Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

With a shudder of revulsion, Sam squeezed the trigger. The blast was thunderous in that confined space.

Coltrane’s head snapped back with the impact of the point-blank shot, then dropped forward, chin on his chest, smoking and bleeding.

The repulsive cables continued to swell and shrink and swell as if with the rhythmic passage of inner fluid.

Sam sensed that the man was not entirely dead. He turned the gun on the computer screen.

One of Coltrane’s skeletal hands released the cable around which it had been firmly clamped. With a click-snick-snack of bare bones, it whipped up and seized Sam’s wrist.

Sam cried out.

The room filled with electronic clicks and snaps and beeps and warblings.

The hellish hand held him fast and with such tremendous strength that the bony fingers pinched his flesh, then began to cut through it. He felt warm blood trickle down his arm, under his shirt sleeve. With a flash of panic he realized that the unhuman power of the man-machine was ultimately sufficient to crush his wrist and leave him crippled. At best his hand would swiftly go numb from lack of circulation, and the revolver would drop from his grasp.

Coltrane was struggling to raise his half-shattered head.

Sam thought of his mother in the wreckage of the car, face torn open, grinning at him, grinning, silent and unmoving but, grinning… .

Frantically he kicked at Coltrane’s chair, hoping to send it rolling and spinning away. The wheels had been locked.

The bony hand squeezed tighter, and Sam screamed. His vision blurred.

Still, he saw that Coltrane’s head was coming up slowly. slowly.

Jesus, I don’t want to see that ruined face!

With his right foot, putting everything he had into the kick, Sam struck once, twice, three times at the cables between Coltrane and the computer. They tore loose from Coltrane, popping out of his flesh with a hideous sound, and the man slumped in, his chair. Simultaneously the skeletal hand opened and fell away from Sam’s wrist. With a cold rattle it struck the hard plastic mat under the chair.

Bass electronic pulses thumped like soft drumbeats and echoed off the walls, while under them a thin bleat wavered continuously through three notes.

Gasping and half in shock, Sam clamped his left hand around his bleeding wrist, as if that would still the stinging pain.

Something brushed against his leg.

He looked down and saw the semiorganic cables, like pale headless snakes, still attached to the computer and full of malevolent life. They seemed to have grown, as well, until they were twice the length they had been when linking Coltrane to the machine. One snared his left ankle, and the other curled sinuously around his right calf.

He tried to tear loose.

They held him fast.

They twined up his legs.

Instinctively he knew they were seeking bare flesh on the upper half of his body, and that upon contact they would burrow into him and make him part of the system.

He was still holding the revolver in his blood-slicked right hand. He aimed at the screen.

Data was no longer flowing across that amber field. Instead, Coltrane’s face looked out from the display. His eyes had been restored, and it seemed as if he could see Sam, for he was looking directly at him and speaking to him:

“… need … need … want, need … .”

Without understanding a damned thing about it, Sam knew Coltrane was still alive. He had not died—or at least not all of him had perished—with his body. He was there, in the machine somehow.

As if to confirm that insight, Coltrane influenced the glass screen of the VDT to relinquish the convex plane of its surface and adapt to the contours of his face. The glass became as flexible as gelatin, thrusting outward, as if Coltrane actually existed within the machine, physically, and was now pushing his face Out of it.

This was impossible. Yet it was happening. Harley Coltrane seemed to be controlling matter with the power of his mind, a mind not even any longer linked to a human body.

Sam was mesmerized by fear, frozen, paralyzed. His finger lay immovable against the trigger.