Chapter 64
Deucalion and the Bozeman replicant arrived on the End Times Highway in driving snow. A straightaway swept down from the crown of a hill behind them and faded ahead, westward, still white lanes dwindling into falling white flakes, all the whiteness flowing into a darkness that at this moment seemed eternal. On both sides of the road were great dark formations of evergreens, like the rising walls of some vast castle, their boughs not yet fully flocked, the faint scent of them almost sweet in the crisp, cold air.
No tire tracks cut through the blanketed pavement, which wasn’t surprising, considering that no one lived along these twenty-four miles of road. The night lay as quiet as if, back in the day, the Cold War had turned hot, atomizing and irradiating all humanity into oblivion, leaving a world where the only significant noises were of occasional seismic events, moving water, and wind.
“Where?” Deucalion asked the replicant whose arm he gripped.
“Directly north, into the forest at least two hundred yards. Three hundred might be better.”
“Take the step with me,” Deucalion said, and transported them into the forest.
Gloriously wild and vast, yet intimate in its every tree-defined space, the forest might be a cathedral by day, though it was a series of chapels by night. This must seem to be a blind-black wilderness to the replicant, but to Deucalion it was an array of chambers receding one into the other in every direction, the air scented and flavored by the natural incense of pines and alpine firs. Because during the day little sunlight reached the forest floor, no brush obstructed, and until the weight of the limb-borne snow caused boughs to bend sufficiently, only flurries of flakes found their way through the evergreen canopy to plant small cold kisses on his face.
“Where?” he asked again, and the replicant said, “Down.”
Deucalion stared at the earth underfoot until he sensed solid strata, dense and deep … but then hollow spaces farther below, a kingdom of strange chambers.
“Turn with me,” he told the replicant, and in the turn they stepped out of the chapel forest and into a long corridor with white walls and a gray floor.
The silence here was more profound than that in the woods above, as if the queen had long abandoned this hive, her workers and her drones swarming in her wake.
Within a few breaths, however, Deucalion knew he had arrived in Victor’s lair: Victor Leben now, clone of Victor Helios — in spite of all aliases and all eras, Frankenstein forever. The telltale scent that came to him was not a trace of pheromones and nothing at all of sweat and blood. He smelled instead the damp stone walls of the old windmill that had been converted to the great man’s first laboratory in faraway Europe, the ozone created by leaping electric arcs between the poles of arcane and primitive machines, the malodor of his own recently dead flesh that lingered even after the moment of successful reanimation. His maker roamed this vault of secrets, near and nearer.
“Kill me,” the Bozeman replicant pleaded, and Deucalion gave him that grace, breaking his neck and lowering him gently to the floor.
The screams and thudding feet overhead were of no concern.
Addison Hawk worked with Erika in the living room, rearranging sofas and armchairs and footstools, which would serve as beds, to open more floor space for makeshift mattresses made with quilts, moving blankets, towels, heavy winter coats, and other items.
As they worked, they got to know each other. Addison could remember no other woman with whom he ever talked so easily, in whose company he had felt so comfortable. He was not a ladies’ man. He was to Don Juan what tinfoil was to silver leaf. Yet this beautiful woman so enchanted him that he chattered away, less self-conscious than he had ever been with one of the fairer sex.
A multitude of footsteps thundered down the back steps, toward the kitchen, accompanied by much squealing and shrieking.
Erika’s beauty was of course the first thing that dazzled him, but soon her looks mattered hardly at all when compared to her many other qualities. She was calm and competent, seemed to know just what to do at every moment, as these bizarre events unfolded. She had an air of worldliness, as though she had traveled everywhere and seen everything, but at the same time she remained humble without being compliant, modest without being coy, gentle but not meek.
A merry jingling of tiny bells arose in the downstairs hallway.
Addison found Erika to be deeply layered to such an extent that she was mysterious. How she could be so approachable and forthcoming yet remain enigmatic, he didn’t know. She inspired in him both wonder and curiosity. Something about this woman was recondite, remote from ordinary perception, almost mystical.
Beyond the archway, Jocko appeared in the downstairs hall, in one of his fourteen belled hats, leading a conga line of children, some of whom were wearing the other thirteen hats. “Step to the left, step to the right, forward hop, hop. Step to the left, step to the right, forward hop, hop.
Erika paused in her work to watch the procession. Her gentle smile was a curve of kindness, sweetly maternal. Addison wanted to kiss that smile, not just Erika but that
Jocko reached the front stairs and started to climb. “Three steps up, one step back, slap your butt cheeks—
As the children ascended behind Jocko and all the whacking and snorting receded, Erika said, “They’ll sleep well tonight.”
“Especially Jocko,” Addison said.
“Oh, Jocko rarely sleeps. Sometimes he sticks a fork in a wall plug and knocks himself out for an hour. I don’t know why it doesn’t kill him, but it doesn’t, and I’ve learned to live with it.”
Rusty in the lightless hallway, just outside Corrina Ringwald’s bedroom, knew something was near him, an arm’s length away to his left, and he assumed it must be another of those abominations that had killed all the people in the Trailblazer.
He considered fleeing to his right, stumbling through the dark toward the dim glow rising in the staircase from windows below. But he clutched when he thought another of the things might be waiting there to receive him, that they were bracketing him, that he must be doomed no matter which way he turned. He was too long from the war, his nerves civilianized, and he could not in such short order armor himself against mortal fear to the extent that he had overcome it on the battlefield.
After no more than half a minute, Rusty knew that light would be preferable to continued darkness, no matter what hideous presence might be revealed. He felt behind him, along the wall beside the bedroom door, and he found a plastic cover plate, the notched head of a screw, and then the switch in the center. He hesitated for a moment, revelation awaiting his command, and as a shudder of dread, as cold as dry ice, passed through him, he turned on the overhead hallway lights.
Nothing waited to his right, as he had feared, but immediately to his left stood a man in a business suit, his face bristling with shards of broken glass. In fact, his face
As Rusty stood frozen in terror, the well-tailored business suit turned to vapor, a mist that the thing appeared to absorb, revealing not a human body but the mere form of a man shaped from some mottled gray substance with veins of twinkling silver bits. Abruptly, glass blossomed from the body at several points, sharp- petaled flowerlike forms that glittered with scores of cutting edges.
Rusty remembered the sound of shattering glass rising from the ground floor earlier, and he sensed that rain of ringing fragments was related to this weird display, though he didn’t know how or why.
From where the mouth ought to have been in that spiny face, several spear-point shards spat out, whistling past Rusty’s head as quick as arrows from a bow. They shattered against the wall at the end of the hallway.
