Death Watch

by Elizabeth Forrest

  “The Nintendo lounge is open. Can you play?”

  “I thought the warden didn’t let you out.”

  He flashed a grin. “They haven’t built a jail cell yet that can hold me. Anyway, do you play?”

  “A little.”

  “I see you’ve got your padded cell suit. Come on, let’s go before all the good games are gone.”

  McKenzie swung her feet to the floor. “I’m supposed to have some tests.”

  Brand shrugged. “They’ll come find you. How far can you run?”

  Running. Like a slash across her eyes. Cody, weaving his way through a maze of tunnels—

  “Mac?”

  “Yes.” She had herself braced at the foot of the hospital bed.

  “You spacing out on me?”

  “I ... must have been.”

  Brand wrinkled his nose. “Don’t take your meds. Pretend to swallow them, then spit them down the toilet or something. Otherwise you’ll be so full of dope you’ll be a zombie.” He made a noise of disgust. “I gotta have somebody around here I can talk to.”

  “Right.” Mac pushed away from the bed. The vision fled, leaving vertigo in its place, a moment of instability when she literally could not tell top from bottom. Then it, too, faded and she was at the door. Brand looked quizzically up at her. She shrugged and made a face of tics and grimaces. “What are you waiting for?”

  “You’re stupid,” he commented with delight and dragged her out into the corridor.

  Susan slept late. The lunch trays were already being put away when she entered the lab. Miller sat at his computer terminal, a can of soda at one elbow and a gnawed-on apple at the other. The sounds of Tetris came from the computer as he tapped keys frantically in response to the falling shapes.

  Her mouth tensed, but she decided not to scold him for playing games on the work machines. Miller was not an outstanding technician, but he did his work without questions or a second thought, which suited her quite well. She was as certain as she could be that the moment he went home, the day’s work disappeared from his skull. When the time came for her to move on, and it would, even if she solved the current crises, that unremarkable memory of Miller’s could be worth its weight in gold.

  “Did you get the Smith girl retested?”

  “Yeah.” He tapped a disk sitting on top of the monitor, lost a moment in the frantic pacing of the game, and moaned in frustration. He cleared the screen to start again, and paused. “I had to look all over for her.”

  “Look for her? Where could she have gone? I had enough thorazine in her to bring down an elephant. She had a bad night.”

  “She was in the game room with Brand X.”

  Susan paused in folding her suit jacket. She laid it carefully over the back of her chair. “With Brandon?”

  “Yeah.” His attention went avidly back to the game screen. “I’ve got ten more minutes of lunch.”

  “That’s fine,” she answered abstractedly. There was no reason for the uneasiness she felt over the pairing of the boy and the young woman, but she didn’t like it, all the same. Until she was finished with Smith, she’d have to find a way to keep the two of them apart. Just in case. “What were the two of them doing?”

  “Playing Super Mario.”

  A game of concentration and reflexes. Susan considered the ramifications and decided to increase the dosage being prescribed. She sat down at her terminal and loaded the new exam disk, sharp blue eyes narrowed. It was the nature of entropy that things would, sooner or later, begin to decay.

  But it was much too soon for what she had planned. If she was going to be forced out of here, to cut and run and start over, then she’d do it on her own terms. If a retreat was in order, she’d make certain the enemy had wounds of their own, suffering of their own, to take care of.

  First, there was Ibie Walker.

  If all went extremely well with Ibie, then perhaps a retreat would not even be necessary.

  Secondly, there was Stephen Hotchkiss. She had to determine what his next move would be. He might understand instinctively that he had to follow her suggestions. Or he might need to be nudged further along.

  Or he might need to be dealt with altogether.

  It might also depend on how much she could count on Dudley. His personality was beginning to show the stress. He needed another overlay, but she was uncertain if that would put him beyond her ability to handle him. He had begun to show the classic signs of disintegration, and they both could ill afford it.

  Frowning at the possibilities and alternatives, she did not notice at first the results coming up on the screen. When she did, she sucked in a hissing breath. Miller stopped what he was doing and swung around to look at her.

  She raised an eyebrow as she met his dweebish expression. “Lunch hour,” she said carefully, “must surely be over by now.”

  Without hesitation, he shut the computer down. “Right. Who’s up next?”

  “We’ll be working with the speech therapy for Ibie Walker.”

  “The soundboard?”

  She nodded. Miller, of the weak chin and lank hair, flashed a sudden smile. “I’m working a double shift today. I’ll go set up the equipment.”

  “Do that.”

  As his footsteps faded, Susan turned back to the monitor. She touched the command for the printer. It began to tractor feed paper and print out as she read the screen.

  The results were scarcely different from yesterday’s readings.

  She tapped a thumb on the keyboard, lost in thought. All the work she had done, all the research, all the imprinting, had been done from the aggressor’s point of view. Her hopes of finding an empathic match had been dashed time and again, if not by personality disintegration of the subject, then by fear of discovery by the authorities.

  But she had never, ever considered trying from the view of the victim.

  Until now.

  Susan leaned close to read the screen. “Who are you, little woman, and what are you doing to my program? Just what do you think you can get away with?”

  As the spikes and grids flashed past her eyes, she began to come to a decision.

  Brand crowed as he successfully brought his character through a colorful segment and punched his fist into the air as the Nintendo screen flashed a score in starburst. Then he caught sight of the doctor watching them from the game room door, and he scowled.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s her ,” he answered, putting aside his control pad. He leaned forward and saved their progress in the console, then snapped the television screen off as well.

  McKenzie stood up, a little more stiffly than she’d anticipated, not wondering that her adult body had not taken to the floor seating the way Brand’s frame had. She watched as the doctor wove her way through the rec room to them.

  Dr. Craig folded her arms lightly over her white jacket. “Nurse tells me you didn’t eat lunch today, Brand.”

  He bounded to his feet. “Didn’t feel like it.”

  The silvery-blonde woman inclined her head slightly. “That’s not our deal, is it?”

  The boy refused to look the doctor in the eye. Finally, he shrugged, saying, “I guess.”

  Craig brought up a slim wrist to catch the time. “It’s not too late. I’ve had a tray put in your room. You don’t have to eat everything, but I want you to make an effort. I asked them not to make it too awful. Okay?”

  He shuffled a bare foot. “I guess,” he repeated.

  “Then I guess you’d better go.” She put a hand lightly on his shoulder, urging him.

  Brand rolled an eye at McKenzie and went. The doctor waited until he was gone from the room and then turned back. She was smiling.

  “Glad he found somebody to relate to. I hate to make him eat, but he needs to.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a manic-depressive. Dr. Whatley treats him with drugs, of course, but nutrition has something to do with it. We’re trying to impress on him the importance of what and when he eats. The
more stable we can keep his mood swings, the better off he’ll be.”

  “Who’s Dr. Whatley?”

  “He’s the head of Psychiatric, actually. He’s been out on seminar. He’s not due back until the end of this week. I work with Brand on self-esteem and a new form of therapy which uses rapid eye movement—are you familiar with that?”

  McKenzie thought. For a moment, she dizzied and as she looked at Susan Craig, she saw a wet, ruby veil drop across her face and then disappear. She blinked, hard. “No ... I don’t think so....”

  “It’s relatively new. The therapist trained in it takes a patient who’s suffered trauma, recent or even long past— there’s been some success with Vietnam vets—anyway, the patient follows a series of hand movements visually. Or watches software, in the helmet, as you were doing this morning. Somehow, and we’re still not sure how, the mind gets retrained and focused, and the traumatic memory is reduced so that the patient can handle it.”

  The doctor had begun to escort her across the game room.

  “I thought Brand’s problem was psychiatric.”

  “It is, mainly. But he also witnessed the death of his father when he was very young and that seems to trigger problems. So he gets to wear the helmet, too, twice a day.” In the corridor, Susan Craig faced Mac triumphantly. “You wouldn’t believe what we can do with that little virtual reality helmet. Or what we can diagnose.”

  McKenzie felt a pinprick of ice on the back of her neck. It began to spread.

  “You’ve read my results?”

  “Yes, I have.” The doctor nodded. “Your concussive symptoms are extremely mild, according to the spatial and other results. However....”

  She knows . McKenzie felt her whole body go cold. She had to know that Mac was seeing things, terrible, horrific things that were entirely a figment of her imagination. Crazy ....

  “I wanted to suggest to you that you’d be a good candidate for therapy yourself. The trauma of domestic violence is as severe as any wartime experience. It would be voluntary. I can’t force you, and since Dr. Whatley isn’t here, he can’t put it on your orders. But,” and the slender woman’s smile grew warmer, “I’d like you to consider it.” That wrist flashed up again as she consulted her watch.

  “In fact, I have someone coming into my lab now for yet another kind of therapy. Why don’t you come in, watch, see for yourself? Then when I’m finished, you can sit in for a session, if you like.” Susan put her hand on McKenzie’s wrist as if sensing her withdraw slightly.

  How could she not? She felt as though she were being peeled away. “I don’t ... I’m not....”

  “Please consider it,” Craig said seriously. “And there’s another possibility. With your cooperation, we might be able to re-create the scenario through computer animation.”

  “The scenario?”

  “The attack,” amplified Craig, irritation edging her voice. “The violence which brought you here in the first place. The police have just begun using crime scene scenarios to work up cases during the investigation, not just for court presentation. If you cooperate, I think we can present Officer Moreno with some persuasion that you were attacked by your ex-husband. A custom-made program, from your memories.”

  “In virtual reality?”

  “Of course. Interested?”

  How could she not be?

  Chapter 23

  “Don’t do it.” Brand’s tone was sullen. Mac watched the way he pushed his food around his plate, picking rather than eating. It didn’t look too bad, actually, the hospital equivalent of chicken nuggets and baby corn, with french fries, and some electric neon blue flavor of gelatin in a cup on the side.

  She pinched a fry. It had been oven-baked, but it was edible. Tasty, even. She pinched a second fry and Brand leveled his betrayed expression on her. “They could be drugged.”

  Mac snipped the fry in two with an even bite and waved the remainder of it. “They’re not bad. Wouldn’t they have some sort of groady aftertaste if they were drugged?”

  He blinked. “Maybe,” he said dubiously. He speared a couple and ate them. “Maybe not.” He opened his mouth to show the half-chewed food. “My tongue turn some weird color?”

  She had to puzzle out the words, muffled as they were by the mulched-up fries. Mac shook her head emphatically. “Not yet.” She was betting on the gelatin.

  He looked almost disappointed. He pushed his food around some more. “I’m not really hungry. Why don’t you eat some more so it’ll look like I did.”

  “I can’t do that. Besides, you need it.”

  His stomach chose that moment to growl loudly, bubbling discontent into the air.

  Mac acknowledged the noise. “Even your body says differently. Your system has to stay in balance—”

  He shoved the tray away viciously. “Cut the crap, okay? You’re not my doctor and not my mom.”

  She sat on the end of his bed. He dropped his chin, not looking at her, and folded his arms over his stomach as if he could quell the hungry sounds by sheer effort. His face looked pale in the hospital room lighting, and there was a light sweat over his forehead.

  “So what’s your point?” Mac asked lightly.

  “The point is ... the point is, I have a mom. But she’s not here. She’s never here.”

  “She isn’t supposed to be, is she?”

  Brand looked at her fiercely. “If your kid was in the hospital, would you let some flaky old doctor keep you away? For weeks? Would you?”

  Her temple throbbed briefly, but her vision stayed clear. She rapped him on the knee, thinking of Cody and how she’d failed him. “I don’t know what I’d do.”

  Brand picked up a chicken nugget and threw it across the room. It made a moist smack against the beige wall and slid to the floor. “Well, I’d do something. I would. I will!”

  Joyce would be back later. Maybe Carter would visit. “Brand.”

  He looked at her, his eyes sunken, pink-rimmed.

  “What if I had a friend call your mother? Tell her you miss her. See what happens.”

  “Could you?”

  She nodded, then added, “I can’t guarantee anything.”

  “I know.” He opened the tiny drawer in the tray table. “They won’t let me have pencils or pens. Too sharp. But I’ve got crayons.” He pulled them out and began to write furiously on his paper napkin. “Hide it,” he ordered as his fingers flew. “Don’t let anybody else see it.”

  “All right.” She watched him as he laboriously wrote out a message, choosing different crayons for emphasis, then folded the napkin in half and gave it to her. The tension in his thin body seemed to evaporate as the message changed hands. Mac forced a smile. “Now you finish your lunch for me.”

  “Deal.” He began to stuff the food into his face.

  She stood. “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you later. If I get through this lab in time, we can play some more Nintendo before dinner.”

  He nodded vigorously, the thatch of his uncombed hair bobbing. Mac slipped out of the room.

  Councilman Walker brought an entourage with him, a nurse pushing his wheelchair, a proud, beautiful young African-American woman with her hair in dreadlocks, and an immaculately suited Hispanic man on her heels. The councilman himself was propped in his chair, one arm lying weakly across the arm of it, IV tubes tangling with oxygen tubes, and a machine on its table being wheeled in tandem with the chair.

  The left side of his mahogany, seamed face drooped markedly as he looked about the long laboratory room. His gaze swept Mac, went on and came back, measuring her.

  Down but not out, she thought. Incapacitated but not crippled. He would, she could see instinctively, do everything in his power to regain what he’d lost. He might even be impatient and querulous in the process. She put a hand to her neckline, suddenly unable to understand why looking at him made her throat tight and hard.

  The female aide brought the chair to a halt at Susan Craig’s desk, and leaned over to whisper something. He made a feeble wa
ve, dismissing it. She spoke again, more sharply, and this made Ibie Walker sit up straighter. He tried to shake his head but did not complete the gesture, ending up with his head wobbling feebly as he sank back into the wheelchair. Susan sat, fiddling with what looked like a headset, and did not acknowledge any of them.

  The nurse straightened him a little. Looking up, she said to both the young woman and the man, “I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  The young woman’s voice rose. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m watching you like a hawk.”