The truck driver hammered his horn.
Carson pulled hard right.
In an arc, the truck’s headlights flared through the Honda’s interior.
Feeling the car want to roll, she avoided the brakes, eased off the accelerator, finessed the wheel to the left.
The truck shot past them so close Carson could hear the other driver cursing even though her window was closed.
When the potential energy of a roll transferred into a back-end slide, a rear tire stuttered off the pavement, gravel rattled against the undercarriage, but then they were on pavement once more, and in the northbound lane where they belonged.
As Carson accelerated, Michael holstered his pistol, tossed her cell phone back to her.
When she caught the phone and as he put up the window in his door, she said, “That settles it. We’ll get married.”
He said, “Obviously.”
Remembering the dog, she said, “How’s Duke?”
“Sitting on the backseat, grinning.”
“He is so our dog.”
When Carson put the phone to her ear, the former Mrs. Helios was saying, “Hello? Are you there? Hello?”
“Just dropped the phone,” Carson said. “You were saying you wanted something in return for helping us.”
“What are you going to do to Victor if you can get your hands on him?” Erika asked. “Arrest him?”
“Nooooo,” Carson said. “Don’t think so. Arresting him would be way too complicated.”
“It’d be the trial of the millennium,” Michael said.
Carson grimaced. “With all the appeals, we’d spend thirty years giving testimony.”
Michael said, “And we’d have to listen to a gazillion really bad monster jokes for the rest of our lives.”
“He’d probably get off scot-free anyway,” Carson said.
“He’d definitely get off,” Michael agreed.
“He’d be like a folk hero to a significant number of idiots.”
“Jury nullification,” Michael said.
“All he wanted was to build a utopia.”
“Paradise on Earth. Nothing wrong with that.”
“A one-nation world without war,” Carson said.
“All of humanity united in pursuit of a glorious future.”
“The New Race wouldn’t pollute like the Old Race.”
“Every last one of them would use the type of light-bulb they were told to use,” Michael said.
“No greed, less waste, a willingness to sacrifice.”
“They’d save the polar bears,” Michael said.
Carson said, “They’d save the oceans.”
“They’d save the planet.”
“They would. They’d save the solar system.”
“The universe.”
Carson said, “And all the killing, that wasn’t Victor’s fault.”
“Monsters,” Michael said. “Those damn monsters.”
“His creations just wouldn’t stay with the program.”
“We’ve seen it in movies a thousand times.”
“It’s tragic,” Carson said. “The brilliant scientist undone.”
“Betrayed by those ungrateful, rebellious monsters.”
“He’s not only going to get off, he’s going to end up with his own reality-TV show,” Carson said.
“He’ll be on Dancing with the Stars.”
“And he’ll win.”
On the phone, the former Mrs. Helios said, “I’m hearing only half of this, but what I hear is you aren’t handling it like police detectives anymore.”
“We’re vigilantes,” Carson acknowledged.
“You want to kill him,” Erika said.
“As often as it takes to make him dead,” Carson said.
“Then we want the same thing. And we can help you, those of us here at the dump. All we ask is don’t just shoot him. Take him alive. Help us kill him the way we want to do it.”
“How do you want to do it?” Carson asked.
“We want to chain him and take him down into the dump.”
“I’m with you so far.”
“We want to make him lie faceup in a grave of garbage lined with the dead flesh of his victims.”
“I like that.”
“Some of the others want to urinate on him.”
“I can understand the impulse.”
“We wish to buckle around his neck a metal collar with a high-voltage cable attached, through which eventually we can administer to him an electric charge powerful enough to make the marrow boil in his bones.”
“Wow.”
“But not right away. After the collar, we want to bury him alive under more garbage and listen to him scream and beg for mercy until we’ve had enough of that. Then we boil his marrow.”
“You’ve really thought this through,” Carson said.
“We really have.”
“Maybe we can work together.”
Erika said, “The next time he comes to the new tank farm—”
“That’ll probably be before dawn. We think he’ll retreat to the farm from New Orleans when the Hands of Mercy burns down.”
“Mercy is going to burn down?” Erika asked with childlike wonder and a tremor of delight.
“It’s going to burn down in …” Carson glanced at Michael, who checked his watch, and she repeated what he told her: “… in eight minutes.”
“Yes,” the fourth Mrs. Helios said, “he’ll surely flee to the farm.”
“My partner and I are already on our way.”
“Meet with us at Crosswoods, at the dump, before you go to the farm,” Erika said.
“I’ll have to talk to our other partner about that. I’ll get back to you. What’s your number there?”
As Erika recited her number, Carson repeated it to Michael, and he wrote it down.
Carson terminated the call, pocketed the phone, and said, “She sounds really nice for a monster.”
CHAPTER 47
ALTHOUGH HE DESPISED HUMANITY, Victor was biologically human. Although intellectually enlightened beyond the comprehension of others in the Old Race, he remained more physically like them than not. To Chameleon, Victor qualified as an approved target.
If he had not created Chameleon himself, Victor wouldn’t have known the meaning of the rippling floor. He would have thought he had imagined it or was having a transient ischemic attack.
Even now, knowing where to look, he could not easily discern Chameleon against the surface across which it moved.
On the desktop computer and on the big screen across the room, stirring, heroic visions of the New Race future continued to appear, but now Victor’s voice rose, reciting the Creed: “The universe is a sea of chaos in which random chance collides with happenstance and spins shatters of meaningless coincidence like shrapnel through our lives….”
Chameleon was wary in its approach, although it did not need to be so prudent and had not been programmed for caution, as it was virtually invisible and capable of speed. Most likely, it was being careful because this was its first hunting expedition. Once it had killed, it would become bolder.
“The purpose of the New Race is to impose order on the face of chaos, to harness the awesome destructive power of the universe and make it serve your needs, to bring meaning to a creation that has been meaningless since time immemorial….”
Victor casually backed deeper into the embrace of his U-shaped workstation.
Chameleon advanced as much as Victor retreated, and then another five feet, until it was only fifteen feet away.
It was a half-smart killing machine because its ability to blend with its environment gave it a great advantage that didn’t require it also to be truly smart. Victor’s intention was to manufacture tens of thousands of Chameleons, to release them on the day the revolution began, as backup for the brigades of New Race warriors as they began killing the Old.
“And the meaning that you will impose upon the universe is the meaning of your maker, the exaltation of my immortal name and face, the fulfillment of my vision and my every desire….”
The granite top of the workstation bumped against the back of Victor’s thighs, halting him.
Chameleon scuttled to within twelve feet and paused again. When it was still, Victor ceased to be able to see it even though he knew precisely where it stood. The ripple effect occurred only when the vicious creature remained in motion.
“Your satisfaction in the task, your every moment of pleasure, your relief from otherwise perpetual anxiety, will be achieved solely by the continuous perfect implementation of my will….”
Keeping his eyes on the spot where he’d last seen the clever mimic, Victor eased sideways, to a bank of three drawers on his left. He believed that what he needed was in the middle of the three.
Chameleon neither reproduced nor ate. For the duration of its existence, it drew upon its own substance for energy. When its weight declined from twenty-four pounds to eighteen, Chameleon weakened and died, though of course it had no awareness of its fate.
Computer models suggested that each Chameleon, released in an urban environment, would be able to kill between a thousand and fifteen hundred targets before expiring.
“Through you, Earth and everything upon it will submit to me, and as the whole of Earth serves me, so will it serve you, because I have made you and sent you forth in my name….”
Chameleon began to move closer—one foot, two feet, three—as Victor pulled open the middle drawer and felt through the contents, his stare focused on the would-be assassin.
Just eight feet away, Chameleon stopped. When it decided to move again, it would surely close the remaining distance and rip into its target’s legs, his torso, clip off his fingers when he struggled to resist, as it climbed frantically toward his face.
Victor glanced down into the drawer. He saw the bottle of pale-green fluid and plucked it out as he returned his attention at once to where Chameleon had been.
No ripple deformed the floor.
Victor extracted the stopper from the bottle.
Chameleon scuttled forward.
Victor splashed half the contents of the bottle on himself as he quickly sidestepped to his right.
Because the fluid contained New Race pheromones kept in the desk in the unlikely event that Chameleon escaped from its sack in the freezer, the lethal mimic halted short of attack. Victor no longer smelled like a target but instead like one of the New Race.
“You live because of me, you live for me, and my happiness is your glory….”
After a long hesitation, Chameleon turned and crawled away into the laboratory, seeking targets.
Victor had not allowed himself anger while the threat remained, but now he felt his face flush with fury. He was eager to know how Chameleon had escaped its cold prison and who should be punished for allowing it to roam free.
At the computer keyboard, he directed the audio-video system to terminate The Creed. The Hands of Mercy fell silent, and the images of the Frankensteinian future vanished from the computer as well as from all other screens in the building.
Instead of displaying the basic menu, however, the computer presented four digits—07:33.
The Dresden clock. Seven and a half minutes, and counting down.
Because he had expected to destroy the Hands of Mercy only in the event of the most extreme and irreversible biological calamity, and because he wanted none of his creations to be able to countermand his decision to destruct once the countdown commenced, the clock could not be stopped. In little more than seven minutes, Mercy would be a seething hell of fire.
His anger gave way to a cool and practical consideration of the circumstances. Having survived two centuries, he could count on a well-exercised survival instinct.
The linked bricks of incendiary material placed throughout the walls and ceilings had been developed by the world’s third-most tyrannical government, refined by the world’s second-most tyrannical government, and brought to exquisite perfection by the world’s most tyrannical government. This was a pyromaniac’s dream fuel.
In the event those governments ever fell and those regimes were in danger of being brought to justice, the press of a button would ensure that their concentration camps, which they denied existed, would burst instantly into flames of such white-hot intensity that even the guards would be unable to escape. The temperatures produced by this incendiary material were not equal to the average surface temperature of the sun; but this stuff would produce the second-hottest fire in the solar system, virtually vaporizing all evidence.
Victor hurried to a cabinet near his workstation and pulled open a door, revealing what appeared to be a large suitcase. Data-transmission cables connected the luggage to outlets in the back of the cabinet. He quickly disconnected all lines.
The Hands of Mercy would be reduced not to rubble and char but instead to ashes as fine as thrice-milled flour floating in a pool of molten bedrock no less hot and fluid than lava from a volcano. Not one splinter of bone or any other source of DNA would survive for forensic pathologists to analyze.
The suitcase contained backup data files of every experiment ever conducted in the Hands of Mercy, including work done within the past hour.
The countdown clock read 06:55.
Carrying the suitcase, Victor hurried across the lab toward the hall door, Chameleon forgotten, the entire staff forgotten.
He had been enamored of the incendiary material now awaiting detonation, and he had been impressed with himself for having the contacts to acquire a large volume of it. In fact, he had kept on his computer an e-mail sent to his supplier, the most tyrannical dictator in the world, expressing his gratitude, saying in part, “… and if it could be revealed that your three nations worked together to perfect this effective and reliable material, the revelation would make fools of cynics who claim your good selves are not capable of international cooperation.”
As Victor knew too well from centuries of disappointments, the worst thing about the sudden relocation of the enterprise following a catastrophic occurrence was the irretrievable loss of correspondence and other mementos that reminded you of the personal side of a great scientific undertaking. His work was not always solitary and somber. He built many friendships over the years, and there were balmy days in places like Cuba and Venezuela and Haiti and the old Soviet, when he had taken the time to share laughter and memories with longtime friends and discuss the important issues of the age with new friends of like mind. In the firestorm to come, so many small but precious things would be destroyed that he risked a disabling seizure of nostalgia if he dwelt too much on the forthcoming loss.