Night Terror (37 page)

63

“WHAT THE HELL?
”said Virgil. The weird combination of words still echoed down the hall. He glanced from Audrey to Cooder. Their faces were blank. They looked more like statues than people and then he knew what had happened. They were hypnotized. Just like Mac.

The public address system rattled again. “Kill the intruder. Take the gun away from him and kill him.”

“Shit,” said Virgil.

A new gleam of unquestioning obedience came on in Cooder’s eyes. Behind Audrey and Cooder, the door to the elevator was sliding shut. The loud
click
as it locked back into place sounded like a casket lid closing. Virgil backed away down the hall, pointing his shotgun at Cooder since he looked to be the only one who had heard the command. Cooder’s movements were jerky and unsure and his hands were spread like a 1930s movie monster. It would have been comic if his face hadn’t been stony, and if Virgil hadn’t been absolutely certain that Cooder would choke him to death with those same hands. Audrey was shaking her head and stamping her feet, and Cooder’s movements were slow and unwieldy, his face a mixture of concentration and confusion.

“Stop, Cooder!” Virgil shouted, waving the gun in Cooder’s face.

Cooder slapped at the shotgun barrel, his movements clumsy and slow. But he kept coming.

“I’ll shoot him!” shouted Virgil, hoping the address system was two-way.

No answer.

“I’ll shoot both of them if I have to!”

He thought he could wound Cooder. Shoot him in the leg, maybe. But he knew he couldn’t shoot Audrey. No way he could do that. And just how powerful
were
Tara’s commands? Would Cooder just keep coming, dragging himself down the hall on stumps? Cooder’d never hurt a fly in his life.

Virgil backed farther and farther down the corridor until another corridor appeared. He peered down it at another long line of white doors. Tara was behind one of the doors around here and if he could get to her he could get her to bring Cooder and Audrey back around. Either that or he’d have to shoot Tara, too, and she wasn’t gonna like that idea. But which corridor?

He backed across the intersection, picking up his pace, putting some distance between himself and Cooder. Audrey was twenty steps back. Virgil stopped beside the first door, and, twisting the handle, kicked it in. It was an empty, tile-lined room. But the smell of death that he had noticed upon first arriving in the cellar was doubly powerful here.

“I’m coming for you, Tara!” he shouted in frustration. “And when I find you, I’m going to shoot you. You got that?”

Cooder was almost across the intersection. Audrey hadn’t reached it yet. Virgil kicked in another door. Another empty room.

“You turn these people off now! I know you can hear me!”

Nothing.

Cooder seemed to be walking faster now. Virgil aimed the shotgun at Cooder’s left leg, just below the knee, and continued backing up. “I’m going to shoot him!” he shouted.

“One more step and I’m going to have to shoot you, boy,” he whispered sadly, his finger tight on the trigger.

Now he had nowhere to run. Cooder was slow and he was unarmed, but sooner or later he was going to get in close and there was no way Virgil could allow him to get his hands on the gun or on his throat.

God help me, I may have to kill him.

64

AUDREY COULD STILL SEE
the corridor around her. There was no sickening sense of dislocation like before. She could control this trance, just as she had learned to control her self-hypnosis. The real power was in her own mind, not Tara’s, and she could hear Zach again like a siren, calling to her.

Help me, Mommy!

I’m coming, honey. I’m coming!

But first she had to help Cooder, or Virgil was going to kill him.

She fought down the last of the lethargy and stumbled down the corridor, catching Virgil’s eye to assure him she meant him no harm. Then she placed herself between the shotgun and Cooder, facing Cooder, focusing on his eyes.

“Cooder!” she shouted. “Cooder, look at me! It’s Audrey! Look me in the eye.”

Nothing. He was a stumbling zombie. Her mind raced. She tried to remember the words she had heard Tara calling just seconds before. The commands that had driven her and Cooder into a hypnotic trance. She remembered them immediately, because suddenly she realized their significance. How could she have been so blind?

They were doors.

“Exit!” she said.

Nothing.

“Egress!”

Again nothing. Of course not. Tara wouldn’t implant just a
word.
What if it came up in conversation? She couldn’t have her subjects popping into and out of trances like a carnival sideshow. Audrey glanced quickly around, finally settling on the shotgun in Virgil’s hands. When she reached for it, he drew back a step.

“Give it to me!” she shouted.

Virgil shook his head, studying her eyes.

“I’m not crazy!” she said. “I need to make a clicking noise.”

Virgil frowned, then understanding hit him. He cocked the gun several times, shells rolling across the floor at his feet. The sound stopped Cooder in midstride.

“Exit!”

A dullness settled over Audrey and she realized her mistake, fighting slowly back to the surface.

“Egress!” she coughed, as Virgil clicked the empty shotgun yet again.

A light came on in Cooder’s eyes and Audrey nodded, patting him on the shoulder.

“Do you see what she did to you?” she said.

Cooder nodded, slowly, still focused inward.

“Can you control it next time?” she asked.

Cooder pondered that while Virgil hurriedly gathered up the errant shells, reloading the gun.

“I think so,” said Cooder.

Just then Audrey felt a flicker of pain starting in her abdomen, shooting out in all directions, and she knew that she was feeling what Zach was feeling. What Paula had felt. That was what the seizure in her garden had been about, the memories of Paula’s pain, and the pain Audrey had felt
from
her. The pain Audrey had hidden from Tara in order to save herself. She felt a sudden stab of guilt as she realized what she had done. She had allowed Paula to die, pretending all along that she felt nothing.

The three of them had reached the final door at the end of the hall. Audrey twisted the doorknob and the door swung open soundlessly, wafting foul air into her face. The room was half in light and half in darkness, and the stench of decay was even heavier here. But the room looked as
clean as the hallway. She stepped through the door and she sensed Cooder and Virgil following her inside.

Zach was strapped into a wheelchair, backed against the far wall, his head covered with what looked like a heavily padded cotton cloth, his body connected to the hateful-looking machine by a hundred brightly colored wires. It was the same machine Tara had used on Paula and Craig and God knew how many other
subjects.
Tara stood over Zach like a vulture, Adler sitting on the floor at her side. Tara adjusted dials and switches on a machine the size of a large-screen television. Audrey noticed an examining table at the other end of the room where a small body lay covered beneath a sheet, and she wondered if that was where the smell was coming from.

She eased silently forward, but Tara raised one gloved hand over her shoulder to let them know that she was aware of their presence. Audrey followed Tara’s pointing finger to the bank of closed circuit cameras overhead. As though for emphasis, Adler bared his teeth and growled.

“You have to stop, Tara,” said Audrey. “Give me my son back. You haven’t hurt him yet.”

“Hurt him?” said Tara, whirling. Her face radiated surprise. One hand remained on an ominous-looking dial. “It’s
you
who’ve hurt him. This boy has potential. I should have known! I should have gotten to him earlier.”

“Please don’t,” said Audrey, easing forward.

“If you take one more step, Adler will rip your throats out.”

Audrey froze halfway across the room.

Virgil raised the shotgun, aiming it directly at Tara. “Put both hands in the air, Doctor Beals!”

Tara laughed, turning to stare ominously at Audrey, her hand on the machine.

Audrey felt Cooder easing up close behind her, smelled him, sensed him the way fish sense each other in a school. She knew how fast his pulse was pounding, felt the sweat breaking out on his brow just like hers. She glanced at him as his eyes fell slowly from her and dropped onto the dog. As Audrey watched, Adler’s lips began to relax back over his teeth.

Zach screamed danger signals into Audrey’s head. He
knew the machine could kill. And the memory fragments that flooded Audrey’s brain said it could kill incredibly painfully. Still, she and Cooder slipped one step closer.

“Put your hands in the air!” repeated Virgil, stepping around Audrey and Cooder.

Tara faced them and chuckled.

“You didn’t say
Mother May I,”
she said.

“What’s the machine?” Virgil whispered to Audrey.

Audrey was afraid shooting Tara might set the machine off. “It causes pain. Terrible pain.”

“She’d do that to her own nephew?”

Audrey didn’t bother to answer. “Let my son go, Tara.”

“I can’t do that. He’s much too talented. As are you. You lied to me, Audrey. Now that I have the two of you, I can get back to my research.”

“What research?”

“Sheriff,” said Tara. “Put the shotgun down and lay your gunbelt on the floor.”

“Afraid I can’t do that.”

“Very well.”

Tara twisted the dial a notch and Zach and Audrey screamed at the same time, Audrey taking a stumbling step forward before Cooder caught her. Tara eased off the power.

“Set your shotgun on the floor, Sheriff, or Zach and Audrey will suffer more pain than you can imagine,” said Tara. “And they will surely die.”

“Can she do that?” said Virgil, glancing at Audrey. When she nodded, he reluctantly did as he was told.

Tara stared thoughtfully at Audrey. “Amazing. You felt more of Zach’s pain than any other subject ever has. This is going to be the crowning achievement of my career.”

Tara reached atop the machine, withdrawing a pistol, aiming it at the three of them but glancing at Zach.

“In Martha’s basement Zach managed to do something to my other pistol. He’s kinesthetic. Did you know that, Audrey?”

Audrey nodded.

“The low level of pain the machine is administering should keep
that
talent under control for now,” said Tara.

Audrey could feel the pain, like a knife digging just its
point into a thousand different locations on her body, so that was why she’d been having trouble contacting Zach. He was fighting the pain as well as his fear.

Audrey shook her head. “You’re insane, Tara.”

“No more than Galileo or Einstein.”

“They didn’t torture children.”

“Look,” said Tara, pointing toward a wide row of colored wires running down Zach’s leg. Audrey squinted as Tara flicked a light switch and bathed Zach in a fluorescent glow. Then she jerked aside the sheet covering his torso. The wires were attached to every portion of his body, now clothed only in a pair of jockey shorts. One heavy cable led up under the cloth covering his head. Audrey knew what lay beneath the cotton. The cable led to the mask, the metal monstrosity that had been haunting her dreams. It was all coming back to her now. Sensing the other’s pain each time a new victim was in the chair. Hiding her feelings because Paula had warned her—revealing them meant that
she
would be strapped into the mask. She remembered everything. Even the cloth was no longer an enigma. Tara draped the cotton over the mask and down across the victim’s torso to stanch the flow of blood. Sometimes the veins in the victim’s neck burst from the stress.

“You’re insane,” she whispered.

“All geniuses are considered mad,” said Tara. “You won’t think so when Zach becomes a phenomenon. You have no idea of what I intend to accomplish. If the fools in the government hadn’t pulled their support, I’d have managed to prove my theories long before now. All I needed was someone with more
juice.
Someone like Zach. You can’t conceive of the potential he may have.”

Virgil tried to edge forward without taking a step.

“If you think I’m joking about the machine or about Adler, Sheriff, then by all means come closer,” said Tara.

Audrey shook her head at Virgil, but mostly she was watching Cooder and the dog. She thought she understood now what he was saying before, about talking to animals. She tried to distract Tara. “You’re not going to let any of us out of here alive.”

Tara frowned. “I don’t want to kill you.”

“But you will.”

Tara’s eyes flicked about the room. “I have to keep up my research.”

“Tara, your research has been killing people for years!”

“People die. It happens. Science progresses.”

“Distract her,” whispered Virgil out of the corner of his mouth.

Audrey could see him tensing, but he was too far from Tara. Even if Cooder could control the dog, by the time Virgil reached Tara it would be too late. Audrey put her hand on his chest and he glanced at her as though she’d betrayed him.

“Wait,” she whispered.

“She’s going to do it, Audrey.”

Audrey tried to make contact with Zach, but the pain was blocking him. He couldn’t concentrate and she couldn’t get through. Tara
was
insane. Her machine didn’t make telepathy easier. It made it impossible.

Cooder’s breathing seemed to have slowed to nothing. He grunted and Adler did a funny prance with his front paws. Audrey saw the look of surprise in Tara’s face.

“So you were blocking your ability too, 79B! How did you manage to best the machine? Are you really that strong? Well, we’ll see. My
new
machine is much better than the old one. Adler! Sit!” The dog settled but kept moving his head from side to side as though searching for an invisible mosquito. “I always suspected you were hiding more ability than you were revealing, 79B. Pity they released you while I was out of the country. I came close to getting you back a couple of times, but you always seemed to slip away.”

“I felt you coming.”

Tara nodded. “What do you remember about our sessions?”

“I seen bad things.”

“Indeed. Like this?”

Tara flicked a switch on the machine and the room was bathed in swirling lights. Audrey felt herself losing her footing again, floating. The lights stimulated other lights inside her mind, and she knew that somehow Tara had tripped another switch in her subconscious. She didn’t remember the lights, but she dimly recalled the pain that followed on their
heels. The agony she had experienced in her garden was nothing compared to what she experienced now.

“What are you doing?” she shrieked.

“Stimulating the optic nerve and increasing Zach’s pain level just a notch. The lights disrupt your ability to focus on things around you, forcing you to focus inward,” shouted Tara. “Remember when I used this technique on Paula?”

Audrey did. She also remembered that she had had to hide the fact that she felt Paula’s pain. Because she knew that if Tara found out, then Audrey would be placed in the machine as well. She remembered her own fear of discovery after Paula warned her of Tara’s evil. “Tara must never find out! Tara must never know that you can do what I do!” That warning had pounded through Audrey’s skull, and somehow she had acted as though the lights and pain had no effect on her. She struggled to do that now, but it wasn’t Paula in the chair, it was Zach. It was her son suffering the agony, and the thought of it tore her heart.

Shut it out!

Suddenly Zach’s voice was in her mind.

You have to not feel it.

How do you do that, Zach?

The pain raged over her. She felt beaten down by it. She wanted to die. Only she couldn’t. She had to save him.

But there was nothing she could do. It took all of her strength just to keep from blacking out. In the distance she could hear Virgil asking if she was all right, feel him holding her upright, hear Tara speaking calmly. “Make your way through the pain. There is a place in your mind that understands. Don’t be afraid. Reach out. I know you can do it.”

Blinded by agony, Audrey stumbled toward the sound of Tara’s voice.