Dead and Alive by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

body melted away, and he looked more like himself, then entirely like himself, although his brown eyes remained enormous and lidless.
    When Werner spoke next, his voice was his own: “Do you want freedom?”
    “No,” said Ripley.
    “You lie.”
    “Well,” said Ripley.
    Werner grew lids and lashes, winked one eye, and whispered, “You can be free in me.”
    “Free in you.”
    “Yes, yes!”
Werner shouted with sudden exuberance.
    “How does that work?”
    In a whisper again: “My biological structure collapsed.”
    “Yes,” said Ripley. “I had noticed.”
    “For a while, all was chaos and pain and terror.”
    “I deduced as much from all your screaming.”
    “But then I fought the chaos and took conscious control of my cellular structure.”
    “I don’t know. Conscious control. That sounds impossible.”
    Werner whispered, “It wasn’t easy,” and then shouted,
“but I had no choice! NO CHOICE!”
    “Well, all right. Maybe,” said Ripley, largely just to stop the shouting. “The Beekeeper thinks he’s going to learn a lot studying and dissecting you.”
    “Beekeeper? What Beekeeper?”
    “Oh. That’s my private name for … Father.”
    “Father is a witless ass!”
Werner shouted. Then hesmiled and resorted once more to a whisper: “You see, when my cellular structure collapsed, so did my program. He has no control of me anymore. I need not obey him. I am free. I can kill anyone I want to kill. I will kill our maker if he gives me the chance.”
    This claim, though surely not true, electrified Ripley. He had not realized until this instant how much the death of the Beekeeper would please him. That he could entertain such a thought with any degree of pleasure seemed to suggest that he, too, was in rebellion against his maker, though not as radically as Werner.
    Werner’s sly expression and conspiratorial grin made Ripley think of scheming pirates he had seen in movies that he had watched on his computer when he was supposed to be working. Suddenly he realized that secretly downloading movies onto his computer was
another
bit of rebellion. A strange excitement overcame him, an emotion he could not name.
    “Hope,” said Werner, as if reading his mind. “I see it in your eyes. For the first time—hope.”
    After consideration, Ripley decided that this thrilling new feeling might indeed be hope, though it might also be some kind of insanity prelude to a collapse of the kind Werner had gone through. Not for the first time this day, he was awash in anxiety. “What did you mean … I can be free in you?”
    Werner leaned closer and whispered even more softly: “Like Patrick is free in me.”
    “Patrick Duchaine? You tore him to pieces in Isolation Room Number Two. I was standing with the Beekeeper, watching, when you did it.”
    “That’s only how it appeared,” Werner replied. “Look at this.”
    Werner’s face shifted, changed, became a featureless blank, and then out of the pudding-like flesh formed the face of Patrick Duchaine, the replicant who had been serving the Beekeeper in the role of Father Patrick, the rector of Our Lady of Sorrows. The eyes opened, and in Patrick’s voice, the Werner thing said, “I am alive in Werner, and free at last.”
    “When you tore Patrick apart,” Ripley said, “you absorbed some of his DNA, and now you can mimic him.”
    “Not at all,” said Werner-as-Patrick. “Werner took my brain whole, and I am now part of him.”
    Standing beside the Beekeeper earlier in the evening, watching Isolation Room Two through six cameras, Ripley had seen the Werner thing, mostly buglike at that time, crack open Patrick’s skull and take his brain as if it were a nut meat.
    “You
ate
Patrick’s brain,” Ripley said to Werner, though the man before him appeared to be Patrick Duchaine.
    In a voice still Duchaine’s, the creature said, “No, Werner is in complete control of his cellular structure. He positioned my brain inside himself and instantly grew