City of Night

shooting at them.”
    “Why are you so negative? ” he asked.
    “Me? I’m positive. I’m for creation. Creation is a positive thing. Who is it that’s against creation?”
    With profound concern for the fate of the two detectives, Benny stared through the windshield toward the distant woods.
    They sat in silence for half a minute, and then Cindi said, “We need a bassinet.”
    He refused to be engaged in that conversation.
    “We’ve been buying clothes,” she said, “when there are so many things we’ll need first. I haven’t bought any diapers, no receiving blankets, either.”
    Thicker than the humid air, a pall of despair began to settle over Benny Lovewell.
    Cindi said, “I’m not buying any formula until I see if I’m able to breast-feed. I really want to breast-feed our baby.”
    From out of the pines, two figures appeared.
    Even with his enhanced vision, at this distance Benny needed a moment to be sure of their identity.
    “Is it them?” he asked.
    After a hesitation, Cindi said, “Yes.”
    “Yes! Yes, it is them.” Benny was so pleased that they were alive and that he would still have a chance to kill them.
    “What’re they carrying?” Cindi asked.
    “I can’t quite tell.”
    “Suitcases?”
    “Could be.”
    “Where would they get suitcases in the woods?” Cindi wondered.
    “Maybe they took them from the people they shot.”
    “But what would those people be doing with suitcases in the woods?”
    “I don’t care,” Benny said. “Who knows why they do what they do? They’re not like us, they’re not a fully rational species. Let’s go kill them.”
    “Is this the place for it?” Cindi asked, but she started the engine.
    “I’m so ready. I need this .”
    “It’s too open,” she said. “We won’t be able to take the time to do it in the most satisfying manner.”
    Grudgingly, Benny said, “You’re right. Okay, okay. But we can overpower them, club them unconscious, and take them somewhere private.”
    “Out past the Warehouse Arts District, where not everything’s been gentrified yet. That abandoned factory. You know the place.”
    “Where we killed the police chief and his wife the night their replicants were ready,” Benny said, warming to the memory.
    “We killed them good,” Cindi said.
    “We did, didn’t we?”
    “Remember how he screamed when we peeled her head like an orange?” Cindi asked.
    “You’d think a police chief would be tougher.”
    Driving the Mountaineer onto the service road, Cindi said, “You can cut them both apart while they’re still alive—and you know what then?”
    “What?” he asked as they approached the parked sedan, where the detectives had just finished loading the suitcases in the backseat.
    “Right there in the blood and all,” Cindi said, “we’ll make a baby.”
    His mood was soaring. He wasn’t going to let her bring him down.
    “All right, sure,” he said.
    “Blood, really fresh blood, is sometimes used in the most effective rituals,” she said.
    “Of course it is. Get us up there before they’re in the car. What rituals?”
    “Fertility rituals. The Old Race is fertile. If we do it in their blood, covered in their warm blood, maybe we’ll be fertile, too.”
    The cops turned to stare at the approaching Mountaineer, and Benny thrilled to the prospect of violence, and yet he couldn’t help asking, “Fertility rituals?”
    “Voodoo,” said Cindi. “The Ibo cult of voodoo.”
    “Ibo?”
    “ Je suis rouge ,” she said.
    “That sounds like French. We’re not programmed with French.”
    “It means, ‘I who am red’ or, more accurately, ‘I the red one.’ It’s what Ibo calls himself.”
    “Ibo again,” said Benny.
    “He’s the evil god of the blood-sacrifice cult of voodoo. We’ll kill these two and then make a baby while wallowing in their blood. Praise Ibo, all glory to Ibo.”
    Cindi had succeeded in distracting Benny from their prey. He stared at her, bewildered and afraid.
     
     
     

Chapter 35
     
    When Erika Helios entered the secret passageway, the door in the bookshelves closed automatically behind her.
    “It’s like a Wilkie Collins novel,” she murmured, referring to the work of a Victorian writer whom she had never read.
    The four-foot-wide passageway had a concrete floor, concrete walls, and a concrete ceiling. She felt as though she had stepped into a bunker deep under a war-torn city.
    Apparently, motion detectors controlled the lights, because when she stood