Midnight Read online

  but he looked like a high-school boy now, too small to be a cop—and scared.

  When Loman got out of his car, Amberlay came to him, gun in hand, visibly shaking. “Only you and me? Where the hell’s everybody else? This is a major alert.”

  “Where’s everybody else?” Loman asked. “Just listen, Paul. Just listen.”

  From every part of town, scores of wild voices were lifted in eerie song, either calling to one another or challenging the unseen moon that floated above the wrung-out clouds.

  Loman hurried to the back of the patrol car and opened the trunk. His unit, like every other, carried a 20-gauge riot gun for which he’d never had use in peaceable Moonlight Cove. But New Wave, which had generously equipped the force, did not stint on equipment even if it was perceived as unnecessary. He pulled the shotgun from its clip mounting on the back wall of the trunk.

  Joining him, Amberlay said, “You telling me they’ve regressed, all of them, everyone on the force, except you and me?”

  “Just listen,” Loman repeated as he leaned the 20-gauge against the bumper.

  “But that’s crazy!” Amberlay insisted. “Jesus, God, you mean this whole thing is coming down on us, the whole damn thing?”

  Loman grabbed a box of shells that was in the right wheel-well of the trunk, tore off the lid. “Don’t you feel the yearning, Paul?”

  “No!” Amberlay said too quickly. “No, I don’t feel it, I don’t feel anything.”

  “I feel it,” Loman said, putting five rounds in the 20-gauge—one in the chamber, four in the magazine. “Oh, Paul, I sure as hell feel it. I want to tear off my clothes and change, change, and just run, be free, go with them, hunt and kill and run with them.”

  “Not me, no, never,” Amberlay said.

  “Liar,” Loman said. He brought up the loaded gun and fired at Amberlay point-blank, blowing his head off.

  He couldn’t have trusted the young officer, couldn’t have turned his back on him, not with the urge to regress so strong in him, and those voices in the night singing their siren songs.

  As he stuffed more shells into his pockets, he heard a shotgun blast from inside the school.

  He wondered if that gun was in the hands of Booker or Shaddack. Struggling to control his raging terror, fighting off the hideous and powerful urge to shed his human form, Loman went inside to find out.

  21

  Tommy Shaddack heard another shotgun, but he didn’t think much about that because, after all, they were in a war now. You could hear what a war it was by just stepping out in the night and listening to the shrieks of the combatants echoing down through the hills to the sea. He was more focused on getting Booker, the woman, and the girl he’d seen in the hall, because he knew the woman must be the Lockland bitch and the girl must be Chrissie Foster, though he couldn’t figure how they had joined up.

  War. So he handled it the way soldiers did in the good movies, kicking the door open, firing a round into the room before entering. No one screamed. He guessed he hadn’t hit anyone, so he fired again, and still no one screamed, so he figured they were already gone from there. He crossed the threshold, fumbled for the light switch, found it, and discovered he was in the deserted band room.

  Evidently they had left by one of the two other doors, and when he saw that, he was angry, really angry. The only time in his life that he had fired a gun was in Phoenix, when he had shot the Indian with his father’s revolver, and that had been close-up, where he could not miss. But still he had expected that he would be good with a gun. After all, Jeez, he had watched a lot of war movies, cowboy movies, cop shows on television, and it didn’t look hard, not hard at all, you just pointed the muzzle and pulled the trigger. But it hadn’t been that easy, after all, and Tommy was angry, furious, because they shouldn’t make it look so easy in the movies and on the boob tube when, in fact, the gun jumped in your hands as if it was alive.

  He knew better now, and he was going to brace himself when he fired, spread his legs and brace himself, so his shots wouldn’t be blowing holes in the ceiling or bouncing off the floor any more. He would nail them cold the next time he got a whack at them, and they’d be sorry for making him chase them, for not just lying down and being dead when he wanted them to be dead.

  22

  The door out of the band room had led into a hall that served ten soundproofed practice rooms, where student musicians could mutilate fine music for hours at a time without disturbing anyone. At the end of that narrow corridor, Tessa pushed through another door and coaxed just enough out of the flashlight to see that they were in a chamber as large as the band room. It also featured tiered platforms rising to the back. A student-drawn sign on one wall, complete with winged angels singing, proclaimed this the home of The World’s Best Chorus.

  As Chrissie and Sam followed her into the room, a shotgun roared in the distance. It sounded as if it was outside. But even as the door to the corridor of practice rooms swung shut behind them, another shotgun discharged, closer than the first, probably back at the door to the band room. Then a second blast from the same location.

  Just like in the band room, two more doors led out of the choral chamber, but the first one she tried was a dead end; it went into the chorus director’s office.

  They dashed to the other exit, beyond which they found a corridor illuminated only by a red, twenty-four-hour-a-day emergency sign—STAIRS—immediately to their right. Not EXIT, just STAIRS, which meant this was an interior well with no access to the outside. “Take her up,” Sam urged Tessa.

  “But—”

  “Up! They’re probably coming in the ground floor by every entrance, anyway.”

  “What’re you—”

  “Gonna make a little stand here,” he said.

  A door crashed open and a shotgun exploded back in the chorus room.

  “Go!” Sam whispered.

  23

  Harry heard the closet door open in the bedroom below.

  The attic was cold, but he was streaming sweat as if in a sauna. Maybe he hadn’t needed the second sweater.

  Go away, he thought. Go away.

  Then he thought, Hell, no, come on, come and get it. You think I want to live forever?

  24

  Sam went down on one knee in the hall outside the chorus room, taking a stable position to compensate somewhat for his weak right wrist. He held the swinging door open six inches, both arms thrust through the gap, the .38 gripped in his right hand, his left hand clamped around his right wrist.

  He could see the guy across the room, silhouetted in the lights of the band-room corridor behind him. Tall. Couldn’t see his face. But something about him struck a chord of familiarity.

  The gunman didn’t see Sam. He was only being cautious, laying down a spray of pellets before he entered. He pulled the trigger. The click was loud in the silent room. He pumped the shotgun. Clackety-dack. No ammo.

  That meant a change in Sam’s plans. He surged to his feet and through the swinging door, back into the chorus room, no longer able to wait for the guy to switch on the overhead lights or step farther across the threshold, because now was the time to take him, before he reloaded. Firing as he went, Sam squeezed off the four remaining rounds in the .38, trying his damnedest to make every slug count. On the second or third shot, the guy in the doorway squealed, God, he squealed like a kid, his voice high-pitched and quaverous, as he threw himself back into the practice-room corridor, out of sight.

  Sam kept moving, fumbling in his jacket pocket with his left hand, grabbing at the spare cartridges, while with his right hand he snapped open the revolver’s cylinder and shook out the expended brass casings. When he reached the closed door to the narrow hall that connected chorus room to band room, the door through which the tall man had vanished, he pressed his back to the wall and jammed fresh rounds into the Smith & Wesson, snapped the cylinder shut.

  He kicked the door open and looked into the hall, where the overhead fluorescents were lit.

  It was de
serted.

  No blood on the floor.

  Damn. His right hand was half numb. He could feel his wrist swelling tight under the bandage, which was now soaked with fresh blood. At the rate his shooting was deteriorating, he was going to have to walk right up to the bastard and ask him to bite on the muzzle in order to make the shot count.

  The doors to the ten practice rooms, five on each side, were closed. The door at the far end, where the hall led into the band room, was open, and the lights were on there. The tall guy could be there or in any of the ten practice rooms. But wherever he was, he had probably slipped at least a couple of shells into that shotgun, so the moment to pursue him had passed.

  Sam backed up, letting the door between the hall and the chorus room slip shut. Even as he let go of it, as it was swinging back into place, he glimpsed the tall man stepping through the open door of the band room about forty feet away.

  It was Shaddack himself.

  The shotgun boomed.

  The soundproofed door, gliding shut at the crucial moment, was thick enough to stop the pellets.

  Sam turned and ran across the chorus room, into the hall, and up the stairs, where he had sent Tessa and Chrissie.

  When he reached the top flight, he found them waiting for him in the upper hall, in the soft red glow of another STAIRS sign.

  Below, Shaddack entered the stairwell.

  Sam turned, stepped back onto the landing and descended the first step. He leaned over the railing, looked down, glimpsed part of his pursuer, and squeezed off two shots.

  Shaddack squealed like a boy again. He ducked back against the wall, away from the open center of the well, where he could not be seen.

  Sam didn’t know whether he’d scored a hit or not. Maybe. What he did know was that Shaddack wasn’t mortally wounded; he was still coming, easing up step by step, staying against the outer wall. And when that geek reached the lower landing, he would take the turn suddenly, firing the shotgun repeatedly at whoever waited above.

  Silently Sam retreated from the upper landing, into the hall once more. The scarlet light of the STAIRS sign fell on Chrissie’s and Tessa’s faces … an illusion of blood.

  25

  A clink. A scraping sound.

  Clink-scrape. Clink-scrape.

  Harry knew what he was hearing. Clothes hangers sliding on a metal rod.

  How could they have known? Hell, maybe they had smelled him up here. He was sweating like a horse, after all. Maybe the conversion improved their senses.

  The clinking and scraping stopped.

  A moment later he heard them lifting the closet rod out of its braces so they could lower the trap.

  26

  The fading flashlight kept winking out, and Tessa had to shake it, jarring the batteries together, to get a few more seconds of weak and fluttery light from it.

  They had stepped out of the hall, into what proved to be a chemistry lab with black marble lab tables and steel sinks and high wooden stools. Nowhere to hide.

  They checked the windows, hoping there might be a roof just under them. No. A two-story drop to a concrete walk.

  At the end of the chemistry lab was a door, through which they passed into a ten-foot-square storage room full of chemicals in sealed tins and bottles, some labeled with skulls and crossbones, some with DANGER in bright red letters. She supposed there were ways to use the contents of that closet as a weapon, but they didn’t have time to inventory the contents, looking for interesting substances to mix together. Besides, she’d never been a great science student, recalled nothing whatsoever of her chemistry classes, and would probably blow herself up with the first bottle she opened. From the expression on Sam’s face, she knew that he saw no more hope there than she did.

  A rear door in the storage closet opened into a second lab that seemed to double as a biology classroom. Anatomy charts hung on one wall. The room offered no better place to hide than had the previous lab.

  Holding Chrissie close against her side, Tessa looked at Sam and whispered, “Now what? Wait here and hope he can’t find us … or keep moving?”

  “I think it’s safer to keep moving,” Sam said. “Easier to be cornered if we sit still.”

  She nodded agreement.

  He eased past her and Chrissie, leading the way between the lab benches, toward the door to the hall.

  From behind them, either in the dark chemical-storage room or in the unlighted chemistry lab beyond it, came a soft but distinct clink.

  Sam halted, motioned Tessa and Chrissie ahead of him, and turned to cover the exit from the storage room.

  With Chrissie at her side, Tessa stepped to the hall door, turned the knob slowly, quietly, and eased the door outward.

  Shaddack came from the darkness in the corridor, into the pale and inconstant pulse of light from her flash, and rammed the barrel of his shotgun into her stomach. “You’re gonna be sorry now,” he said excitedly.

  27

  They pulled the trapdoor down. A shaft of light from the closet shot up to the rafters, but it didn’t illuminate the far corner in which Harry sat with his useless legs splayed out in front of him.

  His bad hand was curled in his lap, while his good hand fiercely clasped the pistol.

  His heart was hammering harder and faster than it had in twenty years, since the battlefields of Southeast Asia. His stomach was churning. His throat was so tight he could barely breathe. He was dizzy with fear. But, God in heaven, he sure felt alive.

  With a squeak and clatter, they unfolded the ladder.

  28

  Tommy Shaddack shoved the muzzle into her belly and almost blew her guts out, almost wasted her, before he realized how pretty she was, and then he didn’t want to kill her any more, at least not right away, not until he’d made her do some things with him, do some things to him. She’d have to do whatever he wanted, anything, whatever he told her to do, or he could just smear her across the wall, yeah, she was his, and she better realize that, or she’d be sorry, he’d make her sorry.

  Then he saw the girl beside her, a pretty little girl, only ten or twelve, and she excited him even more. He could have her first, and then the older one, have them any which way he wanted them, make them do things, all sorts of things, and then hurt them, that was his right, they couldn’t deny him, not him, because all the power was in his hands now, he had seen the moonhawk three times.

  He pushed through the open door, into the room, keeping the gun in the woman’s belly, and she backed up to accommodate him, pulling the girl with her. Booker was behind them, a startled expression on his face. Tommy Shaddack said, “Drop your gun and back away from it, or I’ll make raspberry jelly out of this bitch, I swear I will, you can’t move fast enough to stop me.”

  Booker hesitated.

  “Drop it!” Tommy Shaddack insisted.

  The agent let go of the revolver and sidestepped away from it.

  Keeping the muzzle of the Remington hard against the woman’s belly, he made her edge around until she could reach the light switch and click on the fluorescents. The room leaped out of shadows.

  “Okay, now, all of you,” Tommy Shaddack said, “sit down on those three stools, by that lab bench, yeah, there, and don’t do anything funny.”

  He stepped back from the woman and covered them all with the shotgun. They looked scared, and that made him laugh.

  Tommy was getting excited now, really excited, because he had decided he would kill Booker in front of the woman and the girl, not swift and clean but slowly, the first shot in the legs, let him lie on the floor and wriggle a while, the second shot in the gut but not from such a close range that it finished him instantly, make him hurt, make the woman and the girl watch, show them what a customer they had in Tommy Shaddack, what a damned tough customer, make them grateful for being spared, so grateful they’d get on their knees and let him do things to them, do all the things he had wanted to do for thirty years but which he had denied himself, let off thirty years of steam right here, right now, t
onight… .

  29

  Beyond the house, filtering into the attic through vents in the eaves, came eerie howling, point and counterpoint, first solo and then chorus. It sounded as if the gates of hell had been thrown open, letting denizens of the pit pour forth into Moonlight Cove.

  Harry worried about Sam, Tessa, and Chrissie.

  Below him, the unseen conversion team locked the collapsible ladder in place. One of them began to climb into the attic.

  Harry wondered what they would look like. Would they be just ordinary men—old Doc Fitz with a syringe and a couple of deputies to assist him? Or would they be Boogeymen? Or some of the machine-men Sam had talked about?

  The first one ascended through the open trap. It was Dr. Worthy, the town’s youngest physician.

  Harry considered shooting him while he was still on the ladder. But he hadn’t fired a gun in twenty years, and he didn’t want to waste his limited ammunition. Better to wait for a closer shot.

  Worthy didn’t have a flashlight. Didn’t seem to need one. He looked straight toward the darkest corner, where Harry was propped, and said, “How did you know we were coming, Harry?”

  “Cripple’s intuition,” Harry said sarcastically.

  Along the center of the attic, there was plenty of headroom to allow Worthy to walk upright. He rose from a crouch as he came out from under the sloping rafters near the trap, and when he had taken four steps forward, Harry fired twice at him.

  The first shot missed, but the second hit low in the chest.

  Worthy was flung backward, went down hard on the bare boards of the attic floor. He lay there for a moment, twitching, then sat up, coughed once, and got to his feet.

  Blood glistened all over the front of his torn white shirt. He had been hit hard, yet he had recovered in seconds.

  Harry remembered what Sam had said about how the Coltranes had refused to stay dead. Go for the data processor.

  He aimed for Worthy’s head and fired twice again, but at that distance—

  about twenty-five feet—and at that angle, shooting up from the floor, he couldn’t hit anything. He hesitated with only four rounds left in the pistol’s clip.

  Another man was climbing through the trap.

  Harry shot at him, trying to drive him back down.

  He came on, unperturbed.

  Three rounds in the pistol.

  Keeping his distance, Dr. Worthy said, “Harry, we’re not here to harm you. I don’t know what you’ve heard or how you’ve heard about the project, but it isn’t a bad thing. …”

  His voice trailed off, and he cocked his head as if to listen to the un-human cries that filled the night outside. A peculiar look of longing, visible even in