had no snot at all.”
“Any snot,” Victor corrected.
“No, sir. Like I just said, I don’t have no snot at all.”
Chapter 13
Carson O’Connor lives in a simple white house given some grace by a veranda that wraps three sides.
Oaks draped with Spanish moss shade the property. Cicadas sing in the heat.
In respect of the substantial annual rainfall and the long sultry summers, the veranda and the house itself are raised almost three feet off the ground on concrete piers, creating a crawl space under the entire structure.
The crawl space is concealed by a skirt of crisscrossed lattice. Usually nothing lives here but spiders.
These are unusual days. Now the spiders share their redoubt with Randal Six.
Crossing the city from the Hands of Mercy, especially when a thunderstorm brought the sky crashing to the earth in bright bolts, Randal had been afflicted by too much noise, by too many new sights, smells, sounds, sensations. Never had he known such blind terror.
He had almost clawed out his eyes, had almost poked a sharp stick in his ears to destroy his hearing, thus sparing himself from sensory overload. Fortunately, he had restrained those impulses.
Although he appears to be eighteen, he has been alive and out of the tank for only four months. All of that time, he has lived in one room, mostly in one corner of that room.
He doesn’t like commotion. He doesn’t like being touched or having to speak to anyone. He despises change.
Yet here he is. He has thrown over all he knew and has embraced an unknowable future. This accomplishment makes him proud.
The crawl space is a peaceful environment. His monastery, his hermitage.
For the most part, the only smells are the bare earth under him, the raw wood above, the concrete piers. Occasionally a whiff of star jasmine fords its way to him, though it is a richer scent at night than in the day.
Little sunlight penetrates the interstices of the lattice. The shadows are deep, but because he is of the New Race, with enhanced vision, he can see well enough.
Only an occasional traffic noise reaches him from the street. From overhead, inside the house, come periodic footsteps, the creak of floorboards, muffled music on a radio.
His companions, the spiders, have no smell that he can detect, make no noise, and keep to themselves.
He might be content here for a long time if not for the fact that the secret of happiness abides in the house above him, and he must have it.
In a newspaper, he once saw a photograph of Detective Carson O’Connor with her brother, Arnie. Arnie is an autistic like Randal Six.
Nature made Arnie autistic. Randal was given his affliction by Victor. Nevertheless, he and Arnie are brothers in their suffering.
In the newspaper photo, twelve-year-old Arnie had been with his sister at a charily event benefiting autism research. Arnie had been smiling. He looked happy.
During his four months of life in the Hands of Mercy, Randal has never been happy. Anxiety gnaws at him every minute, every day, more insistently some times than at others, but always chewing, nibbling. He lives in misery.
He never imagined that happiness might be possible — until he had seen Arnie’s smile. Arnie knows something that Randal does not. Arnie the autistic knows a reason to smile. Perhaps many reasons.
They are brothers. Brothers in suffering. Arnie will share his secret with his brother Randal.
Should Arnie refuse to share it, Randal will tear the secret out of him. He will get it one way or another. He will kill for it.
If the world beyond the lattice were not so dazzling, so full of sights and motion, Randal Six would simply slither out from under the house. He would enter the place by a door or window, and get what he needs.
After his trip from Mercy and the ordeal of the thunderstorm, however, he cannot endure that much sensory input. He must find a way into the house from the crawl space.
No doubt the spiders do it often. He will be a spider. He will creep. He will find a way.
Chapter 14
Nicholas Frigg walked the earthen ramparts that wound between and around the lakes of waste and rubbish, manager of the dump and master of all that he surveyed.
Over his jeans he wore thigh-high rubber boots hooked by straps to his belt. In this blazing heat he went barechested, wore no hat, and let the sun bake him to a bread-crust brown.
He had no worry about melanoma. He belonged to the New Race, and cancer could not touch him.
The malignancies that ate at him were alienation, loneliness, and an acute awareness of his enslavement.
In these uplands, significantly northeast of Lake Pontchartrain, the garbage arrived from the Big Easy and from other cities, seven days a week, in an endless caravan of semis with hydraulic rams that expelled compressed blocks of trash into the steaming pits of the landfill.
Misanthropes and cynics might say that regardless of the city, whether it be New Orleans or Paris or Tokyo, the definition of its garbage ought to include the worst examples of humanity that walked its streets.
And, of course, the urban legends of every city included stories asserting that the Mafia disposed of witnesses and other nuisances in garbage dumps where the workers were members of mobster controlled unions.
The putrid depths of the Crosswoods Waste Management facility actually did contain thousands of bodies, many of which had appeared to be human when they had been secretly interred here over the years. Some were human, the cadavers of those who had been replaced by replicants.
The others were failed experiments — some of which did not look human at all — or members of the New Race who for a host of reasons had been terminated. Four Erikas were buried in these reservoirs of waste.
Everyone who worked at the dump belonged to the New Race. They answered to Nick Frigg, and he answered to his maker.
Crosswoods was owned by a Nevada corporation, which was itself owned by a holding company in the Bahamas. That holding company was an asset of a trust based in Switzerland.
The beneficiaries of the trust were three Australian nationals living in New Orleans. The Australians were in fact members of the New Race, who were themselves owned by Victor.
At the apex — or perhaps at the nadir — of this arc of deception stood Nick, both the master of the garbage and the overseer of the secret graveyard. More than most others of his kind, he enjoyed his work even if it was not what he wanted for a life.
The panoply of odors, an unending series of revolting stenches to an ordinary man, were a phantasmagoria of fragrances to Nick. He breathed deeply and licked the air, and savored the intricacies of every aroma.
By the introduction of certain canine genes, Nick’s maker had given him a sense of smell approximately half as sensitive as that of a dog, which meant he enjoyed olfactory perceptions ten thousand times more powerful than those of the average human being.
To a dog, few scents cause revulsion. Many are good, and nearly all are interesting. Even the stink of offal and the ripe miasma of decomposition are intriguing if not savory. And so they were, as well, to Nick Frigg.
This gift of smell turned a foul job into one with the potential to delight. Although Nick had cause to believe that Victor was a hard God if not cruel, here was one reason to consider that he did care, after all, about his creations.
Dog-nose Nick strode the ramparts, which were wide enough to accommodate an SUV, watching the semis
