The Dead Town Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR DEAN KOONTZ’S

  FRANKENSTEIN SERIES

  BOOK ONE: PRODIGAL SON

  “Like [an] expert plate-spinner, the [author sets] up a dizzying array of narrative viewpoints and cycle[s] through them effortlessly.… The odd juxtaposition of a police procedural with a neo-gothic, mad scientist plot gives this novel a wickedly unusual and intriguing feel.… A compelling read, with an elegant cliffhanger ending.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Koontz realizes his original concept for a cable TV effort from which he withdrew. It was TV’s loss, for, filmed utterly faithfully, Prodigal Son could be the best horror thriller and, hands down, would be the best Frankenstein movie, ever. This is a book that helps restore horror’s good name.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “This rich and complex tale is not only an ambitious project, but one of the most enjoyable monster stories in years.… This is classic Koontz at his best.”

  —Fangoria

  “This first book in a multipart saga features fascinating characters and an intriguing premise.”

  —Library Journal

  “Koontz … examine[s] society’s present milieu under the lens of traditional western mores and in so doing has presented the public with works that are perfectly entertaining and, more importantly, prescient.… In [Prodigal Son] the dimensions of the universe are in collision. We are brought to the door of chaos, anarchy, and destruction. In chilling, vivid detail, the author will keep the reader on the edge of his chair, as they begin the journey toward the ultimate blasphemy.”

  —California Literary Review

  BOOK TWO: CITY OF NIGHT

  “Relax, Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein, volume one of which, Prodigal Son, was a pulse-pounder all the way, is going to be a trilogy. But don’t expect to relax all that much. This book cooks, no second-volume doldrums anywhere in it.… Smart dialogue and cutting-edge scientific notions are the oh-so-sweet icing on this delectable thriller’s irresistible, devourable cake.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Dean Koontz gives us another major dose of all the great things we received in the first book. It is filled with sharp narration, imaginative situations, and a thrilling suspense-filled adventure.… This book is not only an insightful and an intellectual delight, but it is also a fun and exciting read.… Koontz has given a fresh new feel to an old story.”

  —Associated Content

  BOOK THREE: DEAD AND ALIVE

  “Spinning the old Mary Shelley classic on its head, Koontz has a grand time making the ‘monster’ his noble hero and the scientist the immoral, heartless villain. He does this with amazing skill. [He] understands that in a world of sinners and saints, we don’t need special effects to make monsters.”

  —INDenver Times

  BOOK FOUR: LOST SOULS

  “Koontz does his dance of … suspense, wry dialogue, sharp characterization … charming (and well-integrated) comic relief, and cultural criticism more adroitly than almost ever before.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “This successful mix of crime-inspired detective story and sf adventure is ideal for Koontz devotees as well as readers who enjoy genre crossovers.”

  —Library Journal

  “[Koontz] sets the scene, tantalizes and goads us to want more.”

  —Bookreporter.com

  ACCLAIM FOR DEAN KOONTZ

  “Of all bestselling authors, Koontz may be the most underestimated by the literary establishment. Book after book, year after year, this author climbs to the top of the charts. Why? His readers know: because he is a master storyteller and a daring writer, and because, in his novels, he gives readers bright hope in a dark world.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A modern Swift … a master satirist.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A rarity among bestselling writers, Koontz continues to pursue new ways of telling stories, never content with repeating himself. He writes of hope and love in the midst of evil in profoundly inspiring and moving ways.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Koontz is a superb plotter and wordsmith. He chronicles the hopes and fears of our time in broad strokes and fine detail, using popular fiction to explore the human condition [and] demonstrating that the real horror of life is found not in monsters, but within the human psyche.”

  —USA Today

  “Perhaps more than any other author, Koontz writes fiction perfectly suited to the mood of America: novels that acknowledge the reality and tenacity of evil but also the power of good; that celebrate the common man and woman; that at their best entertain vastly as they uplift.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “If Stephen King is the Rolling Stones of novels, Koontz is the Beatles.”

  —Playboy

  “[Koontz is] far more than a genre writer. Characters and the search for meaning, exquisitely crafted, are the soul of his work. This is why his novels will be read long after the ghosts and monsters of most genre writers have been consigned to the attic. One of the master storytellers of this or any age.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  “Dean Koontz is not just a master of our darkest dreams, but also a literary juggler.”

  —The Times (London)

  “Dean Koontz writes page-turners, middle-of-the-night-sneak-up-behind-you suspense thrillers. He touches our hearts and tingles our spines.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Dean Koontz almost occupies a genre of his own. He is a master at building suspense and holding the reader spellbound.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Demanding much of itself, Koontz’s style bleaches out clichés while showing a genius for details. He leaves his competitors buried in the dust.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  NOVELS BY DEAN KOONTZ

  What the Night Knows • Breathless • Relentless • Your Heart Belongs to Me • The Darkest Evening of the Year • The Good Guy • The Husband • Velocity • Life Expectancy • The Taking • The Face • By the Light of the Moon • One Door Away From Heaven • From the Corner of His Eye • False Memory • Seize the Night • Fear Nothing • Mr. Murder • Dragon Tears • Hideaway • Cold Fire • The Bad Place • Midnight • Lightning • Watchers • Strangers • Twilight Eyes • Darkfall • Phantoms • Whispers • The Mask • The Vision • The Face of Fear • Night Chills • Shattered • The Voice of the Night • The Servants of Twilight • The House of Thunder • The Key to Midnight • The Eyes of Darkness • Shadowfires • Winter Moon • The Door to December • Dark Rivers of the Heart • Icebound • Strange Highways • Intensity • Sole Survivor • Ticktock • The Funhouse • Demon Seed

  ODD THOMAS

  Odd Thomas • Forever Odd • Brother Odd • Odd Hours

  FRANKENSTEIN

  Prodigal Son • City of Night • Dead and Alive • Lost Souls • The Dead Town

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Bantam Books Mass Market Original

  Copyright © 2011 by Dean Koontz

  Excerpt from What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz

  copyright © 2010 by Dean Koontz

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  A signed, limited edition has been privately printed

  by Charnel House. Charnelhouse.com.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are

  registered t
rademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book contains an excerpt of the title What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz. The excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the published book.

  eISBN: 978-0-440-42330-0

  Cover art and design: Scott Biel

  Title page art from an original photograph by Margaret Young

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1

  To the memory of Gilbert K. Chesterton,

  who presented wisdom and hard truths

  in a most appealing package, changing

  countless lives with kindness and a smile

  Contents

  Cover

  Acclaim for Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein Series

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  About the Author

  Preview of What the Night Knows

  Men can always be blind to a thing so long as it is big enough. It is so difficult to see the world in which we live.

  —G. K. CHESTERTON

  chapter 1

  Owl-eyed and terrified, Warren Snyder occupied an armchair in his living room. He sat stiff, erect, his hands upturned in his lap. Now and then his right hand shook. His mouth hung slightly open, and his lower lip trembled almost continuously.

  On his left temple, a silvery bead gleamed. As rounded and as polished as the head of a decorative upholstery tack, it looked like a misplaced earring.

  The bead was in fact packed with electronics, nanocircuitry, and was rather like the head of a nail in that it was the visible portion of a needle-thin probe that had been fired into his brain by a pistol-like device. Instantaneous chemical cauterization of flesh and bone prevented bleeding.

  Warren said nothing. He had been ordered to remain silent, and he had lost the power to disobey. Except for his twitching fingers and the tremors, which were both involuntary, he did not move, not even to change position in the chair, because he had been told to be still.

  His gaze shifted back and forth between two points of interest: his wives.

  With a silver bead on her left temple and her eyes glazed like those of an amped-out meth junkie, Judy Snyder perched on the sofa, knees together, hands folded serenely in her lap. She didn’t twitch or tremble like her husband. She seemed to be without fear, perhaps because the probe had damaged her brain in ways not intended.

  The other Judy stood by one of the living-room windows that faced the street, alternately studying the snowy night and regarding her two prisoners with contempt. Their kind were the spoilers of the earth. Soon these two would be led away like a couple of sheep, to be rendered and processed. And one day, when the last human beings were eradicated, the world would be as much of a paradise as it had ever been or ever could be.

  This Judy was not a clone of the one on the sofa, nothing as disgusting as a mere meat machine, which was all that human beings were. She had been designed to pass for the original Judy, but the illusion would not hold up if her internal structure and the nature of her flesh were to be studied by physicians. She had been created in a couple of months, programmed and extruded—“born”—as an adult in the Hive, deep underground, with no tao other than her program, with no illusion that she possessed free will, with no obligation whatsoever to any higher power other than her creator, Victor Leben, whose true last name was Frankenstein, and with no life after this one to which she needed to aspire.

  Through the parted draperies, she watched a tall man crossing the snow-mantled street, hands in his coat pockets, face turned to the sky as if delighting in the weather. He approached the house on the front walkway, playfully kicking up little clouds of snow. Judy couldn’t see his face, but she assumed he must be Andrew Snyder, the nineteen-year-old son of the family. His parents expected him to return home from work about this time.

  She let the draperies fall into place and stepped out of the living room, into the foyer. When she heard Andrew’s footsteps on the porch, she opened the door.

  “Andy,” she said, “I was so worried.”

  Shucking off his boots to leave them on the porch, Andrew smiled and shook his head. “You worry too much, Mom. I’m not late.”

  “No, you’re not, but terrible things have been happening in town tonight.”

  “What terrible things?”

  As Andrew stepped into the foyer in his stocking feet, the Judy replicant closed the door, turned to him, and began to unbutton his peacoat. In the best imitation of motherly concern that she could manage, she said, “You’ll catch your death in this weather.”

  Pulling a scarf from around his neck, he asked again, “What terrible things?” He frowned with confusion and annoyance, as if her fussing with his coat must be out of character for her.

  As she opened the buttons, she maneuvered him until the doorway to the study lay beyond even his peripheral vision.

  “All the killings,” she said, “it’s horrible.”

  Intent upon her to an extent he had not been until now, Andrew said, “Killings? What killings?”

  As he spoke, his replicant glided silently out of the study, directly to him, and pulled the trigger instantly upon pressing the muzzle of the brain-probe pistol to Andrew’s left temple.

  The young man’s face wrenched with pain but for only a moment. Then his eyes widened with terror even as his face relaxed into an expression that was hardly more readable than that of someone in a coma.

  “Come with me,” said the replicant Andrew, and led his namesake into the living room. “Sit on the sofa.”

  Silvery bead shimmering like a drop of mercury on his temple, Andrew Snyder did as he was told.

  If the replicant Andrew had chosen to sit opposite the real one and squeeze the trigger again, the pistol wouldn’t have fired another skull-piercing dart. The second shot would have been a telemetric command initiating transmission from the embedded needle to a data-storage module in the replicant’s inorganic brain. In ninety minutes or less, the essence of the young man’s life experience—acquired knowledge, memories, faces, torrents of sights and sounds—would be downloaded to his impersonator.

  The replicant had no need, however, to pass for Andrew Snyder in m
ore than appearance. By this time the night after next, all the citizens of Rainbow Falls would have been killed, rendered, and processed; no one who had known the real Andrew would remain alive to be deceived by his laboratory-bred double.

  Ninety minutes devoted to memory downloading would be, in this instance, a waste of time. Replicants despised waste and distraction. Focus and efficiency were important principles. The only morality was efficiency, and the only immorality was inefficiency.

  The Community, as creatures born in the Hive called their new civilization, would soon possess a secret base from which to move outward relentlessly across the continent and then swiftly across the world. Communitarians were the embodiment of progress, the end of history, the end of all the repulsive messiness of human delusions and random events, the beginning of a planned future that, according to a precise timetable, would lead one day to the absolute perfection of all things.

  The Communitarian Andrew Snyder, already dressed for the winter night, left the living room to join the Communitarian Warren Snyder, who waited for him in the Ford Explorer that was parked in the garage. The real Warren, paralyzed in the living-room armchair, was the general manager and the program director of KBOW, the only radio station in town.

  Early in every violent revolution, those who would overthrow the current order must seize control of all means of communication in order to deny the enemy a command structure that might facilitate resistance. Everyone working the evening shift at KBOW must be controlled and then conveyed to one of the centers where the people of Rainbow Falls were being vigorously processed.

  The replicant Judy remained behind with the Judy whom she had replaced and with the two males sitting docilely in the living room. Her assignment was to wait here until a transport arrived to collect the brain-pierced trio and take them to their destruction.

  Even if the members of the Snyder family had been in control of their faculties, they would not have been acceptable company. Human beings were, after all, not merely base animals like any creatures of the fields and woods; they were by far the worst of all species in the world, so vain as to claim exceptional status among all living things, so utterly deranged as to believe that they were born with souls and were meant to live with meaning so as to fulfill a cosmic destiny, when in fact they were a cancer in the bosom of Nature.