Reprisal

by F. Paul Wilson

  "What's wrong?" Renny said, knowing he sounded like a broken record but unable to say anything else. He was completely in the dark here.

  Jordan held the films up for him. Renny had no idea what he was supposed to see.

  "What?"

  "Empty, man," he said. "The guy's whole chest is fucking empty!"

  "Aw, come on!" Renny said. He was starting to feel a little sick.

  "He's not kidding," Stein said. "Just for the hell of it, Jordan, let's get a look at the abdomen."

  Jordan did some more fiddling at the console and soon another image filled the screen. Stein stared at it, then rotated his chair to face Renny. He wore a crazy smile and his eyes looked as if they were receding toward the back of his head.

  "He's hollow!" he said. "No brain, no heart, no lungs, no liver, no intestines! He's completely hollow! A walking shell!" He started to laugh.

  Renny found Stein's laughter almost as frightening as what he was saying.

  "Hey, easy, Doc."

  "Easy my ass! We're talking about some sort of zombie here! It can't be! It's crazy ! It can't fucking be!"

  The monitoring room was silent as the three of them sat and stared at each other.

  "What we gonna do with this guy?" Jordan said.

  "He's a murder-one suspect," Renny said.

  Jordan smiled. "Try him and fry him."

  "Not in this state. Besides, with all the bullshit that's going down here tonight, he might walk."

  The thought of that twisted Renny's insides. Nobody should get off on a head case plea after what he did to that kid.

  "He's not walking anywhere tonight," Stein said. He turned to Jordan. "Wheel him out of there. I'm taking him back to the ER and no one" He glared at Renny. " No one is moving him anywhere else until I've got plenty of witnesses to what's going down here."

  As long as Loin remained in custody, Renny didn't care where he was kept. And when all this was over, maybe a few questions would get answered.

  Like, where was Mrs. Lorn?

  The waiting jvas killing Bill. The waiting and the incredible story Danny's surgeon had told. No blood? No anesthesia? Awake during the surgery? Feeling everything? How could that be?

  He shuddered. What was happening here? This kind of brutal crime wasn't supposed to make sense, but what had been done to Dannywhat was still being done to him, apparentlywent beyond madness intowhat? The supernatural?

  Poor Danny. God, he wanted to see him, be with him, find some way to comfort him. Only one thing restrained him from making a scene and demanding, as his legal guardian Some guardian to be taken to him. The last words Danny had spoken to him in that almost-gone voice still echoed in his mind. Each syllable drove a nail into a different corner of his skull.

  Why didn't you come, Father Bill? You said you'd come if I called. Why didn't you come?

  "I did come, Danny!" he said aloud around the sob crammed into his throat. "I did! I just came too late!"

  And then the phone rang. One ring that wouldn't stop. He'd never heard a phone ring like that. Was that the way hospital phones worked? On and on it went. Bill looked around, wishing someone would answer it. But he was alone in the doctors' lounge, as he had been all night.

  And then it occurred to him that maybe it was for him. Maybe Danny was out of Recovery and they wanted him upstairs. But wouldn't they tell the cop outside first?

  No matter. He had to stop that ringing. He crossed the room and lifted the receiver.

  "Doctors' lounge."

  There was a child on the line, a small boy, his voice pitched somewhere between a scream and a sob. Bill recognized it immediately.

  Danny's voice.

  " Father, please come and get me ! Pleeeeease! Father, Father, Father, I don't want to die. Please come and get me. Don't let him kill me. I don't want to die !"

  "Danny?" Bill said into the phone, his voice rising to a shout. "Danny, where are you?"

  The voice started again.

  " Father, please come and get me ! Pleeeeease! Father, Father, Father, I don't want to die. Please come and get me . . ."

  Bill tore the receiver away from his ear. The horror of the call was submerged in an almost overwhelming sense of deja vu. And then he remembered that this wasn't the first time for this call. Danny had cried and screamed those same words last night when he'd called from the Loms' house. His last words just before the phone went dead. His last words

  just before Herb had

  Bill couldn't finish the thought. He slammed the phone down and headed for the door to the hall. Some sick bastard had recorded the call and was playing it back. Someone in the hospital. That could be only one person.

  The cop named Kolarcik was sitting outside. He jumped to his feet as Bill stepped out in the hall.

  "Whoa, Father! You can't leave the lounge, not until the sarge says so."

  "Then find him! I want to go see Danny! Now!"

  As the cop fumbled for his walkie-talkie he glanced up the hall.

  "Hey, here he comes now."

  Bill saw Sergeant Augustino and two other men, one white, one black, wheeling a fourth down the hall on a gurney. Their expressions were grim and their eyes held a strange look. As he started toward them Bill wondered what could have happened to make all three men look so strained.

  "Sergeant, I want to"

  And then he saw who was on the gurney. It was the filthy, perverted son of a bitch who'd mutilated Danny.

  Herb Lom.

  Rage like a cold black flame blasted through him, igniting him, consuming him. There was no control, not the slightest consideration given toward control. Bill just wanted to get his hands on Lom. He lunged forward.

  "You bastardV

  He heard shouts, cries of surprise and warning, but they might as well have been coming from the moon. Kolarcik, Augustino, the two men with him, they had disappeared as far as Bill was concerned. There was only Bill, the hallway, and Lom. And Bill knew just what he was going to do: yank Lom from the gurney, pull him to his feet, and slam him against the nearest wall; and when he'd bounced off that wall he'd fling him across the corridor against the opposite wall, and then he'd do it again and again until there was nothing left of either the walls or Herb Lom, whichever went first. Somehow, it was a beautiful thought.

  With his fingers hooked into claws he brushed off the hands that tried to stop him and dove at Lom, reaching for the front of his mint-green hospital gown. His hands slammed down against Lom's chest

  and kept on going.

  With a sickening crunch Lom's chest cavity gave way like weak plaster and Bill's hands sank to their wrists in the man's chest cavity.

  And good God, it was cold in there. Far colder than ice and empty .

  Bill yanked out his hands and backpedaled until he hit the wall where he stood and stared at Herb Lom's chest, at the concavity in his hospital gown that dipped deep into it. He glanced around at Sergeant Augustino and the two men with him. They too were staring at Lom's chest.

  "My God!" Bill said. His hands were numb, still aching with the cold.

  Kolarcik skidded to a halt beside him and gaped at the gurney, gasping.

  "Father! What did you do?"

  And then Lom's body started to shake. Little tremors at first, as if he had a chill. But instead of subsiding they became steadily more pronounced, growing until his whole body was spasming, shaking, convulsing so violently that the gurney began to rattle.

  Then Lorn seemed to collapse.

  Bill noticed it first in his chest wall. The depression in the hospital gown began to widen as more of the green material fell into his chest cavity like Florida real estate dropping into a giant sink hole. Then the rest of his body began to flatten under the gownhis pelvis, legs, arms. They all seemed to be melting away.

  Good Lord, they were melting away. A thick brown fluid was beginning to run out from under the gown and drip off the edges of the gurney. It steamed in the air of the hospital corridor. The stench was awful.

  A
s he turned away, gagging, Bill saw Lom's head collapse into a mahogany puddle on the pillow and begin to stream toward the floor.

  EIGHTEEN

  Three days in hell.

  That poor kid had spent the three days since Christmas Eve in unremitting agony, writhing and turning in his bed. His voice was gone but his open mouth, tight-squeezed eyes, and white, twisted features told the whole story of what he was feeling.

  A story Renny could not bear to hear. And though he came by the hospital often he could not bring himself to enter that room more than once a day or stay more than a moment or two.

  But the priest, Bill RyanFather Bill as Renny had come to think of himhe stuck by the kid's side, sitting by the bed like some guardian angel, holding his hand, talking and reading and praying into ears that weren't listening.

  "They say his mind's gone," Father Bill told Renny and Nick on the morning of the fourth day.

  This fellow Nick, late twenties and homely as all hell, was some sort of scientific professor at Columbia. He'd been in and out, hanging with the priest since Christmas night. Renny learned that the prof was a former St. F.'s orphan too. Good to see an orphan kid go from nothing to being a hotshot scientist. And seeing as they had St. F.'s in common, the prof was all right in Renny's book.

  The three of them were sipping coffee in the parent lounge of the pediatric wing where Danny had one of the few private rooms. Late morning sunlight poured in through the wide picture windows and glared off the remnants of the Christmas snow on the rooftops around them, warming the room until the heat was almost stifling.

  "I'm not surprised," Nick said. "And your mind'U be gone soon as well if you don't get some rest."

  "I'll be okay."

  "He's right, Father," Renny said. "You're heading for a breakdown at about ninety miles an hour. You can't keep going like this."

  The priest shrugged. "I can always catch up. But Danny who knows how much time he's got left?"

  Renny wondered how much time Father Bill had left before he collapsed. He looked like hell. His eyes were sunken halfway into his head, his hair was unkempt from running his hands through it every couple of minutes, and he needed a shave. He looked like an escapee from the drunk tank.

  And Renny was feeling like one. He hadn't had much sleep himself. Seemed like he'd been on a treadmill since Christmas Eve, which wasn't sitting well at all with Joanne. Bad enough he'd missed Christmas morninggood thing they didn't have any kids or he'd really be in the dog housebut he'd also missed Christmas dinner at his in-laws'. It wasn't that he didn't like his in-lawsthey were okay folksit was just that he was in deep shit with the department. A suspect in an attempted murder case had been transferred to him at Downstate, and a few hours later all he had in custody was a pile of stinking goo.

  Renny's stomach gave a little heave at the memory. Over the past three days he had endlessly replayed the scene in the corridor in his mind, but no number of viewings could add any sense or reason to what had happened. One moment he had a suspect in custody, the next he had some lumpy brown liquid. Thank God there'd been witnesses or else no one would have believed him. Hell, he'd been there and had seen the whole thing and still didn't quite believe it himself.

  And no matter who he talked to he couldn't get an explanation. None of the docs in this entire medical center could make any sense out of the MR images or the chest X ray, or what had finally happened to Lom's body. In fact there seemed to be a kind of doublethink going on. Since they couldn't explain it, they were sweeping it under their mental rugs. He'd overheard one of the medical bigwigs saying something like: Well, since what they say happened is obviously impossible, their memories of the incident must be faulty. How can we be expected to come up with a rational explanation when the primary data is faulty and anecdotal?

  It was a different story up at the 112. The precinct had transferred a suspect to Renny and now the suspect was gone. A pile of goo was not going to be able to go before the grand jury for indictment. So they needed a new suspect. The hunt was now on for the missing wife. And Renaldo Augustino knew he'd better find her if he wanted to hold his head up again in the squad room.

  So: Joanne was barely speaking to him at home, his name was mud down at the precinct, and Danny Gordon was still in agony here in the hospital.

  Renny wondered why he stuck with this job. He had his twenty years. He should have got out then.

  "Are they saying Danny's gone crazy?" Renny said to Father Bill.

  "Not so much crazy as shutting down parts of his mind. The human mind can experience only so much trauma and then it begins to draw the blinds. The doctors say he's not really experiencing pain on a high level of consciousness."

  "That's a blessing," Renny said. "I guess."

  The priest gave him a sidelong glance.

  " If they know what they're talking about."

  Renny nodded tiredly. "I hear you, Padre."

  None of the doctors seemed to know what they were doing in Danny's case. They trooped in and out of that room, new bunches every day, about as much help explaining what was happening to the kid as they'd been explaining what had happened to Lorn. Lots of talk, lots of big words, but when you cleared away all the smoke, they didn't know diddly.

  Nick the professor sighed with exasperation.

  "You both realize, don't you, that what's supposedly happening with Danny is impossible. I mean it can't be happening. They say they're putting blood and other fluids into Danny and it's simply disappearing. That's patently impossible. Fluid is matter and matter exists. What goes in as fluid may come out as gas but it just doesn't disappear. It has to be somewhere!"

  Father Bill smiled weakly. "Maybe it is. But it's not in Danny."

  "Wasn't he worked up here before?"

  "Completely. Everything one hundred percent normal."

  Shaking his head, Nick glanced at his watch and stood up.

  "I've got to run," he said, shaking hands with the priest. "But I can be back tonight if you want me to spell you with Danny."

  "Thanks, but I'll be all right."

  Nick shrugged. "I'll come back anyway."

  He waved and left. Renny decided he liked Nick. But he still had to wonder a little. Like, what was the relationship between Nick and Father Bill? An unmarried guy still visiting the priest that took care of him as a kid? What kind of a relationship could they have had when Nick lived at St. F.'s that would hold up after all these years. Renny remembered Father Dougherty from his own days at St. F.'s. He couldn't imagine wanting to pay that cold fish a visit every week, even if he were still alive.

  He canned the thought. Just his policeman's mind at work. You got so used to seeing the slimy side of people that when it didn't hit you in the face you went looking for it. But he could see that Father Bill might be a pretty regular guy when he wasn't under this kind of stress, someone you might want to be friends with, even if he was a priest.

  "How about Sara?" the priest said when Nick was gone. "Anything on her?"

  Renny had been dreading that question. Father Bill had asked it every day, and until this morning the answer had been an easy no.

  "Yeah," he said. "We got something. I sent for a newspaper clipping and a copy of her senior page in the U. of T. at Austin yearbook. They arrived today."

  "Her yearbook? How can that tell you anything?"

  "I do it routinely, just to make sure that the person I'm looking for is really the person I'm looking for."

  The priest's expression was puzzled. "I don't"

  Renny pulled the folded sheets from his breast pocket and handed them over.

  "Here. They're Xeroxes of Xeroxes, but I think you'U*ee what I mean."

  He watched Father Bill's eyes scan the top sheet, come to a halt, narrow, then widen in shock. Renny had had almost the same reaction. The yearbook picture of the Sara Bainbridge who later married Herbert Lorn showed a big, moon-faced blonde. The second sheet was a newspaper clipping of a wedding announcement with a photo of the same big blonde in
a wedding gown.

  Neither of them bore the remotest resemblance to the woman in the photo the priest had given Renny from the St. Francis adoption application.

  Father Bill flipped to the second sheet, then looked up at him with a stricken, befuddled expression.

  "But this isn't"

  "Yeah. I know."

  The priest dropped the sheets and staggered to his feet.

  "Oh, my God!"

  He turned and leaned against the windowsill and stared out at the Brooklyn rooftops in silence. Renny knew he'd just been socked in the gut so he let him have his time. Finally he turned around.

  "I really screwed up, didn't I?"

  There was an impulse in Renny to say, Yeah, you did . But he knew it was just his own anger looking for a convenient target. As a cop he'd had his share of times as target for that kind of anger from citizens and he wasn't going to fall into the trap himself. Besides, what was the point of kicking a decent man when he was down?

  "You got taken. You followed the routine and she slipped through. And didn't you tell me you even went so far as to call the woman's old pastor?"

  A mute nod from the priest.

  "Okay. So how were you to know that the two of you were talking about different people?"

  But Father Bill didn't seem to be listening. He started talking to the air.

  "My God, it's all my fault. If I'd done my job right, Danny wouldn't be all cut up like that. He'd still be in one piece back in St. F.'s."

  "Aw, don't start with that bullshit. It's her fault. Whoever took the real Sara's place is to blame. She's the one who took the knife to Danny."

  "But why? Why all the subterfuge, the elaborate plotting, and most likely the murder of the real Sara?"

  "We don't know that."

  True. They didn't know that. But Renny felt it in his gut: The real Sara was dead.

  " Why , dammit? Just to mutilate a small boy? It doesn't make sense."

  "I stopped expecting sense a long time ago."

  "And what about Herb?"

  "At this point I can go either way on Herb," Renny said with a shrug, trying not to remember what the man had looked like the last time he'd seen him. "But my gut instinct is that Herb was a victim too."