Dead and Alive

after you yesterday. Victor killed me the day
before
yesterday.”
    To Michael, Carson said, “She says Victor killed her the day before yesterday.”
    “Who’re you talking to?” Erika asked.
    “My partner, Michael Maddison.”
    Erika said, “I know it sounds unbelievable, someone telling you she was killed yesterday.”
    “Thanks to your husband,” Carson said, “there’s nothing we find hard to believe anymore.”
    “I’ll believe any damn crazy thing,” Michael agreed.
    “Victor sent my body to the dump. Do you know about Crosswoods Waste Management, Detective O’Connor?”
    “It’s right next door to the tank farm where he’s gonna crank out six thousand of you folks a year.”
    “You are
on top of things. I figured you would be, if Victor worried about you. Nobody worries Victor.”
    “Mrs. Helios, how did you get this number?”
    “Victor had it. I saw it on his desk pad. That wasbefore I was dead. But I have a photographic memory. I’m an Alpha.”
    “Are you still dead?” Carson asked.
    “No, no. Turns out, most of us he sends here are for-sure dead, but a few of us who seem to be dead … well, there’s still a trace of life energy in us that can be brought back to full power, so we can heal. They know how to save us here at the dump.”
    “Who is they?”
    “Those of the New Race discarded here but alive again. I’m one of them now. We call ourselves the Dumpsters.”
    Carson said, “I didn’t know you people had a sense of humor.”
    “We don’t,” Erika said. “Not until we die and drop our program and then come alive again. But this may be gibberish to you. Maybe you don’t understand about our programs.”
    Carson thought of Pastor Kenny Laffite coming undone at his kitchen table in the parsonage, and she said, “Yeah, we know about that.”
    “Oh, and I should have said, I’m Erika Four. The wife with him now is Erika Five.”
    “He moves fast.”
    “He’s always got Erikas in the tanks, just in case the latest one goes wrong. Flesh is cheap. That’s what he says.”
    “Thank God for NoDoz and triple-threat cola,” Carson said.
    Erika Four said, “Excuse me?”
    “If I wasn’t pumped with caffeine to the eyebrows,”Carson said, “I wouldn’t be able to keep up with this conversation.”
    “Detective, do you know you can’t trust anyone in the police department, so many of them are Victor’s people?”
    “Yeah. We’re aware.”
    “So you’re on your own. And here in the parish where the dump and the tank farm are located, every cop and most of the politicians are replicants. You can’t win this.”
    “We can win this,” Carson disagreed.
    Nodding so rapidly that he looked like an out-of-control bobblehead doll, Michael said, “We can win. We can win.”
    “His empire is imploding,” Carson told Erika.
    “Yes. We know. But you still need help.”
    Thinking of Deucalion, Carson said, “We’ve got some help you don’t know about. But what do you have in mind?”
    “We’ve got a deal to propose. The Dumpsters. We’ll help you defeat him, capture him—but there’s something we want.”

CHAPTER 45
    VICTOR NEVER ENTERED the Hands of Mercy directly. Next door to the hospital, which now passed as a ware-house, a five-story office building housed the accounting and personnel-management departments of Biovision, the company that had made him a billionaire.
    In the garage under the building, he parked his S600 Mercedes in a space reserved for him. At this hour, his was the only car.
    He had been put off his stride by the business with Erika Four on the phone and Christine not knowing who she was. In moments like this, work was the best thing to settle his mind, and perhaps now more than ever, numerous issues required his attention.
    Near his parking space was a painted steel door to which only he possessed a key. Beyond the door lay a twelve-foot-square concrete room.
    Opposite the outer door, another door could beoperated only by a wall-mounted keypad. Victor entered his code, and the electronic lock disengaged with a
thonk
.
    He stepped into a six-foot-wide, eight-foot-high corridor with a concrete floor and block-and-timber walls. The passageway had been excavated secretly by members of the New Race.
    Huge responsibilities came with any attempt to pull down an existing civilization and replace it with a new one. The weight on his shoulders might have been intolerable if there had not been perks like secret passageways, hidden rooms, and