by Dean Koontz
Chapter 43
IN THE WINDOWLESS Victorian drawing room beyond the two vault doors, Erika circled the immense glass case, studying every detail. At first it had resembled a big jewel box, which it still did; but now it also seemed like a coffin, though an oversized and highly unconventional one.
She had no reason to believe that it contained a body. At the center of the case, the shape shrouded by the amber liquid — or gas — had no discernible limbs or features. It was just a dark mass without detail; it might have been anything.
If the case in fact contained a body, the specimen was large: about seven and a half feet long, more than three feet wide.
She examined the ornate ormolu frame under which the panels of glass were joined, searching for seams that might indicate concealed hinges. She could not find any. If the top of the box was a lid, it operated on some principle that eluded her.
When she rapped a knuckle against the glass, the sound suggested a thickness of at least one inch.
She noticed that under the glass, directly below the spot where her knuckle struck it, the amberness — whatever its nature — dimpled as water dimples when a stone drops into it. The dimple bloomed sapphire blue, resolved into a ring, and receded across the surface; the amber hue was reestablished in its wake.
She rapped again, with the same effect. When she rapped three times in succession, three concentric blue rings appeared, receded, faded.
Although her knuckle had made only the briefest contact, the glass had seemed cold. When she flattened her palm against it, she discovered that it was icy, though a few degrees too warm for her skin to freeze to it.
When she knelt on the Persian carpet and peered under the case, between its exquisitely sculpted ball-in-claw feet, she could see electrical conduits and pipes of various colors and diameters that came out of the bottom and disappeared into the floor. This suggested that a service room must lie below, although the mansion supposedly had no basement.
Victor owned one of the largest properties in the neighborhood and in fact had combined two great houses so elegantly that he had earned plaudits from historical preservationists. All of the interior reconstruction had been undertaken by members of the New Race, but not all of it had been disclosed to — or permitted by — the city's building department.
Her brilliant husband had achieved more than entire universities of scientists. His accomplishments were even more remarkable when you considered that he had been forced to do his work clandestinely and since the regrettable death of Mao Tse-tung, without grants from any government.
She got to her feet and circled the case once more, trying to determine if there was a head or foot to it, as there would be to any bed or casket. The design of the object offered her no clue, but she at last decided, sheerly by intuition, that the head of it must be the end farthest from the door to the room.
Bending forward, bending low and lower, Erika put her face close to the top of the case, peering intently into the amber miasma, close and then closer, hoping for at least a faint suggestion of contour or texture to the shadowy shape within the liquid shroud.
When her lips were no more than two inches from the glass, she said softly, “Hello, hello, hello in there.”
This time it definitely moved.
Chapter 44
DOG-NOSE NICK stood on the rim of the pit, breathing deeply of the stink brought to him by a light breeze that came down out of the declining sun.
More than an hour ago, the last of the day's incoming trucks had dumped its load, and Crosswoods Waste Management had closed its gates until dawn. Now it was its own world, a universe encircled by chain-link topped with razor wire.
In the night ahead, the members of Nick Frigg's crew were free to be who they were, what they were. They could do what they wanted, without concern that an Old Race truck driver might see behavior that belied their pose of sanitation-worker normality.
Down in the west pit below him, crew members were wedging pole-mounted torches into the trash field in the area where the interments would take place. After nightfall, they would light the oil lamp at the top of each pole.
With their enhanced vision, Nick and his people didn't need as much light as they were providing, but for these ceremonies, torches set the perfect mood. Even those of the New Race, even Gammas like Nick, and even lowly Epsilons like the crew he bossed, could thrill to stagecraft.
Perhaps especially the Epsilons. They were more intelligent than animals, of course, but in some ways they were like animals in their simplicity and excitability.
Sometimes it seemed to Nick Frigg that the longer these Epsilons lived here in Crosswoods, having little contact with any Gamma other than he himself, having no contact at all with Betas or Alphas, the more simpleminded and more animalistic they became, as though without higher classes of the New Race to serve as examples, they could not entirely hold fast to even the meager knowledge and modest standards of deportment that had been downloaded into their brains while they had been in their tanks.
After the interments, the crew would feast, drink very much, and have sex. They would eat hungrily at the start, and soon they would be tearing at their food, gorging with abandon. The liquor would flow directly from bottle to mouth, mixed with nothing, undiluted, to maximize and accelerate its effect. The sex would be eager and selfish, then insistent and angry, then savage, no desire unindulged, no sensation unexperienced.
They would find relief from loneliness, meaninglessness. But the relief came only during the feeding, during the drinking and the sex. After, the anguish would return like a hammer, driving the nail deeper, deeper, deeper. Which they always forgot. Because they needed to forget.
At this moment, Gunny Alecto and other crewmen were at the walk-in cooler, loading the five human bodies and three dead gone-wrongs onto a pair of small, open-bed, four-wheel-drive trucks that would convey them to the site of the ceremony. The Old Race cadavers would be on one truck, the gone-wrongs on another.
The Old Race dead would be transported with less respect than gone-wrongs received, in fact with no respect at all. Their bodies would be subjected to grotesque indignities.
In the class structure of the New Race, the Epsilons had no one to whom they could feel superior — except those of the Old Race. And in these interment ceremonies, they expressed a hatred of such purity and such long-simmering reduction that no one in the history of the earth had ever despised more intensely, loathed more ferociously, or abominated their enemy with greater fury.
Some fun tonight.
Chapter 45
AT THE HANDS OF MERCY, none of the three isolation rooms had been designed to contain a deadly disease, for Victor did not have an interest in the engineering of microorganisms. There was no danger whatsoever that he would accidentally create a deadly new virus or bacterium.
Consequently, the twenty-by-fifteen-foot chamber that he chose for Werner was not surrounded by a positive-pressure envelope to prevent the escape of airborne microbes and spoors. Neither did it have its own self-contained ventilation system.
The isolation room had been meant solely to contain any New Race variant — he experimented with some exotic ones — that Victor suspected might prove difficult to manage and any that unexpectedly exhibited antisocial behavior of a lethal nature.
Therefore, the walls, ceiling, and floor of the chamber were of poured-in-place, steel-reinforced concrete to a thickness of eighteen inches. The interior surfaces had been paneled with three overlapping layers of quarter-inch steel plate.
If necessary, a killing electrical charge could be introduced into those steel plates with the flip of the switch in the adjoining monitor room.
Sole access to the isolation chamber was through a transition module between it and the monitor room.
The staff sometimes referred to it as the air lock, although this inaccurate term annoyed Victor. No atmosphere changes occurred during the use of the transition module, and there was not even a simple recycling of air.
The module featured two round steel doors that had been made for bank vaults. By design, it was mechanically impossible to have both doors open at the same time; therefore, when the inner door opened, a prisoner of the isolation chamber might get into the vestibule, but it could not break through into the monitor room.
On a gurney, his flesh undergoing cellular breakdown if not even molecular reorganization, Werner had been rushed through the halls of Mercy, into the monitor room, through the module, into the isolation chamber, with Victor urging the attendants to “hurry, faster, damn you, run!”
The staff might have thought that blind panic had seized their maker, but Victor couldn't concern himself with what they thought. Werner had been secured in that fortresslike cell, which was all that mattered.
When the hand had formed out of the amorphous flesh of Werner's torso, it had taken hold of Victor's hand tenderly, beseechingly. But the initial docility dared not be taken as a reliable prediction of a benign transformation.
Nothing remotely like this had ever happened before. Such a sudden collapse of cellular integrity accompanied by self-driven biological reformation should not be possible.
Common sense suggested that such a radical metamorphosis, which must obviously include drastic changes in cerebral tissues, would entail the loss of a significant percentage of the direct-to-brain data and programming that Werner had received in the tank, including perhaps the proscription against killing his maker.
Prudence and responsible haste — not panic — had been required. As a man of unequaled scientific vision, Victor had at once foreseen the worst-case scenario and had acted with admirable calm yet with alacrity to respond to the danger and to contain the threat.
He made a mental note to circulate a stern memo to that effect throughout Mercy before the end of the day.
He would dictate it to Annunciata.
No, he would compose it and distribute it himself, and to hell with Annunciata.
In the monitor room, where Victor gathered with Ripley and four additional staff members, a bank of six rectangular high-definition screens, each displaying the closed-circuit feed from one of six cameras in the isolation chamber, revealed that Werner still remained in a disturbingly plastic condition. At the moment, he had four legs, no arms, and an ill-defined, continuously shifting body out of which thrust a vaguely Wernerlike head.
Highly agitated, the Werner thing jittered around the isolation chamber, mewling like a wounded animal and sometimes saying, “Father? Father? Father?”
This father business irritated Victor almost beyond the limits of his endurance. He didn't shout Shut up, shut up, shut up at the screens only because he wished to avoid the necessity of adding a second paragraph to that memo.
He did not want them to think of him as their father. They were not his family; they were his inventions, his fabrications, and most surely his properly. He was their maker, their owner, their master, and even their leader, if they wished to think of him that way, but not their paterfamilias.
The family was a primitive and destructive institution because it put itself above the good of society as a whole. The parent-child relationship was counterrevolutionary and must be eradicated. For his creations, their entire race would be their family, each of them the brother or the sister of all the others, so that no particular relationship would be different from all the others or more special than all the others.
One race, one family, one great humming hive working in unison, without the distractions of individuality and family, could achieve anything to which it set its mind and its bottomless bustling energy, unhampered by childish emotions, freed from all superstition, could conquer any challenge that the universe might hold for it. A dynamic, unstoppable species of heretofore unimagined determination, gathering ever greater momentum, would rush on, rush on, to glory after glory, in his name.
Watching the four-legged, mewling, jittering Werner thing as it began to sprout something like but not like arms from its back, Ripley raised his ridiculous eyebrows and said, “Like Harker.”
Victor at once rebuked him. “This is nothing like Harker. Harker was a singularity. Harker spawned a parasitical second self. Nothing like that is happening to Werner.”
Riveted by the shocking images on the screen, Ripley said, “But, Mr. Helios, sir, he appears to be—”
“Werner is not spawning a parasitical second self,” Victor said tightly. “Werner is experiencing catastrophic cellular metamorphosis. It's not the same. It is not the same at all. Werner is a different singularity.”
Chapter 46
CINDI AND BENNY LOVEWELL, one a believer in the science of voodoo and one not, reestablished contact with Detectives O'Connor and Maddison through the signal emitted by the transponder under the hood of their police-department sedan. They caught up with their targets — but remained out of visual contact — in the Garden District.
For long minutes, the cops cruised the same few blocks, around and around, and then changed directions, cruising the identical territory in the opposite direction, making one circuit and then another.
“Like a blind rat in a maze,” Cindi said solemnly, identifying as before with O'Connor's childlessness.
“No,” Benny disagreed. “This is different.”
“You wouldn't understand.”
“I have the same capacity for understanding that you do.”
“Not about this, you don't. You aren't female.”
“Well, if it's necessary to have ever had a womb in order to be female, then you aren't female, either. You don't have a womb. You were not designed to produce a baby, and you cannot possibly become pregnant.”
“We'll see what Ibo has to say about that,” she replied smugly. “Je suis rouge.”
Studying the blinking blip as it moved on the screen, Benny said, “They're cruising so slow...”
“You want to make contact, block them to the curb, knock 'em cold, and take them?”
“Not here. This is the kind of neighborhood where people call the police. We'll end up in a pursuit.” After watching the screen for another minute, he said, “They're looking for something.”
“For what?”
“How would I know?”
“Too bad Zozo Deslisle isn't here,” Cindi said. “She has voodoo vision. Give her one look at that screen, and she'd know what they're up to.”
“I'm wrong,” Benny said. “They aren't searching. They've found what they want, and now they're casing it.”
“Casing what? Thieves case banks. There aren't any banks in this neighborhood, only houses.”
As Benny squinted at the screen, feeling an answer teasing along the edge of his mind, the target abruptly accelerated. The red blip hung a U-turn on the screen and started moving fast.
“What're they doing now?” Cindi asked.
“They're cops. Maybe they got an emergency call. Stay with them. Don't let them see us, but try to close to within a block. Maybe we'll get an opportunity.”
A minute later, Cindi said, “They're heading for the Quarter. That's too public for us.”
“Stay with them anyway.”
The detectives didn't stop in the Quarter. They followed the curve of the river through Faubourg Marigny into the neighborhood known as Bywater.
The blip on the screen stopped moving, and by the time the Lovewells caught up with the plainwrap sedan, in the first orange flush of twilight, it was parked near a church, in front of a two-story brick house. O'Connor and Maddison were nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 47
CARSON SAT ACROSS the kitchen table from Lulana St. John, cater-corner to Pastor Kenny Laffite.
Michael stood near the cooktop, where Evangeline was heating a Mason jar full of milk in a pot of water.
“Heating it directly in a pan,” she told Michael, “you risk scalding it.”
“Then it gets a skin, doesn't it?” he asked.
She grimaced. “Burnt scum on the bottom and skin on top.”
T
he minister sat with his arms on the table, staring with horror at his hands. “I just suddenly realized I did it. Just by being me, I killed him. And killing is forbidden.”
“Pastor Laffite,” Carson said, “you are not required by law to answer our questions without your attorney present. Do you want to call your attorney?”
“This good man didn't kill anybody,” Lulana protested. “Whatever happened it was an accident.”
Carson and Michael had already conducted a quick search of the house and had not found either a dead body or any signs of violence.
“Pastor Laffite,” Carson said, “please look at me.”
The minister kept staring at his hands. His eyes were opened as wide as eyes could be, and they weren't blinking.
“Pastor Laffite,” she said, “forgive me, but you seem zoned-out and wigged-out at the same time. I'm concerned that you may recently have used an illegal drug.”
“The moment I woke up,” said the minister, “he was dead or soon to be. Just by waking up, I killed him.”
“Pastor Laffite, do you understand that anything you say to me now could be used against you in a court of law?”
“This good man won't ever be in a court of law,” Lulana said. “He's just confused somehow. That's why I wanted you two instead of others. I knew you wouldn't leap to conclusions.”
The minister's eyes had still not blinked. They weren't tearing up, either. They should have started to tear up from not blinking.
From his post by the cooktop, Michael said, “Pastor, who is it you think you killed?”
“I killed Pastor Kenny Laffite,” the minister said.
Lulana gave herself to surprise with some enthusiasm, pulling her head back, letting her jaw drop, putting one hand to her bosom. “Praise the Lord, Pastor Kenny, you can't have killed yourself. You're sitting right here with us.”