Dead and Alive

“What do you think you’re doing, Erika?”
    “I was never loved, only used. I’m flattered to be remembered.”
    Something was very wrong. “Where are you, Erika? Where are you in the house?”
    “I’m not in the house, darling. How could I be?”
    He would be in error if he continued to play her conversational game, whatever the point of it might be. He must not encourage what seemed to be rebellious behavior. Victor answered her with silence.
    “My dearest master, how could I be in the house after you sent me away?”
    He hadn’t sent her away. He had left her, battered and bleeding, in the living room, not a day previously but mere hours earlier.
    She said, “How is the new one? Is she as lubricious as I was? When brutalized, does she cry as pitifully as I did?”
    Victor began to see the nature of the game, and he was shocked by her effrontery.
    “My darling, my maker, after you killed me, you had your people in the sanitation department take me to a landfill northeast of Lake Pontchartrain. You ask where I am in the house, but I am nowhere in the house—though I hope to return.”
    Now that she’d carried this demented charade toan unacceptable extreme, silence was not the appropriate response to her.
    “You are Erika Five,” he said coldly, “not Erika Four. And all you’ve achieved by this absurd impersonation is to ensure that Erika Six will be in your position soon.”
    “From so many nights of passion,” she said, “I remember the hard impact of your fists, the sharpness of your teeth biting into me, and how I bled into your mouth.”
    “Come to me immediately,” he said, for he needed to terminate her within the hour.
    “Oh, darling, I would be there at once if I could, but it’s a long way to the Garden District from the dump.”

CHAPTER 23
    AS THEY REACHED the T junction where the entrance lane met the main road through Audubon Park, Michael drew the illegally purchased .50-caliber Desert Eagle pistol from the scabbard at his left hip.
    Carson said, “If they’re going to be trouble—”
    “I’d bet both kidneys on it.”
    “—then I’m thinking the Urban Sniper makes more sense,” she finished, turning right onto West Drive.
    The headlights washed across the pale forms of Mr. and Mrs. Guitreau on their rainy-night, fully-nude, high-speed dog walk.
    Michael said, “If we have to get out of the car, it’ll for sure be the Sniper, but not if I have to shoot from a sitting position.”
    Hours earlier, they had seen Pastor Kenny Laffite, one of the New Race, breaking down psychologicallyand intellectually. And not long after that, they were forced to deal with another of Victor’s creations who called himself Randal and whose rap was as creepy-crazy as Charles Manson channeling Jeffrey Dahmer. Randal wanted to kill Carson’s brother, Arnie, and he had taken three rounds point-blank from an Urban Sniper before going down and staying down.
    Now this weirdness.
    “Damn,” Carson said. “I’m never gonna get a chance to finish that okra succotash.”
    “I thought it was a little salty. I’ve gotta say, Mrs. Guitreau has a truly fine butt.”
    “For God’s sake, Michael, she’s some kind of monster.”
    “Doesn’t change the fact she’s got a great butt. Small, tight, with those little dimples at the top.”
    “It’s Armageddon, and my backup is an obsessive butt man.”
    “I think her name’s Jane. No. Janet.”
    “Why do you care what her name is? She’s a monster but she’s got a cute butt, so you’re gonna ask her for a date?”
    “How fast are they going?”
    Glancing at the speedometer, Carson said, “About twenty-four miles an hour.”
    “That’s maybe a two-and-a-half-minute mile. I think the fastest the mile’s been run is just under four minutes.”
    “Yeah, but I don’t expect we’ll ever see their pictures on a Wheaties box.”
    “I heard greyhounds can do a mile in two minutes,”Michael said. “I don’t know about German shepherds.”
    “Looks to me like the shepherd is pretty much spent. They’re gaining on him.”
    Michael said, “If we have a dog in this race, it’s the dog. I don’t want to see the dog get hurt.”
    The shepherd and his pursuers were in the left lane. Carson swung into the right lane and rolled down her window.
    As rain bounced off the sill and into her face, she drew even with the nude marathoners and heard what they were shouting.
    The woman—okay,
Janet
—chanted urgently, “Dog nose, dog nose,