The Man Who Vanishes_a gripping horror thriller spanning 3 timelines_One Man. Everywhere.

by J M Gonzalez Riley

  Perhaps it had been stupid to leave Adain there. He would scream the place down when he woke, hoping to be heard by the cleaners or by security. But she’d had no other choice. If she let him go, he would go straight to Hopper with everything he knew. Hopper would invade her lab, hoping for a piece of the action, and her personal research would have to be abandoned. Forever.

  And she would face jail for the murder of Kayn.

  But that did not matter. She would soon be dead.

  She shuddered.

  Unlike Kayn, Adain had many friends who would miss him and were perhaps even now raising the alarm.

  It was just a matter of time.

  Dayna would be all over the news.

  But she didn't care.

  Not now.

  A shard of pain shot up her spine and across the left side of her head. She bent forth until her forehead touched the worktop, bent like the falling petals of a dying flower. She hugged herself hard, a sob racking through her aching body. The sounds of cheer grew louder outside as if mocking her, laughing at her suffering.

  Tears filled her eyes. She had denied herself grieving for longer than she could remember in order to focus. But now she was overcome with the frustration of failure, unable to carry on with her work. She was done.

  A stream of hot tears spilled freely from her eyes, down her cheeks, chocking her with grief. She let out a cry of anguish.

  Twelve months ago she had, under Kayn’s persistence, gone to her GP for a full check-up. She had been under stress, working on Seek, and had started suffering from bouts of pain that soon developed a frightful pattern. The outcome of that visit would change her life forever. Doctor Milner had called her at home the next day, where she had been told to rest, and asked her to come and see him immediately. The short journey to the GP's office had been the longest in her life. The doctor's grim news now echoed inside her head once again, as they had done on every waking moment, during every bout of pain, ever since. Dayna Zoff was dying. Dying of something inside her. Something that had taken seed and now grew in her, spreading inside her, a slow and painful death.

  Dayna had pleaded with her doctor not to tell her any more: she could not bear it. The doctor had objected at first but - though reluctantly – had finally agreed to her wish.

  She had twelve months, at the most.

  That was all she had wanted to know.

  That day, she had blocked the doctor’s number and locked herself at home for the rest of that grim week. After that, she had been forced to filter all incoming calls when the doctor had started calling her from different numbers. She did not want his counselling, his advise or his pity. She did not want to join any stupid society for the terminally ill, or embark on any fund-raising efforts to ensure somebody after her would be saved. She just wanted another chance for herself.

  Eventually, the doctor had resorted to emailing her every week. His messages were easier to ignore, but she had been surprised at his persistence. She was still, twelve months after his diagnosis, receiving and deleting his emails.

  She knew she was running away from a reality she could not face, but at the same time, the doctor’s emails could not change that reality.

  Why me? she had woken up screaming every night for the first month. She had applied herself to her work all her life, worked hard to keep herself in shape, passed on self-indulging binges, smoking and drugs. She had played by the rules, always being the best she could, for herself. But fate is blind. A ruthless, unfair bastard. And so for twelve long months she wondered, with every breath she took, every time the pain surfaced, tearing through her body, what she was dying of.

  Finally, she had dreamt up a way in which to beat the thing inside her. Kronus, her new browser, was a Trojan horse. Her real objective was to create a perfect copy of herself, atom by atom, and remove the shit that she was riddled with. Kronus had enabled her to get the space, time and hardware she needed. If it worked, she would save herself and change history in the process. She would be immortal in every sense of the word.

  But the binary that made up the copy was flawed.

  'Bastard!' she screamed, tearing at her hair, pushing herself away from the console, knocking over her cup. The shattering of glass masked the sound of music and laughter outside for a merciful instant.

  She stood up, warily, and began beating at herself with her fists, beating at her breasts, at her stomach, at her groin... beating at the thing inside her, pounding it to death, willing it to leave her shell, like the demon in some film she had once seen as a young girl. Then she keeled over into a heap of pain, on the floor, cutting herself on broken glass, sobbing uncontrollably.

  In her quest for self-preservation, she’d had to be ruthless. It had meant letting the filthy son-of-a-bitch Hopper inside her as and when he had pleased, so that she could ultimately play him like a puppet, because she had needed his power. In her quest, an innocent had been sacrificed. Kayn, poor, dear Kayn. Kayn whom she had liked dearly; Kayn who had been too shy to look her in the eye for more than a moment; Kayn who had been brilliant, who had helped her unravel the workings of the particle assembler, sharing her excitement at the endless possibilities that Kronus promised, utterly unaware of what she was trying to do for herself. Kayn who had volunteered to be copied, for her, because, secretly, he had loved her. And she had known all along. And she had betrayed that love, using it like she had used Hopper.

  When the first copy of Kayn had been flawed, she had grown desperate and he had pleaded with her to stop there, but she could not. Her life depended on it. How could he have been so fucking selfish? He was alive, and she was dying, and he wanted her to stop trying to save herself. And so she had copied him again, and again. Kayn, trapped in the hydro-chair, like an insect in a Venus flytrap. And then, finally, on the second day, he had stopped thrashing.

  Kayn who had never known what he died for, who had deserved an explanation.

  It should have been Adain, the annoying, arrogant, self-confident fuck who had made the Seek GUI-team by the skin of his teeth. It should have been him who was dead, not Kayn.

  Dayna sobbed, drowning the world outside her window. She cried for Kayn and for herself. Looking up from her sobbing, she spotted the memory card on the floor where it had fallen, in a pool of coffee, glinting under the artificial light. She stretched out and reached for it, holding it tenderly in her hand.

  'I'm so sorry,' she whispered, pressing it to her aching chest. 'Please forgive me.'

  Then she remembered it was Adain whom she was holding and, in a fit of rage, skimmed the card across the floor and through into the living room.

  The waves of pain subsided gently.

  Dayna went cold.

  Her twelve months were up. Doctor Milner had said twelve months at most.

  The tears had dried up. She waited for her heart to stop, utterly detached.

  Silently, she stood up, noticing the cuts on her legs, and went into the bathroom, issuing a command. The bath tub began to fill with hot water. She poured a selection of fragranced oils into the tub, mechanically, then began to undress, slowly, methodically, perhaps for the last time.

  Feeling numb, she gazed into the full-length mirror. It was hard to believe that a deadly snake wriggled inside her, rotting everything it touched. She felt a deep loss, looking at herself.

  She stepped into the bath, bitterly, sitting down, slowly. She pressed the hot water icon and kept her thumb on it until the temperature graph flashed red, feeling the water heating up, slowly at first, then painfully fast. Her skin felt like it was burning, but she didn’t move. She could no longer tell which pain emanated from inside and which pain was penetrating from the outside. Her body had turned into a battlefield.

  Dayna reached for the double-bladed razor in her bath tray and flipped the safety off, peering between the shiny blades, shaking with pain.

  She reached for her nail file and began prising the two blades off their casing. With little effort, the whole razor fell apart, one of
the blades falling in the tub, lost beyond the bubbling soap, the other coming to rest in her hand.

  Her skin was red raw, and yet the pain seemed to have deserted her all of a sudden.

  How ironic. You flee in the face of death.

  Dayna reached between her legs and found the runaway blade, pulling it up and blowing the soap away from it.

  She lay back in the tub, her red eyes stinging, welling up again. The tears came flooding once again.

  The blade ripped into her wrist, upward, drawing blood in a thick stream, turning the water red.

  'I have to do it,' she cried, her voice twisting in agony. 'There's nothing left for me. Please.'

  The cut was not deep enough. This, she knew instinctively. She placed the blade back inside the groove she had carved in her wrist, her vision blurring at the unbearable pain. She sobbed because the world did not care about her, laughing and dancing outside her house, celebrating her departure.

  But what if the doctor had been wrong?

  No. The pain was undeniably real. Something was alive inside her, growing fat, feeding on her.

  But what if the thing died?

  Shit. She did not even know what the fuck it was. She had been too weak to face reality. But now, suddenly, she wanted to know, so that she would know where to cut the bastard thing, where to hurt it.

  What if the thing could be killed? Or what if she at least defied the time she had been given, and lived much longer? Long enough, perhaps, for her to perfect Kronus?

  It had been twelve months already and she was still here. Maybe her body was fighting this thing just as she had been trying to fight it with her genius.

  Dayna dropped the razors in the water. The tub had turned a rich shade of scarlet. She stood up and slipped, banging her head on the tiles, cursing. She tried again, hanging on to the tub with one hand, stepping out of it carefully, her ears ringing loudly. She was red raw, her skin steaming, blistering in places.

  She steadied herself, hanging on to the door. She would call doctor Milner and ask him what she was dying of. Right now. She needed to know.

  Hey, you sentenced me to death a year ago and it's about to happen. I called you so my voice, my face and my life would be fresh in your mind when I go. Remember me, doc?

  Doctors had to deal with this shit all the time. Besides, he cared. His persistence proved that, if nothing else.

  She had wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, as the creator of the most brilliant software in modern history. Her work would have assured her immortality.

  She had just needed a little more time to get it right.

  She thought of the memory card, showing Kayn’s flawed binary.

  No. Adain’s binary.

  She went cold.

  She had woken up on her office couch, tired, her eyes heavy with sleep, had walked to her console, had pulled the card from it…

  Shit. Had she taken the wrong card? Had she taken Kayn’s binary instead of Adain’s?

  She couldn’t be sure.

  It was Kayn’s. It had to be. She’d picked up the wrong one, the one she’d been working with these past two days, always plugged into the same port in her console.

  Shit, shit, shit!

  She needed to act. Quickly. She still had time to beat this thing. Right now, her life meant more to her than it had ever done. This was the second chance she had been waiting for. She needed to get to the office. Now.

  Dayna looked down. Her left hand flapped uselessly at her side, sending flares of pain up her arm. Blood had dripped all down her leg and was pooling on the bathroom floor. The bathroom swam in and out of focus, her legs shaking uncontrollably.

  Don’t faint now, you stupid bitch!

  The cheers outside the house rose in favour of her defiance, like an army of courage, lending her strength. She wanted to run outside and join the cheers, join in the life. She screamed at the pain inside her, screamed and gained strength by doing so. She was going to beat this thing and anything else that came her way.

  Dayna stepped toward the cabinet, avoiding the mirror, opening the first aid box and searching inside for bandages. Her right hand was shaking uncontrollably. She spilled the contents on to the floor and grabbed a roll of bandages, but she couldn’t rip the plastic off with one hand.

  She cursed, dropping the bandages, reaching into the hot steam, searching for the towel rail. She wrapped a hand towel around her bleeding wrist, cursing out loud at the pain.

  Adrenaline was rushing through her now, egging her along with the cheers outside. She stumbled out of the bathroom, a rush of steam flowing out like an army of ghosts, rushing ahead of her toward the living room.

  Call an ambulance. An ambulance. An ambulance. No pain. No pain.

  She was about to instruct the voice system when she caught sight of something that made her look up toward the living room and stop dead.

  It was the man from yesterday. He was back.

  He was holding the memory card in his hand. The one she had skimmed across the kitchen floor earlier.

  How could she have forgotten about the man? She had meant to have her alarm system inspected, had meant to have the locks changed, had meant to do so many things…

  But there simply wasn’t enough time.

  They stared at each other for an eternity, and then, the man exploded into action, coming at her fast, teeth bared, clearing the gap in five paces. And all she could do was watch, dumbstruck, as he fell upon her.

  He struck her across her face, knocking her backward like a rag doll across the floor. White-hot pain exploded in her head, hot blood pouring from her broken nose like the water in the bathtub.

  She lay there, half conscious, no longer able to defend herself, felt the man hovering over her. Her eyes closed when something like a hot iron struck her across the face. There was a sickening crunch, loud in her head, and she wriggled in agony with the unbelievable pain. There was a deafening, high-pitched yell somewhere close by. When she opened her eyes, she realised she was screaming. Her left arm lay limp beside her. There was blood everywhere.

  The man was looking down at her. Her eyes stung like mad, puffing up, closing up. He grabbed her and pulled her up effortlessly, his eyes wild with fear. He had intended to steal the card and slip out unnoticed. But now, he was suddenly out of his depth, made all the more dangerous by his fear.

  He dropped her and Dayna hit the floor, barely able to see. She lay, wriggling in agony, gasping for breath.

  How the fuck does this man get into my house whenever he wants?

  A puddle of blood formed around her quickly. Everything had gone quiet outside the house.

  The man looked down at her. He was shaking, sweating profusely. He showed her the card in his hand, and nodded, once, twice. Then he fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a gun.

  He’s going to kill me. Shit no. Please, no!

  Then he shot her. No words, no explanation. One, two shots in the gut.

  Dayna had the sudden satisfaction of knowing for certain that the bullets had torn through the thing inside her, killing it as it was killing her. Doctor Milner had been wrong after all: she had died of bullets in the end, and she had killed the shit inside when her heart stopped beating, not the other way around.

  And in her dying breath she saw the man who had come to deliver her from evil disappear into nothingness, like an angel, fading into a shower of blue sparks.

  In Dayna’s living room, the console flashed with new mail. A short melody played: SunCorpSoft’s jingle. Dayna’s automation rule applying to all work mail triggered and the email opened itself, filling her screen.

  It was from Adain. The digital stamp, however, showed that he had sent it from her console, in her office. Just now.

  The email read:

  I’m alive.

  To be continued…

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  Copyright © 2001 by J M Gonzalez Riley (updated 2018)

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