Frankenstein Dead and Alive: A Novel Read online

  —Tulsa World

  “For years Koontz has aimed at more than thrills; he is a novelist of metaphysics and moral reflection. Koontz remains one of the most fascinating of contemporary popular novelists.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Koontz knows where we keep our bejesus and what it takes to scare it out of us…. [He] spins his yarns effortlessly.”

  —New York Daily News

  “As scary as anything Poe ever crafted. Koontz has that rare ability to mix despair and hope in almost equal measure.”

  —Mesa Tribune

  “Dean Koontz has always been a master of plot, dialogue, and description. As gifted a writer as Koontz is he’s a better storyteller. The blood of the shaman and chronicler courses through his veins, as he conjures up stories of decent people placed in terrible circumstances. His theme centers on the Grand Romance with its temptations, love, and the struggle against evil. If Koontz tells us anything it is that we are accountable for the choices we make, and one way or another, the bill’s coming due. Fast-paced and dark … Koontz knows we live in a world where evil delights in justifying itself, where materialism has become an end in itself, where the gray, half-light of moral ambiguity supersedes moral verities, and where mankind has turned its collective face away from God. What will become of such a society? Koontz requires us to examine the condition of our kind and there is much to answer for…. Classic literature [that] deserves a place on the bookshelf beside Orwell’s 1984, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Berry’s Jayber Crow.”

  —California Literary Review

  “Show[ing] influences from H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, Dante’s Inferno, and the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, not to mention The Wasteland and other T. S. Eliot works … Koontz effectively merges science-fiction and horror conventions with Judeo-Christian traditions.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Koontz may like to scare readers, but he also likes to charm them. He succeeds at both efforts.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Dean Koontz incorporates mysteries into his plots, but his protagonists are more mysterious than the crimes they solve. He knows how to hook the reader … how to play with our expectations.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “His prose is rich and evocative. His characters are among the warmest—and most despicable—in modern fiction.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “Koontz is writing right where popular culture swells into something larger, just as it did for Homer, Shakespeare, and Dickens. He’s got the gift.”

  —The Australian

  “After three dozen novels and more than 200 million copies sold, Dean Koontz can still reach out and pull the reader into terror.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “Koontz’s plots and characters are always compelling, absorbing, and beautifully drawn with a deep respect for the redemptive power of love.”

  —Orange Coast

  “Dean Koontz … has the power to scare the daylights out of us.”

  —People

  “Koontz’s superlative ability to balance sensationalism with psychological, emotional, and physical realism keeps readers riveted to the page.”

  —Mystery Scene

  “A master of the [suspense] genre.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Koontz is a master at creating believable characters and realistic dialogue…. He has few peers when it comes to snappy one-liners and irreverent humor.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “Koontz knows how to turn the screws, and dealing with internal terrors, really takes the reader for a ride.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “Koontz long ago mastered the art of grabbing a reader’s attention and hanging onto it into the wee hours.”

  —Baton Rouge Advocate

  “Koontz has a touching faith in the human spirit. [His] sure fire plotting and a roster of characters built out of painful tragedies make the pages move.”

  —People

  “The poet laureate of paranoid pop fiction … You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer so tailor-made for the strange, paranoid, black-and-white century we’ve just entered.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Koontz drops readers into the middle of the action, then doubles back to provide the background for his characters, deftly making us care about them…. [He] keeps the action moving at a frenetic pace.”

  —Chicago Sun Times

  Novels by DEAN KOONTZ

  Relentless • Your Heart Belongs to Me • Odd Hours The Darkest Evening of the Year • The Good Guy • Brother Odd The Husband • Forever Odd • Velocity • Life Expectancy The Taking • Odd Thomas • The Face • By the Light of the Moon One Door Away From Heaven • From the Corner of His Eye False Memory • Seize the Night • Fear Nothing • Mr. Murder Dragon Tears • Hideaway • Cold Fire • The Bad Place Midnight • Lightning • Watchers • Strangers • Twilight Eyes Darkfall • Phantoms • Whispers • The Mask • The Vision The Face of Fear • Night Chills • Shattered The Voice of the Night • The Servants of Twilight The House of Thunder • The Key to Midnight The Eyes of Darkness • Shadowfires • Winter Moon The Door to December • Dark Rivers of the Heart • Icebound Strange Highways • Intensity • Sole Survivor • Ticktock The Funhouse • Demon Seed

  DEAN KOONTZ’S FRANKENSTEIN

  Book One: Prodigal Son

  Book Two: City of Night

  Book Three: Dead and Alive

  This trilogy is dedicated to the late

  Mr. Lewis, who long ago realized that

  science was being politicized, that its

  primary goal was changing from knowledge

  to power, that it was also becoming

  scientism, and that in the ism is the

  end of humanity.

  I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.

  —C. S. LEWIS, The Abolition of Man

  CHAPTER 1

  HALF PAST A WINDLESS MIDNIGHT, rain cantered out of the Gulf, across the shore and the levees: parades of phantom horses striking hoof rhythms from roofs of tarpaper, tin, tile, shingles, slate, counting cadence along the avenues.

  Usually a late-night town where restaurants and jazz clubs cooked almost until the breakfast hour, New Orleans was on this occasion unlike itself. Little traffic moved on the streets. Many restaurants closed early. For lack of customers, some of the clubs went dark and quiet.

  A hurricane was transiting the Gulf, well south of the Louisiana coast. The National Weather Service currently predicted landfall near Brownsville, Texas, but the storm track might change. Through hard experience, New Orleans had learned to respect the power of nature.

  Deucalion stepped out of the Luxe Theater without using a door, and stepped into a different district of the city, out of light and into the deep shadows under the boughs of moss-robed oak trees.

  In the glow of streetlamps, the skeins of rain glimmered like tarnished silver. But under the oaks, the precipitation seemed ink-black, as if it were not rain but were instead a product of the darkness, the very sweat of the night.

  Although an intricate tattoo distracted curious people from recognizing the extent of the damage to the ruined half of his face, Deucalion preferred to venture into public places between dusk and dawn. The sunless hours provided an additional layer of disguise.

  His formidable size and physical power could not be concealed. Having endured more than two hundred years, his body was unbent bone and undiminished muscle. Time seemed to have no power to weather him.

  As he followed the sidewalk, he passed through places where the glow of streetlamps penetrated the leafy canopy. The mercurial light chased from memory the torch-carrying mob that had harried Deucalion through a cold and rainless night on a continent far from this one, in an age before el
ectricity.

  Across the street, occupying half a block, the Hands of Mercy stood on an oak-shaded property. Once a Catholic hospital, it closed long ago.

  A tall wrought-iron fence encircled the hospital grounds. The spear-point staves suggested that where mercy had once been offered, none could now be found.

  A sign on the iron driveway gate warned PRIVATE WAREHOUSE / NO ADMITTANCE. The bricked-up windows emitted no light.

  Overlooking the main entrance stood a statue of the Holy Mother. The light once focused on her had been removed, and the robed figure looming in darkness might have been Death, or anyone.

  Only hours earlier, Deucalion had learned that this building harbored the laboratory of his maker, Victor Helios, whose birth name was legend: Frankenstein. Here members of the New Race were designed, created, and programmed.

  The security system would monitor every door. The locks would be difficult to defeat.

  Thanks to gifts carried on the lightning bolt that brought him to life in an earlier and more primitive lab, Deucalion did not need doors. Locks were no impediment to him. Intuitively, he grasped the quantum nature of the world, including the truth that on the deepest structural level, every place in the world was the same place.

  As he contemplated venturing into his maker’s current lair, Deucalion had no fear. If any emotion might undo him, it would be rage. But over these many decades, he had learned to control the anger that had once driven him so easily to violence.

  He stepped out of the rain and into the main laboratory in the Hands of Mercy, wet when he took the step, dry when he completed it.

  Victor’s immense lab was a techno-Deco wonder, mostly stainless-steel and white ceramic, filled with sleek and mysterious equipment that seemed not to be standing along the walls but to be embedded in them, extruding from them. Other machines swelled out of the ceiling and surged up from the floor, polished and gleaming, yet suggesting organic forms.

  Every soft noise was rhythmic, the purr and hum and click of machinery. The place seemed to be deserted.

  Sapphire, primrose-pink, and apple-green luminous gases filled glass spheres. Through elaborate coils of transparent tubing flowed lavender, calamine-blue, and methyl-orange fluids.

  Victor’s U-shaped workstation stood in the center of the room, a black-granite top on a stainless-steel base.

  As Deucalion considered searching the drawers, someone behind him said, “Can you help me, sir?”

  The man wore a gray denim jumpsuit. In a utility belt around his waist were secured spray bottles of cleaning solutions, white rags, and small sponges. He held a mop.

  “Name’s Lester,” he said. “I’m an Epsilon. You seem smarter than me. Are you smarter than me?”

  “Is your maker here?” Deucalion asked.

  “No, sir. Father left earlier.”

  “How many staff are here?”

  “I don’t count much. Numbers confuse me. I heard once—eighty staff. So Father isn’t here, now something’s gone wrong, and I’m just an Epsilon. You seem like maybe an Alpha or a Beta. Are you an Alpha or a Beta?”

  “What’s gone wrong?” Deucalion asked.

  “She says Werner is trapped in Isolation Room Number One. No, maybe Number Two. Anyway, Number Something.”

  “Who is Werner?”

  “He’s the security chief. She wanted instructions, but I don’t give instructions, I’m just Lester.”

  “Who wants instructions?”

  “The woman in the box.”

  As Lester spoke, the computer on Victor’s desk brightened, and on the screen appeared a woman so flawlessly beautiful that her face must have been a digital construction.

  “Mr. Helios, Helios. Welcome to Helios. I am Annunciata. I am not as much Annunciata as before, but I am still trying to be as much Annunciata as I am able. I am now analyzing my helios, Mr. Systems. My systems, Mr. Helios. I am a good girl.”

  “She’s in a box,” Lester said.

  “A computer,” Deucalion said.

  “No. A box in the networking room. She’s a Beta brain in a box. She don’t have no body. Sometimes her container leaks, so I clean up the spill.”

  Annunciata said, “I am wired. I am wired. I am wired into the building’s data-processing system. I am secretary to Mr. Helios. I am very smart. I am a good girl. I want to serve efficiently. I am a good, good girl. I am afraid.”

  “She isn’t usually like this,” said Lester.

  “Perhaps there is an im-im-im-imbalance in my nutrient supply. I am unable to analyze. Could someone analyze my nutrient supply?”

  “Self-aware, forever in a box,” Deucalion said.

  “I am very afraid,” Annunciata said.

  Deucalion found his hands curling into fists. “There is nothing your maker won’t do. No form of slavery offends him, no cruelty is beyond him.”

  Uneasy, shifting from foot to foot like a little boy who needed to go to the bathroom, Lester said, “He’s a great genius. He’s even smarter than an Alpha. We should be grateful to him.”

  “Where is the networking room?” Deucalion asked.

  “We should be grateful.”

  “The networking room. Where is this … woman?”

  “In the basement.”

  On the computer screen, Annunciata said, “I must organize the appointment schedule for Mr. Helios. Helios. But I do not remember what an appointment is. Can you help, help, help me?”

  “Yes,” Deucalion said. “I can help you.”

  CHAPTER 2

  WHEN THE PIZZA-DELIVERY GUY, looking for the Bennet house, made the mistake of going to the Guitreau place next door, Janet Guitreau surprised herself by dragging him into her foyer and strangling him to death.

  Janet and her husband, Bucky Guitreau, the current district attorney of the city of New Orleans, were replicants. The bodies of the real Janet and Bucky had been buried weeks previously in a vast garbage dump in the uplands well northeast of Lake Pontchartrain.

  Most of the New Race were not replicants. They were originals, fully designed by Father. But replicants were crucial to taking control of the city’s political apparatus.

  Janet suspected that some significant lines of code had dropped out of her program, and Bucky was inclined to agree with her.

  Not only had Janet killed without being told to do so by her maker, but she felt good about it. Actually, she felt marvelous.

  She wanted to go next door and kill the Bennets. “Killing is wonderfully refreshing. I feel so alive.”

  Bucky should have reported her to Helios for termination. But he was so in awe of her audacity and so intrigued that he could not convince himself to phone Father’s emergency number.

  This suggested to both of them that Bucky, too, had dropped some lines of his program. He didn’t think that he could kill, but he was excited by the prospect of watching Janet destroy the Bennets.

  They almost rushed next door. But then the dead pizza guy in the foyer seemed worthy of further examination, considering that he was Janet’s first.

  “After all,” Bucky said, “if you were a hunter and this guy were a deer, we’d take a hundred photographs, and we’d cut off his antlers to hang them over the fireplace.”

  Janet’s eyes widened. “Hey, you want to cut something off him, hang it over the fireplace?”

  “That maybe wouldn’t be smart, but I would for sure like to get some snapshots.”

  “So you get the camera,” Janet said, “and I’ll look around for the best backdrop.”

  When Bucky hurried to the second floor to retrieve the camera from the master-bedroom closet, he discovered the Duke of Orleans watching the foyer from the top of the stairs.

  Duke was a handsome German shepherd, caramel-and-black with two white boots. Since the New Race versions of Bucky and Janet had come into his life a few weeks earlier, he had been confused and wary. They looked like his masters, but he knew they were not. He treated them with respect but remained aloof, withheld affection, which they didn�
�t want anyway.

  As Bucky reached the top of the stairs, Duke padded away into one of the guest bedrooms.

  Helios had considered having the dog killed when the original Bucky and Janet had been terminated.