Lost Souls (Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, #4)

by Dean Koontz

None of the hospital patients had phone service. Cell phones and text-messaging devices had been collected using one excuse or another.

“And I think,” Lightner said, “you seem to be obsessing about obsession.”

Some men seemed to walk easy through the world, dealing with anything that came their way, not full of swagger like the bullies at school, but quietly sure of themselves, like Bryce Walker.

But she worked long hours, and Travis could see she was weary, though she never complained.

He didn’t want to have to watch his mom be worn down by life and look old when she was still young.

He wondered what the aliens were like if you could see through their human disguise.

Like many structures in town, it was well over a century old, with a flat and parapeted roof, reminiscent of Western-movie hotels and saloons on which bad men with rifles skulked behind parapets to fire down on the sheriff when he tried to dart from one point of cover to another. Those buildings were usually wood, but this one was brick, in recognition of hard winters.

“That sounds so fake to me,” Hawk said, “that I’ve got to think it might be true.”

Concerned that the building might be out of harmony with true time, he went from clock to clock, his concern quickly escalating into a deepening disquiet as he found every timepiece incorrectly set. The former Erskine Potter had been chronologically challenged to a serious degree. It was almost as if the man didn’t care about time, as if he had no understanding whatsoever that time was the lubricant of the universe, that without time—and fully accurate time—nothing else could exist. There would be no past, no present, no future, no material world, no mass or energy of any kind, no light or dark, no sound or silence, only nothing within nothing unto nothing. By the time he got to the final clock in the kitchen, Erskine Potter was afflicted by the lack of synchronization of time in the roadhouse, and filled with a sense of urgency.

What I do know is that the road was graded and built at breakneck speed in just two years, between 1964 and 1966, which was before my time. It was a federal-government project, and speed clearly trumped budget. A lot of the labor came from here in Montana. But there was other construction going on at the same time, lots of it, and the labor was brought in. Many of them were military personnel, and I assume the others had security clearance of the highest order. They worked out there, at points all along the new highway, from 1964 through 1968.”

“There were definitely a few of those,” Hawk confirmed, “because sometime after the Soviet Union collapsed, the government declared three silo complexes out there obsolete, decommissioned them, and offered them for sale to corporations that might want to use them as low-humidity, highly secure storage vaults for sensitive records. I believe they were all sold, though I don’t know that they’ve all been used. I hear maybe the Mormon church keeps duplicates of their national genealogy-project files out there, but I’ve never been able to confirm that.”

“It’s all speculation, and most of it less real than your average sci-fi show on TV.

Outside, with less than an hour before twilight, the day cooled fast. Behind the clouds that darkened the heavens, a deeper darkness was slowly rising.

The first Victor had been too human. He was a man too much of the flesh. In spite of his contempt for humanity, he wanted most things that ordinary men wanted. In fact, he wanted them to excess.

The original Victor had labored to create a New Race, a stronger version of humankind, apostles of reason, without either superstition or free will, obedient soldiers of materialism who would relentlessly liquidate all who were born of man and woman, unify the planet, and spread out to the stars with the ultimate goal of claiming the entire universe.

We could what-if ourselves into paralysis, son. Anyway, in this situation, we can’t have contingency plans. There’s one way out.”

When you stand there with your head tipped back, at first each star seems to be on the same plane as the others, some brighter than others but equally distant. Then slowly your perception improves, so you see that some are nearer, some farther, and some very far away indeed. You see how the stars go on forever, out there to eternity, and you know then, if for a moment you doubted it, that going on forever is the fundamental way of things.” “There won’t be any stars tonight,” Travis said. “The stars are always there, whether we can see them or not,” Bryce assured him.

“There’s got to be a way,” the boy insisted. “I know that’s how it seems, that there’s got to be, but sometimes there’s just not.”

“I like your spirit, Travis. You’ve got a righteous instinct. We can’t save those people. They’re already dying. But if we can get help and learn what’s going on, maybe we can save others.”

The sky was a field of vaguely phosphorescent ashes, darker in the east than in the west, but dark to one degree or another from horizon to horizon.

A week ago, the first time I looked through the good reverend’s mail, there was a magazine from the National Rifle Association. So back at the LaPierre dump, I figured this was where I could weaponize myself to defend against the Martians.”

If you weren’t afraid, you’d be the biggest dummy in the world, and you’re not the biggest by far. Fact is, there are a lot of people who aren’t dummies at all, but they’re way dumber than you. The world is full of high-IQ, well-educated idiots.”

“Sometimes I don’t make any sense at all to me, either. But I keep on keeping on. You know how many days of his life the average person wastes by making no sense?” “How many?” “Most of them.”

In the center of the park stood a statue of a soldier holding his helmet over his heart, his head tipped back, his eyes turned toward the sky. Inlaid on the granite base were bronze plaques bearing the names of young men and women, locals who had gone off to war and never come home. Such monuments always moved Deucalion. He felt a kinship with these people because they had known, as he knew, that Evil is not just a word and that it can’t be casually redefined to comply with changing standards, that Evil walks the world and that it must be resisted at any cost. The failure to resist, any compromise with Evil, would eventually ensure a jackboot on the neck of humanity, the murder of every innocent, and an eternal darkness that every sunrise would fail to relieve.

He was not consciously looking for anything. He allowed the town to impress itself upon him as it wished. If Rainbow Falls was largely a healthy place, where hope exceeded hopelessness, where freedom thrived, where virtue tipped the scales of justice against the weight of vice, he would eventually know it for the good town that it was. But if there was rot in its foundations, he would know that, as well, and he would begin to notice clues to the source of its sickness.

The trucks were the only things that seemed odd to him. He saw five of them at various places around town: large paneled trucks, with midnight-blue cabs and white cargo sections. Evidently new, well washed and waxed, shiny, they bore no company name. He had not caught them when they were making a delivery or a pickup, but always saw them en route. Each was manned by a crew of two, and after a while of watching them, Deucalion decided the drivers were remarkably uniform in their absolute respect for traffic lights, stop signs, and the rules of the road.

Her favorite pastime was reading, which occupied her evenings. But books were not merely a form of entertainment; through books, she gradually learned what it meant to be human.

Nevertheless, in every way but the most important, the human condition was her condition, and with a good book, especially a novel, she could immerse herself in the human adventure and, page by page, more fully understand it.

He knew he must have a part to play in their battle against Victor, but he didn’t know what that part was.

Erika disliked the Internet more than she liked it, because something about it seemed less informational than disinformational, potentially totalitarian.

“Today is the day,” he whispered. “You only need to seize it, sweetie.” “Today Jocko becomes a member of the team. A comrade. Commando. Warrior. One of the good guys.”

Assuming the clone was as drunk with pride and as given to vainglory as his cloner had been, his experiments would be fraught with setbacks, resulting in the perpetual revision of his schedule for world domination.

“I like movies where people they laugh a lot and nice things happen,” Nummy said.

“This is reality, boy. We only have one channel, and the only way we change it is die.” “That don’t seem fair.

During the day, there had been times when Nummy wished that Mr. Lyss would go away and leave him alone, but now that it happened, he really, really missed the old man.

No matter what happened on any particular day since Grandmama passed away, no matter what kind of awful problem there was, if Nummy just thought hard enough about it, he remembered something she told him that helped him get through the problem with no problem. But Grandmama never said anything about outer-space monsters that made giant cocoons.

“Once I throw it, we can’t never undo what we done.” “No, we can’t,” Mr. Lyss agreed. “That’s the way life is.

Besides, he didn’t know enough about what was happening. He needed more knowledge before taking action.

By 6:40, the parking lot at Pickin’ and Grinnin’ contained more than thirty trucks and SUVs, though not a single car.

Simple folks, none of them rich, they nevertheless dressed up for the evening, though in the case of the men, dress up meant hardly more than making sure their boots were shined and wearing sport coats with their jeans.

Not only were children inefficient, they were also alien to the minds of those in the Community. And not merely alien but repellent. How fine the world would be when, one day, there was no small voice anywhere in it, no childish laughter, no laughter at all.

This facility is so immense that if you were more comfortable living with illusions than with truth, you could believe that it went on forever, corridor into corridor through uncountable intersections, chamber after chamber above chamber under chamber within chamber, like a concrete-and-steel expression of an equation by Einstein defining the indefinable. Victor Immaculate lives with no illusions. Nothing is infinite or eternal, neither the world nor the people of the world, neither the universe nor time.

Two hundred twenty-two individuals work here, live here, but Victor sees his key personnel only when necessary. The many others, he never sees. The facility’s core computer keeps track of Victor’s position at all times. It also tracks the position of every member of the staff, each of whom it alerts by direct-to-brain messaging when Victor approaches them, enabling them to fade away and avoid seeing—or being seen by—the master of this maze. All but a minute fraction of face-to-face encounters are a waste of time. They distract the mind and foster inefficiency.

They call it the Hive, a term that is not intended to have a negative connotation. They all admire the organization, industry, and efficiency of bees.

The original Victor, being a man too much of the flesh and a prisoner of his human heritage, had thought too much in archetypes and clichés. He wanted to build a new race of exceptionally strong and virtually indestructible men, populate the world with immortals, make himself their living god, and thereby become the god of gods. Victor Immaculate is the strict materialist that the original Victor could only dream of being.

To be as a god, one must concede the validity of the concept of God, and Victor Immaculate, unlike the original Victor, makes no such concession. He wishes to create nothing that endures. He desires only to be the transitional manager between the world as it is now and the world as it will be without a single thinking creature in it. He creates to destroy. His vision is a world without vision, without ideals, without purpose.

To Victor Immaculate, the better question is this: If humanity no longer exists on Earth to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the abundance of Nature, does Earth itself continue to exist in its absence? His answer is no. The mind perceives matter and invests it with meaning. Without the mind to observe it, matter has no meaning; what cannot be perceived by any of the five senses—does not exist.

The Builders are in fact destroyers, their name ironic. They are both biological and mechanical. They can pass for human beings as well as can the Communitarians, but each Builder is a community unto itself, a collection of billions of nanoanimals—microbe-size creatures programmed like machines, each to perform its specialized tasks—that together can assume the appearance of a man or woman, but can also deliquesce and operate as a swarm of individuals. Each nanoanimal is intelligent in the most basic sense, with a small amount of memory—but their shared intelligence and memory equals that of a human being. Each nanoanimal can learn from experience and share its learning with the billions of others comprising a Builder.

The original Victor’s plan for the repopulation of the world was flawed. It depended on vast factories for the production of the New Race, what he called tank farms. Tens of millions of the New Race would have been needed to war successfully with humankind. The scale of the enterprise ensured its discovery and destruction by the Old Race that it was intended to replace. Victor Immaculate needs to create only a few Communitarians to support each Builder. The Builders, not the Communitarians, are the true army, the shock troops. They can feed on and dispose of the bodies of the real people the Communitarians replace, but each Builder also can kill and consume additional hundreds of people per day. And because each Builder can self-reproduce, Victor Immaculate does not need tank farms.

“There are some advantages to being an old fart like me,” Bryce said. “One of them is experience. I’ve had maybe a thousand times more experience than you have. No offense. And one thing experience has taught me is that life can hammer you hard just when everything seems to be so fine, but life can also drop the most amazing moments of grace on you just when you thought nothing good would ever happen again.” “Let’s go,” the boy interrupted. “In a moment. What you have to do somehow is be grateful for what good you’ve known and for what good will come, in spite of the bad times, because you come to see that you can’t have one without the other. I’m not saying that it’s always easy to be grateful when the pattern of things so often doesn’t make sense. But by the time you’re my age, you realize it all does make sense, even if you can’t quite say how.”