Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz

bone as dense as armor plating. She might blind him with a face shot, but would that matter, could he function anyway?

      Two hearts. Aim for the chest. Two rapid-fire rounds, maybe three, point-blank if possible. Take out both hearts.

      Across the room, Michael was staying low, using furniture for cover, moving deeper into the living room, angling for a line of sight into the kitchen, where Harker had taken cover.

      Harker was only part of their problem, Jenna the other part. The blood in the hallway suggested she was in the apartment. Hurt. Maybe mortally wounded.

      Small apartment. Probably three rooms, one bath. He had come out of the bedroom. Jenna might be in there.

      Or she might be in the kitchen, where he had gone. He might be slitting her throat now.

      Back against the wall, holding the shotgun cross-body, Carson eased toward the archway between this room and the kitchen, aware that he might be waiting to shoot her in the face the instant she showed.

      They had to whack Harker quickly, get Jenna medical help. The woman wasn’t screaming. Maybe dead. Maybe dying. In this situation, time was the essence, terror the quintessence.

      A noise in the kitchen. She couldn’t identify it.

      Rising recklessly from behind a sofa to get a better look, Michael said, “He’s going out a window!”

      Carson cleared the archway, saw an open casement window. Harker crouched on the sill, his back to her.

      She swept the room to be sure that Jenna wasn’t there to take ricochets. No. Just Harker.

      Monster or no monster, shooting him in the back would earn her an OIS investigation, but she would have shot him anyway, except that he was gone before she could squeeze the trigger.

      Rushing to the window, Carson expected a fire escape beyond, perhaps a balcony. She found neither.

      Harker had thrown himself into the alleyway The fall was at least thirty feet, possibly thirty-five. Far enough to acquire a mortal velocity before impact.

      He lay facedown on the pavement. Unmoving.

      His plunge seemed to refute Deucalion’s contention that Victor’s creations were effectively forbidden to self-destruct.

      Below, Harker stirred. He sprang to his feet. He had known that he could survive such a fall.

      When he looked up at the window, at Carson, reflected moonlight made lanterns of his eyes.

      At this distance, a round – or all four rounds – from the shotgun wouldn’t faze him.

      He ran toward the nearest end of the alley. There he halted when, with a bark of brakes in the street beyond, a white van skidded to a stop in front of him.

      The driver’s door flew open, and a man got half out. From this distance, at night, Carson couldn’t see his face. He seemed to have white or pale-blond hair.

      She heard the driver call something to Harker. She couldn’t make out his words.

      Harker rounded the van, climbed in the passenger’s side.

      Behind the wheel again, the driver slammed his door and stood on the accelerator. Tires spun, shrieked, smoked, and left rubber behind as the vehicle raced off into the night.

      The van might have been a Ford. She couldn’t be certain.

      Perspiration dripped from Carson’s brow. She was soaked. In spite of the heat, the sweat felt cold on her skin.

       CHAPTER 73

      VICTOR HAD NAMED HIM Karloff, perhaps intending humor, but Erika found nothing funny about the hideous “life” that this creature had been given.

      The bodiless head stood in a milky antibiotic bath, served by tubes that brought it nutrients and by others that drained metabolic waste. An array of machines attended and sustained Karloff, all of them mysterious and ominous to Erika.

      The hand lay on the floor, in a corner, palm-up. Still.

      Karloff had controlled that five-fingered explorer through the power of telekenesis, which his maker had hoped to engineer into him. An object of horror, he had nonetheless proved to be a successful experiment.

      Self-disconnected from its sustaining machinery, the hand is now dead. Karloff can still animate it, although not for much longer. The flesh will rapidly deteriorate. Even the power of telekenesis will not be able to manipulate frozen joints and putrefying musculature.

      Surely, however, Victor had not anticipated that Karloff would be able to employ his psychic ability to gain even a limited form of freedom and to roam the mansion with the desperate hope of inciting his maker’s murder.

      With that same uncanny power, Karloff had activated the electric mechanism that operated the secret door in the food pantry, providing entrance to Erika. With it, he had also controlled the television in the master suite, to speak with her and to encourage rebellion.

      Being less of a complete creation than Erika, Karloff had not been programmed with a full understanding of Victor’s mission or with knowledge of the limitations placed upon the freedom of the New Race. Now he knew that she could not act against her maker, and his despair was complete.

      When she suggested that he use his power to disable the machines that supported his existence, Erika discovered that he, too, had been programmed to be incapable of self-destruction.

      She struggled against despondency, her hope reduced to the shaky condition of a three-legged table. The crawling hand and the other apparitions had not been the supernatural events that she had longed to believe they were.

      Oh, how badly she had wanted these miracles to be evidence of another world beyond this one. What seemed to be a divine Presence, however, had been only the grotesque Karloff.

      She might have blamed him for her deep disappointment, might have hated him, but she did not. Instead she pitied this pathetic creature, who was helpless in his power and condemned to a living hell.

      Perhaps what she felt wasn’t pity. Strictly speaking, she should not be capable of pity. But she felt something, felt it poignantly.

      “Kill me,” the pathetic thing pleaded.

      The bloodshot eyes were haunted. The half-formed face was a mask of misery.

      Erika began to tell him that her program forbade her to kill either the Old Race or the New except in self-defense or at the order of her maker. Then she realized that her program did not anticipate this situation.

      Karloff did not belong to the Old Race, but he did not qualify as one of the New Race, either. He was something other, singular.

      None of the rules of conduct under which Erika lived applied in this matter.

      Looking over the sustaining machinery, ignorant of its function, she said, “I don’t want to cause you pain.”

      “Pain is all I know,” he murmured. “Peace is all I want.”

      She threw switches, pulled plugs. The purr of motors and the throb of pumps subsided into silence.

      “I’m going,” Karloff said, his voice thickening into a slur. His bloodshot eyes fell shut. “Going …”

      On the floor, in the corner, the hand spasmed, spasmed.

      The bodiless head’s last words were so slurred and whispery as to be barely intelligible: “You … must be … angel.”

      She stood for a while, thinking about what he’d said, for the poets of the Old Race had often written that God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

      In time she realized that Victor must not find her here.

      She studied the