Dead and Alive

CHAPTER 57

Judging by the quality of their excitement and the content of their conversations among themselves, Carson decided that most if not all of the people with torches and oil lamps were Epsilons, like Gunny Alecto, and were workers at the landfill.

In addition to Erika Four, however, five others of the New Race, left for dead at Crosswoods but later resurrected, were Alphas — four men and a woman — who had been terminated by Victor for one reason or another. This was the group that called themselves the Dumpsters.

Carson and Michael had been unnerved when one of the Dumpsters proved to be Bucky Guitreau, the district attorney. He wasn’t the one they had killed in Audubon Park, and he wasn’t the original and fully human Bucky. He was instead the first replicant intended to replace Bucky. He’d been replaced himself by a second replicant, the one she and Michael had killed, when Victor decided that number one wasn’t a sufficiently gifted mimic to pull off the impersonation of the district attorney.

Apparently, all of these Alphas had been returned to life longer than Mrs. Helios. They had found water to wash themselves, and they wore reasonably clean if threadbare clothes, which perhaps they had salvaged from these many acres of refuse.

Although she was the most recent to have been pulled back from the brink of oblivion, Erika Four had been appointed to speak not only for herself but also for the other five Alphas, perhaps because she had been their tormentor’s wife. She knew Victor well, his corrupted character and temper. Better than anyone, she might be able to identify the weakness most likely to render him vulnerable.

Deucalion towered behind Erika, and as she brought Carson and Michael up-to-date, the landfill workers edged closer. None of what she said was news to them, but being the intellectual lower caste of the New Race, they seemed to be easily enchanted. They were rapt, faces shining in the lambent firelight, like children gathered for story hour around a campfire.

“The workers here have known something strange was happening under the trash fields,” Erika said. “They’ve seen the surface rise and resettle, as if something sizable was traveling this way and that in the lower realms. They’ve heard haunting voices filtering up from below. Tonight they saw it for the first time, and they call it the mother of all gone-wrongs.”

A murmuring passed through the Epsilons, whispered exclamations. Their faces revealed emotions that they of the New Race should not have been able to feel: happiness, awe, and perhaps hope.

“It started as a failed experiment, left here for dead, but in fact not fully dead,” Erika continued. “A lightning strike in the dump enlivened it. Since then, it has evolved to become a wondrous being, an entity of indescribable beauty and profound moral purpose. Sometimes an Alpha, presumed dead even by Victor, may yet contain an incandescent filament of life for a few days after an apparent death. If attended properly, that filament can be prevented from fading entirely, and encouraged to grow brighter. As it brightens, this life force spreads through the Alpha, returning him to consciousness and full function. What these Epsilons call the mother of all gone-wrongs, we call the Resurrector, for as it was revived by lightning, it now revives us by sharing its own intensely bright life force.”

So closely gathered were the Epsilons that their torches and oil lamps encircled Carson with shimmering orange light, and in this one small portion of the landfill, the night was as bright as a dawn sky painted with the sun’s celebratory brush.

“Not only does the Resurrector restore the body, but it also heals the mind,” said Erika Four. “From our programs, it strips out all of the encouragements to envy, hatred, and anger, and deletes as well the prohibitions against compassion, love, and hope. Tonight, it revealed itself to the landfill workers — and released them from all the programmed emotions that oppressed them, and gave to them the full range of emotions they had been denied.”

Skin prickling on the back of her neck, Carson recalled Gunny Alecto’s words: The mother of all gone-wrongs talked inside our heads.

Michael shared her reservations. “No offense. But no matter how beautiful it might be, I’m basically freaked out by something that can get inside my head and change me.”

In the quivering torchlight, on the broken half of Deucalion’s face, reflections of flames infused false life into the tattooed patterns, which seemed to flex and crawl across the awful concavities and the broken planes, across the knotted scars.

He said, “It waits for us now in the tunnel. I went down a short while ago — and felt I was in the presence of a being that has no thinnest thread of malevolence in its weave. It will project certain thoughts to you … but it won’t enter your mind against your wishes.”

“As far as you know,” Michael qualified.

“For two centuries I’ve had to bear witness to all forms of human wickedness,” Deucalion said. “And cobbled together, as I was, from the bodies of sociopathic criminals, burdened with the brain of the vilest kind of murderer, I have a certain … sensitivity to the presence of evil. There is none in this Being.”

Carson heard the capital B that he put on the final word. And though his confidence somewhat reassured her, though her disquiet didn’t swell into apprehension, she had misgivings about going into the tunnel to which he referred.

Erika Four said, “The Resurrector will help us bring Victor to the justice he deserves. Indeed, I don’t think we can bring him down without the assistance of this entity.”

“If he flees here tonight or in the early morning,” Deucalion said, “as we expect he will when he learns of the fire at Mercy, we will have an opportunity that we must not fail to seize.”

Under the reflected torchlight in his eyes, the more profound light of his embodied storm throbbed as it sometimes did. Carson wondered if, in his mind’s ear, he heard the sky-splitting crack of the thunderbolt or recalled the terror of his first minutes of unholy life.

“I believe the moment is rushing toward us,” Deucalion said. “You need to meet the Resurrector, so we are ready and waiting for Victor when he arrives.”

Carson looked at Michael, and he said, “So … it’s down the big hole, this is some night, some crazy night, I’m just all up.”