Dominion

by Greg F. Gifune

  “Lindsay,” he said softly. “You’re back, you’re—you’re really back.”

  “I never left you, baby.”

  Her voice, her unmistakable voice, it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard.

  Daniel reached out and touched her, his hands gliding carefully across her face, onto her neck, shoulders and down her arms to her wrists and fingers, across her breasts and down along her stomach to her ribcage, waist and hips, to be certain everything was still intact, undamaged and just as he’d remembered it. She stood mannequin still and let him finish his inspection. The feel of her, the softness of her skin, the contours of her flesh and bone and the warmth coming from her small body rushed back to him, into him, through him, filling him.

  He embraced her. “I’m so sorry. I should’ve been there to protect you, I should’ve been there for you, I’m so sorry—you—you have to forgive me, I—”

  “Easy,” she whispered. “I’m here now. I’m here.”

  Pulling her back far enough to hold her face with his hands, he showered her face with kisses. She laughed playfully as he kissed her eyes and nose and lips and cheeks and chin then drew her to him again. “God, I’ve missed you so much.”

  “I’ve missed you too.” She smiled. She looked tired, but otherwise herself, like nothing had happened, like she hadn’t been destroyed and left for dead in the street just months before, her once beautiful body broken and tangled on bloody concrete.

  “This can’t be.” Daniel forced himself to let go. “You’re dead.”

  “I’m alive.”

  Images of her body in that awful morgue flashed in his mind. “I identified you, I—”

  She put a finger to his lips and gently shook her head no. The feel he had missed so terribly, that he had fought so hard to retain and remember was back and real, tangible, her flesh pressed to his. “That wasn’t me,” she said. “Not really.”

  “Yes, it was. You’re dead and buried, this can’t be happening.” He backed away and brought his hands to his head as tears spilled from his eyes. “Am I in Hell? Is that what this is?”

  “Does this feel like Hell to you, Danny?”

  He dropped his hands. “No.”

  “You knew I’d come,” she told him.

  He studied her more closely. “I don’t know what’s real anymore.”

  “We’re real, Danny. You and me, our love, that’s real.”

  “Bryce,” he muttered, remembering the look on his face as the knife had entered his back. “He’s dead. Russell—”

  “You’re not tied to any of that anymore.” She said it abruptly but without malice, in fact her tone bordered on joy. “That’s over with now. We’re free.”

  She reminded him of the Lindsay he’d known when they’d first married, a happy, carefree and innocent Lindsay. His tears refused to stop. “I can’t do this.”

  “Yes you can,” she said, coming closer. “It’s easy. Just love me.”

  “I never stopped. Christ, I couldn’t even if I’d wanted to.”

  “Neither of us could.”

  “But is it really you?”

  Looking as if the question itself had wounded her, she nodded.

  “It can’t be,” he said.

  “Yolanda Vasquez, the EMT, do you remember what she told you?”

  “She said your last words were: ‘It’s not me. Tell him it’s not me.’”

  “What do you think that meant?”

  He looked deep into her eyes for the answers. “Maybe when you die, or when you’re dying, it all becomes clear to you, it all comes together. Maybe an eternity can play out in those moments, your last hours. Maybe you knew what was still to come for me, what I had to go through once you’d gone, and you were warning me about right now, this very moment even, and trying to let me know somehow that this isn’t you at all.”

  “Or maybe,” she said, her fingers curling around his arms and stroking them slowly up and down, “I was letting you know that the woman dying in the street that night wasn’t really all of me. Maybe I was telling you I was still alive, still out there and coming back for you.”

  Her touch left him lightheaded, wanting more. “I can’t think anymore, I…” He wiped away the last of his tears and stood before her trembling, destroyed. “I don’t know what to do.”

  This time it was she who held him close, pulling him into her and hugging him with all her might. “You’re with me, baby, you’re with me.” She ran a hand up along the side of his face, tilted his head up until their eyes met. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “You’re dead,” he whispered, even as he felt her breath against his neck.

  “I’m alive and so are you. All we have to be is together.”

  “Even if I know you’re lying to me? Even if I can’t trust you or anything you say?”

  “Why are you so certain this is damnation? Why can’t it be salvation instead? I’ve felt every one of your tears, all your sorrow and pain because they were mine too. Do you really believe you were the only one lost and alone, the only one so deeply hurt you could barely take even another second of the agony? Didn’t you feel me? Didn’t you sense me around you, with you, reaching out for you? You did, I know you did. It was me. All along, Danny, it was me.”

  Do they know who they are? What they are?

  “But where were you? Where did you come from?”

  Do any of us?

  “It’s so strange.” Her hand slipped free of his face. “I don’t know. It’s like I’ve…it feels like I’ve been asleep.” Her brow drooped, as if something more had just then occurred to her. “It’s been a bad time for me too, you know.”

  “Where are we now, Lindsay?”

  “We’re home.”

  “I had a dream one night. I thought you’d come back because Scooter was here.”

  She smiled vaguely.

  “Scooter,” he said again, laughing lightly, powerlessly, and as he did so it felt like something within him had given way, released itself. “I kept asking him where Mommy was.” She looked away then back at him again, and he realized then what it was. “You don’t know who Scooter is, do you?”

  “I know I’m supposed to but I—I can’t remember.”

  Just when he’d begun to feel the floor might hold him, it fell out from beneath his feet. “If you were really Lindsay you’d know who he was. You’d know he was our cat, that we adored him, and that when he died we were both devastated. He was like our child, for God’s sake.”

  She put a hand to her temple, and her posture slumped a bit. “I…I know I had a dog once. His name was Dempsey. But I don’t like to think about him because he died and—”

  “We’ve never had a dog.”

  “It was when I was younger,” she said, gazing off across the room as if the answers were written on the walls. “When I was a teenager, my dog—”

  “You never had a dog.”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding furiously, like that might somehow make it so. “Yes, I did. He was a black lab and his name was Dempsey. I had him growing up and until I was a teenager. That’s when he died and I—”

  “You told me you weren’t allowed to have animals in the house when you were growing up because of your father’s allergies. You loved animals but were never able to have any of your own. That’s why you couldn’t wait to get a cat once we were married.”

  She gave a familiar look of frustration he’d seen her display countless times over the years. “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No I’m not. I swear to you I’m not.”

  He was suddenly confronted with the unsettling feeling that she was telling him the truth. Perhaps the truth as she knew it, he thought, as she believed it to be. “You don’t know who Scooter is because the Lindsay Bryce created didn’t have a cat. She was married to me—maybe even loved me—and had the same life, the same job, looked the same, but he never mentioned our having had a cat to Russell when he created you. He made up a
dog named Dempsey from your past—a past that never really existed—and gave you that instead. That’s why, isn’t it? That’s why you don’t know who Scooter is.”

  Frowning, she wandered away. “For Christ’s sake, don’t be absurd,” she said quietly. “Bryce may have helped bring me to life in a way, but he certainly didn’t create me. I was already alive and...”

  “And what…” He stopped short, unsure of what to call her now.

  “I know who I am,” she insisted. “It’s me.”

  “Part of you maybe.”

  “This is about you, Daniel, not me. Not really.” A faint glimmer of optimism skipped across her face. “You don’t have to feel this pain anymore. We can be together like before, only better because now you’re free.”

  “Free of what?”

  “Restraint…our wounds…sorrow…regret…time.” She took his hands in hers desperately but lovingly. “It’s my face and body you touched, my hands you held, my laughter you missed, my tears you tasted, my heart and soul you fell in love with. Can’t you see that? It’s me, Daniel. It’s me.”

  A dream, a nightmare, a phantom, a ghost or a demon, a lie or the truth, she was the most stunning definition of beauty he had ever laid eyes on, and the living embodiment of his destiny, everything he’d so cherished and completely loved, everything he’d grieved for, agonized over and so desperately missed, his soul mate, the piece of him that had been ripped free and died a violent and premature death, risen now from the dead, Lady Lazarus in the flesh. Nothing short of rapture, he could not avoid loving her. It simply wasn’t possible.

  Wet snow, slowly turning back to rain, spat against the windows and filled the silence.

  “Night lasts so long here,” she said sadly.

  “What about you and me? How long do we last?”

  She cocked her head like a bewildered puppy.

  “I can’t lose you again, Lindsay. I can’t.”

  She smiled at the sound of her name coming from his lips. “Then don’t.”

  They came together, clinging to each other tightly. “I love you,” he said, burying himself in her neck. “Christ, I love you so much.”

  “I love you back. Don’t be afraid.”

  “Just stay with me. I’ll go anywhere with you.”

  “I know, baby.” Her lips brushed his ear. “I know.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  They made love again and again, stopping only when they were too exhausted and sore to go on and until continuing became an exercise in joyless sadomasochism. Sated and drained, they lay tangled together in the same bed made so awful and lonely by Lindsay’s absence, a bed now healed and born again, like its occupants. In the quiet that followed, her face nestled in the crook of his neck and her heart beating steadily against his side, darkness folded around them like night wings. Safe in their cocoon, they spiraled down into bottomless, dreamless sleep. Together.

  Daniel awakened some time later to find the bedroom partially illuminated by a thin band of moonlight cascading from the rain-blurred windows on the far wall. The sheets and blankets were in a clump near the foot of the bed. He hadn’t slept that well in ages, and for quite a while he lay there groggily, allowing his mind to sharpen and his thoughts to become more coherent. The alarm clock on the nightstand was out. Had they lost power? With a contented sigh, he slid a hand across the mattress to Lindsay.

  She was gone.

  “No.” He rolled from bed, quickly checked the adjacent master bathroom then bolted from the bedroom in search of her.

  He found her in the computer room. Nude, wrapped in a blanket and kneeling on the floor as if in prayer, her ass resting back on her heels and her hands neatly folded over her thighs, she sat mesmerized in front of the computer monitor on the far wall. The computer itself had been removed from the house and left at Bedbug’s apartment, but she’d apparently plugged the monitor in, as it was on. Ambient light seeped from it, bathing her in flickering and shifting rays. Wires and disconnected cords dangled from the edge of the desk, slinking from behind the computer like tendons torn free of some greater, more intricate being. A multicolored test pattern in a box floated and bobbed across the otherwise empty screen.

  “Lindsay?”

  When she offered no response, he moved closer and up alongside her until he could see her face. Her eyes wide open and her face expressionless, she stared at the monitor like she’d slipped into a deep trance. Goosebumps rose and spread rapidly across his bare skin. “Lindsay?” he said again, a bit louder this time. “Can you hear me?”

  Shadows climbed the walls, slid about overhead.

  Daniel touched her shoulder and she blinked and turned her head, only noticing him just then. Her face laced with melancholy, she reached up with one hand and let it rest against his waist.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve done terrible things. But so have you.”

  “The past doesn’t matter. Whatever they made you do, it—”

  “They didn’t make me,” she said sullenly. “It’s how I am. It’s how I was made.”

  “That’s not true.” He stroked her shoulder. “None of that matters anymore.”

  She nodded unconvincingly. “The darkness, it…sweeps you away.”

  “I only care that we’re together.”

  “We’re still chained to fate, Daniel. This is ours.”

  Before he could answer, the screen blinked and became dark, but the darkness was populated with specters, flashes of hideous and bloody hybrid beings—flesh and machine merged—watching them, waiting, mouths moving silently in profane prayer.

  “Don’t look at it,” he whispered.

  But she seemed incapable of turning away and instead subtly rocked back and forth on her heels. Her eyes glazed.

  “Don’t look at it!” He crossed the small room and stabbed a finger at the Power button. The monitor remained on, so he pressed the button again, this time holding it down for several seconds. The screen was unfazed but the phantoms were gone, replaced by the small gliding test pattern box that had been there before. He reached behind it for the cord. Several loose cords fell free and hung over the desk in a mess like vines. When he located the power cord he gave it a violent tug to yank it from the wall socket, but it came free easily. Too easily.

  Already unplugged, it hung from his grasp like some dead, broken-necked thing.

  He threw it aside and noticed a thin cord had been plugged directly into the front of the monitor. Previously masked in the tangle of other wires and the limited light, it ran down the front of the desk and across the floor.

  Directly to Lindsay.

  It disappeared beneath the blanket she had wrapped herself in.

  Heart racing, Daniel grabbed the blanket and pulled it free.

  With a quick intake of breath, Lindsay continued rocking, her hands moving slowly up her waist and onto her breasts while she rocked harder on her heels, head swaying in sudden ecstasy.

  The cord was coiled between her legs, the end frayed to expose bare wires that were up inside her. Small things scurried across her abdomen, the skin bulging and moving as whatever was inside her slithered past.

  “My God.” Daniel’s face twisted in horror as bile spattered the base of his throat. “My…My God.”

  “Yes,” she answered, reaching down and stroking the cord passionately, electrical impulse and human tissue one, it swayed with life, an umbilical link to some other place. A guttural moan escaped her as she came up onto her knees, her hands grasping for him.

  Daniel tore the monitor from the desk and smashed it to the floor. It bounced, cracking the cabinet and breaking the tube. With a crackling sound and a quick burst of light, it bounced off the floor and fell dark.

  Lindsay toppled back, and the cord fell free of her with a sickening moist sound of release. It gave a spasmodic jump, like the final involuntary reflexive actions of an already dead corpse. A small amount of blood and vaginal secretion trickled from between her legs, but she seemed unconcerned.
She drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her shins. Resting her cheek atop her knees, she smiled at him like an innocent schoolgirl.

  Behind her, in the hallway, something moved.

  Daniel grabbed the blanket to cover himself. Something previously hidden in it fell free and lay at his feet, a nightmare relic come to life before his eyes.

  A pair of black goggles.

  Hell does horrible things to the eyes.

  “It’s all right,” she sighed. “They’re not mine.”

  He backed into the corner.

  “They’re yours, Daniel.”

  It’s not me. Tell him it’s not me.

  Russell stepped into the room, eyes still destroyed; pulverized wet sockets the color of raw red meat and the rest of his body a network of veins and ravaged glossy flesh. Most of his skin had been removed. He stood behind Lindsay, put his hands on her shoulders and grinned. Lingering in the dark hall was another form Daniel could not quite make out, but he already knew who it was, or proposed to be. Bryce. The trinity completed.

  The dark sides hang on the longest.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to remember who made who.” Lindsay raised her head, tossing her hair back and away from her face to reveal the same demonic delight. Void of irises and pupils, reduced instead to wet white orbs, hers had become the eyes of the possessed, the damned and the never-were. “And who can and can’t exist without the other. But all that matters is, we’re together, just like you wanted.”

  They’re usually the last to die…and the hardest to kill.

  “This is how you wanted it, Daniel. This is how you wanted me.” Her voice was no longer her own, but one eerily deep and elongated, like an audiotape played back at too slow a speed. “Now come and play with your toys like a good boy.”

  Daniel felt moisture between his fingers. The blanket fell free.

  He was bleeding.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Sitting in the corner, nude, his body compacted and drawn as far into himself as possible, he’d pushed back against the wall as if hoping to escape through it. Alone in the room, he inspected himself. The blood was gone. No wounds, just a slight headache and nausea. Despite the chill in the air his body was covered in perspiration. The monitor was positioned on the desk as he’d left it, off and silent, the wires dangling from it as they’d been the day he disconnected them from the hard drive tower.