Dead and Alive

scintillant blue pulsesacross the case, as a rap of her knuckle had done before.
    She spoke again: “I am Queen Esther to his King Ahasuerus.”
    The pulses of blue were a more intense color than previously. The shadowy presence appeared to rise closer to the underside of the glass, revealing the barest suggestion of a pale face, but no details.
    Turning to Jocko, Erika whispered, “This is exactly what happened yesterday.”
    The troll’s yellow eyes were wide with fright. He gaped at the featureless suggestion of a face beneath the glass, and what appeared to be an iridescent soap bubble floated from his open mouth.
    Lowering her lips close to the glass once more, Erika repeated, “I am Queen Esther to his King Ahasuerus.”
    Out of the throbbing blue pulses raised by her words, a rough low voice, not muffled by the glass, said, “You are Erika Five, and you are mine.”
    Jocko fainted.

CHAPTER 51
    BY PHONE , Deucalion told them to drive directly to the main gate of Crosswoods Waste Management. “You’ll be met by an escort. They’re a Gamma and an Epsilon, but you can trust them.”
    The long rows of loblolly pines broke for the main entrance. The ten-foot-high chain-link gates featured green privacy panels and were topped with coils of barbed wire to match the fence that flanked them.
    As Carson coasted to a stop, she said, “They’re of the New Race. How can we possibly trust them? This makes me nervous, very uneasy.”
    “That’s just the caffeine.”
    “It’s not just the caffeine, Michael. This situation, putting ourselves in the hands of Victor’s people, I’m spooked.”
    “Deucalion trusts them,” Michael said. “And that’s good enough for me.”
    “I guess I know which side he’s on, all right. But he’s still strange sometimes, sometimes moody, and hard to figure.”
    “Let’s see. He’s over two hundred years old. He was made from parts of cadavers taken from a prison graveyard. He’s got a handsome side to his face and a caved-in side tattooed to conceal the extent of the damage. He’s got two hearts and who knows what other weird arrangement of internal organs. He’s been a monk, the star in a carnival freak show, and maybe a hundred other things we’ll never know about. He’s seen two centuries of war and had three average lifetimes to think about them, and he seems to have read every book worth reading, probably a hundred times more books than you’ve read, a thousand times more than me. He’s lived through the decline of Christendom and the rise of a new Gomorrah. He can open doorways in the air and step through them to the other side of the world because the lightning bolt that animated him brought mysterious gifts with it, as well. Gee, Carson, I don’t see any reason why he should seem strange or moody or hard to figure. You’re right—it must just be that he’s setting us up, he’s been lying all along about wanting to nail Victor, they just wanted to lure us to the dump so they could eat us for breakfast.”
    Carson said, “If you’re going to go off on rants, you can’t have any more NoDoz.”
    “I don’t
need
any more NoDoz. I feel like my eyelids have been stitched open with surgical sutures.”
    In the headlight beams, the gates of Crosswoodsbegan to swing inward. Beyond lay the darkness of the dump, which seemed blacker than the moonless night on this side of the fence.
    Carson let the Honda coast forward, between the gates, and two figures with flashlights loomed out of the darkness.
    One of them was a guy, rough-looking but handsome in a brutish kind of way. He wore a filthy white T-shirt, jeans, and thigh-high rubber boots.
    In the backsplash of the flashlights, the woman appeared to be movie-star gorgeous. Her blond hair needed to be washed, and her face was spotted with grime, but she had a beauty so intense that it would have shone through just about anything except a mud pack.
    With his flashlight, the man showed Carson where to park, while the woman walked backward in front of them, grinning and waving as if Carson and Michael were beloved kin not seen since everybody had to flee the Ozarks one step ahead of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms task force.
    Like the man, she wore a filthy white T-shirt, jeans, and thigh-high rubber boots, but the unattractive getup somehow only emphasized that she had the body of a goddess.
    “I’m beginning to think our Victor is less a scientist than he is a horndog,” Carson