Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

“Most logical thing for her to do,” Amberlay said, “is come straight to us—to the police. She’ll walk right into our arms. Maybe,” Loman said, unconvinced. He began to pick through the rubble.

“Help me find her purse. With them bashing down the door, she’d have gone out the window without pausing to grab her purse.”

Trott found it wedged between the bed and one of the nightstands.

Loman emptied the contents onto the mattress. He snatched up the wallet, flipped through the plastic windows full of credit cards and photographs, until he found her driver’s license. According to the license data, she was five-four, one hundred and four pounds, blond, blue-eyed. Loman held up the ID so Trott and Amberlay could see the photograph.

“She’s a looker,” Amberlay said.

“I’d like to get a bite of that,” Trott said.

His officer’s choice of words gave Loman a chill. He couldn’t help wondering whether Trott meant “bite” as a euphemism for sex or whether he was expressing a very real subconscious desire to savage the woman as the regressives had torn apart the couple from Portland.

“We know what she looks like,” Loman said. “That helps.”

Trott’s hard, sharp features were inadequate for the expression of gentler emotions like affection and delight, but they perfectly conveyed the animal hunger and urge to violence that seethed deep within him.

“You want us to bring her in?”

“Yes. She doesn’t know anything, really, but on the other hand she knows too much. She knows the couple down the hall were killed, and she probably saw a regressive.”

“Maybe the regressives followed her through the window and got her,” Amberlay suggested.

“We might find her body somewhere outside, on the grounds of the lodge.”

“Could be,” Loman said.

“But if not, we have to find her and bring her in. You called Callan?”

“Yeah,” Amberlay said.

“We’ve got to get this place cleaned up,” Loman said.

“We’ve got to keep a lid on until midnight, until everyone in town’s been put through the Change. Then, when Moonlight Cove’s secure, we can concentrate on finding the regressives and eliminating them.”

Trott and Amberlay met Loman’s eyes, then looked at each other. In the glances they exchanged, Loman saw the dark knowledge that they all were potential regressives, that they, too, felt the call toward that unburdened, primitive state. It was an awareness of which none of them dared speak, for to give it voice was to admit that Moonhawk was a deeply flawed project and that they might all be damned.

41

Mike Peyser heard the dial tone and fumbled with the buttons, which were too small and closely set for his long, tine-like fingers. Abruptly he realized that he could not call Shaddack, dared not call Shaddack, though they had known each other for more than twenty years, since their days together at Stanford, could not call Shaddack even though it was Shaddack who had made him what he was, because Shaddack would consider him an outlaw now, a regressive, and Shaddack would have him restrained in a laboratory and either treat him with all the tenderness that a vivisectionist bestowed upon a white rat or destroy him because of the threat he posed to the ongoing conversion of Moonlight Cove. Peyser shrieked in frustration. He tore the telephone out of the wall and threw it across the bedroom, where it hit the dresser mirror, shattering the glass.

His sudden perception of Shaddack as a powerful enemy rather than a friend and mentor was the last entirely clear and rational thought that Peyser had for a while. His fear was a trapdoor that opened under him, casting him down into the darkness of the primeval mind that he had unleashed for the pleasure of a night hunt. He moved back and forth through the house, sometimes in a frenzy, sometimes in a sullen slouch, not sure why he was alternately excited, depressed, or smoldering with savage needs, driven more by feelings than intellect.

He relieved himself in a corner of the living room, sniffed his own urine, then went into the kitchen in search of more food. Now and then his mind cleared, and he tried to call his body back to its more civilized form, but when his tissues would not respond to his will, he cycled down into the darkness of animal thought again. Several times he was clearheaded enough to appreciate the irony of having been reduced to savagery by a process—the Change—meant to elevate him to superhuman status, but that line of thought was too bleak to be endured, and a new descent into the savage mind was almost welcome.