Koontz, Dean - Soft come the Dragons Read online

  They edged around into the corridor. The two bodies were there, lying in black pools of blood.

  But the killerbot was gone.

  "Well never find him," Cullen said. "It will take more men."

  Jacobs hushed him, surveyed the corridor. For a moment, he couldn't understand what his eyes were trying to tell him. Then it registered. "No. We have him cornered."

  "What—"

  "There aren't any stairs or elevators in this corridor," Jacobs said, pointing to the four doors on each side. "Just those eight rooms. He has to be in one of them."

  Cautiously, quietly, they moved down the hall, checking the rooms on both sides. Jacobs stood to the side, flung the portal wide, and jerked his arm back as Minter fired a burst of frag slugs into the darkened room. Then, just as cautiously, they would flip on the light and scan it. When Jacobs threw open the fifth door, Minter fired another burst—and was answered with a round that smashed his chest apart.

  Two to one. The odds were still in their favor.

  Jacobs wished he had not left the suitcase of explosives in the storage room. A ball of contact jelly would be just the thing now. But they didn't have it, so no use wishing. He looked across the doorway to where Cullen waited on the other side, face drawn and white. He pantomimed his intentions, shook off Cullen's gestured disapproval. Gun clutched firm in his right hand, he bent down, leaned to his side, and rolled through the doorway into the darkened room.

  Frag shells splintered the doorway behind him.

  He had come to rest against a heavy desk, his shoulder stinging with the impact. From the flash of the killerbot's frag pistol, he knew it was on the other side of the desk. Holding his breath so that his panting would not give away his position, he placed the barrel of the pistol against the front of the desk, depressed the trigger and held it down until the clip had emptied itself, more than two dozen frag slugs shredding through the desk, ripping out and into the killerbot crouched on the other side.

  There were screams.

  That didn't fit either. Killerbots never screamed.

  Cullen hit the lights.

  The room seemed to flare as if the walls had been set afire. There was little left of the desk. The center had been chewed away by the bullets, and both halves had caved inward, the broken top now forming a vee whose point rested on the floor. Carefully, Jacobs got to his feet, his empty pistol clamped in his hand, only a talisman now that its ammunition had been expended. He walked around the desk, kicked away some larger chunks of wood.

  The killerbot was approximately forty years old. Black hair. Fair-skinned. And . . . And what? Something was wrong, but Jacobs could not decide quite what. He inspected the wounds. A dozen scraps of metal had punctured the corpse. The holes they made welled thick blood. Splinters of wood prickled the body. To one side of the head lay a dartgun.

  A dartgun.

  He stared at the thing for long, long seconds, unwilling to believe it—to even comprehend it.

  "Phil, look at this," Cullen said, shoving a frag slug clip and a pistol into the captain's hands.

  "Help me strip him," Jacobs said suddenly, laying the pistol and clip on the floor.

  "Huh?"

  "Come on."

  Jacobs bent to the corpse, hands trembling as he and Cullen peeled away the bloody garments. As he had suspected, the body bore no scars from weapon implantation. There were only the gashes of the frag slugs from Jacobs' own gun—and the wounds of wood splinters from the shattered desk.

  "He wasn't a killerbot," Cullen said, his eyes too wide, his mouth hanging too far open.

  "He was just a man," Jacobs agreed.

  "But why?"

  "I—I think maybe I see it. The psych boys may be more detailed—"

  "What?" Cullen shifted his weight from one foot to the other, coughed.

  Jacobs couldn't take his eyes from the hands of the corpse, the hands that had held the throbbing guns. "We were in war with Euro. A normal war—if any wars are normal. Then Euro command changed the character of armed conflict. They came up with the killerbots. The enemy could be living next door now, waiting. Life took on a fluid, unstable quality." He looked to the hands, could not take his eyes from the trigger fingers.

  Cullen coughed.

  "Our government played the game too. Nortamer took its criminals, political prisoners, and outcasts, made them into our own killerbots. Both sides admitted that human life was unimportant compared to the robo-factories and towering cities. The inanimate must be preserved while the flesh died. It became a war of attrition. Women and children—

  "Women and children were not spared by either side," Jacobs continued. "The family could dissolve in an instant. We became frustrated with the high degree of instability of society. As we lost our loved ones and were powerless to stop the loss, we were frustrated because there was no one to be angry with. The enemy was amongst us; the enemy was us. Sooner or later—psychosis."

  "And the man here pretended to be a killerbot because he could shirk his responsibilities and strike back, dump his frustration. But if this catches on—"

  Jacobs shuddered. "Exactly."

  He stood, left Cullen with the body, and left the Medarts Building.

  Outside, the rain was still falling, the fog thicker than ever. At the first barricade, he sent the psych boys up to the tenth floor. As he was crawling into his car, Burtram, Captain of the Westside Sector, pulled his car alongside. "It's over," Jacobs said.

  "Strangest thing tonight," Burtrum said, leaning out of the window, his hair plastered to his head. "We brought down two killerbots over near the sports arena, but they—"

  "Weren't really killerbots, Jacobs finished.

  "How'd you hear?"

  "We just had the same thing."

  "Gives me the shivers. Wonder what the psych boys will find out?"

  Jacobs shrugged, started the car, and pulled out, sweeping in a U-turn and heading down Sycamore Avenue toward the ramp of the autoway. His mind boiled. When frustrations reached an unbearable limit, when family could be dissolved in a hail of bullets at any moment, the human mind rebelled against responsibility. Men took a holiday, indulged in a season for freedom—freedom from everything, freedom to do anything. And now it had begun. He didn't want to think about where and when it might end.

  The autoway lay ahead. He punched the key for an extended drive without chosen exit, and took his hands from the wheel. The car moved into the high-speed lane.

  Again, the gray rain was peppered with sleet.

  Jacobs rolled down the window. He took out his frag slug gun, rested the barrel on the sill. A car came spinning along the black roadway, going the other direction.

  He pumped four slugs into it.

  The vehicle whined. The autodrive mechanism had been shattered in its dashboard. The wheels locked. It kicked upward, rolled end over end along the autoway. Fire gushed out of it in crimson and amber waves. The flames on the wet pavement reminded him of a carnival midway on a damp Saturday. He had a glimpse of a carousel. Painted horses. Ken/child, grinning. . . .

  The flames behind died and were gone as the night rushed him headlong.

  The carnival vision was blistered away by the onrushing headlamps of another car.

  THE PSYCHEDELIC CHILDREN

  Whether or not one believes the scientific "evidence" that LSD-25 causes damage to the chromosomes, one has to admit that the idea of a child mutated by LSD use is an intriguing one. It must be intriguing, for I received about a dozen letters from readers about this story, and it has been published in French and will be included in a book of stories and author interviews to be published later this year in Spain. What interests readers, I think and hope, is not so much the plot, but the style (ah, now the traditionalists leap down my throat!). I have attempted to write a story whose style (typography and scene-switching, and mood counterpointing) would convey to the reader a sense of the psychedelic, of a mild acid trip. The end of the story fits into this attempt, for it is much like a drug de
lusion, suddenly turning the tables on you and making you realize how thin is the fabric of what you thought was reality. . . .

  HE woke even before she and lay listening to the rasping of her breath: seafoam whispering over jagged rocks. It would get worse before she woke. He reached to the night-stand and took a cigarette from the nearly empty pack, lighted it, and sat up. He tried not to think of the energies raging within her mind, of the deadly and painful powers roaring there. In the darkness, he tried to turn his mind to other things.

  The view from the window was pleasant, for snow had been falling since suppertime, embracing everything. The clouds parted now and then to let the moon through. It lighted the night, washing onto the white blanket and splashing back. Beyond the hoary willow tree lay the highway, a black slash in the calcimined wonderland. It was obvious that the heater coils in the roadbed had broken down again, for the drifts were edging back onto the hard surface unchecked. Old-fashioned plows were working on things now.

  "Ashen dreams fluttering flaked

  float peacefully downward

  while lightning men with swords

  stroke the brain harshly

  and draw fingernails

  over the ice . . ."

  He was not certain whether that was completely senseless or not. It was a mood piece, no doubt. He repeated it softly again. He would have to remember it, polish it—perhaps—for inclusion in his next volume.

  Minutes later, he looked back to Laurie. Her face was pale, her eyes closed and edged with wrinkles. He ran his hand through the billows of raven hair that cascaded down her pillow. She moaned in answer, the air rushing in and out of her chest. Harder, harder she breathed. Deciding to get a head start this time, he stood and pulled on his trousers, slipped into a banlon shirt.

  "Frank?" she said.

  "I know."

  She slipped out of bed, naked, and dressed in a sheath— a red and black one that he liked.

  "I'll pull the car out of the garage," he said.

  "The snow—"

  "They seem to have it under control. Don't worry. I'll pick you up at the front door in five minutes."

  "I love you," she said as he went through the doorway into the shadow-filled living room. That always sent shivers through him: that face, that voice, those words.

  He took a flashlight and the gun that lay beside it from the kitchen catchall drawer. Stepping into the glittering night, he stuffed the gun in a jacket pocket and sniffed the cold air. It hurt all the way down into his lungs and woke him all the way up. The path between house and garage was unshoveled; the snow lay a good twelve or fourteen inches deep. He plodded through it, listening to the easy sweep of the wind, the distant moan of heavy machinery battling Nature. The garage door hummed open when it recognized his thumbprint on the lock disc. He crawled into the car, started it, backed out, pushing snow with the rear bumper. He flipped on the front and rear heating bars. With Laurie's problem, he had to be ready to move at any hour, in any weather. The melting bars had been a costly extra, but a necessary one. When he pulled up to the front door, she was waiting. She climbed in, huddled next to him.

  "Where to?"

  "The country somewhere," she whispered in her tiny voice. "Hurry, please. It's going to be real bad this time."

  Melting snow in advance, he drove across the highway into the lane leading away from the city and suburbs. The robo-grid drove for him then while he stroked her forehead and kissed her cheeks, her ears, her neck . . .

  Ten minutes later, they were cruising down a ramp, and the red eye winked at him as if to say he must now caress the controls. Somewhere in the bowels of the car a buzzer bleeped for the same reason. He turned left along a secondary route that was not nearly so well cleaned as the superhighway. Drifts were clawing at the macadam, choking it to half its normal width in many places. He held the accelerator down and kept the Champion moving.

  She was moaning . . .

  This looked bad. She was rapidly reaching the critical point: the moment when the psychic powers reached maximal point of tolerance and exploded violently and deadly. Laurie was an Esper, but it did her no good, for she could not control the power. She could not siphon it off until it reached the critical point, and once it had reached the critical point, there were only moments left to get rid of it.

  He was glad he had had the melting bars installed. Someday all cars, he thought, would have them. Then the snow plows and heating coils would both be obsolete. The bars burned away the crystals, evaporating some, melting some and leaving them behind to freeze into ice as the night wind roared in and covered the road in their wake.

  "A little further yet," he said.

  She whimpered something . . .

  He risked a glance away from the road, was shocked—as always—by the white fish-belly color of her beautiful face. It always reminded him of the dead. It always frightened him. "Hold on."

  The car skidded sideways without warning. He grabbed desperately at the wheel, then remembered to let the car follow the direction of the slide. They lodged in a drift, and it took the melting bars a few minutes to free them. He went another mile without seeing any houses and—therefore—turned abruptly across what appeared to be a wheat field, flat and snow covered. The bars were burning at full capacity. He took it slow, melting his way toward the edge of the forest which began where the field sloped upward and continued over the rise and into the distance. When they reached the forest's perimeter, he braked, stopped, shut off the lights. They would not be seen from the highway against the black backdrop of trees.

  He sat with her at the side of a tree, sat on the snow with her. She had reached the critical point.

  "Okay," he said. "There is no one here."

  She whimpered again . . .

  Her breath rushed out . . .

  The snow began to melt around them . . . In two minutes there was a four-foot circle of bare earth. Then there was mud. Then boiling mud . . .

  "I remember watt papered parlors

  With a grandfather clock that chimed

  Like a voice saying I'll give you

  A dollar for a dime.

  "I recall sun-bleached kitchens

  On a then late afternoon,

  A hundred thousand fragrances,

  My mother's tasting spoon . . ."

  He flipped off the recording machine, rewound the tape, removed and packaged it. That was Saturday's show—aired on one hundred and two FM radio stations. Fifteen minutes of poetry and commentary, recital and rebuttal. He was a little bitter about it. He wondered how many really listened and how many only laughed. He suspected that many of the gentler arts were not designed for the mass media. But then, it brought pennies for bread, pennies for lard.

  "Frank—" Laurie came into the den, all sweet-smiling in a dress covered with large red apples on a straw background, a red band dipping in and out of her dark hair. "Have you seen this morning's paper?"

  He couldn't have missed the headline: HALLUCINO-CHILD BELIEVED TO BE IN AREA. And below that: POLICE BEGIN SEARCH. It told all about the field near Crockerton where the snow had been vaporized, the earth boiled and glazed, the trees splintered and charred. It told how there was only one thing that could have done all that. And they were searching for the hallucino-child.

  "Don't worry," he said.

  "But they say the police are searching outward on a ten mile radius."

  He pulled her down on his lap and kissed her. "And what can they find? I'm a poet who contributes well to the party in power; the party in power is very anti-Esper. We live normal lives. We have never once voiced disapproval over punishment of captured hallucino-children."

  "Just the same," she said, "I'll worry."

  So would he.

  Until noon. That is when the police came.

  They stood watching through the porthole in the front door as the police approached the house. "It's just a question party. Only routine investigators following routine procedures," he said.

  She was trembli
ng just the same. She retreated to the kitchen.

  He waited for two knocks before he opened the door. He did not want to appear too anxious, and he needed those extra few seconds to paint a false smile on his face. "Yes?"

  "Police Inspector Jameson and android assistant T," the dark-eyed detective said, motioning to the parody of a man beside him.

  "Oh, this must be about the hallucino-child in the papers. Come in, inspector."

  He led them into the den. The inspector and he sat, but T remained standing. The snowflakes that had fallen on his metal hide were melting and dropping onto the carpet after cutting wet swaths across the "skin" of his face to the precipice of his chin.

  "Nice place you have here, Mr. Cauvell"

  "Thank you."

  "This where you write poems?"

  Cauvell looked to the desk, nodded.

  "I'm a fan of yours. Though I must say I don't often like those unrhymed ones."

  He breathed more easily. The man was certainly not a forceful, probing, hard policeman. He seemed rather meek, in fact. Why, Cauvell thought, he can't even meet my eyes directly. . . .

  "Is your wife—Mrs. Cauvell—at home?"

  His heart jumped a little, but he did not hesitate. "Yes, she is. Laurie!" he shouted, perhaps a bit too loud. "Laurie!"

  She came in from the kitchen and stood next to his chair, eyeing the android suspiciously. Too suspiciously, Cauvell was afraid. Would T notice and become suspicious of her suspicion?

  "Please sit down, Mrs. Cauvell," Jameson said. He addressed both of them then. "We are running a survey of the neighborhood and would like to ask you both a few questions."

  They both nodded.

  "T," Jameson said.

  The android's throat seemed to hum for a moment; then a deep, hoarse voice groaned from a plate in the lower portion of his neck. THIS INTERVIEW IS BEING RECORDED. ARE YOU AWARE OF THIS, MR. AND MRS. FRANK CAUVELL?