Dead and Alive

were meat machines just as the members of the Old Race were meat machines, just as every animal was a meat machine, and that their maker was also only a meat machine, albeit a meat machine with the most brilliant mind in the history of the species and with an infallible vision of a man-made utopia that would establish a Million-Year Reich on Earth before spreading to every habitable planet circling every star in the universe.

This creed of absolute materialism and antihumanism had been drilled into Bucky and Janet as they formed in the creation tanks, which was an immeasurably more effective way to have learned it than by watching Sesame Street and reading a series of dull grade-school textbooks.

Unlike members of the Old Race, who could be comfortable for decades with the philosophy that life had no meaning, only to become God-besotted in middle age, the New Race could take satisfaction from knowing they were so indoctrinated with hopelessness that they would never have a doubt about their convictions. Father told them that unassailable hopelessness was the beginning of wisdom.

But now the dog.

His disturbing forthright stare, his judgmental attitude, the fact that he knew they were impostors, that he followed them through the night without their knowledge, that he did not slink away from the danger Bucky and Janet currently posed to any living thing not of their kind, that instead he came to confront them: Suddenly this dog seemed to be something more than a meat machine.

Evidently, the same perception troubled Janet, for she said, “What’s he doing with his eyes?”

“I don’t like his eyes,” Bucky agreed.

“He’s like not looking at me, he’s looking into me.”

“He’s like looking into me, too.”

“He’s weird.”

“He’s totally weird,” Bucky agreed.

“What does he want?”

“He wants something.”

“I could kill him so fast,” Janet said.

“You could. In like three seconds.”

“He’s seen what we can do. Why isn’t he afraid?”

“He doesn’t seem to be afraid, does he?”

In the doorway, Duke growled.

“I’ve never felt like this before,” Janet said.

“How do you feel?”

“Different. I don’t have a word for it.”

“Neither do I.”

“I just suddenly feel like … things are happening right in front of me that I can’t see. Does that make sense?”

“Are we losing more of our programming?”

“All I know is, the dog knows something big,” Janet said.

“Does he? What does he know?”

“He knows some reason he doesn’t have to be afraid of us.”

“What reason?” Bucky asked.

“I don’t know. Do you know?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky said.

“I don’t like not knowing.”

“He’s just a dog. He can’t know big things we don’t know.”

“He should be very afraid of us.” Janet hugged herself and seemed to shiver. “But he’s not. He knows big things we don’t know.”

“He’s just a meat machine like us.”

“He’s not acting like one.”

“We’re smart meat machines. He’s a dumb one,” Bucky said, but his uneasiness was of a kind he had never experienced before.

“He’s got secrets,” Janet said.

“What secrets?”

“The big things he knows that we don’t.”

“How can a dog have secrets?”

“Maybe he’s not just a dog.”

“What else would he be?”

“Something,” she said portentously.

“Just a minute ago, I felt so good killing in the nude, so natural.”

“Good,” she echoed. “Natural.”

“Now I’m afraid,” he said.

“I’m afraid, too. I’ve never been so afraid.”

“But I don’t know what I’m afraid of, Janet.”

“Neither do I. So we must be afraid of … the unknown.”

“But nothing’s unknowable to a rational intellect. Right? Isn’t that right?”

“Then why isn’t the dog afraid of us?”

Bucky said, “He keeps staring. I can’t stand the way he’s just staring. It’s not natural, and tonight I learned what natural feels like. This isn’t natural.”

“It’s supernatural,” Janet whispered.

The back of Bucky’s neck was suddenly damp. A chill corkscrewed the length of his spine.

Precisely when Janet spoke the word supernatural, the dog turned away from them and disappeared into the upstairs hall.

“Where’s he going, going, going?” Janet wondered.

“Maybe he was never there.”

“I’ve got to know where he’s going, what he is, what he knows,” Janet said urgently, and hurried across the bedroom.

Following her into the hallway, Bucky saw that the dog was gone.

Janet ran to the head of the stairs. “Here he is! Going down. He knows something big, oh yeah, oh yeah, he’s going somewhere big, he’s something.”

In pursuit of the mysterious dog, Bucky descended the stairs with Janet, and then hurried toward the back of the house.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah, something big, big, bigger than big, the dog knows, the dog knows, the dog.”

An instant before they entered the family room, Bucky was struck by the crazy, frightening thought that Charles would be there alive, Charles and Preston and Marcella and Antoine and Evangeline, all of them resurrected, furious, possessed of hideous supernatural powers that would make them invulnerable, and that they would do things to him that he could not imagine, things unknown.

Fortunately, young Charles Arceneaux was the only one there, and he was still as dead as anyone had ever been.

Seeing Charles dead and thoroughly dismantled, Bucky should have felt better, but his fear tightened like an overwound clock spring. He was electrified by a sense of the uncanny, by a recognition of mysterious realms beyond his ken, by astonishment that the world had suddenly revealed itself to contain strange dimensions previously unimagined.

Janet bounded after the dog, chanting, “Dog knows, knows, knows. Dog sees, sees, sees. Dog, dog, dog,” and Bucky sprinted after them both, out of the Arceneaux house, across the veranda, into the rain. He was not exactly sure how the appearance of the German shepherd in the bedroom doorway had led to this frantic chase, what it all meant, where it would end, but he knew as certainly as he had ever known anything that an event of a profound and magical nature loomed, something big, something huge.

He was not just nude, he was naked, vulnerable both physically and mentally, his tandem hearts pounding, flooded with emotion as he had never been before, not at the moment killing anyone and yet exhilarated. They ran