I was alone, and in the dark.
“This isn't going to help you,” I shouted. No one answered. “If you're going to stop me, you're going to have to face me, and I'll see you coming! It's kind of hard to hide in the dark when you're glowing!”
Again, there was no answer.
“Well, screw it,” I muttered under my breath, and started sliding along the wall toward the server room. It was down the hall, that much I knew, a double door on the other side of the hallway that was usually left unlocked. All I had to do, I told myself, was inch my way down the hallway to the appropriate point, then throw myself into the server room and take care of business.
Two feet. Three. I measured distance by steps, each one a half a cautious foot in the making. Three and a half. Four.
Light flared behind me, enough to blind my dark-adjusted eyes. I squeezed my lids shut and grimaced in pain but didn't look back. Wouldn't look back.
“You're going to the server room,” she said conversationally. From the sound of her voice, she was maybe ten feet away, maybe a little nearer, but not moving. Not coming any closer. “You're going to destroy the tape backups, the same way you wiped me from the network.”
“Good guess,” I told her. Her light flickered out, and she vanished. I rested a moment, to let my eyes adjust and to put the lockbox down on the floor. It felt heavier in my arms than it had any right to be, like it was carrying in it the weight of something of gravity and worth.
Well, hell, maybe it was.
I picked the box back up, the metal warm under my fingers. Another step, then two, then three. The door to the supply closet was smooth against my shoulder as I inched along, then the doorknob caught me in the kidney and I grunted in pain. Damn idiot doors, I thought. Why hadn't we just gone to passcards inside, too?
Down the hall, she flared, nova-bright in the gloom. “Does this make you feel safer?” she shouted.
“Not as long as you can throw lightning,” I said under my breath, hoping she couldn't hear me and afraid that she could. If she did catch it, though, she gave no sign.
“The lockbox has the rest of the off-site backups, doesn't it?” she asked, her voice carrying further than it had any right to. “You're going to destroy those, too, and then that will be the end of me.”
I said nothing.
Her star-bright shape faded away again. My eyes still stung, and all I could see was afterimage, her silhouette burned onto my retinas. I blinked, squinted, and rubbed my eyes as best I could, but it still took a long time to go away.
When it finally did, I blinked a few times against the dark to test what I was seeing. Nothing was visible, no matter which way I turned. I held my breath and counted to ten, to see if she'd come back.
Nothing.
“Good enough,” I told myself, and pushed away from the wall with one hand. The other held the lockbox to my chest for fear of losing it in the dark. Back I went, hoping I'd lined myself up straight against the wall, hoping I hadn't overshot, hoping I hadn't undershot.
Another few steps. The hallway seemed infinitely wider than it had in the light. More steps, backwards into the black. Did I aim wrong? I asked myself. Is the wall still here? What if she destroyed it? What if I—
My back thudded into the wall on the opposite side.
I stood there a moment, breathing hard. Nothing moved. Nothing shone. As quietly as I could, I reached out with my free hand, feeling along the wall. The plaster was cool to the touch, the faint bumps and indentations of the paint painfully obvious to my still-battered fingers. Then, abruptly, they hit cool metal.
The doorframe. And beyond it, the door.
Holding my breath, I eased myself forward. My hand dropped to belt height, about where I remembered the doorknob being, and I fanned it back and forth across the door's surface, searching. I could feel the cool of the wood, the grain of it and the almost imperceptible seams where the strips of wood that comprised it came together. Nothing else, though. No metal, no circular base, no doorknob. I raised my hand up a bit, broadened my sweeps, kept searching. Still nothing.
“Come on!” The lockbox fell to my feet as I scrabbled with both hands. She could resurrect herself, she could devour the light, but I prayed that she couldn't make a doorknob disappear.
“Looking for this?” Blue Lightning said, and opened the door from the inside.
“Oh, shit.” The light from her was too much to look at. I could feel it on my skin as a physical force, a steady pressure moving me back and away. I turned away as the glow became painful, screwed my eyes shut, and still I could see her. Without thinking, I found myself retreating all the way across the hallway, six feet of staggering backwards and away. My hands went up in front of my eyes to protect them, and still light leaked through knotted fingers. I thought about the lockbox for a moment, but it was gone. Six feet away…but against her, it might as well have been six miles, straight up and into the wind.
“No, no,” she said. “This isn't right.” The glow faded, but I kept my hands over my eyes, crouched against the wall and huddling against the return of the light. Sounds, I heard. Footsteps. The clank of the lockbox being lifted. And then her voice, very close to my ear. “It's okay. You don't have to look away any more.”
Slowly, I unfurled my fingers. Slowly, I opened my eyes.
She was there, in front of me. Her glow was tamped down to a soft blue light, and she dangled the lockbox from her left hand. “You look very silly down there,” she said. “Stand up. This is important.”
“You're going to kill me now, right?” I asked her, but I shrugged myself to my feet. “You've got the backups. You're between me and the server room. I can't run. You win.”
“No,” she said, and leaned forward. Her lips brushed my ear. “I'm going to kill myself.”
I blinked. “What? Why? You've won? Don't you get it? You've won!” I took a step forward. This time she retreated, gliding gracefully backwards into the room behind her. I followed her. Here, there was still light that wasn't hers—green and red and amber eyes all blinking in syncopated rhythm on all of the server shelves. Against the wall were tape drives, the backbone of the backup system, and stacked in front of them were the actual tapes. These were the institutional memory of the company, the fossilized work of all that had been done in Horseshoe's name.
She turned and laid her hand on them. There was a brief, sizzling crackle, and sparks jumped from box to box to box. The smell of burning plastic and hot metal filled the air. One by one the tapes themselves burst into flames.
I gaped at her. “What are you doing?”
Blue Lightning turned to look at me, and smiled. “What you came here to do, Ryan. I'm destroying everything here that's me.”
The fumes from the burning tapes filled the air, leaving my eyes stinging and watering. Lined up in rows on the shelf, they looked like little jack-o-lanterns from the Halloween at the end of the world. Bits of burning tape lifted off and drifted into the air, flaring orange and bright red. And still she stood there, the lockbox loose in her grip and the evidence of her existence disappearing behind her.
I blinked. The fumes were stronger than I thought; there were tears in the corners of my eyes that blurred my vision. “But you're killing yourself.”
The last of the tapes erupted into flame. Behind it, the tape drives got busy melting themselves into slag. Lightning danced from each to each like a forest fire in the treetops and then leaped to the servers. One by one, those shorted out in a shower of sparks. The red eyes, the green ones and the amber, all began winking out.
“You made this part of me, too,” she said, her voice even and low. “You made your choice. I'm just saving you the trouble of putting it into effect.”
“Don't you want to live?”
She didn't answer, just looked at me while the servers died and the lights that weren't her went out.
“You made your choice,” she said softly, holding up the lockbox, the one thing in the building still holding copies of her
. “Goodbye, Ryan. All of me loved you.”
The last of the servers guttered out and died.
“Don't,” I heard myself say. “Isn't there a way?”
She looked at me one last time. “You didn’t give me one.”
I looked away, unable to face her. “No. I didn’t.”
Light exploded from her fingers and danced across the surface of the box. Smoke poured from its corners, and I fell, gasping and choking, to the floor.
Not her, though. She shone, brighter and brighter. And as her light grew, I could hear her singing. Her voice clean and clear, sometimes off-key but always there until the flames consumed the things that held her.
She was singing as she died.
The light from her flared and guttered out. There was an instant of silence, and then the clang of the lockbox hitting the floor. I crawled over to it, but the metal was too hot to touch. It was twisted, too, bent and misshapen by the heat, and on the sides the outline of two hands were clearly visible.
One by one, the burning tapes went out, sagging into ash and melted plastic, leaving me in darkness. And that's where I stayed, huddled on the floor, until Eric arrived.
* * *
It might have been an hour later, it might have been five minutes. I didn't know. All I know is that I was sitting there, knees to my chest, when he walked into the server room.
“Ryan,” he said. He didn't sound happy.
“Hi, Eric,” I replied. “I don't think you'll have any more trouble with the black project.”
He flicked the light switch in the corner, and, by some miracle, it worked. “Did you do this?” he asked, looking around at the devastation. The fumes were still heavy in the air, and he fought back a cough. “Please tell me you didn't do this.”
“I didn't,” I told him, without looking up, without standing. My fingers hovered near the lockbox, feeling the heat spill off from it as it melted the carpet it sat on. “I was here when it happened, though. Oh, and I beat the crap out of Terry. I think he's unconscious in the hallway.” Then I looked up. “Are you going to call the police?”
He looked at me, looked at the half-melted server farm, looked at me again. “No,” he said, a long minute later. “Terry might, but I don't think he will. And when you say you didn't do this, I believe you. She did, right?” He extended a hand to me. After a moment's hesitation, I took it and let him pull me up.
“You saw her too?” It wasn't much of a question.
“It wasn't just your game,” he said, and that was enough.
“Yeah,” I said, and licked my lips. They were dry and tasted like melted plastic. “I guess it wasn't.”
“Come on.” He put his arm around my shoulder and helped me out into the hallway. “No sense sitting there breathing that crap any longer than necessary.”
I didn't answer. Instead, I concentrated on staying upright and on putting one foot in front of the other. It was enough of a task to keep me busy for a while, or at least until we stopped in front of the door I'd smashed in, a couple of lifetimes ago.
Eric stopped, and I stopped with him by default. “Are you OK to stand up?” he asked me.
I nodded, and slipped myself out from under his arm. “Yeah. I think so.”
“Good,” he said, and held out his hand. “I hate to do this, but, uh, Ryan? You're fired.”
“About damn time,” I said, and started laughing.
After a minute, he started laughing, too. But I don't think his heart was in it.
Chapter 30
When I finally staggered outside, there was a car waiting. I rubbed my eyes for a minute before I finally figured out whose it was.
Leon’s.
He rolled down his window and leaned out. “You need a ride, man?”
I nodded wordlessly and hobbled to where he sat idling at the curbside. “I thought you were pissed at me.”
“I am. Doesn’t mean I can’t help a brother out. Get in.”
Slowly, agonizingly, I made my way around to the other side. He leaned across and opened the passenger door, and I heaved myself onto the seat. I sat there a moment, and then he shot me a crossways look. “Seatbelt. The way your night’s going, you need it.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I strapped myself in. “Jesus. What time is it?”
Leon tapped the clock on the dash. “Coming up on four thirty.”
“Is it late?”
“No, it’s early.” We both laughed for a second, then let it die.
“I’m glad you’re here, Leon,” I said after enough silence had gone by. “I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, Shelly told me to get my ass over here. That you might need some help. And pissed as I am at you, bro, she said it was serious trouble, and I don’t mess with serious.” He looked around. “Course, if I’d gotten here sooner, I coulda been some real help. Maybe I shoulda just called you a cab.”
“But then I couldn’t have told you what a dick I was to you.” I rolled down the window and let my arm dangle. “Take me home, OK? Just take me home.”
“I’ll take you to your house, man,” he said. “I dunno if I’m taking you home.”
* * *
He dropped me off in front of the house and made sure I could stand up before peeling out. We’d exchanged promises to sit down and talk, really talk about what happened, but the thought of it seemed insubstantial. What mattered was that I’d admitted fault to him and that I’d told him I was sorry. If there was penance to be borne after that, I’d take it with good grace and appropriate humility.
I watched his car diminish until he turned a corner and vanished. I stared down the street a few moments longer, delaying the inevitable and the climb up the too-steep driveway that went with it.
The door was locked, but the window Shelly had punched out was still gone, so I reached in and unlocked the deadbolt. The door swung open easily. My feet crunched on shattered glass as I entered.
“Ryan? Is that you?” Sarah’s voice came from upstairs. She sounded weak but feisty, which was better than I’d hope for after the evening’s events.
“Yes,” I said and started climbing stairs. “Did Shelly bring you home?”
“She did.” I heard a drawer slam shut and another one open. “She kept apologizing. Which was nice of her, I guess.”
I tromped up the last couple of stairs, leaning heavily on the banister. “She feels awful, and considering the circumstances under which…things happened, she’s maybe blaming herself more than she should.”
“And who should she blame?” Sarah came out into the hallway, and looked at me. She was a mess. Stitches. A big fat gauze pad taped to her forehead. A sling on one arm, and God knows what else.
Then again, I didn’t exactly look like a prize at that moment either, and the whistling sound that came out every time I tried to breathe through my nose was equal parts annoying and worrisome.
“She should blame me,” I said, hobbling forward. “But maybe not in the way that she thinks. By the way, I just got myself fired.”
Sarah nodded. “Good.”
I stopped. “Good?”
“Good.” She turned around and headed back into the bedroom, talking back at me over her shoulder as she went. “Did you really think you were going to be able to function in that building after what you went through?”
“Well, no,” I admitted as I followed her. “Besides, I sort of had to beat the crap out of Terry in order to take care of business. And I wrecked some systems. And a bunch of company property. On the bright side, nobody’s going to press charges.”
“That’s good, too.” She sounded like she was going to pin me up on the fridge with a magnet to show off what a good job I’d done. “No matter what, though, I think it’s for the best that you’re out of there. And not for my sake. For yours.”
“You’re probably right. I don’t know anymore,” I said. I edged my way into the bedroom. If anything, it was more of a mess than we were. All of the evidence of the evening’s crisis was there i
n drab, unpleasant detail. Splintered furniture, broken glass, blood spatters on carpet and walls—it gave the room the appearance of a set from the third act of a Scorsese movie. It certainly didn’t look like a place anyone would want to spend the night. There was a burned and decapitated teddy bear on the floor. Goodbye, Linus, I told it silently. Thank you for trying to protect her.
And in the middle of the room, on the bed, was the thing that caught my attention. It was a suitcase, and from where I stood, it already looked to be about half full of clothes.
Sarah caught me staring at it, and stared at me in turn until I looked away. “Yes?” she said. It was about as much a question as I was an All-Star centerfielder, which was to say not one at all.
“You’re packing a bag,” I said, and slid down against the wall to rest on the floor.
“Yes,” she said again.
“You’re leaving?”
“No.” And she crossed to my dresser and pulled open a drawer, then reached in and grabbed a handful of t-shirts. None that I’d gotten from the studio, I noticed. None I’d gotten from trade shows. Just concert tees, an old Carolina Mudcats grounds crew shirt, a souvenir t-shirt from a long-ago trip to Chicago—these she put in the suitcase. Then, and only then, did she turn to me. “You are.”
“Ah,” I said, and realized I’d been expecting this. I also discovered that I agreed with her. The house, at the moment, was not a place I should be. “Is this a permanent thing, or a temporary one?” I kept the hope out of my voice. Honestly, I had no idea which side of the equation it would have dropped itself on.
“I don’t know,” she said, then stopped and hugged herself. “God, Ryan, after tonight….” She looked at me for a minute, then tried again. “Look. I know you didn’t assault me tonight. I know that you risked a lot, that you did…things that you didn’t have to do, that you got hurt trying to rescue me. I know that a lot of couples have come back from a lot worse than what you and Shelly did. But I’m still mad at you, Ryan. You cheated on me. And you may not have hurt me tonight, but it’s because of you that I got hurt. That’s powerful, Ryan. It’s hard to look at you without wondering what’s going to happen next. Without being a little afraid.”
Vaporware Page 38