Frankenstein

main floor. Here were high-backed booths upholstered in dark-blue vinyl. Six stairs led to the lower and larger part of the huge room.
    The bar, a great mass of polished mahogany, was on the right, at the end of the rectangular main room. Opposite the bar, on the left, beyond a set of double doors, a private dining room could accommodate as many as twenty-four.
    Between the bar and the private area were forty square tables,each with four chairs. The tables were furnished with salt and pepper shakers, ketchup bottles, mustard bottles, and ruby-glass cups in which candles would be burning when the place opened for business.
    Centered along the rear wall, the elevated stage lay beyond the dance floor. Behind a backdrop of midnight-blue velvet curtains lay a small backstage area and beyond that were two dressing rooms and two small bathrooms for the exclusive use of the talent.
    There were no windows in the public areas.
    “Six ways out of this space,” Erskine Potter said as he stood on the dance floor with the city councilmen. “Front doors we came through.” He turned, pointing: “Door to the bathroom hall, from which there’s also a fire exit. Door to the kitchen hall. Double doors to the private dining room, which itself has a fire exit. That door in the backbar leads to a service hall. And behind those curtains is a backstage door to the parking lot. Some of them look like nice wood doors, but they’re steel fire doors clad in fake wood. Once locked, nobody can break them down to get out.”
    “How many will be here?” Tom Zell asked.
    “A hundred twenty to a hundred fifty.”
    “Will any of them be one of us?”
    “Their pastor. Reverend Kelsey Fortis.”
    “How many Builders will we have?” Ben Shanley asked.
    “Three.”
    “What’s the strategy?”
    “Take the youngest and strongest men first and fast,” Erskine Potter said, “before they can resist. Then the other men.”
    “Will they resist?” Shanley wondered. “Church folk?”
    “Maybe a little. But the men will be finished quickly. Women’s instinctwill be to get the children out the moment it starts, but they’ll find the doors locked.”
    “Then we take the women,” said Tom Zell.
    “Yes.”
    “Leaving the children for last.”
    “Yes. Eliminate the strong, proceed to the weaker and then to the weakest. When all the adults have been processed, we can secure the children and present them to the Builders one by one, as they’re needed.”

    
chapter
15

    In the pretty little house, Jocko spent an hour climbing the stairs and descending. Up, down, up, down.
    Sometimes he sang as he raced up, plunged down. Or whistled. Or made up rhymes: “Jocko eats kittens each day for lunch! He eats them not singly but by the bunch! He eats children for dinner and then—he coughs them up and eats them again!”
    Usually, Jocko paused on the landing. To pirouette. Pirouetting sometimes made him nauseous. But he loved it. Twirling.
    Jocko didn’t actually eat kittens. Or children. He was just pretending to be a big mean monster.
    Before he started up the stairs, he made scary faces at the foyer mirror. Usually the faces made him giggle. A couple of times, he screamed in real terror.
    Jocko was happy. Happier than he deserved to be.
    He didn’t deserve great happiness because, for one thing, he
was
a monster. Just not big or mean.
    He started life in New Orleans as a kind of tumor. Inside thestrange flesh of one of Victor Frankenstein’s New Race. He grew, grew inside the other person. Became self-aware. Broke free, destroying his host. Free of the New Race body. Free of Victor.
    When you began as a tumor, life could only get better.
    Jocko was taller than an average dwarf. Pale as soap. Hairless. Well, except for three hairs on his tongue. A knobby chin. A lipless slit for a mouth. Warty skin. Funny feet.
    Not funny
ha-ha
. Funny
yuck
.
    He wasn’t the kind of new man that Victor would have
tried
to create. Lots of things Victor created didn’t turn out like expected.
    Up the stairs and down again. “Jocko’s a spook! Troll, demon, a ghoul! Jocko is beastly! Strange, weird, but
so cool!
”
    Jocko didn’t deserve to be happy because he was also a screwup. He never looked before he leaped. He often didn’t look
after
he leaped.
    Jocko knew what goes up must come down. But sometimes he threw a stone at dive-bombing birds, and the stone fell back on his head, and so he ended up stoning himself.
    Birds. They said a bird in the