Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz

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СКАЧАТЬ powdered Viagra to the whorehouse clientele. They were having a special on Ecstasy and meth.

      Four Harleys stood in a hog line behind the porno shop. Hardcase bikers seemed to be providing security for the whorehouse or for the bar. Or for the drug dealers. Perhaps for all of them.

      Deucalion passed among them, noticed by some, not by others. For him, a black coat and blacker shadows could be almost as concealing as a cloak of invisibility.

      The mysterious lightning that brought him to life had also conveyed to him an understanding of the quantum structure of the universe, and perhaps something more. Having spent two centuries exploring and gradually applying that knowledge, he could when he wished move through the world with an ease, a grace, a stealth that others found bewildering.

      An argument between a biker and a slender young woman at the back door of the whorehouse drew Deucalion as blood in the water draws a shark.

      Although dressed to arouse, the girl looked fresh-faced and vulnerable. She might have been sixteen.

      “Lemme go, Wayne,” she pleaded. “I want out.”

      Wayne, the biker, held her by both arms, jamming her against the green door. “Once you’re in, there is no out.”

      “I’m not but fifteen.”

      “Don’t worry. You’ll age fast.”

      Through tears, she said, “I never knew it was gonna be like this.”

      “What did you think it would be like, you dumb bitch? Richard Gere and Pretty Woman?”

      “He’s ugly and he stinks.”

      “Joyce, honey, they’re all ugly and they all stink. After number fifty, you won’t notice anymore.”

      The girl saw Deucalion first, and her widening eyes caused Wayne to turn.

      “Release her,” Deucalion advised.

      The biker – massive, with a cruel face – was not impressed. “You walk real fast away from here, Lone Ranger, and you might leave with your cojones.”

      Deucalion seized his adversary’s right arm and bent it behind his back so suddenly, with such violence, that the shoulder broke with a loud crack. He pitched the big man away from him.

      Briefly airborne, Wayne landed face-first, his scream stifled by a mouthful of blacktop.

      A hard stomp to the nape of the biker’s neck would have snapped his spine. Remembering torch-bearing mobs with pitchforks in another century, Deucalion restrained himself.

      He turned toward the whoosh of a swung chain.

      Another motorcycle aficionado, a leering grotesque with a studded eyebrow, studded nose, studded tongue, and bristling red beard, recklessly joined the fray.

      Instead of dodging the chain-link whip, Deucalion stepped toward his assailant. The chain lashed around his left arm. He seized it and pulled Redbeard off balance.

      The biker had a ponytail. It served as a handle.

      Deucalion lifted him, punched him, threw him.

      In possession of the chain, he rounded on a third thug, whipped him across the knees.

      The struck man cried out and fell. Deucalion helped him off the ground by throat, by crotch, and slammed him into the fourth of the four enforcers.

      He rapped their heads against a wall to the bar-band beat, creating much misery and perhaps some remorse.

      Already the customers wandering from porno shop to brothel to bar had fled the alleyway. The dealers on wheels had skated with their wares.

      In rapid succession, the pimpmobiles fired up. No one drove toward Deucalion. They reversed out of the alleyway.

      A chopped-and-stretched Cadillac crashed into a yellow Mercedes.

      Neither driver stopped to provide the other with the name of his insurance agent.

      In a moment, Deucalion and the girl, Joyce, were alone with the disabled bikers, though surely watched from doorways and windows.

      In the bar, the zydeco band jammed without faltering. The thick, damp air seemed to shimmer with the music.

      Deucalion walked the girl to the corner, where the alleyway met the street. He said nothing, but Joyce needed no encouragement to stay at his side.

      Although she went with him, she was clearly afraid. She had good reason to be.

      The action in the alley had not diminished his fury. When he was fully self-possessed, his mind was a centuries-old mansion furnished with rich experience, elegant thought, and philosophical reflection. Now, however, it was a many-chambered charnel house dark with blood and cold with the urge to murder.

      As they passed under a streetlamp, treading on the fluttering shadows cast by moths above, the girl glanced at him. He was aware that she shuddered.

      She seemed as bewildered as she was frightened, as if she had awakened from a bad dream and could not yet distinguish between what might be real and what might be remnants of her nightmare.

      In the gloom between streetlamps, when Deucalion put one hand on her shoulder, when they traded shadows for shadows and fading zydeco for louder jazz, her bewilderment increased, and her fear. “What … what just happened? This is the Quarter.”

      “At this hour,” he warned, as he walked her across Jackson Square, past the statue of the general, “the Quarter is no safer for you than that alleyway. You have somewhere to go?”

      Hugging herself as if the bayou air had taken an arctic chill, she said, “Home.”

      “Here in the city?”

      “No. Up to Baton Rouge.” She was close to tears. “Home don’t seem boring anymore.”

      Envy seasoned Deucalion’s ferocious anger, for he had never had a home. He’d had places where he stayed, but none had truly been a home.

      A wild criminal desire to smash the girl raged at the bars of the mental cell in which he strove to keep imprisoned his bestial impulses, to smash her because she could go home in a way that he never could.

      He said, “You’ve got a phone?”

      She nodded, and unclipped a cell phone from her braided belt.

      “You tell your mother and father you’ll be waiting in the cathedral over there,” he said.

      He walked her to the church, paused in the street, encouraged her forward, made certain to be gone before she turned to look at him.

       CHAPTER 2

      IN HIS MANSION in the Garden District, Victor Helios, formerly Frankenstein, began this fine summer morning СКАЧАТЬ