Frankenstein: Dead and Alive (23 page)

“Jocko needs to pee.”

“Do you see how the internal luminosity reveals a large, dark shape suspended in the middle of the case?”

“Jocko needs to pee so bad.”

“Although I can’t see even a single small detail of that shadowy form,” Erika said, “it reminds me of something. Does it remind you of anything, Jocko?”

“Jocko is reminded of a shadowy form.”

Erika said, “It reminds me of a scarab petrified in resin. The ancient Egyptians considered scarabs sacred.”

This seemed like a quintessential H. Rider Haggard moment, but she doubted the troll would be able to appreciate a literary allusion to the writer of great adventures.

“What is … scarab?”

“A giant beetle,” she said.

“Did you hear? Jocko needs to pee.”

“You do not need to pee.”

“Better believe it.”

Putting a hand under his chin, turning his head, forcing him to meet her stare, Erika said, “Look me in the eyes and tell me true. I’ll know if you’re lying.”

“You will?”

“Better believe it. Now … does Jocko need to pee?”

He searched her eyes, considering his answer, and tiny beads of sweat appeared on his brow. Finally he said, “Ah. The urge has passed.”

“I thought it might. Look at the shadow floating in the case. Look, Jocko.”

Reluctantly, he returned his attention to the occupant of the big jewel box.

“Touch the glass,” she said.

“Why?”

“I want to see what happens.”

“Jocko doesn’t want to see what happens.”

“I suspect nothing will happen. Please, Jocko. For me.”

As if he were being asked to press the nose of a coiled cobra, the troll put one finger to the glass, held it there a few seconds, and then snatched it away. He survived.

“Cold,” he said. “Icy.”

Erika said, “Yes, but not so icy that your skin sticks to it. Now let’s see what happens when I touch it….”

She pressed a forefinger to the glass, and within the luminous substance, the shadowy form twitched.

CHAPTER 49

“Father … father … father …”

The Werner thing progressed clumsily, knocking against the east wall of the corridor, then colliding with the west wall, staggering back four or five feet before advancing seven or eight, as though its every movement required a majority vote of a committee.

This creature was not only an abomination, but also a vicious mockery of everything Victor had achieved, intended to deride his triumphs, to imply that his life’s work was but a crude burlesque of science. He now suspected that Werner wasn’t a victim of catastrophic cellular metamorphosis, not a
victim
, but instead a
perpetrator
, that the security chief had consciously
rebelled
against his maker. Indeed, judging by the composition of this many-faced travesty, the entire staff of the Hands of Mercy had committed themselves to this insane commune of flesh, reducing
themselves to a mutant mob in a single entity. They could have but one reason for re-creating themselves as this lumbering atrocity: to offend their maker, to disrespect him, to dishonor him, to make of him a laughingstock. By such a vivid expression of their irrational contempt and scorn, these ungrateful wretches expected to confuse and dishearten him, to
humiliate
him.

Flesh is cheap, but flesh is also treacherous.

“Father … Father … Father …”

They were meat machines who fancied themselves philosophers and critics, daring to ridicule the only intellect of paramount importance they would ever know. Victor was transforming the world, and they transformed nothing but themselves, yet they thought this miserable degradation of their well-crafted forms made them his equal, even his superior, with license to jeer and insult him.

As the Werner thing ricocheted from wall to wall and staggered backward in order to stumble forward, Victor said to it, to all of them tangled within it, “Your pathetic bit of biological theater means nothing to me, discourages me not at all. I haven’t failed.
You
have failed, you have failed me, betrayed me, and you have also failed to discourage me in the slightest. You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”

His outrage thus expressed, Victor spoke the death phrase, the words that would shut down the autonomic nervous systems of these anarchic fools, reducing their mocking many-faced grotesquerie to a heap of lifeless flesh.

The Werner thing kept coming, in its tedious fashion, ranting the one word that it knew—that they
all
knew—would most infuriate Victor.

He had little more than six minutes to escape the Hands of Mercy and get out of the neighborhood before the place flared into a molten imitation of the sun. The coming conflagration would obliterate the Werner thing, answering their blasphemy with purifying fire.

The elevator lay between Victor and the shambling mob-in-one. The stairs seemed more advisable.

Carrying the suitcase that contained every minim of his historic work in Mercy, he hurried away from the Werner thing, slammed through the staircase door, and raced down to the lowest level.

Through columns of light and pools of shadow, past the rubble that stood as a monument to a previous bad day in Mercy. Into the file room.

The keypad, his code. One digit wrong. Enter it again. Each tap of a finger eliciting a tone.

He glanced back. The Werner thing had not followed him. It would not get out this way, and no other doors functioned. The Jabberwock was doomed. Let it die mocking him with its many mouths, he didn’t care.

Into the corridor with concrete floor, block-and-timber walls. First door closing automatically behind him as he reached the next. Keypad, code again. Right on the first try. The small concrete room, the final door, always unlocked from this side.

The S600 Mercedes sedan looked magnificent, a carriage fit for any royalty and even adequate for him.
He opened the back door, but thought better of putting the precious suitcase in such an unsecured place. He went to the back of the car and locked the case in the trunk.

He closed the back door, opened the driver’s door, got behind the wheel. The key was in his pocket, and the touch of a finger to the keyless ignition fired the engine.

He drove up to the street and turned right, away from Mercy.

Rising wind pummeled the streets with pellets of rain that bounced like stones off the pavement, and flotillas of litter raced along brimming gutters. But rain ten times heavier than this would have no quenching effect on the incendiary material soon to ignite in his lost laboratories.

So spectacularly would the old hospital burn that no one in the city—or in the nation, for that matter, sea to shining sea—would ever have seen anything to rival the ferocity of the blaze, and they would never forget those white-white flames so bright as to be blinding. Structures across the street from Mercy might also catch fire, and the five-story building next door—owned by his Biovision—would without question be destroyed, which would make him a source of interest to the media and maybe even to authorities.

Considering that the previous day William, the butler, had bitten off his fingers and been terminated, that within the past hour Christine had experienced an inexplicable interruption of function before Victor had shot her to death, he must face the possibility that
others on his household staff might be of dubious psychological and/or physical integrity. They might not merely be unable to provide the high quality of service he expected but might also be unable to maintain a credible humanoid form. He could not go home again, at least not for a while.

Logical analysis wouldn’t allow Victor to avoid the conclusion that some of the two thousand of the New Race seeded throughout the city might soon begin to have problems of one kind or another. Not all of them, surely. But perhaps a significant fraction, say 5 percent, or 10. He should not remain in New Orleans during this uncertain period.

Because of the widespread nature of the crisis, Victor suspected a problem with the creation tanks at the Hands of Mercy. He knew that his genetic formulations and flesh-matrix designs were brilliant and without fault. Therefore, only a failure of machinery could explain these events.

Or sabotage.

A thousand suspicions suddenly plagued him, and with renewed anger, he feverishly considered who might have been secretly scheming to ruin him.

But no. Now was not the time to be distracted by the possibility of a saboteur. He must first decamp to a new center of operations, of which there was only one—the tank farm. He must strive to insulate himself from any connection to whatever events might occur in the city during the days ahead.

Later there would be time to identify a villain in his life, if one existed.

In truth, mechanical failure was more likely. He had made numerous improvements to the creation tanks that had been installed at the farm. They were three generations more sophisticated than the version in operation at the Hands of Mercy.

Heading for the causeway that would take him twenty-eight miles across Lake Pontchartrain, Victor reminded himself that every setback of his long career had been followed by more rapid and far greater advances than ever before. The universe asserted its chaotic nature, but always he imposed order on it once more.

Proof of his indomitable character was as evident as the clothes he wore, here and now. The encounter with Chameleon, the subsequent confrontation with the Werner thing, and the flight from Mercy would have taken a visible toll of most men. But his shoes were without a scuff, the crease in his trousers remained as crisp as ever, and a quick check in the rearview mirror revealed that his handsome head of hair was not in the least disarranged.

CHAPTER 50

Warily circling the glass case mounted on the ball-and-claw feet, halting on the farther side of it from Erika, Jocko said, “Not jewel box. Coffin.”

“A coffin would have a lid,” Erika said, “so I assume there’s not a dead man in it.”

“Good. Jocko knows enough. Let’s go.”

“Watch,” she said, and rapped a knuckle against the top of the case, as she had done on her previous visit.

The glass sounded as though it must be an inch thick or thicker, and from the spot where her knuckle struck the pane, the amber stuff inside—whether liquid or gas—dimpled much the way water dimpled when a stone was dropped into it. The sapphire-blue dimple resolved into a ring that widened across the surface. The amber color returned in the ring’s wake.

“Maybe never do that again,” Jocko suggested.

She rapped the glass three times. Three concentric blue rings appeared, receded to the perimeter of the case, and the amber color returned.

Regarding Erika across the top of the case, Jocko said, “Jocko feels kind of sick.”

“If you get down on the floor and look under the case—”

“Jocko won’t.”

“But if you did, you’d see electrical conduits, pipes of several colors and diameters. They all come out of the case, disappear into the floor. Which suggests there’s a service room directly under us.”

Putting both hands on his belly, Jocko said, “Kind of queasy.”

“Yet the mansion supposedly doesn’t have a basement.”

“Jocko doesn’t go in basements.”

“You lived in a storm drain.”

“Not happily.”

Erika moved to the end of the case farthest from the door. “If this were a casket, I figure this would be the head of it.”

“Definitely nauseated,” said Jocko.

Erika bent low, until her lips were a few inches from the glass. She said softly, “Hello, hello, hello in there.”

Within the amber shroud of gas or liquid, the shadowy form thrashed, thrashed.

Jocko scrambled away from the case so fast that Erika didn’t see how he had ascended to the fireplace
mantel, where he perched, arms wide, holding tight to the framing bronze sconces.

“It scared me, too, the first time,” she said. “But I’d only been beaten once at that point, and I hadn’t seen Christine shot dead. I’m harder to scare now.”

“Jocko is gonna vomit.”

“You are not going to vomit, little friend.”

“If we don’t leave now, Jocko vomits.”

“Look me in the eyes and tell me true,” she said. “Jocko is not sick, only frightened. I’ll know if you’re lying.”

Meeting her stare, he made a pathetic mewling sound. Finally he said, “Jocko leaves or Jocko vomits.”

“I’m disappointed in you.”

He looked stricken.

She said, “If you were telling me the truth—then where’s the vomit?”

Jocko sucked his upper and lower mouth flaps between his teeth and bit on them. He looked abashed.

When Erika wouldn’t stop staring at him, the troll opened his mouth, let go of one of the sconces, and stuck his fingers down his throat.

“Even if that worked,” she said, “it wouldn’t count. If you were really nauseated, truly nauseated, you could throw up without the finger trick.”

Gagging, eyes flooding with tears, Jocko tried and tried, but he could not make himself regurgitate. His efforts were so strenuous that his right foot slipped off the mantel, he lost his grip on the second sconce, and he fell to the floor.

“See where you get when you lie to a friend?”

Cringing in shame, the troll tried to hide behind the wingback chair.

“Don’t be silly,” Erika said. “Come here.”

“Jocko can’t look at you. Just can’t.”

“Of course you can.”

“No. Jocko can’t bear to see you hate him.”

“Nonsense. I don’t hate you.”

“You hate Jocko. He lied to his best friend.”

“And I know he’s learned his lesson.”

From behind the chair, Jocko said, “He has. He really has.”

“I know Jocko will never lie to me again.”

“Never. He … I never will.”

“Then come here.”

“Jocko is so embarrassed.”

“There’s no need to be. We’re better friends than ever.”

Hesitantly, he moved out from behind the chair. Shyly, he came to Erika, where she remained at the head of the glass case.

“Before I ask for the opinion I need from you,” she said, “I’ve one more thing to show you.”