Dead and Alive

shouting ‘What is it, what is it, what is it?’ You run away faster than they can run, and you want to shout something really smart at them, but you can’t think of anything smart, so there’s always the finger. Can Jocko give them the okay sign?”
    “I think it’s better if you keep your hands down and just enjoy the ride.”
    “Can Jocko give them a thumbs-up sign? Attaboy! Way to go! You done good!”
    “Maybe the next time we go for a ride. Not tonight.”
    “Can Jocko give them a power-to-the-people fist?”
    “I didn’t know you were political.” The tote bag bulged with books. “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.”
    “Oh. Wait. Jocko forgot. In his room.”
    “There’s nothing in your room that you’ll need.”
    “Be back in half a jiffy.”
    He snatched up one of the laces from the sneakers and, holding it between his teeth, somersaulted out of the library.
    When the troll returned a few minutes later, he was carrying a sack made from a pillowcase, tied shut with the shoelace.
    “What’s that?” Erika asked.
    “Stuff.”
    “What stuff?”
    “Jocko’s stuff.”
    “All right. All right. Let’s go.”
    In the garage, at the GL550, Jocko said, “You want me to drive?”

CHAPTER 57
    JUDGING BY THE QUALITY of their excitement and the content of their conversations among themselves, Carson decided that most if not all of the people with torches and oil lamps were Epsilons, like Gunny Alecto, and were workers at the landfill.
    In addition to Erika Four, however, five others of the New Race, left for dead at Crosswoods but later resurrected, were Alphas—four men and a woman—who had been terminated by Victor for one reason or another. This was the group that called themselves the Dumpsters.
    Carson and Michael had been unnerved when one of the Dumpsters proved to be Bucky Guitreau, the district attorney. He wasn’t the one they had killed in Audubon Park, and he wasn’t the original and fully human Bucky. He was instead the
first
replicant intended to replace Bucky. He’d been replaced himselfby a second replicant, the one she and Michael had killed, when Victor decided that number one wasn’t a sufficiently gifted mimic to pull off the impersonation of the district attorney.
    Apparently, all of these Alphas had been returned to life longer than Mrs. Helios. They had found water to wash themselves, and they wore reasonably clean if threadbare clothes, which perhaps they had salvaged from these many acres of refuse.
    Although she was the most recent to have been pulled back from the brink of oblivion, Erika Four had been appointed to speak not only for herself but also for the other five Alphas, perhaps because she had been their tormentor’s wife. She knew Victor well, his corrupted character and temper. Better than anyone, she might be able to identify the weakness most likely to render him vulnerable.
    Deucalion towered behind Erika, and as she brought Carson and Michael up-to-date, the landfill workers edged closer. None of what she said was news to them, but being the intellectual lower caste of the New Race, they seemed to be easily enchanted. They were rapt, faces shining in the lambent firelight, like children gathered for story hour around a campfire.
    “The workers here have known something strange was happening under the trash fields,” Erika said. “They’ve seen the surface rise and resettle, as if something sizable was traveling this way and that in the lower realms. They’ve heard haunting voices filtering up from below. Tonight they saw it for the first time, and they call it the mother of all gone-wrongs.”
    A murmuring passed through the Epsilons, whispered exclamations. Their faces revealed emotions that they of the New Race should not have been able to feel: happiness, awe, and perhaps hope.
    “It started as a failed experiment, left here for dead, but in fact not fully dead,” Erika continued. “A lightning strike in the dump enlivened it. Since then, it has evolved to become a wondrous being, an entity of indescribable beauty and profound moral purpose. Sometimes an Alpha, presumed dead even by Victor, may yet contain an incandescent filament of life for a few days after an apparent death. If attended properly, that filament can be prevented from fading entirely, and encouraged to grow brighter. As it brightens, this life force spreads through the Alpha, returning him to consciousness and full function. What these Epsilons call the mother of