Dead Town by Dean Koontz

no one.
    A cascade of sweet clear notes put an end to the creepy silence as Tweetie, in his cage, greeted them. In spite of the circumstances, Frost found the birdsong cheerful and even calming, perhaps because he was reminded of the parrots and other feathered denizens of the equatorial jungle in his past life.
    “What neighborhood of Hell is this?” Dagget muttered.
    Frost’s attention dropped from the bright yellow bird to a furry blue bedroom slipper lying beside the overturned needlepoint chair. He required a moment to realize that the footwear was not what had inspired Dagget’s question. Beyond the slipper lay a bare foot with toenails painted candy-apple red. A woman’s slender foot with well-formed toes and a delicate arch. Severed at the ankle.
    Severed
was not the right word because it implied a blade. The flesh and bone were neither clean-cut, as they might have been if the dismembering weapon were a razor-edged sword, nor ragged and splintered, as any kind of saw would have left them. The stump looked both glazed and finely pitted, as if dissolved but simultaneously cauterized by an acid.
    Dagget settled on one knee beside that grisly object, to examine it closely. He spoke in a murmur: “It’s damn pale, isn’t it? Skin as white as plaster. No visiblesurface veins or arteries. The exposed flesh … it’s as pale as halibut. As if all the blood was sucked out of it.”
    Not a drop of gore marred the carpet around the foot.
    Leaning closer, Dagget said, “The flesh isn’t pitted exactly. It looks … as if it’s been chewed on by a million tiny teeth.”
    “Don’t touch it,” Frost whispered.
    “I don’t intend to,” Dagget assured him. “It’s evidence.”
    Frost’s admonition had nothing to do with a concern about contaminating evidence. The foot looked so strange that he wondered if they could be contaminated
by
it.
    Although Tweetie had most likely continued to sing, for a while Frost had not been aware of the canary. The trilling notes reclaimed his attention, but instead of being cheerful, as before, they sounded thin and shrill and bleak.
    “What now?” Frost wondered.
    “Upstairs.”
    Leaving the living room through an archway, entering the foyer, they discovered part of a hand.

chapter 14
    As Teague took them on a quick tour of the house—the residence of Hank and Dolly Samples—he brought them up to speed regarding what happened at the country-music nightclub earlier in the evening. Considering his certainty about the extraterrestrial identity of their adversaries, Carson wondered how she and Michael would be able to convince these people that their interpretation of events was incorrect.
    The men of the Riders in the Sky Church were distributing guns and supplies of ammunition at key defense points throughout the house, fortifying and barring most windows with spaced two-by-fours that were screwed to the interior casings, allocating compact fire extinguishers that they routinely carried in their pickups and SUVs, and taking every precaution they could think of to make the house as much of a fortress as possible.
    Meanwhile, the womenfolk were in the kitchen and dining room with the younger children, turning mountains of groceries, brought from other less defendable houses, into pasta salads, potato salads, and casseroles. These could be stored in both the kitchen and garage refrigerators, ready to feed on demand everyone here gathered.
    Three portable generators, fueled with gasoline, were being tied into the house’s electrical system to ensure refrigeration and microwave-oven availability if Rainbow Falls lost its power supply. Because the heating-oil tank had been filled only two days earlier, they could keep the furnace going for at least a month.
    No one expected this war of the worlds to last anywhere near a month. Either the Lord would support humanity in the quick and utter defeat of these obviously godless invaders from a far world ruled by Satan, or this must be