Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

Loman’s fear of taking action was at last outweighed by his fear of not acting. He stepped forward, put the muzzle of the revolver against the boy’s right temple, and fired two rounds.

17

Crouching on the back porch, leaning against the wall of the house, rising up now and then to look cautiously through the window at the three people gathered around the kitchen table, Chrissie grew slowly more confident that they could be trusted. Above the dull roar and sizzle of the rain, through the closed window, she could hear only snatches of their conversation. After a while, however, she determined that they knew something was terribly wrong in Moonlight Cove. The two strangers seemed to be hiding out in Mr. Talbot’s house and were on the run as much as she was. Apparently they were working on a plan to get help from authorities outside of town.

She decided against knocking on the door. It was solid wood, with no panes in the upper half, so they would not be able to see who was knocking. She had heard enough to know they were all tense, maybe not as completely frazzle-nerved as she was her self, but definitely on edge. An unexpected knock at the door would give them all massive heart attacks—or maybe they’d pick up guns and blast the door to smithereens, and her with it.

Instead she rose up in plain sight and rapped on the window.

Mr. Talbot jerked his head in surprise and pointed, but even as he was pointing, the other man and the woman flew to their feet with the suddenness of marionettes snapped upright on strings. Moose barked once, twice. The three people—and the dog—stared in surprise at Chrissie. From the expression on their faces, she might have been not a bedraggled eleven-year-old girl but a chainsaw-wielding maniac wearing a leather hood to conceal a deformed face.

She supposed that right now, in alien-infested Moonlight Cove, even a pathetic, rain-soaked, exhausted little girl could be an object of terror to those who didn’t know that she was still human. In hope of allaying their fear, she spoke through the windowpane:

“Help me. Please, help me.”

18

The machine screamed. Its skull shattered under the impact of the two slugs, and it was blown out of its seat, toppling to the floor of the bedroom and pulling the chair with it. The elongated fingers tore loose of the computer on the desk. The segmented wormlike probe snapped in two, halfway between the computer and the forehead from which it had sprung. The thing lay on the floor, twitching, spasming.

Loman had to think of it as a machine. He could not think of it as his son. That was too terrifying.

The face was misshapen, wrenched into an asymmetrical real mask by the impact of the bullets as they’d torn through the cranium.

The silvery eyes had gone black. Now it appeared as if puddles of oil, not mercury, were pooled in the sockets in the thing’s’ skull.

Between plates of shattered bone, Loman saw not merely the gray matter he had expected but what appeared to be coiled wire, glinting shards that looked almost ceramic, odd geometrical shapes. The blood that seeped from the wounds was accompanied by wisps of blue smoke.

Still, the machine screamed.

The electronic shrieks no longer came from the boy-thing but from the computer on the desk. Those sounds were so bizarre that they were as out of place in the machine half of the organism as they had been in the boy half.

Loman realized these were not entirely electronic walls. They also had a tonal quality and character that were unnervingly “human.”

The waves of data ceased flowing across the screen. One word was repeated hundreds of times, filling line after line on the display:

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO …

He suddenly knew that Denny was only half dead. The part of the boy’s mind that had inhabited his body was extinguished, but another fragment of his consciousness still lived somehow within the computer, kept alive in silicon instead of brain tissue. That part of him was screaming in this machine-cold voice.