Static!

by Michael R Collings

  The riot of colors startled him. He pulled a pair out, holding them at a distance between his finger and thumb. He glowered at the skimpy briefs that were barely more than a band of elastic around the top and a pouch in front.

  Shit, this guy’s as wimpy as Wheeler, he thought. Maybe they get it on together over here, watch some fag movies and get it on in the bathroom or the kitchen.

  He dropped the briefs like they were contaminated and pushed the drawer closed with his hip. He didn’t open the rest of the drawers. He left the bedroom almost immediately.

  The kitchen was a zero, too. He could locate no toaster, no Mr. Coffee, no microwave, nothing that he could pass on for a few more bucks.

  So…it was just the electronics stuff. And the rest of that was all stored in the back room.

  Before he opened the door, his mind had already begun toting up the street value of what he knew was there. Two more DVD players, pretty new and in top condition, with yards of top quality wiring connecting them. A couple of stereo systems—turntables, amplifiers, tuners. Three different radios, one with police bands, the other two not quite so sophisticated but all three worth at least a hundred more each.

  And the records and tapes and cassettes and discs. All totally untraceable, especially the discs.

  He ran his fingers over the film cases, noting titles, deciding which ones he would get rid of, which ones he would keep for himself. Gunnison had a good collection, including some pretty sexy things. Ric smiled.

  But first....

  He crossed over to the DVD consoles and began unplugging jacks, disconnecting wires, unscrewing screws. He lifted the first player out of its place on the shelf and carried it into the kitchen. He set it on the table near the door. He figured on getting most of the stuff in here, then backing the truck up to the door and moving it all after dark, when the truck would keep anyone from seeing what he was up to.

  Except maybe the squirrel next door, but by then he won’t be in any condition to say anything to anyone.

  Ric smiled. It promised to be a good evening.

  Oh, he would have to kiss the job with Tasco goodbye. No way he could pretend that he didn’t have anything to do with this rip off. But by the time anyone found out that the stuff was gone, he would be gone with the stuff and Tasco’s truck. He knew some guys out in the Valley that could handle this much loot easily. Then he would disappear for a couple months, take a vacation, maybe to Acapulco or somewhere before he came back and got into the stream again.

  He returned to the back room for the second load.

  He walked in. And stopped.

  Something was wrong.

  He listened. His ears were ringing fiercely, like he was standing under a high-tension wire on a scorching hot day. He shook his head and yawned to pop his ears. That helped a little, but not much. The ringing continued, as irritating as hell.

  He looked around the room. Maybe something was running that he hadn’t noticed.

  Something was.

  The monitor on the far wall glared at him.

  Tough as he was—and Ric was tough, in spite of his obsessive, narcissistic posturing—he was startled.

  There was more involved here than just a television screen playing to an empty room.

  Enclosed in the gunmetal-gray rim that surrounded the screen, he saw an image of himself staring into a television screen.

  He spun his head to stare into each corner of the room.

  In the round lenses of four cameras he saw himself replicated.

  “What the hell!” he shouted, breaking the silence.

  No matter how he twisted or turned, the monitor continually showed the same thing: him, up close, his face distorted like he was seeing it through a fish-eye lens.

  He slapped the on-off switch on the remaining console two or three times, but the monitor kept repeating his image through bands of snowy static that broke up the picture at eerily regular intervals.

  “Shit!”

  He was out the doorway and halfway down the hall before the thought of running clarified enough for him to know that he was running.

  The living room was dark except for the light spilling from that monitor. Without looking at the screen, he circled until he was standing in the middle of the room. He took a deep breath and raised his eyes.

  He saw himself frozen in a facial close up so detailed that he could see pores in his skin. The white carpet he stood on, the white walls and the white furniture that surrounded him echoed reflections of colors from his dark hair, his dark eyes, his deep skin tones that stained the whiteness like clotting blood.

  Ric was scared.

  For the first time in his life, he was scared spitless.

  And that fact scared him more than anything—that he could be so afraid when there was nothing in the place but a bunch of TV sets and cameras. It shouldn’t bother him, but it did.

  As he watched his own image on the screen, it changed. The camera angle drew back until his shoulders appeared, then his chest, encased in a black sleeveless T-shirt. The black material swallowed up most of the screen and the room suddenly grew darker.

  At that instant, Ric bolted for the front door.

  The second his fingers touched the brass knob, the room lightened briefly. There was a thin crackling, a suffocating ozone smell, and a piercing shriek from Ric that was swallowed whole by the white walls and white draperies as electrical current tore through his fingertips and up his arm, paralyzing it to the shoulder.

  Before the sound died, he grabbed his injured arm and hugged it tightly against his chest as if that would bring back feeling, any feeling, even the shooting pain of the current. He swore, deeply and venomously and vehemently, and threw his weight against the locked door, almost numbing his good shoulder from the impact. His paralyzed arm dropped loose, flopping uselessly like a shirttail in a high wind.

  Through his fear rose another complex of emotions, even more distressing for someone like Ric.

  Embarrassment. Humiliation. Shame. Helplessness.

  He grabbed his dead hand and tucked the fingers between his belt and his waistband, tightening the worn leather around his fingers until they couldn’t slip out. Then he turned back to face the house.

  The front door was out as an escape route. That was obvious even to him. But there were windows he could crash through. The back door was part glass and therefore vulnerable. He forced himself to calm down and think things through. He closed his eyes and pulled gasps of air into his lungs. His muscles tingled with the effort. He focused his attention on his injured hand and arm. He slapped his forearm as hard as he could.

  Yes! There was a tingle. The fingers wobbled when he tried to move them. He slapped himself again, and once again. The tingling increased to a low pain.

  At this rate, he would be all right in a few minutes. There had been no permanent damage. Nothing he couldn’t handle if he….

  The lighting changed.

  He glared at the monitor, as much in anger now as in fear.

  It showed him full-figure, his arm limp at his side, his hand tucked ridiculously into his belt. He was staring at himself, and the expression on his face startled him.

  Suddenly the monitor showed a different room and a different figure. He stared at it, trying to identify the figure that floated like a gray shadow through a static-fogged background. It seemed hunched, dark, twisted, but it was moving.

  There was someone else in the house with him.

  Ric straightened and smiled. This was something he could handle. Whoever figured on mind-fucking him was in for the shock of his lifetime.

  “Who’s here?” he yelled, his voice loud and steady. “Who the hell’s in here?”

  The only answer he received was a dead silence relieved by the electronic buzzing from the monitor.

  “Come on out, the game’s over,” he called. “I know you’re here. Wheeler, you bitch, is that you?”

  He raced down the hall, slamming doors open and scanning each room in turn. A
s he went, he continued yelling obscenities, describing in graphic detail what he was about to inflict on Wheeler’s body when he found him.

  There was no one in any of the rooms.

  When Ric reached the back room, he stopped in the doorway. From there he could see the screen. It was still playing the image of the crippled figure. Now it was closer to the camera, but still shadowed so deeply that Ric could make out no details. Except that it seemed threatening.

  He backed out of the doorway and backed down the hall, closing each door as he came to it and locking out the sight of the monitors that repeated the same image as if it were a short loop running incessantly over and over.

  Without knowing it, he found himself backing into the living room, watching the hallway for any signs of intruders.

  Something struck his leg.

  He spun, and in doing so tipped a small table over and spilled chess pieces across the room.

  He regained his balanced and tried to take stock of what was happening.

  His arm was tingling more now, and the fingers moved enough that he could pull them from the belt. He still couldn’t lift the arm but at least it wasn’t flopping around and getting in his way.

  It was his right arm, too. His fighting arm. He had to reach across with his left and dig awkwardly in his hip pocket for the knife he always carried after working hours.

  When he finally worked it out, it felt odd and foreign in his grasp. But he had fought left-handed in a pinch more than once. He didn’t like to, but he could do it now.

  He crouched in a fighting stance, the knife weaving in front of him as if he expected attack from any quarter.

  “It’s no use.”

  The voice came from nowhere and everywhere, as if the walls themselves had spoken. Ric was so startled that he nearly dropped the knife.

  “Who’s out there?” he yelped, and this time his voice broke into high ranges he hadn’t heard in years, not since he became a man and stuck it into his first woman.

  “You can’t fight me.” The voice had an odd timbre to it, as if it were coming from a machine rather than a human.

  Ric couldn’t tell whether it was male or female, probably because it was distorted somehow to make the game more exciting for the prick who was dumping all of this shit on him.

  “Yeah? That so? Get your ass out here and we’ll see. Stop hiding, Wheeler, come on out and face me!”

  “You want to see me? Very well.”

  The figure in the screen was more distinct now. The reception was still lousy, though, Ric noted even though his rising panic.

  The picture suddenly broke up into static lines. The faint hints of color died into stark black-and-white. He couldn’t even tell which room was being filmed.

  “I got a knife,” he yelled, brandishing the four-inch blade into the air in front of him. As he moved, he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye.

  He whirled.

  One of the cameras had swiveled in its bracket to focus on him. A small red light just below the lens blinked slowly on and off with hypnotic regularity. Ric checked the other three cameras. Each was tilted directly toward him, and each showed the same red light.

  He backed up until his legs struck the edge of the couch. The cameras followed him. They moved when he moved and stopped when he stopped.

  His eyes darted to the middle of the inner wall where the monitor glowed like a demon’s eye.

  The figure had disappeared.

  In its place, the screen now displayed something that sent chills in a rapid tattoo up and down Ric’s spine.

  It showed him again.

  But this time the image was not simply Ric the way he was standing in the living room.

  In this new apparition, his arms were raised over his head as if he was trying to surrender—come out with your hands up—come in and get me, you dirty copper! The face on this other Ric was twisted like he was screaming his throat raw, but no sounds came out of the screen.

  He stared at the picture.

  He didn’t even notice when the knife dropped from his hand because at that moment the picture died, then the screen readjusted itself to show him again.

  He was naked, trying to cover himself with one hand while the other flopped helplessly at his side. This Ric this chicken-shit coward, that wasn’t him at all, never him, never—was crying openly. Tears streaked his face. Yellow-green tendrils of snot dribbled from his nose. The lips quivered like a baby’s.

  “No. Noo!” he screamed. He tore his eyes away long enough to look at the cameras.

  The red lights were blinking more rapidly, almost in sequence with each other.

  When he turned back, his image had disappeared from the screen and the figure had reappeared, closer to the camera now and blocking out most of the background. The picture was clearer, but Ric still couldn’t see who or what it was other than just a dark form that seemed shrouded in blackness but that reached out toward him with something that sparkled and glistened and shot a tremor of terror through him even before he recognized it.

  When he did, he screamed again.

  It was his own knife. Locked into an image on a TV screen.

  He looked down at his feet where the knife had fallen.

  It was gone. In its place he saw a knot of fluorescence that became a sparkle of blue like an electrical spark thrown from an overloaded transformer in a dark room.

  He looked up at the monitor.

  His image was back, still naked, still struggling as if against invisible bonds, still trying to cover himself with his hand and in the background some music played, something that he had heard before—that was it, “Satin Blue,” the music from that flick he had seen last year, the one with the creep who tortured and murdered, the film where this woman finds a man in her closet and comes at him with a knife and makes him strip while she kneels in front of him with the knife and something flashed across the screen, something blue and quick and threatening and there was a spurt of blood from the groin and his image screamed and Ric screamed as the blade sliced through his groin, severing the worn threads of his jeans as if they did not exist and cutting deeply into his flesh.

  But the real pain, the pain that he felt in the instant before realization and shock set in, was not that of a knife.

  It was an electrical current, a blue-white flash of power that slit him from groin to throat, that snapped along his spine like a high power line in a hurricane. It tore his breath from his throat, the air from his lungs so that he could not scream. It wrapped his testicles and his bleeding sex in living pain and twisted and tore and at the last instant he saw himself in the monitor, bleeding and dying and falling, and he saw the figure in front of him now, no longer encased in metal and plastic but it can’t be but there it is, shit there it is standing not a yard from him, hunched and shadowed, the bloody blade of his own knife gripped in one twisted hand.

  “Who...?” Ric tried to say, but all that came out was a liquid gurgle.

  The knife moved again, swiftly and unerringly. This time it was aimed higher and penetrated his stomach.

  The figure thrust once, and Ric could feel its hand against his gut when the knife pressed into his stomach. The skin was hot and sticky and felt like a Fourth-of-July sparkler pressing against Ric’s flesh.

  Then the sparkle burst into an explosion of pain as the knife twisted upward, gutting him.

  He might have died then. By all the laws of nature he probably should have died then, either from shock or from trauma or from loss of blood. But he didn’t.

  Instead, the red lights beneath each of the cameras began blinking so rapidly that they became a blur, and in the instant that the knife penetrated Ric’s heart, they flashed into fingers of blood-red flame that whipped across the room and encircled him from four directions.

  The figure reached out and became part of the flame and in joining it transformed hot red into cold blue. He didn’t die, much as he desperately wanted to, not even when the real pain started. Nor did he di
e when layer after layer of skin was stripped from his body and disintegrated and then sucked away to become part of the blue flame that grew stronger second by second. Nor even when the muscles and sinews and tissues of his body sloughed off and the flame consumed them as well. Not until the bones began to disappear, first the small bones of the fingers and toes, then the larger bones in the legs and arms and ribs—only then, perhaps, did Ric finally die, although it would have been impossible to name the precise instant when life ceased to be enclosed by what remained of a human husk.

  When finally what did remain was no longer recognizable as human, the blue lights flashed once in concert, blindingly bright, and then there was darkness throughout the house.

  Almost.

  First in one room, then the next, finally in each room, the screens came alive.

  Each showed variations on the same image. Ric helpless. Ric emasculated. Ric subjugated and submitting. Ric screaming for release while the phantom-figure toyed with him as cruelly as a satiated cat played with a terrified mouse.

  The episodes all ended the same way. Ric died. Then there would be a moment of blackness and quiet (let’s all stand and observe a moment of silence in memory of....) before the sequence began again, the loop repeating over and over.

  If the images had been merely films, they would have been perverted and inhuman.

  But they were not films.

  And throughout each agonizingly infinite second, Ric finally understood that this cruelty would never come to an end, that he would never truly die.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Payne arrived home just after three o’clock. He had planned on staying the night at Cathy’s. She had apparently planned on it, too, and in spite of the passionate intensity of their love-making (or perhaps because of it), she was obviously angry when he woke suddenly and got out of her bed and began pulling on his clothes.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  There was no light on in the room except the diffuse glow of LA at night from outside the window. He didn’t answer. Cathy sat up and turned on the light.