Dead and Alive
Page 26

Jocko thought about it anyway. Jocko couldn’t turn his mind off. It spun and somersaulted like Jocko.
Maybe that was why no gen**als. No need for them. Not when you were one of a kind.
Through all this thinking, Jocko secretly watched Erika.
“Do you think about big issues?” Jocko asked.
“Like what?”
“Like … things you don’t have.”
She was quiet so long. Jocko thought he screwed up again.
Then she said, “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have a mother.”
Jocko slumped in his seat. “Jocko’s sorry. Sorry he asked. That’s too hard. Don’t think about it.”
“And what’s it like to be a mother? I’ll never know.”
“Why never?”
“Because of how I’m made. Made to be used. Not to be loved.”
“You’d be a great mother,” Jocko said.
She said nothing. Eyes on the road. Rain on the road, rain in her eyes.
“You would,” he insisted. “You take care of Jocko real good.”
She kind of laughed. It was kind of a sob, too.
Way to go. Jocko speaks. People weep.
“You’re very sweet,” she said.
So maybe things weren’t as bad as they seemed.
Letting their speed drop, she said, “Isn’t that Victor’s car?”
Or maybe things were worse than they seemed.
Rising in his seat, he said, “Where?”
“That rest area on the right. Yes, it’s him.”
“Keep going.”
“I don’t want him behind us. We have to get there separately from him, or I can’t sneak you in.”
Erika pulled into the rest area. Stopped behind Victor’s sedan. “Stay here, stay down.”
“You’re getting out? It’s raining.”
“We don’t want him coming to us, do we?” She opened the door.
AFTER RECEIVING CONFIRMATION that James had done as instructed, Victor took a few minutes to consider how he would approach the tank farm.
Some of the New Race who lived and worked at the farm might be breaking down in one way or another. He would need to be cautious, but he refused to be scared off. These were his creations, products of his genius, inferior to him in every way imaginable, and they could no more frighten him than one of Mozart’s concertos could have terrified the composer, than a painting by Rembrandt could have sent the artist screaming into the night. They would submit to him or hear the death phrase.
He foresaw no chance that anything like the Werner abomination would greet him at the farm. Werner had been a singularity. And where was it now? Vaporized with everything else in the Hands of Mercy.
No rebellion against Victor could hope to succeed, not only because his power was that of the mythic gods, but also because the smartest of the Alphas was an idiot by comparison with its maker, he on whom the centuries took no toll.
Erika Four, an Alpha, would be no match for him. He had killed her once with only a silk necktie and the power of his hands, and he could kill her again if the bitch had in fact been revived. An Alpha, a woman, and a wife—she was three times inferior to him. He would delight in the opportunity to punish her for the impudence of those two phone calls. If she thought she had been cruelly treated in her first life, in her second he would teach her what cruelty really was.
He had no fear of going to the tank farm. He seethed with desire to be there and to rule this new kingdom with a ferocious discipline that would allow no repeat of the Hands of Mercy.
As he reached to release the parking brake, a vehicle appeared on the highway, approaching from the south. Instead of passing, it parked behind him, flooding the interior of the sedan with light.
His mirrors presented too few details, so he turned in his seat to look through the back window. Erika Five was behind the wheel of the GL550, which he had ordered her to drive to the farm.
Staring back at her, furious with her because she looked like the impudent and insulting Erika Four, Victor saw nothing in the backseat, but he heard something move there. In the instant, he knew why he had felt that he was not alone: Chameleon!
The New Race pheromones with which he had doused himself would provide hours of protection. Except that … in moments of exertion when a light sweat might be broken, in moments of rage or fear, his true scent would grow riper and might be detected under the New Race disguise.
Victor flung open the driver’s door and plunged out of the car, into the night. Into the rain. The down-pour would fade the scent of his own pheromones, but it would more effectively wash away the odor of the New Race, which was only sprinkled on his suit.
He should have slammed the door, locked it remotely, abandoned the sedan, and gone to the farm with Erika. But he no longer dared approach the open driver’s door, because Chameleon might already have scrambled into the front seat.
Worse, it already might be out of the sedan, on rest-area pavement immediately around him. The ceaseless dance of raindrops on the blacktop would entirely conceal the telltale ripple of Chameleon in motion.
Inexplicably, Erika seemed to have gotten out of the GL even an instant before he had vacated the S600. At his side, sensing trouble, she said, “Victor? What’s wrong?”
ERIKA TOLD JOCKO, Stay down.
She said it like a scolding mother. She would be a good mother. But wasn’t Jocko’s mother. Nobody was.
Jocko raised his head. Saw Erika and Victor together. Instantly soaked by rain.
More interesting was the bug. The biggest bug Jocko ever saw. Half as big as Jocko.
This one didn’t look tasty. Looked bitter.
In the storm drain, bugs came close to Jocko. Easy to catch. Bugs didn’t know his big yellow eyes could see them in the dark.
Something wrong with this bug. Besides being so big.
Suddenly Jocko knew. The way it sneaked. The way it started to rear up. This bug would kill.
Pillowcase. On the floor. In front of his seat. Slip the knot in the shoelace. Inside—soap, soap, soap. The knife.
Quick, quick, quick, Jocko in the rain. Capering toward Erika and Victor. Don’t pirouette.
CHAPTER 66
THE BUG DIDN’T WANT TO DIE.
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—an incredible coincidence indeed! Deucalion assumed that he was destroying Victor, when instead he was preventing more flawed models of the New Race from being produced, forcing Victor to use only the vastly improved creation tanks at the farm. Synchronicity had corrected the error. And no doubt synchronicity would deal with Deucalion, as well, and clean up other minor annoyances—Detectives O’Connor and Maddison, among others—that might otherwise inhibit Victor in his ever more rapid march toward absolute dominance of all things.
With Victor’s unstoppable drive for power, with his singular intellect, with his cold materialism and his ruthless practicality, and now with synchronicity on his side, he had become untouchable, immortal.
He was immortal.
He took the elevator from the parking garage to the tank fields on the main floor. When the doors opened and he stepped through, he found the entire staff, sixty-two of the New Race, waiting for him, as throughout the ages commoners have gathered along streets to bask in the glory of passing royalty or to honor great political leaders whose courage and commitment those drudges of the proletariat could never hope to match.
Having stood in the rain while the synchronistic Harker mutant had killed Chameleon, Victor was disheveled as no one had ever seen him. On any other day, he might have been keenly annoyed to be seen in a sodden and rumpled suit with his hair disarranged. But in this hour of his transcendence, the condition of his wardrobe and hair did not matter, because his elevation to immortality was clearly evident to this audience, his radiance undiminished.