Death Watch

by Elizabeth Forrest

  But it was the major setup which drew Mac’s attention like a magnet. The monitor was alive, and a face filled the screen. His dark brown hair had been neatly combed back, and the hazel eyes glowed with life, the flecks of gold and green in those caramel depths gleaming like flames of fire. She knew that face, those eyes. Fingers that dipped in blood and drew. She wanted to turn away from that stare, that watcher, a predator waiting for the prey to make the tiniest of moves, like a cat or a raptor. One small motion and the chase would begin. The eyes were unblinking, eternal.

  Mac stopped breathing as Susan wheeled her around to look at it.

  “Meet the sleeping man. McKenzie Smith, this is, or was, Georg Bauer.”

  She managed to take a breath as the screen did not respond. She looked into a photo, a still picture, as lifelike as any reproduction.

  But it was not alive.

  Susan Craig touched the monitor screen gently with her fingertips. “Put her in the chair, Dudley,” she said absently.

  Scowling, Dudley untied Mac’s arms and lifted her in his. He dumped her in the contour chair in front of the computer.

  Without looking around, Susan ordered, “Secure the feet and left arm only.”

  “She could get loose.”

  “Once she’s in the program, she won’t even try. She needs to wear the glove.”

  Don’t let him waken.

  She must have spoke aloud, for the other woman looked back over her shoulder, and her mouth stretched with irony.

  “That’s what I kept you alive for, McKenzie. You’ve met with him before. Now you’re going to join him, for me. We’ll work together, you and I.” Susan broke off, humming a few bars of “Beautiful Dreamer.”

  Dudley carefully secured her to the new chair. The only good thing about him was that his muscular body broke her field of vision, and the deadly stare of the man on the computer screen. When he had finished, she found her voice.

  “He’s a monster.”

  The cold blue eyes looked into hers. “You don’t know him the way I do. But you will.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “He’s dormant,” agreed Susan. She tapped the computer. “But not in here. I have him broken down, fragmentized, everything that he was and could be. The force of his personality—I’ve been studying the effects of his imprints for years.”

  “You killed him.”

  Her mouth tightened a moment. “No,” Craig answered. “But Georg and I both knew that he was ... socially unacceptable. That we could never have a life within the norms. So we did what we had to, and this is what I was left with. His essence. His psychological soul, if you will. Digitized into virtual reality.”

  “You keep trying to recreate him.”

  “Yes.”

  Dudley came toward her with the VR helmet. McKenzie jerked wildly away. “Brand,” she said.

  “Yes. Only partially successful. He had his own wild personality traits. Dudley here is a far better copy, but then, I had excellent raw material to work with. But, again, he has his own life. He does not wish to live as a copy of another man, and I would not wish him to.”

  Dudley grabbed Mac harshly by the chin as she tried to snap at him.

  He began to pull the helmet over her head.

  “Why me?” cried McKenzie.

  “Because you bring reality into virtual reality. You create and manipulate what is not in the software, the program. I don’t want to create a legion of serial killers. I don’t know how you interface, I only know that you do. You can meet him face-to-face without my imprinting him over your own matrix.

  You’ll bring him out. You the victim, he the hunter. Two halves of the same equation.”

  “Why?” screamed Mac again, struggling against Dudley and the chair, afraid as she had never been in her life. All the flashes she had ever seen began to careen through her mind.

  “To cure Georg Bauer, naturally.” Susan’s face lit with the first genuine, warm smile Mac had seen from her. “I hope you enjoy meeting him.”

  Dudley thumped the helmet down, shutting her into twilight.

  Flash. Her father placing the bat in her hands. The wood, new and shiny. The weight, heavy. Walton Smith smiling, his eyes bloodshot from a hangover the day before, but his love fresh as the new day. “Just swing when you’re comfortable, Mac,” he said. “Don’t try to hit a home run. Just get on base.”

  She seemed to hold the bat firmly in her hands. Had she done this before? She moved hesitantly forward into the neighborhood of California tract homes.

  Something sharp pinched the inside of her arm. What are you afraid of, McKenzie? Susan Craig’s voice echoed in her head. It must be Carter Wyndall. He knows what’s inside of you. He wants to free it. You mustn’t let him.

  Rage.

  The sleeping man.

  Don’t. Wake. Mustn’t. Rouse.

  She tightened her hands around the handle of the bat.

  A whine at her ankles.

  “Cody!”

  His tail waved for her, golden silky hide rippling, his chocolate eyes sparkling with doggish spirit and love. But as she tried to take another step forward, he hugged his body against her legs and lowered his head. He growled in warning.

  He pressed heavily against her, forcing her back.

  Mac rocked back in the chair. The sudden feel of it around her knocked her from the program momentarily, her senses reeling.

  An alarm sounded.

  Mac put her gloved hand to the visor, was able to tip it up and partially off.

  The small black and white monitor showed a tipped view of a double-door entry in one of its cubed shots. Someone walked through warily.

  Susan said to Dudley, “It’s Carter. I thought you took care of him.”

  “He went down.”

  “He didn’t remain down. Handle it. I’ve got to stay here. I need her if this works, she’s expendable if it doesn’t.”

  He hesitated.

  “Go on! I just gave you the imprint for the building. You’ll be one step ahead of him the whole way.”

  Dudley leaped into motion like a deadly cat. Craig leaned back over the security monitor.

  McKenzie drew one foot out of her cloth shackles and kicked the other free. She slid her right hand out of the VR glove and picked her left hand free. The helmet she drew off her head as she got stealthily out of the contour chair.

  Susan must have heard her coming, for she straightened and turned halfway around when Mac faced her. “Don’t try anything, McKenzie.”

  “My father isn’t here now.”

  “I know you better than you know yourself. I’ve started a process you can’t stop this time. There are strings I’ve pulled.

  Thoughts that can explode like land mines inside your head—”

  “I will not be a victim!” Mac backhanded her with the VR helmet. The doctor’s head shot back and she fell with a sharp sound, and lay very still on the floor. An empty syringe rolled beside her.

  In the corridor, McKenzie paused for a moment. Her guts reeled as if she were going to be very, very ill. When she looked up, it was as though she were in two worlds. She had brought the program with her, a waking dream, one that she could not leave.

  She looked down at her left forearm and saw the angry spot, the puncture mark, on the inside curve.

  With certain hallucinogenic drugs....”

  Susan Craig had tried to ensure her meshing with the artificial world of her murdering lover.

  Mac took another staggering step. The double vision was excruciatingly painful to endure.

  She looked up. Cody stood at the intersection. He lifted his head, and gave her a grin, red tongue lolling from between sharp, clean teeth. His ears pricked with happiness.

  If not real, then at least Cody came from her, formed by her experiences.

  She ran after him.

  She sprinted up a story and skidded around a corner. Cody faded, his golden shimmering body growing fainter and fainter until he disappeared. Mac stopped.
She held her breath, listening.

  A faint scuffle. The corridors here were dark, illuminated only by the faraway glow of fixtures mounted along other pathways. She put her back to the wall and eased toward the intersection.

  The darkness seemed to help the war within her senses. She looked with one vision momentarily, heard with one set of ears. Touched with one pair of hands. She came to the right angle corner and stopped.

  She crept around the juncture.

  He turned as she did, and they stared face-to-face.

  “McKenzie!”

  Seeing him jolted her. She flung up a hand to stop him as he drew close.

  She could not bear to have him within arm’s reach. Within harm’s way. She warred with herself and did not want to add casualties.

  Flash. The bat, in her hand, standing over Carter’s body, a crimson wetness splashed around. Her vision or Craig’s?

  The son of a bitch will never hurt anyone again. Her voice, in her head, low and snarling.

  But it was Jack she thought of. Not Carter. Why did she see Carter’s body?

  It couldn’t happen to him.

  Not her.

  She closed her eyes as visions crowded.

  What did she see from within? What did she sense that Susan Craig had implanted there?

  “Mac?”

  She swallowed it down as if that was all it took to suppress it, and looked at him. The lines in his face deepened with concern as she answered, “I’ll be all right.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “No.”

  He had her by the hand, but her flesh was so chill and numb she could scarcely feel his touch.

  “She has a program,” Mac got out. “You have to do something. She has him on disk.”

  “Who?”

  “Georg Bauer.”

  Chapter 37

  He took a step back as if she’d physically hit him. Then he inhaled deeply, though it seemed to pain him. He put a hand to his ribs, bracing himself. “Where?”

  “Back this way.” She turned to lead him.

  He stopped her. “Tell me which way to go. And you stay here.”

  “Dudley is looking for you. He thought he’d killed you.”

  “I know who he is.” He stared back the way he’d come, then met her eyes again. “She has a program ... do you know—”

  “She said she’d imprinted him with the hospital’s layout.”

  Carter looked grim. “Then he’ll find us wherever we are.” He put a hand to the small of his back. She gathered he carried a gun there.

  Flash. She saw Bauer’s face.

  The death watch blinked.

  The prey had given itself away. The stalker leaped.

  The realization set off a flood of adrenaline, a rush. He was in her mind, but she stood, fighting the impulse to attack, that idea that Carter was the enemy.

  She had done this to McKenzie. She who loved a computer image, a printout, a personality matrix was trying to come between Mac and Carter.

  Mac shaded her eyes from Carter. It’s not real, she told herself. They had lain together. She had felt the love pooled between them. That was real. She knew what it was now. She’d never had it from Jack, but Carter had touched her, embraced her with it, and she knew what it was. She didn’t want to let it go. She didn’t want to let him go.

  But Susan Craig had taken her father’s legacy of rage and turned it back on her. She could feel it mounting inside her, like a volcano ready to blow.

  He took her hand. “Mac, what is it?”

  She heard a noise beyond the intersection and slipped her hand away quickly. “Hurry.”

  They ran.

  Carter could not catch his breath. Even if they could stay ahead of Dudley, whenever they paused, he sounded like a bellows. His left side grew wetter and slicker. McKenzie seemed to know the way, yet she paused and doubled back once or twice.

  He knew he could not go much farther. He caught her sleeve. “Mac!”

  She froze in place. He bent over and tried to breathe deep. Had Dudley sliced into a lung? He lost his bearings for a moment and slapped his hand onto the wall to keep himself upright.

  He left a bloody palm print.

  Mac grabbed up the edge of her shirt and tried to scrub it away. “He’ll know. He’ll see it and he’ll know.”

  Carter stared at it dully, trying to think, to remember. Then it came to him. The horrible drawings in the apartment building, like and unlike Georg Bauer.

  “Let’s give him something to think about,” he said. He pushed Mac away. He wiggled his right fingers inside his shirt, dampened them on the compress. Oddly enough, he wondered if he’d bled enough to do anything.

  He managed a sun, a sun with corona flames. The original was emblazoned in his memory from the very first murder site he’d stumbled across, a Georg Bauer original.

  Mac shuddered. “Why?”

  “Because part of him is Bauer, and part of him isn’t. Even when he kills, this guy is torn apart. He’s going to kill us when he meets us. This is going to stop him in his tracks.” Carter wet his lips. He turned around, unable to face the pictograph himself.

  “He’s afraid of the sleeping man,” Mac murmured in agreement. She brushed her hair from her forehead. She seemed to wake. “Come on.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere.” He pointed at a shadowy doorway ten yards down. “I’m sitting here, and I’m waiting.”

  “Carter—”

  He looked into her face. “Where does Craig have the computer set up?”

  “One more turn and then downstairs.”

  “The old offices and storage rooms. I know them. You go on. I’ll catch up.”

  She started to argue, but then Carter grabbed her by the arm and dragged her down the corridor to the recessed doorway. She heard then the whisper of running shoes on linoleum. They crouched side by side, and Carter put his hand in his pocket, reaching for his gun. They waited.

  He charged them out of the shadows, from in front of them and not behind. He had circled them. A warning scream tore out of Mac’s throat. Carter did not even have a chance to pull the gun out or get to his feet in response.

  Dudley put his shoulder down, driving a tackle into Carter that threw him across the corridor. Carter hit the wall and slid down limply.

  The gun. What had Carter done with the gun? She did not see it in Carter’s hand or on the ground.

  Dudley picked Carter up by a fistful of shirt. Carter blocked the first blow, then came a crunch of meat and bone. Carter went to his knees and spewed helplessly, painfully.

  He rolled aside, scrambling out of Dudley’s reach, lunging at the other’s ankles. His weight brought Dudley down with a surprise grunt. They grappled while Mac watched in horror. Dudley got to his feet by sheer brute effort and drew Carter with him. He turned, holding Carter at arm’s length, and threw him across the corridor again, slamming him into the wall.

  Carter’s breathing rasped in and out of broken lungs. His nose was a crimson smear. But he stayed on his feet and when Dudley pivoted around to finish him off, the stalker froze in horror.

  He stared into the bloody sun signature of Georg Bauer.

  Carter reached into his trouser pocket and brought his hand out filled with the .38. He hesitated.

  Dudley let out an inhuman roar and charged.

  The .38 answered back, knocking him halfway down the corridor. He landed on his back and jerked once. Then he lay sprawled in a gory pool.

  Carter swayed. He returned the gun to his pocket. He looked up, met Mac’s eyes. She said nothing. She came over and placed herself under his arm, and braced herself as he leaned on her. They moved crablike into the darkness.

  “I think this is it,” Mac whispered into his ear. They came to a painful stop.

  Carter put his hand behind him, then shook his head. “You stay away from Susan Craig. I’ll do what I have to.”

  Mac nodded. She turned the doorknob slowly, waiting for the click, and p
ushed it open as soundlessly as she could.

  They had entered the wrong room. As they stepped in, the soft beep and chime of monitors filled the air. Hospital equipment of every imaginable kind ringed the room. Old filing cabinets and desks had been shoved aside to accommodate the medical equipment. They stared in disbelief.