Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

* * *

For a while Loman was disoriented.

When a sense of time and place returned to him, he first glanced at the door, realizing that it was ajar. Denny could have seen them if he’d come down the hall—surely had heard them but Loman couldn’t make himself care whether they had been seen or heard. Shame and modesty were two more casualties of the Change.

As he became fully oriented to the world around him, fear slipped into his heart, and he quickly touched himself—his face, arms, chest, legs—to be sure that he was in no way less than he ought to be. In the midst of sex, the wildness in him grew, and sometimes he thought that approaching orgasm he did change, regress, if only slightly. But upon regaining awareness, he never found evidence of backsliding.

He was, however, sticky with blood.

He switched on the bedside lamp.

“Turn it off,” Grace said at once.

But he was not satisfied with even his enhanced night vision. He wanted to look at her closely to determine if she was in any way … different.

She had not regressed. Or, if she had regressed, she had already returned to the higher form. Her body was smeared with blood, and a few welts showed on her flesh, where he had gouged her and where she had not finished healing.

He turned the light off and sat on the edge of the bed.

Because the recuperative powers of their bodies had been vastly improved by the Change, superficial cuts and scrapes healed in only minutes; you could actually watch your flesh knit its wounds. They were impervious to disease now, their immune systems too aggressive for the most infectious virus or bacterium to survive long enough to replicate. Shaddack believed that their life spans would prove to be of great duration, as well, perhaps hundreds of years.

They could be killed, of course, but only by a wound that tore and stopped the heart or shattered the brain or destroyed their lungs and prevented a flow of oxygen to the blood. If a vein or artery was severed, the blood supply was drastically reduced to that vessel for the few minutes required to heal it. If a vital organ other than the heart or lungs or brain was damaged, the body could limp along for hours while accelerated repairs were under way. They were not yet as fully reliable as machines, for machines could not die; with the right spare parts, a machine could be rebuilt even from rubble and could work again; but they were closer to that degree of corporeal endurance than anyone outside Moonlight Cove would have believed.

To live for hundreds of years …

Sometimes Loman brooded about that.

To live for hundreds of years, knowing only fear and physical sensation …

He rose from the bed, went into the adjacent bathroom, and took a quick shower to sluice off the blood.

He could not meet his eyes in the bathroom mirror.

In the bedroom again, without turning on a light, he pulled on a fresh uniform that he took from his closet.

Grace was still lying on the bed.

She said, “I wish I could sleep.”

He sensed that she was still crying silently.

When he left the room, he closed the door behind him.

49

They gathered in the kitchen, which Tessa liked because some of her happiest memories of childhood and adolescence involved family conferences and impromptu chats in the kitchen of their house in San Diego. The kitchen was the heart of a home and in a way the heart of a family. Somehow the worst problems became insignificant when you discussed them in a warm kitchen redolent of coffee and hot cocoa, nibbling on home-baked cake or pastry. In a kitchen she felt secure.

Harry Talbot’s kitchen was large, for it had been remodeled to suit a man in a wheelchair, with lots of clearance around the central cooking island, which was built low—as were the counters along the walls—to be accessible from a sitting position. Otherwise it was a kitchen like many others: cabinets painted a pleasant creamy shade; pale yellow ceramic tile; a quietly purring refrigerator. The Levolor blinds at the windows were electrically operated by a button on one of the counters, and Harry put them down.