Dead and Alive

Although they did not know the Arceneauxs as well as they had known the Bennets, Janet and Bucky knew that in addition to Charles, four other people lived in this house: sixteen-year-old Preston, who was the neighborhood bully, Antoine and Evangeline, and Evangeline’s mother, Marcella. The grandmother had a downstairs bedroom, and the others were on the second floor.

“I’m ready to do one just as complete as you did Charlie,” Bucky said.

“Do Marcella.”

“Yes. Then we’ll go upstairs.”

“Take off your clothes. Feel the power.”

“I want to do one with my clothes on first,” said Bucky. “So when I do one in the nude, then I’ll have something to compare it to.”

“That’s a good idea.”

Janet strode out of the family room with the power, the grace, and the stealth of a panther, and Bucky followed in high spirits, leaving the door to the veranda open to the night.

CHAPTER 17

Because a woman capable of humility, shame, and tenderness presented a more satisfactory punching bag than a woman who could only hate and fear and stew in anger, Victor designed his Erikas to have a wider range of emotions than others of the New Race.

As they drank together on the porch, Erika Five found that her sympathy for the troll quickly ripened into compassion.

Something about him made her want to take him under her wing. Because he was the size of a child, perhaps he strummed a maternal chord in her — though she was barren, as were all New Race women. They did not reproduce; they were produced in a factory, as were sofas and sump pumps, so she most likely had no maternal instinct.

Perhaps his poverty affected her. Once he had burst out of his original Alpha body, the troll possessed no clothes to fit him, no shoes. He had no money for food or shelter, and he was too small and disturbing in appearance to return to work as a homicide detective.

If you were given to literary allusions, you might say he was a Quasimodo for his time — or more poignantly, an Elephant Man, a victim of prejudice against ugliness in a society that worshipped beauty.

Whatever the reason for her compassion, Erika said, “I can make a life for you here. But you must be discreet. It will be a secret life. Only I must know. Would you like to live here free from need?”

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