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.
From his pocket he extracts the photographs. They slip from his fingers. He tramples them underfoot as he leaves the room.
His metamorphizing vision amplifies the most meager sources of light, so that he navigates the rooms and hallways with increasing agitation, but without knocking against anything, as silent as a silverfish that has slithered out of a crack in the baseboard to explore in the darkness that it prefers.
In spite of the wondrous nature of his becoming or because of it, he cannot sit and wait. He fidgets even as he moves from one place to another, wringing his hands and running them through his hair, plucking at the spots on his T-shirt that are crusted with Justine’s blood, sucking at his teeth for a remaining taste of her.
He finds himself in Megan’s art studio, standing at a window, with no memory of having come here. Tall, slender yard trees are bent severely toward the southeast, as though the very rotation of Earth has so violently accelerated that all things rooted in its crust will be torn loose and sent tumbling. The wind’s ferocity excites Shacket, calls for him to break things as it shatters fragile limbs, to tear things as it shreds leaves and sends them swarming through the night like colonies of deformed bats.
Then he’s on the move again, through a bizarre architecture, as if the house is transforming in sympathy with him. Hallways are now tunnels, although not carved out of earth or rock, but rather shaped by legions from some secreted organic material resembling coarse paper, windowless rooms roughly rounded like chambers in an enclosed nest. As strange as it is, he nonetheless feels he belongs here, and he is drawn toward some communion with a horde of his own kind.
But that proves to be a hallucination—or a memory born not of experience but of instinct—because then he finds himself in the kitchen, hungrier than he has ever been. He puts his pistol on the table and searches through the contents of the freezer drawer in the bottom of the refrigerator. He finds four steaks—filet mignon—in sealed packets bearing the name of a high-end mail-order purveyor of meats. He tears open one package and chews on the raw product, but it is frozen and doesn’t satisfy.
Not bothering with a dish, he places the steak in the microwave and presses the control labeled Defrost and stands looking through the oven window while the carousel turns