Dead and Alive

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.