The minutes came and went. Susan worked with other patients being brought in, for large segments of McKenzie’s software kept her quiet and passive. It was late afternoon before she hit the segment in which Craig had the most invested.
McKenzie’s hands shook, even as her fingers curled, and she said in an audible voice. “No. No. I can’t. I can’t. Let sleeping dogs lie. Don’t wake. Don’t awaken them. Please.”
Susan pumped up the blood pressure cuff to take a reading. The pulse had jumped, though it surged strongly. The doctor smiled with satisfaction.
The moment when McKenzie stopped fighting the image, bent, and took up the basketball bat, came out crystal clear on the tape. She tossed her head from side to side and fought the impulse.
Then the hand curled as if it grasped something firmly. Hefted it. Swung it lightly.
Susan Craig patted her on the knee. “Good. Good girl.”
There was no response to her, but the monitor needles began to jump. The doctor watched everything, smiling. “Good girl.”
No more beaches, no more sunny glens or shadowy, dew-tipped woods. Pine needles no longer cushioned her burning feet. She walked in an urban jungle now, dilapidated houses, walls layered with graffiti, and the fog which roiled up was a dirty, stinking condensation.
And I am the hunter, Mac thought, and wrapped her fingers tightly around the handle of her bat. She searched the deserted streets for shadows. She listened for footsteps before or after her, chest tight with apprehension, shoulders hunched with anxiety.
She’d known ever since she’d picked up the bat that the tide was turning. That things were changing. All the running, all the throat-lancing panic, changed. Now she had a choice.
A choice to keep running or be a victim no more. There was power in the bat, in the old weathered wood whose feel her hands knew so well. McKenzie had lost her way, but now she was back. The power ran through her fingers, lightninged up her wrists and into her arms, rested in her shoulders, dormant. Dormant but there, reserved, power .
Something went skittering away from her. She half-turned to see it go, scaly tail dragging behind it, a moth-eaten rat running from her. She knew that it was she who’d scared it. No one else.
She turned the corner. The neighborhood looked vaguely familiar, in that way that she sometimes dreamed of her home and it would be her home yet not be her home, not really. This was her neighborhood. Mac knew that instinctively. Her neighborhood and she was stepping onto its streets for the first times in years, unafraid.
Flash. Running and hiding in the neighbor’s hedge.
She took a step past the oleander boundaries. Grapestake fences sagged, weathered and termite-ridden.
Flash. Her father screaming in her face.
She curled her fingers so tightly around the bat handle that she could feel a knuckle pop. She could feel an answering surge of power.
Never again.
Don’t let it wake up. Don’t. Smother it. Let sleeping dogs lie. Walk away.
Her chest felt tight. The breath seemed to be squeezing in and out of her through a narrow, constricted passageway. Walk softly, but carry a big stick.
The biggest. She looked down at the piece of wood. So faint against the grain: Louisville Slugger. An antique, an icon, among bats.
She saw her house, vaguely recognized it. She turned down the driveway to come in the back, the way she always had when she was growing up. In the back, to the kitchen, to the heartbeat of the house. Before she stepped up, she could see lights going on, as twilight fell, and shadowy figures moving behind the curtains.
Mac watched, torn by the need to run, to hide, and the need to ... what? She didn’t know, couldn’t identify it. Not the need to be safe, for it was not a haven she was entering. Confrontation faced her once she crossed the threshold.
She walked into the house.
“Who’s there?” Shouted at her from rooms beyond, shadowy rooms, unlit rooms, beyond the bright pulsating heart of the kitchen.
Who do you want it to be? She tapped the bat once lightly against the side of her shoe as if she were knocking off dirt from baseball cleats. Who am I?
Flash. Blood dropping in runnels along the floor, golden-red dog’s body lying in disarray.
McKenzie blinked. She put up her free hand and waved it through the air, searching, as if cobwebs obscured her vision. The quicker than the eye vision of murdered Cody did not flicker away. He stayed there, in the corner of the kitchen, her kitchen— no—no —which kitchen? She could not remember. An icy emotion seized her. She walked past the dog’s body and kept on going.
“Who the hell is there?” she answered back.
As she passed into the hallway, listening for the familiar creak of the hardwood floors, shadows grew longer, darker, deeper. She turned her face slightly toward them. She would be aware. Alert. Empowered.
Darkness leaped at her, grunting with a man’s voice; she swung about. McKenzie planted her feet. Ready. The man charged at her and she swung, swung with all her might, swung from her shoulders and her hips, toeing the plate.
Home run!
The man slumped down to the floor, soundlessly, his face a red ruin. Breathing hard, arms tingling with the release of the power, McKenzie leaned down. She clubbed him one more time to make sure he stayed down. She stared at the features.
Jack? No. It couldn’t be ... her father? Mac leaned closer.
Carter Wyndall.
She straightened. “You killed my dog, you son of a bitch.”
He wouldn’t do it again.
She would never have to run again.
McKenzie panted. Her head felt heavy, so heavy her neck couldn’t hold it up any longer. Heavy and weighted, encompassed.
Flash. Susan Craig’s soft voice. “Who do you want to kill?”
A man stood behind her. He reached around and took the bat from her.
“Very good,” he said.
“Did I do all right, Georg?”
“You did fine.” The man smiled, with a warmth that never reached his hard eyes.
McKenzie’s hands felt strange, empty.
“Wake up and smell the blood,” he said. “Taste it. Enjoy it. He’ll never bother you again. Serves the son of a bitch right.” He dipped a finger in the blood and traced a sun, a crescent moon, and stars on the wall behind the body. “Immortality,” he said. “Neverness. Pain.”
Never again.
McKenzie fought to breathe.
“Oh. My. God.”
Sweet Jesus, Joyce thought. I’ve died and gone to the Valley. There must be some mistake.
She couldn’t be dead. The promise was that all wounds would heal, all spirits would be made whole, all aches and pains and discomforts of the physical world would be gone. She ached as if she’d been dropped from a ten-story building, was as cold as hell, and her stomach burned like it needed a raft of antacids.
She couldn’t be dead.
No. She was probably laid out on one of the tables in the morgue since she remembered going down as if Grady had yelled timber—
Joyce let out a shout and got up almost without opening her eyes. The two attendants who’d been leaning over her screamed in panic.
The three of them faced each other, weak-kneed. Grady’s face paled to the color of ashes. His companion, a young woman in her late twenties, panted until she swayed from hyperventilation and Joyce braced herself on the pathology table. She felt like Rochester in an old Jack Benny movie.
“You didn’t think I was dead, did you?” she asked wildly, looking at them closely.
“Oh. My. God,” the girl repeated. She wrapped a blonde tress around one finger and tried to breathe normally.
“Ah, no, we knew you weren’t dead. But,” and Grady put up a hand. “I couldn’t catch you. You’re, um, heavier than you look and swept me right off my, ah, feet.”
“I fainted.”
“You fainted.”
Joyce straightened up. She pulled her blouse and suit jacket around sli
ghtly, untwisting them. “How long have I been out?”
“Um. About ... a little over an hour. I’d say so, wouldn’t you?” Grady looked desperately at the Valley Girl attendant, who must have been his supervisor.
“Like that,” she agreed.
“I didn’t want to get in any trouble,” Grady said. He gulped. “So we just put you in the empty viewing room to let you rest.”
“Your pupils weren’t all dilated or like that or anything,” the girl added.
Joyce could only thank her stars that they dealt with the already deceased. She checked her watch. Their little over an hour was closer to two hours. Like the White Rabbit, she was late, late, late. “Do you have an office? A phone?”
“Well.” They swapped looks. “We’re not supposed to let anybody use it. Not the public or anything. There are pay phones upstairs in the lobby....”
“Forget that. You owe me. While you had me laid out here like Sleeping Beauty, I missed a court appearance. I need to make a call.” She flashed her eyes at them like she would have one of her kids who was having trouble getting to the homework.
They moved like they’d been jump-started. “Follow me Miss Tompkins.”
Joyce passed him in the hallway.
Carter slept. He knew he was sleeping, which made it easier to bear the dream, the dream of passing through endless corridors painted with the rusty-red pictographs of a madman’s visions. His head began to pound with every footstep he took, every footfall of his shoes a thundering boom upon the hall floors. Boom, boom, boom! His temples throbbed and his neck cramped. He put a hand up to ease it and woke himself up, half-falling from his chair in front of the computer.
Bam, bam, bam! The front door shook with every blow. Sleepily, exhausted, Carter hauled himself to his feet and fumbled at the lock. Dolan, leaning on it, fell over the threshold. Carter blinked. He looked back at the computer. “You were there. Now you’re here.” He stifled a massive yawn.
“No shit, Sherlock.” Dolan’s face was flushed from the warm sun, bringing the last two or three pimples, remnants of his expired teenhood, to volcanic proportions. “I thought you might want to see this in person. I didn’t know I’d have to raise the dead to do it.”
“See what?”
“What we, I, downloaded off CyberImago.”
Carter sat back down. “That was hours ago.”
“I’ve been fooling with it off and on all day. I’m not exactly getting paid for this.”
“You’re not?”
Dolan gave him an exasperated tilt of the head. “Shall we pump caffeine into you, or do you think you can stay awake for this?”
Caffeine sounded good. He sent Dolan to the kitchen for some bottled iced tea. Dolan came back with a couple of long neck bottles and tossed him one. He drained the bottle in three long gulps. Feeling revived, he dragged a second chair over next to his. “Anything in the fax?”
Dolan looked before he came and sat. “No. Expecting something?”
“Yeah. It’s FYI, so keep your hands off it.”
Dolan held both hands in the air. “I don’t touch or read anything I’m not supposed to.”
“Right.” He sucked the last few drops out of the bottle and tossed it across the room. The Bureau would send him material when they could. He’d grown to trust Franklin and Sofer. “Okay. What have you got?”
‘I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve heard about it, rumors, y’know, stuff like that. From the ’50s and again in the ’70s. Buy popcorn, drink Coke. You know.”
Carter looked at Dolan. Words were coming out of his mouth, and Carter was listening, but he hadn’t heard anything that made any sense. “What are you talking about?”
“This.” Dolan stabbed a finger at the computer monitor as the color screen filled with generated images that were as sharp as any cinematography he’d ever seen.
Carter sat back in his chair, watching a seascape from the rugged but scenic coastline of Northern California, or perhaps it was Oregon. The spray of the incoming tide flumed off the rocks like white feathers, before raining down onto the sand and foaming away. Driftwood logs rocked under the assault. Yet it was peaceful.
“Dolan.”
The other’s eyes fairly shone. “Great, isn’t it? Really good. And then there’s this.” He stopped the frame with a click of the mouse and the editing file he had brought up from another program.
Carter jumped. “Jesus!”
He looked into the sadistic face of Georg Bauer. Smiling at him. Eyes watching him. “Where did that come from?”
“From the program. It’s subliminal, Carter. That frame would float by so quickly you’d never consciously realize you saw it. Software isn’t regulated yet like the movies are. And who would even think to look?” Dolan advanced another few frames.
A double-bladed knife, dripping with blood.
Carter gripped the edge of the computer desk. “You would, Dolan. You would. How much are we looking at?”
“Not much more, unfortunately. They shut us down pretty quickly.”
“Can we prove it’s them?”
“It’s CyberImago?” Dolan shook his head. “Not with this. We’d have to get our hands on the original software ... something packaged with the logo, maybe even copyrighted.” He shot a look at Carter. “Worried about legal?”
“Only if I have to make the evening edition.” But he didn’t. Not this time. He stared at the screen. He had the connection he wanted, between Bauer and Susan Craig, but he had no idea why or what it meant or what it could ultimately lead to.
He only knew he had to get Mac out of there. He pulled back his sleeve cuff. “Almighty. It’s after four.”
Dolan slapped a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve been asleep, bro.”
He swiveled in his chair. Dolan had no idea how right he was. Carter felt as though he’d been asleep for the last decade. Now this had jolted him awake.
“What is it, Carter?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what she’s doing and I’m damn well sure she isn’t going to tell me if I walk up and ask.”
He might even get killed for his effort, like John Nelson. His fingers twitched. “I’ve got nothing but a shitload of bad feelings.”
Chapter 32
“Incoming,” informed Dolan. He stood by the fax machine, his hand wrapped around a slice of pizza. “I hope you’ve got a lot of paper or a big memory. This looks to be a whale of a transmission. And it looks official, too.”
Carter came in from the kitchen, two more bottles of tea between the fingers of his left hand, and a similar piece of pizza folded in his right hand. He’d showered and changed, and his hair was slicked wetly back from his forehead. Barefoot, he walked over to the dinette table and sat, listening to the fax feeding up pages.
“That’s got to be the Bureau.”
“Franklin and Sofer?”
“The same.”
“What did you do to deserve this? These look like copies of an investigation.” Dolan joined him. Having emptied his hand, he refilled it with another slice.
“That would be telling.”
Dolan pulled a long string of hot cheese from his lips. “As long as you didn’t go to bed with ’em.”
“Not my type.”
“Really? I thought the redhead was kind of cute. In a crawled out from under a rock sort of way.”
“They all look like that. Everyone’s got a tan, out here.” Carter looked over a second piece of pizza critically. “You didn’t get anchovies, did you? I thought I told you no anchovies.”
“Would I do that to you?”
“A man who would rewrite another man’s copy without permission would do anything.”
Dolan squirmed. “That was a long time ago. I was just a green intern then.”
“You’re still green.”
“Yeah, but now I’m earning money.”
The fax machine made a noise and a red light came on. Dolan jumped.
“It’s out of paper. Go put i
n a new roll. It’ll hold everything in memory and start fresh on a new page, then back up when the transmission’s ended and print out the memory.”
“No kidding.” Dolan got up and did what he was told. “I guess all the excuses you’re always making about the fax machine screwing up don’t hold water.”
Death Watch Page 35