Dead and Alive

“You are Erika Five,” he said coldly, “not Erika Four. And all you’ve achieved by this absurd impersonation is to ensure that Erika Six will be in your position soon.”

“From so many nights of passion,” she said, “I remember the hard impact of your fists, the sharpness of your teeth biting into me, and how I bled into your mouth.”

“Come to me immediately,” he said, for he needed to terminate her within the hour.

“Oh, darling, I would be there at once if I could, but it’s a long way to the Garden District from the dump.”

CHAPTER 23

As they reached the T junction where the entrance lane met the main road through Audubon Park, Michael drew the illegally purchased.50-caliber Desert Eagle pistol from the scabbard at his left hip.

Carson said, “If they’re going to be trouble—”

“I’d bet both kidneys on it.”

“—then I’m thinking the Urban Sniper makes more sense,” she finished, turning right onto West Drive.

The headlights washed across the pale forms of Mr. and Mrs. Guitreau on their rainy-night, fully-nude, high- speed dog walk.

Michael said, “If we have to get out of the car, it’ll for sure be the Sniper, but not if I have to shoot from a sitting position.”

Hours earlier, they had seen Pastor Kenny Laffite, one of the New Race, breaking down psychologically and intellectually. And not long after that, they were forced to deal with another of Victor’s creations who called himself Randal and whose rap was as creepy-crazy as Charles Manson channeling Jeffrey Dahmer. Randal wanted to kill Carson’s brother, Arnie, and he had taken three rounds point-blank from an Urban Sniper before going down and staying down.

Now this weirdness.

“Damn,” Carson said. “I’m never gonna get a chance to finish that okra succotash.”

“I thought it was a little salty. I’ve gotta say, Mrs. Guitreau has a truly fine butt.”

“For God’s sake, Michael, she’s some kind of monster.”

“Doesn’t change the fact she’s got a great butt. Small, tight, with those little dimples at the top.”

“It’s Armageddon, and my backup is an obsessive butt man.”

“I think her name’s Jane. No. Janet.”

“Why do you care what her name is? She’s a monster but she’s got a cute butt, so you’re gonna ask her for a date?”

“How fast are they going?”

Glancing at the speedometer, Carson said, “About twenty-four miles an hour.”

“That’s maybe a two-and-a-half-minute mile. I think the fastest the mile’s been run is just under four minutes.”

“Yeah, but I don’t expect we’ll ever see their pictures on a Wheaties box.”

“I heard greyhounds can do a mile in two minutes,” Michael said. “I don’t know about German shepherds.”

“Looks to me like the shepherd is pretty much spent. They’re gaining on him.”

Michael said, “If we have a dog in this race, it’s the dog. I don’t want to see the dog get hurt.”

The shepherd and his pursuers were in the left lane. Carson swung into the right lane and rolled down her window.

As rain bounced off the sill and into her face, she drew even with the nude marathoners and heard what they were shouting.

The woman — okay, Janet—chanted urgently, “Dog nose, dog nose, big, big, big.”

“I think she wants the dog’s nose,” Carson said.

Michael said, “She can’t have it.”

Neither of the nudists was breathing hard.

Bucky Guitreau, the nearer of the two, was raving with a slight quirky calypso lilt: “Kill, kill, pizza guy, pizza guy, kill, kill.”

Both the district attorney and his wife, certainly replicants in the throes of a total breakdown, seemed oblivious to the Honda pacing them. The dog had their full attention, and they were closing on him.

Reading the speedometer, Michael said, “Twenty-six miles an hour.”

Trying to discern if the runners were even capable of breaking their fixation with the dog, Carson shouted at them, “Pull over!”

CHAPTER 24

Sitting in the spa, his champagne mood tainted with the vinegar of his wife’s unthinkable rebellion, Victor should already have hung up on Erika Five as she pretended to be Erika Four. He didn’t know why he continued to listen to this tripe, but he was rapt.

“Here at the dump,” she said, “in a heap of garbage, I found a disposable cell phone that has some unused minutes on it. Eighteen, in fact. Those of the Old Race are so wasteful, throwing away what has value. I, too, still had value, I believe.”

Every Erika was created with precisely the same voice, just as they looked alike in every luscious detail.

“My lovely Victor, my dearest sociopath, I can prove to you that I am who I claim to be. Your current punching bag doesn’t know how you murdered me, does she?”

He realized he was clenching the telephone so tightly that his hand ached.

“But, sweetheart, of course she doesn’t know. Because if you wish to murder her in the same fashion, you want it to be a surprise to her, as it was to me.”

No one in decades had spoken to him so contemptuously, and never had one whom he created addressed him with such disrespect.

Furious, he declared, “Only people can be murdered. You’re not a person, you’re property, a thing I owned. I didn’t murder you, I disposed of you, disposed of a worn-out, useless thing.”

He had lost control. He needed to restrain himself. His reply had seemed to suggest he accepted her ridiculous assertion that she was Erika Four.

She said, “All of the New Race are designed to be extremely difficult to kill. None can be strangled easily, if at all. None except your Erikas. Unlike the others, we wives have tender throats, fragile windpipes, carotid arteries that can be compressed to stop the blood from flowing to our brains.”

The water in the spa seemed to be less hot than it had been a minute ago.

“We were in the library, where you had beaten me. You instructed me to sit in a straightbacked chair. I could only obey. You took off your silk necktie and strangled me. And not quickly. You made an ordeal of it for me.”

He said, “Erika Four earned what she received. And now so have you.”

“In extreme situations,” she continued, “you are able to kill any of your creations by speaking a few words, a secret phrase, which triggers in our programs a shutdown of the autonomic nervous system. The heart ceases to beat. Lungs at once stop expanding, contracting. But you didn’t deal with me as mercifully as that.”

“Now I shall.” He spoke the phrase that would shut her down.

“Dear one, my precious Victor, it will no longer work. I was for a while dead enough that your control program dropped out of me. Not so dead, however, that I couldn’t be resurrected.”

“Nonsense,” he said, but his voice had no conviction.

“Oh, darling, how I yearn to be with you again. And I will be. This is not good-bye, only au revoir.” She hung up.