Dead and Alive

CHAPTER 41

Rain had not yet reached the parishes above Lake Pontchartrain. The humid night lay unbreathing but expectant, as if the low overcast and the dark land had compressed the air between them until at any moment an electric discharge would shock the heart of the storm into a thunderous beating.

Deucalion stood on a deserted two-lane road, outside Crosswoods Waste Management. The facility was enormous. A high chain-link fence was topped with coils of barbed wire and fitted with continuous nylon privacy panels. RESTRICTED AREA signs every forty feet warned of the health hazards of a landfill.

Outside the fence, a triple phalanx of loblolly pines encircled the property, the rows offset from one another. Between ninety and a hundred feet tall, these trees formed an effective screen, blocking views into the dump from the somewhat higher slopes to the north and east.

Deucalion walked off the road, among the pines, and went through the fence by way of a gate that didn’t exist — a quantum gate — into the dump.

He had night vision better than that of the Old Race, even better than that of the New. His enhanced eyesight, not the work of Victor, was perhaps another gift delivered on the lightning that had animated him, the ghost of which still sometimes throbbed through his gray eyes.

He walked a rampart of compacted earth, a span more than wide enough to accommodate an SUV. To both his left and right, well below the level of this elevated pathway, were huge lakes of trash heaped in uneven swells that would eventually be plowed level before being capped with eight feet of earth and methane-gas vent pipes.

The stench offended, but he had encountered worse in the past two hundred years. In his first two decades, after leaving Victor for dead in the arctic, Deucalion frequently had been seized by the urge to violence, raging at the injustice of having been stitched together and animated by a narcissistic would-be god who could give his creation neither meaning nor peace, nor any hope of fellowship and community. In his most haunted and self-pitying hours, Deucalion prowled graveyards and broke into granite crypts, mausoleums, where he tore open caskets and forced himself to gaze upon the decomposing corpses, saying aloud to himself, “Here is what you are, just dead flesh, dead flesh, the bones and guts of arsonists, of murderers, filled with false life, dead and alive, not fit for any other world but an abomination in this one.” Standing at those open caskets, he’d known stenches that, by comparison, made this Louisiana dump smell as sweet as a rose garden.

In those graveyard visits, during those long staring matches with sightless cadavers, he had yearned to die. Although he tried, he was unable to submit to a well-stropped razor or to a hangman’s noose that he fashioned, and at every cliff’s edge, he could not take the final step. So in those long nights when he kept company with the dead, he argued with himself to embrace the necessity for self-destruction.

The proscription against suicide had not come from Victor.

In his earliest strivings for godhood, that vainglorious beast wasn’t able to program his first creation as well as he programmed those he brewed up these days. Victor had planted a device in Deucalion’s skull, which had cratered half the giant’s face when he tried to strike his maker. But Victor had not in those days been able to forbid suicide.

After years marked by a frustrated death wish as much as by rage, Deucalion had arrived at a humbling realization. The edict that so effectively stayed his hand from destroying himself came from a more powerful and infinitely more mysterious source than Victor. He was denied felo-de-se because he had a purpose in life, even if he could not — at that time — recognize what it might be, a vital mission that he must fulfill before final peace would be granted him.

Two hundred years had at last brought him to Louisiana, to this reeking wasteyard that was a trash dump and a graveyard. The pending storm would be not merely one of thunder, lightning, wind, and rain, but also one of justice, judgment, execution, and damnation.

To his left, far out in the west pit, flames flickered. A dozen small fires moved one behind the other, as if they were torches held by people in a procession.