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The truck’s forward reat capacity to endure pain He pushed it open again and swung into the passenger seat, pulling the door shut behind hi the vehicle required mere seconds, and the confused driver only half braked when he saw his partner snatched froine Surprised but not afraid--these new replicants seeht fist, but Deucalion seized it in runted but didn’t cry out in pain As the truck coasted along the street, Deucalion clamped his left hand to the back of his adversary’s head, sla wheel He sla the horn

The weaving truck swiftly lost momentum, the front tire on the port side ed to cli As the vehicle caainst a lamppost Deucalion was certain the replicant ot the s could not be called ainst humanity Except for outward appearances, these specimens from Victor’s current laboratory were not human in any sense Abouilt for having terminated them, because he was, after all, another monster, the earliest model in Victor’s product line Perhaps he had been soo criht even be a h still in essence a monster, a product of Victor’s hubris, created froed criminals as an affront to God

He could be as brutal and ruthless as any of his ainst the natural world had begun, humanity would need athe corpse behind the wheel, Deucalion got out of the truck Even in the breathless night, the storm still seemed to qualify as a blizzard, so thickly did the snow fall

Suddenly, it seeht from the streetlamp but, instead, were illuminated fros of the lost er that Deucalion lived, the ical he found this precious world

Russell Street, a secondary thoroughfare, was deserted, free of both other traffic and pedestrians No shops were open in this block But a witnessthe tire tracks and stopped beside the individual whom he had thrown from the truck In spite of its crushed throat, the lab rat still tried to draw breath and clawed at the tire-co itself onto its knees With the hard stamp of a boot to the back of its neck, he put an end to the creature’s suffering

He carried the corpse to the truck and opened the rear door The cargo space was empty; the next batch of luckless people destined for extermination had not yet been collected He tossed the body into the truck

He pulled the driver from the cab, carried hio box with the other corpse, and closed the door

Behind the steering wheel, he started the engine He backed the truck away from the lamppost, off the curb, into the street

The display screen in the dashboard brightened with ared GPS indicator showed the current position of the truck A green line traced a route that the driver was evidently meant to follow At the top of the screen were the words TRANSPORT 3 SCHEDULE Beside those words, two boxes offered options, one labeled LIST, the other MAP The second box was currently highlighted

Deucalion pressed a forefinger to LIST The nhted--THE FALLS INN--at the corner of Beartooth Avenue and Falls Road Evidently that would have been the truck’s next stop

Along the right side of the touch screen, in a vertical line, were five boxes, each labeled with a nuer to the 1, the list on the screen was replaced with a different series of addresses The legend at the top now read TRANSPORT 1 SCHEDULE

Here, too, the third line was highlighted The two-man crew of Transport 1 had evidently successfully collected the people at the first two addresses and perhaps conveyed them to their doom Their next stop appeared to be KBOW, the radio station that served not only Rainbow Falls but also the entire surrounding county

Having replaced the employees of the telephone co, thereby seizing control of all land-line phones and cell-phone towers, Victor’s ar the trans either to residents of the town or to the people in the s communities

Deucalion switched to MAP and saw that the radio station was on River Road, toward the northeastern end of the city limits, about two miles from his current position Transport 1 was scheduled to arrive there in less than four ested that the assault on the radio station un If the route he followed to KBOW was the one that the truck’s navigation system recommended, the shoould be over by the ti out of the truck--and stepped fro lot

Chapter 3

Mr Lyss drove around going nowhere in the snohile he tried to think what to do next Nu to the saood at riding

Nu in this car because Mr Lyss stole it, and stealing was never good Mr Lyss said the keys were in the ignition, so the oanted anyone to use it who one a mile before Nummy realized that was a lie

"Grandmama she used to say, if you can’t buy what somebody else has or either make it for your own self, then you shouldn’t keep on alanting it That kind of wanting is called envy, and envy can make you into a thief faster than buttertoo damn stupid to build us a car from scratch," Mr Lyss said

"I didn’t say you was stupid I don’t call nobody nah et a thrill out of it I delight in calling people names I been known to oing to tell ives me so much innocent pleasure"

Mr Lyss wasn’t as scary as he looked earlier in the day His short-chopped gray hair still stood out every which way, like it was shocked by all the hts in his head His face was squinched as if he just bit hard into a leas flames, shreds of dry skin curled on his cracked lips, and his teeth were gray He see fine without food or water, just so he had his anger to feed on But soone out of hiry He was too du really duo to school: You just couldn’t think about anything hard enough to get angry over it

He and Mr Lyss were an odd couple, like odd couples in some movies that Nuuys were always cops, one of them calm and nice, the other one crazy and funny Nummy and Mr Lyss weren’t cops at all, but they were really different from each other Mr Lyss was the crazy and funny one, except that he wasn’t that funny

Nummy was thirty, but Mr Lyss must be older than anyone else as still alive Nuy and round-faced and freckled, but Mr Lyss seeristle and thick skin with a million creases in it like some beat-up old leather jacket

So at him, kind of like in adown on the bo at hiive your eyes a rest The snoas soft and cool to look at, floating down through the dark like tiny angels all in white

"The snow’s real pretty," Nuht"

"Oh, yeah," Mr Lyss said, "it’s abeauty everywhere you look, prettier than all the prettiness in all the pretty Christmas cards ever made--except for the ravenouspeople faster than a wood-chipper could chew up a daet theht’s pretty anyway So what do you want to do, you want to drive out to the end of town, maybe see are the cops and the roadblock still there?"

"They’re not cops, boy They’reto be cops, and they’ll be there till they’ve eaten everyone in town"

Although Mr Lyss drove slowly, sometimes the back end of the car fishtailed or it slid toward one curb or the other He always got control again before they hit anything, but already they needed a car with tire chains or winter tires

If Mr Lyss stole another car, one with tire chains, and if Nu, he would probably be a thief his he did would bring shame on her in front of God, where she was now

Nummy said, "You don’t really know the o look"

"I know, all right"

"How do you know?"