Prodigal Son

Page 24

“See, right away, I start getting geeky Renaissance Fair vibes from the name. It sounds like the Fourth Musketeer or something. What kind of name is Deucalion, anyway?”
“He named himself. It’s from mythology. Deucalion was the son of Prometheus.”
“Oh, of course,” Michael said. “Deucalion Prometheus, son of Fred Prometheus. I remember him now.”
“Deucalion is his only name, first and last.”
“Like Cher.”
“In classic mythology, Prometheus was the brother of Atlas. He shaped humans out of clay and gave them the spark of life. He taught humanity several arts, and in defiance of Zeus, he gave us the gift of fire.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have fallen asleep in school so often if my teacher had been driving the classroom at eighty miles an hour. For God’s sake, slow down.”
“Anyway, Deucalion has Victor’s original diary. It’s written in German, and it’s full of anatomical drawings that include an improved circulatory system with two hearts.”
“Maybe if you give it to Dan Rather and Sixty Minutes, they’ll do a segment on it, but it sounds like a forgery to me.”
She wanted to punch him. To temper that impulse, she reminded herself of how cuddly he had looked back at his apartment.
Instead of hitting him, she pumped the brakes and slid the plainwrap sedan to the curb in front of Fullbright’s Funeral Home.
‘A good cop has to have an open mind,” she said.
‘Agreed. But it doesn’t help much to have one so open that the wind blows through with a mournful, empty sound.”
CHAPTER 68
life IN THE HOUSE of Victor Frankenstein was certain to involve more macabre moments than life in the house of Huckleberry Finn.
Nevertheless, the sight of a severed hand crawling across the drawing-room carpet amazed even Erika, a man-made woman equipped with two hearts. She stood transfixed for perhaps a minute, unable to move.
No science could explain an ambulatory hand. This seemed to be a supernatural manifestation as surely as would be an ectoplasmic human figure floating above a seance table.
Yet Erika felt less fear than amazement, less amazement than wonder. Her heart beat faster the longer that she watched the hand, and a not-unpleasant thrill made her tremble.
Instinctively, she knew that the hand was aware of her. It had no eyes, no sense other than touch— and should not possess a sense of touch, either, considering that it had no nervous system, no brain— yet somehow it knew that she was watching it.
This must have been the thing that she’d heard moving furtively through the bedroom, under the bed, the thing rattling the contents of the bathroom cabinet. The thing that had left the scalpel on her bath mat.
That last thought led her to the realization that the hand must be merely the tool of whatever entity had spoken to her through the television screen and had encouraged her to kill Victor. As it used the TV, it used the hand.
As it used the hand, it wished to use her as agent to destroy the man it had called evil.
There is no world but this one.
Erika reminded herself that she was a soul-free soldier in the army of materialism. Belief in something more than the eyes can see was punishable by termination.
As if it were the hand of a blind man exploring the patterns on the Persian carpet, the beast with five fingers felt its way past furniture, toward the double doors that separated the drawing room from the downstairs hall.
The thing did not wander aimlessly. By all appearances, it moved with purpose.
One of the two doors to the hallway stood open. The hand paused there, waiting.
Erika suspected that it not only moved with purpose but also that it wanted her to follow. She stepped toward it.
The hand crabbed forward once more, crawled across the threshold and into the hallway.
CHAPTER 67
EVEN AS THE NIGHT ticked toward the dark start of a new day, lights were on at the back of the funeral home.
Insistently thumbing the bell push, Michael said, “See, another thing that doesn’t make sense is why Victor Frankenstein would turn up in New Orleans, of all places.”
Carson said, “Where would you expect him to set up shop—Baton Rouge, Baltimore, Omaha, Las Vegas?”
“Somewhere in Europe.”
“Why Europe?”
“He’s European.”
“Once was, yeah, but not now. As Helios, he doesn’t even speak with an accent.”
“The whole creepy Frankenstein shtick—it’s totally European,” Michael insisted.
“Remember the mobs with pitchforks and torches storming the castle?” Carson asked. “He can’t go back there ever.”
“That was in the movies, Carson.”
“Maybe they’re more like documentaries.”
She knew she sounded crazy The bayou heat and humidity had finally gotten to her. Maybe if you cut open her skull, you’d find Spanish moss growing on her brain.
She said, “Where is the most recombinant-DNA work being done, the most research into cloning? Where are the most discoveries in molecular biology taking place?”
‘According to the tabloids I read, probably in Atlantis, a few miles under the surface of the Caribbean.”
“It’s all happening here in the good old USA, Michael. If Victor Frankenstein is alive, this is where he’d want to be, right where the most science is being done. And New Orleans is plenty creepy enough to please him. Where else do they bury all their dead in mausoleums aboveground?”
The porch light came on. A deadbolt turned with a rasp and a clack, and the door opened.
Taylor Fullbright stood before them in red silk pajamas and a black silk robe on the breast of which was appliqued an image of Judy Garland as Dorothy.
As convivial as ever, Fullbright said, “Why, hello again!”
“I’m sorry if we woke you,” Carson apologized.
“No, no. You didn’t. I finished embalming a customer half an hour ago, worked up an appetite. I’m making a pastrami and tongue sandwich, if you’d like one.”
Michael said, “No thanks. I’m full of Cheez Doodles, and she’s full of inexplicable enthusiasm.”
“We don’t need to come in,” Carson said, showing him first the silver-framed photo of Roy Pribeaux. “Have you ever seen him before?”
“Quite a handsome fellow,” said Fullbright. “But he looks a bit smug. I know the type. They’re always trouble.”
“More trouble than you can imagine.”
“But I don’t know him,” Fullbright said.
From a nine-by-twelve manila envelope, Carson extracted a police-department file photo of Detective Jonathan Harker.
“This one I know,” said the funeral director. “He was Allwine’s funeral buddy”
CHAPTER 68
JENNA PARKER, party girl, not for the first time na*ed in front of a man, but for the first time unable to excite sexual interest, wept. Her sobs were more pathetic for being muffled by the rag in her mouth and the lip-sealing duct tape.
“It’s not that I don’t find you attractive,” Jonathan told her. “I do. I think you’re a fine example of your species. It’s just that I’m of the New Race, and ha**ng s*x with you would be like you ha**ng s*x with a monkey”
For some reason, his sincere explanation made her cry harder. She was going to choke on her sobs if she wasn’t careful.
Giving her a chance to adjust to her circumstances and to get control of her emotions, he fetched a physician’s bag from a closet. He put it on a stainless-steel cart, and rolled the cart to the autopsy table.
From the black bag he extracted surgical instruments — scalpels, clamps, retractors —and lined them up on the cart. They had not been sterilized, but as Jenna would be dead when he was done with her, there was no reason to guard against infection.
When the sight of the surgical instruments excited the woman to greater weeping, Jonathan realized that fear of pain and death might be the sole cause of her tears.
“Well,” he told her, “if you’re going to cry about that, then you’re going to have to cry, because there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t very well let you go now. You’d tell.”
After emptying the bag, he set it aside.
On the bed lay a thin but tough plastic raincoat, one of those that could be wadded up and stored in a zippered case no larger than a tobacco pouch. He intended to wear it over his T-shirt and jeans to minimize cleanup when he had finished with Jenna.
As Jonathan shook the raincoat to unfurl it, a familiar throb, a shifting and turning within him, made him gasp with surprise, with excitement.
He threw aside the raincoat. He pulled up his T-shirt, exposing his torso.
In his abdomen, the Other pressed against the caging flesh, as if testing the walls of its confinement. It writhed, it bulged.
He had no concern that it would burst out of him and perhaps kill him in the process. That was not how the birth would occur. He had studied various methods of reproduction, and he had developed a theory that he found convincing.
Seeing this movement within Jonathan, Jenna stopped crying in a blink—and started to scream into the rag, the duct tape.
He attempted to explain to her that this was nothing to fear, that this was his ultimate act of rebellion against Father and the start of the New Race’s emancipation.
“He denies us the power to reproduce,” Jonathan said, “but I am reproducing. It’s going to be like parthenogenesis, I think. When the time comes, I’ll divide, like an ameba. Then there will be two of me—I the father, and my son.”
When Jenna thrashed, desperately but stupidly trying to wrench loose of her restraints, Jonathan worried that she would tear out the IV drip. Eager to proceed with her dissection, he didn’t want to have to waste time reinserting the cannula.
He carefully pressed the plunger of the syringe in the drug port and delivered a couple ccs of the sedative.
Her thrashing quickly quieted to a trembling. She grew still. She slept.
Inside Jonathan, the Other grew still, as well. His stretched torso regained its natural shape.
Smiling, he slid one hand down his chest and abdomen. “Our time is coming.”
CHAPTER 69
TURNING away from the front door of Fullbright’s Funeral Home, Michael wanted to sprint to the car and climb in behind the wheel. He would have done it, too, would have seized control—if he’d had a key Mere possession of the driver’s seat would mean nothing to Carson. She wouldn’t give him her key Unless she chose to ride shotgun, she’d walk before she’d give up the wheel.
The plainwrap came with two sets of keys. Carson had both.
Michael had frequently considered requisitioning another set from the motor pool. He knew she’d consider that betrayal.
So she drove again. Clearly, there were no safety engineers in her family At least he was distracted from consideration of their speed by the need to get his mind around the cockamamie story she wanted him to believe. “Man-made men? Science just isn’t that far along yet.”
“Maybe most scientists aren’t, but Victor is.”
“Mary Shelley was a novelist.”
“She must’ve based the book on a true story she heard that summer. Michael, you heard what Jack Rogers told us. Not a freak. Bobby Allwine was designed”
“Why would he be creating monsters to be security guards like Bobby Allwine? Doesn’t that seem goofy?”
“Maybe he creates them to be all kinds of things—cops, like Harker. Mechanics. Pilots. Bureaucrats. Maybe they’re all around us.”
“Why?”
“Deucalion says—to take our place, to destroy God’s work and replace it with his own.”
“I’m not Austin Powers, and neither are you, and it’s hard to swallow that Helios is Dr. Evil.”
Impatiently, she said, “What happened to your imagination? Have you watched so many movies, you can’t imagine for yourself anymore, you have to have Hollywood do it for you?” . “Harker, huh? From homicide cop to homicidal robot?”
“Not robot. Engineered or cloned or grown in a vat—I don’t know how. It’s no longer parts of corpses animated by lightning.”
“One man, even a genius, couldn’t—“
She interrupted him: “Helios is an obsessed, demented visionary at work for two centuries, with a huge family fortune.”
Preoccupied with a new thought, she let their speed fall.
After a silence, Michael said, “What?”
“We’re dead.”
“I don’t feel dead.”
“I mean, if Helios is who Deucalion says, if he has achieved all of this, if his creations are seeded through the city, we don’t have much of a chance against him. He’s a genius, a billionaire, a man of enormous power—and we’re squat.”
She was scared. He could hear fear in her voice. He had never known her to be afraid. Not like this. Not without a gun in her face and some dirtbag’s finger on the trigger.
“I just don’t buy this,” he said, though he half did. “I don’t understand why you buy it.”
With an edge, she said, “If I buy it, homey, isn’t that good enough for you?”
When he hesitated to reply, she braked hard and pulled to the curb. Pissed, she switched off the light and got out of the car.
In the movies, when they saw a body with two hearts and organs of unknown purpose, they knew right away it was aliens or something.
Even though he hadn’t met Deucalion, Michael didn’t know why he was resisting the usual movie conclusion to be made from what Jack Rogers had found inside Bobby Allwine. Besides, someone had stolen Allwine’s corpse and the autopsy records, which seemed to indicate a vast conspiracy of some kind.
He got out of the car.
They were in a residential neighborhood, under a canopy of live oaks. The night was hot. The moon seemed to be melting down through the branches of the trees.
Michael and Carson regarded each other across the roof of the sedan. Her lips were tight. Usually they looked kissable. They didn’t look kissable now.
“Michael, I told you what I saw”
“I’ve jumped off cliffs with you before—but this one’s pretty damn high.”
She said nothing at first. What might have been a wistful look came over her face. Then: “Some mornings it’s hard to get up knowing Arnie will still be… Arnie.”
Michael moved toward the front of the car. ‘All of us want things we maybe aren’t ever going to get.”
Carson remained at the driver’s door, not giving an inch. “I want meaning. Purpose. Higher stakes. I want things to matter more than they do.”