The Watchers (11 page)
There were hundreds. Thousands.
She found herself weeping, swept away on a wave of awe and gratitude. Even as the tears flowed she continued to read. And as she did, she began to slowly realize one common denominator in her responses.
Each respondent was as clueless, as pleading, as lost as she was. No one had any answers. There were shadowy tentacles of the phenomenon reaching back into the history of the last hundred years, but they largely consisted of rumors and oral folktales. No one could give her any more clues or direction other than a simple confirmation that, no, her experience was not unique.
Beyond that, her sisters were all of them, each one, alone.
In the early hours of the morning, after fatigue had conspired with the sheer number of responses to numb her capacity for reason, Abby reached both hands to the keyboard and began to type out a response.
Dear Sisters,
Thank you all for your responses to my ignorant and aimless plea. I am humbled and awed by the passion, kinship, and love in each of your letters. I just finished my first attempt to read through all of your posts, so I am still reeling, to be honest. I had no idea, when I sent my blind question out into the cyber-void, that there were so many of you out there.
And now, since so many have honored me with your stories, I have some news for you. I'm writing from a hospital bed. A few hours after I finished typing my dream-blog on my laptop, someone very twisted and unspeakably evil broke into my house and not only murdered my beloved friend and housekeeper, Narbeli, in monstrous fashion, but then tried to kill me. He did not succeed. At least not immediately. But my doctors tell me that he infected me with some sort of poisonous substance that they are not able to identify, but whose effect is unstoppable.
So, if you pick up and read the electronic clipboard hanging from the end of my bed, it seems I am dying. No one can tell me whether it will be next week or next month. Nor can they treat with any great success the pain that wracks my body while the poison does its work. My mind is fine. For that fact, even my body is remarkably functional, except for the pain itself. I can move around still. It just hurts like crazy. I'd be up and walking, although more slowly than usual, if I wasn't in this place for round after round of never-ending tests.
Even as I type these words, it occurs to me that there must be meaning to all this. There just has to be. I'm not here to tiptoe up to the edge of this mystery and simply pass away, leaving it all unsolved. You didn't write me so the unanswered questions in each of your stories could only deepen, sit there and rot.
There must be an answer. I sense it in my deepest spirit. Don't you? I think I can feel it “between the lines” in each of your replies. There's a reason for all this. We've all been stranded on the very edge of something really big, and up until now apparently unseen.
Pray for me, Sisters, and gather round, if there's an Internet version of such a thing. We've got a mystery to solve. A bridge to find, and to cross.
(One thing about being told you're going to die very soon and way too young. It sharpens your sense of purpose like no kick in the head you'll ever get on any soccer field or karate dojo. It clears the mind and everything else about you. Leaves you keen and sharp as a knife's edge. That's what I'm feeling right now.)
Forget this. I'm not going to sit here and wait to die. I'm going to get up from this bed and figure out what's up.
Are you with me?
Abby Sherman
She woke up the next morning with a sense of determination, if anything, beating stronger and more urgently within her. Her father entered the room shortly after seven o'clock and, instead of finding her still dozing as he had every morning before, saw his daughter finishing up an early power breakfast.
“Abby, what's up?” he asked.
“Dad, I have something to tell you.”
He stared hard and long at her, for he had not heard such steel in her voice for quite a long while. “I have something to tell you too,” he said. “But why don't you go first.”
“Dad, I'm getting out of here. I can't explain it, but I just know that God doesn't mean for me to sit here and wait for the end. You know how many arguments you and I have had about what I should do with my life. You know I've always thought He had a special purpose for my life, and as weird as this sounds, I know that now more than ever. I just have far less time to waste. And now I have a direction I never had before.”
He took a seat in the visitor's chair, crossed his leg and pretended to wave some invisible dust bunny from his knee. “Have you really thought this through? You know that the doctors want you here. If you check yourself out against their orders, you may be shutting yourself off from pain management, from the kind of treatment you're going to need as this thing progresses. Worse still, you could be cutting off their research just as they're about to discover what's wrong with you.”
“Dad, they've taken enough of my blood to fill a swimming pool. They've got their samples. They don't need me to stick around. I'm not just going to lie here and waste my last days being a guinea pig. Look up at these lights. Would you want this to be the last sky you ever gazed up on? Would you want this to be your last bed? The last sight your eyes ever saw?”
He gave the sigh he always let out when her logic had gotten the best of him.
“So where are you proposing to go?”
“I have no idea, Dad. I just know I've stumbled into something big, and I'm supposed to do something about it. But all I know is the first step, and that's to get out of this bed. After that, it's all on faith.”
“Well, now it's my turn,” he said after a pause. “And I may just know what your second step may be.”
“What do you mean?”
“Take a look outside.”
She slowly swung her legs down and walked gingerly over to the window, waved aside the flimsy curtain and peered out. Three floors down, the sidewalk lay jumbled with a mass of television trucks, glowing reflector screens, and camera lights.
“What's going on?” she asked, turning to face her dad. “Some kind of celebrity in here with me?”
His gaze bore into hers. “It's you, sweetheart.”
“Me? What are you talking about?”
“I think you know. It seems that Internet blog you posted has made a huge splash. You're the flavor of the day. The web celebrity of the hour, honey. In less than twelve hours you've registered more friends than anyone in MyCorner history.”
She sat back down, her head swimming.
“What in the world did you write about?” he continued. “Was this something about Narbeli's death? Your sickness? What could have provoked a response like this?”
“Both of those, I guess. But it's more than that, Dad. It was actually a dream I had.”
An incredulous look crossed his handsome features. “A dream. That's it?”
She picked up the laptop and handed it to him. “It's too involved to explain right now. Here, read it for yourself. I have to go.”
“Where?”
His voice had become tinged with exasperation. “Where are you going? Don't think I'm just going to let my little girl take off and leave her to the wolves.”
“Who're the wolves, Dad? Those people outside?”
“Some of them. You know the media. They don't care about your privacy or your peace of mind.”
“I'm not after peace of mind. I'm after answers.”
He sighed deeply. “Well, Abby, maybe I can help. Just before I walked in here, I got a call from a producer working for Mara McQueen. Mara wants to interview you.”
Abby began to shake her head slowly, as though answering a question only she could hear.
“Wow. Mara. I'll talk to her. Tomorrow morning.”
“I'll arrange the interview, sweetheart, on one condition. Just stay in the hospital one more day. Let her interview you here, and in the meantime give your doctors one more chance to help you. Will you do that for me?”
She nodded and glanced glumly around the room. “For you, Dad. Only for you.”
BRITISH AIRWAYS 747, FIRST CLASS, 37,000 FEET ABOVE THE ATLANTIC
Dylan's Sidekick hummed to life on the airplane tray before him, vibrating with the special ring tone that announced a warning from the one contact in the world he could least afford to ignore.
His apartment.
First, he tensed his body out of the half-dozing state in which he'd allowed himself to lapse. He furtively glanced around him to gauge the prudence of checking in right away. The first-class cabin lay dark and deep in that nocturnal midflight interlude when all its privileged occupants were either sleeping or spellbound by some form of seat-back entertainment. Apart from the plane's droning engine noise and a light snore from the businessman beside him, no sound of life emanated from anywhere around the space.
Dylan picked up the Sidekick, flipped down its keyboard, and pressed on the touch screen to respond. A password dialog box appeared. He glanced around him again and typed in five digits to reach his most urgent contact.
It was Camera One calling. As usual. The one he'd had hidden inside the crown molding of his loft's vestibule to catch any visitors, welcome or unwelcome. It was the most-used camera in his inventory. Naturally, as the one that recorded people's initial approach, it was nearly always the one that responded first.
He winced. The video, even while it stuttered with the imperfections of its airborne bandwidth, clearly revealed the person approaching. Actually, two persons. One of them was Gretchen, his current prime candidate for what one might loosely label a
girlfriend
. Her companion, stumbling drunkenly and giggling, was her favorite fashion photographer, Claude. Gretchen had introduced him to Dylan at various parties, always failing to conceal her infatuation with the man.
Dylan allowed himself a small groan. He'd always known that Gretchen wasn't the epitome of faithfulness. For one thing, their relationship could hardly be thought of as monogamous, a fact for which he was as much to blame as she. But the blue-eyed Swede was so exotic that he'd willingly overlooked the drawbacks.
Still, bringing a man to
his
apartment . . .
The Sidekick broadcast the rattle of his industrial garage-sized door being yanked upward. Camera Two switched on, its motion detector installed to catch activity just inside the loft.
He heard laughter, then Gretchen's voice giggling in that alluring Scandinavian accent of hers. “He's in Europe, scaredy cat. Come on in. It's beautiful.”
And it was. Since he was a bit vain about the place, the remark caused him to feel a twinge of goodwill for Gretchen. His apartment was indeed the quintessential Tribeca loft: shabby-chic industrial, sprawling, devoid of walls, open on three sides to high windows, bright with views of the neighborhood's distinctive Romanesque Revival architecture.
The scene switched over to Camera Three, Dylan's kitchen. The cheaters had ducked in for a quick perusing glance. Then Camera Five kicked in as they hurried into the bedroom, a vague area bounded by only a bookcase and a large ficus tree.
Dylan sighed and for the first time began to question how long he could endure this. It certainly gave him no voyeuristic thrill. His index finger quivered with an autonomous urge to click Shutdown. Just as he was poised to switch off the whole transmission, Camera Three abruptly switched back on.
What burst upon his screen nearly made him forget to breathe. A male figure dressed in tightly fitting black clothes hid behind a column, a long revolver gripped in one fist. For the first time in several years, Dylan lost external control and audibly gasped. The security system, prompted by activity in dual locations, abruptly switched to a split screen. On the left, the gunman tiptoed forward with the slowness and exaggerated mannerisms of a trained professional. On the right, Gretchen and her lover stood beside his bed, kissing ardently and beginning to peel off each other's shirts.
Dylan's fingers now flew into a flurry of action.
Was there time?
He'd armed his apartment with four layers of cutting-edge security systems. The fourth, which the gunman surely would not have disabled, might save . . .
There came an angry sound of bone striking flesh, then the sight of furious movement flooded the underlit image. Claude's head flew back and violently struck the headboard, his body flung along with the force of the intruder's brutal kick. Gretchen screamed so loudly that Dylan was forced to punch down the Sidekick's volume.
Too late
.
The security module had loaded, but not in time. In the top right-hand corner of the screen, discreetly positioned to avoid obscuring his view, sat three dialog boxes he only had to press in order to release one of a trio of gases.
The first, labeled K for Knockout, contained a relatively harmless cocktail that would swiftly put an intruder to sleep. The second, N for Noxious, was a variant of tear gas, intended to incapacitate the intruder and drive him, coughing, away. The third, framed in bright red, warned F for Fatal. It would kill within two seconds, also triggering a sophisticated exhaust system that would render his apartment uninhabitable for several days to anyone not wearing a special gas mask.
“It's not him!” Gretchen screamed at the man, even as she clawed frantically from a pathetic kneeling position. The gunman paced, striding away from Claude's unconscious body, which he had kicked over for a better look. At her side, he brandished the weapon in her face and growled at her to be quiet.
Dylan grimaced again. Obviously the gunman was surprised to find that he had knocked out someone other than him. Claude did resemble Dylan, true, but in a twinge of professional objectivity he observed that the intruder should have been one hundred percent certain. At least he'd been prudent enough to choose a hard kick over a wild first shot.