Dean Koontz - Lost Souls

That was the grandest mission the first Victor had been able to envision. But Victor Immaculate realized that it merely replaced one kind of human animal with another, and thus suggested that humanity was not a failure but might be a potential success needing only to be redesigned.

Eradicating every human being from Earth is a momentous achievement only if he does not replace them with a new kind of man. When the members of the Community have hunted down the last man, the last woman, and the last child, Victor Immaculate will within one day cause all the creatures he has made to fall dead.

He alone will remain alive on Earth for a few days, perhaps seven, to bear witness to the emptiness of the world. Then he will kill himself, and with his death reduce Genesis to a single chapter with only twenty-five verses, and the entire so-called sacred book to one page.

He is the ultimate annihilator, who will not only put an end to history but obliterate it.

Now, from a speaker somewhere overhead comes the synthesized voice of a computer, androgynous in character: “Twilight.”

Victor opens his eyes.

The first night of the first war day will soon begin.

He rises to the occasion.

In the hospital lobby, near the front entrance, Chief Rafael Jarmillo discussed the situation with the four deputies who would deal with friends and relatives of patients who arrived at the hospital during evening visiting hours.

As he finished giving instructions, he was approached by Ned Gronski, head of Memorial’s small security staff. Gronski was of course a replicant of the real man, who had earlier been given to a Builder in the basement.

Holding out a coiled rope made from a bedsheet, Gronski said, “A nurse found this tied to the window post in a patient’s room.”

“When?”

“Half an hour ago. We’ve searched the grounds.”

Nobody would climb out a window and down a rope unless he knew he would not be allowed to walk out a door.

“What patient?” Jarmillo asked.

“Bryce Walker, the Western writer.”

“What does he know? How does he know it?”

Gronski shook his head. “No idea. There’s a kid missing, too. Travis Ahern. Nurse says he and Walker visited a lot this afternoon, in the boy’s room.”

When earlier it had been learned that Nummy O’Bannon and the vagrant, Conway Lyss, escaped the jail after having seen a Builder at work, Jarmillo had decided that the breach of secrecy didn’t warrant the immediate lockdown of the whole town. Nummy was well liked, but no one would be quick to believe such a fantastic story coming from a boy who treated a stuffed animal as if it were a real dog. Lyss, booked on a charge of burglary the previous day, was wanted for several crimes in Nevada and Idaho. He would most likely want nothing more than to put as much distance between himself and Rainbow Falls as he could. Considering Lyss’s appearance, crackpot demeanor, and ripe stench, most people would tune out the grizzled vagrant or keep their distance from him. Even if they listened to him, he would seem irrational; he apparently wasn’t a dead-end drunk, but he looked like one.

The longer Jarmillo could avoid putting roadblocks on the two exits from town and the longer he could restrict the interruption of phone service to one or two venues at a time-currently only the hospital-the less likely that people would realize something out of the ordinary might be occurring. The farther into the operation they got without arousing widespread curiosity or suspicion, the more certain they were to have eliminated everyone in town and to have transformed Rainbow Falls into the first Community stronghold by Friday morning.

Nine-year-old Ahern wouldn’t be a much better witness than Nummy O’Bannon, but Bryce Walker couldn’t be easily dismissed. A lifetime resident, personable, and articulate, he had many friends who trusted him and would believe almost anything he said.

Ned Gronski had the same concern. “It’s Walker that worries me. He’s an institution in this town.”

Whatever Bryce Walker knew or suspected about what was happening at the hospital, he most likely would come to the police to tell his story-and they would deal with him. In the unlikely event that he had some reason to worry that the department was not to be trusted, what would he do then? Organize some citizen militia to inspect the hospital for nefarious activity? Let the inspection occur. When they carried their search to the basement, they would be more fodder for the Builders.

Jarmillo decided to take no drastic action. To Gronski, he said, “I’ll alert every officer in the department and all other replicants currently among the population to be on the lookout for Walker and Ahern. I’ll send their photos to everyone’s cell phone. They should be subdued on sight by any means necessary and at once returned to the hospital for execution and processing.”

As he finished winding the bedsheet rope into a ball, Gronski pointed to the glass doors of the lobby. “Speaking of execution and processing, here come the first visitors of the evening.”

The stairs led up to an unlocked door that opened into a ten-foot-square room. Bryce switched on the overhead fluorescent panel and switched off the stair light behind them. A second door stood directly opposite the first. On the walls hung shovels, push brooms, and other implements.

Bryce examined the door through which they had just come, to be sure that, as he recalled, it did not automatically lock, and then he eased it shut behind them.

The hospital maintenance staff called this space the lid-service room. From outside on the roof, it looked like a shed.

Bryce opened a supply cabinet. On the top shelf, he tucked away the pillowcase that now contained Travis’s pajamas and slippers.

“We’ll wait here until dark,” he told the boy.

“Will they really think we climbed down from your window? What if they realize the bedsheet is a fakeout?”

“We could what-if ourselves into paralysis, son. Anyway, in this situation, we can’t have contingency plans. There’s one way out.”

Although unheated, the service room had to be warmer than the open roof. Yet within minutes Bryce felt a chill. He remained on his feet because the soles of his slippers provided better insulation between him and the floor than would the seat of his pajamas.

Among the maintenance supplies, he found twine. He fashioned a strap for his blanket roll, so he could carry it over his shoulder.

“How did you know this was here?” Travis asked.

“When Rennie, my wife, was hospitalized for the last time, they allowed me to stay with her 24/7 during her last few days. Sometimes when she was sleeping, I’d come up to the roof, especially at night, with all the stars. When you stand there with your head tipped back, at first each star seems to be on the same plane as the others, some brighter than others but equally distant. Then slowly your perception improves, so you see that some are nearer, some farther, and some very far away indeed. You see how the stars go on forever, out there to eternity, and you know then, if for a moment you doubted it, that going on forever is the fundamental way of things.”

“There won’t be any stars tonight,” Travis said.

“The stars are always there, whether we can see them or not,” Bryce assured him.

The boy worried that his mother might not be safe, out there in the suddenly unknown streets of this long-familiar town. In spite of what Bryce had said about what-ifs, Travis Ahern shuffled through a deck of them, waiting for nightfall.