Midnight Read online

  Worse, the call at once was answered by the beast’s excited kin. At least half a dozen equally chilling shrieks arose from perhaps as far south as Paddock Lane and as far north as Holliwell Road, from the high hills in the east end of town and from the beach-facing bluffs only a couple of blocks to the west.

  All of a sudden Chrissie longed for the cold, lightless culvert churning with waist-deep water so filthy that it might have come from the devil’s own bathtub. This open ground seemed wildly dangerous by comparison.

  A new cry arose as the others faded, and it was closer than any that had come before it. Too close.

  “Let’s get inside,” Sam said urgently.

  Chrissie was beginning to admit to herself that she might not make a good Andre Norton heroine, after all. She was scared, cold, grainy-eyed with exhaustion, starting to feel sorry for herself, and hungry again. She was sick and tired of adventure. She yearned for warm rooms and lazy days with good books and trips to movie theaters and wedges of double-fudge cake. By this time a true adventure-story heroine would have worked out a series of brilliant stratagems that would have brought the beasts in Moonlight Cove to ruin, would have found a way to turn the robot-people into harmless car-washing machines, and would be well on her way to being crowned princess of the kingdom by acclamation of the respectful and grateful citizenry.

  They hurried to the end of the field, rounded the bleachers, and crossed the deserted parking lot to the back of the school.

  Nothing attacked them.

  Thank you, God. Your friend, Chrissie.

  Something howled again.

  Sometimes even God seemed to have a perverse streak.

  There were six doors at different places along the back of the school. They moved from one to another, as Sam tried them all and examined the locks in the hand-hooded beam of his flashlight. He apparently couldn’t pick any of them, which disappointed her, because she’d imagined FBI men were so well trained that in an emergency they could open a bank vault with spit and a hairpin.

  He also tried a few windows and spent what seemed a long time peering through the panes with his flashlight. He was examining not the rooms beyond but the inner sills and frames of the windows.

  At the last door—which was the only one that had glass in the top of it, the others being blank rectangles of metal—Sam clicked off the flashlight, looked solemnly at Tessa, and spoke to her in a low voice. “I don’t think there’s an alarm system here. Could be wrong. But there’s no alarm tape on the glass and, as far as I can see, no hard-wired contacts along the frames or at the window latches.”

  “Are those the only two kinds of alarms they might have?” Tessa whispered.

  “Well, there’re motion-detection systems, either employing sonic transmitters or electric eyes. But they’d be too elaborate for just a school, and probably too sensitive for a building like this.”

  “So now what?”

  “Now I break a window.”

  Chrissie expected him to withdraw a roll of masking tape from a pocket of his coat and tape one of the panes to soften the sound of shattering glass and to prevent the shards from falling noisily to the floor inside. That was how they usually did it in books. But he just turned sideways to the door, drew his arm forward, then rammed it back and drove his elbow through the eight-inch-square pane in the lower-right corner of the window grid. Glass broke and clattered to the floor with an awful racket. Maybe he had forgotten to bring his tape.

  He reached through the empty pane, felt for the locks, disengaged them, and went inside first. Chrissie followed him, trying not to step on the broken glass.

  Sam switched on the flashlight. He didn’t hood it quite so much as he had done outside, though he was obviously trying to keep the backwash of the beam off the windows.

  They were in a long hallway. It was full of the cedar-pine smell that came from the crumbly green disinfectant and dust-attractor that for years the janitors had sprinkled on the floors and then swept up, until the tiles and walls had become impregnated with the scent. The aroma was familiar to her from Thomas Jefferson Elementary, and she was disappointed to find it here. She had thought of high school as a special, mysterious place, but how special or mysterious could it be if they used the same disinfectant as at the grade school?

  Tessa quietly closed the outside door behind them.

  They stood listening for a moment.

  The school was silent.

  They moved down the hall, looking into classrooms and lavatories and supply closets on both sides, searching for the computer lab. In a hundred and fifty feet they reached a junction with another hall. They stood in the intersection for a moment, heads cocked, listening again.

  The school was still silent.

  And dark. The only light in any direction was the flashlight, which Sam still held in his left hand but which he no longer hooded with his right. He had withdrawn his revolver from his holster and needed his right hand for that.

  After a long wait, Sam said, “Nobody’s here.”

  Which did seem to be the case.

  Briefly Chrissie felt better, safer.

  On the other hand, if he really believed they were the only people in the school, why didn’t he put his gun away?

  10

  As he drove through his domain, impatient for midnight, which was still five hours away, Thomas Shaddack had largely regressed to a childlike condition. Now that his triumph was at hand, he could cast off the masquerade of a grown man, which he had so long sustained, and he was relieved to do so. He had never been an adult, really, but a boy whose emotional development had been forever arrested at the age of twelve, when the message of the moonhawk had not only come to him but been imbedded in him; he had thereafter faked emotional ascension into adulthood to match his physical growth.

  But it was no longer necessary to pretend.

  On one level, he had always known this about himself, and had considered it to be his great strength, an advantage over those who had put childhood behind them. A boy of twelve could harbor and nurture a dream with more determination than could an adult, for adults were constantly distracted by conflicting needs and desires. A boy on the edge of puberty, however, had the single-mindedness to focus on and dedicate himself unswervingly to a single Big Dream. Properly bent, a twelve-year-old boy was the perfect monomaniac.

  The Moonhawk Project, his Big Dream of godlike power, would not have reached fruition if he had matured in the usual way. He owed his impending triumph to arrested development.

  He was a boy again, not secretly any more but openly, eager to satisfy his every whim, to take whatever he wanted, to do anything that broke the rules. Twelve-year-old boys reveled in breaking the rules, challenging authority. At their worst, twelve-year-old boys were naturally lawless, on the verge of hormonal-induced rebellion.

  But he was more than lawless. He was a boy flying on cactus candy that had been eaten long ago but that had left a psychic if not a physical residue. He was a boy who knew that he was a god. Any boy’s potential for cruelty paled in comparison to the cruelty of gods.

  To pass the time until midnight, he imagined what he would do with his power when the last of Moonlight Cove had fallen under his command. Some of his ideas made him shiver with a strange mixture of excitement and disgust.

  He was on Iceberry Way when he realized the Indian was with him. He was surprised when he turned his head and saw Runningdeer sitting in the passenger seat. Indeed he stopped the van in the middle of the street and stared in disbelief, shocked and afraid.

  But Runningdeer did not menace him. In fact the Indian didn’t even speak to him or look at him, but stared straight ahead, through the windshield.

  Slowly understanding came to Shaddack. The Indian’s spirit was his now, his possession as surely as was the van. The great spirits had given him the Indian as an advisor, as a reward for having made a success of Moonhawk. But he, not Runningdeer, was in control this time, and the Indian would speak only when spoken to.
r />   “Hello, Runningdeer,” he said.

  The Indian looked at him. “Hello, Little Chief.”

  “You’re mine now.”

  “Yes, Little Chief.”

  For just a brief flicker of time, it occurred to Shaddack that he was mad and that Runningdeer was an illusion coughed up by a sick mind. But monomaniacal boys do not have the capacity for an extended examination of their mental condition, and the thought passed out of his mind as quickly as it had entered.

  To Runningdeer, he said, “You’ll do what I say.”

  “Always.”

  Immensely pleased, Shaddack let up on the brake pedal and drove on. The headlights revealed an amber-eyed thing of fantastic shape, drinking from a puddle on the pavement. He refused to regard it as a thing of consequence, and when it loped away, he let it vanish from his memory as swiftly as it disappeared from the night-mantled street.

  Casting a sly glance at the Indian, he said, “You know one thing I’m going to do some day?”

  “What’s that, Little Chief?”

  “When I’ve converted everyone, not just the people in Moonlight Cove but everyone in the world, when no one stands against me, then I’ll spend some time tracking down your family, all of your remaining brothers, sisters, even your cousins, and I’ll find all of their children, and all their wives and husbands, and all their children’s wives and husbands … and I’ll make them pay for your crimes, I’ll really, really make them pay.” A whining petulance had entered his voice. He disapproved of the tone he heard himself using, but he could not lose it. “I’ll kill all the men, hack them to bloody bits and pieces, do it myself. I’ll let them know that it’s because of their relation to you that they’ve got to suffer, and they’ll despise you and curse your name, they’ll be sorry you ever existed. And I’ll rape all the women and hurt them, hurt them all, really bad, and then I’ll kill them too. What do you think of that? Huh?”

  “If it’s what you want, Little Chief.”

  “Damn right it’s what I want.”

  “Then you may have it.”

  “Damn right I may have it.”

  Shaddack was surprised when tears came to his eyes. He stopped at an intersection and didn’t move on. “It wasn’t right what you did to me.”

  The Indian said nothing.

  “Say it wasn’t right!”

  “It wasn’t right, Little Chief.”

  “It wasn’t right at all.”

  “It wasn’t right.”

  Shaddack pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He blotted his eyes. Soon his tears dried up.

  He smiled at the nightscape revealed through the windshield. He sighed. He glanced at Runningdeer.

  The Indian was staring forward, silent.

  Shaddack said, “Of course, without you, I might never have been a child of the moonhawk.”

  11

  The computer lab was on the ground floor, in the center of the building, near a confluence of corridors. Windows looked out on a courtyard but could not be seen from any street, which allowed Sam to switch on the overhead lights.

  It was a large chamber, laid out like a language lab, with each VDT in its own three-sided cubicle. Thirty computers—upper end, hard-disk systems—were lined up along three walls and in a back-to-back row down the middle of the room.

  Looking around at the wealth of hardware, Tessa said, “New Wave sure was generous, huh?”

  “Maybe ‘thorough’ is a better word,” Sam said.

  He walked along a row of VDTs, looking for telephone lines and modems, but he found none.

  Tessa and Chrissie stayed back by the open lab door, peering out at the dark hallway.

  Sam sat down at one of the machines and switched it on. The New Wave logo appeared in the center of the screen.

  With no telephones, no modems, maybe the computers really had been given to the school for student training, without the additional intention of tying the kids to New Wave during some stage of the Moonhawk Project.

  The logo blinked off, and a menu appeared on the screen. Because they were hard-disk machines with tremendous capacity, their programs were already loaded and ready to go as soon as the system was powered up. The menu offered him five choices:

  A. TRAINING 1

  B. TRAINING 2

  C. WORD PROCESSING

  D. ACCOUNTING

  E. OTHER

  He hesitated, not because he couldn’t decide what letter to push but because he was suddenly afraid of using the machine. He vividly remembered the Coltranes. Though it had seemed to him that they had elected to meld with their computers, that their transformation began within them, he had no way of knowing for sure that it had not been the other way around.

  Maybe the computers had somehow reached out and seized them. That seemed impossible. Besides, thanks to Harry’s observations, they knew that people in Moonlight Cove were being converted by an injection, not by some insidious force that passed semimagically through computer keys into the pads of their fingers. He was hesitant nevertheless. Finally he pressed E and got a list of school subjects:

  A. ALL LANGUAGES

  B. MATH

  C. ALL SCIENCES

  D. HISTORY

  E. ENGLISH

  F. OTHER

  He pressed F. A third menu appeared, and the process continued until he finally got a menu on which the final selection was NEW WAVE. When he keyed in that choice, words began to march across the screen.

  HELLO, STUDENT.

  YOU ARE NOW IN CONTACT

  WITH THE SUPERCOMPUTER

  AT NEW WAVE MICRO TECHNOLOGY.

  MY NAME IS SUN.

  I AM HERE TO SERVE YOU.

  The school machines were wired directly to New Wave. Modems were unnecessary.

  WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE MENUS?

  OR WILL YOU SPECIFY INTEREST?

  Considering the wealth of menus in the police department’s system alone, which he had reviewed last night in the patrol car, he figured he could sit here all evening just looking at menu after menu after submenu before he found what he wanted. He typed in: MOONLIGHT COVE POLICE DEPARTMENT.

  THIS FILE RESTRICTED.

  PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PROCEED WITHOUT

  THE ASSISTANCE OF YOUR TEACHER.

  He supposed that the teachers had individual code numbers that, depending on whether or not they were converted, would allow them to access otherwise restricted data. The only way to hit on one of their codes was to begin trying random combinations of digits, but since he didn’t even know how many numbers were in a code, there were millions if not billions of possibilities. He could sit there until his hair turned white and his teeth fell out, and not luck into a good number.

  Last night he had used Officer Reese Dorn’s personal computer-access code, and he wondered whether it worked only on a designated police-department VDT or whether any computer tied to Sun would accept it. Nothing lost for trying. He typed in 262699.

  The screen cleared. Then: HELLO, OFFICER DORN.

  Again he requested the police-department data system.

  This time it was given to him.

  CHOOSE ONE

  A. DISPATCHER

  B. CENTRAL FILES

  C. BULLETIN BOARD

  D. OUTSYSTEM MODEM

  He pressed D.

  He was shown a list of computers nationwide with which he could link through the police-department’s modem.

  His hands were suddenly damp with sweat. He was sure something was going to go wrong, if only because nothing had been easy thus far, not from the minute he had driven into town.

  He glanced at Tessa. “Everything okay?”

  She squinted at the dark hallway, then blinked at him. “Seems to be. Any luck?”

  “Yeah … maybe.” He turned to the computer again and said softly, “Please. …”

  He scanned the long roster of possible outsystem links. He found FBI KEY, which was the name of the latest and most sophisticated of the Bureau’s computer networks�
�a highly secure, interoffice data-storage, -retrieval, and -transmission system housed at headquarters in Washington, which had been installed only within the past year. Supposedly no one but approved agents at the home office and in the Bureau’s field offices, accessing with their own special codes, were able to use FBI KEY.

  So much for high security.

  Still expecting trouble, Sam selected FBI KEY. The menu disappeared. The screen remained blank for a moment. Then, on the display, which proved to be a full-color monitor, the FBI shield appeared in blue and gold. The word KEY appeared below it.

  Next, a series of questions was flashed on the screen—WHAT IS YOUR BUREAU ID NUMBER? NAME? DATE OF BIRTH?

  DATE OF BUREAU INDUCTION? MOTHER’S MAIDEN NAME ?—and when he answered those, he was rewarded with access.

  “Bingo!” he said, daring to be optimistic.

  Tessa said, “What’s happened?”

  “I’m in the Bureau’s main system in D.C.”

  “You’re a hacker,” Chrissie said.

  “I’m a fumbler. But I’m in.”

  “Now what?” Tessa asked.