“Which is?”
“How I can catch him once and for all.”
“You might start with the girl who was with him,” Wilder said, after stealing a glance up at the looming Rathman.
“Tell me more about her,” Rathman said.
89
SKETCHBOOK
NIGHT HAD JUST FALLEN when Alex made his way across the adjoining properties into the backyard of his family’s bungalow, his home. He tried not to think of it that way, since this wasn’t really his home anymore and never would be again; all the crime scene tape and the police cruiser parked outside to keep the curious away was more than enough evidence of that. Raiff had parked down the block, out of sight of the house on the chance either the men he called Trackers or more of the ash man’s androids were waiting and watching, his last words weighing heavy on Alex’s mind.
* * *
“There’s something else you need to know, Alex,” Raiff told him, before he climbed out of the car. “They think it was you.”
“Think what was me?”
“They think you killed your parents and probably your doctor too. That’s the theory they’re proceeding on.”
“Nice of you to mention that,” Alex said, rolling his eyes.
“I didn’t want to say anything in front of your friend.”
“Sam. And she’s more than a friend.”
“You mean…”
“No, not like that. I mean in spite of everything, she stayed with me. She didn’t run. Truth is, Raiff, I don’t know what I would’ve done without her, especially last night.”
“All the more reason she doesn’t need to hear you’re a suspect, on top of everything else.”
“Guess that makes me a fugitive too,” Alex said, and finally reached for the latch.
* * *
There was no one watching the rear of the property, and his parents always kept a spare key inside a fake rock mixed into his mother’s flower garden. Her roses seemed to droop, looking almost sad. Alex wondered if it was possible for plants to have some degree of consciousness and awareness of their surroundings. Not here, probably, but who knew on the other planets both like Earth and advanced far beyond it.
Under cover of darkness, Alex used the key to unlock the back door and enter the house where his parents had been murdered twenty-fours earlier. He expected it to smell stale and musty, even faintly of death. Instead, though, the only scents that lingered were from the last meals his mother had cooked. The thought tightened his chest and thickened his throat, making it hard to breathe.
Focus!
That was easy to do on the football field, where moments unfolded quickly and melded into the next. But inside the house in which he’d grown up, everything slowed and lingered. Time seemed to have frozen in the moments before his parents were attacked, beaten by the drone things that had come for him.
Alex padded through the house and up the stairs, careful to avoid looking at the living room, where he’d held his mother’s hand as she took her last breath. It felt stuffy, the air trying to choke him as he sucked it in.
He reached the top of the stairs without remembering the climb, stopping when the vision of himself as a seven-year-old boy trampling across the Oriental runner in his football uniform struck him hard and fast. Alex watched his younger version tossing a football lightly enough to dash under it and snatch the ball from the air. Remembered doing just that for hours, conscious now but not then of the concerned voices of his parents coming through their cracked open bedroom door.
* * *
“He could be hurt,” his father raised in the cautious tone his voice took on when expressing such concern. “Then what?”
“He’s a boy,” came his mother’s retort. “He deserves a normal life.”
“If he were normal, you mean. But he’s not. And we are fooling ourselves to think otherwise. You knew that when you took him, when you brought him home.”
“I knew nothing until we took him to Dr. Chu.” His mother’s voice hesitated here. “Why do you look at me like that? What is it you’re not saying?”
“Dr. Chu is gone.”
“Gone?”
“His office is abandoned, closed up. No trace of his nurse or receptionist. He must’ve gone back to China.”
“Without telling his patients?”
“His filing cabinets and desk drawers were empty too—emptied, we must hope, by him.”
“He never would’ve written anything down about Alex. He was too careful a man.”
“As I said, that is what we must hope.”
* * *
Alex wondered if he eased open their door now whether they might be standing there, continuing the conversation. He’d tell them never to let him play football, warn them about what was coming a whole bunch of years down the road. Give them the exact date and time, so they could be someplace else. He’d never thought much about why he could never remember going to the doctor, but realized now it must’ve been because of Dr. Chu’s sudden departure.
Alex continued watching the vision of his younger self tossing the football into the air and running under it. The next toss struck the overhead ceiling fan and light fixture, splaying shadows in all directions until it stopped swaying at the same time his mother peeked out from her bedroom to survey the scene.
Don’t hurt yourself, Alex.
Spoken with her eyes seemingly fixed on him instead of his younger self. Then the little-boy version of Alex in football regalia vanished, and the Alex of today pressed on toward his bedroom.
The lump in his throat thickened further as he eased his bedroom door open, stopping just short of flipping on the light. Couldn’t do that, couldn’t do anything that might alert the cop watching the house that someone was inside. There wasn’t much light, but it was enough to move to his bed and clamp a hand onto the sketchbook he kept between his mattress and box spring. He hadn’t drawn in it for a while, not since football had started up again over the summer. And because of that the visions he’d failed to sketch out on paper, a kind of relief valve, had begun haunting his dreams. Visions of vast machine-like assemblages strung into barely recognizable forms lurking at the edge of his consciousness.
Just like in the motel room, covering the walls with the ink of a couple Monterey Motor Inn pens he must’ve dug out of a drawer. Once drawn, the subject of the visions would retreat to the farthest reaches of his mind, where they could not hold him hostage to their whims.
Sliding the sketchbook out in the spill of light coming from a streetlamp beyond, Alex realized very few pages were still blank, his efforts having filled far more than he had recalled. He sat down atop his bed, soothed by the familiar squeak of the springs, and paged to the end as if to refresh his memory.
But none of the drawings touched any chords, as if he’d traced them in his sleep. Had he woken up a few mornings with what he thought might be ink staining his fingers? That thought did strike a chord but he wasn’t sure. And what did these drawings mean in any event?
The evening left his room bathed in shadows, sparing him further glimpses of his life until forty-eight hours ago. The pair of jeans hanging off the edge of his bed, collection of sneakers pushing their way out of the closet. He didn’t want to think, didn’t want to look. But something made him strip off the still-stiff cheap pair of jeans he’d bought at the Buy Two store and slide his old jeans on in their place, careful to replace the folded pages containing the results of Dr. Chu’s lab tests into the back pocket. Then he grabbed a pair of sneakers and replaced the cheap ones that were more comfortable than Dr. Payne’s but still not right. Alex felt instantly better, himself again. That’s what it was—he felt like himself.
Except that person didn’t exist anymore; in point of fact, had never existed. His entire life was a lie and changing his clothes couldn’t change that. Still, he fished a shirt from his drawer and pulled his arms through it, the scents of fabric softener and laundry detergent sending a lump up his throat because they made him pict
ure his mother doing laundry, obsessive about adding just the right amount of both.
That lump, and a heaviness that had settled in his chest, accompanied him back to his bedroom door, which he eased open all the way.
“Hello again, Alex,” said the hazy shape of the ash man.
90
PRESCRIPTION
SAM CREPT DOWN THE hospital hall wearing doctor’s scrubs she’d purchased at a drugstore with the very last of her cash. The outfit at least kept her from standing out. She must’ve looked like an intern or orderly, the kind of hospital worker who melted into the scenery. Alex had told her where she could find Dr. Payne’s office and that’s where she was headed now, having no idea if she’d even be able to access it. If it were locked or guarded, her mission would end before it began.
She hated what she was about to do, had to do, in order to create the distraction she needed and give herself time to see if she could find Alex’s medical file on Dr. Payne’s computer. In school it was always the bad kids who pulled fire alarms as a prank or to get out of class. Normally, they got caught, something she didn’t dare let happen here and now.
She also hated being separated from Alex, the intensity of the past twenty-four hours creating a bond with him like none she’d ever felt before. Raiff had driven him to his house to retrieve the sketchbook, while she proceeded to the hospital alone by mass transit with throwaway cell phone in hand to await Dr. Donati’s call about where they could meet. The medical tests Alex had endured, especially the CT scan, seemed to have spun these events into motion. So she needed Alex’s file to bring with her to Donati to prove to him she wasn’t crazy, that all this had really happened, was happening. Amazing that barely a day before she’d been agonizing about whether or not to help the girls of the CatPack, who weren’t even her friends, cheat on an AP bio test.
Grow up, girl!
Well, she’d certainly done that, going all the way from potentially cheating to breaking into a murdered doctor’s hospital office. The fire alarm first, though. Be a lot easier if she could have hacked his computer from an off-site location. Sam knew her way around computers to the point where the keyboard seemed an extension of her hands, but hacking was a whole different discipline she’d never even tried, couldn’t even imagine herself trying.
Then again, not too long ago she couldn’t envision herself cheating on a test, much less on someone else’s behalf. Or triggering a false fire alarm.
Sam waited until she was alone in the hallway and in no one’s view before reaching out toward the pull station. She could see herself hesitating, even freezing, but in the end she pulled down on the alarm in a single swift motion and listened to the shrill squealing sound claim the hall, accompanied by the strobe-like flashing of the emergency lights. She had no idea what the procedure was for critical care, ICU, and operating room patients at this point, only that it would take only between six and seven minutes for the fire department to determine it to be a false pull instead of a real emergency.
That’s how long she had to get to Dr. Payne’s office, too much of the time wasted when the hall filled up almost immediately with hospital personnel spilling out of rooms and stations everywhere. Sam did her best to blend in, pretending to hurry along, shoving an empty gurney before her to avoid being tasked by a higher-up with something else to do.
She abandoned the gurney just short of the bend in the hall around which Alex told her she could find Dr. Payne’s office. Sam recognized it immediately from the crime scene tape strung both across the width of the door and in an X pattern covering the whole frame. A now abandoned chair rested outside the office, Sam picturing a cop or hospital security guard on duty there to keep the crime scene secure.
This hall contained only offices, all of them abandoned by the time she reached Dr. Payne’s. If the door was locked, she could try accessing the office through an adjoining one on the chance there might be a connecting door. Or she could flag down a janitor in the hope of convincing him to lend her his keys so she could check behind locked doors for any patient somehow left behind.
Such a cover story likely wouldn’t have held, but it didn’t have to, as things turned out. The door to Dr. Payne’s office was unlocked and Sam ducked low and slipped between the dueling strips of yellow crime scene tape to enter.
She eased the door closed behind her, aware immediately that the lamp on Dr. Payne’s desk was providing the room’s only light. She pictured his body still settled in the leather desk chair, just as Alex had described. It must’ve been removed from the scene long before, the proper authorities trying to determine how he was killed by something Alex described like a bullet that wasn’t a bullet.
Sam breathed a sigh of relief when she spotted Payne’s laptop sitting slightly askew of its faded outline atop his blotter. She had to hope Alex’s patient ID number would be enough to access his records and started toward Payne’s desk, catching a glimpse of her reflection in his bare office window. The sight startled her not just from the simple shock, but because the reflection didn’t look like, well, her. It seemed she had changed, and not just because of the hospital scrubs. Everything about her looked different, although she couldn’t say how, exactly, and reached the desk before thinking about it any further.
Hoping she could bypass trying the laptop altogether, Sam ruffled a hand through all the desktop clutter, unsure of what she was looking for now. Payne wasn’t exactly a study in organization, not based on the clumps of papers and sprawl of files atop his desk. She wondered if he was working on a paper or something, and the unkempt clutter made up the sum total of his research or, perhaps, the result of a fruitless search by police officials investigating his murder. But these files were all labeled with names.
The fire alarm was still blaring when she started thumbing through the folders and random pages containing test results. No idea really of what she was looking for until she found a folder closer to the edge of Payne’s desk labeled ALEX CHIN.
He must’ve been studying its contents just before he was killed. That thought chilled Sam, but the file was hers now so she flipped it open.
And found it empty.
91
OUTER LIMITS
ALEX STIFFENED JUST SHORT of the doorway. “Get out of my way.”
“I just wanted to finish our conversation,” the ash man said in a voice that sounded like a car radio station fading in and out.
“We finished it when I cut you in half.”
Maybe it was his imagination, or the darkness of the hallway beyond, but it looked to Alex as if a solid black line ran up the center of the spectral figure, tracing the blow he’d struck that had cut the ash man in two.
But he wasn’t speaking out of both sides of his mouth anymore. Not too long ago, a couple summers, maybe, Alex had come across the old Outer Limits television series, in black-and-white, of all things, and streamed a whole bunch of episodes that all opened with a narrator saying, “There is nothing wrong with your television set,” over a jumbled screen. Looking at the ash man’s vague grayish shape that kept fading in and out, some kind of astral projection as opposed to a physical being, made him think of the chintzy special effects that dominated The Outer Limits.
“There is no reason for all this, Alex. We mean you no harm.”
“You meant my parents plenty of harm, though, didn’t you?”
“They weren’t your parents.”
“I’m tired of hearing that. I’ve got a better idea of what’s going on than the last time we talked and it just makes me want to cut you in half again even more.”
The ash man seemed to be weighing a response. Then Alex realized from the tightening of his grainy features that there was a slight delay in his words reaching the form, maybe because there were more of them in this exchange. And when the ash man next opened his mouth, no words emerged right away, the lag very slight but present.
“The Chins had no place in your life, Alex.”
“What kind of shit are you slinging her
e?”
“This isn’t your world. Your world is with us.”
“Who’s us?”
No response this time, but Alex thought he saw the grainy image swallow hard.
“I think you’re scared of me,” Alex continued.
He waited for the ash man’s response, figured the lag was behind the lack of one, until he stayed silent.
“And I realize now you’ve got reason to be scared of me,” Alex resumed, the spectral shape looming before him suddenly no different than any opponent on the football field.
“This is not your fight, Alex,” the ash man said suddenly.
“Yes, it is. I’m going to make it my fight. I know I was smuggled here to stop you. That’s why you’re scared of me. And know what? I used to be scared of you too, but not anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever be scared of anything again, thanks to what you did to my parents. And, yeah, they were my parents. They are my parents, always will be my parents. You get that? Maybe you should’ve killed me too but you couldn’t, could you? Because then you’d never know what it is I know and who else knows about it back where you come from.”
“It’s where you’re from too.”
“Home is where the heart is, bro. And how’s this for another quote: to know your enemy, you must become your enemy. Sun Tzu said that. And know what? You’re right. I already am you. We come from the same place. That’s why you’re really scared of me, isn’t it?”
“You read Sun Tzu?”
“My tutor does.”
“That would be the girl I remember seeing.”
Alex stiffened. “Leave her out of this.”
“It’s too late. She’s already a part of it, just like your parents.”
“You should’ve left them out of this too. You made a really bad mistake when you killed them.”
“What if they’re not dead, Alex?”
92
PUSH OF A BUTTON
SAM TRIED TO PAUSE the ticking clock in her head. She’d never expected to find a file folder with the answers she was seeking, anyway, and just had to take her thinking backward to her original intentions in the form of Dr. Payne’s laptop.
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