Frankenstein: The Dead Town Read Online Free PDF Page A

mean—her head blew up?”
    “From the bee sting on her neck. She had the allergies but never knew till the sting. Her face they say it blowed up like a balloon.”
    “What do you mean—‘she went to quiet’?”
    “Quiet Meadows. The cemetery up on Brown Bear Road. The bee it stung and just buzzed away, but Kiku she died, so you never know.”
    “They have any kids?”
    “The Boze and Kiku? No. That’s good because now Boze is dead, too, the kids would be orphans, all sad and everything.”
    “No, they’d be monster food, just like the Boze was. And since he’s a cop, now a monster cop,” Mr. Lysscontinued, “we’ll be able to get at his snowmobile, because he won’t be home to stop us. All the cops will be out and busy, killing people and building those cocoons like we saw and doing whatever other filthy stuff their stinking alien kind does.”
    “I didn’t notice they stink,” Nummy said.
    “Oh, they stink. They stink big-time.”
    “Must be something wrong with my nose.”

chapter 4
    Behind the wheel of the Jeep Grand Cherokee, squinting through the snow, Carson O’Connor-Maddison—with Michael Maddison—cruised Rainbow Falls on a monster hunt.
    Earlier, Deucalion had told them about the large unmarked panel trucks with midnight-blue cabs and white cargo sections, which were essentially on an Auschwitz mission, collecting citizens who had been forcibly subdued and delivering them to an extermination facility in a warehouse. They had found one of the trucks and had tried to take the two-man crew captive for interrogation by pretending also to be Victor’s creations. But the driver quickly recognized the deception, said “You’re not Communitarians,” and then it was just kill or be killed.
    From an earlier encounter, Carson had learned that these newest golems of Victor’s were harder to takedown than an ordinary man or woman but were far less tough than his previous creatures in New Orleans. She didn’t know why he had stopped producing the nearly invincible specimens that he had called the New Race, unless perhaps his failure to be able to control them completely and at all times had instilled in him some fear of his own creations.
    Because they couldn’t think of anything else to do, they were looking now for another blue-and-white truck with the hope of being able to wound rather than kill the crew. With the right techniques of enhanced interrogation, maybe the wounded could be persuaded to reveal Victor’s current center of operations.
    The snow complicated the search, diminishing visibility and hampering mobility even for a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Carson was a need-for-speed driver, but these road conditions inhibited her. Snow sucked.
    Carson had been born on the Bayou. She was a Louisiana girl who loved Cajun food and danced to zydeco. As a New Orleans homicide detective, she had chased down Victor Helios, aka Frankenstein, and once he and all his creations in the Big Easy were dead, she had been able to look back on the case as an exhilarating adventure. In fact, even at the height of the terror, she and her partner, Michael, now her husband, had been having fun. Police work was always fun. Taking down bad guys was the best fun there was. Guns were fun. Even being shot at was fun as long as the shooters kept missing.
    They were no longer cops, they were private investigators, and they lived in San Francisco. Here in Montana, they were out of their element and without authority, though not without big guns, including Urban Sniper shotguns that fired slugs capable of dropping a grizzly bear. A weapon of this power was its own kind of authority. In spite of the guns and even though they were decked out in ultracool black Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suits, the situation in Rainbow Falls was so desperate that they hadn’t had a laugh since before sundown, and the prospects for fun seemed bleak.
    “Snow sucks,” Carson said.
    “That’s like the tenth time you’ve made that