Prodigal Son (30 page)

CHAPTER 95

A SET OF SWITCHBACK
fire stairs zigzagged down the side of the warehouse. Carson paused at the top only long enough to take three spare shotgun shells from Michael and load them in the 12-gauge.

The iron stairs were slippery in the rain. When she grabbed the railing, it felt slick under her hand.

Michael followed close behind her, too close, the open stairs trembling and clanking under them. “You see that
thing
?”

“Yeah.”

“That face?”

“Yeah.”

“It was coming out of him.”

“What?”

“Out of him!”

She said nothing. Didn’t know
what
to say. Just kept racing down, turning flight to flight.

“The thing
touched
me,” Michael said, revulsion thick in his voice.

“All right.”

“It’s
not
all right.”

“You hurt?”

“If it’s not dead—”

“It’s dead,” she hoped.

“—kill it.”

When they reached the alleyway, Harker remained where he had fallen, but he no longer lay facedown. He had turned to the sky.

His mouth sagged open. His eyes were wide, unblinking; rain pooled in them.

From hips to shoulders, the substance of him was…gone. His chest and abdomen had collapsed. Rags of skin and torn T-shirt hung on shattered fragments of his rib cage.

“It came
out
of him,” Michael declared.

A scrape and clank drew their attention to a point farther along the alleyway, toward the front of the warehouse.

Through the blear of rain, in the scintillation of lightning, Carson saw a pale trollish figure crouched beside an open manhole from which it had dragged the cover.

At a distance of thirty feet, in the murk of the tropical storm, she could see few details of the thing. Yet she
knew
that it was staring at her.

She raised the shotgun, but the pallid creature dropped into the manhole, out of sight.

Michael said, “What the hell
was
that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe…maybe I don’t want to know.”

CSI, ME PERSONNEL
, a dozen jakes, and the usual obnoxious gaggle of media types had come, and the storm had gone.

The buildings dripped, the puddled street glistened, but nothing looked clean, nothing smelled clean, either, and Carson suspected that nothing would ever quite
feel
clean again.

Jack Rogers had shown up to oversee the handling and transport of Jonathan Harker’s remains. He was determined not to lose evidence this time.

At the back of the plainwrap sedan, stowing the shotgun, Carson said, “Where’s Deucalion?”

Michael said, “Probably had a dinner date with Dracula.”

“After what you’ve seen, you aren’t still resisting this?”

“Let’s just say that I’m continuing to process the data.”

She slapped him affectionately—but hard enough—alongside the head. “Better get an upgraded logic unit.”

Her cell phone rang. When she answered it, she heard Vicky Chou in a panic.

CHAPTER 96

FINISHED, PROGRAMMED
, having received a downloaded education in language and other basics, Erika Five lay in the sealed glass tank, awaiting animation.

Victor stood over her, smiling. She was a lovely creature.

Although four Erikas had failed him, he had high hopes for the fifth. Even after two hundred years, he was learning new techniques, better design solutions.

He keyed commands into the computer that was associated with this tank—number 32—and watched as the milky solution in which Erika lay was cycled out of the container to be replaced with a clear cleansing solution. Within a few minutes, this second bath drained, leaving her dry and pink.

The numerous electrodes, nutrient lines, drains, and service tubes connected to her automatically withdrew. At this decoupling, she bled from a few veins, but only for a moment; in members of the New Race, such small wounds healed in seconds.

The curved glass lid opened on pneumatic hinges as a triggering shock started Erika breathing on her own.

Victor sat on a stool beside the tank, leaned forward, his face close to hers.

Her luxurious eyelashes fluttered. She opened her eyes. Her gaze was first wild and fearful. This was not unusual.

When the moment was right and Victor knew she had passed from birth shock to engagement, he said, “Do you know what you are?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why you are?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who I am?”

For the first time, she met his eyes. “Yes.” Then she lowered her gaze with a kind of reverence.

“Are you ready to serve?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to enjoy using you.”

She glanced at him again, and then humbly away.

“Arise,” he said.

The tank revolved a quarter of a turn, allowing her to swing her legs out easily, to stand.

“I have given you a life,” he said. “Remember that. I have given you a life, and I will choose what you do with it.”

CHAPTER 97

ON THE DARK
and rain-soaked lawn, a supermarket shopping cart full of aluminum cans and glass bottles stood alongside the house, near the back porch.

Carson, followed by Michael, glanced at the cart, puzzled, as she hurried past it to the porch steps.

Vicky Chou, in a robe and slippers, waited in the kitchen. She held a meat fork as if she intended to use it as a weapon.

“The doors were locked. I know they were,” she said.

“It’s all right, Vic. Like I told you on the phone, I know him. He’s all right.”

“Big, tattooed,
really
big,” Vicky told Michael. “I don’t know how he got in the house.”

“He probably lifted the roof off,” Michael said. “Came down through the attic.”

Deucalion stood in Arnie’s room, watching the boy work on the castle. He looked up as Carson and Michael came through the door.

Arnie spoke to himself, “Fortify. Fortify. Fortify and defend.”

“Your brother,” Deucalion said, “sees deeply into the true nature of reality.”

Mystified by this statement, Carson said, “He’s autistic.”

“Autistic…because he sees too much, too much yet not enough to understand what he sees. He mistakes complexity for chaos. Chaos scares him. He struggles to bring order to his world.”

Michael said, “Yeah. After everything I’ve seen tonight, I’m struggling, too.”

To Deucalion, Carson said, “Two hundred years…you and this Victor Frankenstein…So why now? Why here?”

“On the night I came alive…perhaps I was given the task of destroying Victor when the moment arrived.”

“Given by whom?”

“By whoever created the natural order that Victor challenges with such anger and such ego.”

Deucalion took a penny from the stack on the table, which he had given earlier to Arnie. He flipped it, snatched it from midair, clutched it in his fist, opened his hand. The penny was gone.

“I have free will,” Deucalion said. “I could walk away from my destiny. But I won’t.”

He flipped the penny again.

Carson watched him, transfixed.

Again he snatched it, opened his hand. No penny.

Michael said, “Harker and these…these other things Victor has made—they’re demonic. But what about you? Do you have…”

When Michael hesitated, Carson finished his question: “Man-made and yet…do you have a soul? That lightning…did it bring you one?”

Deucalion closed his hand, opened it an instant later, and the two missing pennies were on his palm. “All I know is…I suffer.”

Arnie had stopped working on the castle. He rose from his chair, mesmerized by the two pennies on Deucalion’s palm.

“I suffer guilt, remorse, contrition. I see mysteries everywhere in the weave of life…and I believe.”

He put the pennies in Arnie’s open hand.

“Victor was a man,” Deucalion continued, “but made a monster of himself. I was a monster…but feel so human now.”

Arnie closed his fist around the coins and at once opened it.

Carson’s breath caught. The pennies were gone from Arnie’s hand.

“Two hundred years,” Deucalion said, “I’ve lived as an outsider in your world. I’ve learned to treasure flawed humanity for its optimism in spite of its flaws, for its hope in the face of ceaseless struggle.”

Arnie closed his empty hand.

“Victor would murder all mankind,” Deucalion said, “and populate the world with his machines of blood and bone.”

Arnie stared at his clenched fist—and smiled.

“If you do not help me resist,” Deucalion said, “he is arrogant enough to succeed.”

Again Arnie opened his hand. The pennies had reappeared.

“Those who fight him,” Deucalion said, “will find themselves in the struggle of their lives….”

From Arnie’s hand, Deucalion retrieved one of the two pennies.

“Leave it to blind fate?” he asked Michael. His gaze moved to Carson. “Heads, you fight beside me…tails, I fight alone.”

He flipped the penny, caught it, held out his fist.

Before he could reveal the penny, Carson put her hand on his, to keep his fist closed. She looked at Michael.

He sighed. “Well, I never did want to be a safety engineer,” he acknowledged, and placed his hand atop hers.

To Deucalion, Carson said, “Screw fate. We fight.”

DARK DRY QUIET
, the crawl space under the house provides Randal Six with an ideal environment. The spiders do not bother him.

The journey from Mercy has been a triumph, but it has frayed his nerves and rubbed his courage raw. The storm had almost undone him. The rain, the sky afire with lightning and shadows leaping on the earth, the crashes of thunder, the trees shuddering in the wind, the gutters overflowing with dirty water awhirl with litter…Too much data. Too much input. Several times he almost shut down, almost fell to the ground and curled into a ball like a pill bug.

He needs time now to recover, to regain his confidence.

He closes his eyes in the dark, breathes slowly and deeply. The sweet smell of star jasmine threads to him through the crisscrossed lattice that screens the crawl space.

From directly overhead come three muffled voices in earnest conversation.

In the room above him is happiness. He can feel it, radiant. He has arrived at the source. The secret is within his grasp. This child of Mercy, in the spidery dark, smiles.

THE LEGEND CONTINUES…

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