though he didn’t know why.
He was blinking away those tears when the next thing happened, so he couldn’t be sure he saw it like it really was. But it seemed that the angel took Xerox Boze by the arm, turned with him as if to leave the room, but vanished in the turning.
Mr. Lyss let out a terrible seven-word curse that it was good the angel couldn’t hear, and ran into the hallway looking for the vanished two. But he didn’t find anyone.
Nummy followed Mr. Lyss back to the room where they had been watching over the Xerox Boze. They settled in chairs, and Nummy watched the old man, who sat for a while, leaning forward with his head in his hands. Nummy wanted to ask if Mr. Lyss had a headache and if he could get him some aspirins, but he didn’t want to stir up the old man with a wrong word.
After a while, Mr. Lyss looked up at Nummy. “Peaches, you remember earlier when I told you this was a lot bigger than space aliens or Frankenstein, that there was a way bigger Evil in town tonight?”
Nummy nodded. “A bigger Evil and something else, too.”
“I told you we should have been dead ten times over, and I’m pretty sure I know why we aren’t.”
“You said you’d explain that part later.”
“Well, the reason we’re not dead — the reason
“No, sir,” Nummy said.
“I’ve been humbled. I’ve just been given to see myself as what I am, what I insist on being. Peaches, I’m going to try my best to do right by you, but when I slip back to being like what I’ve always been, don’t pay any attention to me. I’ll get better in a while. I’m a shiftless, irritable, intemperate sonofabitch and a world-class people-hater, and maybe I can change, but I can’t change easily or overnight.”
Surprised, Nummy said, “What people do you hate?”
“All of them. All of them I ever met. Except you.”
Chapter 63
When Carson returned to the house after seeing off Deucalion on what might be his final confrontation with Victor, Michael was in the living room, playing his where-have-I-hidden-your-nose game with the three young children waiting to be evacuated, and the kids were giggling with delight. She stood watching him, loving him, thinking about little Scout, about her brother, Arnie, back in San Francisco, until the screaming started.
Outside. The front of the property. The initial screams were followed rapidly by gunfire, a lot of it. Something had broken into the garrisoned neighborhood.
The Riders in the living room grabbed their weapons. One of them dashed to the bolted front door and dropped a length of four-by-six lumber into sturdy steel brackets that had been bolted into the jamb, providing extra resistance to an assault on that entrance.
Carson glanced into the adjoining dining room, where the ever-ready Riderettes were abandoning their culinary chores and picking up their guns.
She knew — maybe they all knew — that this war wouldn’t be won with firearms. Those Builders on the cell- phone videos, in mere seconds consuming Johnny Tankredo and other Riders at the Pickin’ and Grinnin’ Roadhouse, wouldn’t be stopped with bullets. They wouldn’t be defeated with
If they could hold their position long enough, Deucalion might have time to find his maker’s rat hole and go into it after him. If the clone of Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein, was like his namesake unto a fault, which seemed to be the case, then he would not tolerate the possibility that his creations might live on after his death. As in Louisiana, killing Victor would ensure the death of every creature spawned in his laboratories.
The gunfire stopped. Screams gave way to shouts of confusion. Something slammed hard against the front door. The deadbolt and the bracing lumber held through the first impact, the second, the third.
To the left of the door, a window shattered. Backlit by a porch lamp, a young woman’s blond hair registered as an otherworldly nimbus around her head, and in the outflowing light of the living room, her exquisite face seemed to absorb the light and return it in a radiance twice as bright as the lumens she received. She was without doubt a Builder, but she didn’t appear calm and beatific like the Builders in the opening frames of the roadhouse videos. Her feverish blue eyes burned with hate. Her toothpaste-commercial-perfect teeth were bared in an unvoiced snarl. She appeared savage, eager, driven by some unthinkable need. The Riders had fortified the window with bars of two- by-four lumber; these infuriated her, and she clawed at them, tearing away splinters of wood. She opened her mouth as if in a scream, but what issued from her was a sound partly like a garbage disposal grinding up half- spoiled fruit and partly like a cackling animatronic witch in a carnival fortune-telling machine. From her mouth puffed a thin silvery plume, as though she had coughed out lungfuls of twinkling smoke, but then the small cloud raveled back between her lips.
One of the Riders stepped past Carson, thrust his shotgun between the two-by-fours, and pumped four rounds into the Builder’s face, the thunderous crashes echoing deafeningly around the room. She received the deadly pearls of buckshot with no more effect than they would have caused if fired down into a still pond: a froth of emulsified flesh, brief holes, turbulence in her tissues, and then the smoothness of the surface reasserted.
The Builder vomited what appeared to be a mass of wet ashes brightened with silver sequins, which flowed around the smoking barrel of the shotgun and tore it from the hands of the startled Rider, who fell back and scrambled out of the way. Like a tentacle, the repulsive gray mass retracted through the two-by-fours, taking the weapon with it, seeming to dissolve it even as the walnut stock clattered against those wooden bars and vanished into a sucking maw so grotesque that Carson would no longer be able to think of the creature as “she,” regardless of the form in which it might choose to manifest.
In fact, the Builder didn’t return to its Miss Universe mode, but in a frenzy of rage — assuming any human emotion could be assigned to it — the thing entered the house as a swarm. It churned between the two-by-four bars in three streams, but the three coalesced into one in the living room.
Michael herded the children into a corner. He offered himself as a human shield for them.
As the swarm ascended to the ceiling, Carson returned to her husband’s side. They both held Urban Snipers, which could stop cold a charging bull — but couldn’t halt a Builder.
The swarm of nanoanimals circled overhead, buzzing and hissing, exploring the limits of this space, as if the billions of them were conferring about what to devour next.
Intuition seemed to have brought the same message to everyone in the living room, to the Riders as to Carson and Michael: The swarm might be attracted to movement, and whoever moved first might be the first to die.
