City of Night

Like phantom dragons, wings and tails of lambent orange light chased across the trash field, and shadows leaped.

Thirteen of the fourteen members of Nick’s crew were with him in the pit, wearing hip-high boots, faces glistening, lined up in eager anticipation along the route that the pair of low, open-bed trucks would take to the place of interment.

Beside him stood Gunny Alecto, her eyes shining with reflected fire. “Saving savant savour sausages sandwiches savages. Savages! Here come the dead savages, Nick. You got your stuff?”

“I got it.”

“You got your stuff?”

He raised his pail, which was like her pail, like the pail that each of them carried.

The first of the trucks descended the sloped wall of the pit and growled across the desolation, uncountable varieties of garbage crunching and crackling under the tires.

Five sturdy poles, seven feet high, rose from the bed of the truck. To each pole had been lashed one of the dead members of the Old Race, who had been replaced by replicants. Three had been city bureaucrats, and two had been police officers. Two were female; three were male.

The cadavers had been stripped of clothes. Their eyes had been taped open to give the impression that they bore witness to their humiliation.

The mouths of the dead were wedged open with sticks because their tormentors liked to imagine that they were pleading for mercy or at least were screaming.

One of the males had been delivered dismembered and decapitated. The Crosswoods crew had wired the parts together with malicious glee, putting the head on backward, comically repositioning the genitals.

As the truck drew near, the assembled crew began to jeer the dead with enthusiasm, with mocking laughter and catcalls, louder than they were articulate.

Epsilons, lowest of the rigid social order, were allowed to have contempt for no one of their own race, only for the one-heart men and women who claimed to be the children of God yet could not turn off pain and died so easily. With jeers and venomous laughter, these simplest products of the tanks expressed their detestation and thereby claimed their superiority.

As the truck came to a stop, the crew looked excitedly at Nick, who stood at the midpoint of the lineup. As a Gamma among Epsilons, he must lead by example, even though they, not he, had conceived this ceremony and designed these rituals.

From his pail, he scooped a reeking mass. Always available in a dump were rotting fruits and vegetables, filth in infinite variety, decomposing this and rancid that. During the day, he had collected choice items. Now, with a cry of contempt, he hurled his first handful at one of the cadavers on the truck.

The splattery impact drew a cheer from the Epsilons. After his example, they scooped foul wads from their buckets and pelted the hoisted dead.

As the wide-eyed, open-mouthed corpses endured this sustained barrage, the jeers of the tormenting crew grew more vicious, less verbal and more vocal. The laughter became too shrill to have any quality whatsoever of merriment, and then grew too bitter to be mistaken for any kind of laughter at all.

When the Epsilons had exhausted their ammunition, they threw the empty pails and then flung themselves upon the truck, tearing fervently at the bindings that held the cadavers to the poles. As they freed each stained and dripping body, they pitched it from the truck into a nearby shallow depression in the trash field, which would serve as a mass grave.

Although Nick Frigg did not climb onto the open-bed pillory with his shrieking crew, their rage and their hatred excited him, inflamed his own resentment against those supposedly God-made people who claimed free will, dignity, and hope. He cheered on the denizens of Crosswoods and tossed his greasy hair and shook his fists at the night, and felt empowered by the thought that one day soon his kind would reveal themselves in all their inhuman ferocity and would show the self-satisfied Old Race how quickly their precious free will could be stripped from them, how brutally their dignity could be destroyed, and how utterly their pathetic hope could be extinguished forever.

Now came the symbolic killing.

When the five cadavers had been tossed from the truck, the Epsilons, including the driver, scrambled to the gravesite in full cry.

They longed to kill, craved killing, lived with a need to kill that was intense to the point of anguish, yet they were forbidden to uncork their wrath until their maker gave permission. The frustration of their shackled lives daily paid compound interest on the principal of their anger until they were rich with it, each of them a treasury of rage.

In the symbolic killing, they spent mere pennies of their wealth of wrath. They stomped, stomped, kicked, punted, ground their heels, threw their arms around one another’s shoulders and circle-danced in groups of four and six, danced among the dead and certainly upon the dead, in ferocious hammering rhythms, filling the torch-lit night with the dreadful drumming, timpani and tom-tom and bass drums and kettle, but all in fact the boom of booted feet.

Although a Gamma, dog-nose Nick was infected by the excitement of the Epsilons, and a fever of fury boiled his blood, too, as he joined them in this dance of death, linking himself into a circle with the conviction that any Beta would have done the same, or even any Alpha, for this was an expression not merely of the frustration of the lowest class of the New Race but also of the yearning and the repressed desires of all the children of Mercy, who were made for different work and loaded with different programs, but who were as one in their hatred and their wrath.

Shrieking, howling, hooting, screaming, their sweating faces dark with desire, bright with torchlight, they stomped what they had previously jeered, ritually killing those who were already dead, the drumfire of their feet shaking the night with a promise of the final war to come.

Chapter 53

From across the street and half a block away, Cindi and Benny Lovewell watched O’Connor and Maddison escort two black women from the parsonage to the plainwrap sedan, which was parked under a streetlamp.

“We’d probably end up killing one or both of the women to nab the cops,” Cindi said.

Considering that they were not authorized to kill anyone but the detectives, Benny said, “We better wait.”

“What are the women carrying?” Cindi wondered.

“Pies, I think.”

“Why are they carrying pies?”

“Maybe they were caught stealing them,” Benny suggested.

“Do people steal pies?”

“Their kind of people do. They steal everything.”

She said, “Aren’t O’Connor and Maddison homicide detectives?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why would they rush out here to arrest pie thieves?”

Benny shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe the women killed someone for the pies.”

Frowning, Cindi said, “That’s possible, I suppose. But I have the feeling we’re missing something. Neither one of them looks like a killer.”

“Neither do we,” Benny reminded her.

“If they did kill for the pies, why would they be allowed to keep them?”

“Their legal system doesn’t make much sense to me,” Benny said. “I don’t really care about the women or the pies. I just want to rip the guts out of O’Connor and Maddison.”

“Well, so do I,” Cindi said. “Just because I want a baby doesn’t mean I still don’t enjoy killing.”

Benny sighed. “I didn’t mean to imply that you were going soft or anything.”