Carter said, “Holy shit,” softly and limped toward the massive coffin that stood in the center. “It’s a hyperbaric chamber.”
It looked like an Egyptian sarcophagus. Mac tripped over a heavy cable, one of several crisscrossing the floor. The room hummed with the power and the working of the machines. She looked at a monitor which she recognized from ICU. A slim paper fed in and out. She touched it, read it. The heart rate had been holding steady at 55. Then it had begun to increase and was now approaching 75. She dropped the paper, uncomprehending.
Carter reached the side of the chamber and looked down through the glass lid. “Oh, my God. She’s got him on ice.”
The sleeping man.
Mac turned toward him. “In suspension. Waiting for a cure.”
“There’s no cure for what he has.” Carter stepped back, his face creased with disbelief and horror. “Find the plug and pull it.” He whipped around, started to retrace the cables. “This is why she didn’t get out. This is why she hesitated, even when everything started to fall apart.”
The chamber drew Mac. She went to it, one shaky step at a time. She reached it just as Carter yelled at her.
“Don’t fool with this, Mac. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”
She leaned over the glass lid. Pale in death, yet appearing merely asleep, tucked into loose overalls, he lay, eyes closed, hands palm up, a beatific pose. His dark brown hair waved over a satin pillow. The Father of All Violence. A Bringer of Destruction.
With a grunt of agony and triumph, Carter found a connection and pulled it apart. A bank of machinery went blank and quiet.
The chamber stayed lit. She could see an intricate network of fine lines and wires that crisscrossed his body, as well as tubes. Fluids dripped in and out. The body was remarkably well preserved and she wondered what Susan Craig had done to it.
The door crashed open. Susan screamed, “Get away from him!” She hurled herself at Carter, clawing at his eyes. He fell back into a stand, taking the machine with him.
Sparks flew in blue and orange arcs. They snapped and crackled and Carter, locked in mortal combat with Susan Craig, could only swing around and barge into another bank of equipment. He managed to topple that as well.
The smell of electrical fire filled the room. A thin veil of smoke rose.
Mac froze. The machinery still on at her elbow began to chatter. The stylus danced and drew intense, increasing lines. She looked down into the chamber.
The eyes opened. Hazel orbs with yellow fire licking deep inside them stared into hers.
He was alive and awake.
Mac bolted. As she dashed into the corridor, she heard a massive crash, a thunderous clanging. Its echo filled the hallway and gripped her, freezing her in place. The chamber had overturned. Had to have. She couldn’t leave Carter behind—
Flash. Bauer was behind her, awakening, coming. She had to run.
A woman screamed. It was truncated, cut short. Mac’s heart pumped faster and faster until she thought it would burst, but she could not move. Could not turn around. Could not scream. Her eyes watered as the stinging smoke of an expanding electrical fire surrounded her.
Cody appeared at the end of the corridor. He barked once, urgently.
She knew this nightmare. Mac leaned forward and her feet followed. She broke into a shambling run. Something metallic crashed behind her and she could hear hoarse breathing. Blind panic drove her.
The dog led her through the maze. They went up and up and around and around. She could feel him coming after her. The heat of his body was like a smothering cloud, drawing closer and closer.
Mac slipped and went down, sprawling. She sobbed in exhaustion, hugging the floor. Cody’s apparition disappeared. She got to her feet.
A thin wailing sounded. Smoke alarms, going off throughout the building. She turned.
She’d left Carter behind.
She could not.
She went back.
Carter crawled painfully across the floor. He caught Susan Craig up as he would a drowning swimmer and crawled back across the room, dragging her limp body with him. She began to kick and fight feebly. Blood matted her wheat-blonde hair. The side of her face had swollen purple-red and only one eye could open to look at him. He pulled her over the threshold and into the corridor. There was no sign of either Bauer or McKenzie. Carter and Craig coughed and choked until the fresher air of the corridor revived them. Carter managed to pull himself to his feet. He hauled the doctor up with him.
“What was that thing that came out of the chamber?”
She glared balefully at him. The bruised and swollen shut eye teared blood. “Georg Bauer.”
“How do you stop him?”
She coughed again and said hoarsely, “You don’t.”
“What the hell did you have him in?”
“A medically induced coma. It was the only way to keep him safe while I worked. I gave him everything—” Susan looked in distress down the empty corridor as smoke snaked out across their feet and began to rise, a lethal fog.
He started to limp, pulling her with him.
“My work—”
“Fuck your work. You know him so bloody well. Where’s he gone? What’s he doing?”
Her chin trembled slightly as she squinted down the abandoned hallway. “He’s hunting,” she said simply.
Carefully, Mac traced her steps backward. Whenever she halted, could not find her way, she searched for the sign Cody had left. Pools of thin urine upon the floor. Once or twice, the sign had been disturbed. Fading wet footprints led the other way. The pursuer had been outrun.
She began to speed up as the alarms got louder, noisier. The building might smolder for a while, but once it caught, it would go like tinder.
She went downstairs. Her footsteps drummed in the stairwell, echoed up around her and gradually faded away, saying to anyone who listened, Here I am. Come get me.
She stood in the lobby. Another stairwell faced her and as she hesitated, she heard them come up out of the depths of the building.
Carter was dragging Susan Craig. Halfway across the lobby he let her drop to the ground and bent over, coughing, retching miserably. Blood dripped from his side as he did so.
He raised his head and spotted her. His jaw worked. “Mac—”
Too late.
A hand dropped on her shoulder. Fingers gripped her like iron.
Susan Craig got to her feet with a sob. Staggered forward, entreating. “Georg,” she said in a lover’s pleading tone. “Please.”
Mac swung free as the hand moved. Bauer came from behind her, crossed the floor in three swift strides, to catch Susan Craig up in his arms. The woman smiled and tilted her battered face upward.
“Georg—”
He bent her backward in his embrace. “For what you did to me.” His voice was dry and rusty. Without another word, he put a knee up and cracked her back across it. Then he dropped her on the floor. He looked at McKenzie.
And smiled.
McKenzie’s hell burst in her mind. She took a step forward.
Wires trailed from his jumpsuit. He looked as if he had stepped out of an ebony spiderweb. As she looked at him, his image seemed to waver and fade, like a bad television transmission.
Carter begged. “Run, Mac. Get out of here.” He squirmed on the flooring and brought his gun out, held it up, tried to keep a steady bead.
Georg Bauer glanced at him. And laughed. He drew closer to McKenzie.
She watched him with vision both real and virtually real. She knew him, and he knew her. Susan Craig had brought them together, tried to meld them.
What are you afraid of?
This was her dark half. This was the rage she had inherited from her father, doubled, trebled, quadrupled by a warping society.
She could let it swallow her or break free.
Bauer held out his hand.
Curling smoke began to pour out of the downstairs well. Carter’s hand shook. The barrel of the gun wa
vered uncontrollably.
“Mac,” he said hoarsely. “Run. Get out of the way. Please.”
Bauer pivoted and kicked out in one deadly move. The gun flew from Carter’s hand as he gave a shocked cry. The .38 disappeared down the stairwell into the fire. Bauer moved to stand over Carter.
“Leave him,” she said. “It’s me you want.”
The killer looked over his shoulder at her. “Actually,” and his smile grew wider. “You’re a little old for my taste.”
Mac took three sharp breaths, closed her eyes, and loosed her rage into the virtual reality plane. Bauer staggered back.
No more.
She stuck her right hand out. A baseball bat immediately filled it. What are you afraid of?
She ran her hand over the weathered wood. Her touch renewed it into gleaming freshness. She could feel her father’s hands over hers, guiding her into the correct grip. This was their bridge, the span which crossed the gulf between their ages and their genders, his rage and her innocence. It was all he’d had to give her, and McKenzie knew now that Walton Smith had prayed daily that it would be enough. She could feel the puff of a breath across her temple, the warmth of a presence standing behind her to embrace her, as he wrapped his arms around her, enfolded her hands in his. Circle the bases, McKenzie.
This was her heritage. Not the rage. The love of a sport. The enthusiasm. The goodwill in playing, and playing well. The fairness and drive of the competition. The lesson and future that athletic success could give her, that he could not. She could feel his hands engulfing hers still, molding her fingers about the wood.
What are you afraid of?
Not this. Not anymore.
Her weapon. Her tool. She gripped it tightly with all her senses and all her heart. Virtually real. She advanced.
Bauer seemed frozen in hesitation; she could see the overlapping realities. Carter gasped at his feet. There was a serious pool of blood growing around the reporter. He couldn’t last much longer.
And she could see others as well. Children. Shades of Bauer’s victims. Watching her. Their tortured flesh hanging from their bodies. The souls shining through like beacons of angelic light. The suffering. The violence.
Bauer put his hand out. “You’re part of me,” he said.
“No. Never.”
“I know what you feel.”
“No. Never!”
Carter felt the heat from the two of them, hotter and more searing than the flames at his back, as his own body grew icier by the second. So this is what it feels like to die, he thought. Like lying down to sleep in the snow. He ought to get up to help McKenzie, but his legs had stopped obeying him.
Only his heart still responded. Bauer and Mac faced each other like wrestlers waiting for an opening. She denied him, but fear for her resided in Carter’s guts like a ball of ice. He leaned over and dug his fingers into the tile, dragging himself across the floor. It was slippery and tried to cling to him, tried to glue him down.
“Mac, don’t listen to him. Whatever he wants in you, she put in there. It’s not you! Don’t let him take you!”
There was no sign she heard him as the killer leaned close and placed his hands on her shoulders. She gave a mighty shudder and her face paled to a silvery unearthliness.
She faced Georg Bauer across the planes. He began to draw on her. She could feel herself grow thin, insubstantial. In his way, he was murdering her here.
Just as he planned to do in reality.
“No. Never!” She stepped into the swing with all her might, the bat following through.
Carter saw her take a step into Bauer’s embrace. It wrenched an incoherent cry from him and he pulled himself up, grasping, hand outstretched, fingers curled at her ankle as if he had strength enough left to yank her away. He felt a shock through his hand, a levin bolt, a jolt of electricity charged enough to stand his hair on end.
He heard her shout, “No. Never!”
Bauer grunted with the impact and rocked back on his heels. His arms flung into the air, wires trailing, black licorice whips about his body. His lips peeled back from his teeth in a rictus grin. Then he brought his hands in, clutching his chest. Tottering back, the killer went down and did not move again.
Headlights streamed through the night. The wailing of fire engines still pulling into the Fernandina lot was deafening. Behind them, the flames rose hungrily, licking white-orange into the heavens. There was no way the firefighters were going to save the building or anything that might be left in it. Police and Bureau agents busied themselves in the flickering light, pulling yellow crime scene tape into place. Helicopters beat overhead, adding their beams to the effort to light the scene.
Mac walked beside the gurney, holding tightly onto Carter’s hand. Dolan trotted on the opposite side, suspending a plastic bag in the air. His other hand held a tape recorder and he was trying to catch all of what Carter was saying.
Sofer and Franklin sat on the bumper of the ambulance, watching as the attendants and paramedics steered the gurney near.
Moreno helped collapse the gurney legs and hoist it into the ambulance. Dolan clicked off the recorder.
Carter coughed once, wetly. He made an effort to keep his eyes open. He said, weakly, “When you call out the cavalry—”
Dolan grinned. “Better late than never, right!”
“Right,” softly answered Mac. She climbed into the ambulance next to Carter. She smoothed his tousled hair from his forehead.
He coughed again and winced in pain. Then he told her, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
She only smiled.
Joyce Tompkins leaned into the back of the van before they closed it up. “Carter, just tell me you got that son of a bitch who killed Graciela and Donnie.”
Carter lifted his head. He looked back at the outline of the building as the fire consumed it. A corner caved in as they watched, sparks like shooting stars aimed to the skyline.
“We got ’em,” he answered. Then he put his head down and closed his eyes peacefully. Mac leaned over and put her face to his chest, listening to his strong, steady heartbeat.
In the depths of the night shift, Brand awoke suddenly from a dream. The lamp in the backboard was on, and in its halo, he could see his mother, drowsing in a chair pulled close to the hospital bed.
Delight burst in him. “Mom!” He reached for her, bandages trailing from his wrists and sheets falling from the bed.
She woke with a smile and reached back. Her face came closer and closer—
and he looked into Susan Craig’s ice blue eyes.
Brand screamed.
He bolted upright in his bed, sweating, the sheets falling from him, his room shrouded in night. Steps came swiftly down the hall, the door to his room bursting open.
He sat, panting. “Bad dream, bad dream.”
The light came on.
“Brandon. You’re awake.”
He looked up.
His mother stood in the doorway. Tears began to stream down her face. “Brandon!” she cried joyfully. “My baby.” She opened her arms to embrace him.
He was afraid to reach for her.
-the end-
Death Watch Page 42