Behind Lester, Deucalion stepped forward, too, snaked his right arm around the other’s neck, his left arm around the head. As the janitor, with his strong hands, tried to claw loose of the death grip, Deucalion wrenched with such force that the Epsilon’s spine shattered. Instant brain death precluded any healing, rapid or otherwise.
Gently, Deucalion lowered Lester to the floor. He knelt beside the cadaver. Neither of the janitor’s two hearts continued beating. His eyes did not track his executioner’s hand, and his eyelids did not resist the fingers that tenderly closed them.
“Not dead and alive,” Deucalion said. “Only dead and safe now … beyond despair and beyond your maker’s fury.”
Rising from his knees in the basement networking room, Deucalion reached his full height in the main laboratory, at Victor’s U-shaped workstation, where his search had been interrupted by Lester and then by Annunciata.
Earlier in the night, from Pastor Kenny Laffite — a creation of Victor’s, whose program had been breaking down — Deucalion had learned that at least two thousand of the New Race were passing as ordinary people in the city. Pastor Kenny, who was now at peace like Lester, also said the creation tanks in the Hands of Mercy could produce a new crop of his kind every four months, over three hundred annually.
More important was Kenny’s revelation that a New Race farm, somewhere outside the city, might go into operation within the next week. Two thousand creation tanks, under a single roof, would produce six thousand in the first year. Yet another such farm was rumored to be under construction.
When Deucalion found nothing useful in the drawers of Victor’s workstation, he switched on the computer.
CHAPTER 11
Ripley, in the monitoring hub, was also in a dilemma.
He knew that, even as strong and smart as he was, he couldn’t survive a battle with the Werner thing. Patrick Duchaine, also an Alpha, had been overpowered and torn to pieces in Isolation Room Number Two.
Certain beyond doubt that he would be killed in a confrontation with this creature, he must do everything possible to avoid contact, although not because he wanted to live. The unfocused anxiety that every day tormented him for long hours — as well as the fact that he was in essence a slave to his maker — made life less of a joy than it was portrayed in the warm and cozy novels of Jan Karon, which Ripley sometimes secretly downloaded from the Internet and read. Although he would have been relieved to die, he must escape from Werner because the proscription against suicide, genetically wired into his brain, restrained him from doing battle with an adversary that inevitably would destroy him.
As the Werner grotesquerie conjured words out of an insectile mouth that should have been incapable of producing speech—“
When the servomotors began to hum and the bolt-retraction gears to click, the Werner thing looked toward the source of the sounds and cocked its grisly head, as if considering why Ripley had taken this action.
Having seen the lethal quickness with which Free Werner sprang upon Duchaine, faster than a snake could strike, Ripley struggled to think of a way to buy time, to distract the mutated security chief. The only hope seemed to be to open a dialogue.
“Quite a day, huh?”
Free Werner continued to stare toward the humming servomotors.
“Just last night,” Ripley tried again, “Vincent said to me, ‘A day in the Hands of Mercy can be like a year with your testicles in a vise and not allowed to turn off the pain.’”
The palpi around the insectile mouth quivered excitedly at the soft sucking sound of the four dozen three- inch-thick lock bolts retracting from the architraves.
“Of course,” said Ripley, “I had to report him to Father for an attitude adjustment. Now he’s hanging upside down in a re-education box with a catheter in his penis, a collection hose up his rectum, and two holes in his skull to allow the insertion of brain probes.”
Finally, as the bolts finished retracting and the two vault doors on the transition modules began to swing open, Free Werner turned his attention once more to Ripley.
“Of course, as primary lab assistant to the Beekeeper … that is, to Mr. Helios, there’s no place I’d rather be than in the Hands of Mercy. This is the birth-place of the future, where the Million-Year Reich has begun.”
As he spoke, Ripley casually reached toward the control console, intending to tap two switches and cycle shut the doors that had just opened. If he could slip into one of the transition modules just as the door closed, before Free Werner could follow, he might be safe.
When he had been security chief, Werner had known how to operate the console. But the genetic chaos that the Beekeeper referred to as catastrophic cellular metamorphosis might have scrambled his cerebral function as much as it had wrought havoc with his body. His cognitive power or his memory, or both, might be so diminished that he would not know how to open the vault door and get at his prey.
In that gargly, hissing voice, Free Werner said,
CHAPTER 12
Having narrowly escaped death-by-Mercedes on the rain-slickened streets of a city soon to be under assault by Victor Frankenstein’s berserk killing machines, Carson O’Connor wanted an Acadiana fried-redfish poor boy.
Acadiana didn’t advertise. You couldn’t see it from the street. Locals didn’t tell tourists about it. For fear too much success would ruin the place, locals didn’t tell other locals about it all that often. If you found Acadiana, it meant you had the right kind of soul to eat there.
“We already had dinner,” Michael reminded her.
“So you’re on death row, you eat your last meal, after dessert you’ll be electrocuted, but they ask if you want to delay execution long enough to have a
“I don’t think dinner was our last meal.”
“I think it could have been.”
“It could have been,” he admitted, “but probably not. Besides, Deucalion told us just to cruise the neighborhood until he called.”
“I’ll have the cell phone with me.”
Acadiana didn’t have a parking lot. You couldn’t park on the street near it, because it was approached by an alleyway. The only diners who dared to leave their vehicles in the alleyway were cops.
“With this car, we’ll have to park a block away,” Michael said. “And what if we get back, and somebody’s stolen it?”
“Only an idiot is going to steal this spavined heap.”
“The Helios empire is exploding, Carson.”
“The Frankenstein empire.”
“I still can’t bring myself to say that. Anyway, it’s blowing up, and we have to be ready to move.”
“I’m sleep-deprived and I’m starving. I can’t sleep, but I can get a po’ boy. Look at me, I’m a poster girl for protein deficiency.” She turned off the street into a backway. “I’ll park in the alley.”
