The Dead Town

in rebellion against him, Deucalion suggested that he hold the pages, review them himself, and ask questions if he had any.

Now Jocko stood ready. Waiting for questions. About Progress for Perfect Peace. Standing ready. Well, not just standing. Dancing from foot to foot. Sometimes pirouetting, but only five or maybe six revolutions at a time. Doing the boogaloo. A little bit of the funky chicken. Making propeller noises with his mouth flaps. Hat bells jingling. Sort of Christmasy.

He felt the need to talk, too. He said, “Jocko had it all done like an hour ago. Ripped it, zipped it, got it done. Then Jocko was Princess Josephine. Not the real one. Stand-in. Didn’t put on a dress or anything. Stand-in for teatime. With Princess Chrissy. Her dad, I don’t know. Maybe he chops off heads. Maybe he doesn’t. Jocko sweated from his ears. Otherwise did pretty well. Jocko hates tea. Tea sucks. Whoopie pies are good. Better than bugs, like Jocko ate back when. When he lived in a sewer. Way better. No whoopie pies in a sewer. Jocko likes Little Women, the movie. Jocko’s got every version. Poor sweet Beth. She always dies. It just rips Jocko up. Jocko cries. Not ashamed. It’s a good cry. But they should remake. Little Women. Let Beth live. Jocko would watch it a thousand times. Unless Johnny Depp played Beth. You know Johnny Depp? Probably not. Different social circles. Jocko used to be afraid of Justin Bieber. Still is, a little. Then saw Depp. You have allergies? Jocko does. Raspberries. Face swells up. Lots of snot pours out. Well, not snot. Uglier than snot. Don’t know what. Never had it analyzed. Disgusting. Jocko can be disgusting. Not on purpose though. Do you like to pirouette? Jocko likes to pirouette.”

The big guy said, “You’ve done an excellent job here.”

Jocko almost died of delight.

“Progress for Perfect Peace. No doubt this Victor Leben is the clone of our Victor. I’ve been to the warehouse you discovered they own. It’s not where he’s located. It’s a center for liquidation of the people they’ve replaced with replicants. You found nothing that would pinpoint a location along the End Times Highway that’s related to Progress for Perfect Peace?”

Jocko shook his head. Adamantly. Proud of his thoroughness. “Nothing to find. Jocko shucked every ear of data corn. Popped it, buttered it, salted it, ate it up. Peeled the online onion down to its last layer. Bit every byte of the banana. Sliced, chopped, diced, minced, mashed — and what you see is what there is. Jocko would bet life on it. Jocko will kill himself if he missed something. Kill himself brutally. Savagely. Over and over again.”

“Progress for Perfect Peace,” Deucalion brooded. “Knowing this name is key. Knowing it, we’ll find him.”

Chapter 47

A mild wind came up, and Mr. Lyss called it a devil wind, not because devils were blowing around in it, but because it started to smooth away the snowmobile tracks. Just as it seemed the trail would be erased before their eyes, they saw house lights through the snow and found their way back to the Bozeman place.

The sad music was still being played. After Mr. Lyss retrieved his long gun from the workbench in the garage, he went into the house, to the living room.

Nummy followed the old man, though he didn’t want to follow because he was afraid of the monster playing the piano. There was something about Mr. Lyss that made you have to follow him, though Nummy didn’t understand what it was. It wasn’t just that he sometimes threatened to cut your feet off and feed them to wolves if you didn’t follow him or if you resisted doing other things he wanted you to do. In fact, Nummy felt compelled to follow Mr. Lyss in spite of the threats. Maybe at the beginning the threats were part of what made Nummy stay with him, but now it was something else. If Grandmama was still alive, she would know what it was and would be able to explain it.

In the living room, Mr. Lyss said to the piano player, “Was Bozeman the most depressive sonofabitch who ever lived, or are you just not playing the livelier music he knew?”

“Kill me,” the piano man said, “and the music will stop.”

“I’d like nothing better than to kill you dead as anyone’s ever been,” Mr. Lyss said. “I’ve killed every damn monster I’ve ever met, and there have been more than a few. But I won’t be told to do it by the monster himself. I’m not a man who can be bossed around. Tell him that’s true, boy.”

Nummy said, “That’s true. Mr. Lyss can’t be bossed around. He gets his back up easy. If he was on fire and somebody told him jump in the water, he might not do it ’cause it wasn’t his idea first.”

“Hell’s bells,” the old man said, “where did that come from, boy?”

“It come from me, sir.”

“Well, I know it came from you, I heard you say it. But it came from somewhere deeper in you than most of your jabber and prattle comes from. Not that I’m encouraging more of the same. I didn’t ask you to psychoanalyze me. I asked you to confirm my simple statement for this gloomy sonofabitch.”

As before, Xerox Bozeman’s hands seemed to float back and forth across the keys, almost as if they weren’t taking the music from the piano, as if instead the music was in the hands and the piano was drawing it out of them, like the land draws lightning to it in a storm.

Nummy felt a little hypnotized by the floating hands, as before. Maybe Mr. Lyss was hypnotized, too, because he listened for a while without saying anything.

But then the old man said, “If you want to be dead because of what you saw when Bozeman died, why don’t you kill yourself?”

“I can’t. My program forbids self-destruction.”

“Your program.”

“The one installed in me in the Hive, in the laboratory where I was made.”

“By Frankenstein,” Mr. Lyss said with some scorn. “In the Hive.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re still sticking to that story.”

“It’s true.”

“And it’s not true that you’re a Martian or some murderous scum from some other planet?”

“It’s not true,” said the piano player.

“We burned some big cocoons earlier tonight. You make those cocoons?”

“No. I’m a Communitarian. The cocoons are made by Builders. We both come from the Hive.”

Mr. Lyss thought about that for a while before he said, “Earlier I wanted to kill you, but I knew for some reason it was a bad idea. I think it’s still a bad idea, damn if I know why, since I’d get plenty of satisfaction from it. So I’ll tell you what — I’ll kill you as dead as dead can be, as soon as I feel it’s right.”

The music was very sad. Nummy thought a person might curl up like a pill bug and never uncurl, listening to that music too much.

“In return,” Mr. Lyss said, “you come along with us, answer some questions.”

“What questions?” the piano player asked.

“Any damn question that pops in my head to ask. I’m not giving you a list of questions ahead of time so you can study them and just scheme up a bunch of lying answers. O’Bannon here is a dummy, but I’m not, and you better keep that in mind. If you lie to me, I’ll know it’s a lie, I can smell a lie better than a bloodhound can smell the nearest sausage. Then I’ll put you in a cage and feed you well and never kill you. You have to earn it. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” the Xerox Bozeman said, and he stood up from the piano.

Chapter 48

The Communitarian workers in the Hive are forbidden to descend to the vacant lower floors not used by Victor’s enterprise, through which he now walks in splendid isolation.

In the early days of their creation, two had come down here, been lured into this realm by a scientist named Ehlis Shaitan, or so he claimed, who worked in the building back in the Cold War.