Mr. Murder. By: Dean R. Koontz

Like the sulfur powder and the penicillin I’ve been treating you with.

He seems to know where to get whatever he needs. He’s some character.”

“I don’t even really know him,” Marty said, reaching down for another

can of apple juice, “but I love him like a brother.”

He popped open the can and drank at least one-third of it. He said, “I

like his hat too.”

Paige laughed out of all proportion to the feeble humor of the remark,

but Marty laughed with her.

“God,” she said, driving north through gray, unpopulated land, “I love

you, Marty. If you had died, I’d never have forgiven you.”

That night they took two rooms at the motel in Fallon, using a false

name and paying cash in advance. They had a dinner of pizza and Pepsi

in the motel. Marty was starved, but two pieces of pizza filled him.

While they ate, they played a game of Look Who’s the Monkey Now, in

which the purpose was to think of all the words for foods that began

with the letter P. The girls weren’t in their best playing form.

In fact, they were so subdued that Marty worried about them.

Maybe they were just tired. After dinner, in spite of their nap in the

car, Charlotte and Emily were asleep within seconds of putting heads to

pillows.

They left the door open between the adjoining rooms. Karl Clocker had

provided Paige with an Uzi submachine gun which had been illegally

converted for full automatic fire. They kept it on the nightstand

within easy reach.

Paige and Marty shared a bed. She stretched out to his right, so she

could hold his good hand.

As they talked, he discovered that she had learned the answer to the

question he’d never had a chance to ask Karl Clocker, Why did it look

like me?

One of the most powerful men in the Network, primary owner of a media

empire, had lost a four-year-old son to cancer. As the boy lay dying at

Cedars-Sinai Hospital, five years ago, blood and bone marrow samples had

been taken from him because it was his father’s emotional decision that

the Alpha-series clones should be developed from his lost boy’s genetic

material. If functional clones could be made a reality, they would be a

lasting monument to his son.

“Jesus, that’s sick,” Marty said. “What father would think a race of

genetically engineered killers might be a suitable memorial? God

Almighty.”

“God had nothing to do with it,” Paige said.

The Network representative assigned to obtain those blood and marrow

samples from the lab had gotten confused and wound up with Marty’s

samples instead, which had been taken to determine whether he would be a

suitable donor for Charlotte if she proved in need of a transplant.

“And they want to rule the world,” Marty said, amazed. He was still far

from recuperated and in need of more sleep, but he had to know one more

thing before he drifted off. “If they only started engineering Alfie

five years ago . . . how can he be a grown man?”

Paige said, “According to Clocker, they ‘improved’ on the basic human

design in several ways.”

They had given Alfie an unusual metabolism and tremendously accelerated

healing power. They also engineered his phenomenally rapid maturation

with human growth hormone and raised him from fetus to thirtyish adult

with nonstop intravenous feeding and electrically stimulated muscle

development over a period of less than two years.

“Like a damned hydroponic vegetable or something,” she said.

“Dear Jesus,” Marty said, and glanced at the nightstand to make sure the

Uzi was there. “Didn’t they have a few doubts when this clone didn’t

resemble the boy?”

“For one thing, the boy had been wasted by cancer between the ages of

two and four. They didn’t know what he might have looked like if he’d

been healthy during those years. And besides, they’d edited the genetic

material so extensively they couldn’t be sure the Alpha generation would

resemble the boy all that much anyway.

“He was taught language, mathematics, and other things largely by

sophisticated subliminal input while he was asleep and growing.”

She had more to tell him, but her voice faded gradually as he

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