Dean Koontz's Frankenstein 4-Book Bundle by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz [Koontz, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-52999-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

WHEN THE PIZZA-DELIVERY GUY, looking for the Bennet house, made the mistake of going to the Guitreau place next door, Janet Guitreau surprised herself by dragging him into her foyer and strangling him to death.

Janet and her husband, Bucky Guitreau, the current district attorney of the city of New Orleans, were replicants. The bodies of the real Janet and Bucky had been buried weeks previously in a vast garbage dump in the uplands well northeast of Lake Pontchartrain.

Most of the New Race were not replicants. They were originals, fully designed by Father. But replicants were crucial to taking control of the city’s political apparatus.

Janet suspected that some significant lines of code had dropped out of her program, and Bucky was inclined to agree with her.

Not only had Janet killed without being told to do so by her maker, but she felt good about it. Actually, she felt marvelous.

She wanted to go next door and kill the Bennets. “Killing is wonderfully refreshing. I feel so alive.”

Bucky should have reported her to Helios for termination. But he was so in awe of her audacity and so intrigued that he could not convince himself to phone Father’s emergency number.

This suggested to both of them that Bucky, too, had dropped some lines of his program. He didn’t think that he could kill, but he was excited by the prospect of watching Janet destroy the Bennets.

They almost rushed next door. But then the dead pizza guy in the foyer seemed worthy of further examination, considering that he was Janet’s first.

“After all,” Bucky said, “if you were a hunter and this guy were a deer, we’d take a hundred photographs, and we’d cut off his antlers to hang them over the fireplace.”

Janet’s eyes widened. “Hey, you want to cut something off him, hang it over the fireplace?”

“That maybe wouldn’t be smart, but I would for sure like to get some snapshots.”

“So you get the camera,” Janet said, “and I’ll look around for the best backdrop.”

When Bucky hurried to the second floor to retrieve the camera from the master-bedroom closet, he discovered the Duke of Orleans watching the foyer from the top of the stairs.

Duke was a handsome German shepherd, caramel-and-black with two white boots. Since the New Race versions of Bucky and Janet had come into his life a few weeks earlier, he had been confused and wary. They looked like his masters, but he knew they were not. He treated them with respect but remained aloof, withheld affection, which they didn’t want anyway.

As Bucky reached the top of the stairs, Duke padded away into one of the guest bedrooms.

Helios had considered having the dog killed when the original Bucky and Janet had been terminated.

But Duke was a New Orleans icon: He had saved two small girls from a house fire, and he was so well-behaved that he often went to court with his master. His passing would be a major human-interest story, and there might be a jazz funeral for him. This would draw too much attention to a pair of newly installed replicants.

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