Dead and Alive

harm’s way, into the northbound lane, the doe turned to follow him, the Honda exploded past them, and hardly more than a hundred feet away, a truck appeared at the top of the incline, barreling south.
    The truck driver hammered his horn.
    Carson pulled hard right.
    In an arc, the truck’s headlights flared through the Honda’s interior.
    Feeling the car want to roll, she avoided the brakes, eased off the accelerator, finessed the wheel to the left.
    The truck shot past them so close Carson could hear the other driver cursing even though her window was closed.
    When the potential energy of a roll transferred into a back-end slide, a rear tire stuttered off the pavement, gravel rattled against the undercarriage, but then they were on pavement once more, and in the northbound lane where they belonged.
    As Carson accelerated, Michael holstered his pistol, tossed her cell phone back to her.
    When she caught the phone and as he put up the window in his door, she said, “That settles it. We’ll get married.”
    He said, “Obviously.”
    Remembering the dog, she said, “How’s Duke?”
    “Sitting on the backseat, grinning.”
    “He is
so
our dog.”
    When Carson put the phone to her ear, the former Mrs. Helios was saying, “Hello? Are you there? Hello?”
    “Just dropped the phone,” Carson said. “You were saying you wanted something in return for helping us.”
    “What are you going to do to Victor if you can get your hands on him?” Erika asked. “Arrest him?”
    “Nooooo,” Carson said. “Don’t think so. Arresting him would be way too complicated.”
    “It’d be the trial of the millennium,” Michael said.
    Carson grimaced. “With all the appeals, we’d spend thirty years giving testimony.”
    Michael said, “And we’d have to listen to a gazillion really bad monster jokes for the rest of our lives.”
    “He’d probably get off scot-free anyway,” Carson said.
    “He’d definitely get off,” Michael agreed.
    “He’d be like a folk hero to a significant number of idiots.”
    “Jury nullification,” Michael said.
    “All he wanted was to build a utopia.”
    “Paradise on Earth. Nothing wrong with that.”
    “A one-nation world without war,” Carson said.
    “All of humanity united in pursuit of a glorious future.”
    “The New Race wouldn’t pollute like the Old Race.”
    “Every last one of them would use the type of light-bulb they were told to use,” Michael said.
    “No greed, less waste, a willingness to sacrifice.”
    “They’d save the polar bears,” Michael said.
    Carson said, “They’d save the oceans.”
    “They’d save the planet.”
    “They would. They’d save the solar system.”
    “The universe.”
    Carson said, “And all the killing, that wasn’t Victor’s fault.”
    “Monsters,” Michael said. “Those damn monsters.”
    “His creations just wouldn’t stay with the program.”
    “We’ve seen it in movies a thousand times.”
    “It’s tragic,” Carson said. “The brilliant scientist undone.”
    “Betrayed by those ungrateful, rebellious monsters.”
    “He’s not only going to get off, he’s going to end up with his own reality-TV show,” Carson said.
    “He’ll be on
Dancing with the Stars.”
    “And he’ll win.”
    On the phone, the former Mrs. Helios said, “I’m hearing only half of this, but what I hear is you aren’t handling it like police detectives anymore.”
    “We’re vigilantes,” Carson acknowledged.
    “You want to kill him,” Erika said.
    “As often as it takes to make him dead,” Carson said.
    “Then we want the same thing. And we can help you, those of us here at the dump. All we ask is don’t just shoot him. Take him alive. Help us kill him the way we want to do it.”
    “How do you want to do it?” Carson asked.
    “We want to chain him and take him down into the dump.”
    “I’m with you so far.”
    “We want to make him lie faceup in a grave of garbage lined with the dead flesh of his victims.”
    “I like that.”
    “Some of the others want to urinate on him.”
    “I can understand the impulse.”
    “We wish to buckle around his neck a metal collar with a high-voltage cable attached, through which eventually we can administer to him an electric charge powerful enough to make the marrow boil in his bones.”
    “Wow.”
    “But not right away. After the collar, we want to bury him alive under more garbage and listen to him scream and beg for mercy until we’ve had enough of that.
Then
we boil