Dean Koontz - City of Night

As the truck came to a stop, the crew looked excitedly at Nick, who stood at the midpoint of the lineup. As a Gamma among Epsilons, he must lead by example, even though they, not he, had conceived this ceremony and designed these rituals.

From his pail, he scooped a reeking mass. Always available in a dump were rotting fruits and vegetables, filth in infinite variety, decomposing this and rancid that. During the day, he had collected choice items. Now, with a cry of contempt, he hurled his first handful at one of the cadavers on the truck.

The splattery impact drew a cheer from the Epsilons. After his example, they scooped foul wads from their buckets and pelted the hoisted dead.

As the wide-eyed, open-mouthed corpses endured this sustained barrage, the jeers of the tormenting crew grew more vicious, less verbal and more vocal. The laughter became too shrill to have any quality whatsoever of merriment, and then grew too bitter to be mistaken for any kind of laughter at all.

When the Epsilons had exhausted their ammunition, they threw the empty pails and then flung themselves upon the truck, tearing fervently at the bindings that held the cadavers to the poles. As they freed each stained and dripping body, they pitched it from the truck into a nearby shallow depression in the trash field, which would serve as a mass grave.

Although Nick Frigg did not climb onto the open-bed pillory with his shrieking crew, their rage and their hatred excited him, inflamed his own resentment against those supposedly God-made people who claimed free will, dignity, and hope. He cheered on the denizens of Crosswoods and tossed his greasy hair and shook his fists at the night, and felt empowered by the thought that one day soon his kind would reveal themselves in all their inhuman ferocity and would show the self-satisfied Old Race how quickly their precious free will could be stripped from them, how brutally their dignity could be destroyed, and how utterly their pathetic hope could be extinguished forever.

Now came the symbolic killing.

When the five cadavers had been tossed from the truck, the Epsilons, including the driver, scrambled to the gravesite in full cry.

They longed to kill, craved killing, lived with a need to kill that was intense to the point of anguish, yet they were forbidden to uncork their wrath until their maker gave permission. The frustration of their shackled lives daily paid compound interest on the principal of their anger until they were rich with it, each of them a treasury of rage.

In the symbolic killing, they spent mere pennies of their wealth of wrath. They stomped, stomped, kicked, punted, ground their heels, threw their arms around one another’s shoulders and circle-danced in groups of four and six, danced among the dead and certainly upon the dead, in ferocious hammering rhythms, filling the torch-lit night with the dreadful drumming, timpani and tom-tom and bass drums and kettle, but all in fact the boom of booted feet.

Although a Gamma, dog-nose Nick was infected by the excitement of the Epsilons, and a fever of fury boiled his blood, too, as he joined them in this dance of death, linking himself into a circle with the conviction that any Beta would have done the same, or even any Alpha, for this was an expression not merely of the frustration of the lowest class of the New Race but also of the yearning and the repressed desires of all the children of Mercy, who were made for different work and loaded with different programs, but who were as one in their hatred and their wrath.

Shrieking, howling, hooting, screaming, their sweating faces dark with desire, bright with torchlight, they stomped what they had previously jeered, ritually killing those who were already dead, the drumfire of their feet shaking the night with a promise of the final war to come.

From across the street and half a block away, Cindi and Benny Lovewell watched O’Connor and Maddison escort two black women from the parsonage to the plainwrap sedan, which was parked under a streetlamp.

“We’d probably end up killing one or both of the women to nab the cops,” Cindi said.

Considering that they were not authorized to kill anyone but the detectives, Benny said, “We better wait.”

“What are the women carrying?” Cindi wondered.

“Pies, I think.”

“Why are they carrying pies?”

“Maybe they were caught stealing them,” Benny suggested.

“Do people steal pies?”

“ Their kind of people do. They steal everything.”

She said, “Aren’t O’Connor and Maddison homicide detectives?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why would they rush out here to arrest pie thieves?”

Benny shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe the women killed someone for the pies.”

Frowning, Cindi said, “That’s possible, I suppose. But I have the feeling we’re missing something. Neither one of them looks like a killer.”

“Neither do we,” Benny reminded her.

“If they did kill for the pies, why would they be allowed to keep them?”

“Their legal system doesn’t make much sense to me,” Benny said. “I don’t really care about the women or the pies. I just want to rip the guts out of O’Connor and Maddison.”

“Well, so do I,” Cindi said. “Just because I want a baby doesn’t mean I still don’t enjoy killing.”

Benny sighed. “I didn’t mean to imply that you were going soft or anything.”

When the women and the pies had been loaded in the backseat, O’Connor got behind the wheel, and Maddison sat shotgun.

“Follow them just short of visual,” Benny said. “We want to be able to move in quick if there’s an opportunity at the other end.”

The unmarked police car pulled away from the curb, and when it turned out of sight at the corner, Cindi followed in the Mountaineer.

Instead of conveying the black women to a police lockup, the detectives drove them only two blocks, to another house in Bywater.

Once again parking half a block away and across the street, in the shadows between two streetlamps, Cindi said, “This is no good. At half these houses, people are sitting on the front porch. Too many witnesses.”

“Yeah,” Benny agreed. “We might snatch O’Connor and Maddison, but we’ll end up in a police chase.”

They needed to be discreet. If the authorities identified them as professional killers, they would so longer be able to do their jobs. They would not be authorized to kill any more people, and indeed their maker would terminate them.

“Look at all these morons. What’re they doing setting on a porch in a rocking chair?” Cindi wondered.

“They sit and drink beer or lemonade, or something, and some of them smoke, and they talk to one another.”

“What do they talk about?”

“I don’t know.”

“They’re so… unfocused ,” Cindi said. “What’s the point of their lives?”

“I heard one of them say the purpose of life is living.”

“They just sit there. They aren’t trying to take over the world and gain total command of nature, or anything.”

“They already own the world,” Benny reminded her.

“Not for long.”

Sitting at the table in the kitchen of the parson age with the replicant of Pastor Laffite, Deucalion said, “How many of your kind have been infiltrated into the city?”

“I only know my number,” Laffite replied in a slowly thickening voice. He sat staring at his hands, which were palm-up on the table, as if he were reading two versions of his future. “Nineteen hundred and eighty-seven. There must be many more since me.”

“How fast can he produce his people?”