Dead and Alive

sustain it at full metabolic function.
    Suffocation panic triggers Chameleon’s thrashing.
    Although the polymeric fabric of the sack is as strong as bulletproof Kevlar, Chameleon’s combat claws rip it open.
    Fourteen gallons of chemically treated saline solution gush out of the sack, spilling Chameleon into the freezer, through the missing door, and onto the floor of the laboratory.
    Air flows into its spiracles and follows the tracheal tubes that branch throughout its body.
    As it dries out, Chameleon regains its sense of smell.
    It is able to detect only two odors: a specially engineered pheromone with which all of the New Race are tagged, and human beings of the Old Race, who are identifiable by a melange of pheromones
lacking
that New Race spice.
    The smell of the New Race pleases Chameleon, and therefore they are EXEMPTS .
    Because the Old Race lacks the artificial pheromone, their scent infuriates Chameleon, and they are TARGETS .
    Chameleon lives to kill.
    At the moment, it smells only EXEMPTS. And even all of them seem to be dead, sprawled throughout the room.
    It crawls across the debris-strewn floor of the wrecked lab, through pools of water, seeking prey.
    Every external tissue of Chameleon mimics to the smallest detail the surface under it: color, pattern, texture. No matter how simple or complex the ground under it, Chameleon will blend with it.
    To any observer looking down on it, Chameleon is invisible when not in motion.
    If Chameleon moves, the observer may sense something amiss, but he will not understand what his eyes perceive: a vague shifting of a part of the floor, an impossible rippling of a solid surface, as if the wood or stone, or the lawn, has become fluid.
    Most of the time, the observer will interpret this phenomenon not as a real event but as disturbing evidence of a problem internal to himself: dizziness or hallucination, or the first symptom of an oncoming stroke.
    Often, the observer will close his eyes for a moment, to settle his disturbed senses. Closing his eyes is the end of him.
    If Chameleon is on a higher plane than the floor, perhaps a kitchen countertop, it will remain invisible from the side only if the backsplash is of the same materialas the surface on which it stands. Otherwise, it will be visible as a silhouette.
    For this reason, Chameleon generally remains low as it stalks its prey. A TARGET becomes aware of his attacker only when it skitters up his leg, ripping as it goes.
    The wrecked lab offers no TARGETS .
    Chameleon proceeds into the hallway. Here it discovers numerous EXEMPTS , all dead.
    Taking more time to consider these cadavers than it did those in the lab, Chameleon discovers heads split open, brains missing.
    Interesting.
    This is not how Chameleon does its work. Effective, however.
    Among the debrained EXEMPTS , Chameleon detects a whiff of a TARGET. One of the Old Race has been here recently.
    Chameleon follows the scent to the stairs.

CHAPTER 41
    RAIN HAD NOT YET REACHED the parishes above Lake Pontchartrain. The humid night lay unbreathing but expectant, as if the low overcast and the dark land had compressed the air between them until at any moment an electric discharge would shock the heart of the storm into a thunderous beating.
    Deucalion stood on a deserted two-lane road, outside Crosswoods Waste Management. The facility was enormous. A high chain-link fence was topped with coils of barbed wire and fitted with continuous nylon privacy panels. RESTRICTED AREA signs every forty feet warned of the health hazards of a landfill.
    Outside the fence, a triple phalanx of loblolly pines encircled the property, the rows offset from one another. Between ninety and a hundred feet tall, these trees formed an effective screen, blocking views intothe dump from the somewhat higher slopes to the north and east.
    Deucalion walked off the road, among the pines, and went through the fence by way of a gate that didn’t exist—a quantum gate—into the dump.
    He had night vision better than that of the Old Race, even better than that of the New. His enhanced eyesight, not the work of Victor, was perhaps another gift delivered on the lightning that had animated him, the ghost of which still sometimes throbbed through his gray eyes.
    He walked a rampart of compacted earth, a span more than wide enough to accommodate an SUV. To both his left and right, well below the level of this elevated pathway, were huge lakes of trash heaped in uneven swells that would