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 Crosswoods began 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 said.
“Well, I guess it doesn’t cost him any more to make them curvy than to make them flat.”
Switching off the headlights and then the engine, Carson said, “We’re taking all our guns.”
“In case we have to protect our virtue.”
Carson said, “Now that we’re planning on you having my babies, I’ll protect your virtue for you.”
They got out of the Honda, each with two handguns holstered and an Urban Sniper held by the pistol grip, muzzle toward the ground.
The man didn’t offer his hand. “I’m Nick Frigg. I run the dump.”
Close up, the woman impressed Carson as being even more gorgeous than she had appeared from the car. She radiated a wildness but also an affability, an animal vitality and enthusiasm that made her hard not to like.
She declared with energy, “Marble, mutton, mustard, mice, mule, mumps, muck, manhole—”
Nick Frigg said, “Give her a chance. Sometimes she just has trouble finding the right word to get started.”
“—mole, moon, moan, mush, mushroom, moth, mother. Mother! We saw the mother of all gone-wrongs tonight!”
“This is Gunny Alecto,” Nick said. “She drives one of what we call our garbage galleons, big machine, plowing the trash flat and compacting it good and solid.”
“What’s a gone-wrong?” Michael asked.
“Experiments that have gone all wrong down at the Hands of Mercy. Specialized meat machines, maybe some warrior thing now and then was supposed to help us in the Last War, even some Alphas or Betas that turned out not like he expected.”
“We bury them here,” Gunny Alecto said. “We treat them right. They look stupid, stupid, stupid, but they kind of come from where we do, so they’re sort of weird family.”
“The one tonight wasn’t stupid,” Nick said.
An expression of awe possessed Gunny’s face. “Oh, tonight, it was all different down the big hole. The mother of all gone-wrongs, it’s the most beautiful thing ever.”
“It changed us,” said Nick Frigg.
“Totally changed us,” Gunny agreed, nodding enthusiastically.
“It made us understand,” Nick said.
“Heaps, harps, holes, hoops, hens, hawks, hooks, hoses, hearts, hands, heads. Heads! The mother of all gone-wrongs talked inside our heads.”
“It made us free,” Nick said. “We don’t have to do anything we used to have to do.”
“We don’t hate your kind anymore,” Gunny said. “It’s like—why did we ever.”
“That’s nice,” said Carson.
“We used to hate you so bad,” Gunny revealed. “When Old Race dead were sent to the dump, we stomped their faces. Stomped them head to foot, over and over, till they were nothing but bone splinters and smashed meat.”
“In fact,” Nick added, “we just did that earlier tonight with some like you.”
“That was before we went down the big hole and met the mother of all gone-wrongs and learned better,” Gunny clarified. “Man, oh, man, life is different now, for sure.”
Carson shifted her grip on the Urban Sniper, holding it with both hands, the muzzle aimed at the sky instead of toward the ground.
Casually, Michael did the same with his Sniper as he said, “So where is Deucalion?”
“We’ll take you to him,” Nick said. “He’s really the first, isn’t he, the first man-made man?”
“Yes, he really is,” Carson said.
“Listen,” Michael said, “we’ve got a dog in the car. Is he going to be safe if we leave him here?”
“Bring him along,” Nick said. “Dogs—they love a dump. They call me dog-nose Nick ’cause to help me in my job, I have some canine genes that give me a sense of smell half what a dog’s is but ten thousand times what you smell.”
When Michael opened the back door of the Honda, Duke bounded out and raised his nose to the rich night air. He regarded Nick and Gunny warily, cocked his head left, then right.
“He smells New Race,” Nick said. “And that worries him. But he smells something different about us, too.”
“Because we’ve been down the big hole,” Gunny said, “and had our heads talked in by the mother of all gone-wrongs.”
“That’s right,” Nick said. “The dog, he knows.”
The Duke of Orleans tentatively wagged his tail.
“He smells like a good dog,” Nick said. “He smells the way I’d want to smell if I didn’t have just some canine genes but was all the way a dog. He smells perfect for a dog. You’re lucky to have him.”
Carson gave Michael a look that asked, Are we crazy to go with them into this dark and lonely place?
He read her clearly, because he said, “Well, it’s dark and it’s lonely, but we’ve been through crazy for three days, and I think we’re coming out the other side tonight. I say trust Deucalion and the Duke.”