Koontz, Dean - Soft come the Dragons Read online

  "Yes," they answered ceremoniously.

  ALL INFORMATION RECORDED MAY BE USED IN A COURT OF LAW. ARE YOU AWARE OF THIS, MR. AND MRS. CAUVELL?

  "Yes."

  THIS IS ANDROID T OF CITY DIVISION COOPERATING WITH INSPECTOR HAROLD JAMESON. MR. CAUVELL, A HALLUCINO-CHILD IS A PERSON BORN OF PARENTS WHOSE GENES WERE ALTERED BY THEIR USE OF LSD-25. THESE CHILDREN BECOME EITHER PHYSICAL FREAKS OR MENTAL FREAKS. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE USE OF THE TERM HALLUCINO-CHILD?

  "Yes."

  AND YOU, MRS. CAUVELL?

  "I do."

  THE PHYSICAL FREAKS ARE CARED FOR BY THE GOVERNMENT. THE HALLUCINO-CHTLDREN WHO ARE BORN WITH THE CONGENITAL DEFECT OF ESP SENSITIVITY ARE A DANGER TO THE STATE AND CANNOT BE AFFORDED FULL CITIZENSHIP. BECAUSE OF THE NATURE OF THEIR POWER—WHICH CAN ONLY BE STUDIED AT THE CRITICAL POINT AND WHICH IS TOO DANGEROUS AT THE CRITICAL POINT TO STUDY—MANY OF THESE MUTANTS MUST BE PUT TO SLEEP, HUMANELY. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THIS, MR. AND MRS. CAUVELL?

  They said that they did. The formalities were over.

  WE HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE THERE IS A HALLUCINO-CHILD IN THIS VICINITY. HAVE EITHER OF YOU KNOWLEDGE OF SAID PERSON?

  They said no.

  DID EITHER OF YOU LEAVE THE HOUSE LAST NIGHT?

  "No."

  The question suddenly became very pointed. THEN

  HOW DID THE DRIVEWAY AND ENTRANCE TO THE SUPERHIGHWAY BECOME CLEARED?

  "We noticed as we came in," Jameson said, "that your driveway seems to have been cleared by melting bars."

  "I went out this morning for a few groceries," Cauvell answered a bit too quickly.

  "You do your own shopping?" Jameson asked, raising his eyebrows.

  "Yes." Cauvell was suddenly glad that he had never gone completely modem. Less than a fifth of the population did their own grocery shopping in person anymore. The banks of robot clerks that took the orders by phone had more-or-less depersonalized food purchasing. Cauvell, however, had always liked to see the steak before he bought it Perhaps it was his picky appetite.

  MRS. CAUVELL'S FATHER WAS A COLLEGE PROFESSOR, T SAID GRATINGLY. THE COLLEGE INSTRUCTORS OF THE SIXTIES

  AND SEVENTIES WERE OFTEN QUITE LIBERAL AND AS ANXIOUS AS THEIR STUDENTS TO EXPERIMENT. MRS. CAUVELL, DID YOUR FATHER TAKE LSD-25?

  They had prepared themselves, long ago, for the possibility of questions like these. And they had agreed that a little bit of the truth would be better than a complete lie. "I believe he tried it twice with bad experiences both times," Laurie said.

  Cauvell was proud of her firm, unshaken answers.

  HE WAS NOT A REGULAR USER?

  "No."

  "How can you be so certain, my dear?" Jameson asked kindly.

  Cauvell realized that Jameson was anything but stupid, anything but meek. He was T's straight man, but some of his own lines hit the mark close to center.

  "My mother told me," Laurie said. "My father died when I was seven. My mother spent the rest of her life telling me about everything he did. I heard all the stories a thousand times. I couldn't forget them. He took LSD twice and had bad trips both times."

  WHICH PARTY DO YOU BELONG TO? T ASKED.

  "The party in power for the last thirteen years. The Constitutional Tolerant Party." Cauvell tried to force pride into his voice while he forced his gorge down.

  AND WHY DID YOU JOIN THE PARTY?

  "Because we feared the Communist countries and realized the subversive trends within our own society must stop."

  AND YOU HAVE SEEN NOR HEARD NOTHING OF THE HALLUCINO-CHILD?

  "Nothing."

  WAS THIS INTERVIEW RECORDED WITH YOUR KNOWLEDGE, MR. AND MRS. CAUVELL?

  They said it was.

  The android's voice clicked off, its throat humming for a moment before going tomb silent. Inspector Jameson got to his feet. "Sorry to inconvenience you. It has been, a pleas-sure. Thank you for cooperating."

  "Only too happy," Frank said.

  "Hope you find the mutant," Laurie said.

  They watched through the porthole as the inspector and the android stepped into the police car and pulled onto the highway, growing smaller, smaller, and disappearing in the distance.

  From the looks of the sky, it was going to snow again.

  Somewhere a mutated boy hid, shivering.

  Some unbearable moment, his nerves split; he ran.

  He ran right into the arms of the android. The eyes of the metal man were jewels, even as the tears on his own cheeks frosted into diamonds. He backed away, but there were others behind him. There was no place to go.

  He unleashed the psychic forces at them, watched them go up in flames, watched their faces melt, watched their insides smoke.

  But there were more of them. And they would not wait. Nozzles opened on their hips. Fire sprayed; flames engulfed him, swallowed, digested him.

  All the while the snow fell . . . little white bullets . . .

  "They got some poor devil," Laurie said, handing him the paper.

  He looked at it, grimaced. HALLUCINO-CHILD FIGHTS IT OUT WITH POLICE. Not "fights it out with robots," for that was too crude. That would make the entire thing seem promutant. Cauvell wagered a live cop had not come within a hundred yards of the boy.

  "It's my fault," Laurie said.

  "That's absurd! How could it possibly be your fault?"

  "We were too open. We left a trail or clues, at least, that made them search."

  "And it was an emergency," he argued. "You'd have blasted the both of us to kingdom come if you had tried to hold back that force any longer."

  "Just the same, they might not have flushed the boy out if we—"

  "Forget it. What's for supper?"

  "Spaghetti."

  The next night it was pork chops. The next night, meat loaf. The night after that, he woke up to her heavy breathing.

  "Laurie?"

  Her eyes were open. "Yes?"

  "Why didn't you wake me?" He got out of bed, began to dress.

  "Frank?"

  "What? Hurry and get your clothes on."

  "Frank, maybe it would be a lot better if I just let it kill me."

  He stopped tucking his shirt in and turned around to face her. He could see only the vague outline of her small but womanly body outlined by the sheet, her hair like spun silk . . . He crossed to her and lifted her head up. "What is that supposed to mean?"

  She was crying.

  "Don't you love me?" he asked.

  She tried to answer, but the words were sobs.

  "Then get the hell dressed," he said gently.

  And he left. In the kitchen, he took the gun from the drawer. Outside, the sky was clear; the wind was stiff, whipping the snow into a frenzy. When he brought the car to the front door, she was waiting.

  "Where will we go?" she asked.

  "Farther out than before. And we will cover well."

  Christmas was coming.

  He thought about that as he drove. He thought about parties and eggnog, church services, candles on altars, candles in windows. He thought about Christ climbing down from his bare tree and wondered what Ferlinghetti would have written had he lived in the present and been married to a hallucino-child.

  Far out in the country, he angled the Champion onto a side road, cruised along it for a time, broke off the road into a wide trench that petered out into woods at a clearing in the center of the forest. They were three miles from a road, sheltered on all sides by trees, exposed only directly overhead where the clearing allowed the stars to look down. When they got out, they heard the helicopter whining somewhere above them.

  Then the sun came on. The copter settled into the clearing, its headlamps like the eyes of some tremendous moth, its rotors like wings.

  "Frank!"

  He grabbed her, pulled her back into the car, scrambled behind the wheel.

  PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE. It Was the Voice of T.

  He would have to reverse out of there, which would be a disastrous undertaking in this rugged terrain. Or he would h
ave to push through them. Jameson, T, and another android labeled JJK were crossing the hoary field, legs frosted with snow, weapons drawn. He rolled down the window. "What do you want?"

  "If you bought groceries that morning, Mr. Cauvell," Jameson said between breaths, "why did no grocer within fifty miles have a record of your personal purchase?"

  T was twenty feet away, directly in front of the car.

  He slammed down on the accelerator, flipped the melting bars to full power, felt the jolt when T went under the wheels, as the second android was struck a glancing blow that tore its arm off. The engine was whining. He could not make a swift escape through the drifts, for the melting bars would not be able to work fast enough. He wrenched the wheel to the left, spun the Champion around, and shot back along the trail he had burned into the clearing in the first place. He passed Jameson who leaped out of his way. The two androids were lifeless.

  "We're free!" he shouted excitedly.

  The vibra-beam sliced a neat hole through the rear window and struck Laurie on the temple. She slumped across him, dribbling blood from one ear . . .

  He could personify the moon: the moon peered down patronizingly. He could make a girl into a rose: she was a rose, soft and gentle. He could forge metaphors, hammer out similes; he could allocate so much alliteration to just so many lines. But he could not stop the bleeding from her ear.

  He could rise up in the morning like a dragon from the sea.

  With the sun over his shoulder, he could warp words to say his thoughts.

  He could lie down at night, satisfied as a god must be.

  But stopping the blood was beyond his powers.

  She was stretched across the back seat, face up, pale and ghostly in what little moonlight filtered through the tinted windows. Cauvell lashed himself into the bucket seat, gripped the wheel viciously. Where to? How long would he have until all roads were blocked? The forest clearing was fifteen miles behind, but the world had shrunk to the size of an orange in recent years, and fifteen miles was hardly the length of one seed. The thing, perhaps, was to find a small town and—with the gun—force a doctor to care for her. Hide the Champion in the doctor's garage. He turned the engine over, wheeled into the twisting lane, and spun his wheels over the snow.

  Thin rust trickled from her ear—liquid.

  Caldwell twenty-six miles . . .

  Caldwell nineteen miles . . .

  He was ten miles from Caldwell when the helicopter fluttered over the tree tops that sheltered much of the road. The car was bathed in sickly yellow light. He swerved left, right, darting out of the beam. But they broadened the shaft and covered both lanes with it. Bullets cut up the pavement in front of him. One pinged off the hood. A few vibra-beams sent little sections of the pavement boiling. Then, abruptly, there was darkness and no helicopter.

  Slowing, he rolled down the window, listened. No whupa-whupa of fiercely beating blades. It was gone. It vanished; it did not simply drift away. Perhaps it had crashed. Yet there was no explosion, no crashing sound. He rolled the window up and drove on. They had spotted him near Caldwell, and he must bypass that town now. Forty miles away lay Steepleton.

  He looked over the seat, felt his stomach flop at the sight of her, comatose and pale-dark. He pressed down on the accelerator.

  Steepleton thirty-two miles . . .

  Steepleton twenty-four miles . . .

  At the boundaries of Steepleton there was a roadblock. Seven men, seven androids. And they knew damn well whose car was coming; they had their weapons raised . . .

  Death is not something that creeps about in black robes, slavering. Death cannot be seen . . .

  It can't!

  And yet his world was a graveyard. The moon rode high above clouds like pieces of torn shrouds flapping madly to the tune of the winds in the dead trees. He struggled up the hill in the cold air, the wind-born explosions of snow forcing him to squint.

  "Good evening," said the mortician.

  He said good evening . . .

  "Dust to dust," the embalmer said from his perch atop a monument steeple.

  "Ashes to ashes," said the sexton.

  He ignored all of them. He pushed onward, toward the summit of the hill where the sepulcher bit at the sky, a broken tooth. Somewhere a muffled drum. Somewhere a passing bell . . .

  He pushed his shoulder against the stone door, felt the rusted hinges move a bit, heard them squeak, heard the rats run inside. Stepping in, the moonlight flooding in behind him, he advanced to the sarcophagus. They had buried her in a limestone coffin, for that facilitated the rotting of the corpse. Somehow, that filled him with rage. He thrust the immensely heavy lid free, looked down at her pale face. Gently—oh! so gently—he lifted her out, placed her upon the marble slab where no coffin yet lay.

  Somewhere a tolling—in rereverse; somewhere a dirge is sung backwards.

  And he would sing the oration; he would make with panegyrics . . .

  "For the Moon never beams without bringing me dreams

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

  And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

  And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

  Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,

  In her sepulcher there by the sea—

  In her tomb by . . ."

  He was three miles past Steepleton. And there were no guards . . .

  He pulled the car off the road and sat thinking for a time. Was his mind leaving him? There had been guards and a roadblock back there, had there not? Which was real, the police or the graveyard world? The police, certainly. He was no E.A. Poe who slept with his dead mistress. Besides, his mistress was not dead. He turned to look at her. Her face had become wrinkled as if she were in pain. He called her name. For a brief second, he thought she answered. But her lips had not moved. He turned back and faced front. It was ten miles to Kingsmir. What would happen there? Would the graveyard delusion come back? Would there be further oddities? He suddenly remembered the disappearance of the helicopter and shuddered. Pulling back onto the road . . .

  . . . He woke and kissed her on the neck.

  Her black-black hair spilled down her bare shoulders, over her bare breasts, curled under her pink ears . . .

  She kissed him back . . .

  And then she was lying in a limestone casket . . . Then warm and alive . . . then cold and rotting . . . A helicopter fluttered again . . . A helicopter blinked out of existence in a world where men had suddenly never learned to fly . . . Then it was back again, chasing after quarry that had gone long ago when the world had been different for a few moments . . .

  Tombstones. . .

  Blink!

  A warm bed, warm bodies . . .

  Blink!

  Blink! Blink!

  He woke up two miles closer to Kingsmir. And he knew! He pulled the Champion onto the berm and crawled between the bucket seats to where she lay. He ran his fingers over her face, trailed them under her chin, felt the blood pulsing in her neck. Laurie was changing reality! Somehow, comatose as she was, the psychic powers were siphoning themselves off instead of exploding violently. They were under control! And they were not merely powers of teleportation and mind reading; they were powers that could change the basic fiber of the universe. He had thought he imagined her answering him a while back; now he knew she had answered. There had been no need of lips.

  "Laurie, can you hear me?"

  There was the distant answer that he had to strain to hear.

  "Laurie, you heard the helicopter, sensed the guards and the roadblock. And you changed reality for a while until the car—moving independent of both worlds—had passed the trouble spot. Isn't that what you did, Laurie?"

  A distant yes.

  "Listen, Laurie. The graveyard is all wrong. Poetic as hell, but wrong. The other one. The one where we are in bed, Laurie." He stroked her chin. He kissed her lips and urged her to concentrate. He heard the sirens on the
road and talked faster . . .

  He talked of a world where there had never been hallucino-children. He spoke of a world where all were normal . . .

  He woke before she did and lay listening to the rasping of her breath: seafoam whispering over jagged rocks. It would get worse before she woke.

  The view from the window was pleasant. It had been snowing since suppertime. Beyond the hoary willow tree lay the highway, a black slash in the calcimined wonderland. They were plowing the road, for the heating coils had broken down again. Somehow, he felt that he had seen it all before. Everything was like an echo being relived.

  "Glittering dreams fluttering flaked

  float softly downward

  while snow priests prepare

  for fairy cotillions . . ."

  He was not sure whether that was senseless or not. And even the poem seemed naggling familiar. He repeated it softly.

  "Frank?" she said.

  "I know."

  "Soon."

  "I'll pull the car out of the garage."

  "The snow—"

  "They seem to have it under control," he said, feeling as if he had said the same thing once before.

  "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. The shiver continued, however, rippling over his spine, quaking across his forehead, spreading to nearly every nerve in his body. What was he frightened of? And what was this feeling of familiarity all about? He was more than normally afraid for Laurie. After all, she was only pregnant. Suddenly, he hoped to hell it would be a girl. And then the shivers were gone as he rushed for the car. He was warm, the world was wonderful, and there was no longer a sense of familiarity. Suddenly things were very much different and very new indeed.

  DRAGON IN THE LAND

  There has been a great deal of talk about McLuhanism, Marshall McLuhan's philosophies on our electric world of superfast communications. McLuhan says we are all drawing the world tighter and tighter together into a Global Village, and that when mankind is that close, war will gradually disappear. "Dragon in the Land," directly extrapolates from that thesis. Herein is the final war. And when enemies meet—one in defeat, the other in triumph—and find, perhaps grudgingly, that the Global Village concept and the war have made them brothers, they find that caring for someone not of your fatherland requires no more effort than loving your own father. I think there is a dragon in the land of our own time, of the here and now. It seems to be the dragon of peace, a good beast, and it is winning friends and influencing more people every day. This story brought me over thirty letters from fans so far, and it is good to know there are people willing to take the time to sit down and write and say, "Peace." Another story of mine called "Muse" has garnered forty-five letters to date, and it concerns the same idea, namely that all men—indeed, all living creatures—are linked in the scheme of things and are, in a sense, brothers. And people are banning together to protest industrial plants being built in places where there was once natural beauty . . . And left-wingers and right-wingers are fighting pollution with a growing vehemence . . . And a former Commandant of the Marines goes on speaking tours against the Vietnamese war where we kill each other without knowing why . . . Sometimes I think it pays to be an optimist . . .