by Dean Koontz
“What next?” he said. “Will you toilet here?”
One of the New Race, Erika could turn off pain at will. Slapping her, punching her, biting her, Victor insisted that she endure the agony, and she obeyed.
“Perhaps you’ll learn from suffering,” he said.
Minutes after Victor went upstairs to bed, Erika’s many cuts closed. Within half an hour, the swelling around her eyes diminished. Like all of her kind, she had been engineered to heal rapidly and to live a thousand years.
Unlike the rest of her kind, Erika was permitted to experience humility, shame, and hope. Victor found tenderness and vulnerability appealing in a wife.
The day had begun with a beating, too, during morning sex. He left her racked with pain and sobbing in the bed.
Two hours later, her bruised face was as smooth and as fair as ever, though she was troubled by her failure to please him. By all biological evidence, he had been excited and fulfilled, but that must not have been the case. The beating seemed to indicate that he found her inadequate.
She was Erika Five. Four previous females, identical to her in appearance, had been cultured in the creation tanks to serve as their maker’s wife. For various reasons, they had not been satisfactory.
Erika Five remained determined not to fail her husband.
Her first day as Mrs. Helios had been characterized by numerous surprises, mystery, violence, pain, the death of a household servant, and a naked albino dwarf. Surely the second day, soon to begin, would be less eventful.
Recovering from the second beating, sitting in the dark on the glassed-in back porch, she drank cognac faster than her superbly engineered metabolism could burn off the alcohol. Thus far, however, in spite of the consumption of two and a half bottles, she had not been able to achieve inebriation; but she felt relaxed.
Earlier, before the rain began to fall, the albino dwarf had appeared on the rear lawn, revealed by landscape lighting, scampering from the shadows under an ancient magnolia tree to the gazebo, to the arbor draped in trumpet vines, to the reflecting pond.
Because Victor purchased and combined three grand properties, his estate was the largest in the fabled Garden District. The expansive grounds gave an inquisitive albino dwarf numerous corners to explore.
Eventually, this strange visitor had noticed her behind the big windows on the dark porch. He had come close to the glass, they had exchanged only a few words, and Erika had felt an inexplicable sympathy for him.
Although the dwarf was not a guest of whom Victor was likely to approve, Erika nevertheless had a duty to treat visitors with grace. She was Mrs. Helios, after all, the wife of one of the most prominent men in New Orleans.
After telling the dwarf to wait, she went to the kitchen and filled a wicker picnic hamper with cheese, roast beef, bread, fruit, and a chilled bottle of Far Niente Chardonnay.
When she had stepped outside with the hamper, the frightened creature hurried to a safe distance. She placed the offering on the lawn and returned to the porch, to her cognac.
Eventually, the dwarf came back for the hamper, and then hurried away into the night with it.
Needing little sleep, Erika remained on the porch, wondering at these events. When the rain came, her contemplative mood deepened.
Now, less than half an hour after the rainfall began, the dwarf returned through the down-pour. He carried the half-finished bottle of Chardonnay.
From the small red-and-white-checkered tablecloth that had lined the picnic hamper, he had fashioned a sarong that fell from his waist to his ankles, suggesting that he had not been running naked through the night by choice. He stood at the glass door, gazing at her.
Although in fact he was not a dwarf but something strange, and though she previously decided that troll described him better than any other word, Erika wasn’t afraid of him. She gestured to him to join her on the dark porch, and he opened the door.
CHAPTER 10
WHEN ANNUNCIATA’S FACE FADED entirely from the computer screen in the networking room, Deucalion quickly plucked the oxygen-infusion lines from the four additional glass cylinders, putting a merciful end to the imprisonment and the existence of the other disembodied Alpha brains, whatever their function.
Lester, the Epsilon-class maintenance man who had accompanied him down from the main lab, watched with obvious longing.
Members of the New Race were created with a proscription against suicide. They were incapable of killing themselves or one another, just as they were incapable of striking out against their maker.
Lester met Deucalion’s stare and said, “You aren’t forbidden?”
“Only to strike at my maker.”
“But … you’re one like us.”
“No. I’m long before all of you. I’m his first.”
Lester considered this, then raised his eyes to the blank screen where Annunciata had once appeared. Like a cow chewing its cud, his Epsilon-class brain processed what he had been told.
“Dead and alive,” he said.
“I will destroy him,” Deucalion promised.
“What will the world be like … without Father?” Lester wondered.
“For you, I don’t know. For me … it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.”
Lester raised his hands and stared at them. “Sometimes, when I don’t have no work to do, I scratch myself till I bleed, then I watch myself heal, then I scratch till I bleed some more.”
“Why?”
Shrugging, Lester said, “What else is there to do? My job is me. That’s the program. Seeing blood makes me think about the revolution, the day we get to kill them all, and then I feel better.” He frowned. “Can’t be a world without Father.”
“Before he was born,” Deucalion said, “there was a world. It will go on without him.”
Lester thought about that, but then shook his head. “A world without Father scares me. Don’t want to see it.”
“Well, then you won’t.”
“Problem is … like all of us, I’m made strong.”
“I’m stronger,” Deucalion assured him.
“Problem is, I’m quick, too.”
“I’m quicker.”
Deucalion took a step back from Lester and, with a quantum trick, wound up not farther from him but closer to him, no longer in front of him, but behind him.
From Lester’s perspective, Deucalion had vanished. Startled, the janitor stepped forward.
Behind Lester, Deucalion stepped forward, too, snaked his right arm around the other’s neck, his left arm around the head. As the janitor, with his strong hands, tried to claw loose of the death grip, Deucalion wrenched with such force that the Epsilon’s spine shattered. Instant brain death precluded any healing, rapid or otherwise.
Gently, Deucalion lowered Lester to the floor. He knelt beside the cadaver. Neither of the janitor’s two hearts continued beating. His eyes did not track his executioner’s hand, and his eyelids did not resist the fingers that tenderly closed them.
“Not dead and alive,” Deucalion said. “Only dead and safe now … beyond despair and beyond your maker’s fury.”
Rising from his knees in the basement networking room, Deucalion reached his full height in the main laboratory, at Victor’s U-shaped workstation, where his search had been interrupted by Lester and then by Annunciata.
Earlier in the night, from Pastor Kenny Laffite—a creation of Victor’s, whose program had been breaking down—Deucalion had learned that at least two thousand of the New Race were passing as ordinary people in the city. Pastor Kenny, who was now at peace like Lester, also said the creation tanks in the Hands of Mercy could produce a new crop of his kind every four months, over three hundred annually.
More important was Kenny’s revelation that a New Race farm, somewhere outside the city, might go into operation within the next week. Two thousand creation tanks, under a single roof, would produce six thousand in the first year. Yet another such farm was rumored to be under construc
tion.
When Deucalion found nothing useful in the drawers of Victor’s workstation, he switched on the computer.
CHAPTER 11
RIPLEY, IN THE MONITORING HUB, was also in a dilemma.
He knew that, even as strong and smart as he was, he couldn’t survive a battle with the Werner thing. Patrick Duchaine, also an Alpha, had been overpowered and torn to pieces in Isolation Room Number Two.
Certain beyond doubt that he would be killed in a confrontation with this creature, he must do everything possible to avoid contact, although not because he wanted to live. The unfocused anxiety that every day tormented him for long hours—as well as the fact that he was in essence a slave to his maker—made life less of a joy than it was portrayed in the warm and cozy novels of Jan Karon, which Ripley sometimes secretly downloaded from the Internet and read. Although he would have been relieved to die, he must escape from Werner because the proscription against suicide, genetically wired into his brain, restrained him from doing battle with an adversary that inevitably would destroy him.
As the Werner grotesquerie conjured words out of an insectile mouth that should have been incapable of producing speech—“I am free, free, free. I am FREE!”— Ripley glanced at the control console and quickly tapped two switches that would cycle open the outer doors to Isolation Rooms One and Three, which at the moment contained no prisoners.
Prisoners was the wrong word, he at once admonished himself, the wrong word and evidence of a rebellious attitude. Subjects was a more accurate word. Rooms One and Three held no subjects for observation.
“Free Werner. Werner free, free.”
When the servomotors began to hum and the bolt-retraction gears to click, the Werner thing looked toward the source of the sounds and cocked its grisly head, as if considering why Ripley had taken this action.
Having seen the lethal quickness with which Free Werner sprang upon Duchaine, faster than a snake could strike, Ripley struggled to think of a way to buy time, to distract the mutated security chief. The only hope seemed to be to open a dialogue.
“Quite a day, huh?”
Free Werner continued to stare toward the humming servomotors.
“Just last night,” Ripley tried again, “Vincent said to me, ‘A day in the Hands of Mercy can be like a year with your testicles in a vise and not allowed to turn off the pain.’”
The palpi around the insectile mouth quivered excitedly at the soft sucking sound of the four dozen three-inch-thick lock bolts retracting from the architraves.
“Of course,” said Ripley, “I had to report him to Father for an attitude adjustment. Now he’s hanging upside down in a re-education box with a catheter in his penis, a collection hose up his rectum, and two holes in his skull to allow the insertion of brain probes.”
Finally, as the bolts finished retracting and the two vault doors on the transition modules began to swing open, Free Werner turned his attention once more to Ripley.
“Of course, as primary lab assistant to the Beekeeper … that is, to Mr. Helios, there’s no place I’d rather be than in the Hands of Mercy. This is the birth-place of the future, where the Million-Year Reich has begun.”
As he spoke, Ripley casually reached toward the control console, intending to tap two switches and cycle shut the doors that had just opened. If he could slip into one of the transition modules just as the door closed, before Free Werner could follow, he might be safe.
When he had been security chief, Werner had known how to operate the console. But the genetic chaos that the Beekeeper referred to as catastrophic cellular metamorphosis might have scrambled his cerebral function as much as it had wrought havoc with his body. His cognitive power or his memory, or both, might be so diminished that he would not know how to open the vault door and get at his prey.
In that gargly, hissing voice, Free Werner said, “Don’t touch the switches.”
CHAPTER 12
HAVING NARROWLY ESCAPED death-by-Mercedes on the rain-slickened streets of a city soon to be under assault by Victor Frankenstein’s berserk killing machines, Carson O’Connor wanted an Acadiana fried-redfish poor boy.
Acadiana didn’t advertise. You couldn’t see it from the street. Locals didn’t tell tourists about it. For fear too much success would ruin the place, locals didn’t tell other locals about it all that often. If you found Acadiana, it meant you had the right kind of soul to eat there.
“We already had dinner,” Michael reminded her.
“So you’re on death row, you eat your last meal, after dessert you’ll be electrocuted, but they ask if you want to delay execution long enough to have a second last meal—and you’re gonna say no?”
“I don’t think dinner was our last meal.”
“I think it could have been.”
“It could have been,” he admitted, “but probably not. Besides, Deucalion told us just to cruise the neighborhood until he called.”
“I’ll have the cell phone with me.”
Acadiana didn’t have a parking lot. You couldn’t park on the street near it, because it was approached by an alleyway. The only diners who dared to leave their vehicles in the alleyway were cops.
“With this car, we’ll have to park a block away,” Michael said. “And what if we get back, and somebody’s stolen it?”
“Only an idiot is going to steal this spavined heap.”
“The Helios empire is exploding, Carson.”
“The Frankenstein empire.”
“I still can’t bring myself to say that. Anyway, it’s blowing up, and we have to be ready to move.”
“I’m sleep-deprived and I’m starving. I can’t sleep, but I can get a po’ boy. Look at me, I’m a poster girl for protein deficiency.” She turned off the street into a backway. “I’ll park in the alley.”
“If you park in the alley, I’ll have to stay with the car.”
“Okay, stay with the car, we’ll eat in the car, we’ll get married someday in the car, we’ll live in the car with four kids, and when the last one goes off to college, we’ll finally get rid of the damn car and buy a house.”
“You’re a little bit on edge tonight.”
“I’m a lot on edge.” She set the hand brake and switched to the parking lights, but didn’t kill the engine. “And I’m crazy hungry.”
Flanking Michael, muzzles resting on the floor, were a pair of Urban Sniper shotguns with fourteen-inch barrels.
Nevertheless, he drew a pistol from a side scabbard under his sport coat. This was not his service pistol, which he carried in a shoulder holster. This was a Desert Eagle Magnum loaded with .50-caliber Action Express cartridges, which could stop a grizzly bear if one happened to be wandering around New Orleans in a foul mood.
“Okay,” he said.
Carson got out of the car, keeping her right hand under her jacket, cross-body, on the butt of her Desert Eagle, which she carried on her left hip.
All of these weapons were illegally obtained, but Victor Helios posed an extraordinary threat to her and her partner. Better that their badges should be pulled than that their heads should be torn off by the soulless minions of a mad scientist.
Never before in her police career had the words soulless minions crossed her mind, although in the past few days, mad scientist had gotten a workout.
She hurried through the rain, around the front of the car, to a door under a lighted sign that said 22 PARISHES.
The chef-owner of Acadiana made a fetish out of keeping a low profile. There were twenty-two parishes—counties—in that area of Louisiana known as Acadiana. If you didn’t know this, the cryptic sign might have appeared to announce the offices of some religious organization.
Behind the door were stairs, and at the top lay the restaurant: a worn wooden floor, red-vinyl booths, tables draped with red-and-black-checkered oilcloth, candles in red votive glasses, recorded zydeco music, lively conversations among the diners, the air rich with aromas that made Carson’s mouth water.
At this hour, th
e customers were second-shift workers eating by a clock different from that of day-world people, hookers of a subdued kind meeting after having tucked their spent johns in bed for the night, insomniacs, and some lonely souls whose closest friends were waitresses and busboys and other lonely souls who on a regular basis took their post-midnight dinner here.
To Carson, the harmony among these disparate people seemed akin to grace, and it gave her hope that humanity might one day be saved from itself—and that it might be worth saving.
At the takeout counter, she ordered a poor-boy sandwich with crispy-fried redfish layered with white-cabbage-and-onion cole slaw, sliced tomatoes, and tartar sauce. She asked that it be sliced into four sections, each wrapped.
She also ordered side dishes: red beans and rice au vin, okra succotash with rice, and mushrooms sautéed in butter and Sauterne with cayenne pepper.
Everything was split between two bags. To each bag, the clerk added an ice-cold half-liter bottle of a local cola that offered a caffeine jolt three times that of the national brands.
Descending the stairs toward the alleyway, Carson realized her arms were too full to allow her to keep one hand on her holstered Desert Eagle. But she made it into the car alive. Big trouble was still a few minutes away.
CHAPTER 13
IN THE MONITORING HUB, at the control console for the three isolation rooms, Ripley obeyed the Werner thing when in its singular voice it told him not to touch the switches.
For as long as he had been out of the tank—three years and four months—he’d been obedient, taking orders not only from the Beekeeper but also from other Alphas in positions superior to his. Werner was a Beta, not the equal of any Alpha, and he wasn’t even a Beta anymore, but instead a freak, an ambulatory stew of primordial cells changing into ever more degenerative forms—but Ripley obeyed him anyway. The habit of obedience is difficult to break, especially when it’s coded into your genes and downloaded with your in-tank education,
