4 Blood Pact (33 page)

“It has to.” Adjusting her glasses, more for the comfort of a familiar action than from necessity, she gave half her mind over to searching the scant information they had for clues. The other half of her mind filtered the noises of an old building at night, listening for the approach of shuffling footsteps. Suddenly, she turned to squint up at Celluci. “Dr. Burke said Henry was in a large metal box.”

“So?”

“And she implied it was heavy.”

“Again, so?”

Vicki almost smiled. “Look at the floor, Celluci.”

Together, they bowed their heads and stared at the pale, institutional gray tile, dulled by the passage of thousands of feet. A number of nicks and impressions dimpled the surface with shadow and darker still were a half-dozen signatures of black rubber heels.

“If the box is as massive as Dr. Burke implied,” Vicki said, raising her head and looking Celluci in the eyes, “one way or another it’ll have left its mark. Rubber wheels will scuff. Metal wheels will imprint.”

Celluci nodded slowly. “So we look for the tracks she left moving the box. It’s still a big building. . . .”

“Yeah, but we know damn well she didn’t take it up and down the stairs.” Vicki raised her arm and shone the flashlight down the hall. “The power’s on, so the elevators must be working. We check just outside them on every floor for the marks and then backtrack from there.”

An appreciative grin spread over Celluci’s face. “You know, that’s practically brilliant.”

Vicki snorted. “Thanks. You needn’t sound so surprised.”

For no reason other than that they had to start somewhere, they began working their way down from the eighth, and highest, floor. On three, they found what they were looking for—pressed not only into the tile but into the metal lip leading onto the elevator, were the marks of two pairs of wheels about four feet apart. Silently, they stepped ut into the hall and let the door wheeze closed behind them.

No one appeared to investigate the noise.

Unwilling to risk the flashlight and a premature discovery, Vicki grabbed Celluci’s shoulder and allowed him to lead her down the hall. To her surprise, moving in what was to her total darkness was less stressful than the peep show the flashlight had offered. Although she still listened for approaching footsteps, the accompanying tension had lessened.
Or maybe
, she conceded, her grip tightening slightly,
it’s just that now I have an anchor.

When they reached the first intersection, even she could see the way they had to go.

The harsh white of the fluorescent lights spilled out through the open door and across the corridor.

Vicki felt Celluci’s shoulder rise as he reached beneath his jacket and she heard the unmistakable sound of metal sliding free of leather. Up until this moment, she hadn’t realized he’d brought his gun. Considering the amount of trouble he could get into for using it, she couldn’t believe he’d actually drawn it.

“Isn’t that just a tad
American,”
she whispered, lips nearly touching his ear.

He drew her back around the comer and bent his head to hers. “What Dr. Burke neglected to mention,” he said in a voice pitched to carry to her alone, “was that there’s something else wandering around in here besides a mad scientist and your uh . . .”

“Mother,” Vicki interjected flatly. “It’s okay.” Her feelings were irrelevant to the situation.
And I’ll just keep telling myself that.

“Yeah, well, something else killed that kid and we’re not taking any more chances than we have to.”

“Mike, if it’s already dead, what good will shooting it do?”

His voice was grim as he answered. “If it died once, it can die again.”

“So what am I supposed to use, strong language?”

“You can wait here.”

“Fuck you.” And under the bravado, fear.
Not alone. Not in the dark. Not here
.

They made their way to the open door. Vicki released her hold on Celluci’s shoulder at the edge of the light. “Give it a five count.” His breath lapped warm against the side of her face, then he darted across the opening.

The next five seconds were among the longest Vicki had ever spent as she closed her eyes, leaned her head back against the wall, and wondered if she’d have the courage to look. On five, she swallowed hard, opened her eyes, and peered around and into the room, conscious of Celluci across the doorway mirroring her movements.

Even with lids slitted against the glare, it took a moment for her eyes to stop watering enough for her to focus. It
was
a lab. It had obviously been in use recently. It had just as obviously been abandoned. Eight years with the police had taught her to recognize the telltale mess left behind when suspects had cut and run.

Cautiously, they moved away from the door, slowly turned, and simultaneously spotted the isolation box, humming in mechanical loneliness at the far end of the room.

Vicki took two quick steps toward it, then stopped and forced her brain to function. “If this is the original lab, we know Catherine moved Henry away . . .”

“So Henry’s not in that box.”

“Maybe it’s empty.”

“Maybe.”

But neither of them believed it.

“We have to know for sure.” Somehow, without her being aware of it, Vicki’s feet had moved her to within an arm’s length of the box. All she had to do was reach out and lift the lid.

. . .
and lift the lid. Oh, Momma, I’m sorry
.
I can’t.
She despised herself for being a coward, but she couldn’t stop the sudden cold sweat nor the weakness in her knees that threatened to drop her flat on her face.

“It’s all right.” It wasn’t
all right
, but those were the words to say, so Celluci said them as he came around her and put one hand on the latch. This, at least, he could do for her. “You don’t have to stay.”

“Yes. Yes, I do.” She could be a passive observer, if only that.

Celluci searched her face, swore privately that someone would pay for the pain that kept forcing its way out through the cracks in the masks she wore, and lifted the lid.

The release of tension was so great that Vicki swayed and would have fallen had Celluci not stepped back and grabbed her. She allowed herself a moment leaning on the strength of his arm, then shook herself free. From the beginning, she’d declared she was going to find her mother
. Why am I so relieved that we didn’t?

Thick purple incisions, tacked closed with coarse black thread, marked the naked body of the young Oriental male in an ugly “y” pattern. A collar of purple and green bruises circled the slender column of the throat. Plastic tubes ran into both elbows and the inner thigh. Across the forehead, partially covered by a thick fall of ebony hair, another incision appeared to have been stapled closed.

Over the years, both Vicki and Celluci had seen more corpses than they cared to remember. The young man in the box was dead.

“Mike, his chest . . . it’s . . .”

“I know.”

Two steps forward and she was close enough to reach over the side and gently touch her fingertips to the skin over the diaphragm. It was cold. And it rose and fell to the prompting of something that vibrated beneath it.

“Jesus . . . There’s a motor.” She withdrew her hand and scrubbed the fingers against her jacket. Raising her head, she caught Celluci making the sign of the cross. “Dr. Burke never mentioned this.”

“No. Not quite.” He shifted his gun to his right hand and slipped it back into the shoulder holster. It didn’t look like he’d be needing it right away. “But something tells me we’ve finally found Donald Li.”

The young man’s eyes snapped open.

Vicki couldn’t have moved had she wanted to. Nor could she look away when the dark eyes tracked from her to Celluci and back again.

A muscle shifted behind the purple bruises on the throat.

Gray-blue lips parted.

“Kill . . . me . . .”

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, he’s alive.”

In the box, the dark eyes slid slowly back to Celluci. “No . . .”

“No? What the hell do you mean no?”

“He means he’s not alive, Mike.” Vicki could hear a part of herself screaming. She ignored it. “He’s like my mother.”
Hands splayed against the glass. Mouth moving soundlessly.
“He’s dead. But he’s trapped in there.”

“Kill . . . me . . . please . . .”

Her fingers digging into the bend of Celluci’s elbow, Vicki backed away, pulling him with her. She stopped when the high rim of stainless steel replaced Donald Li’s face with her own. “We have to do something.”

Celluci continued to stare in the direction of the box. “Do what?” he demanded harshly.

Vicki fought the urge to turn and run, thankful Celluci seemed frozen to the spot because she didn’t have the strength to stop them both. “What he asks. We have to kill him.”

“If he’s alive, killing him is murder. If he’s dead . . .”

“He’s dead, Mike. He says himself he’d dead. Can you walk away and leave him like that?”

She felt the shudder run down the length of his body and barely heard his answer.

“Vicki, we’re out of our depth here.” This was the stuff of nightmares. Not demons or werewolves or mummies or a four-hundred-and-fifty-year-old romance writer—this. He’d thought that thirteen years of police work had equipped him to deal with anything and that the events of the last year had covered everything else. He’d been wrong. “I can’t . . .”

“We have to.”

“Why?” Weighed down by horror, his voice hardly rose above a whisper.

“Because we found him. Because we’re all he has.”

There’s a whole world out there. Let someone else deal with it
. But when he turned and looked down into Vicki’s face, he couldn’t say it. He recognized the look of someone very nearly at the end of her resources, someone who’d been hit too hard and too often, but he also recognized the determined set to her jaw. She couldn’t walk away leaving Donald Li trapped in his prison of dead meat. He couldn’t walk away and leave her. Although he had to force his mouth to form the words, he asked, “How do we do it?”

Speaking slowly—if she lost control even a little she’d lose it all—Vicki laid out what they knew. “He’s dead. We know it. He says so. But his . . .” Twentieth-century attitudes added difficulty to expressing what was so terrifyingly clear. “. . . his soul is trapped. Why? The only difference between this corpse and any other . . .”
Except my mother’s.
She felt herself begin to slide toward the edge.
No! Don’t think of that now.
“. . . is that someone has given it an artificial resemblance to life. That has to be why he’s trapped.”

“So we unhook his life support?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Vicki. One of us has to be
sure.”

She lifted her head and met his gaze.

After a moment, he nodded. “Let’s do it.”

It didn’t take long for them to unhook the tubes and hoses, training and practice shoehorning distance in between what had to been done and feelings about doing it. Neither of them touched the body any more than was absolutely necessary. When they’d finished, although Donald Li said nothing, they saw him still staring up out of dead eyes and knew it hadn’t been enough.

“We should’ve known. The others are up and walking around.”

Then Vicki found the input jack hidden under a thick fringe of hair and traced the cable back to the computer. She squinted at Catherine’s message on the screen and tried to keep her hands from shaking just long enough to work the keyboard.

“It seems to be loading programming into . . .” There was only one place it could be loading programming. “Okay. Odds are good that if programming can be loaded, it can also be erased.” Wiping her palms on her thighs, she dropped into the chair.

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Celluci asked, grateful for an excuse to walk away from the horror in the box. “This setup’s more complicated than the gear you’ve got at home.”

“How complicated can it be?” Vicki muttered, making a note of the destination file. “It all comes down to ones and zeros. Besides,” she added grimly, hitting the reset button, “how could I possibly make it any worse?”

She scanned the main menu. “Mike, what does initialize mean to you?”

“Something to do with starting up?”

“That’s what I thought.” Under the list of things that could be initialized was the destination code the program had been downloading into.

“Well?”

“I just told it to reinitialize Donald’s brain.”

“And?”

“And that should wipe it clean.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, but I wiped my hard drive that way once.” Shoving the chair back from the desk, Vicki stood and pushed at her glasses. “Hopefully, it’ll release him.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” If it didn’t work, they’d have to leave him there and hope that as the body slowly decayed so would whatever held him to it.
To know you’re dead. To watch your body rot. To have that be your only hope. .
. . She clamped down hard on the hysteria she could feel rising.
Later
, she told it.
Later, when Henry’s safe and my mother’s . . . my mother is . . .
”

Celluci’s voice cut through the thought. “No change.”

“Give it a minute.” One step at a time, she managed to return to the box and to Celluci’s side. If he hadn’t gone back before her, she didn’t think she could’ve made it. With her arm pressed up against the warm resilience of his, she looked down at Donald Li’s face.

Dark eyes caught her gaze and held it. Wrung dry, Vicki didn’t even attempt to pull away. Suddenly, she realized that as all encompassing as her terror and revulsion might be it was
nothing
next to the terror that shrieked from behind the eyes of Donald Li.

She had nothing to be afraid of in comparison.