Dead and Alive

with the Bucky thing and had felt no obligation to sprint to his assistance. A small army of the New Race might inhabit the city, but perhaps there wasn’t sufficient camaraderie among them to ensure they would always fight together.
    On the other hand, maybe this lack of commitment to the cause resulted solely from the fact that Janet’s brain train had jumped the tracks and was rolling through strange territory where no rails had ever been laid.
    Out there in the scintillant silver rain, bathed in the Honda’s high-beam headlights, she appeared ethereal, as if a curtain had parted between this world and another where people were as radiant as spirits and as wild as any animal.
    Michael held out a hand, cartridges gleaming on his palm.
    Reloading, Carson said, “What’re you thinking—go after her?”
    “Not me. I have a rule—one showdown with an insane superclone per day. But she might come for us.”
    For the first time all night, a sudden light wind sprang up, trumping gravity, so that the rain angled at them, pelting Carson’s face instead of the top of her head.
    As though the wind had spoken to Janet, counseling retreat, she turned from them and sprinted off the roadway, between trees, into the dark grassy mystery of the park.
    At Carson’s side, the dog issued a low, long growl that seemed to mean
good riddance
.
    Michael’s cell phone sounded. His newest ring was Curly’s laugh, Curly being
the
Curly of the Three Stooges. “N’yuck, n’yuck, n’yuck,” said the phone. “N’yuck, n’yuck, n’yuck.”
    “Life in the twenty-first century,” Carson said, “is every bit as stupid as it is insane.”
    Michael took the call and said, “Hey, yeah.” To Carson, he said, “It’s Deucalion.”
    “About freakin’ time.” She surveyed the darkness to the east and south, expecting Janet to come bouncing back in full killer mode.
    After listening a moment, Michael told Deucalion, “No, where we are isn’t a good place to meet. We just had a situation, and there’s debris everywhere.”
    Carson glanced at the body of the Bucky replicant. Still dead.
    “Give us like ten or fifteen minutes to get somewhere that makes sense. I’ll call you back, let you know where.” Pocketing his phone, he said to Carson, “Deucalion’s almost done at Mercy, he found what he hoped to find.”
    “What do you want to do about the dog?”
    Having been drinking from a puddle on the pavement, the shepherd looked up and favored Carson, then Michael, with a beseeching look.
    Michael said, “We take him with us.”
    “The whole car’s gonna smell like wet dog.”
    “It’s a lot worse for him. From his point of view, the whole car smells like wet cops.”
    “He’s a pretty boy,” she admitted. “And he looks like he ought to be a police dog. I wonder what his name is.”
    “Wait a minute,” Michael said. “This must be Duke. The D.A.’s dog. Goes to court with Bucky. Or used to.”
    “The Duke of Orleans,” Carson said. “Saved two kids in a fire.”
    The dog’s tail spun so fast that Carson half expected it would propel him across the slick pavement in the manner of one of those Florida Everglades air-boats.
    The wind soughed in the trees, and suddenly it seemed to carry the scent of the sea.
    She opened the car door, coaxed the shepherd into the backseat, and got in behind the wheel once more. As she returned her Urban Sniper, muzzle down, to the leg space in front of the passenger’s seat, she realized that the bags of Acadiana food were gone.
    Through the windshield, she saw Michael returning from a nearby roadside trash receptacle.
    “What have you done?” she demanded when he splashed into his seat and pulled the door shut.
    “We’d already eaten most of it.”
    “We hadn’t eaten
all
of it. Acadiana is good-to-the-last-crumb wondermous.”
    “The smell of it would drive the dog crazy.”
    “So we could’ve given him some.”
    “It’s too rich for a dog. He’d be puking it up later.”
    “The stupid Curly ring, and now this.”
    She put the car in gear, hung a U-turn without driving over the Bucky replicant, switched the headlights to low beam, drove across the mangled park gate, hoping not to puncture a tire, and turned right onto St. Charles Avenue.
    “So … I’m not going to get the silent treatment, am I?” Michael asked.
    “You should be so lucky.”
    “Another prayer unanswered.”
    “Here’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”
    “I can’t afford