Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz
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it. Anyway, they weren’t grave robbers. They didn’t dig Allwine out of the ground. They took him from a morgue drawer.”
“So they’re bodysnatchers,” Michael said. “Getting the term right doesn’t change the fact that your ass is in a sling, Jack.”
“It feels like a barbed-wire thong,” Jack said. “Losing evidence in a capital case? Man, there goes the pension.”
Trying to make sense of the situation, Carson said, “Did the city cut your security budget or what?”
Jack shook his head. “We’re as tight as a prison here. It has to be an inside job.”
Simultaneously, Carson and Michael looked at Luke, who sat on a stool in a corner.
“Hey,” he said, “I never stole a dime in my life, let alone a dead guy.”
“Not Luke,” Jack Rogers assured them. “He couldn’t have pulled it off. He’d have screwed up.”
Luke winced. “Thanks, I guess.”
“Luke and I were here for a while after you two left, but not all night. We hit a wall, needed sleep. Because I’d sent home the night staff to keep the lid on this, the place was deserted.”
“You forget to lock up?” Carson asked.
Jack glowered at her. “No way.”
“Signs of forced entry?”
“None. They must’ve had keys.”
“Somebody knew what you’d find in Allwine,” she said, “because maybe he’s not unique. Maybe there’re others like him.”
“Don’t go off in the Twilight Zone again,” Michael half warned, half pleaded.
“At least one other,” she said. “The friend he went to funerals with. Mr. Average Everything.”
Almost simultaneous with a knock, the door opened, and Frye, Jonathan Harker’s partner, entered. He looked surprised to see them.
“Why so glum?” he asked. “Did somebody die?”
Weariness and caffeine sharpened Carson’s edge. “What don’t you understand about ‘buzz off?”
“Hey, I’m not here about your case. We’re on that liquor-store shooting.”
“Yeah? Is that right? Is that what you were doing yesterday at Allwine’s apartment – looking for clues in the liquor-store shooting?”
Frye pretended innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. O’Connor, you’re wound as tight as a golf ball’s guts. Get a man, relieve some tension.”
She wanted to shoot him accidentally.
As if reading her mind, Michael said, “A gun can always go off accidentally, but you’d have to explain why you drew it in the first place.”
COMFORTABLE IN HER ROBE, ensconced in a wingback chair, Erika spent the night and the morning with no company but books, and even took her breakfast in the library.
Reading for pleasure, lingering over the prose, she nevertheless covered a hundred pages an hour. She was, after all, an Alpha-class member of the New Race, with superb language skills.
She read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and when she finished it, she did something that she had not done before in her weeks of life. She wept.
The story was about the power of love, the nobility of self-sacrifice, and the horrors of revolution in the name of political ideology, among other things.
Erika understood the concept of love and found it appealing, but she didn’t know if she would ever feel it. The New Race was supposed to value reason, to eschew emotion, to reject superstition.
She had heard Victor say that love was superstition. One of the Old Race, he’d made himself New. He claimed that perfect clarity of mind was a pleasure greater than any mere sentiment.
Nevertheless, Erika found herself intrigued by the concept of love and longed to experience it.
She found hope in the fact that she was capable of tears. Her built-in disposition toward reason at the expense of emotion had not prevented her from identifying with the tragic lawyer who, at the end of Dickens’s novel, went to the guillotine in place of another man.
The lawyer had sacrificed himself to ensure that the woman he loved would have happiness with the man she loved. That man was the one whose name the lawyer had assumed and in whose place he had been executed.
Even if Erika was capable of love, she would not be capable of self-sacrifice, for it violated the proscription against suicide that had been embedded in every member of the New Race. Therefore, she was in awe of this capacity in ordinary human beings.
As for revolution … A day would come when Victor would give the command, and the New Race living secretly among the Old would pour down upon humanity a storm of terror unprecedented in history.
She’d not been created to serve in the front lines of that war, only to be a wife to Victor. When the time came, she supposed that she would be as ruthless as her maker had created her to be.
If they knew what she was, ordinary humans would consider her a monster. Members of the Old Race weren’t her brothers and sisters.
Yet she admired much about them and, in truth, envied some of their gifts.
She suspected that it would be a mistake to let Victor know that her interest in the arts of the Old Race had evolved into admiration. In his view, they deserved only contempt. If she could not sustain that contempt, Erika Five could always be activated.
As noon drew near, when she was certain that the household staff had cleaned the master suite and made the bed, she went upstairs.
If the maids had found something extraordinary or just peculiar in the bedroom, if they had uncovered even a few rat droppings, she would have been told. Whatever had been in the bedroom the previous night must not be there now.
She prowled the suite anyway, listening for furtive sounds, looking behind furniture.
In the night, gripped by a surprising fear of the unknown, she had retreated. Fear, an important survival mechanism, had not been entirely denied to the New Race.
Superstition, on the other hand, was uncontestable proof of a weak mind. Victor had no tolerance for superstition. Those with weak minds would be recalled, terminated, replaced.
The most innocent-seeming superstition – such as a belief that ill fortune attended every Friday the thirteenth – could open a door in the mind to consideration of larger supernatural issues. The most essential purpose of Victor’s revolution was to complete the work of modernity and create a race of absolute materialists.
Erika searched the suite to quell the quasi-superstitious dread that had seized her the previous night and that still lingered. When she found nothing untoward, her confidence returned.
She enjoyed a long hot shower.
Members of the New Race, even Alphas like her, were encouraged to develop a keen appreciation for simple physical pleasures that could serve as an inoculation against emotions. Emotions themselves could be a form of pleasure, but also an antirevolutionary force.
Sex was among the approved pleasures, pure animal sex divorced from affection, from love. Sex between members of the New Race was also divorced from reproduction; they were engineered to be sterile.
Each new man and woman owed his or her existence to the direct action of Victor. The family was an antirevolutionary institution. Family fostered emotion.
Victor trusted no one but Victor