Frankenstein: Dead and Alive Read Online Free PDF Page B

are they?” Yancy asked.
    “In the living room.”
    As Yancy started toward the darkened hallway leading to the front of the house, Janet stepped into the lighted kitchen.
    She was the crimson bride of Death.
    Shocked, Yancy halted. “Oh, God, what happened to you?”
    “Nothing happened to me ,” Janet said. “ I happened to Helene.”
    An instant later, she happened to Yancy. He was a big man, and she was a woman of average size. But he was Old Race, and she was New, and the outcome was as inevitable as the result of a contest between a wood-chipper and a woodchuck.
    Most amazing of all: Janet did not once repeat herself. Her vicious hatred of the Old Race was expressed in unique cruelties.
    In Bucky’s hands, the camera flashed and flashed.

CHAPTER 5
    Without the lash of wind, rain did not whip the streets but fell in a heavy dispiriting drizzle, painting blacktop blacker, oiling the pavement.
    Homicide detective Carson O’Connor and her partner, Michael Maddison, had abandoned their unmarked sedan because it would be easily spotted by other members of the police department. They no longer trusted their fellow officers.
    Victor Helios had replaced numerous officials in city government with replicants. Perhaps only ten percent of the police were Victor’s creations, but then again … maybe ninety percent. Prudence required Carson to assume the worst.
    She was driving a car that she had borrowed from her friend Vicky Chou. The five-year-old Honda seemed reliable, but it was a lot less powerful than the Batmobile.
    Every time Carson turned a corner sharp and fast, the sedan groaned, creaked, shuddered. On the flat streets, when she tramped on the accelerator, the car responded but as grudgingly as a dray horse that had spent its working life pulling a wagon at an easy pace.
    “How can Vicky drive this crate?” Carson fumed. “It’s arthritic, it’s sclerotic, it’s a dead car rolling. Doesn’t she ever give it an oil change, is the thing lubed with sloth fat, what the hell ?”
    “All we’re doing is waiting for a phone call from Deucalion,” Michael said. “Just cruise nice and easy around the neighborhood. He said stay in Uptown, near the Hands of Mercy. You don’t have to be anywhere yesterday.”
    “Speed soothes my nerves,” she said.
    Vicky Chou was the caregiver to Arnie, Carson’s autistic younger brother. She and her sister, Liane, had fled to Shreveport, to stay with their Aunt Leelee in case, as seemed to be happening, Victor’s race of laboratory-conceived post-humans went berserk and destroyed the city.
    “I was born for velocity,” Carson said. “What doesn’t quicken dies. That’s an indisputable truth of life.”
    Currently, Arnie’s caregivers were the Buddhist monks with whom Deucalion had lived for an extended period. Somehow, only hours ago, Deucalion opened a door between New Orleans and Tibet, and he left Arnie in a monastery in the Himalayas, where the boy would be out of harm’s way.
    “The race doesn’t always go to the swift,” Michael reminded her.
    “Don’t give me any of that hare-and-tortoise crap. Turtles end up crushed by eighteen-wheelers on the interstate.”
    “So do a lot of bunnies, even as quick as they are.”
    Squeezing enough speed out of the Honda to make the rain snap against the windshield, Carson said, “Don’t call me a bunny.”
    “I didn’t call you a bunny,” he assured her.
    “I’m no damn bunny. I’m cheetah-fast. How does Deucalion just turn away from me, vanish with Arnie, and step into a monastery in Tibet?”
    “Like he said, it’s a quantum-mechanics thing.”
    “Yeah, that’s totally clear. Poor Arnie, the sweet kid, he must think he’s been abandoned.”
    “We’ve been through this. Arnie is fine. Trust Deucalion. Watch your speed.”
    “This isn’t speed. This is pathetic. What is this car, some kind of idiot green vehicle, it runs on corn syrup?”
    “I can’t imagine what it’ll be like,” Michael