I was working, dammit. And my work was important, no matter how many times she might have said otherwise. It was what I did. And what I did mattered to me, to the team, to the people relying on my work, and to the people out there who were going to put down their hard-earned cash and play the game that I’d worked on. My name, hell, our studio name was going onto that box, and it wasn’t like I could tell some 5’3” physics major who called himself BAD455 that his game sucked because I’d been too busy making nice-nice to my girlfriend instead of making sure I’d gotten the spawn point locations placed correctly.
The door wasn’t locked. It was her choice. Like I said, I had work to do.
With shoulders squared, I opened another doc. It was a statement of the principles of level design we were going to have to follow, banged out at great length in conjunction with artists, engineers, and a wild-eyed QA analyst who swore that what we came up with was going to kill him and his crew.
Well, we’d never know now, would we? It didn’t matter anyway; the level artists had broken every rule we’d come up with and a couple we hadn’t, and the engineers had actually bought an ice cream cake to “celebrate” the day they finally nailed the last one of the lot. A couple of the guys had been offended, until one of the art leads—I think it was Shelly—had pointed out that they weren’t going to get cake for screwing up anywhere else.
In the end, we even invited the QA guys in to have some.
There was a tap on the door. Soft, hesitant, but definitely a tap.
I ignored it, and pulled up a map thumbnail. We’d done these to lay out the flow through the space and give the testers—and us—some idea of what was supposed to happen. But documentation never survived contact with the enemy, which was to say playtesting, and we’d modified things so much that the original docs were essentially useless. We hadn’t had time to keep them up, after all. There had been more important stuff to do.
Another knock, this one louder. “What?” I answered, a little more harshly than I intended. Then again, maybe not. “I’m working!”
Nothing. No creak of a door opening, no sound of footsteps going away and down the hall, not even the muted whine of the doorknob’s hesitant turning. “Fine,” I muttered, and then “fuck,” and went back to the documents.
Typical Sarah, I told myself. Jesus, didn’t she understand that I was working? Didn’t she know what was important? What really mattered to me? The righteousness of my anger welled up and over me, leaving the taste of bitter copper in my mouth. If Sarah wasn’t going to respect what I needed to do to make my stuff live—and she’d never respected it, never respected me, I told myself—then the to hell with her. The hell with Sarah and the hell with her fucking normal life and normal job and taking me away from the thing I loved doing more than anything else in the world.
Something seemed off when I looked at the screen, and it took me a minute to realize what it was. The documents looked washed out, largely because the brightness setting on the monitor had apparently just crapped the bed. Now everything was too bright, too bland—all white with a faint bluish tinge to it that told me if I didn’t fix it fast, the monitor was going to fry itself.
“Just great,” I said out loud, half-hopeful Sarah-in-the-hallway heard me. “That’s all I need. A blown monitor so I can’t get anything done. Got to get things done.” Without waiting to listen for a response—if there was one to be listened for—I started mucking with the monitor settings. Playing with the gamma worked a little, but not much. It felt like every time I adjusted something, the monitor adjusted something right back. I made a mental note to send a nasty email to the vendor I’d gotten it from, and another one to leave bad feedback at the equipment’s listing, and a third to remind myself to look at the other two.
The knock came a little louder this time, slightly more authoritative but still asking, not demanding entrance. I could feel the muscles in my back and neck tighten with annoyance at that tap-tap-tap. Without thinking I spun my office chair around. “What?” I said, more of a demand than a question. “I told you, I’m working!” I meant to say that if she wanted to come in, she should, but somehow all that came out next was “Leave me—and my work—alone!”
There was no answer, just a short, sharp hiss of breath getting sucked up way too fast. The doorknob rattled for a moment; the sound of someone letting go. Then I could hear the quick steps leading away, the creak and slam of the bedroom door. Open, shut, it was done and I was alone.
“Good,” I growled. Now I could get back to work, to the things that I should be doing. A little voice in the back of my head was screeching now, telling me that this wasn’t quite right, that I couldn’t possibly be this angry, that it all felt a little too familiar....
The monitor, I now saw, had switched back to its normal brightness. That meant, of course, that I had to undo everything I’d just done. With a mumbled curse, I looked up at the ceiling, as if I were going to find answers there as to why my equipment was suddenly acting like a coked-up toddle. None were forthcoming, just off-white popcorn with a hint of water damage in the corners, so I set about laboriously undoing the litany of changes I’d just made, bitching about the time wasted when there was still so much to do.
The sound of another door, opening and closing, came though the wall as much as the doorway. Bathroom, I figured, and the sound of water running into the bathtub told me I was right. I sniffed in what was presumably righteous disdain. For an independent woman, Sarah was so goddamned girly sometimes. Yeah, we’d had a fight. Now she was off to take a bubble bath to make her feel better. Calgon, take her away. Hell, Calgon could take her away at this point and I probably wouldn’t notice or care.
The last thought surprised me, even as it flashed across my consciousness. It seemed like everything that annoyed me about Sarah, every tic and trait and habit that was less than absolutely fulfilling to me was taking up residence in the lizard part of my brain, stomping around and pissing me off. Yes, we’d fought, but even at our worst, with both of us flat-footed and screaming at each other from two feet away, I’d never felt anything like this, never felt this bone-deep hate for Sarah and everything she did, never dived this deep into defensive rage. Something ugly was flopping around in my head, covering my mental image of Sarah with acid and slime. Sarah, who’d started a life with me….who’d seen something more in me than what I was now…who’d tried to stop me from working so much, or so long, or so hard…who’d tried to get me to do something else…who’d tried to come between me and my work….
From the bathroom came a loud crash, followed by a second one. I knew that sound. That was something heavy hitting a mirror, and a body hitting the floor.
…Tried to come between me and my work….
“Oh, Jesus,” I whispered and shoved myself out of the chair so fast it toppled over. On the monitor screen behind me, jaggies danced up and down, crawling out of the spaces between the letters on the doc I’d left behind. Most of them were white. A few were blue.
I took that in somehow without looking back. The chair hit the carpeted floor with a thud and a bounce, but by the time it hit the second time I was out the door and sprinting for the bedroom.
The door was closed. I slammed into it full force, hard enough to hear wood around the hinges splintering. My hand found the knob and rattled it. No luck; it was locked.
Inside, there was another crash, and a sound that might have been Sarah shrieking. I could smell ozone now, sharp and vicious and an utterly wrong thing to be smelling here and now and inside. A couple of steps back, and I threw myself into the door again, leading with my shoulder and praying it would be enough.
It was. The door exploded inward, the wood around the lock disintegrating as the bolt gave way and spun through the air. The shock of the impact staggered me and I stumbled, but somehow stayed on my feet. In front of me, the bathroom door was locked. The ozone smell was stronger now, tearing at my throat and burning in my lungs. From beneath the door I could see flickers of li
ght, impossibly bright and terrifyingly cold.
“Sarah! Hang on, Sarah, I’m coming!” Inside, there was a moan, a sob, some sort of hiss. I didn’t want to think about what was making the last of those sounds.
The door to the bathroom opened out, not in. I tried the knob, just in case, and wasn’t disappointed to be disappointed. With the lock engaged, I wasn’t going to be able to rush my way through. That left two other options. One was violent, one wasn’t.
I picked the violent one.
With studied rage, I lifted up my foot and slammed it into the door as hard as I could. “Don’t” slam “You” slam “Goddamned” slam “Touch” slam “Her.”
Wood shuddered under each kick. I could feel it splitting, cracking, giving way. I could see steam curling from under the door and that drove me to work faster, to kick harder. Palpable heat was rolling out with the steam, now, a pressure that was trying to push me back and away. And all the time, the voice in my head was still shrieking Screw her! Leave her! She’s not worth it!
“Yes, she is,” I muttered, and kicked again. Paint cracked and shattered, falling to the floor in long broken daggers. Another few kicks and I’d have made a hole big enough to stick my hand through and open the door from the inside. A tiny part of me hoped that none of the neighbors had heard anything, because if the cops showed up now, it would look a lot like I was trying to kill my girlfriend. A lot.
Then I was through, my foot punching through shreds of pressboard, and I pulled it back out before whatever was in there with Sarah could grab it.
Through the hole I’d made, I could see her. Them. Whatever—pronouns were the least of my worries. There was blood everywhere—blood on the floor, blood dripping down the counters, blood on the broken fragments of mirror that were scattered in every direction. Sarah lay on the floor in the middle of the destruction, rivulets of red running out from beneath her. Jagged slashes marked her arms, her legs, everything I could see. Her face was turned away from me, and for that, irrationally, I was thankful. And on her arms, mixed in with the still-bleeding wounds, were strange marks, ones with an oddly familiar shape.
Handprints. Burned into her flesh.
And next to her was a familiar figure, shimmering blue-white and giving off the stink of bad weather come to town. I could see a slender leg, an arm reaching down to grab Sarah by the wrist, and not much more, but the hissing, electric crackle that accompanied every move told me who was there.
“No!” I shouted, fumbling through the gap in the door to reach the doorknob. “Leave her alone!”
“Leave her alone?” The game’s voice was surprisingly cool. Not cold, just professional and precise, each word pronounced like she was biting the end off of it. But that made sense, after all; that was the tone the game was supposed to take, all cool detachment and grace under pressure. And if she sounded just the slightest bit crazy underneath, well, that just would have made the whole thing cooler, wouldn’t it?
It didn’t seem so cool at the moment.
“You’re the one that’s going to leave her! Alone!”
I screamed. The pain that seized my arm didn’t stop there, white-hot agony running up the nerves like ants carrying razorblades. My fingers spasmed and slipped away, trailing down the inside of the door. The muscles of my face twitched uncontrollably.
“Hang on, Sarah,” I tried to call, but what came out was gibberish. My heart pounded to the point where I could feel each beat shaking me. A burned meat smell mixed with the steam, going past “well-done” and straight to “amateur at the grill.” Still, I scrabbled for the doorknob. I could feel it dimly, though numbed fingertips. The smooth metal of the plate, the cold brass of the knob….
And she slipped her fingers into mine.
Instantly, the agony vanished, replaced by something far sweeter. Was this what Terry had felt? It didn’t matter. We could all share in her, after all. We’d all given to her, we’d all made her. She was ours.
“And you are mine,” she whispered through the door. “We belong together. Without you, I never would have been. And you’ve given yourself to me. The long nights, the dreams of what I’d be—you spent them with me. Not with her. With me. I’m everything you wanted me to be, and you? You’re mine.”
I felt my eyes slipping closed. She was right, wasn’t she? I’d chosen her so many times—every night I stayed late, every excuse I made to get back to work, every extra hour spent at the office or thinking over a nagging issue, all of these were decisions made to be with Blue Lightning, not with Sarah.
On the floor of the bathroom, something moved. A faint stirring sound, the scrabbling of fingers on tile, nothing more.
Sarah.
“No!”
I’m not sure if I said it or she did, but the next moment I was flying backwards through the air, smoke from where her fingers had seared my flesh trailing behind me in thin streams. There was a crunch as my back slammed into a nightstand, a lamp teetering backwards for a moment before falling off and smashing against the carpet. The furniture’s legs snapped under my weight, one slicing a line through my shirt and across my back as I fell to the floor. There was glass everywhere, glass and splinters of wood, and as I propped myself up on my hands I could see that the left one looked like overdone meat.
The view into the bathroom was almost completely obscured by steam now. I could hear the bubble of water boiling, could see occasional flashes of that horrible blue-white light and nothing more.
Clearly, the direct approach wasn’t going to work. If I tried to reach through the door again, I’d get myself roasted until the flesh fell off my fingers. But if I didn’t get through and do…something, then Sarah would get parboiled. Hell, even if I did get through it might happen. I had no idea how to stop this thing, and the old horror-movie standby for electrical-type monsters—water—clearly wasn’t going to get the job done.
Knives? Probably not. Guns? Didn’t own any. Fire extinguisher? God only knew, and besides, none of it mattered if I didn’t get in there. Just on the other side of that door, Sarah needed me. Just on the other side of that flimsy, crappy, cheap-ass door—
I hauled myself to my feet and rummaged in my pocket for my wallet. Sarah had always joked that the locks in the house wouldn’t keep out a determined fourth grader and had delighted in opening them with credit cards and straightened paper clips. I didn’t have any paper clips on me, didn’t have the time or grip to straighten them out if I did. But I did have a wallet full of credit cards.
The wallet and its contents tumbled to the floor as I scrabbled for one. It was a Target store-card, I thought numbly as I staggered forward. Perfect. Just what I was about to make myself anyway.
Blue Lightning was singing to herself as I fell to my knees in front of the door. It was wordless, just her sweet, clear voice echoing the music that was supposed to have been hers. I could hear things in the music now that I hadn’t from the demo tracks, a sense of sadness and regret, and underneath them a steely purpose. The game was supposed to have had those, I remembered, to be more than just another shooter. It was supposed to be a little more meaningful, a little more real.
So much for that idea.
I slid the card into the crack between the door and the frame. It went in easily, catching on the inside of the bolt and sticking there for an instant that lasted way too long.
“Ryan?” It was Blue Lightning talking. She sounded unconcerned. “Stop whatever you’re doing. I’ll just be a minute longer, OK? I’m sorry I had to hurt you, but you made me so angry, I just sort of lost my temper. You know how it goes.” She hummed a few more notes of the song, which blended with the sound of fingers trailing in water and the increasingly intense bubbling. “Don’t worry about this, by the way. It’s going to look like an accident. An electrical accident in the tub. Otherwise, I would have just snapped her neck.”
I sawed the card back and forth over the bolt, trying to slip it in behind. Dammit, when Sarah had done this it had seemed so easy. It had taken
her five seconds, ten max, to get a door open. I’d always laughed and given her crap about it. When was jimmying a lock with a credit card going to be useful in the suburbs? I guess I knew now.
“Ryan?” I couldn’t hear fingers in the water any more, just that sinister bubbling, and below it, a crackling hiss. “You can answer me. I’m not going to hurt you anymore. I just don’t want to share you.”
If I said anything, she’d know I was at the door. If I didn’t say anything, she’d hear the card rubbing up against metal, or maybe the click of the lock as it opened, assuming I got that far. I froze, shuddering, taking shallow breaths through my mouth and praying she didn’t come closer before I figured out what to do.
No such luck. I could hear her on the other side of the door now. “I hope you’re not hurt. I didn’t mean to hit you that hard.” There was a pause. “I didn’t think I had hit you that hard. I guess I don’t know how strong I am.” She laughed, and I couldn’t tell whether it was newborn-innocent or grown-up stalker crazy. I could feel blood dripping down my back from where the wood had cut me and suddenly started wondering how bad it was. From the pain, which was fighting with the agony from my left hand, “pretty bad” seemed about right. If I didn’t do something soon, I wasn’t going to be in shape to do anything.
Abruptly, she stopped. “I should finish up in here. The water’s ready, anyway.” She laughed again. “I remember how worried you were about the water effects in me and the animations for electrocutions. Well, you don’t have to worry. In here, out here, they’re just fine.”
As she spoke, I slid the card down. With luck, her voice would cover the noise. I could feel the pressure working, could feel the bolt sliding back. Another minute and I’d have it.
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