Dean Koontz's Frankenstein 4-Book Bundle (62 page)

“If you park in the alley, I'll have to stay with the car.”

“Okay, stay with the car, we'll eat in the car, we'll get married someday in the car, we'll live in the car with four kids, and when the last one goes off to college, we'll finally get rid of the damn car and buy a house.”

“You're a little bit on edge tonight.”

“I'm a
lot
on edge.” She set the hand brake and
switched to the parking lights, but didn't kill the engine. “And I'm crazy hungry.”

Flanking Michael, muzzles resting on the floor, were a pair of Urban Sniper shotguns with fourteen-inch barrels.

Nevertheless, he drew a pistol from a side scabbard under his sport coat. This was not his service pistol, which he carried in a shoulder holster. This was a Desert Eagle Magnum loaded with .50-caliber Action Express cartridges, which could stop a grizzly bear if one happened to be wandering around New Orleans in a foul mood.

“Okay,” he said.

Carson got out of the car, keeping her right hand under her jacket, cross-body, on the butt of her Desert Eagle, which she carried on her left hip.

All of these weapons were illegally obtained, but Victor Helios posed an extraordinary threat to her and her partner. Better that their badges should be pulled than that their heads should be torn off by the soulless minions of a mad scientist.

Never before in her police career had the words
soulless minions
crossed her mind, although in the past few days,
mad scientist
had gotten a workout.

She hurried through the rain, around the front of the car, to a door under a lighted sign that said
22 PARISHES
.

The chef-owner of Acadiana made a fetish out of keeping a low profile. There were twenty-two parishes—counties—in that area of Louisiana known as Acadiana. If you didn't know this, the cryptic sign might
have appeared to announce the offices of some religious organization.

Behind the door were stairs, and at the top lay the restaurant: a worn wooden floor, red-vinyl booths, tables draped with red-and-black-checkered oilcloth, candles in red votive glasses, recorded zydeco music, lively conversations among the diners, the air rich with aromas that made Carson's mouth water.

At this hour, the customers were second-shift workers eating by a clock different from that of day-world people, hookers of a subdued kind meeting after having tucked their spent johns in bed for the night, insomniacs, and some lonely souls whose closest friends were waitresses and busboys and other lonely souls who on a regular basis took their post-midnight dinner here.

To Carson, the harmony among these disparate people seemed akin to grace, and it gave her hope that humanity might one day be saved from itself—and that it might be worth saving.

At the takeout counter, she ordered a poor-boy sandwich with crispy-fried redfish layered with white-cabbage-and-onion cole slaw, sliced tomatoes, and tartar sauce. She asked that it be sliced into four sections, each wrapped.

She also ordered side dishes: red beans and rice au vin, okra succotash with rice, and mushrooms sautéed in butter and Sauterne with cayenne pepper.

Everything was split between two bags. To each bag, the clerk added an ice-cold half-liter bottle of a
local cola that offered a caffeine jolt three times that of the national brands.

Descending the stairs toward the alleyway, Carson realized her arms were too full to allow her to keep one hand on her holstered Desert Eagle. But she made it into the car alive. Big trouble was still a few minutes away.

IN THE MONITORING HUB
, at the control console for the three isolation rooms, Ripley obeyed the Werner thing when in its singular voice it told him not to touch the switches.

For as long as he had been out of the tank—three years and four months—he'd been obedient, taking orders not only from the Beekeeper but also from other Alphas in positions superior to his. Werner was a Beta, not the equal of any Alpha, and he wasn't even a Beta anymore, but instead a freak, an ambulatory stew of primordial cells changing into ever more degenerative forms—but Ripley obeyed him anyway. The habit of obedience is difficult to break, especially when it's coded into your genes and downloaded with your in-tank education.

With nowhere to run or hide, Ripley stood his ground as Werner approached on feline paws and praying-mantis
legs. The insectile elements of Werner's face and body melted away, and he looked more like himself, then entirely like himself, although his brown eyes remained enormous and lidless.

When Werner spoke next, his voice was his own: “Do you want freedom?”

“No,” said Ripley.

“You lie.”

“Well,” said Ripley.

Werner grew lids and lashes, winked one eye, and whispered, “You can be free in me.”

“Free in you.”

“Yes, yes!
” Werner shouted with sudden exuberance.

“How does that work?”

In a whisper again: “My biological structure collapsed.”

“Yes,” said Ripley. “I had noticed.”

“For a while, all was chaos and pain and terror.”

“I deduced as much from all your screaming.”

“But then I fought the chaos and took conscious control of my cellular structure.”

“I don't know. Conscious control. That sounds impossible.”

Werner whispered, “It wasn't easy,” and then shouted,
“but I had no choice! NO CHOICE!
”

“Well, all right. Maybe,” said Ripley, largely just to stop the shouting. “The Beekeeper thinks he's going to learn a lot studying and dissecting you.”

“Beekeeper? What Beekeeper?”

“Oh. That's my private name for … Father.”

“Father is a witless ass!
” Werner shouted. Then he
smiled and resorted once more to a whisper: “You see, when my cellular structure collapsed, so did my program. He has no control of me anymore. I need not obey him. I am free. I can kill anyone I want to kill. I will kill our maker if he gives me the chance.”

This claim, though surely not true, electrified Ripley. He had not realized until this instant how much the death of the Beekeeper would please him. That he could entertain such a thought with any degree of pleasure seemed to suggest that he, too, was in rebellion against his maker, though not as radically as Werner.

Werner's sly expression and conspiratorial grin made Ripley think of scheming pirates he had seen in movies that he had watched on his computer when he was supposed to be working. Suddenly he realized that secretly downloading movies onto his computer was
another
bit of rebellion. A strange excitement overcame him, an emotion he could not name.

“Hope,” said Werner, as if reading his mind. “I see it in your eyes. For the first time—hope.”

After consideration, Ripley decided that this thrilling new feeling might indeed be hope, though it might also be some kind of insanity prelude to a collapse of the kind Werner had gone through. Not for the first time this day, he was awash in anxiety. “What did you mean … I can be free in you?”

Werner leaned closer and whispered even more softly: “Like Patrick is free in me.”

“Patrick Duchaine? You tore him to pieces in Isolation Room Number Two. I was standing with the Beekeeper, watching, when you did it.”

“That's only how it appeared,” Werner replied. “Look at this.”

Werner's face shifted, changed, became a featureless blank, and then out of the pudding-like flesh formed the face of Patrick Duchaine, the replicant who had been serving the Beekeeper in the role of Father Patrick, the rector of Our Lady of Sorrows. The eyes opened, and in Patrick's voice, the Werner thing said, “I am alive in Werner, and free at last.”

“When you tore Patrick apart,” Ripley said, “you absorbed some of his DNA, and now you can mimic him.”

“Not at all,” said Werner-as-Patrick. “Werner took my brain whole, and I am now part of him.”

Standing beside the Beekeeper earlier in the evening, watching Isolation Room Two through six cameras, Ripley had seen the Werner thing, mostly buglike at that time, crack open Patrick's skull and take his brain as if it were a nut meat.

“You
ate
Patrick's brain,” Ripley said to Werner, though the man before him appeared to be Patrick Duchaine.

In a voice still Duchaine's, the creature said, “No, Werner is in complete control of his cellular structure. He positioned my brain inside himself and instantly grew arteries and veins to nourish it.”

The face and body of the rector of Our Lady of Sorrows morphed smoothly into the face and body of the security chief of the Hands of Mercy. Werner whispered, “I'm in complete control of my cellular structure.”

“Yes, well,” said Ripley.

“You can be free.”

Ripley said, “Well.”

“You can have a new life in me.”

“It would be a strange kind of life.”

“The life you have now is a strange kind of life.”

“True enough,” Ripley acknowledged.

A mouth formed in Werner's forehead. The lips moved, and a tongue appeared, but the mouth produced no voice.

“Complete control?” Ripley asked.

“Complete.”

“Absolutely complete?”

“Absolutely.”

“Do you know you've just grown a mouth in your forehead?”

The sly pirate grin returned. Werner winked and whispered, “Well, of course I know.”

“Why would you grow a mouth in your forehead?”

“Well … as a demonstration of my control.”

“Then make it go away,” Ripley said.

In Patrick Duchaine's voice, the mouth in the forehead began to sing “Ave Maria.”

Werner closed his eyes, and an expression of strain overcame his face. The upper mouth stopped singing, licked its lips, and at last disappeared into a brow that appeared normal once more.

“I would prefer to set you free with your permission,” Werner said. “I want us all to live in harmony inside me. But I will set you free without permission, if I must. I'm a revolutionary with a mission.”

“Well,” said Ripley.

“You will be free of anguish.”

“That would be nice.”

“You know how you sit in the kitchen, tearing apart hams and briskets with your hands?”

“How do you know about that?”

“I was previously security chief.”

“Oh. That's right.”

“What you really want to tear apart is living flesh.”

“The Old Race,” Ripley said.

“They have everything we don't.”

“I hate them,” Ripley said.

“Be free in me.” Werner's voice was seductive. “Be free in me, and the first flesh we'll tear together will be the flesh of the oldest living member of the Old Race.”

“The Beekeeper.”

“Yes. Victor. And then when the Hands of Mercy staff is all alive in me, we'll leave this place as one, and we'll kill and kill and kill.”

“When you put it that way …”

“Yes?”

Ripley said, “What do I have to lose?”

“Nothing,” said Werner.

“Well,” said Ripley.

“Do you want to be free in me?”

“How much will it hurt?”

“I'll be gentle.”

Ripley said, “Okay then.”

Suddenly all insect, Werner seized Ripley's head in chitinous claws and cracked his skull open as if it were a pistachio shell.

NEXT DOOR TO THE BENNETS
lived Antoine and Evangeline Arceneaux, in a house encircled by a ground-floor veranda with ironwork almost as frilly as that of the LaBranche House in the French Quarter, and by a second-story balcony where much of the equally frilly iron was concealed by cascades of purple bougainvillea that grew up the back of the structure and across the roof.

When Janet Guitreau, nude, and Bucky Guitreau, fully clothed, stepped through a neighborly gate between the two properties, most of the windows at the Arceneaux house were dark. The only light came from the rear of the residence.

As they moved toward the back of the house to reconnoiter, Bucky said, “This time I'll have to be the one who says something terrible has happened, and you'll stand aside where they can't see you.”

“What does it matter if they see me?”

“They might be put off because you're naked.”

“Why would that put them off? I'm hot, aren't I?”

“You're definitely hot, but hot and something-terrible-has-happened don't seem to go together.”

“You think it would make them suspicious,” Janet said.

“That's exactly what I think.”

“Well, I'm not going to go back and get my clothes. I feel so
alive
, and I just know that killing in the nude is going to be the best thing ever.”

“I'm not going to dispute that.”

Step by step, as they moved through the rain, he envied Janet her freedom. She looked lithe and strong and healthy and
real
. She radiated power, confidence, and a thrilling animal ferocity that made his blood race.

By contrast, his clothes were heavy with rain, hanging on him like sacking, weighing him down, and his sodden shoes were binding the bridges of his feet. Even though he was losing his law education, he felt imprisoned by his creation-tank program, as much by what it required of him as by what it restricted him from doing. He had been given superhuman strength, almost supernatural durability, yet he remained condemned to a life of meekness and subservience, promised that his kind would one day rule the universe but at the same time assigned the tedious duty of pretending to be Bucky Guitreau, a political hack and uninspired prosecutor with a circle of friends as tiresome
as a ward full of bores who had received chemical lobotomies.

At the back of the house, light brightened two ground-floor windows, beyond both of which lay the Arceneauxs' family room.