Dead and Alive Read online

  Climbing twice as many stairs as he descended, Jocko tried again: You are the monster child of he who I!

  No, no, no. Not even close.

  I am you he who I am who die!

  Jocko was so angry with himself that he wanted to spit. He did spit. And he spat again. On his feet. Two steps up, one step back, spit. Two steps up, one step back, spit.

  Finally he reached the top step, feet glistening.

  In the second-floor south hall, Jocko stopped to collect his thoughts. There was one. And here was another. And here was a third thought, connected to the other two. Very nice.

  Jocko often had to collect his thoughts. They scattered so easily.

  I am the child of Jonathan Harker! He died to birth me! I am a juggler, monsters and apples! Now you die!

  Close enough.

  Tippytoe, tippytoe, east along the south hall, across soft rugs. Toward the main corridor.

  Jocko heard voices. In his head? Could be. Had been before. No, no, not this time. Real voices. In the main hallway.

  The corner. Careful. Jocko halted, peeked around.

  Erika stood in the hallway, at the open master-suite doors. Talking to someone inside, probably Victor.

  So pretty. Such shimmering hair. She had lips. Jocko wished he had lips, too.

  “It’s the name of a great English house, a literary allusion,” Erika said to probably Victor.

  Her voice soothed Jocko. Her voice was music.

  As a calmness came over Jocko, he realized that he was different when in her company. With her, he didn’t feel compelled to do so much skipping, hopping, spitting, pirouetting, juggling, capering, nostril pulling, scampering, and walking on his hands.

  She lied to Jocko. Lied about the tastiness of soap. Otherwise, however, she was a positive influence.

  Eighty or ninety feet away, Victor Helios appeared. Out of the master suite. Tall. Trim. Excellent hair on his head, probably none on his tongue. Pretty suit.

  Jocko thought: Die, juggler, die!

  Victor walked past Erika. To the stairs. Said one last thing to her. Started down.

  Jocko had the knife. The knife belonged in Victor.

  A thousand knives belonged in Victor.

  Jocko only had two hands. Could juggle three knives with two hands, put them in Victor. Trying to juggle a thousand knives, Jocko would probably lose some fingers.

  To reach Victor with one pathetic knife, Jocko must run past Erika. That would be awkward.

  She would see him. Would know he broke his promise. More than one promise. Would know he lied. Would be disappointed in him.

  And she might smell soap on his breath.

  Erika moved to the stairs. Watched Victor descend.

  Maybe she saw Jocko. From the corner of her eye. She started to turn. Turn toward Jocko.

  Jocko ducked back. Away from the corner.

  Hoppity-hoppity-hop. Hoppity-hoppity-hop. West along the south hall. Backward down the stairs.

  Kitchen again. Apples on the floor. Oranges would be even more round. Jocko must ask for oranges. And scissors to trim his tongue hairs.

  Jocko capered out of the kitchen, through a butler’s pantry, across an intimate dining room.

  Beyond was a large, formal dining room. Jocko didn’t see it too clearly because he had to, had to, had to pirouette.

  Room after room, small connecting halls, so much house. Walking on his hands, knife gripped in one foot. Cartwheeling, cartwheeling, knife in his teeth.

  North hall. Back stairs. Second floor. His suite.

  Jocko hid the knife in his bedding. He scampered back into the living room. Sat on the floor in front of the fireplace. Enjoying the fireplace without fire.

  She would say: I thought I saw you in the hall.

  He would say: No, not Jocko, not Jocko. No, no, no. Not I who am from he who was, monster from monster, no, not Jocko, not in the hall and not eating soap.

  Or maybe he would just say No.

  Jocko would play it by ear. See what seemed right at the time.

  After gazing at no fire for half a minute, Jocko realized he had forgotten to kill Victor.

  Jocko hooked fingers in his nostrils and pulled them toward his brow until his eyes watered. He deserved worse.

  CHAPTER 40

  FOLLOWING THE FAILURE of the freezer motors, the saline solution in the transparent sack begins to warm.

  After the busy visitor in the laboratory throws the sink that smashes the glass door, the pace of the warming accelerates.

  The first improvement in Chameleon’s condition concerns its vision. In the cold environment, it sees only shades of blue. Now it begins to apprehend other colors, gradually at first, and then more rapidly.

  For so long, Chameleon has drifted in the sack, mobility limited by the bitter cold of the fluid in which it is immersed. Now it is able to flex its abdomen and thorax. Its head turns more easily.

  Suddenly it thrashes, thrashes again, a great commotion that causes the hanging sack to swing side to side and bump against the walls of the disabled freezer.

  In semisuspended animation, Chameleon’s metabolism performs at a basal rate so low as to be almost undetectable. As the fluid in the sack warms, the catabolic processes increase.

  With the energy provided by catabolism, anabolic processes begin to speed up. Chameleon is returning to full function.

  The thrashing signifies a need for air. The highly oxygenated solution in the sack maintains Chameleon in subfreezing cold, but is inadequate to sustain it at full metabolic function.

  Suffocation panic triggers Chameleon’s thrashing.

  Although the polymeric fabric of the sack is as strong as bulletproof Kevlar, Chameleon’s combat claws rip it open.

  Fourteen gallons of chemically treated saline solution gush out of the sack, spilling Chameleon into the freezer, through the missing door, and onto the floor of the laboratory.

  Air flows into its spiracles and follows the tracheal tubes that branch throughout its body.

  As it dries out, Chameleon regains its sense of smell.

  It is able to detect only two odors: a specially engineered pheromone with which all of the New Race are tagged, and human beings of the Old Race, who are identifiable by a melange of pheromones lacking that New Race spice.

  The smell of the New Race pleases Chameleon, and therefore they are EXEMPTS.

  Because the Old Race lacks the artificial pheromone, their scent infuriates Chameleon, and they are TARGETS.

  Chameleon lives to kill.

  At the moment, it smells only EXEMPTS. And even all of them seem to be dead, sprawled throughout the room.

  It crawls across the debris-strewn floor of the wrecked lab, through pools of water, seeking prey.

  Every external tissue of Chameleon mimics to the smallest detail the surface under it: color, pattern, texture. No matter how simple or complex the ground under it, Chameleon will blend with it.

  To any observer looking down on it, Chameleon is invisible when not in motion.

  If Chameleon moves, the observer may sense something amiss, but he will not understand what his eyes perceive: a vague shifting of a part of the floor, an impossible rippling of a solid surface, as if the wood or stone, or the lawn, has become fluid.

  Most of the time, the observer will interpret this phenomenon not as a real event but as disturbing evidence of a problem internal to himself: dizziness or hallucination, or the first symptom of an oncoming stroke.

  Often, the observer will close his eyes for a moment, to settle his disturbed senses. Closing his eyes is the end of him.

  If Chameleon is on a higher plane than the floor, perhaps a kitchen countertop, it will remain invisible from the side only if the backsplash is of the same material as the surface on which it stands. Otherwise, it will be visible as a silhouette.

  For this reason, Chameleon generally remains low as it stalks its prey. A TARGET becomes aware of his attacker only when it skitters up his leg, ripping as it goes.
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br />   The wrecked lab offers no TARGETS.

  Chameleon proceeds into the hallway. Here it discovers numerous EXEMPTS, all dead.

  Taking more time to consider these cadavers than it did those in the lab, Chameleon discovers heads split open, brains missing.

  Interesting.

  This is not how Chameleon does its work. Effective, however.

  Among the debrained EXEMPTS, Chameleon detects a whiff of a TARGET. One of the Old Race has been here recently.

  Chameleon follows the scent to the stairs.

  CHAPTER 41

  RAIN HAD NOT YET REACHED the parishes above Lake Pontchartrain. The humid night lay unbreathing but expectant, as if the low overcast and the dark land had compressed the air between them until at any moment an electric discharge would shock the heart of the storm into a thunderous beating.

  Deucalion stood on a deserted two-lane road, outside Crosswoods Waste Management. The facility was enormous. A high chain-link fence was topped with coils of barbed wire and fitted with continuous nylon privacy panels. RESTRICTED AREA signs every forty feet warned of the health hazards of a landfill.

  Outside the fence, a triple phalanx of loblolly pines encircled the property, the rows offset from one another. Between ninety and a hundred feet tall, these trees formed an effective screen, blocking views into the dump from the somewhat higher slopes to the north and east.

  Deucalion walked off the road, among the pines, and went through the fence by way of a gate that didn’t exist—a quantum gate—into the dump.

  He had night vision better than that of the Old Race, even better than that of the New. His enhanced eyesight, not the work of Victor, was perhaps another gift delivered on the lightning that had animated him, the ghost of which still sometimes throbbed through his gray eyes.

  He walked a rampart of compacted earth, a span more than wide enough to accommodate an SUV. To both his left and right, well below the level of this elevated pathway, were huge lakes of trash heaped in uneven swells that would eventually be plowed level before being capped with eight feet of earth and methane-gas vent pipes.

  The stench offended, but he had encountered worse in the past two hundred years. In his first two decades, after leaving Victor for dead in the arctic, Deucalion frequently had been seized by the urge to violence, raging at the injustice of having been stitched together and animated by a narcissistic would-be god who could give his creation neither meaning nor peace, nor any hope of fellowship and community. In his most haunted and self-pitying hours, Deucalion prowled graveyards and broke into granite crypts, mausoleums, where he tore open caskets and forced himself to gaze upon the decomposing corpses, saying aloud to himself, “Here is what you are, just dead flesh, dead flesh, the bones and guts of arsonists, of murderers, filled with false life, dead and alive, not fit for any other world but an abomination in this one.” Standing at those open caskets, he’d known stenches that, by comparison, made this Louisiana dump smell as sweet as a rose garden.

  In those graveyard visits, during those long staring matches with sightless cadavers, he had yearned to die. Although he tried, he was unable to submit to a well-stropped razor or to a hangman’s noose that he fashioned, and at every cliff’s edge, he could not take the final step. So in those long nights when he kept company with the dead, he argued with himself to embrace the necessity for self-destruction.

  The proscription against suicide had not come from Victor.

  In his earliest strivings for godhood, that vainglorious beast wasn’t able to program his first creation as well as he programmed those he brewed up these days. Victor had planted a device in Deucalion’s skull, which had cratered half the giant’s face when he tried to strike his maker. But Victor had not in those days been able to forbid suicide.

  After years marked by a frustrated death wish as much as by rage, Deucalion had arrived at a humbling realization. The edict that so effectively stayed his hand from destroying himself came from a more powerful and infinitely more mysterious source than Victor. He was denied felo-de-se because he had a purpose in life, even if he could not—at that time—recognize what it might be, a vital mission that he must fulfill before final peace would be granted him.

  Two hundred years had at last brought him to Louisiana, to this reeking wasteyard that was a trash dump and a graveyard. The pending storm would be not merely one of thunder, lightning, wind, and rain, but also one of justice, judgment, execution, and damnation.

  To his left, far out in the west pit, flames flickered. A dozen small fires moved one behind the other, as if they were torches held by people in a procession.

  CHAPTER 42

  ERIKA STOOD over the body of Christine for a minute, trying to understand why Victor had shot her to death.

  Although Christine seemed to have become convinced that she was someone other than herself, she had not been threatening. Quite the opposite: She had been confused and distraught, and in spite of her contention that she was not “as fragile a spirit” as she might look, she had the air of a shy, uncertain girl not yet a woman.

  Yet Victor shot her four times in her two hearts. And kicked her head twice, after she was dead.

  Instead of wrapping the body for whoever would collect it and at once cleaning up the blood as instructed, Christine surprised herself by returning to the troll’s quarters in the north wing. She knocked softly and said sotto voce, “It’s me, Erika,” because she didn’t want to disturb the little guy if he was sitting in a corner, sucking on his toes, his mind having gone away to the red place to rest.

  With a discretion that matched hers, he said, “Come in,” just loud enough for her to hear him when she pressed her ear to the door.

  In the living room, she found him sitting on the floor in front of the dark fireplace, as if flames warmed the hearth.

  Sitting beside him, she said, “Did you hear the gunshots?”

  “No. Jocko heard nothing.”

  “I thought you must have heard them and might be frightened.”

  “No. And Jocko wasn’t juggling apples, either. Not Jocko. Not here in his rooms.”

  “Apples? I didn’t bring you apples.”

  “You are very kind to Jocko.”

  “Would you like some apples?”

  “Three oranges would be better.”

  “I’ll bring you some oranges later. Is there anything else you would like?”

  Although the troll’s unfortunate face could produce many expressions that might cause cardiac arrest in an entire pack of attacking wolves, Erika found him cute, if not most of the time, at least occasionally cute, like now.

  Somehow his separately terrifying features conspired to come together in a sweet, yearning expression. His enormous yellow eyes sparkled with delight when he considered what else he might like in addition to the oranges.

  He said, “Oh, there is a thing, a special thing, that I would like, but it’s too much. Jocko doesn’t deserve it.”

  “If I’m able to get it for you,” she said, “I will. So what is this special thing?”

  “No, no. What Jocko deserves is his nostrils pulled back to his eyebrows. Jocko deserves to hit himself hard in the face, to spit on his own feet, to stick his head in a toilet and flush and flush and flush, to tie a ten-pound sledgehammer to his tongue and throw the hammer over a bridge railing, that’s what Jocko deserves.”

  “Nonsense,” said Erika. “You have some peculiar ideas, little friend. You don’t deserve such treatment any more than you would like the taste of soap.”

  “I know better now about the soap,” he assured her.

  “Good. And I’m going to teach you some self-esteem, too.”

  “What is self-esteem?”

  “To like yourself. I’m going to teach you to like yourself.”

  “Jocko tolerates Jocko. Jocko doesn’t like Jocko.”

  “That’s very sad.”

  “Jocko doesn’t trust Jocko.”

  “Why wouldn’t you trust yourself?”

&nbs
p; Pondering her question, the troll smacked the flaps of his mouth for a moment and then said, “Let’s say Jocko wanted a knife.”

  “For what?”

  “Let’s say … for paring his toenails.”

  “I can get you clippers for that.”

  “But let’s just say. Let’s just say Jocko wanted a knife to pare his toenails, and let’s say it was really urgent. The toenails—see, they had to be pared right away, right away, or all hope was lost. So let’s say Jocko hurried to someplace like a kitchen to get the knife. What happens then is what always happens. Let’s say Jocko gets to the kitchen, and sees some … bananas, yes, that’s what he sees, a platter of bananas. Are you with Jocko so far?”

  “Yes, I am,” she said.

  His conversation was not always easy to follow, and sometimes it made no sense at all, but Erika could tell that this mattered to Jocko a great deal. She wanted to understand. She wanted to be there for him, her secret friend.

  “So,” he continued, “Jocko goes all the way to the kitchen. It’s a long way because this house is so big … this imaginary house we’re talking about somewhere, like maybe San Francisco, a big house. Jocko needs to pare his toenails right away. If he doesn’t, all is lost! But Jocko sees bananas. The next thing Jocko knows, Jocko is juggling bananas, capering around the kitchen in San Francisco. Capering or cartwheeling, or pirouetting, or some stupid, stupid, stupid thing. Jocko forgets about the knife until it’s too late to trim toenails, too late, the toenails are gone, Jocko has screwed up again, it’s all over, it’s the end of EVERYTHING!”

  Erika patted his warty shoulder. “It’s all right. It’s okay.”

  “Do you see what Jocko means?”

  “Yes, I do,” she lied. “But I’d like to think about what you’ve said for a while, a day or so, maybe a week, before I respond.”

  Jocko nodded. “That’s fair. It was a lot for Jocko to dump on you. You’re a good listener.”

  “Now,” she said, “let’s go back to the one special thing you would like but don’t think you deserve.”

  That sweet, yearning expression returned to his face, and none too soon. His huge yellow eyes sparkled with excitement as he said, “Oh, oh goodness, oh, how Jocko would like a funny hat!”