lighted kitchen.
She was the crimson bride of Death.
Shocked, Yancy halted. “Oh, God, what happened to you?”
“Nothing happened to
An instant later, she happened to Yancy. He was a big man, and she was a woman of average size. But he was Old Race, and she was New, and the outcome was as inevitable as the result of a contest between a wood- chipper and a woodchuck.
Most amazing of all: Janet did not once repeat herself. Her vicious hatred of the Old Race was expressed in unique cruelties.
In Bucky’s hands, the camera flashed and flashed.
CHAPTER 5
Without the lash of wind, rain did not whip the streets but fell in a heavy dispiriting drizzle, painting blacktop blacker, oiling the pavement.
Homicide detective Carson O’Connor and her partner, Michael Maddison, had abandoned their unmarked sedan because it would be easily spotted by other members of the police department. They no longer trusted their fellow officers.
Victor Helios had replaced numerous officials in city government with replicants. Perhaps only ten percent of the police were Victor’s creations, but then again … maybe ninety percent. Prudence required Carson to assume the worst.
She was driving a car that she had borrowed from her friend Vicky Chou. The five-year-old Honda seemed reliable, but it was a lot less powerful than the Batmobile.
Every time Carson turned a corner sharp and fast, the sedan groaned, creaked, shuddered. On the flat streets, when she tramped on the accelerator, the car responded but as grudgingly as a dray horse that had spent its working life pulling a wagon at an easy pace.
“How can Vicky drive this crate?” Carson fumed. “It’s arthritic, it’s sclerotic, it’s a dead car rolling. Doesn’t she ever give it an oil change, is the thing lubed with sloth fat, what the
“All we’re doing is waiting for a phone call from Deucalion,” Michael said. “Just cruise nice and easy around the neighborhood. He said stay in Uptown, near the Hands of Mercy. You don’t have to be anywhere yesterday.”
“Speed soothes my nerves,” she said.
Vicky Chou was the caregiver to Arnie, Carson’s autistic younger brother. She and her sister, Liane, had fled to Shreveport, to stay with their Aunt Leelee in case, as seemed to be happening, Victor’s race of laboratory- conceived post-humans went berserk and destroyed the city.
“I was born for velocity,” Carson said. “What doesn’t quicken dies. That’s an indisputable truth of life.”
Currently, Arnie’s caregivers were the Buddhist monks with whom Deucalion had lived for an extended period. Somehow, only hours ago, Deucalion opened a door between New Orleans and Tibet, and he left Arnie in a monastery in the Himalayas, where the boy would be out of harm’s way.
“The race doesn’t always go to the swift,” Michael reminded her.
“Don’t give me any of that hare-and-tortoise crap. Turtles end up crushed by eighteen-wheelers on the interstate.”
“So do a lot of bunnies, even as quick as they are.”
Squeezing enough speed out of the Honda to make the rain snap against the windshield, Carson said, “Don’t call me a bunny.”
“I didn’t call you a bunny,” he assured her.
“I’m no damn bunny. I’m cheetah-fast. How does Deucalion just turn away from me, vanish with Arnie, and step into a monastery in Tibet?”
“Like he said, it’s a quantum-mechanics thing.”
“Yeah, that’s totally clear. Poor Arnie, the sweet kid, he must think he’s been abandoned.”
“We’ve been through this. Arnie is fine. Trust Deucalion. Watch your speed.”
“This isn’t speed. This is pathetic. What is this car, some kind of idiot
“I can’t imagine what it’ll be like,” Michael said.
“What?”
“Being married to you.”
“Don’t start. Keep your game on. We’ve got to live through this first. We can’t live through this if we’re playing grab-ass.”
“I’m not going to grab your ass.”
“Don’t even talk about grabbing or not grabbing my ass. We’re in a war, we’re up against man-made monsters with two hearts in their chests, we have to stay focused.”
Because the cross street was deserted, Carson decided not to stop for a traffic light, but of course Victor Helios Frankenstein’s freak show wasn’t the only mortal danger in New Orleans. A pie-eyed prettyboy and his slack-jawed girlfriend, in a black Mercedes without headlights, barreled out of the night as if racing through a quantum doorway from Las Vegas.
Carson stood on the brake pedal. The Mercedes shot across the bow of the Honda close enough for her headlights to reveal the Botox injection marks in the prettyboy’s face. The Honda hydroplaned on the slick pavement and then spun 180 degrees, the Mercedes raced away toward some other rendezvous with Death, and Carson cruised back the way they had come, impatient for Deucalion’s phone call.
“Only three days ago, everything was so great,” she said. “We were just two homicide dicks, taking down bad guys, nothing worse to worry about than ax murderers and gang shootings, stuffing our faces with shrimp- and-ham jambalaya at Wondermous Eats when the bullets weren’t flying, just a couple of I’ve-got-your-back cops who never even thought about making moon eyes at each other—”
“Well, I was thinking about it,” Michael said, and she refused to glance at him because he would be adorable.
“—and suddenly we’re being hunted by a legion of inhuman, superhuman, posthuman, pass-for-human, hard- to-kill meat machines cooked up by the for-real Victor Frankenstein, and they’re all in a go-nuts mode, it’s Armageddon on the Bayou, and on top of all that, you suddenly want to have my babies.”
He said, “We’ll negotiate who has the babies. Anyway, bad as things are right now, it wasn’t all jambalaya and roses before we discovered Transylvania had come to Louisiana. Don’t forget the psycho dentist who made himself a set of pointy steel dentures and bit three little girls to death. He was totally human.”
“I’m not going to defend humanity. Real people can be as inhuman as anything Helios stitches together in his lab. Why hasn’t Deucalion called? Something must have gone wrong.”
“What could go wrong,” Michael asked, “on a warm, languid night in the Big Easy?”
CHAPTER 6
A stairwell descended from the main lab all the way to the basement. Lester led Deucalion to the networking room, where three walls were lined with racks of electronic equipment.
Against the back wall were handsome mahogany cabinets topped with a copper-flecked black-granite counter. Even in mechanical rooms, Victor had specified high-quality materials. His financial resources seemed bottomless.
“That’s Annunciata,” said Lester, “in the middle box.”
Lined up on the black granite were not boxes but instead five thick glass cylinders on stainless-steel cradles.
