Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

A new cry arose as the others faded, and it was closer than any that had come before it. Too close.

“Let’s get inside,” Sam said urgently.

Chrissie was beginning to admit to herself that she might not make a good Andre Norton heroine, after all. She was scared, cold, grainy-eyed with exhaustion, starting to feel sorry for herself, and hungry again. She was sick and tired of adventure. She yearned for warm rooms and lazy days with good books and trips to movie theaters and wedges of double-fudge cake. By this time a true adventure-story heroine would have worked out a series of brilliant stratagems that would have brought the beasts in Moonlight Cove to ruin, would have found a way to turn the robot-people into harmless car-washing machines, and would be well on her way to being crowned princess of the kingdom by acclamation of the respectful and grateful citizenry.

They hurried to the end of the field, rounded the bleachers, and crossed the deserted parking lot to the back of the school.

Nothing attacked them.

Thank you, God. Your friend, Chrissie.

Something howled again.

Sometimes even God seemed to have a perverse streak.

There were six doors at different places along the back of the school. They moved from one to another, as Sam tried them all and examined the locks in the hand-hooded beam of his flashlight. He apparently couldn’t pick any of them, which disappointed her, because she’d imagined FBI men were so well trained that in an emergency they could open a bank vault with spit and a hairpin.

He also tried a few windows and spent what seemed a long time peering through the panes with his flashlight. He was examining not the rooms beyond but the inner sills and frames of the windows.

At the last door—which was the only one that had glass in the top of it, the others being blank rectangles of metal—Sam clicked off the flashlight, looked solemnly at Tessa, and spoke to her in a low voice. “I don’t think there’s an alarm system here. Could be wrong. But there’s no alarm tape on the glass and, as far as I can see, no hard-wired contacts along the frames or at the window latches.”

“Are those the only two kinds of alarms they might have?” Tessa whispered.

“Well, there’re motion-detection systems, either employing sonic transmitters or electric eyes. But they’d be too elaborate for just a school, and probably too sensitive for a building like this.”

“So now what?”

“Now I break a window.”

Chrissie expected him to withdraw a roll of masking tape from a pocket of his coat and tape one of the panes to soften the sound of shattering glass and to prevent the shards from falling noisily to the floor inside. That was how they usually did it in books. But he just turned sideways to the door, drew his arm forward, then rammed it back and drove his elbow through the eight-inch-square pane in the lower-right corner of the window grid. Glass broke and clattered to the floor with an awful racket. Maybe he had forgotten to bring his tape.

He reached through the empty pane, felt for the locks, disengaged them, and went inside first. Chrissie followed him, trying not to step on the broken glass.

Sam switched on the flashlight. He didn’t hood it quite so much as he had done outside, though he was obviously trying to keep the backwash of the beam off the windows.

They were in a long hallway. It was full of the cedar-pine smell that came from the crumbly green disinfectant and dust-attractor that for years the janitors had sprinkled on the floors and then swept up, until the tiles and walls had become impregnated with the scent. The aroma was familiar to her from Thomas Jefferson Elementary, and she was disappointed to find it here. She had thought of high school as a special, mysterious place, but how special or mysterious could it be if they used the same disinfectant as at the grade school?

Tessa quietly closed the outside door behind them.

They stood listening for a moment.

The school was silent.

They moved down the hall, looking into classrooms and lavatories and supply closets on both sides, searching for the computer lab. In a hundred and fifty feet they reached a junction with another hall. They stood in the intersection for a moment, heads cocked, listening again.