Devoted(45)
That door has no deadbolt, only a flimsy privacy latch engaged by a button in the knob. Most likely, she won’t even use that. The perimeter of the security system is armed, the doors and windows. She feels that she is in no danger.
Earlier, while she and the boy ate dinner, Shacket returned to her bedroom, suddenly wondering about the possibility of a gun. A woman alone was likely to have a weapon.
He found the gun safe attached to the bed rail, which he had previously overlooked. To open it, he required a four-digit number.
He knew several important things about Megan, and one of them was likely to provide what he needed. When programming such devices, people tended to resort to a sequence of numbers they weren’t likely to forget. He knew her birthday, Jason’s birthday, Woody’s birthday, and the date of her wedding, at which he had been a guest but not of course the best man. He had tried the numbers in that order. The wedding date did the trick.
The ten bullets are now in the toilet bowl in the spare-bedroom bath, waiting to be flushed.
He leaves the guest room and makes his way along the hall to the master suite. He puts one ear to the door, listens, and hears running water.
When he turns the knob, the privacy latch is not engaged. He opens the door several inches. Both bedside lamps are aglow. The door to the bathroom stands half-open. He can’t see Megan, but he can hear the buzz of an electric toothbrush.
On the bed is a book. Apparently she intends to read for a while.
If he is to fulfill his fantasy of settling atop her when she is asleep, entering her as she wakes, he needs to give her a couple of hours before he returns.
He closes the door quietly and makes his way down through the lightless house, which is not dark to him.
47
In her first few months in this house, when the Sierra night seemed to harbor imminent existential threats, Megan lay awake, in anticipation of shattering glass and the piercing shrillness of the alarm. Because she slept in a T-shirt and panties, before retiring each evening, she laid out a pair of jeans and a crewneck sweater on the other half of the king-size bed, where she could quickly snatch them up and slip into them. Three years later, though she now found her initial paranoia amusing, she remained in the habit of having clothes near at hand.
After placing the jeans and sweater like the form of an imaginary bedmate, she went around to her side of the bed, turned back the top sheet with the blanket—and discovered a three-inch-long smear of some kind on the bottom sheet. This was Wednesday, and Verna Brickit routinely changed the linens midweek, so they ought to be spotless.
When Megan wiped a finger across the substance and brought it to her nose, it smelled like earth, dirt. A few small flecks of chaff were in it, bits of golden grass or weeds.
She couldn’t imagine how this had gotten here or why Verna hadn’t noticed it. Nearly all of it brushed off with the sweep of her hand. She returned to the bathroom to get a fresh washcloth, dampened a corner, and used that to remove the last traces of dirt without leaving a significant wet spot.
After washing her hands, as she settled in bed to read, her back against the padded headboard, she smelled something alien to herself and to the room, a thin, acrid odor. She turned her head left, right, leaned forward to smell the blanket, but the strange scent had been faint and transient. She could no longer detect it.
She picked up her book and opened it.
48
As restless as the wind that chases its many tails through the night, Lee Shacket wanders the dark rooms on the ground floor of the house.
He is frustrated not merely by the need to wait for Megan to fall asleep, but also by the slow pace of his becoming. When this horizontal gene transfer is complete, he will be a more formidable man than he is now, above all men and all laws, including the laws of nature, and he is eager—impatient—to fulfill his singular destiny. He intuits that the programmed archaea will effect further changes, rendering him powerful beyond all human dreams of power, but he lacks the imagination to foresee what his new strengths and capabilities will be. He wants them now.
As the wind combs dead needles from the pines and slings them through the night to prickle like sleet against the living room windows, Shacket circles the grand piano, the very presence of which angers him for some reason that he can’t define.
She won’t play the damn thing when she is his collared and obedient bitch. She will not be allowed music or painting. She will be allowed only to submit, to service him in all the ways he likes, and she will enjoy it.
The ten empty silver frames stand testament to a past that he will erase, to a husband and son who will be purged from her memory, so that her life will begin tonight, under him. He feels the folded photos in the pocket of his jeans and realizes that his previous intention to wad them and shove them down her throat to punish her for resistance is not necessary.
There will be no significant resistance. By the hour, he grows stronger. He is aware of an increasing density of his muscles and a previously unknown tensile strength. He will easily be able to pin her beneath him. At the least provocation, he will bite off one of her ears and chew it and spit it in her face, terrifying her into submission without materially damaging her beauty, which she must retain to be worthy of him.
She must as well remain worthy of being the mother of the new race, for she will bear many offspring, children who will be formed in Shacket’s image, blessed with his superior genes. They won’t be merely children, but demigods incorporating the diverse attributes of many species. He no longer has any doubt that he will pass along what the billions—trillions!—of archaea have installed within him. His testicles feel swollen with the seed of a new world.