by Dean Koontz
CHAPTER 31
A NINETEENTH-CENTURY stonemason had chiseled HANDS OF MERCY into a limestone block above the hospital entrance. A weathered image of the Virgin Mary overlooked the front steps.
The hospital had closed long ago, and after the building had been sold to a shell corporation controlled by Victor Helios, the windows had been bricked shut. Steel doors had been installed at every entrance, equipped with both mechanical and electronic locks.
A tall wrought-iron fence surrounded the oak-shaded property, like a stockpile of spears from a full Roman legion. To the rolling electric gate was affixed a sign: PRIVATE WAREHOUSE / NO ADMITTANCE.
Hidden cameras surveyed the grounds, the perimeter. No nuclear weapons storage depot had a larger or more dedicated security force, or one more discreet.
The forbidding structure stood silent. No beam of light escaped it, though here the new rulers of the Earth were designed and made.
A staff of eighty lived and worked within these walls, assisting in experiments in a maze of laboratories. In rooms that had once held hospital patients, newly minted men and women were housed and rapidly educated until they could be infiltrated into the population of the city.
The armored doors of certain other rooms were locked. The creations within them needed to be restrained while being studied.
Victor conducted his most important work in the main laboratory. This vast space had a techno sensibility with some Art Deco style and a dash of Wagnerian grandeur. Glass, stainless steel, white ceramic: All were easy to sterilize if things got…messy.
Sleek and arcane equipment, much of which he himself designed and built, lined the chamber, rose out of the floor, depended from the ceiling. Some of the machines hummed, some bubbled, some stood silent and menacing.
In this windowless lab, if he put his wristwatch in a drawer, he could labor long hours, days, without a break. Having improved his physiology and metabolism to the point that he needed little or no sleep, he was able to give himself passionately to his work.
Tonight, as he arrived at his desk, his phone rang. The call came on line five. Of eight lines, the last four—rollovers that served a single number—were reserved for messages and inquiries from those creations with which he had been gradually populating the city.
He picked up the handset. “Yes?”
The caller, a man, was struggling to repress the emotion in his voice, more emotion than Victor ever expected to hear from one of the New Race: “Something is happening to me, Father. Something strange. Maybe something wonderful.”
Victor’s creations understood that they must contact him only in a crisis. “Which one are you?”
“Help me, Father.”
Victor felt diminished by the word father. “I’m not your father. Tell me your name.”
“I’m confused…and sometimes scared.”
“I asked for your name.”
His creations had not been designed to have the capability to deny him, but this one refused to identify himself: “I’ve begun to change.”
“You must tell me your name.”
“Murder,” said the caller. “Murder…excites me.”
Victor kept the growing concern out of his voice. “No, your mind is fine. I don’t make mistakes.”
“I’m changing. There’s so much to learn from murder.”
“Come to me at the Hands of Mercy.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve killed three men…without remorse.”
“Come to me,” Victor insisted.
“Your mercy won’t extend to one of us who has…fallen so far.”
A rare queasiness overcame Victor. He wondered if this might be the serial killer who enchanted the media. One of his own creations, breaking programming to commit murder for no authorized reason?
“Come to me, and I’ll provide whatever guidance you need. There is only compassion for you here.”
The electronically disguised voice denied him again. “The most recent one I killed…was one of yours.”
Victor’s alarm grew. One of his creations killing another by its own decision. Never had this happened before. A programmed injunction against suicide was knit tightly into their psyches, as was a stern commandment that permitted murder for just two reasons: in self-defense or when instructed by their maker to kill.
“The victim,” Victor said. “His name?”
“Allwine. They found his corpse inside the city library this morning.”
Victor caught his breath as he considered the implications.
The caller said, “There was nothing to learn from Allwine. He was like me inside. I’ve got to find it elsewhere, in others.”
“Find what?” Victor asked.
“What I need,” said the caller, and then hung up.
Victor keyed in *69—and discovered that the caller’s phone was blocked for automatic call-back.
Furious, he slammed down the handset.
He sensed a setback.
CHAPTER 32
FOR A WHILE AFTER Victor left for the Hands of Mercy, Erika remained in bed, curled in the fetal position that she’d never known in the creation tank. She waited to see if her depression would pass or thicken into the darker morass of discouragement.
The flux of her emotional states sometimes seemed to have little relation to the experiences from which they proceeded. After sex with Victor, depression always followed without fail, and understandably; but when it should have ripened into something like despondency, it sometimes did not. And though her future seemed so bleak that her despondency should have been unshakable, she often shook it off.
Remembering verses by Emily Dickinson could lift her out of gloom: “Hope” is the thing with feathers—/ That perches in the soul—/ And sings the tune without the words—/ And never stops at all.
The art on Victor’s walls was abstract: oddly juxtaposed blocks of color that loomed oppressively, spatterings of color or smears of gray on black that to Erika seemed like chaos or nullity. In his library, however, were large books of art, and sometimes her mood could be improved simply by immersing herself in a single painting by Albert Bierstadt or Childe Hassam.
She has been taught that she is of the New Race, posthuman, improved, superior. She is all but impervious to disease. She heals rapidly, almost miraculously.
Yet when she needs solace, she finds it in the art and music and poetry of the mere humanity that she and her kind are intended to replace.
When she has been confused, has felt lost, she’s found clarity and direction in the writings of imperfect humanity. And the writers are those of whom Victor would especially disapprove.
This puzzles Erika: that a primitive and failed species, infirm humanity, should by its works lift her heart when none of her own kind is able to lift it for her.
She would like to discuss this with others of the New Race, but she is concerned that one of them will think her puzzlement makes her a heretic. All are obedient to Victor by design, but some view him with such reverential fear that they will interpret her questions as doubts, her doubts as betrayals, and will then in turn betray her to her maker.
And so she keeps her questions to herself, for she knows that in a holding tank waits Erika Five.
Abed, with the smell of Victor lingering in the sheets, Erika finds this to be one of the times when poetry will prevent depression from ripening toward despair. If I shouldn’t be alive / When the Robins come / Give the one in Red Cravat / A Memorial crumb.
She smiled at Dickinson’s gentle humor. That smile might have led to others if not for a scrabbling noise under the bed.
Throwing back the sheets, she sat up, breath held, listening.
As though aware of her reaction, the scrabbler went still—or if not still, at least silent, creeping now without a sound.
Having neither heard nor seen any indication of a rat when she and Victor had returned to the bedroom following the departure of their guests, Erika had assumed that she’d been mistaken in thinking one had be
en here. Or perhaps it had found its way into a wall or a drain and from there to another place in the great house.
Either the vermin was back or it had been here all along, quiet witness to the terrible tax Victor placed upon Erika’s right to live.
A moment passed, and then a sound issued from elsewhere in the room. A short-lived furtive rustle.
Shadows veiled the room, were lifted only where the light of a single bedside lamp could reach.
Naked, Erika slipped out of bed and stood, poised and alert.
Although her enhanced eyes made the most of available light, she lacked the penetrating night vision of a cat. Victor was conducting cross-species experiments these days, but she was not one of them.
Desirous of more light, she moved toward a reading lamp beside an armchair.
Before she reached the lamp, she sensed more than heard a thing on the floor scurry past her. Startled, she pulled her left foot back, pivoted on her right, and tried to sight the intruder along the path that instinct told her it must have taken.
When there was nothing to be seen—or at least nothing that she could see—she continued to the reading lamp and switched it on. More light revealed nothing that she hoped to find.
A clatter in the bathroom sounded like the small waste can being knocked over.
That door stood ajar. Darkness lay beyond.
She started toward the bathroom, moving quickly but coming to a stop short of the threshold.
Because members of the New Race were immune to most diseases and healed rapidly, they were afraid of fewer things than were ordinary human beings. That didn’t mean they were utter strangers to fear.
Although hard to kill, they were not immortal, and having been made in contempt of God, they could have no hope of a life after this one. Therefore, they feared death.
Conversely, many of them feared life because they had no control of their destinies. They were indentured servants to Victor, and there was no sum they could work off to gain their freedom.
They feared life also because they could not surrender it if the burden of serving Victor became too great. They had been created with a deeply embedded psychological injunction against suicide; so if the void appealed to them, they were denied even that.
Here but a step from the bathroom threshold, Erika experienced another kind of fear: of the unknown.
That which is abnormal to nature is a monster, even if it might be beautiful in its way. Erika, created not by nature but by the hand of man, was a lovely monster but a monster nonetheless.
She supposed that monsters should not fear the unknown because, by any reasonable definition, they were part of it. Yet a tingle of apprehension traced the contours of her spine.
Instinct told her that the rat was not a rat, that instead it was a thing unknown.
From the bathroom came a clink, a clatter, a metallic rattle, as if something had opened a cabinet and set about exploring the contents in the dark.
Erika’s two hearts beat faster. Her mouth went dry. Her palms grew damp. In this vulnerability, but for the double pulse, she was so human, regardless of her origins.
She backed away from the bathroom door.
Her blue silk robe was draped over the armchair. With her gaze fixed on the bathroom door, she slipped into the robe and belted it.
Barefoot, she left the suite, closing the hall door behind her.
As the midnight hour came, she descended through the house of Frankenstein, to the library where, among the many volumes of human thought and hope, she felt safer.
CHAPTER 33
AT VICTOR'S SUMMONS they came to him in the main lab, two young men as ordinary in appearance as any in New Orleans.
Not all the men of the New Race were handsome. Not all the women were beautiful.
For one thing, when at last he had secretly seeded enough of his creations in society to exterminate the Old Race, humanity would put up a better defense if it could identify its enemy by even the most subtle telltales of appearance. If all members of the New Race looked like gorgeous fodder for the box-office battlefields of Hollywood, their beauty would make them objects of suspicion, subject them to testing and interrogation, and ultimately expose them.
Their infinite variety, on the other hand, would ensure the winning of the war. Their variety, their physical superiority, and their ruthlessness.
Besides, though he sometimes crafted specimens breathtaking in appearance, this enterprise was not fundamentally about beauty. It was at root about power and the establishment of a New Truth.
Consequently, the young men he summoned might be considered extraordinary in appearance only because, considering what they were inside, they looked so common. Their names were Jones and Picou.
He told them about Bobby Allwine in a drawer at the morgue. “His body must disappear tonight. And all confirming evidence—tissue samples, photographs, video.”
“The autopsy report, tape recordings?” asked Jones.
“If they’re easily found,” Victor said. “But by themselves, they confirm nothing.”
Picou said, “What about the medical examiner, anyone who might have been there when the body was opened?”
“For now, let them live,” Victor said. “Without the body or any evidence, all they’ll have is a wild story that’ll make them sound like drunks or druggies.”
Although they were intellectually capable of greater work than this garbage detail, neither Jones nor Picou complained or found their assignments demeaning. Their patient obedience was the essence of the New Race.
In the revolutionary civilization that Victor was making, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, everyone in the social order would have a rank. And all would be content, without envy.
Huxley ordered his world with Alphas at the top, the ruling elite, followed by Betas and Gammas. Brute laborers were designated Epsilons, born to their positions in a designed society.
To Huxley, this vision had been a dystopia. Victor saw it more clearly: utopia.
He’d once met Huxley at a cocktail party. He considered the man to be an officious little prig who worried ridiculously about science becoming a juggernaut and more dogmatic than any religion could hope to be, crushing everything human from humanity. Victor found him to be rich in book knowledge, light on experience, and boring.
Nevertheless, Huxley’s nightmare vision served well as Victor’s ideal. He would make the Alpha class almost equal to himself, so they would be challenging company and capable of carrying out his plans for the day after humanity had been liquidated, when the Earth would serve as a platform for great accomplishments by a race of posthumans who would work together as industriously as a hive.
Now these two Epsilons, Oliver Jones and Byron Picou, set out like two good worker bees, eager to fulfill the roles for which they had been designed and built. They would steal Allwine’s remains and dispose of them in a landfill that operated in higher ground outside the city.
The landfill was owned by Victor through another shell company, and it employed only members of the New Race. He regularly required a secure disposal site to bury forever those interesting but failed experiments that must never be discovered by ordinary humans.
Under those mountains of garbage lay a city of the dead. If ever they fossilized and were excavated by paleontologists a million years hence, what mysteries they would present, what nightmares they would inspire.
Although problems existed with the comparatively small hive—as yet only two thousand of the New Race—that he had established here in New Orleans, they would be solved. Week by week he made advances in his science and increased the number in his implacable army. He would soon begin to mass produce the tanks, creating his people not in a laboratory but by the many thousands in much larger facilities that might accurately be called farms.
The work was endless but rewarding. The Earth had not been made in a day, but he had the necessary patience to re make it.
Now he was thirsty. From a lab refrigerat
or, he got a Pepsi. A little plate of chocolate chip cookies was in the fridge. He adored chocolate chip cookies. He took two.
CHAPTER 34
SOMEONE HAD PUT a police seal on Bobby Allwine’s apartment door. Carson broke it.
This was a minor infraction, considering that the place was not actually a crime scene. Besides, she was, after all, a cop.
Then she used a Lockaid lock-release gun, sold only to police agencies, to spring the deadbolt. She eased the thin pick of the gun into the keyway, under the pin tumblers, and pulled the trigger. She pulled it four times before lodging all the pins at the shear line.
The Lockaid gun was more problematic than breaking the seal. The department owned several. They were kept in the gun locker with spare weapons. You were supposed to requisition one, in writing, through the duty officer each time that you had a legal right to use it.
No detective was authorized to carry a Lockaid gun at all times. Because of a screwup in the requisition process, Carson had come into permanent possession of one—and chose not to reveal that she had it.
She had never used it in violation of anyone’s rights, only when it was legal and when precious time would be saved by dispensing with a written requisition. In the current instance, she couldn’t violate the rights of Bobby Allwine for the simple reason that he was dead.
Although she liked those old movies, she wasn’t a female Dirty Harry. She’d never yet bent a rule far enough to break it, not in a situation of true importance.
She could have awakened the superintendent and gotten a pass key. She would have enjoyed rousting the rude old bastard from his bed.
However, she remembered how he’d looked her up and down, licking his lips. Without Michael present, roused from sleep perhaps induced by wine, the super might try to play grab-ass.
Then she would have to reacquaint him with the effect of a knee to the gonads. That might necessitate an arrest, when all she wanted was to meditate on the meaning of Allwine’s black-on-black apartment.
She switched on the living-room ceiling fixture, closed the door behind her, and put the Lockaid gun on the floor.
