Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

“But if you get caught because you didn’t wait for nightfall, then the chances of saving anyone become a hell of a lot Slimmer.”

“The lady has a point,” Harry said.

“A good one,” Chrissie said. “Just because they’re not aliens doesn’t mean they’re going to be any easier to deal with.”

Because even the working telephones would allow a caller to dial only approved numbers within town, they’d given up on hope. But Sam had realized that any PC connected by modem with the supercomputer at New Wave—Harry said they called it Sun—might provide a way out of town, an electronic high-way on which they could circumvent the current restrictions on the phone lines and the roadblocks.

As Sam had noted last night while using the VDT in the police car, Sun maintained direct contacts with scores of other computers—including several FBI data banks, both those approved for wide access and those supposedly sealed to all but bureau agents. If he could sit at a VDT, link in to Sun, and through Sun link to a Bureau computer, then he could transmit a call for help that would appear on Bureau computer screens and spew out in hard copy from the laser printers in their offices.

They were assuming, of course, that the restrictions on outside contact that applied to all other phone lines in town did not apply to the lines by which Sun maintained its linkages with the broader world. If Sun’s routes out of Moonlight Cove were clipped off, too, they were utterly without hope.

Understandably, Sam was reluctant to enter the houses of the people who worked for New Wave, afraid that he would encounter more people like the Coltranes. That left only two ways to attain access to a PC that could be linked to Sun.

First, he could try to get into a black-and-white and use one of their mobile terminals, as he’d done last night. But they were alert to his presence now, making it harder to sneak into an unused patrol car. Furthermore, all of the cars were probably now in use, as the cops searched diligently for him and no doubt, for Tessa as well. And even if a cruiser were parked behind the municipal building, that area was at the moment, bound to be a lot busier than the last time he had been there.

Second, they could use the computers at the high school on Roshmore Way. New Wave had donated them not out of a normal concern for the educational quality of local schools but as more means of tying the community to it. Sam believed, and Tessa agreed, that the school’s terminals probably had the capacity to link with Sun.

But Moonlight Cove Central, as the combination junior-senior high school was called, stood on the west side of Roshmore Way, two blocks west of Harry’s house and a full block south. In ordinary times it was a pleasant five-minute walk. But with the streets under surveillance and every house potentially a watchtower occupied by enemies, reaching Central high School now without being seen was easy as crossing a minefield.

“Besides,” Chrissie said, “they’re still in class at Central. You couldn’t just walk in there and use a computer.”

“Especially,” Tessa said, “since you can figure the teachers were among the first to be converted.”

“What time are classes over?” Sam asked.

“Well, at Thomas Jefferson we get out at three o’clock, but they go an extra half hour at Central.”

“Three-thirty,” Sam said.

Checking his watch, Harry said, “Forty-seven minutes yet. But even then, there’ll be after-school activities, won’t there?”

“Sure,” Chrissie said. “Band, probably football practice, a few other clubs that don’t meet during regular activity period.”

“What time would all that be done with?”

“I know band practice is from a quarter to four till a quarter to five,” Chrissie said, “because I’m friends with a kid one year older than me who’s in the band. I play a clarinet. I want to be in the band, too, next year. If there is a band. If there is a next year.”

“So, say by five o’clock the place is cleared out.”

“Football practice runs later than that.”