Dead and Alive

Neither did Jocko. Everything going so well. Soap. His first ride in a car. Someone to talk to. His first pants. Nobody hit him for hours. Soon a funny hat. So of course a giant killer bug shows up. Jocko luck.

Two ripping claws. One crushing claw. Six pincers. Stinger. Reciprocating saw for a tongue. Teeth. Teeth behind the first teeth. Everything but a flame-spitting hole. Oh, there it was. A bug born to be bad.

Jocko dropped on it with both knees. Stabbed, slashed, ripped, tore. Picked the bug up, slammed it down. Slammed it again. Slammed it. More stabbing. Fierce. Unrelenting. Jocko scared himself.

The bug squirmed. Tried to wriggle away. But it didn’t fight back, and it died.

Puzzled by the bug’s pacifism, Jocko got to his feet. Maybe the sight of Jocko paralyzed it with terror. Jocko stood in the driving rain. Breathless. Dizzy.

Rain snapping on his bald head.

Lost the baseball cap. Ah. Standing on it.

Erika and Victor seemed speechless.

Gasping, Jocko said, “Bug.”

Erika said, “I couldn’t see it. Until it was dead.”

Jocko triumphant. Heroic. His time had come. His time at last. To shine.

Victor skewered Jocko with his stare. “You could see it?”

The cap’s expansion strap was hooked around Jocko’s toes.

Wheezing, Jocko said to Erika, “It was … gonna … kill you.”

Victor disagreed: “It’s programmed to spare anyone with the scent of New Race flesh. Of we three, it would have killed only me.”

Jocko had saved Victor from certain death.

Victor said, “You’re of my flesh, but I don’t know you.”

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Jocko wanted to lie down in front of one of the cars and drive over himself.

“What are you?” Victor demanded.

Jocko wanted to beat himself with a bucket.

“Who are you?” Victor pressed.

Trying to shake the cap off his foot, panting, Jocko said without the desired force: “I am … the child of … Jonathan Harker.”

He raised the knife. The blade had broken off in the bug.

“He died … to birth me….”

“You’re the parasitical second self that developed spontaneously from Harker’s flesh.”

“I am … a juggler….”

“Juggler?”

“Never mind,” said Jocko. He dropped the handle of the knife. Furiously kicked his foot. Cast off the cap.

“I will need to study your eyes,” said Victor.

“Sure. Why not.”

Jocko turned away. Skip, skip, skip forward, hop backward. Skip, skip, skip forward, hop backward. Twirl.

As she watched the troll pirouetting across the blacktop, Erika wanted to hurry to him, halt him, give him a hug, and tell him that he was very brave.

Victor said, “Where did he come from?”

“He showed up at the house a little while ago. I knew you’d want to examine him.”

“What is he doing?”

“It’s just a thing he does.”

“I’ll find answers in him,” Victor said. “Why they’re changing form. Why the flesh has gone wrong. There’s much to learn from him.”

“I’ll bring him to the farm.”

“The eyes are a bonus,” Victor said. “If he’s awake when I dissect the eyes, I’ll have the best chance of understanding how they function.”

She watched Victor walk to the open door of the S600.

Before getting into the car, he looked again at the skipping, hopping, twirling troll, and then at Erika. “Don’t let him dance away into the night.”

“I won’t. I’ll bring him to the farm.”

As Victor got into the sedan and drove out of the rest area, Erika walked into the middle of the roadway.

Wind tore the night, ripped rain from the black sky, shook the trees as if to throttle the life from them. The world was wild and violent and strange.

The troll walked on his hands, down the center line of the highway.

When she could no longer hear the S600 above the wind roar, Erika glanced back, watching the distant taillights until they were out of sight.

The troll capered in a serpentine pattern, lane to lane, pausing now and then to spring off the pavement and kick his heels together.

Wind danced with the night, anointed the earth with rain, inspired the trees to celebrate. The world was free and exuberant and wondrous.

Erika rose onto the points of her toes, spread her arms wide, took a deep breath of the wind, and stood for a moment in expectation of the twirl.

CHAPTER 67

As the landfill was encircled by a formidable fence, so was the tank farm. Instead of three staggered rows of loblolly pines, there were clusters of live oaks festooned with moss.

The sign at the entry gate identified the resident corporation as GEGENANGRIFF, German for counterattack, Victor’s little joke, as his life was dedicated to an assault against the world.

The main building covered over two acres: a two-story brick structure with clean modern lines. Because every policeman, public official, and bureaucrat in the parish was a replicant, he’d had no trouble with building-code requirements, building inspections, or government approvals.

He opened the rolling iron gate with his remote control and parked in the underground garage.

The experience at the rest area had blown away the last clinging doubts that made him wary of returning to the farm. He’d been spared from a murderous creation of his own, Chameleon, by the mutant being that had evolved out of Jonathan Harker, who himself was one of the New Race. To Victor, this strongly suggested — nay, confirmed beyond question — that the entire New Race enterprise was so brilliantly conceived and so powerfully executed that within it had evolved a system of synchronicity that would ensure that errors in the project, if any, would self-correct.

Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychologist, had theorized that synchronicity, a word he invented for remarkable coincidences that have profound effects, is an acausal connecting principle that can in strange ways impose order on our lives. Victor enjoyed Jung’s work, though he would have liked to rewrite all the man’s essays and books, to bring to them a far greater depth of insight than poor Carl possessed. Synchronicity was not integral to the universe, as Carl believed, but sprang up only during those certain periods in certain cultures when human endeavor was as close to fully rational as it would ever get. The more rational the culture, the more likely that synchronicity would arise as a means of correcting what few errors the culture committed.

Victor’s implementation of the New Race and of his vision for a unified world was so rational, was worked out in such exquisitely logical detail, that a system of synchronicity evolved within it while he wasn’t looking. Something had gone wrong with the creation tanks at the Hands of Mercy without any indication to Victor, and before more imperfect New Race models could be produced, Deucalion appeared after two centuries to burn down the facility —