Dean Koontz - City of Night

The car was parked under a streetlamp. With all the commotion, surely they were being watched. They would probably need to switch vehicles in an hour or two.

Carson and Michael assumed their usual positions: she behind the steering wheel, he in the shotgun seat, which was literally the shotgun seat tonight, because he sat there with two Urban Snipers that still smelled hot.

The engine caught, and she popped the handbrake, and Michael said, “Show me some NASCAR moves.”

“You finally want me to put the pedal to the metal, and it’s a five-year-old Honda.”

Behind them, Vicky began snoring.

Carson burned rubber away from the curb, ran the stop sign at the end of the block, and hung a left at the corner in a test of the Honda’s rollover resistance.

More than two blocks away, approaching, were the flashing red-and-blue lights of a squad car.

She wheeled right into an alleyway, stood on the accelerator, took out someone’s trash can, scared one of the nine lives out of a cat, said, “That sonofabitch Frankenstein,” and blew out of the neighborhood.

When the exhilarating dance of death was done, Gunny Alecto and another garbage-galleon driver plowed two feet of concealing trash into the shallow grave in which the remains of the five members of the Old Race were interred.

In the torchlight, the trash field glimmered like a sea of gold doubloons, and the excited crew appeared to sweat molten gold, too, as they calmed themselves, with some effort, for the more solemn ceremony ahead.

Beginning shortly after dawn, all the incoming trucks would dump here in the west pit for at least a week, and soon the brutalized remains would be buried too deep for accidental discovery and beyond easy exhumation.

When the plowing was finished, Gunny came to Nick, movie-star beautiful and filthy and grinning with dark delight. “Did they crunch like roaches?” she asked excitedly.

“Oh, they crunched,” Nick agreed.

“Did they squish? ”

“Yeah, they squished.”

“That was hot! ” she said.

“You’re hot.”

“Someday, all we’ll be pushin’ into these pits is people like them, truckloads of their kind. That’s gonna be some day, Nick. Isn’t that gonna be someday?”

“Gonna get you later,” he said, slipping a hand between her hip boots, clutching the crotch of her jeans.

“Gonna get you! ” she shot back, and grabbed him the same way, with a ferocity that excited him.

Dog-nose Nick couldn’t get enough of her stink, and buried his face in her hair, growling as she laughed.

The second truck now descended the sloped wall of the pit and drove toward the crew line. On the open bed were arranged the three dead gone-wrongs, the consequences of experiments that had not led to the hoped-for results.

Victor Helios didn’t refer to them as gone-wrongs, and neither did anyone at Mercy, as far as Nick knew. This word was part of the culture of Crosswoods, as were the crew’s ceremonies.

The five members of the Old Race had been lashed upright to poles for the last leg of their journey to the grave, the better to be pelted with garbage and reviled, but the gone-wrongs lay upon a thick bed of palm fronds, which arrived weekly by the hundreds if not thousands in masses of landscapers’ clippings.

They would be buried apart from the five Old Race cadavers, and with respect, though of course not with a prayer. The gone-wrongs had come from the creation tanks, just as had every member of the crew. Although they bore little resemblance to the human model, they were in a way kin to the crew. It was too easy to imagine that Gunny or Nick himself, or any of them, might have gone wrong, too, and might have been sent here as trash instead of as the keepers of the trash.

When the truck came to a stop, Nick and his fourteen crewmen climbed onto the open bed. They boarded it not in the raucous mood with which they had scrambled onto the first truck to cut down the bodies and to pitch them off, but with curiosity and some fear, and not without awe.

One of the Old Race, back in the days when carnivals had freakshows, might have stared at some deformed specimen on the stage and said softly to himself, There but for the grace of God go I . Some of this feeling filled Nick and his crewmen, too, although it was not colored with the pity that might have troubled the freakshow patron. And there was no sense in any of them that divine mercy had spared them from the tortures that these gone-wrongs had been through. For them it was sheer blind luck that they had arisen from their maker’s machines and processes in a functional form, to face only the anguish and tortures that were common to all their kind.

Yet, though in neither of their hearts did they have room for the concept of transcendence, though they were forbidden superstition and would laugh at the Old Race’s perception of a holiness behind nature, they knelt among the gone-wrongs, marveling at their twisted and macabre features, tentatively touching their grotesque bodies, and unto them came a kind of animal wonder and a chill of mystery, and a recognition of the unknown.

Beyond the windows of the Rombuk Monastery, the higher peaks of the snow-capped Himalayas vanished into the terrible, turbulent beauty of thunderheads as mottled black as cast-iron skillets that had known much fire.

Nebo, an elderly monk in a wool robe with the hood turned back from his shaved head, led Arnie and Deucalion along a stone corridor in which the effects of the hard surfaces were softened by painted mandalas, by the sweet fragrance of incense, and by the buttery light of fat candles on altar tables and in wall sconces.

In terms of decor and amenities, the monks’ rooms ranged from severe to austere. Perhaps an autistic would find that simplicity appealing, even soothing, but no one in Rombuk would allow a visiting child, regardless of his preferences, to occupy one of the typical cells.

These holy men were known for their kindness and hospitality as much as for their spirituality, and they maintained a few chambers as guest quarters. In these, the furnishings and amenities were for those visitors who had not yet felt — and might never feel — the need to eschew creature comforts in the pursuit of purer meditation.

A few days ago, Deucalion had left Rombuk after residing there for years. His stay had been by far the longest of any guest in the history of the monastery, and he had made more friends within its walls than anywhere outside of the carnival.

He had not expected to return for many months, if ever. Yet here he found himself less than a week after leaving, though not even for so much as an overnight.

The room to which Nebo led them was three or four times the size of the typical monk’s quarters. Large tapestries graced the walls, and a hand-loomed carnelian-red rug hushed every footfall. The four-poster bed featured a privacy curtain, the furniture was comfortably upholstered, and a large stone fireplace with a decorative bronze surround provided charming light and offered as much or as little heat as might be wanted with just the adjustment of a series of vents.

As Nebo lit candles around the room and took linens from a chest to dress the bed, Deucalion sat with Arnie on a sofa that faced the fireplace.

By firelight, he performed for the boy the coin tricks that had created a bond between them from their first encounter. As the shiny quarters disappeared, reappeared, and vanished forever in thin air, he also told Arnie of the situation in New Orleans. He did not doubt that the boy understood, and he did not patronize him but told him the truth, and did not hesitate to reveal even the possible cost of his sister’s courage.