He ejects the depleted magazine. Slaps in a fresh one. He has twenty additional rounds available in yet a third magazine.
Stepping into the hall, he surveys the ceiling, which is a darker shade of green than the walls. He cocks his head left and right, trying to gauge the trio’s location by the telltale sounds they’re making. He enters the next room on the right, wishing that their body heat could reveal them by translating through the attic floor and manifesting as green glowing footprints on this ceiling, an irrational desire perhaps related to the Benzedrine. He squeezes off three rounds to no effect and returns to the hallway, attention focused overhead.
A scissoring sound, blade against blade, and a series of soft clicks puzzle him. He can’t figure out what Mace and his companions are doing up there, and then he realizes the source of the noise is not in the attic. When he looks south, a daunting apparition comes off the stairs and into the hallway, an entity so bizarre that it evokes in him the closest thing to fear that he has felt since he was seven years old and purged himself of that hampering emotion. Never before have mere bennies troubled him with hallucinations. At first, in the strange light that his goggles conjure from the dark, the intruder seems spiderlike, the number of its legs difficult to discern. Then it goes erect on its two back limbs, revealing that it has only four legs, and its body appears to reconfigure in some way, with a soft whir and a softer chunk-chunk-chunk. As Calaphas begins to realize that this is neither a hallucination nor some monstrous insect, that it’s a machine, and as alarm rises in him, the intruder projects a broad beam of light—
—LIGHT so bright that the night-vision unit is overwhelmed. Calaphas can see nothing. He yanks off the headset and throws it aside and begins to bring up his rifle, but he is slower than he needs to be. The roar of gunfire—none of it his—floods the hall, and Calaphas seems to be lifted, seems to be swept backward and up in the ascension he has expected. The world, which was green and then white, becomes all red and then black. What seems to be an ascension is not.
When they descend the ladder, John marvels at the robot, and Nina marvels at Michael.
He says, “I’ll explain in the car. Let’s hurry.”
The machine drops to all fours as if to follow, but Michael instructs it to power down to minimal awareness and wait here. The scene must be left as is, so that the killing of Calaphas can’t be pinned on anyone other than Magog.
Michael pats its head and says, “Good dog.”
The shots were all fired inside, and the walls muffled much of the clamor. The acreage around the residence also provides a buffer. However, the sound has surely traveled, and someone is even now trying to determine from where it came.
They load the ice chests in the Range Rover, each selecting a beverage before closing the liftgate. Calaphas has been dead less than three minutes when they set out for Arizona.
HOME IS THE HUNTER
Royce Kinnel is so shaken by events that the moment he arrives home, he washes his hands until they are red, selects an album of nerve-soothing easy-listening piano for the through-house music system, takes a tablet of Prozac, brews a pot of tea, and opens a tin of butter cookies that have been finished with a cinnamon glaze and sprinkled with sea salt.
Before indulging in this predawn repast, he descends to the windowless room in the finished basement, where he opens a secret panel with a touch latch and then opens the heavily insulated steel door that is thus revealed. In the love nest, he strips the sheets off the bed and loads them in the washing machine that he uses only for this task. He’s finicky about consigning his own garments to the same machine that he uses to launder the bedclothes in which have lain the women he keeps here.
Upstairs once more, seated at the kitchen table with tea and cookies, he laments the passing of Lenore, whom he had kept in the basement for seven delightful months. She was especially lovely and, once properly trained, precisely as submissive as he requires. All things must come to an end, however, for he is a man who needs a certain degree of variety.
Royce is thirty, heir to a trust fund that spares him from the need to work. However, with financial independence comes the worry that those who seem to like you actually have contempt for you and are nice to you only because you have money. Dating is a dangerous enterprise for a young man of his position. Fortunately, he has the skills and courage to resolve the problem with such as Lenore. He adopted this style of courtship when he was twenty-one, and in the past nine years has had the pleasure of twelve beauties.
He terminates these relationships by strangulation, which is less messy than most alternatives but also invigorating for reasons that he finds difficult to explain. He dislikes messiness, and when he’s not in his current girlfriend’s room, engaged in six-or eight-hour sessions of amorous pursuits, he spends a lot of time cleaning the house. Fortunately, he enjoys housekeeping, which eliminates the need to have a domestic employee. His residence is spotless. Royce believes in doing things the right way, with diligence and care.
In the case of his previous eleven girlfriends, after breaking up with them, he removed them from his life with such forethought and care that only one was ever found. To this day, he can’t imagine how Jennifer—the second Jennifer, not the first—floated into Dana Point Harbor on a Sunday morning, after he had, on Friday, packed her in a metal steamer trunk and buried her at sea, ten miles south of there and nine miles from land. The trunk was bound in chains to which were attached six twenty-pound barbells; a hydraulic hand truck with a five-hundred-pound capacity was needed to get that package onto his boat and later raise it over the gunwale to slide it into the sea. If Royce believed in ghosts, he might wonder if the spirit of Harry Houdini freed Jennifer’s corpse for some macabre reason.
After strangling a girlfriend, he never deposits her in a place where he has left another one. Indeed, he has conveyed two of them to New Mexico, wrapped in plastic drop cloths that he sprayed with lubricant before dropping them into ancient lava pipes, long tubes about three or four feet in width, leading down through solid stone, up which lava had gushed in an epoch long before the creation of humanity. Those lovelies lie hundreds—perhaps thousands—of feet below the possibility of discovery. Another he cremated in Arizona, by leaving her in an abandoned church to which he set fire.
He had chosen to bury Lenore on public land, in a lonely vale more than thirty miles from his home. He had found the site before he strangled her and had tested the texture of the soil to be sure he could dig a grave easily enough with pick and spade. He almost had her in the ground when the robots appeared.
After enough time has passed, many episodes in Royce Kinnel’s life seem surrealistic, phantasmagorical, too colorful and quirky to have played out as they did, more like vivid dreams than real-life experiences; reliving them in memory is far more entertaining than anything on television. Thinking back, Royce is often amazed at what he’s done and that he’s gotten away with it, although at the time his actions seemed as mundane as taking out the trash. A few hours earlier, however, the incident near Rancho Santa Fe struck him as surrealistic even as it occurred. Robots. As big as Great Danes. Appearing out of nowhere.
Royce isn’t interested in either science fiction or science. He’s not interested in much of anything other than his girlfriends and housekeeping; he doesn’t care what’s cool in movies or music or art or fashion, and he has no politics. People say there will be robots everywhere one day, but he’s sure that is at least a decade from now. So, aliens. A lot of people seem to be fascinated with UFOs, but Royce isn’t. He couldn’t care less about aliens. Whatever extraterrestrial females are like, they won’t be hot in any way that’s likely to get his sap rising. Earth girls are enough for him.