They left the stairwell again on the third floor, taking an immediate left and going down a long, unlit corridor, which would have been scary and too claustrophobic without the feeble beam from the flashlight. By consensus they walked silently, side by side until they reached another door. Damien pressed his ear against the panel and listened for a long moment before he pushed the latch and eased it open with the tip of his plundered rifle.
Brice followed him down another hall, their steps again muffled by more of the black rubber matting like that in Damien’s office. All through their trek down dark stairwells and unlit corridors, he had remained calm and efficient—almost like a cat stalking its prey. Brice’s nerves were still on edge, but Damien looked about as panicked as a sack of potatoes. She found that immensely, though probably unreasonably, reassuring.
“This is it.”
They stopped in front of a long gray box that had high-voltage warning stickers on it. Damien opened the metal door carefully and then began to swear in Greek.
“They’ve been here too?” Brice asked, feeling suddenly deflated.
“Yes, and with a mallet, from the looks of things. Damn it.”
“It’s really that bad?”
“It’s pure Humpty-Dumpty.” Damien stepped back and shone their weak light inside. There were broken dials and gauges, and tangles of torn loose wires that glinted in the feeble illumination. Even the most electrically ignorant person could see that the case for repair was hopeless.
“And I don’t suppose there is backup to the backup maybe down in the basement?” Brice asked, clutching at straws.
“You ‘don’t suppose’ correctly.” He paused. “Unless…that computer company on the sixth floor has giant UPS’s on their computers.”
“Network-sized backup battery systems?” Brice asked. “I suppose they might.”
“Yes. But I’m not sure they’re useful even if they’re there. They’d have to be cabled together, which I haven’t a clue how to do, and then wired into the main electrical system. They wouldn’t last long anyway if they had to supply power to the whole building. We’d have to figure out how to send power to selected floors. I don’t suppose that you—”
“You ‘don’t suppose’ correctly,” she said, smiling without humor as she parroted his words back at him.
“Well, then.” Damien turned to look at Brice. His serious expression warned her of what was coming.
“Don’t say it,” she begged. “It is such a bad idea. Don’t you ever watch horror movies? People split up and they end up dead.”
“I’m afraid we are out of options.” Damien began counting off the obstacles on his fingers. “Without power, we can’t use the regular phones.”
“Regular phones?”
“I have a rotary phone in my office for those occasions when I absolutely must use one. It’s possible, if I can get to the basement that perhaps I can get the phone lines back up—if the bastards have just thrown a switch instead of turning our boy with the mallet loose down there.”
“Then I could come with you—”
“No. The only way down is the service elevator shaft. It’s worse than the regular one. Very tight, and the ladder is older and half rusted through. It isn’t safe. Sorry.” Damien didn’t sound very sorry.
Brice made a frustrated sound and damned her claustrophobia.
“Why can’t we just leave?” she asked him. “We’ll take the stairs down, get out and call your detectives or something.”
“Because, if Dippel was smart, he tripped the building’s alarm system before taking out that backup generator. That causes a bank-vault-like lockdown on the lobby floor. That also means I can’t disengage the locks on those doors until the power is up, so we are trapped inside. Breaking the glass isn’t an option either, since it’s shatter-proof—didn’t want looters breaking in and hurting anyone if there was a riot, you know.” Damien didn’t smile at this irony of safety reversal. “He will also have posted at least one guard in the lobby. The only other way out is down the side of the building, and the fire escape ends on the second floor—supposing that he has left that unguarded. You’d have to do the rest of it climbing down a drainpipe, on your own, and the storm is worse now. Much worse.” The skin at his throat and wrists was still marked by the jagged lightning marks which proclaimed the state of the weather.
Brice looked into Damien’s dark eyes. Underneath all the wildness of the storm there were equal parts of anger and revulsion. He hated what he was doing.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m not leaving you to face this alone,” she said quietly. “And you aren’t going to let this go until they’re all dead, are you? Which means a lot more killing, and then explaining a bunch of bodies to the police.”
“I can’t let it go,” he said simply, regretfully. “He’s already killed five times—that I know of. And I suspect he has murdered even more. I don’t want to spend my entire life—our entire lives—looking over our shoulders for Dippel or his creatures. He has to be gotten rid of. They all have to be destroyed. Now. While we have the chance.”
Our lives. Our shoulders. Yes, she was involved too.
As a set of general guidelines for her life, Brice found the whole let’s-kill-them-all thing an unacceptable philosophy to live by. She had always had mixed feeling about the death penalty and favored gun control. But on this particular night, she was willing to embrace Dippel’s annihilation as her goal. She would worry about finding another loftier—and hopefully more pacifistic—ambition if she lived to see another day.
Resolved, if not particularly happy, Brice nodded jerkily and then straightened. She pushed back the sleeves of her borrowed robe. Thinking about Dippel persecuting Damien for all eternity made her angry, and that helped her to keep the other, undermining emotions away.
“I agree. So what can I do to help? Besides cower in a bathroom.”
“You can cower in the lawyers’ bathroom with a portable PC,” Damien said immediately. “I’ve just recalled that the offices on the fifth floor have wireless Internet. You can use that while the portable’s battery holds out. We’ll borrow one from Cyber QT. Someone is bound to have forgotten to lock theirs down before they left for the holiday.”
He didn’t suggest climbing all the way back up to his apartment to get her own portable, and neither did she.
Brice blinked.
“And do what with a PC?”
“Find out how to contact the police or fire department on-line—or the utility company. E-mail. Or maybe there is something for the hearing impaired. Anyhow, we need a fall-back plan if something goes wrong. I don’t want you stuck in here over Christmas.” Brice stared at him, wanting to protest his utterance of the unthinkable in case the perverse gods were listening. Something going wrong meant she needed a way out if he got killed.
“Don’t look like that, love,” he said gently, brushing a finger over her cheek. His eyes were serious, but not worried. “Nothing is going to go wrong—I already promised, didn’t I? This is just for luck. You know that if you go to a lot of bother, you’ll never need anything. It’s Murphy’s Corollary for Crises.”
She wanted desperately to argue, but she didn’t. As much as she hated the idea of Damien assuming the role of executioner and facing these creatures alone—and knew she would have a difficult time closing a dark door on the horrors of this night—Damien was correct. Heaven help them both! In spite of the danger, Dippel and his monsters had to be hunted down and destroyed. And she and Damien had to do it without outside help, if that was at all possible. Even if no one in authority ever asked difficult questions about the physical state of the corpses already scattered about—and the coroner would have to have lost all sense of sight and smell to miss how different these bodies were—they would surely want to know who had shot them.
Of course, that did rather beg the question of what they were going to do with all the bodies when they were finally exterminated, but Brice wasn’t going to ask about that plan. One horrib
le thing at a time was all she could manage.
“Okay, if it’s to be done, best it be done quickly,” she said, misquoting Shakespeare. “The sooner it’s over, the better for both of us. Let’s go steal a laptop, and then you can show me this fancy bathroom.”
“Thank you, love,” Damien said softly.
“Don’t thank me. I still think it’s wrong to split up and it’s bloody unfair that you should have to face the monsters alone.”
He nodded. “There’s an old Chinese proverb. It asks: Who must do the difficult thing? The answer is: He who can.”
Brice exhaled slowly and then nodded assent.
Chapter Fifteen
If people will stop at the first tense of “aimer” they must not be surprised if one finishes the conjugation with somebody else.
—Byron ( from a letter dated January 13, 1814)
Sorrow is knowledge, those who know the most must mourn the deepest, for the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.
—Byron
We die only once, and for such a long time.
—Molière
Brice sat on the counter in the most sumptuous bathroom she’d ever seen and did her best to find a way to contact the NYPD on the portable computer. It had taken her and Damien a while to find one at Cyber QT that wasn’t locked into a docking station and protected by a password.
Her cyber search wasn’t going well. You could submit an e-mail and someone would eventually get back to you—they promised. But there was no mention of when. For some reason, it seemed that most people didn’t choose to report all emergencies via e-mail. If they needed the police, they generally needed them right now. Likewise, the fire department seemed to feel that most people would prefer to phone in their emergencies. She could contact the utility company, but only if she had her account number and knew the name of the party she wished to e-mail.
Frustrated and unable to stop worrying about what Dippel might be doing, Brice decided that she needed to think about something else. Something engrossing. Naturally enough, she ruminated on her new and perhaps fragile relationship with Damien Ruthven—who had once been Lord Byron.
Lord Byron!
Only now he wasn’t, because he had let a homicidal doctor perform some mad experiment on him, the result of which was that he was now peculiar. Not quite human. A person forever in disguise.
“You don’t mean that. He’s human,” she whispered to herself, to the judgmental voice inside, hoping that she truly didn’t think otherwise. Brice didn’t usually use religious vocabulary to describe her feelings, but a few notions kept coming up in moments of terror that were uncomfortably close to the spiritual dogma she had long ago rejected. It bothered her. She didn’t like discovering that, in an emergency, she retreated to these shady places in the landscape of her psyche, ugly quagmires of old religious training where one might get stuck and even drown.
Judge not, lest ye be judged?
Exactly.
What would she have done if she were sitting—or, more accurately, lying—at the edge of her own mortality while her brain besieged itself with violent seizures? On the one hand, there was almost certain death. On the other, a chance at life—albeit one so different that it defied all known laws relating to human lifespan. What would she have done?
If she had had the power, wouldn’t she have used it the night her husband died? If she could have saved Mark, wouldn’t she have done the same thing, whatever the long-term effect?
And Damien hadn’t known what the outcome would be. He only thought he was curing his epilepsy.
Okay. Maybe that was true the first time. But what about the times after that?
Brice rubbed her forehead.
What? He should surrender and let epilepsy claim him now?
Look at it another way. Weren’t scientists the world over experimenting with similar things? With their work in medicine, weren’t they all seeking to prolong life? To cure disease? To end suffering from illness? How was what Damien did any different than Brice herself taking antibiotics or vitamins or having had her appendix out when she was twelve?
And, bottom line, could she really wish that Damien wasn’t here? That they had never met?
“No! God, no!” She was just afraid and lashing out.
Brice shifted restlessly, pulling her robe tighter. The extra ammunition Damien had pressed upon her tinkled against her borrowed gun.
There was no denying that Dippel was a perversion, an absolute monster, an absolute abomination in the eyes of nature and probably in the eyes of any divinity. True. But was that his fault? Sometimes experiments went awry, didn’t they? He could just be a victim.
And what did all this mean in regard to Damien? That was the key question here, wasn’t it? Would Damien eventually become a monster? Would his continued existence pervert him like it had seemed to pervert Dippel?
Brice thought for a while, but decided she was at a dead end. She couldn’t know if Dippel had always been a little off, and that was what had led him to this line of work; or if, just as likely, it was the work that had finally twisted him.
Of course, even this wasn’t the very bottom line. What was bothering her was what Damien had suggested—that she might also be able to make the change. She could, perhaps, extend her life. Be with him for centuries.
Brice glanced over at the mirrors that surrounded her. One look was enough. Even in the computer’s dim light, she could see that the skin beneath her eyes was painted with bruises. She looked tired. And old. At least, older than she ever had. How would she feel when these changes were permanent? When her hair grayed and her skin became lined? When she grew weary, and he remained young and healthy and vibrant? Would he be repulsed by her? Would he leave her rather than stay and see her ravaged by the diseases of old age? He had already sustained so many losses—could she ask him to endure another?
And yet, what would their life be like if she did make the change? Could any relationship sustain itself for centuries? What would happen if she did this thing—and then she and Damien eventually grew apart? Or what if she did this and felt changed inside? Unclean. Evil.
A part of Brice, a part she didn’t want to deal with just then, recognized that whatever she decided, she had already left her old existence behind. She might return to her cozy little house with its warped door, but her life—that safe little hollow of blissful ignorance—was over. The ocean of human experience was deeper than she’d ever thought. And monsters swam there. She’d never be able to pretend otherwise again.
And to think that she’d once spent her time worrying about the IRS and global warming!
Unhappy, and more than a bit confused, Brice looked down at the portable PC she had “borrowed” and started typing in a made-up account number for the utility company.
Just in case.
The barometer was falling again; he could feel it clouding his brain. The next wave of this unnatural, endless storm was about to hit.
Damien hated war; he always had. But at one time he had felt that war was the only answer in certain situations. Of course, sometimes it still was the only answer, but he loathed it now more than ever. Even, or perhaps especially, if his foe was the man who had extended his life.
It helped somewhat to think of this as a game—a deadly game, but one which could be won with intuition, experience, ruthlessness and a bit of luck. He didn’t let himself think about the fact that he was tired of holocausts, that a man shouldn’t be asked to see or participate in more than one in a lifetime. What happened now was a conflict he couldn’t avoid.
This war was also different for another reason. It was personal. He wasn’t here out of idealism, fighting an unknown enemy for some higher principle. He was here because his life—and Brice’s—were being threatened by someone in his past.
Damien had never gone to war for gain—personal or political. Always it had been to help people. Unfortunately, too often the help that came in military form left the very people you were trying to assis
t sitting in smoldering ruins. Such help meant death and destruction and lost as many lives as it saved. So, for Damien, deciding on a way to help the needy grew increasingly more difficult. Technology had only upped the ante. It was why he had moved into spying, rather than actual fighting. But even then, he could not escape the knowledge that there were consequences to his actions that affected innocent people. He didn’t drop bombs, but he told others where they should be placed. He didn’t invade villages, but he told generals where to send the dogs of war.
And sometimes innocent people got hurt because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Like Brice.
“Damn you,” he whispered—and he was speaking not just to Dippel, but to all the tyrants who had sought greatness with a sword.
Damnation. Did he believe in eternal punishment? He believed in hell. War had finally taught him to accept that there was such a thing. It wasn’t the hell of the theologians who had educated him as a child. Their claims of spiritual damnation had never seemed as terrifying as earthly bombs, mustard gas and the napalm he had seen. But he now believed that hell existed, and what was most fearsome was that it would last a very long time.
A smoke detector flashed annoyingly, throwing Damien’s shadow against a sterile white door. It made him recall the cafeteria on that floor, and so Damien jogged to the right.
He didn’t like the Memuria cafeteria. The place was aesthetically offensive. It was a stark white room filled with brushed-aluminum tables and plastic chairs, and had one long wall of vending machines whose humming gave him a headache. These things didn’t interest him. But the attached kitchen, and its potential collection of knives and cleavers, did.
Probably, everything would be locked up, but he was certain he could get in. He had to. He was low on ammunition, and with his new experiences that showed his foes were tough to make dead dead—he could just hope to make them dead enough to be sidelined—he couldn’t afford to pass up any potential equipment.
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