Dean Koontz - City of Night

Thicker than the humid air, a pall of despair began to settle over Benny Lovewell.

Cindi said, “I’m not buying any formula until I see if I’m able to breast-feed. I really want to breast-feed our baby.”

From out of the pines, two figures appeared.

Even with his enhanced vision, at this distance Benny needed a moment to be sure of their identity.

“Is it them?” he asked.

After a hesitation, Cindi said, “Yes.”

“Yes! Yes, it is them.” Benny was so pleased that they were alive and that he would still have a chance to kill them.

“What’re they carrying?” Cindi asked.

“I can’t quite tell.”

“Suitcases?”

“Could be.”

“Where would they get suitcases in the woods?” Cindi wondered.

“Maybe they took them from the people they shot.”

“But what would those people be doing with suitcases in the woods?”

“I don’t care,” Benny said. “Who knows why they do what they do? They’re not like us, they’re not a fully rational species. Let’s go kill them.”

“Is this the place for it?” Cindi asked, but she started the engine.

“I’m so ready. I need this .”

“It’s too open,” she said. “We won’t be able to take the time to do it in the most satisfying manner.”

Grudgingly, Benny said, “You’re right. Okay, okay. But we can overpower them, club them unconscious, and take them somewhere private.”

“Out past the Warehouse Arts District, where not everything’s been gentrified yet. That abandoned factory. You know the place.”

“Where we killed the police chief and his wife the night their replicants were ready,” Benny said, warming to the memory.

“We killed them good,” Cindi said.

“We did, didn’t we?”

“Remember how he screamed when we peeled her head like an orange?” Cindi asked.

“You’d think a police chief would be tougher.”

Driving the Mountaineer onto the service road, Cindi said, “You can cut them both apart while they’re still alive — and you know what then?”

“What?” he asked as they approached the parked sedan, where the detectives had just finished loading the suitcases in the backseat.

“Right there in the blood and all,” Cindi said, “we’ll make a baby.”

His mood was soaring. He wasn’t going to let her bring him down.

“All right, sure,” he said.

“Blood, really fresh blood, is sometimes used in the most effective rituals,” she said.

“Of course it is. Get us up there before they’re in the car. What rituals?”

“Fertility rituals. The Old Race is fertile. If we do it in their blood, covered in their warm blood, maybe we’ll be fertile, too.”

The cops turned to stare at the approaching Mountaineer, and Benny thrilled to the prospect of violence, and yet he couldn’t help asking, “Fertility rituals?”

“Voodoo,” said Cindi. “The Ibo cult of voodoo.”

“Ibo?”

“ Je suis rouge ,” she said.

“That sounds like French. We’re not programmed with French.”

“It means, ‘I who am red’ or, more accurately, ‘I the red one.’ It’s what Ibo calls himself.”

“Ibo again,” said Benny.

“He’s the evil god of the blood-sacrifice cult of voodoo. We’ll kill these two and then make a baby while wallowing in their blood. Praise Ibo, all glory to Ibo.”

Cindi had succeeded in distracting Benny from their prey. He stared at her, bewildered and afraid.

When Erika Helios entered the secret passageway, the door in the bookshelves closed automatically behind her.

“It’s like a Wilkie Collins novel,” she murmured, referring to the work of a Victorian writer whom she had never read.

The four-foot-wide passageway had a concrete floor, concrete walls, and a concrete ceiling. She felt as though she had stepped into a bunker deep under a war-torn city.

Apparently, motion detectors controlled the lights, because when she stood quite still for a long moment, assessing her discovery, the passageway went dark. When she reached out into the blackness, the lights came on again.

The narrow corridor led in only one direction and ended in a formidable steel door.

Because Victor loved gadgets and techie stuff, Erika would have expected this door to have an electronic lock. Victor’s style would be to equip it with a scanner that read palm prints or patterns in the retina, allowing access only to him.

Instead, the door was secured by inch-thick steel lock bolts: five of them. One was inserted in the header, one in the threshold, and three in the right-hand jamb, opposite the massive hinges.

Contemplating this barrier, Erika considered that opening it might be unwise. The space beyond was not a box, and the door was not a lid, but inevitably, she thought of Pandora, the first woman, whose curiosity had led her to open the box in which Prometheus had locked away all the evils that could afflict humanity.

This bit of myth gave her only brief pause, because humanity — another term for the Old Race — was doomed anyway. She herself might one day be told to kill as many as she could find.

Besides, Samuel Johnson — whoever he was — had once said, “Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.”

Judging by the imposing weight of this door and the size of the lock bolts that secured it, something of considerable importance to Victor must wait to be discovered behind it. If Erika were to be the best wife that she could be — and the last Erika ever to rise from the tanks — she must understand her husband, and to understand him, she must know everything that he most valued. Whatever lay behind this barrier, which resembled a vault door, clearly was of enormous value to him.

She extracted the bolt from the header, and thereafter the bolt seated in the concrete floor. One by one, she pulled the bolts from the jamb.

The steel slab opened away from her, into the next space, where a row of ceiling lights brightened automatically. As she crossed the threshold, she saw that the door, which swung smoothly and quietly on its massive ball-bearing hinges, measured about eight inches thick.

She found herself in another short passageway, about twelve feet in length, which ended in a door identical to the first.

Along the length of this second corridor, scores of metal rods bristled from the walls. On her left, the rods appeared to be copper. On the right, they were of another metal, perhaps steel but perhaps not.

A soft, ululant hum filled the passageway. It seemed to arise from the metal rods.

Her downloaded education had focused primarily on music, dance, literary allusions, and other subjects that would ensure that she would be a scintillating hostess when Victor entertained politically important members of the Old Race, which he would do until such a time as he could confidently eliminate them. She didn’t know much about the sciences.

Nevertheless, she suspected that when needed for whatever reason — powerful electrical currents arced between the metal rods that were aligned on opposite sides of the passageway, perhaps frying or vaporizing altogether whoever might be caught between them.

Not even a member of the New Race would emerge unscathed.

As she stood two steps inside the threshold, brooding on this discovery, a blue laser beam speared forth from a ceiling fixture and scanned her body from top to bottom, and then to top again, as if assessing her form.

The laser winked off. An instant later the rods stopped humming. A heavy silence claimed the passageway.

She had the impression that she’d been found acceptable. She would most likely not be sizzled as crisp as burnt toast if she proceeded.