Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

Penniworth slowly turned his head to face Loman.

In his eyeless sockets, crackling white fingers of electricity wiggled and jittered ceaselessly.

Shaddack had said that the New People’s freedom from emotion had given them the ability to make far greater use of their innate brain power, even to the extent of exerting mental control over the form and function of matter. Their consciousness now dictated their form; to escape a world in which they were not permitted emotion, they could become whatever they chose—though they could not return to the Old People they had been. Evidently life as a cyborg was free of angst, for Penniworth had sought release from fear and longing—perhaps some kind of obliteration, as well—in this monstrous incarnation.

But what did he feel now? What purpose did he have? And did he remain in that altered state because he truly preferred it? Or was he like Peyser—trapped either for physical reasons or because an aberrant aspect of his own psychology would not permit him to reassume the human form to which, otherwise, he desired to return?

Loman reached for the revolver on the seat beside him.

A segmented cable burst from the driver’s door of Penniworth’s car, without shredding metal, extruding as if a part of the door had melted and re-formed to produce it—except that it looked at least semiorganic. The probe struck Loman’s side window with a snap.

The revolver eluded Loman’s sweaty hand, for he could not take his eyes off the probe to look for the gun.

The glass did not crack, but a quarter-size patch bubbled and melted in an instant, and the probe weaved into the car, straight at Loman’s face. It had a fleshy sucker mouth, like an eel, but the tiny, sharply pointed teeth within it looked like steel.

He ducked his head, forgot about the revolver, and tramped the accelerator to the floor. The Chevy almost seemed to rear back for a fraction of a second; then with a surge of power that pressed Loman into the seat, it shot forward, south on Juniper.

For a moment the probe between the cars stretched to maintain contact, brushed the bridge of Loman’s nose—and abruptly was gone, reeled back into the vehicle from which it had come.

He drove fast all the way to the end of Juniper before slowing down to make a turn. The wind of his passage whistled at the hole that the probe had melted in his window.

Loman’s worst fear seemed to be unfolding. Those New People who didn’t choose regression were going to transform themselves—or be transformed at the demand of Shaddack—into hellish hybrids of man and machine.

Find Shaddack. Murder the maker and release the anguished monsters he had made.

9

Preceded by Sam and followed by Tessa, Chrissie squelched through the mushy turf of the athletic field. In places the soggy grass gave way to gluey mud, which pulled noisily at her shoes, and she thought she sounded like a sort of goofy alien herself, plodding along on big, sucker-equipped feet. Then it occurred to her that in a way she was an alien in Moonlight Cove tonight, a different sort of creature from what the majority of the citizens had become.

They were two-thirds of the way across the field when they were halted by a shrill cry that split the night as cleanly as a sharp ax would split a dry cord of wood. That unhuman voice rose and fell and rose again, savage and uncanny but familiar, the call of one of those beasts that she’d thought were invading aliens. Though the rain had stopped, the air was laden with moisture, and in that humidity, the unearthly shriek carried well, like the bell-clear notes of a distant trumpet.

Worse, the call at once was answered by the beast’s excited kin. At least half a dozen equally chilling shrieks arose from perhaps as far south as Paddock Lane and as far north as Holliwell Road, from the high hills in the east end of town and from the beach-facing bluffs only a couple of blocks to the west.

All of a sudden Chrissie longed for the cold, lightless culvert churning with waist-deep water so filthy that it might have come from the devil’s own bathtub. This open ground seemed wildly dangerous by comparison.