Frankenstein: Dead and Alive (10 page)

His smile would have stampeded horses. “Jocko would like that.” Seeing her bafflement, he said, “Jocko seems to suit me.”

“Swear you’ll conspire with me to keep your presence secret. Swear, Jocko, that you come here with only innocent intentions.”

“Sworn! He who became me was violent. I who was him want peace.”

“Your kind have a reputation for saying one thing and meaning another,” Erika observed, “but if you cause the slightest trouble, please know that I will deal with you severely.”

Puzzled, he said, “Others like me exist?”

“In fairy tales, there are many similar to you. Trolls, ogres, imps, manikins, gremlins … And all the literary allusions referring to such folk suggest they’re full of mischief.”

“Not Jocko.” The whites of his eyes were red in the red light, and the lemon-yellow irises were orange.
“Jocko hopes only to perform some service to repay your kindness.”

“As it happens, there is something you could do.”

“Jocko thought there might be.”

His sly look seemed to belie his claim to innocence, but having experienced two beatings in one day, Erika was motivated to give Jocko the benefit of the doubt.

“I’m not permitted to read books,” she said, “but I’m curious about them. I want you to read books to me.”

“Jocko will read until his voice fails and he goes blind.”

“A few hours a day will be enough,” Erika assured him.

CHAPTER 18

From grandmother to neighborhood bully, to Antoine, to Evangeline, Bucky and Janet Guitreau went through the Arceneaux family like a school of angry piranha through anything that might piss off killer fish.

Although it would have been good to hear their tormented cries and pleas for mercy, the time hadn’t yet come for open warfare. Bucky and Janet did not want their victims to wake the family next door, who in their sleep were corpses waiting to happen. By various means, they silenced the Arceneauxs before proceeding to destroy them.

Neither he nor Janet knew the rest of the people who lived in the houses past the Arceneaux place, but those potential victims were of the Old Race and therefore no less fun to kill merely because they were strangers.

At some point he could not precisely recall, Bucky
had stripped off his clothes. Janet let him render Marcella and then devastate young Preston, and in the master bedroom, she gave him Antoine while she took Evangeline apart. They needed but a few minutes.

At first the nudity had been awkward; but then he sensed chunks of his program dropping out, not only lines of code but blocks of it, and he felt as free and natural as a wolf in its fur, though far more savage than a wolf, and angry as a wolf could never be, and not in the least limited in his killing to what was strictly necessary for survival, as was a wolf.

When only he and Janet were alive in the master bedroom, she kicked at what remained of what she had destroyed. Choking with rage, spitting with disgust, she declared, “I hate them,
hate
them, so soft and fragile, so quick to fear and beg, so arrogant in their certainty that they have souls, yet so cowardly for creatures who say there is a god who loves them—loves them! As if there is about them anything worth loving—such hopeless trembling milksops, spineless braggarts who claim a world they won’t fight for. I can’t wait to see
canyons
bulldozed full of their dead bodies and oceans red with their blood, can’t wait to smell cities reeking with their rotting corpses and pyres of them burning by the thousands.”

Her rant thrilled Bucky, made his twin hearts race, thickened his throat with fury, tightened the cords of muscle in his neck, until he could feel his carotids throbbing like drums. He would have listened to her longer, before the need to move on to the next house
would have overcome him, but when movement in the doorway drew his attention, he silenced her with two words:
“The dog!”

In the hallway, staring in at them, stood the Duke of Orleans, tail low and motionless, hackles raised, ears pricked, teeth bared. Having seen the pizza guy dead on the foyer floor, Duke must have followed them from their house to the Bennets’, and from the Bennets’ here, witness to every slaughter, for his eyes were accusing and his sudden growl was a challenge.

From the evening that they replaced the real Bucky and Janet Guitreau, this perceptive German shepherd had known they were not who they appeared to be. Friends and family accepted them without hesitation, evincing not a moment of suspicion, but Duke kept his distance, wary from hour one of their impersonation.

Now, as the dog regarded them where they stood in the carnage that had been Antoine and Evangeline, Bucky experienced a startling change of perception. The dog was not merely a dog.

All of the New Race understood that this was the only life and that no afterlife awaited either them or the Old Race. They knew that the concept of an immortal soul was a lie concocted by members of the Old Race to help their fragile kind cope with the reality of death, death everlasting. The New Race recognized that no realm existed beyond the material, that the world was not a place of mystery but instead a place of unambiguous cause and effect, that applied rational
intellect could reason its way to the simple truth behind any apparent enigma, that they were meat machines just as the members of the Old Race were meat machines, just as every animal was a meat machine, and that their maker was also only a meat machine, albeit a meat machine with the most brilliant mind in the history of the species and with an infallible vision of a man-made utopia that would establish a Million-Year Reich on Earth before spreading to every habitable planet circling every star in the universe.

This creed of absolute materialism and antihumanism had been drilled into Bucky and Janet as they formed in the creation tanks, which was an immeasurably more effective way to have learned it than by watching
Sesame Street
and reading a series of dull grade-school textbooks.

Unlike members of the Old Race, who could be comfortable for decades with the philosophy that life had no meaning, only to become God-besotted in middle age, the New Race could take satisfaction from knowing they were so indoctrinated with hopelessness that they would never have a doubt about their convictions. Father told them that unassailable hopelessness was the beginning of wisdom.

But now the dog.

His disturbing forthright stare, his judgmental attitude, the fact that he
knew
they were impostors, that he followed them through the night without their knowledge, that he did not slink away from the danger Bucky and Janet currently posed to any living thing not of their kind, that instead he came to confront
them: Suddenly this dog seemed to be something more than a meat machine.

Evidently, the same perception troubled Janet, for she said, “What’s he doing with his eyes?”

“I don’t like his eyes,” Bucky agreed.

“He’s like not looking at me, he’s looking into me.”

“He’s like looking into me, too.”

“He’s weird.”

“He’s totally weird,” Bucky agreed.

“What does he want?”

“He wants something.”

“I could kill him so fast,” Janet said.

“You could. In like three seconds.”

“He’s seen what we can do. Why isn’t he afraid?”

“He doesn’t seem to be afraid, does he?”

In the doorway, Duke growled.

“I’ve never felt like this before,” Janet said.

“How do you feel?”

“Different. I don’t have a word for it.”

“Neither do I.”

“I just suddenly feel like … things are happening right in front of me that I can’t see. Does that make sense?”

“Are we losing more of our programming?”

“All I know is, the dog knows something big,” Janet said.

“Does he? What does he know?”

“He knows some reason he doesn’t have to be afraid of us.”

“What reason?” Bucky asked.

“I don’t know. Do you know?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky said.

“I don’t like not knowing.”

“He’s just a dog. He can’t know big things we don’t know.”

“He should be very afraid of us.” Janet hugged herself and seemed to shiver. “But he’s not. He knows big things we don’t know.”

“He’s just a meat machine like us.”

“He’s not acting like one.”

“We’re smart meat machines. He’s a dumb one,” Bucky said, but his uneasiness was of a kind he had never experienced before.

“He’s got secrets,” Janet said.

“What secrets?”

“The big things he knows that we don’t.”

“How can a dog have secrets?”

“Maybe he’s not just a dog.”

“What else would he be?”

“Something,” she said portentously.

“Just a minute ago, I felt so good killing in the nude, so natural.”

“Good,” she echoed. “Natural.”

“Now I’m afraid,” he said.

“I’m afraid, too. I’ve never been so afraid.”

“But I don’t know what I’m afraid of, Janet.”

“Neither do I. So we must be afraid of … the
unknown
.”

“But nothing’s unknowable to a rational intellect. Right? Isn’t that right?”

“Then why isn’t the dog afraid of us?”

Bucky said, “He keeps
staring
. I can’t stand the way he’s just
staring
. It’s not natural, and tonight I learned what natural feels like. This isn’t natural.”

“It’s
supernatural
,” Janet whispered.

The back of Bucky’s neck was suddenly damp. A chill corkscrewed the length of his spine.

Precisely when Janet spoke the word
supernatural
, the dog turned away from them and disappeared into the upstairs hall.

“Where’s he going, going, going?” Janet wondered.

“Maybe he was never there.”

“I’ve got to know where he’s going, what he is, what he knows,” Janet said urgently, and hurried across the bedroom.

Following her into the hallway, Bucky saw that the dog was gone.

Janet ran to the head of the stairs. “Here he is! Going down. He knows something big, oh yeah, oh yeah, he’s going somewhere big, he’s
something
.”

In pursuit of the mysterious dog, Bucky descended the stairs with Janet, and then hurried toward the back of the house.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah, something big, big, bigger than big, the dog knows, the dog knows, the dog.”

An instant before they entered the family room, Bucky was struck by the crazy, frightening thought that Charles would be there alive, Charles and Preston and Marcella and Antoine and Evangeline, all of them resurrected, furious, possessed of hideous supernatural powers that would make them invulnerable, and
that they would do things to him that he could not imagine, things
unknown
.

Fortunately, young Charles Arceneaux was the only one there, and he was still as dead as anyone had ever been.

Seeing Charles dead and thoroughly dismantled, Bucky should have felt better, but his fear tightened like an overwound clock spring. He was electrified by a sense of the uncanny, by a recognition of mysterious realms beyond his ken, by astonishment that the world had suddenly revealed itself to contain strange dimensions previously unimagined.

Janet bounded after the dog, chanting, “Dog knows, knows, knows. Dog sees, sees, sees. Dog, dog, dog,” and Bucky sprinted after them both, out of the Arceneaux house, across the veranda, into the rain. He was not exactly sure how the appearance of the German shepherd in the bedroom doorway had led to this frantic chase, what it all meant, where it would end, but he knew as certainly as he had ever known anything that an event of a profound and magical nature loomed, something big, something
huge
.

He was not just nude, he was naked, vulnerable both physically and mentally, his tandem hearts pounding, flooded with emotion as he had never been before, not at the moment killing anyone and yet exhilarated. They ran through the neighborly gate, into the backyard at the Bennet house, alongside the house toward the street, the dog in the lead, and Bucky heard himself saying, “
A
terrible thing has happened, a terrible thing has happened,” and he was so disturbed by
the desperation in his voice that he forced himself to stop that chant. By the time they were running down the center of the street, not gaining on the dog but not falling behind, he was chanting, “Kill the pizza guy, kill the pizza guy,” and though he had no idea what that meant, he liked the sound of it.

CHAPTER 19

The master suite of the Helios mansion included two bathrooms, one for Victor and one for Erika. She was not permitted to cross the threshold of his bath.

Every man needed a sacrosanct retreat, a private space where he could relax and relish both the accomplishments of the day and his intentions for the morrow. If he was a revolutionary with the power of science at his command, and if he had the courage and the will to change the world, he needed and deserved a sanctum sanctorum of grand design and dimensions.

Victor’s bathroom measured over sixteen hundred square feet. It included a steam room, a sauna, a spacious shower, a whirlpool spa, two under-the-counter refrigerators, an icemaker, a fully stocked bar, a microwave concealed behind a tambour door, three plasma-screen TVs with Blu-Ray DVD capacity, and
an anigre-wood cabinet containing a collection of exquisitely braided leather whips.

The gold-leafed ceiling featured custom crystal chandeliers in the Deco style, and the walls were clad with marble. Inlaid in the center of the polished-marble floor were semiprecious stones forming the double helix of the DNA molecule. The faucets and other fixtures were gold-plated, including even the flush lever on the toilet, and there were acres of beveled-edge mirrors. The room glittered.

Nothing in this luxurious space brought Victor as much pleasure as his reflection. Because mirrors were arranged to reflect other mirrors, he could see multiple images of himself wherever he went.

His favorite place for self-examination was an octagonal meditation chamber with a mirrored door. Therein, nude, he could admire every aspect of his body at the same time, and also see infinite images of each angle marching away to infinity, a world of Victors and nothing less.