From Black Rooms (18 page)

throwing them both against the open door.

Natalie did not have time to appreciate the spectacle of watching Serena beat the crap out of Tackle while wearing a housedress and support hose. Block had his own stun gun aimed at Serena's back. Natalie pivoted the wheelchair and rammed him, crouching low and

keeping her head down. She heard rather than saw the stun gun's darts whiz past an inch above her, felt their wires drop lightly onto her arched back like streamers from a popped party favor. Then the chair plowed into Block's sprawling stomach as if hitting a side of beef. He let out an oof and reached for her over the back of the chair. But as soon as his porterhouse hands

encircled her neck, the fingers slackened their grip, jittering with the electricity coursing through them. He thumped onto the floor, his fat rippling, and Natalie stood to find Serena squatting a few feet behind her, holding the stun gun she'd scooped off the floor.

"Teach you to mind your elders, boy," she drawled, setting the gun's handle back on the floor so it could continue to pump its paralyzing current into the helpless Block.

Serena bunched her skirt in both hands and lifted the hem to her waist to sprint toward the automatic doors of the facility's entrance. Natalie fol owed her lead, risking only a brief glance back at Carleton Amis. The whole melee had happened so fast, he remained

sandwiched between the door and Tackle, who gasped in his arms. With disgust, Amis threw his

semiconscious goon to the floor and glared at Natalie, his face ripening to red fury.

Though she'd either ditched or lost her reading glasses in the fight, Serena made no attempt to remove the rest of her costume when they got outside, but saddled up on the Harley, support hose and al . Nor did she take time to put on either of the helmets that dangled from the handlebars by their chin straps. Instead, she cast both helmets off on the sidewalk like unwanted bal ast and fired the bike's motor to life. Natalie barely had a chance to climb on the back before they zoomed off at motocross speed, but she couldn't complain. Although the ride home was even more terrifying without any protection for her head, the wind felt good on her face, for it meant she was stil alive and free.

15

Mr. Pancrit Cleans Up the Mess

WHEN THE INTERLOPERS HAD ABSCONDED,

THE MAN KNOWN VARIOUSLY as Carl Pancrit and

Carleton Amis smoothed the lapels of his blue blazer, surveyed the worthless Corps Security agents laid out like sausages before him, and debated what to do first. Tempting as it was to let Block and Tackle suffer the consequences of their own incompetence, there was too much work to do, and Pancrit himself had higher

priorities to attend to.

Sighing, he stepped over Tackle, who clutched at his throat and made little gurgling noises, and went to pick up the stun gun that the black woman in the grandma getup had left on the floor. Pancrit gathered the gun's insulated wires in his fist and yanked on them to dislodge the electrode darts from Block's prostrate bulk. When the man stopped his gelatinous quivering and rol ed his eyes open with a moan, Pancrit pointed to Tackle.

"Assuming he fails to die the way he fails at everything else, take him to the lab and start crating up the equipment. We're moving...again." His irritation festered in the final word. "I'l listen to your excuses when you're coherent enough to give them."

Confident that Block would obey his commands, he

didn't wait for verbal agreement. Although the

infiltrators who'd sandbagged Tackle and Block were a nuisance, Pancrit had a far more serious saboteur to punish.

He returned to the rec room, where Evan Markham stil sat strapped into a wheelchair much like the one the interfering women had abandoned in the hal way.

Markham's expression bore a trace of amusement, as if Bartholomew Wax could hardly restrain a smile at

Pancrit's expense.

"Trouble, Carl?" Wax asked with mock concern.

"Nothing that need concern you." Pancrit strode to the two easels set up a few feet apart in front of the wheelchair. On the left one rested the Madonna of the
Yarnwinder; on the right, The Scream, which he'd
col ected from Calvin Criswel that morning. "You have more important things to worry about, Dr. Wax." He stroked one edge of the Madonna's frame.

The gesture wiped al mirth from Wax's manner.

"D
on't."

The exclamation doubled as a plea and a warning.

Pancrit ignored both.

"What shal we use this time?" Like a chef selecting his ingredients, he picked the bottle of acid from the smorgasbord of torture paraphernalia arrayed on the table beside him, considered it. "Nah, we've done that. No, I think we need something with some more spark to it." He exchanged the bottle for a can of lighter fluid that he raised to Wax as if proposing a toast...which in some ways he was. "Aha! That's more like it." The Violet's visage paled. "I've done everything you asked."

"Who do you think you're fooling, Barty?" Pancrit uncapped the can. "You perfected the treatment months ago, and we both know it."

"I d-did not!" Wax babbled, hastening his speech as Pancrit moved the lighter fluid closer to the Madonna's canvas. "Please...I'l try harder."

"Oh, you'l do better than try, Barty, or I'l bring each of your children here, one by one, and do this." The dead scientist began to scream even before Pancrit squirted the flammable liquid over the Virgin and child. With the pungent kerosene scent weighting the air, Pancrit took a box of matches from his pocket, struck one, and flicked it at the painting with the offhand sadism of a pyromaniac. A flower of blue-and-yel ow flame blossomed from the point where the match head bounced off the picture, petals unfurling to curl around the frame. Through the waves of translucent fire that shimmered up over the canvas, the faces of Mary and Jesus melted and ran, burbled and blistered.

Apoplectic with impotent rage, Bartholomew Wax

hurled himself toward Pancrit, but the plastic cuffs held Evan Markham's powerful body fast to the wheelchair, which tilted forward and dropped back with a clatter. A shorn Samson, Wax stammered at falsetto pitch, his naive vocabulary unable to summon a sufficiently awful epithet for his oppressor. "You...you...MONSTER!" Pancrit cast a wry look at the blackened canvas beneath its shroud of fire. "Shame about that one--it was my favorite. I assume we'l see more promising results from your research in the near future, Dr. Wax?" Wax grew ominously quiet, withholding tears, like a boy too proud to cry before a playground bul y. "Yes,
Mr. Pancrit."

"Good. Because if we don't--" He indicated the Munch on the right easel. "--you'l get to hear that picture scream."

The dead scientist sagged, drained of defiance. "When can I get back to work?"

"Soon. Once we've ironed out a few smal problems." Wax didn't nod so much as bowed the conduit's head in defeat. When the man in the wheelchair raised his face again, the violet gaze radiated Evan Markham's freezerburn coldness. He sniffed and blinked his watery eyes, Bartholomew Wax's anguish no more to him than an

irritating al ergy. "The doc seems more compliant now. You want me to go back to the lab and summon him to get started again?"

"No, I'm afraid there's been a bit of a delay." Pancrit took a box cutter from among his torture implements and cut the Violet loose from the chair. "Maddox is worthless now. I need you to recruit another test subject."

"Already on it." Markham stood and rubbed his wrists, his gaze flicking toward the unending wails that drifted through the building like inclement weather. His hands clenched and unclenched, hungering for work. "You want me to dispose of him?"

"No," Pancrit said, "I'm conducting a little experiment with Mr. Maddox. But there is something else you can do for me."

"And what would that be? Wash your car?" The Violet advanced on him, tensing with unrelieved aggression.

"Maybe I don't like being your errand boy." Pancrit took an instinctive step backward, aware that he did not have Tackle and Block to protect him. "I understand your impatience--I'm impatient, too. If that girlfriend of yours hadn't interfered--"

Markham stiffened at the mention of Lindstrom, the way he had in the cel at Corps headquarters. "What about Boo?"

"She and her friend came for a visit." Pancrit tightened his grip on the box cutter to defend himself if the Violet attacked. "They evidently bluffed their way past those two Einsteins out in the hal , with some amateur

theatrics. I, however, recognized Ms. Lindstrom at once, having seen pictures of her in al manner of cheap wigs. I need you to find out why she was here." The news appeared to disturb the Violet Kil er, but he iced over any anxiety he may have felt. "You wouldn't have to worry about her if you'd just let me--"

"No. You can't have her yet." For his own safety, Pancrit decided to bluff. "I've left orders: if anything happens to either me or the project, she'l be kil ed. You'l never have her."

A frosty smirk rose on Markham's lips. "I've waited ten years. I can wait a little longer."

"I've waited longer than that, Mr. Markham. And I
can't wait anymore." Pancrit pulled out the fire
extinguisher he'd placed under the table and dowsed the crackling Madonna with carbon-dioxide fog. He didn't let the Violet Kil er see how he quietly stashed the box cutter in his coat pocket for protection.

After Markham departed, Carl Pancrit went to the

makeshift lab they had established in what had once been the rest home's kitchen. Anyone expecting the sparking Tesla coils and bubbling beakers of a mad scientist's lair would have found the accoutrements disappointing: mostly electronic devices paneled in beige plastic like so much office equipment.

Fluorescent gene sequencers, thermal cyclers for

"amplifying" or replicating desired DNA strands, and scores of other automated analyzers, as wel as assorted centrifuges, microscopes, and desktop computers. Block and Tackle listlessly shuffled around the room, packing the delicate devices in plastic crates and cushioning them in molded foam rubber. Block seemed to have

recovered somewhat from the stun gun's electroshock, but Tackle stil rasped and hacked, a huge oval bruise blooming over his Adam's apple.

"Leave this one out," Pancrit instructed them as he set a battery-operated SoulScan unit onto a pushcart along with a rol of surgical tape. With its green monitor and tangle of electrode cables, one could easily mistake the SoulScan for an electroencephalograph, were it not for the large and ominous red button on its control panel. Violets had charmingly nicknamed this the "Panic Button" for its capacity to eject an inhabiting soul from a conduit's body with a short, sharp shock of electricity. Not a pleasant experience, but often preferable to possession by a dangerous dead person.

Pancrit next opened the refrigerator, where he stored the adenovirus he used to carry and implant the modified DNA for their gene therapy. He skimmed his index

finger along the racks of vials fil ed with green liquid, each emblazoned with a label bearing a number, a

name, a time duration, and the words TRIAL

TERMINATED stamped in red. All his glorious failures.
He stopped at the rack with the designation #17-MARISA A. 52 HRS., 23 MIN. He checked his watch. Maddox was due to reach the end of his gene therapy within the next three or four hours.

"Leave that for now," Pancrit told the Corps Security agents regarding their cleanup work. "I need your help with Clem."

The physician fil ed two syringes, one with a mild sedative and the other with a lethal dose of morphine, and set them beside the SoulScan on the cart, then pushed it out of the lab. Tackle and Block accompanied him to the observation room where they'd confined their current test subject. The moment they reached the room's locked entrance, Maddox threw himself against the window with a grating shriek.

Pancrit pul ed the cart to one side and jerked his head toward the door. "You first."

Tackle glowered at him, but unlocked the room. Clem Maddox tried to bolt through the door the moment they opened it, but the Corps Security agents each seized one of his arms and lifted him from the floor as they dragged him back inside.

"Y
ou lied to me!" Maddox screamed at Pancrit, kicking
his dangling feet to twist himself free from the agents'

grasp. "You told me I could be with Amy!"

"I didn't lie to you, Clem." Pancrit wheeled the cart through the door with the solicitousness of a garcon delivering room service. "We'l have you with her in no time."

Tackle and Block wrestled Maddox onto a table with a top upholstered in Naugahyde and outfitted with sinewy leather straps. Pancrit then jabbed the needle containing the sedative into the patient's arm. As it took effect, the drug weakened Maddox enough to enable the Corps

Security agents to cinch the belts tight around his torso and limbs.

Clem's thrashing slowed, and he slurred his obscenities.

"No...no more shots," he muttered, mush-mouthed.

"Already got...too many people in my head."

"Only one more, Clem. I promise." Pancrit smiled and readied the needle with the morphine.

When the tranquilizer had sufficiently pacified his test subject, Pancrit used the surgical tape to affix each of the SoulScan's twenty metal electrodes to its

corresponding node point as marked in ink on

Maddox's shaved scalp. With the sensors in place, he switched on the SoulScan monitor. As he expected, the three glowing green lines that scrol ed across the top of the screen jiggled with the subdued brain waves of Clem's sedated thoughts. The bottom three lines

alternately flattened and fuzzed with irregular bursts of scratchy static. This intermittent interference indicated that one or more souls--possibly several--were

"knocking," attempting to access and control Maddox's mind and body.

If left to the faulty efficacy of Bartholomew Wax's latest DNA treatment, Maddox would most likely have remained in this inadequate intermediate state, neither able to permit the knocking souls to inhabit him