Frankenstein

Lyss turned his back to the corridor. With shaking hands, he put the picks in the yellow tube and capped it.
    Offering the tube to Nummy, the old man whispered, “There’s no pockets in this jumpsuit. Hide it in your jeans.”
    “No way, not after where it’s been.”
    Mr. Lyss grabbed him, pulled him close, and shoved the tube in a pocket of his blue jeans.
    “You’re a jailbreaker,” Nummy whispered.
    As footsteps approached, Mr. Lyss looked as fierce as the people-eating zombies in movies Nummy didn’t like to watch. “You mention the tube, I’ll chew your eyes right out of your head.”
    The jailbreaker turned toward the cell door.
    A moment later, a young man with a nice face appeared. He stopped at their cell and smiled at them. He had a very friendly smile.
    Nummy liked the young man right away, liked him a lot more than he liked Mr. Lyss. The young man had white teeth instead of gray. He seemed to be very neat and probably wasn’t stinky the way Mr. Lyss was. And he didn’t look like the kind of person who would keep anything up his butt.
    Because Grandmama had taught him always to do the right thing and because helping a jailbreaker could never be good, Nummy almost handed over the set of lock picks. He hesitated only because he would have to reach into his pocket and touch the yellow plastic tube, and the thought of touching it disgusted him.
    As Nummy made gagging noises, Mr. Lyss said to the young man, “What’re you grinning at, pretty boy? You better not be the attorney I asked for. You’re wet behind the ears, just out of law school.”
    Nummy realized this visitor wasn’t wearing a uniform. He was in slacks, a sweater, a white shirt.
    When Nummy took a second look at the young man, he saw something wrong. The nice face and friendly smile didn’t match what was in his eyes. There was no easy word for what was in his eyes.
Crazy
wasn’t the right word. But it was close.
Hungry
wasn’t the right word. But the young man was hungry for something.
    “I’ll leave you two until last,” said the visitor. “You’ll be sweeter because you’ll try to resist.”
    “Sweeter?” Nummy asked, and Mr. Lyss told him to shut up.
    The visitor turned away from them and went to the middle of the three large cells. He used a key to unlock the door, left it open behind him when he went inside.
    None of the nine prisoners tried to escape. They didn’t even get up from where they were sitting.
    If Nummy had been one of them, he would have at least gotten up. People with good manners got up when someone new entered a room.
    Standing in the center of the cell, the smiling young man pointed to a woman in pajamas, sitting on a bunk. “You. Come to me.”
    She rose to her feet, stepped to the young man, and stood before him. Her mouth moved, but no words came from her.
    He pointed to a tall man in boxer shorts and a T-shirt. “You. Come to me.”
    The man did as he was told. His whole body was shaking.
    The young man said to them, “I am your Builder.”
    Then a terrible, scary, beautiful thing happened.

    
chapter
18

    Erika followed Victor from the main highway onto a two-lane county route that ascended west through golden meadows into woods thick with purple shadows even in the bright morning light. The ribbon of blacktop unspooled up and down the serried hills, rising higher after each descent. Where the topography required curves, they were wide and sweeping, the consequence of massive excavation; this two-lane was less constricted by the landscape than were most country roads and seemed to have been constructed without regard for cost.
    The GL550 disappeared over the crown of a hill, traveling at about fifty miles an hour, and when Erika topped the same rise half a minute later, the Mercedes was nowhere to be seen. Ahead lay a long, easy straightaway sloping down for at least a mile to the next curve. Even if Victor had tramped the accelerator the moment that he was out of sight, he could not have traveled such a distance so quickly.
    She slowed to search the nearer shoulder of the road for a dirt or gravel turnoff, or for a place where the four-wheel-drive GL550 mighthave traveled through weeds and away among the trees. By the time she reached the bottom of the grade, she had found nothing.
    Hanging a U-turn, driving back up the same slope, she surveyed the other shoulder. A hundred yards short of the crown of the hill, she spotted broken weeds and compressed grass: a well-beaten although