Frankenstein

“I love you.”
    Beside the first button was a smaller one. If you pushed it, you didn’t hear the next thing the dog could say, but you heard again the thing it had just said.
    “I love you,” the dog repeated.
    Holding Norman close, Nummy said, “I love you, too.”
    Norman’s fur was soft and silky. Nummy liked to pet him.
    After a while, he pushed the smaller button again, and the dog said, “I love you.”
    With the dog to hold and pet, Nummy almost forgot about Mr. Lyss. When he remembered him, the old man was still sitting in the chair, but he wasn’t laughing anymore. He looked different, too—not as much like a witch.
    “How old are you, kid?”
    “I’m told I’ll be thirty-one next March.”
    “How long’s your grandma been gone?”
    Nummy shrugged. “Not long. But too long.”
    After a silence, Mr. Lyss said, “We can’t stay here. Whoever they are, whatever they are, they’ll come here looking for you.”
    “Chief Jarmillo he’s my friend,” said Nummy.
    “Not
this
Chief Jarmillo.” Mr. Lyss got to his feet. “Hey, kid, you have any money?”
    “Sure. Grandmama left me money.”
    “Where is it?”
    “Most is in the bank. Mr. Leland Reese he pays bills and gives me pocket money.”
    “But you have some here in the house?”
    “Some.”
    “Show me where it is. And I have to get out of this jail suit.”
    Standing up with Norman in his arms, Nummy said, “You gonna steal from me?”
    “Nobody said anything about stealing. I’m asking for a loan. I’ll pay it back.”
    “A loan,” Nummy said. “Well … ”
    “Kid, we don’t have time to negotiate an interest rate. We have toget out of here before those extraterrestrial sonsofbitches show up, rip our heads off, and do to us whatever the hell it was they did to those people in the next cell.”
    Nummy remembered the good-looking young man in the gray pants and the sweater, and how he stopped being good-looking, stopped being a man, and got as ugly as anything could get.
    He shivered and said, “Okay, a loan.”

    
chapter
28

    Chief Rafael Jarmillo followed Principal Melinda Raines down two flights of stairs to the basement of the Meriwether Lewis Elementary School.
    The stairs brought them to a short hallway with a fire door at the end. Beyond the door lay a large furnace room.
    Three high-efficiency gas-fired boilers heated the water that warmed the classrooms through a four-pipe fan-coil system. Stacks of chillers cooled the school in warmer weather. This room contained a maze of white PVC pipes, plus uncounted valves, gauges, and arcane pieces of equipment. Between the islands of boilers and chillers and machinery, the walkways were wide.
    As Principal Raines led the chief along a winding path through the equipment, she said, “We’ll bring two classrooms of children down here at a time.”
    “Under what pretense?” Jarmillo asked.
    “We’ll call it an in-school field trip. So they can learn how all the mechanical systems of the school work, the many mysteries thathave been under their feet all this time. We’ll sell it as an adventure. Elementary-school children love field trips, they love adventures.”
    “Two classrooms at a time. How many classrooms are there?”
    “Twenty-two.”
    “How many students per class?”
    “It varies from eighteen to twenty-two.”
    “How many children altogether?”
    “Four hundred and forty-two minus any who may be off sick.”
    At the end of the mechanical room, they passed through another fire door into a long, spacious concrete-walled hallway. On the right were a series of doors, but on the left were only two sets of double doors with push-bar handles.
    Each set of doors was chained together and secured with a heavy padlock. Melinda Raines fished a key out of her suit coat, opened the padlock, and let the length of chain rattle through the bar handles and spill into a puddle of links on the floor.
    Beyond the threshold, she switched on the lights, revealing a gymnasium-sized chamber with a long rectangular depression in the center. “It was supposed to be a swimming pool. Never finished.”
    Thirty years earlier, Rainbow Falls had thought itself on the brink of an economic boom. The discovery of large natural-gas fields and oil deposits in the surrounding county generated huge investments by the energy industry that, according to informed predictions, were modest compared to the investments still to come. The population of Rainbow Falls would double in a