The sudden darkness hurled Dr. Burke up against the wall, heart in her throat, palms prickling with sweat. She could feel the jolt of adrenaline eating away at the alcohol-induced distance and struggled to calm herself. Being sober, in this building, was no part of her plan.
"I knew, I knew, I knew I should've brought the resht... of the sec... ond bottle," she muttered, her voice very nearly lost in the passage of throat and teeth and lips it had to negotiate before it could clear her mouth.
The equally sudden appearance of light from the battery-operated floods at each end of the hall brought a victorious wave of Donald's jacket. "Ha, ha! Let's hear it for modern engin... eering! Power goes off, emer... gency lights... go on. Rah! Damn good thing they did, too," she continued, stumbling forward again. "Never find the damn lab... otherwise. Wander around here for... days. Maybe even... months."
She squinted down the length of the corridor. "Speaking of... which. Where the hell am I?" It took a moment's concentrated effort before she recognized the upcoming t-junction. The left wing, after crossing a lecture hall and going down a small flight of stairs, was a dead end, she thought, but the right, with a little luck, would eventually lead her to the back door of the lab. The small wooden door led into the storeroom; they'd never used it, but Dr. Burke had seen to it in the beginning that she carried the key.
"Maybe I knew something like this was... going to happen," she confided to a fire extinguisher. "Maybe I was just being... prepared for crazy-Cathy to pop her... cork."
And were you prepared, asked the voice of reason, for what happened to Donald?
Not even a bottle of single malt whiskey could shut the voice up, but it did make it very easy to ignore. So Dr. Burke did.
While Vicki could see the emergency lights as white pinpricks in a black shroud, her companions apparently found them more than sufficient illumination. Given that Henry needed so little light, he could probably see quite clearly, and she knew from experience that Celluci had better than average night vision. God, how she envied them; to be able to move freely without fear of misstep or collision, to be able to see movement in the shadows in time to...
To what?
Vicki pushed the question away and concentrated on not outpacing her circle of sight. Although she kept the flashlight beam trained closely on the floor in front of her so as not to blind the two men, she allowed a small part to overlap onto Henry. After everything they'd been through, everything all three of them had been through, she wasn't letting him slip into darkness just because of her lousy eyes.
Henry was safe.
They'd saved him.
Her mother was dead, but Henry was alive and he was safe with them.
That made up for a lot.
Breathing heavily, Celluci's hand tucked into the elbow of her good arm, she followed the little bit of Henry out of a stairwell and squinted up at the red pinprick in the darkness that had to be the exit sign. "You guys sure this is the right floor?"
"I'm sure." Henry's voice was flat and atonal. "The stink of perverted death is strongest here."
"Henry... " Shaking free of Celluci's grip, Vicki reached out and poked him gently in the hip with the side of the flashlight. "It's going to be worse in the lab." They'd told him about Donald down in the electrical room. All three of them had needed a moment to recover from the telling. "You can wait in the hall if you think it's going to be too strong."
"It's only a difference of degree," Henry told her abruptly, not turning. He could see the outline of the door at the end of the hall. "I might as well go into the lab because I can't smell anything else even here." Then he reached back and brushed his fingers over the warmth of her hand, softening his tone. "We've all moved past the time for running. Now it's time to face those last few fears and... "
"And get the hell out of here," Celluci finished. "Which we won't do if we continue to stand here flapping our lips. Come on." He caught hold of Vicki again and dragged her forward, forcing Henry to move ahead or be run down. If they lost momentum, they'd never get this finished. He hadn't wanted to see anything finished quite so much in a very long time. "It can't possibly be worse than the last visit, for any of us."
Vicki tightened her hand around the barrel of the flashlight, giving thanks the grip was heavy ridged rubber. Her palm was so wet that a slicker surface would've squirted right out of her grasp. Face our last few fears. Oh, God, I hope not.
The lab, possibly because it was such a large room, possibly because after a century of renovation the building just generally defied logic, rated an emergency light of its own.
"Well, thank God for small favors," Celluci muttered as they entered. "I didn't much want to be in the dark with that."
Vicki let her light lick over that, the stainless steel blazing momentarily then sliding into shadow again. All the horror lay in memory now for the body the isolation box contained was merely dead, and they'd all dealt with death before. He's really most sincerely dead. She bit back a giggle and stomped down hard on the thought. It would be frighteningly easy to lose control.
Henry ignored the box and strode quickly down the length of the room to the one remaining computer, trench coat flapping back from his naked torso. With the power off, he had no way to tell if it contained the files concerning him, but he had to assume that if Catherine did the tests in this lab then she entered the data into this machine.
"Fitzroy."
He turned, fingers already wrapped around a fistful of cables.
"You might want to clear this out of here as well." Celluci offered him the wallet he'd picked up off the floor, various pieces of ID stuffed loosely inside. "Let's not give Detective Fergusson a chance to cash in on the obvious."
"Thank you." A quick check, and Henry shoved it all into his coat pocket. "If the police managed to connect me to all of this, I'd have had to disappear." One corner of his mouth twisted in the detective's direction. "Maybe you should have left the wallet on the floor."
Celluci mirrored both expression and tone. "Maybe I should have."
Setting cables and monitor keyboard carefully to one side, Henry lifted the actual computer over his head and threw it into the corner as hard as he could.
Catherine jerked back at the sound of plastic shattering, eyes snapping open impossibly wide. "It's her. She's wrecking things." Her fingers wrapped around number nine's arm, molding imprints into the increasingly malleable flesh. "We've got to stop her!"
Number nine stopped moving, obedient to the pressure. He would do what she wanted.
From the lab up ahead came the sound of further destruction, small pieces being made smaller still until they were beyond all hope of repair.
"All right." Catherine rose on her toes and rested her forehead on number nine's skull just below where the staples held the cap of bone in place. "This is my plan. I'll distract her, get her to chase me and lose her in the halls. You go in and get Donald. He should be viable outside the box by now. Don't let anything stop you."
He couldn't feel her breath, warm against his ear and neck, the nerves in the skin had never regenerated, but he could feel her closeness and that was enough. He reached up and awkwardly patted her arm.
"I knew I could count on you!" She squeezed his hand in return, never feeling the tiny bones shifting out of their moorings, tendons and ligaments beginning to let go. "Come on!"
While Henry smashed hardware into progressively smaller pieces and Celluci snapped disks, Vicki, flashlight tucked under her chin, flipped through reams and reams of printout.
"Finding anything?" Celluci asked, reaching for yet another plastic square.
Vicki shook her head. "Mostly EEG records."
He craned his neck and peered down at the paper bisected with a black ink trail of spikes and valleys.
"How the hell do you know that?"
She snorted. "They're labeled."
"Stop it!"
All three of them jerked around.
"Stop it this instant!"
Vicki's flashlight just barely managed to pick out a pale circle of face and hair over a paler rectangle of lab coat in the doorway at the far end of the long room.
"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!" Fury and madness were stridently obvious in her voice.
"Catherine." Leaping the wreckage at his feet, Henry charged forward.
The figure in the doorway disappeared.
"Fitzroy!"
"Henry!"
He ignored them, intent on the hunt. This madwoman had imprisoned him, tortured him, left him alone in the darkness; she was his. Knowing what she was, he would avoid sinking into the emptiness of her eyes. He would take her down. Her blood was not tainted even if her mind was. And she owed him blood.
In spite of his speed, not yet fully returned but still greater than mortal, she was out of sight when he reached the hall. Her scent lay buried under the clinging stench of death perverted, which not only filled the air but covered the inside of his mouth and nose like a noxious film of oil. He could hear her life so he sped after it.
But sound became a twisting and uncertain trail, easy to lose track of in the maze of rooms and passageways and, so long used to hunting by sight or scent, Henry found it more difficult than he'd believed possible to close the distance. Her life grew closer, but embarrassingly slowly.
Madness gives strength of limb even while it destroys strength of mind. He couldn't remember who had said that to him, so many years ago, but it appeared that madness gave fleetness of foot as well as strength for Catherine continued to elude him, using the peculiarities of the building to her advantage.
Around a corner and through a lecture hall and out a small door only someone with intimate knowledge of the building would know existed, her heartbeat led him on. The emergency lighting provided patches of too bright light alternating with bands of shadow much easier on his eyes. He was beginning to grow tired, his body protesting the demands he was making on it so soon after the punishment it had endured. Vicki's blood could only do so much.
In the instant before flight, Catherine had recognized the vampire and it hadn't taken her long to realize that she couldn't outrun him. Her knowledge of the building was her only advantage and while it prevented an immediate confrontation, she soon saw it wasn't enough to throw him off her trail.
She had no idea what he would do when he finally caught her, nor did she care. Her only thoughts were for number nine and how she'd been forced to leave him alone and outnumbered in the lab. She had to get back to him.
Rounding a corner, the angle of the emergency light caught her eye and she skidded to a stop. The heavy battery contained in the base had proved too much for the antique plaster and lath expected to hold the screws and the unit had sagged away from the wall. Chest heaving, she jumped for it and hooked her fingertips over a narrow metal lip.
Henry followed Catherine's life around another corner and down a corridor much darker than the rest had been. Her heartbeat grew louder. Then he saw her outlined against the institutional gray of the wall; cowering, cornered.
His lips drew off his teeth and the Hunter closed in on his prey.
She straightened, her body no longer blocking the object cradled in her arms.
Brilliant white light drove spikes of hot metal into night-sensitive eyes. Crying out in pain, Henry fell back, hands raised, an ineffectual barrier now that the damage had been done. He heard her go by, recoiled as her life brushed its shattered edges over him, and could not follow.
Celluci had taken three quick steps after the running vampire, saw he was fast being left behind and stopped. "God damn him!" He flung the disk he was holding at the wall, as hard as he was able, and found his feelings were not in the least relieved by its shattering. "After all we went through to haul his ass out of danger, that god-damned undead bastard runs off on us!"
Vicki merely shook her head, hand clutched tightly around the barrel of her flashlight. Although the sound of her own heartbeat nearly deafened her, she felt surprisingly calm. "It's not," she said softly, "like he's a tame lion."
Celluci turned on her, both hands driving up through his hair. "And what the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"It's a line from a children's book. I used it to describe him last spring, when we met."
"Great, just great. You're taking a literary trip down memory lane and Fitzroy's buggered off." He took another step toward the door, then changed his mind, whirled, and stomped back to her side. "Vicki, that's it. We're out of here." Feelings of betrayal outweighed worry and concern. "If Fitzroy's able to go running off like some kind of bloodsucking avenging angel, he can manage without us around and... "
All at once, he realized she wasn't listening to him. Which was, in itself, not particularly unusual but her expression, pointed fixedly down the flashlight beam, was one he'd seen on her face only once before, about an hour and a half before when they'd opened the metal coffin and Donald Li had opened his eyes.
The flesh between his shoulder blades crawling, he spun around.
Standing in the doorway, was a parody of a man.
She had told him to rescue Donald. She had not mentioned the people standing beyond the box, so number nine ignored them.
He shuffled forward.
Celluci's right hand came up and sketched a quick sign of the cross. "That girl, the witness the night the boy was killed, she said that he was strangled by a dead man."
The creature continued to shuffle forward, the stink of it growing with every step.
A sane man would run. But his feet and legs refused to obey. "This has got to be the thing that killed the boy."
"Odds are good," Vicki agreed, her voice sounding as though she'd forced it through clenched teeth. "So what are you going to do? Arrest it?"
"Oh, very funny." Without taking his eyes off the lurching obscenity, he moved sideways until his shoulder came in contact with hers; the warmth of another life suddenly important. "What do you suppose it wants?"
He felt her shrug. "I'm afraid to guess."
It arrived at the isolation box and reached out for the latch.
"Fuck that!" Barely aware he was moving, Celluci charged forward. After what they'd gone through to save Donald Li, after what Donald Li had gone through, he'd be damned if he'd let the kid be dragged back into the ranks of the undead. Ranks of the undead... Jesus! I sound like the cut line on a made-for-TV movie. He rocked to a halt at the end of the box and bellowed, "Go on! Get away from there!"
It ignored him.
"God damn you, I said get away!" He didn't remember pulling his gun, but there it was in his hand. "Just back away from the box! Now!"
Finally recognizing some sort of threat, it turned its head and looked right at him.
Get Donald. Don't let anything stop you.
Number nine stared at the man by the box. The voice had held command, but the words had not been words he had to obey.
Don't let anything stop you.
The words were not enough to stop him. The man could be ignored.
He turned his attention back to the latch, trying to get his fingers to close.
The worst of it wasn't the grave-gray of the skin, lips and fingertips greenish-black, nor was it the line of staples across the forehead or even the obvious signs of the triumph of decay. The worst of it was that there was someone in there, that not only an intelligence but a personality existed within the ruin.
Trembling violently with horror and pity and revulsion in about equal proportion, Celluci braced his gun with his left hand and, whispering a "Hail Mary" through dry lips, pulled the trigger. The first shot missed. The second creased the back of the creature's skull with enough force to spin it around and throw it over the stainless steel curve of the isolation box. He never got the chance to fire a third.
The blow caught him just below the shoulder, knocking him into the trio of oxygen tanks lined up under the window. He lost his grip on the gun, was vaguely aware of it skittering away across the floor, and saw Vicki charging around the end of the box, flashlight raised like a club.
Vicki had watched Celluci advance on the creature with a curious detachment. It was as though, when she'd seen it appear in the doorway and realized both what it was and what it wasn't, an overload switch had been tripped and she could no longer react, only wait. Her mouth had moved in response to comments made, but her mind had been disconnected. After the last few days of constant internal turmoil, charges and countercharges and just general hysteria, the peace and quiet was kind of nice. She kept the flashlight beam trained on the creature as it shuffled along and refused to wonder what it was she waited for.
She thought she understood what motivated Celluci to try and prevent the opening of the box, but she couldn't seem to make it matter. She heard him speak, but the words got tangled and made no sense. When he pulled his gun, the only thing she felt was mild surprise.
Muscles spasmed with the first shot, her brain slamming back and forth between her ears. The crack of the second shot jerked her out of her retreat and shook her awake.
She saw the creature's arm come up and Celluci fly back. She started moving before he hit the floor. Keeping the beam pointed along her path until she got near enough to finish blind, she raised the heavy flashlight like a club and slammed it down. Contact had a strangely muffled feel.
Although she'd come so close that the slightly sweet stink of decomposing flesh wrapped around her, she couldn't actually see the creature she faced. And thank God for small mercies. It had been terrifying enough from a distance. Unfortunately, neither could she see the return blow.
With only one arm for balance, she went down hard, more concerned with hanging onto her only means of sight than with breaking her fall. She struck, rolled, and crushed her injured wrist against the floor.
Celluci heard her gasp of pain as he launched himself back at the creature. What are you doing? screamed the still rational part of his brain. But even while recognizing that the question had merit, the night had gone on too long for him to listen to it.
With a dull squelch, his shoulder drove into the creature's ribs, forcing it back toward the door. They went down together, grappled, rolled. He lost track of time, lost track of place, lost track of self until he found himself staring up at the hall ceiling as his spine smashed into the tile. He grunted as the heavy muscles of his back absorbed most, but not all, of the blow. He tried to kick free. Was lifted. Thrown against a wall of shelves. Slid down them. Saw a door closing. And was suddenly alone in darkness.
Number nine had put the last intruder in the box. She had been pleased with that. So he found a box for this intruder as well.
Pressing down with both hands, he bent the round metal thing until it would no longer turn.
Now the intruder would stay in the box.
It was undoubtedly a storage closet, not that it mattered. Celluci flung himself against the door. It didn't budge. And when, screaming Italian profanity, he finally found the knob, it didn't turn.
Vicki levered herself up onto her knees, head spinning. She assumed the sounds of impact she heard were Celluci and the creature, but at the moment she was physically incapable of going to his aid. Curled around her injured arm, she dry retched, fighting the waves of dizziness that threatened to knock her flat again.
Damn it, Vicki, get it together! Mike needs you! So you've lost a little blood, big fucking deal. It isn't the first time. Get UP!
Panting through locked teeth, she groped for the flashlight and suddenly realized she wasn't alone.
Her vision consisted of only a very narrow path along the floor, illuminated by the flashlight and bound by the disease that had destroyed her sight. Into that path shuffled a pair of feet wearing new track shoes with velcro tabs. Beyond horror, Vicki froze, unable to move, unable to think, unable to look away as the feet shuffled toward her. When they stopped, she could also see sweatpants covering the legs from knees to ankles. The creature by the box had been wearing sweatpants, but she could still hear the sounds of fighting... .
Finally, she got her fingers closed around the rubber grip and, clutching it like a talisman, she slowly forced herself to straighten.
Her mother looked down at her, much as her mother had looked down at her a thousand times before. Except this time, her mother was dead.
She felt reason slipping away and scrambled desperately for its edges. This was her mother. Her mother loved her. Dead or not, her mother would never harm her.
Then the dead lips parted and a dead mouth formed her name.
Too much.
Henry heard the scream, turned, and ran toward it. Still half blind, his sense of smell useless in corridors saturated with abomination, he raced back along the path of Vicki's terror and came up facing a dead end.
Howling with rage, he doubled back, senses straining for the touch of her life to guide him.
"VICKI!" Celluci threw himself against the door in impotent fury. Again, and again.
And again.
Mouth dry, heart pounding in the too-small cage of her ribs, Vicki slowly backed away. Hands reaching out for her, her dead mother followed. The harsh illumination of the flashlight accentuated the death pallor and threw tiny shadows beside each of the staples across Marjory Nelson's forehead.
Her feet continued moving for a moment before Vicki realized she wasn't going any farther, that the distance between them was closing. The cold metal curve of the isolation box pressed into the small of her back. Go around! she thought, but she couldn't remember how. She couldn't take her eyes off the approaching figure. Nor could she turn the light away in the hope that it would disappear in the darkness.
"Stop!"
Vicki jerked, the sound slapping at her.
The dead woman, who had been Marjory Nelson, dragged herself forward one more step, then had to obey.
"Stay!" Catherine, with number nine following close behind her, entered the lab, squinted as she crossed the beam of light, and glared around. "Just look at this place. It'll take days to get it all cleared up." She kicked at a fractured bit of circuit board and turned on Vicki, her movements nearly as jerky as her companion's. "Who are you?"
Who am I? Her glasses were sliding down her nose. She bent her head until she could push them up with the index finger of her injured hand. Who was she? She swallowed, trying to wet her mouth. "Nelson. Vicki Nelson."
"Vicki Nelson?" Catherine repeated, coming closer.
The tone sent a knife blade down Vicki's spine, although the grad student was still outside the boundary of her vision. This person is insane. Crazy just wasn't a strong enough word for the fractures in Catherine's voice.
Leaving number nine in the shadows, Catherine crossed into the cone of light and stopped just in front of where Marjory Nelson strained against the compulsion holding her in place. "Dr. Burke told me about you. You wouldn't stop snooping around." The pointed chin rose and the pale blue eyes narrowed. "She wouldn't have tried to terminate the experiments if it wasn't for you. This is all your fault!" The last word became a curse and she threw herself forward, fingers curved to claws, claws reaching for Vicki's throat.
Self-preservation broke the paralysis. Vicki threw herself sideways, knowing she wasn't going to be fast enough. She felt fingertips catch at her collar, had a sudden look into the pit of madness as, for an instant, Catherine's contorted face filled her vision, then all at once, found herself staggering back, no longer under attack. Sagging against the support of the box, she raised the light, searching for an explanation.
Catherine dangled from her mother's hands then was tossed, with no apparent effort, to one side.
It was the sort of rescue that small children implicitly believed their mothers could perform. In spite of everything, Vicki found herself smiling.
"Way to go, Mom," she muttered, trying to catch her breath.
Number nine had not understood what the other who was like him was about to do.
Then he heard her cry out as she struck the floor.
She was hurt.
He remembered anger.
Number nine's first blow shattered ribs, the crack of breaking bone gunshot loud, splinters driven into the chest cavity.
That first blow would have killed her, had she not already been dead. She staggered under the impact but managed to remain standing. The second blow knocked uplifted arms aside, the third threw her halfway across the lab.
Vicki struggled to keep the battle in sight, bracing herself on the box and playing the flashlight beam over the room like some kind of demented spotlight operator at a production more macabre than anything modern theater had to offer.
Nutrient fluid dripped from the ruin of number nine's hands, violence having finished what rot had begun. Glistening curves of bone showed through the destruction of his wrists. He used his forearms like clubs, smashing them down again and again.
Vicki watched as her mother's body slammed into a metal shelving unit, shelves and contents crashing to the floor. A number of the glass containers seemed to explode on contact with the floor, spewing chemical vapor into the air to mix with the smell of decay. As number nine lurched forward, Vicki could stand it no longer.
"For chrissakes, Mom!" she screamed. "Hit the bastard back!"
Her mother turned, head lolling on a neck no longer capable of support, met her daughter's gaze for a moment, then bent and ripped free one of the shelves' flat metal struts. Holding it like a baseball bat, she straightened and swung.
The ragged end of the steel bar caught number nine in the temple, shearing through the thin bone and into the brain. Gold gleamed for a second as the neural net tore loose, then number nine reeled back and collapsed.
The bar rang against the tile. Marjory Nelson swayed and crumpled, as though invisible strings had been cut.
"MOM!" Vicki stumbled forward and threw herself to her knees. She couldn't hold her mother and the flashlight both, so she shoved the latter in under her sling and dragged the limp body up onto her lap. The diffuse light, shining through the thin cotton of Henry's shirt, wiped away all the changes that death and science had made and gave her back her mother.
"Mom? Don't be dead. Oh, please, don't be dead. Not again... ."
Too much damage. She could feel the binding letting go.
But there was something she had to do.
"Mom? Goddamnit, Mom... " Pale gray eyes, so like her own, flickered open and Vicki forgot how to breathe. She shouldn't have been able to see their expression, but she could, could see it clearly, felt it wrap around her and for one long moment keep her safe from the world.
"... love you... Vic... ki... "
Tears pooled under the edge of her glasses and spilled down her cheeks. "I love you, too, Mom." Her vision blurred and when it cleared she was alone. "Mom?" But the gray eyes stared up at nothing and the body she held was empty. Very, very carefully, she slid it off her lap and stroked the eyes closed.
Her mother was dead.
She started to shake. The pressure grew, closing her throat, twisting her muscles into knots, tossing her back and forth where she knelt. The first sob ripped huge burning holes in her heart and held as much anger as grief. It hurt so much that she surrendered to the second, curled around the pain, and cried.
Cried for her mother.
Cried for herself.
Number nine lay where he had fallen. The anger was gone. Although he had no way of knowing that the neural net had stopped functioning, he dimly understood that the part that was body and the part that was him were now separate.
He stared up at the ceiling, wanting...
... wanting...
Then the view shifted and she was there.
Catherine gently turned number nine's head to face her.
"I can't fix you," she whispered, drawing her finger softly around the curve of his jaw, alternately tracing flesh and bone. "You were going to stay with me forever. I wouldn't have let her shut you down." She smiled and tenderly pushed a flap of skin back into place.
"You were," she told him, voice catching in her throat, "the very best experiment I ever did."
He wanted her to smile.
He liked it when she smiled.
Then she was gone.
He wanted her to come back.
Slowly, every movement precisely performed, Catherine got to her feet. Every step carefully planned, she advanced across the lab. She paused at the jagged length of steel, still lying where it had been dropped, bent, and lifted it from the floor.
The end torn from the shelf gleamed, polished and pointed by the force that had ripped it free.
She held it up and smiled at it.
The flat metal bar cracked across Vicki's bent shoulders and smashed her to the floor. The world tilted and instinct took over as, gasping in pain, she managed to squirm around to face the assault, shoving her glasses back into place.
The flashlight twisted in the folds of cloth and somehow finished pointed straight up, a miniature searchlight. It lit the gleaming end of steel descending toward Vicki. But not in time.
