Dead and Alive

CHAPTER 58

Somber thoughts distracted Victor from his driving, and the deserted state route, winding through lonely darkness, contributed to his bleak mood.

Always before, when setbacks forced a change of venue on him — from Germany to Argentina, to the old Soviet, to China and elsewhere — he had been furious at the associates who had failed him and at Nature for her jealous guarding of the secrets of molecular biology and her stubborn resistance to the incisive blade of his singular intelligence, but he had not lost hope.

The short-lived project in Cuba, so promising, came to ruin because of one stupid peasant, a rabid cat, a treacherous set of stairs, and a wet bar of soap left on one of the treads for no reason that made sense. Yet he and Fidel remained friends, and Victor persevered in another country, certain of ultimate triumph.

The interesting facility in North Korea, with the generous funding by a consortium of forward-thinking governments, should have been the place where the ultimate breakthroughs at last occurred. At his disposal was a virtually infinite supply of body parts from self-pitying political prisoners who preferred being carved up alive to enduring further prison meals. But how could he have foreseen that the dictator, a strutting rooster with a harem, would end up shooting the speed-grown clone of himself that Victor created at his request, when said clone developed a passion for his dangerous look-alike and extravagantly tongue-kissed him? Victor had escaped the country with his testicles only because he and the dictator had a mutual friend, one of the most admired movie stars in the world, who had brokered peace between them. Yet still he had persevered and had suffered neither one day of doubt nor one hour of depression.

The total destruction of the Hands of Mercy affected him more negatively than any previous setback in part because he had been much closer than ever before to triumph, within easy reach of the absolute mastery of flesh, its creation and control.

In truth, the fire itself and all the losses were not what shook his confidence. The identity of the arsonist: That’s what brought him this low. The return of his first creation, the crude and lumbering beast who should have spent the past two centuries frozen in polar ice, seemed even less possible to him than that a gay clone could have undone him on the very brink of a glorious success.

He realized that his speed had fallen under twenty miles per hour. This had happened twice before. Each time he accelerated, his mind drifted, and his speed fell again.

Deucalion. What a pretentious name.

Deucalion in Patrick Duchaine’s kitchen, turning away from Victor and — just gone. Merely a trick, of course. But quite a trick.

Deucalion, penetrating the Hands of Mercy without setting off an alarm.

In just a few days: Harker giving birth to some monstrosity, William chewing off his fingers, Christine confused about her identity, Werner’s catastrophic cellular metamorphosis, the apparent incorporation of the entire Mercy staff into the Werner thing, the freeing of Chameleon, Erika Four destroying the Karloff experiment in psychic control, now Erika Four supposedly back from the dead, those two detectives somehow escaping Benny and Cindi Lovewell, two superb assassins … The list of unlikely incidents went on and on.

It all meant something.

So many things could not go wrong spontaneously.

A pattern waited to be discovered. A pattern that might well reveal a conspiracy A cabal.

Occasionally Victor thought that he might have a mild tendency toward paranoia, but in this instance he knew his suspicion must be correct.

This time, the setback felt different from all before it. What brought him to the brink of ruin this time was not just a bar of soap on a stair or an amorous clone. A symphony of troubles required an orchestra of enemies and a determined conductor.

This time he might have to prepare for the worst.

Again he became aware that if the Mercedes lost more speed, it would be coasting.

Ahead on the right loomed a rest area. He drove off the highway, braked to a stop, and put the car in park.

Before he rushed heedlessly to the tank farm, he needed to brood about these recent events. He suspected that he was going to have to make the biggest decision of his life.

He’d driven out of the storm, but as he stared at the dwindling cones of his headlight beams, the rain caught up to him again, and a groaning wind.

Although Victor’s powers of concentration were legendary among all who had worked with him, he found himself repeatedly distracted by the nonsensical apprehension that he might not be alone in the car. He was alone, of course, not just in the car but alone in the world to a degree that he did not need to contemplate right now, when his mood was already dark.