Dean Koontz: City of Night

Perhaps inspired by something Jelly said or by the paperback covers ablaze with colorful mayhem, Deucalion suddenly understood what his instinct had been trying to tell him. The end was here.

Less than half a day previously, in Carson O’Connor’s house, Deucalion and the two detectives had agreed to join forces to resist and ultimately to destroy Victor Helios. They had recognized that this mission would require patience, determination, cunning, courage — and that it might take a long time, as well.

Now, less by deductive reasoning than by intuition, Deucalion knew that they had no time at all.

Detective Harker, a member of Victor’s New Race, had spiraled into homicidal madness. There were reasons to believe that others of his kind were in despair, too, and psychologically fragile.

Furthermore, something fundamental had gone wrong with Harker’s biology. Shotguns had not felled him. Something that had been born within him, some strange dwarfish creature that had burst from him, had destroyed his body in its birth throes.

These facts alone were not sufficient evidence to justify the conclusion that Victor’s empire of the soulless might be on the verge of violent collapse. But Deucalion knew it was. He knew .

“And,” Jelly Biggs said, still sorting through the paperbacks, “give me a villain I’m not supposed to feel sorry for.”

Deucalion had no psychic power. Sometimes, however, knowledge arose in him, profound insights and understandings that he recognized as truths, and he did not doubt them or question their source. He knew.

“I don’t care that he kills and eats people because he had a bad childhood,” Jelly railed. “If he kills good people, I want some good people to get together and pound the crap out of him. I don’t want them to see that he gets therapy.”

Deucalion turned away from the books. He feared nothing that might happen to him. For the fate of others, however, for this city, he was overcome by dread.

Victor’s assault on nature and humanity had built into a perfect storm. And now the deluge.

The gutters of the stainless-steel dissection table were not yet wet, and the glossy white ceramic-tile floor in Autopsy Room Number 2 remained spotless.

Poisoned by gumbo, the old man lay in naked anticipation of the coroner’s scalpel. He looked surprised.

Jack Rogers and his young assistant, Luke, were gowned, gloved, and ready to cut.

Michael said, “Is every elderly naked dead man a thrill, or after a while do they all seem the same?”

“In fact,” said the medical examiner, “every one of them has more personality than the average homicide cop.”

“Ouch. I thought you only cut stiffs.”

“Actually,” Luke said, “this one will be pretty interesting because analysis of the stomach contents is more important than usual.”

Sometimes it seemed to Carson O’Connor that Luke enjoyed his work too much.

She said, “I thought you’d have Harker on the table.”

“Been there, done that,” said Luke. “We started early, and we’re moving right along.”

For a man who had been profoundly shaken by the autopsy that he had performed on one of the New Race little more than a day ago, Jack Rogers seemed remarkably calm about his second encounter with one of them.

Laying out the sharp tools of his trade, he said, “I’ll messenger the prelim to you. The enzyme profiles and other chemical analyses will follow when I get them from the lab.”

“Prelim? Profiles? You sound like this is SOP”

“Why shouldn’t it be?” Jack asked, his attention focused on the gleaming blades, clamps, and forceps.

With his owlish eyes and ascetic features, Luke usually appeared bookish, slightly fey. Now he regarded Carson with hawkish intensity.

To Jack, she said, “I told you last night, he’s one of them.”

“Them,” said Luke, nodding gravely.

“Something came out of Harker, some creature. Tore its way out of his torso. That’s what killed him.”

“Falling off the warehouse roof killed him,” Jack Rogers said.

Impatiently, Carson said, “Jack, for God’s sake, you saw Harker lying in that alleyway last night. His abdomen, his chest — they were like blown open.”

“A consequence of the fall.”

Michael said, “Whoa, Jack, everything inside Harker was just gone .”

Finally the medical examiner looked at them. “A trick of light and shadow.”

Bayou-born, Carson had never known a bitter winter. A Canadian wind in January could have been no colder than the sudden chill in her blood, her marrow.

“I want to see the body,” she said.

“We released it to his family,” Jack said.

“What family?” Michael, demanded. “He was cloned in a cauldron or some damned thing. He didn’t have family.”

With a solemnity not characteristic of him, eyes narrowed, Luke said, “He had us.”

The folds and flews of Jack’s hound-dog face were as they had been a day ago, and the jowls and dewlaps, all familiar. But this was not Jack.

“He had us,” Jack agreed.

As Michael reached cross-body, under his coat, to put his right hand on the grip of the pistol in his shoulder holster, Carson took a step backward, and another, toward the door.

The medical examiner and his assistant did not approach, merely watched in silence.

Carson expected to find the door locked. It opened.

Past the threshold, in the hall, no one blocked their way.

She retreated from Autopsy Room Number 2. Michael followed her.

Erika Helios, less than one day from the creation tank, found the world to be a wondrous place.

Nasty, too. Thanks to her exceptional physiology, the lingering pain from Victor’s punishing blows sluiced out of her in a long hot shower, though her shame did not so easily wash away.

Everything amazed her, and much of it delighted — like water. From the shower head it fell in glimmering streams, twinkling with reflections of the overhead lights. Liquid jewels.

She liked the way it purled across the golden-marble floor to the drain. Pellucid yet visible.

Erika relished the subtle aroma of water, too, the crispness. She breathed deeply of the scented soap, steamy clouds of soothing fragrance. And after the soap, the smell of her clean skin was most pleasing.

Educated by direct-to-brain data downloading, she had awakened with full knowledge of the world. But facts were not experience. All the billions of bits of data streamed into her brain had painted a ghost world in comparison to the depth and brilliance of the real thing. All she had learned in the tank was but a single note plucked from a guitar, at most a chord, while the true world was a symphony of astonishing complexity and beauty.

The only thing thus far that had struck her as ugly was Victor’s body.

Born of man and woman, heir to the ills of mortal flesh, he’d taken extraordinary measures over the years to extend his life and to maintain his vigor. His body was puckered and welted by scars, crusted with gnarled excrescences.

Her revulsion was ungrateful and ungracious, and she was ashamed of it. Victor had given her life, and all that he asked in return was love, or something like it.

Although she had hidden her disgust, he must have sensed it, for he had been angry with her throughout the sex. He’d struck her often, called her unflattering names, and in general had been rough with her.

Even from-to-brain data downloading, Erika knew that what they had shared had not been ideal — or even ordinary — sex.

In spite of the fact that she failed him in their first session of lovemaking, Victor still harbored some tender feelings toward her. When it was over, he’d slapped her bottom affectionately — as opposed to the rage with which he had delivered previous slaps and punches — and had said, “That was good.”