Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

We hate what the regressives have become and what they do, Loman thought, but in some sick way we’re also envious of them, of their ultimate freedom.

Something within him—and, he suspected, in all of the New People—cried out to join the regressives. As at the Foster place, Loman felt the urge to employ his newfound bodily control not to elevate himself, as Shaddack had intended, but to devolve into a wild state. He yearned to descend to a level of consciousness in which thoughts of the purpose and meaning of life would not trouble him, in which intellectual challenge would be nonexistent, in which he would be a creature whose existence was defined almost entirely by sensation, in which every decision was made solely on the basis of what would give him pleasure, a condition untroubled by complex thought. Oh, God, to be freed from the burdens of civilization and higher intelligence!

Sholnick made a low sound in the back of his throat.

Loman looked up from the dead man.

In Sholnick’s brown eyes a wild light burned.

Am I as pale as he? Loman wondered. As sunken-eyed and strange?

For a moment Sholnick met the chiefs gaze, then looked away as if he had been caught in a shameful act.

Loman’s heart was pounding.

Sholnick went to the window. He stared out at the lightless sea. His hands were fisted at his sides.

Loman was trembling.

The smell, darkly sweet. The smell of the hunt, the kill.

He turned away from the corpse and walked out of the room, into the hallway, where the sight of the dead woman—half naked, gouged, lacerated—was no relief. Bob Trott, one of several recent additions to the force when it expanded to twelve men last week, stood over the battered body. He was a big man, four inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than Loman, with a face of hard planes and chiseled edges. He looked down at the cadaver with a faint, unholy smile.

Flushed, his vision beginning to blur, his eyes smarting in the harsh fluorescent glare, Loman spoke sharply “Trott, come with me.” He set off along the hall to the other room that had been broken into. With evident reluctance, Trott finally followed him.

By the time Loman reached the shattered door of that unit, Paul Amberlay, another of his officers, appeared at the head of the north stairs, returning from the motel office where Loman had sent him to check the register.

“The couple in room twenty-four were named Jenks, Sarah and Charles,” Amberlay reported. He was twenty-five, lean and sinewy, intelligent. Perhaps because the young officer’s face was slightly pointed, with deep-set eyes, he had always reminded Loman of a fox.

“They’re from Portland.”

“And in thirty-six here?”

“Tessa Lockland from San Diego.”

Loman blinked.

“Lockland?”

Amberlay spelled it.

“When did she check in?”

“Just tonight.”

“The minister’s widow, Janice Capshaw,” Loman said.

“Her maiden name was Lockland. I had to deal with her mother by phone, and she was in San Diego. Persistent old broad. A million questions. Had some trouble getting her to consent to cremation. She said her other daughter was out of the country, somewhere really remote, couldn’t be reached quickly, but would come around within a month to empty the house and settle Mrs. Capshaw’s affairs. So this is her, I guess.”

Loman led them into Tessa Lockland’s room, two doors down from unit forty, in which Booker was registered. Wind huffed at the open window. The place was littered with broken furniture, torn bedding, and the glass from a shattered TV set, but unmarked by blood. Earlier they had checked the room for a body and found none; the open window indicated that the occupant fled before the regressives had managed to smash through the door.

“So Booker’s out there,” Loman said, “and we’ve got to assume he saw the regressives or heard the killing. He knows something’s wrong here. He doesn’t understand it, but he knows enough … too much.”

“You can bet he’s busting his ass to get a call out to the damn Bureau,” Trott said.

Loman agreed.

“And now we’ve also got this Lockland bitch, and she’s got to be thinking her sister never committed suicide, that she was killed by the same things that killed the couple from Portland—”