Midnight

stake, a cross, a silver bullet.
    The artery-circuits that webbed her naked body were still pulsing with light, although in places she was sparking, just as the computers themselves had done when he had pumped a couple of slugs into them.
    No rounds were left in the revolver.
    He searched his pockets for cartridges.
    He had none.
    Get out.
    An electronic wail, not deafening but more nerve-splintering than a thousand sharp fingernails scraped simultaneously down a blackboard, shrilled from her.
    Two segmented, wormlike probes burst from her face and flew straight at him. Both fell inches short of him—perhaps a sign of her waning energy—and returned to her like splashes of quicksilver streaming back into the mother mass.
    But she was getting up.
    Sam scrambled to the doorway, stooped, and snatched up the 'two cartridges he had dropped when he had reloaded the gun. He broke open the cylinder, shook out the empty brass casings, Jammed in the last two rounds.
    "… neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed … neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed …"
    She was on her feet, coming toward him.
    This time he held the Smith & Wesson in both hands, aimed carefully, and shot her in the head.
    Take out the data processor, he thought with a flash of black humor. Only way to stop a determined machine. Take out its data processor, and it's nothing but a tangle of junk.
    She crumpled to the floor. The red light went out of the unhuman eyes; they were black now. She was perfectly still.
    Suddenly flames erupted from her bullet-cracked skull, spurting from the wound, from her eyes, nostrils, and gaping mouth.
    He moved quickly to the socket to which she was still tethered, and he kicked at the semiorganic plug that she had extruded from her body, knocking it loose.
    The flames still leaped from her.
    He could not afford a house fire. The bodies would be found and the neighborhood, Harry's house included, would be searched door-to-door. He looked around for something to throw over her to smother the flames, but already the blaze within the skull was subsiding. In a moment it burned itself out.
    The air reeked of a dozen foul odors, some of which did not bear contemplation.
    He was mildly dizzy. Nausea stole over him. He gagged clenched his teeth, and forced back his gorge.
    Though he wanted desperately to get out of there, he took time to unplug both computers. They were inoperable and dammaged beyond repair, but he was irrationally afraid that, like Frankenstein's homebuilt man in movie sequel after sequel, they would somehow come to life if exposed to electricity.
    He hesitated at the doorway, leaned against the jamb to take some of the weight off his weak and trembling legs, looked at the computers and the strange corpses. He had expected them to revert to normal appearance when they were dead, the way they were in the movies, upon taking a silver bullet in the heart or beaten with a silver-headed cane, always metamorphosed for the last time, becoming their tortured, too-human selves, finally released from the curse. Unfortunately this was not Lycanthropy. This was not a supernatural affliction, but something worse that men had brought upon themselves with no help from demonic spirits or other things that went bump in the night. The Coltranes as they had been, monstrous half-breeds of flesh and blood and silicon—human and machine.
    He could not comprehend how they had become what they had become, but he half remembered that a word existed for them, and in a moment he recalled it. Cyborg : a person whose biological functioning was aided by or dependent on a mechanical or electronic device. People wearing pacemakers to regulate arrhythmic hearts were cyborgs, and that was a good thing. Those whose kidneys had both failed—and who received dialysis on a regular basis—were cyborgs, and that was good too. But with the Coltranes the concept had been carried to extremes. They were the nightmare side of advanced cybernetics, in whom not merely physiological but mental function had become aided by and almost certainly dependent on a machine.
    Sam began to gag again. He turned quickly away from the smoke-hazed den and backtracked through the house to the kitchen door, by which he had entered.
    Every step of the way, he was certain that he would hear a voice behind him, half human and half electronic— "neeeeeeeeeeed" —and would look back to see one of the Coltranes lumbering toward him, reanimated by a last small supply of current stored in battery cells.

25
    At the