The girl nodded.
“I mean, they changed before my eyes, grew these probes, tried to spear me. Yet with this incredible control of their bodies, of their physical substance, all they apparently wanted to make of themselves was … something out of a bad dream.”
The wound on his abdomen was the least of the three. As on his forehead, the skin was stripped away in a dime-sized circle, though the probe that had struck him there seemed to have been meant to burn rather than cut its way into him. His flesh was scorched, and the wound itself was pretty much cauterized.
From his wheelchair Harry said, “Sam, do you think they’re really people who control themselves, who have chosen to become machinelike, or are they people who’ve somehow been taken over by machines, against their will?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “It could be either, I guess.”
“But how could they be taken over, how could this happen, how could such a change in the human body be accomplished? And how does what’s happened to the Coltranes tie in with the Boogeymen?”
“Damned if I know,” Sam said. “Somehow it’s all related to New Wave. Got to be. And none of us here knows anything much about the cutting edge of that kind of technology, so we don’t even have the basic knowledge required to speculate intelligently. It might as well be magic to us, supernatural. The only way we’ll ever really understand what’s happened is to get help from outside, quarantine Moonlight Cove, seize New Wave’s labs and records, and reconstruct it the way fire marshals reconstruct the history of a fire from what they sift out of the ashes.”
“Ashes?” Tessa asked as Sam stood up and as she helped him into his shirt. “This talk about fires and ashes—and other things you’ve said—make it sound as if you think whatever’s in Moonlight Cove is building real fast toward an explosion or something.”
“It is,” he said.
At first he tried to button his shirt with one hand, but then he allowed Tessa to do it for him. She noticed that his skin was still cold and that his shivers were not subsiding with time.
He said, “All these murders they’ve got to cover up, these things that stalk the night … there’s a sense that a collapse has begun, that whatever they tried to do here isn’t turning out like they expected, and that the collapse is accelerating.” He was breathing too quickly, too shallowly. He paused, took a deeper breath. “What I saw in the Coltranes’ house … that didn’t look like anything anyone could have planned, not something you’d want to do to people or that they’d want for themselves. It looked like an experiment out of control, biology run amok, reality turned inside out, and I swear to God that if those kinds of secrets are hidden in the houses of this town, then the whole project has to be collapsing on New Wave right now, coming down fast and hard on their heads, whether they want to admit it or not. It’s all blowing up now, right now, one hell of an explosion, and we’re in the middle of it.”
From the moment he’d stumbled through the kitchen door, dripping rain and blood, throughout the time Tessa had cleaned and bandaged his wounds, she had noticed something that frightened her more than his paleness and shivering. He kept touching them. He had embraced Tessa in the kitchen when she gasped at the sight of the bleeding hole in his forehead; he’d held her and leaned against her and assured her that he was okay. Primarily he seemed to be reassuring himself that she and Harry and Chrissie were okay, as if he had expected to come back and find them … changed. He hugged Chrissie, too, as if she were his own daughter, and he said, “It’ll be all right, everything’ll be all right,” when he saw how frightened she was. Harry held out a hand in concern, and Sam grasped it and was reluctant to let go. In the bathroom, while Tessa dressed his wounds, he had repeatedly touched her hands, her arms, and had once put a hand against her cheek as if wondering at the softness and warmth of her skin. He reached out to touch Chrissie, too, where she stood inside the bathroom door, patting her shoulder, holding her hand for a moment and giving it a reassuring squeeze. Until now he had not been a toucher. He had been reserved, self-contained, cool, even distant. But during the quarter of an hour he’d spent in the Coltrane house, he had been so profoundly shaken by what he had seen that his shell of self-imposed isolation had cracked wide open; he had come to want and need the human contact that, only a short while ago, he had not even ranked as desirable as good Mexican food, Guinness Stout, and Goldie Hawn films.