Dead and Alive by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

landscape lighting, scampering from the shadows under an ancient magnolia tree to the gazebo, to the arbor draped in trumpet vines, to the reflecting pond.
    Because Victor purchased and combined three grand properties, his estate was the largest in the fabled Garden District. The expansive grounds gave an inquisitive albino dwarf numerous corners to explore.
    Eventually, this strange visitor had noticed her behind the big windows on the dark porch. He had come close to the glass, they had exchanged only a few words, and Erika had felt an inexplicable sympathy for him.
    Although the dwarf was not a guest of whom Victor was likely to approve, Erika nevertheless had a duty to treat visitors with grace. She was Mrs. Helios, after all, the wife of one of the most prominent men in New Orleans.
    After telling the dwarf to wait, she went to the kitchen and filled a wicker picnic hamper with cheese, roast beef, bread, fruit, and a chilled bottle of Far Niente Chardonnay.
    When she had stepped outside with the hamper, the frightened creature hurried to a safe distance. She placed the offering on the lawn and returned to the porch, to her cognac.
    Eventually, the dwarf came back for the hamper, and then hurried away into the night with it.
    Needing little sleep, Erika remained on the porch, wondering at these events. When the rain came, her contemplative mood deepened.
    Now, less than half an hour after the rainfall began, the dwarf returned through the down-pour. He carried the half-finished bottle of Chardonnay.
    From the small red-and-white-checkered tablecloth that had lined the picnic hamper, he had fashioned a sarong that fell from his waist to his ankles, suggesting that he had not been running naked through the night by choice. He stood at the glass door, gazing at her.
    Although in fact he was not a dwarf but something strange, and though she previously decided that
troll
described him better than any other word, Erika wasn’t afraid of him. She gestured to him to join her on the dark porch, and he opened the door.

CHAPTER 10
    WHEN ANNUNCIATA’S FACE FADED entirely from the computer screen in the networking room, Deucalion quickly plucked the oxygen-infusion lines from the four additional glass cylinders, putting a merciful end to the imprisonment and the existence of the other disembodied Alpha brains, whatever their function.
    Lester, the Epsilon-class maintenance man who had accompanied him down from the main lab, watched with obvious longing.
    Members of the New Race were created with a proscription against suicide. They were incapable of killing themselves or one another, just as they were incapable of striking out against their maker.
    Lester met Deucalion’s stare and said, “You aren’t forbidden?”
    “Only to strike at my maker.”
    “But … you’re one like us.”
    “No. I’m long before all of you. I’m his first.”
    Lester considered this, then raised his eyes to the blank screen where Annunciata had once appeared. Like a cow chewing its cud, his Epsilon-class brain processed what he had been told.
    “Dead and alive,” he said.
    “I will destroy him,” Deucalion promised.
    “What will the world be like … without Father?” Lester wondered.
    “For you, I don’t know. For me … it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.”
    Lester raised his hands and stared at them. “Sometimes, when I don’t have no work to do, I scratch myself till I bleed, then I watch myself heal, then I scratch till I bleed some more.”
    “Why?”
    Shrugging, Lester said, “What else is there to do? My job is me. That’s the program. Seeing blood makes me think about the revolution, the day we get to kill them all, and then I feel better.” He frowned. “Can’t be a world without Father.”
    “Before he was born,” Deucalion said, “there was a world. It will go on without him.”
    Lester thought about that, but then shook his head. “A world without Father scares me. Don’t want