Dead and Alive

concealed staircases, which allowed a measure
of fun
in every day.
    He had found such hugger-mugger thrilling ever since he was a boy growing up in a rambling house built by a paranoid grandfather who included in his design more blind doors than visible ones, more unknown rooms than known, more secret passages than public hallways. Victor thought it said something admirable about him that he had not lost touch with his roots, had not forgotten from where he came.
    At the end of the corridor, another keypad accepted his code. A final door opened into an ordinary file room in the lowest realms of the Hands of Mercy.
    These days, no work was conducted on this level. A regrettable incident had occurred here, the consequence of sloppy work by some of his Alphas, and forty had perished. He passed through a dimly lighted area, where unrepaired destruction loomed in the shadows.
    In the elevator, on his way up to the main lab, Victorheard music by Wagner, and his heart stirred at the majesty of it. Then he realized someone must have activated
The Creed
, the short film that played once every day throughout the facility for the inspiration and motivation of the New Race staff. But only Victor knew the procedure whereby the computer could be directed to feed the film throughout the Hands of Mercy, and he was curious as to how it had been activated.
    When he entered his laboratory, he stood before the embedded wall screen, charmed as always by the marching legions, by the city of tomorrow with its immense buildings that dear Adolf had imagined but had failed ever to erect, by the monuments to himself that would, when the city was built, be much more grand than these examples.
    With a team of his people, he had created this realistic glimpse of the future through computer animation. Soon would come the moment when the Wagnerian score faded and in his own voice the Creed would be delivered.
    He went to his workstation, intending to sit in his chair to enjoy the last of the film. But arriving there, turning to face the screen from across the room, he saw a portion of the floor ripple, about twenty feet away, and he thought with alarm,
Chameleon
.

CHAPTER 46
    TOWARD THE END of a long incline, out of the darkness to the right of the roadway, a white-tailed doe bounded into the headlights and froze in fear.
    Ignoring speed limits and periodic roadside pictographs of the silhouette of a leaping antlered buck, Carson had forgotten that at night in rural territory, deer could be no less a traffic hazard than drunken drivers.
    Being a city girl out of her element was the lesser part of the problem. Having spent the past few days immersed in the twisted world of Victor Helios Frankenstein, she learned to fear and to be alert for extraordinary, preposterous, grotesque threats of all kinds, while becoming less attuned to the perils of ordinary life.
    In spite of her complaints about the Honda, she had pressed it to a reckless speed. The instant she sawthe deer in the northbound lane, she knew she was maybe five seconds from impact, couldn’t lose enough speed to avoid a disastrous collision, might roll the car if she braked hard.
    Speaking on behalf of the Dumpsters, Erika Four said, “… but there’s something we want,” just as the deer appeared.
    To free both hands for the wheel, Carson tossed the cell phone to Michael, who snared it in midair as if he’d asked for it, and who at the same time reached cross-body with his left hand to press a button that put down the power window in his door.
    In the split second she needed to throw the phone to Michael, Carson also considered her two options:
    Pull left, pass Bambi’s mom by using the southbound lane and south shoulder, but you might startle her, she might try to complete her crossing, bounding hard into the Honda.
    Pull right, go off-road behind the deer, but you might plow into another one if they were traveling in a herd or family.
    Even as the phone arced through the air toward Michael’s rising hand, Carson put all her chips on a bet that the doe wasn’t alone. She swung into the southbound lane.
    Directly ahead, a buck bolted from where she least expected, from the darkness on the left, into the southbound lane,
returning
for his petrified doe.
    Having tossed the phone from right hand to left, having snatched the pistol from his shoulder rig,Michael thrust the weapon out the window, which was still purring down, and squeezed off two shots.
    Spooked, the buck sprang out of