Frankenstein: The Dead Town Read Free Page B

lamppost. Deucalion was certain the replicant must be dead, but for insurance he got the man in a choke hold and broke his neck.
    These two killings could not be called murder. True murder was strictly a crime against humanity. Except for outward appearances, these specimens from Victor’s current laboratory were not human in any sense. Abominations. Monsters. Lab rats.
    Deucalion felt no guilt for having terminated them, because he was, after all, another monster, the earliest model in Victor’s product line. Perhaps he had been somewhat sanctified by contrition for his long-ago crimes and by his centuries of suffering. He might even be a monster on a sacred mission, although still in essence a monster, a product of Victor’s hubris, created from the bodies of hanged criminals as an affront to God.
    He could be as brutal and ruthless as any of his maker’s newer creations. If the war against the naturalworld had begun, humanity would need a monster of its own to have any hope of survival.
    Leaving the 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 seemed to him that the flakes of falling snow did not take light from the streetlamp but, instead, were illuminated from within their crystalline structures, as if they were shavings of the lost moon, each filled with its measure of the lunar glow. The longer that Deucalion lived, the more magical 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 witness might appear at any moment.
    Deucalion walked back along the 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-compacted snow in a feeble attempt to drag 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 him tothe back of the vehicle, threw him into the cargo 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 a map of a small portion of Rainbow Falls. A blinking red 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 map vanished from the screen, and an assignment list appeared in its place. The third address was highlighted—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 number. The 3 was highlighted.
    When Deucalion put a forefinger 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 stopappeared 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 company with identical replicants earlier in the