Frankenstein: The Dead Town by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

headlights aimed in different directions. “Seems you expect to have to defend the place. The wife you mentioned—is she over there?”
    “She is.”
    “What’s her name?”
    “Calista.”
    “I bet Calista would make up her mind about Michael and me five times faster than you. She must want to kick your butt sometimes, how long you take to make up your mind.”
    “I’m deliberate. She likes that.”
    “She’d have to.”
    They engaged in another staring contest, and after a half smile jacked up one corner of his mouth, Teague lowered his shotgun. “Okay, arm yourselves.Come with me, let’s swap information, see if we can all come out of this thing alive.”
    Arvid returned the Urban Sniper.
    Michael settled into the passenger seat of the Grand Cherokee as Carson climbed behind the steering wheel again. By the time she switched on the headlights, Arvid and Clint had returned to their sentry posts, vanishing into the snow and shrubbery.
    She drove forward along the shoulder of the road and turned right into the driveway, following Teague, who had already walked halfway to the house.
    As she parked behind the last SUV in the caravan, Carson realized there were more vehicles ahead of her than she had first thought, at least a dozen. The property was bigger than it appeared from the street. The single lane of blacktop curved past the house to a low building, perhaps a combination garage and workshop.
    When she got out of the Jeep, she heard the engines of some of the other vehicles idling, those that brightened the snowy night with their headlights. Here and there, in the shadows between the cars, men stood in pairs, quiet and vigilant.
    Crossing the yard to the front porch, Carson said to Teague, “Are these people your neighbors?”
    “No, ma’am,” Teague said. “We belong to the same church. We were at our family social, which we hold once a month out at the roadhouse Mayor Potter owns, when these aliens—or whatever they are—attackedus. We lost three good people. No kids, though, thank the Lord.”
    “What church?” Michael asked.
    “Riders in the Sky Church,” Teague said as they reached the porch steps. “Our folks who died earlier—we reckon they all rode heavenly horses through the gates of Paradise tonight, but that’s not as fully consoling as it ought to be.”

chapter 9
    Nancy Potter, wife of the mayor of Rainbow Falls, was at first displeased by the arrangement of twenty-six porcelain figurines that stood on three shelves in a glass display case in the Potter living room. Over the period of an hour, her displeasure became annoyance, which grew into anger, which escalated into rage. If the porcelain figurines had been real people, she would have killed them all; she would have gutted them and torn their heads off and set their remains on fire.
    If the real Nancy Potter had not been dead, this Nancy Potter would have beaten her to death just for having bought the figurines in the first place. Three shelves with twenty-six porcelains simply could not be balanced and pleasing to the eye. For one thing, the closest she could come to having the same number on each shelf was nine, nine, eight. For another thing, the ideal number per shelf, to ensure that the display case would look neither too empty nor too crowded, was twelve. She could make it look acceptable with eleven per shelf, but that still left her seven figurines short. The real Nancy Potter clearly had no awareness of the necessity for symmetry in all things, for order and balance.
    Every Communitarian understood that perfect symmetry, absolute order, balance, and conformity were important principles. There were numerous important principles, none more important than the others: undeviating focus, efficiency, unconditional equality, uniformity, obedience to the Community’s Creator, the embrace of cold reason and the rejection of sentimentality.…
    The real Nancy Potter had been a typical human being, poorly focused, inefficient. And