Read Online Fear that man by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online

stiff and immovable. “You and the darts beneath your fingernails. What the hell kind of man are you!”
        Sam lifted his hands and looked at them. The nails were discolored as if fine bits of flesh had puffed into ashes beneath them, leaving blackened pits. He rubbed one, but the color was definitely not on the surface.
        “What kind of man are you!” Breadloaf roared this time, panic flushing every word, every word cored with fear.
        “I don’t know,” Sam said finally. “Is there some way I can help you?”
        Breadloaf was breathing heavily. “Yes! Go get help!”
        “I can’t do that,” Sam said. He stood on the carpet, shuffling one foot over the other, feeling somewhat the hypocrite.
        “Why? Why can’t you?”
        “It won’t let me.”
        “It?”
        Briefly, he recounted his story-the jelly-mass, the hypnotic commands. When he finished, the other man’s eyes were wide-too wide to contain anything but horror. “The Prisoner!” he croaked.
        “What?”
        “The Prisoner of the Shield. You’re under its direction!”
        Sam turned instinctively toward the portal of wavering colors. “Then they are alive!”
        Breadloaf was laughing, and Sam could not get him to stop. It was not the laughter of him and Hurkos and Gnossos in the Inferno. This was laughter at the inevitability of some unknown tragedy. He could sense that, but he could not stop the other man. Neither could he leave to get help. His feet would carry him toward the doorway but not through it. There was a mental block that kept him within the room. His memory began to clear slightly, and he could remember what else he had done in this building. He had planted some sort of bomb in the machinery below. And it must be the machinery that kept this… this Shield going.
        “A thousand years,” Breadloaf shouted between whoops of laughter. “For a thousand years it tried the same things over and over, and we thought it was too dense to attempt anything different. Instead, it was pretending stupidity, making us lax. And it worked. Just when we were feeling secure, it takes you and breaks in with ridiculous ease. A thousand years to the Prisoner are like but a day to us.” He laughed again, harshly.
        There was sweat on Sam’s upper lip. He wiped it off and became aware of perspiration all over him. He was frightened. A thousand years behind the Shield. And it had only been playing around, using the time as a diversion. A score of centuries had meant nothing to it. He watched it with a loathing that touched the deepest part of him. Were the colors its true appearance or merely the effects of it filtered by the Shield? He thought the colors were a front, not the true nature of it. The true nature could not be something so beautiful and vibrant, surely. A blue splotch rippled up from the bottom, seemed to form a question mark like one would find on a large tronicsign-
        Tronicsign!
        He remembered seeing the high tronicsign band that ran around all four sides of the Breadloaf Building, carrying letters twenty feet tall. Perhaps the control console was up here. If it was, he could spell out a message for Gnossos and Hurkos. Surely they would be looking for him. It was almost a certainty they could see the towering tronicsign from anywhere in this part of the city. If they were in this part of the city…
        “The tronicsign controls,” he asked-said.
        “What?” Breadloaf’s eyes slid back and forth in the sockets liked trapped animals.
        “The advertising screen. The light letters. Where are the controls for the light letters?”
        “Why?”
        “Where are they?” There was a tone of command in his voice that he had not known he possessed.
        “There’s a master set in the main lounge, but I have a secondary plug-in set in the wall cabinet-over there.”
        He found it, plugged it in, began typing out a message that the big