“Very, very funny,” she promised.

“With some little bells on it?”

“If I find a funny hat without bells, I’ll sew as many on it as you want.”

CHAPTER 43

CORRIDOR AFTER CORRIDOR, laboratory after laboratory, room after room, in stairways and lavatories and storage closets, a perfect hush has fallen over this place.

With all of its windows bricked up, the building admits no sound from the world outside.

Here and there, brainless bodies lie in groups. They are all EXEMPTS.

No one moves who can be seen.

Chameleon follows the tantalizing spoor of the TARGET until those pheromones come to an end at the workstation in the main lab, with no sign of the person who cast them off.

Dim memories of this enormous room stir in Chameleon’s mind. It seems to have no recollections prior to these.

Memories do not interest Chameleon. It lives for the future, for the infuriating smell of TARGETS.

Frenzies of violence thrill the pleasure center in its forebrain as intense sex might thrill it if it were capable of sexual activity. Slaughter and only slaughter stimulates its orgasm. Chameleon dreams of war, because for it, war is continuous ecstasy.

Suddenly, on the desktop computer and on an eight-by-six-foot screen embedded in a wall, images appear.

The screens show a broad avenue, tens of thousands of people, dressed alike and ordered into precise ranks, marching in cadence to loud music.

In every fifth row of the stiff-legged marchers, every person carries a flag. The flag is red with a white circle. In the circle is a man’s face.

The face is familiar to Chameleon. It has seen this man a long time ago, has seen him often and in this very lab.

The camera pulls back to reveal colossal structures flanking the twelve-lane avenue. They are all of bold design unlike any of the scores of typical-building layouts programmed into Chameleon to assist it in navigating an average office high-rise or church, or shopping mall.

On some of these immense edifices are portraits. The face of the man on the flags is rendered in paint or in mosaic tile, or is etched in stone.

None of these images is smaller than ten stories high. Some are thirty stories.

The music swells, swells, then recedes to a background level. Words are being spoken now, but Chameleon is not interested in what is being said.

The marching hordes on the screens are not real people, merely images. They cannot be killed.

Crawling among the many machines, Chameleon seeks what lives only to be killed.

For a while it smells nothing but the lingering pheromones of the TARGET that was recently here but has gone. Then a new scent.

Chameleon turns its head left, right. Its two ripping claws scissor with anticipation, and its crushing claw opens wide to grip. Its stinger extrudes from under its carapace.

The scent is that of a TARGET. In the hallway but approaching.

CHAPTER 44

ABRUPTLY THE RAIN FELL AWAY behind them and the two-lane blacktop state route lay dry ahead. By driving out of the storm, seemingly swifter than nature in a rampage, Carson enjoyed the illusion of even greater speed than she had actually managed to squeeze out of the Honda.

She raised the bottle of never-sleep-again cola from between her thighs and took another swig. She recognized the signs of noncritical dehydration caused by caffeine: dry mouth, dry lips, a faint ringing in the ears.

In the passenger seat, playing imaginary drums with imaginary drumsticks, Michael said, “Maybe we shouldn’t have exceeded the recommended dose for the caffeine tablets. Already I have NoDoz nostrils.”

“Me too. My nasal passages are so dry, it’s like I’m breathing air that came out of a furnace, it has just a little burn to it.”

“Yeah. Feels dry. But this is still Louisiana, so at a minimum it has to be ninety percent humidity by state law. Hey, you know how much of the human body is water?”

“If it’s the time of month I retain it, I’d say ninety percent.”

“Sixty percent for men, fifty percent for women.”

She said, “There’s proof—women have more substance than men.”

“It was an answer on Jeopardy!”

“I can’t believe you watch TV game shows.”

“They’re educational,” he said. “Half of what I know, I learned from game shows.”

“That I do believe.”

Moss-draped live oaks on both sides of the road formed a tunnel, and the headlights flared again and again off what might have been colonies of phosphorescent lichen on the fissured bark.

“Do you have to drive so fast?”

“Fast? This heap of Vicky’s isn’t good for driving anywhere except in funeral processions.”

Carson’s cell phone rang, and she fished it out of an inside coat pocket.

“O’Connor,” she said.

“Detective O’Connor,” a woman said, “this is Erika Helios.”

“Good evening, Mrs. Helios.”

When he heard the name, Michael popped up in his seat as if he were a slice of bread in a toaster.

Erika Helios said, “I believe you may be aware of who my husband really is. At least I think he suspects you know.”

“He knows we know,” Carson said. “He sent two of his New Race assassins after us yesterday. Cute couple. Looked like dancers. We called them Fred and Ginger. They blasted their way through my house, nearly killed my brother.”

“Sounds like Benny and Cindi Lovewell,” Erika Helios said. “I’m of the New Race, too. But I don’t know about Benny and Cindi being sent after you yesterday. Victor killed me the day before yesterday.”

To Michael, Carson said, “She says Victor killed her the day before yesterday.”

“Who’re you talking to?” Erika asked.

“My partner, Michael Maddison.”

Erika said, “I know it sounds unbelievable, someone telling you she was killed yesterday.”

“Thanks to your husband,” Carson said, “there’s nothing we find hard to believe anymore.”

“I’ll believe any damn crazy thing,” Michael agreed.

“Victor sent my body to the dump. Do you know about Crosswoods Waste Management, Detective O’Connor?”

“It’s right next door to the tank farm where he’s gonna crank out six thousand of you folks a year.”

“You are on top of things. I figured you would be, if Victor worried about you. Nobody worries Victor.”

“Mrs. Helios, how did you get this number?”

“Victor had it. I saw it on his desk pad. That was before I was dead. But I have a photographic memory. I’m an Alpha.”

“Are you still dead?” Carson asked.

“No, no. Turns out, most of us he sends here are for-sure dead, but a few of us who seem to be dead … well, there’s still a trace of life energy in us that can be brought back to full power, so we can heal. They know how to save us here at the dump.”

“Who is they?”

“Those of the New Race discarded here but alive again. I’m one of them now. We call ourselves the Dumpsters.”

Carson said, “I didn’t know you people had a sense of humor.”

“We don’t,” Erika said. “Not until we die and drop our program and then come alive again. But this may be gibberish to you. Maybe you don’t understand about our programs.”

Carson thought of Pastor Kenny Laffite coming undone at his kitchen table in the parsonage, and she said, “Yeah, we know about that.”

“Oh, and I should have said, I’m Erika Four. The wife with him now is Erika Five.”

“He moves fast.”

“He’s always got Erikas in the tanks, just in case the latest one goes wrong. Flesh is cheap. That’s what he says.”

“Thank God for NoDoz and triple-threat cola,” Carson said.

Erika Four said, “Excuse me?”

“If I wasn’t pumped with caffeine to the eyebrows,” Carson said, “I wouldn’t be able to keep up with this conversation.”

“Detective, do you know you can’t trust anyone in the police department, so many of them are Victor’s people?”

“Yeah. We’re aware.”

“So you’re on your own. And here in the parish where the dump and the tank farm are located, every cop and most of the politicians are replicants. You can’t win this.”

“We can win this,” Carson disagreed.

Nodding so rapidly that he looked like an out-of-control bobblehead doll, Michael said, “We can win. We can win.”

“His empire is imploding,” Carson told Erika.

“Yes. We know. But you still need help.”

Thinking of Deucalion, Carson said, “We’ve got some help you don’t know about. But what do you have in mind?”

“We’ve got a deal to propose. The Dumpsters. We’ll help you defeat him, capture him—but there’s something we want.”

CHAPTER 45

VICTOR NEVER ENTERED the Hands of Mercy directly. Next door to the hospital, which now passed as a ware-house, a five-story office building housed the accounting and personnel-management departments of Biovision, the company that had made him a billionaire.

In the garage under the building, he parked his S600 Mercedes in a space reserved for him. At this hour, his was the only car.

He had been put off his stride by the business with Erika Four on the phone and Christine not knowing who she was. In moments like this, work was the best thing to settle his mind, and perhaps now more than ever, numerous issues required his attention.

Near his parking space was a painted steel door to which only he possessed a key. Beyond the door lay a twelve-foot-square concrete room.

Opposite the outer door, another door could be operated only by a wall-mounted keypad. Victor entered his code, and the electronic lock disengaged with a thonk.

He stepped into a six-foot-wide, eight-foot-high corridor with a concrete floor and block-and-timber walls. The passageway had been excavated secretly by members of the New Race.

Huge responsibilities came with any attempt to pull down an existing civilization and replace it with a new one. The weight on his shoulders might have been intolerable if there had not been perks like secret passageways, hidden rooms, and concealed staircases, which allowed a measure of fun in every day.

He had found such hugger-mugger thrilling ever since he was a boy growing up in a rambling house built by a paranoid grandfather who included in his design more blind doors than visible ones, more unknown rooms than known, more secret passages than public hallways. Victor thought it said something admirable about him that he had not lost touch with his roots, had not forgotten from where he came.

At the end of the corridor, another keypad accepted his code. A final door opened into an ordinary file room in the lowest realms of the Hands of Mercy.

These days, no work was conducted on this level. A regrettable incident had occurred here, the consequence of sloppy work by some of his Alphas, and forty had perished. He passed through a dimly lighted area, where unrepaired destruction loomed in the shadows.

In the elevator, on his way up to the main lab, Victor heard music by Wagner, and his heart stirred at the majesty of it. Then he realized someone must have activated The Creed, the short film that played once every day throughout the facility for the inspiration and motivation of the New Race staff. But only Victor knew the procedure whereby the computer could be directed to feed the film throughout the Hands of Mercy, and he was curious as to how it had been activated.

When he entered his laboratory, he stood before the embedded wall screen, charmed as always by the marching legions, by the city of tomorrow with its immense buildings that dear Adolf had imagined but had failed ever to erect, by the monuments to himself that would, when the city was built, be much more grand than these examples.

With a team of his people, he had created this realistic glimpse of the future through computer animation. Soon would come the moment when the Wagnerian score faded and in his own voice the Creed would be delivered.

He went to his workstation, intending to sit in his chair to enjoy the last of the film. But arriving there, turning to face the screen from across the room, he saw a portion of the floor ripple, about twenty feet away, and he thought with alarm, Chameleon.

CHAPTER 46

TOWARD THE END of a long incline, out of the darkness to the right of the roadway, a white-tailed doe bounded into the headlights and froze in fear.

Ignoring speed limits and periodic roadside pictographs of the silhouette of a leaping antlered buck, Carson had forgotten that at night in rural territory, deer could be no less a traffic hazard than drunken drivers.

Being a city girl out of her element was the lesser part of the problem. Having spent the past few days immersed in the twisted world of Victor Helios Frankenstein, she learned to fear and to be alert for extraordinary, preposterous, grotesque threats of all kinds, while becoming less attuned to the perils of ordinary life.

In spite of her complaints about the Honda, she had pressed it to a reckless speed. The instant she saw the deer in the northbound lane, she knew she was maybe five seconds from impact, couldn’t lose enough speed to avoid a disastrous collision, might roll the car if she braked hard.

Speaking on behalf of the Dumpsters, Erika Four said, “… but there’s something we want,” just as the deer appeared.

To free both hands for the wheel, Carson tossed the cell phone to Michael, who snared it in midair as if he’d asked for it, and who at the same time reached cross-body with his left hand to press a button that put down the power window in his door.

In the split second she needed to throw the phone to Michael, Carson also considered her two options:

Pull left, pass Bambi’s mom by using the southbound lane and south shoulder, but you might startle her, she might try to complete her crossing, bounding hard into the Honda.

Pull right, go off-road behind the deer, but you might plow into another one if they were traveling in a herd or family.

Even as the phone arced through the air toward Michael’s rising hand, Carson put all her chips on a bet that the doe wasn’t alone. She swung into the southbound lane.

Directly ahead, a buck bolted from where she least expected, from the darkness on the left, into the southbound lane, returning for his petrified doe.

Having tossed the phone from right hand to left, having snatched the pistol from his shoulder rig, Michael thrust the weapon out the window, which was still purring down, and squeezed off two shots.

Spooked, the buck sprang out of harm’s way, into the northbound lane, the doe turned to follow him, the Honda exploded past them, and hardly more than a hundred feet away, a truck appeared at the top of the incline, barreling south.