Dead and Alive

Page 16

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?”
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!”
“What kind of funny hat?”
“Any kind. Just so it’s very funny.”
“I won’t be able to find a funny hat tonight.”
He shrugged. “Whenever. If ever. Jocko—he doesn’t deserve it anyway.”
“Yes, you’ve said. But I promise I will have a funny hat for you within a day or two.”
Regardless of what difficulty Erika might have finding a very funny hat, she was rewarded in advance for her trouble when she saw his delight, his tears of gratitude.
“You are such a kind lady. Jocko would kiss your hand, except he doesn’t want to disgust you.”
“You’re my friend,” she said, and extended her right hand.
The loose flaps around his mouth and the brief touch of his sticky teeth were even more repellent than she expected, but Erika smiled and said, “You’re welcome, dear friend. Now there’s something I hope you can do for me.”
“Jocko will read a book to you,” Jocko said, “two books at once, and one upside down!”
“Later, you can read to me. First, I need your opinion about something.”
The troll grabbed his feet with his hands and rocked back and forth on the floor. “Jocko doesn’t know about a whole lot besides storm drains, rats, and bugs, but he can try.”
“You’re Jonathan Harker, or were Harker, whatever. So you know the New Race has little emotional life. When they do have emotional reactions, they’re limited to envy, anger, and hatred, only emotions that turn back on themselves and can’t lead to hope, because he says hope leads to a desire for freedom, to disobedience and rebellion.”
“Jocko is different now. Jocko feels big good things with great exuberance.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that. Anyway, I don’t have the knowledge or the breadth of vision to understand fully why a genius like Victor would create his New Race this way. Only I, his wife, am different. He allows me humility and shame … which in a strange way lead to hope, and hope to tenderness.”
Feet in his hands, rocking, his head turned toward her, the troll said, “You are the first ever, Old Race or New, to be kind to Jocko,” and again tears spilled down his cheeks.
“I hope for many things,” Erika said. “I hope to become a better wife day by day. I hope to see approval in Victor’s eyes. If in time I become a very good wife and no longer deserve beatings, if in time he comes to cherish me, I will ask him to allow others of the New Race to have hope as I do. I will ask Victor to give my people gentler lives than they have now.”
The troll stopped rocking. “Don’t ask Victor anytime soon.”
“No. First I’ve got to be a better wife. I must learn to serve him to perfection. But I’ve been thinking maybe I could be Queen Esther to his King Ahasuerus.”
“Remember,” he said, “Jocko is ignorant. An ignorant screwup.”
“They’re figures in the Bible, which I’ve never read. Esther was the daughter of Mordecai. She persuaded King Ahasuerus, her husband, to spare her people, the Jews, from annihilation at the hands of Haman, a prince of the king’s realm.”
“Don’t ask Victor anytime soon,” the troll repeated. “That is Jocko’s opinion. That is Jocko’s very strongly held opinion.”
In her mind’s eye, Erika saw Christine lying on the floor of the master-suite vestibule, shot four times through her two hearts.
“That isn’t what I want your opinion about,” she said, getting to her feet. “Come with me to the library. There’s something strange I need to show you.”
The troll hesitated. “I who am came out of he who was only a few days ago, but I who am Jocko have had enough strange for as long as I live.”
She held out a hand to him. “You are my only friend in the world. I have no one else to whom I can turn.”
Jocko sprang off the floor and stood en pointe, as if about to pirouette, but still hesitated. “Jocko must be discreet. Jocko is a secret friend.”
“Victor has gone to the Hands of Mercy. The staff is at the back of the estate, in their dormitory. We have the house to ourselves.”
After a moment, he came down from his toes, slipped his hand in hers. “It’s gonna be a very, very funny hat, isn’t it?”