Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz

whom?”

      The Presence did not answer.

      She repeated her question.

      On the plasma screen, out of the snow, a pale ascetic face began to form. For a moment, she assumed this must be the face of a spirit, but as it developed character, she recognized Victor, eyes closed and features relaxed, as though this were his death mask.

       “Kill him.”

      “He made me.”

       “To use.”

      “I can’t.”

       “You’re strong.”

      “Impossible.”

       “Kill him.”

      “Who are you?”

      “Evil,” said the voice, and she knew that this Presence was not speaking of itself, but of Victor.

      If she participated in this conversation, she would inevitably consider betraying Victor even if only to make an argument that it was impossible to raise a hand against him. The mere act of thinking about killing her maker could bring her own death.

      Every thought creates a unique electrical signature in the brain. Victor had identified those signatures that represented the thought of taking violent action against him.

      Implanted in Erika’s brain – as in the brain of every member of the New Race – was a nanodevice programmed to recognize the thought signature of patricide, of deicide.

      If ever she picked up a weapon with the intention of using it against Victor, that spy within would instantly recognize her intent. It would plunge her into a state of paralysis from which only Victor could retrieve her.

      If thereafter he allowed her to live, hers would be a life of greater suffering. He would fill all her days with imaginative punishment.

      Consequently, she moved now to the Crestron touch panel on the nightstand and used it to switch off the TV. The plasma screen went dark.

      Waiting with the control in hand, she expected the TV to switch itself on again, but it remained off.

      She did not believe in spirits. She must not believe. Such belief was disobedience. Disobedience would lead to termination.

      The mysterious voice urging murder was best left mysterious. To pursue an understanding of it would be to chase it off a cliff, to certain death.

      When she realized that she was trembling with fear, Erika returned to her chair at the table.

      She began to eat again, but now her appetite was of the nervous variety. She ate voraciously, trying to quell a hunger that food could never satisfy: a hunger for meaning, for freedom.

      Her tremors – and the fear of death they represented – surprised her. There had been times since her “birth” six weeks ago when she had thought death desirable.

      Not now. Something had changed. When she had not been looking, that thing with feathers, hope, had come into her heart.

       CHAPTER 54

      ROY PRIBEAUX HAD GUNS.

      He retrieved them from the closet where they were stored in custom cases. He examined them lovingly, one by one, cleaned and lubricated them as necessary, preparing them for use.

      Throughout his adolescence and twenties, he had adored guns. Revolvers, pistols, shotguns, rifles – he had a core collection of each type of weapon.

      Shortly after his twentieth birthday, when he had come into his inheritance, he bought a Ford Explorer, loaded it with his favorite firearms, and toured the South and Southwest.

      Until that time, he had only killed animals.

      He hadn’t been a hunter. He’d never acquired a hunting license. Tramping around in the woods and fields didn’t appeal to him. His prey were domestic and farm animals.

      On the road at twenty, he targeted people for the first time. For several years he was carefree and happy.

      As are many people in their twenties, Roy had been idealistic. He believed that he could make this a better society, a better world.

      Even then, he’d realized that life was made tolerable only by the existence of beauty. Beauty in nature. Beauty in architecture and art and in objects of human manufacture. Beauty among human beings.

      From childhood, he himself had been strikingly attractive, and he had been aware how the sight of him lifted people’s spirits and how his company improved their moods.

      He intended to make the world a happier place by eliminating ugly people wherever he found them. And he found them everywhere.

      In eighteen states as far east as Alabama, as far north as Colorado, as far west as Arizona, and as far south as Texas, Roy traveled to kill. He destroyed ugly humanity where circumstances assured that he could strike without risk of apprehension.

      He employed such a variety of fine weapons over such an enormous geographical area that his many scores were never linked as the work of one perpetrator. He killed at a distance with rifles, at forty yards or less with 12-gauge shotguns loaded with buckshot, and close-up with revolvers or pistols as the mood took him.

      Generally he preferred the intimacy of handguns. They virtually always allowed him to get close enough to explain that he held no personal animosity toward the target.

      “It’s an aesthetic issue,” he might say. Or “I’m sure you’ll agree, dead is better than ugly” Or “I’m just doing Darwin’s work to advance the beauty of the species.”

      Shotguns were thrilling when he had the leisure to reload and to use with increasing proximity a total of four or six Federal three-inch, ooo shells, which had tremendous penetration. He could not only remove the ugly person from the gene pool but also, with the Federal rounds, obliterate their ugliness and leave a corpse so ravaged that there would have to be a closed-casket funeral.

      During those years of travel and accomplishment, Roy had known the satisfaction of noble purpose and worthwhile labor. He assumed that this would be his life’s work, with no need ever to learn new job skills or to retire.

      Over time, however, he reluctantly came to the conclusion that so many ugly people inhabited the world that his efforts alone could not ensure prettier future generations. In fact, the more people he killed, the uglier the world seemed to become.

      Ugliness has the momentum of a tsunami. It is the handmaiden to entropy. One man’s resistance, while admirable, cannot turn back the most titanic forces of nature.

      Eventually he returned to New Orleans, to rest and to reconsider his mission. He purchased this building and rebuilt the loft into an apartment.

      He began to suspect that he had too long associated with too many ugly people. Although he had killed them all, sparing humanity the further sight of them, perhaps their ugliness had somehow tainted Roy himself.

      For the first time, his reflection in a mirror disquieted him. Being brutally honest, he had to admit that he was still beautiful, certainly in the top one tenth of one percent of the most beautiful people in the world, but perhaps not as beautiful as he had been before he had set out in his Explorer to save humanity from ugliness.

      Being a forward-looking and determined person, he had not fallen into despair. He developed a program of diet, exercise, nutritional supplementation, and meditation to regain fully his former splendor.

      As any mirror now revealed, he succeeded. He was breathtaking.

      Nevertheless, he often thought of those years of rehabilitation as the Wasted Years, because while he restored himself, he had no time to kill anyone. And no reason to kill them.