The Blonde (21 page)

“
Watch the closing doors
, ” an automated voice said.

T
he plastic robot face was the first thing he saw. A blue robot, solid jaw, face bolted together with plastic bumps meant to look like rivets. To his right, a fleshy strongman was torn open at the torso by a spear of glass. Pink slime oozed out of the wound. Yet the expression on his molded-plastic face remained the same. Now that was stoicism at its finest. Inspirational, even.

Kowalski lay broken in a sea of dusty toys, stuff he remembered from his own childhood.

That must have been when this shop closed down, the 1970s. Kowalski squinted and saw a painted wooden sign stacked vertically in the corner,
SNYDER’S TOYS
.

Cute.

All around him, toys. Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. Stretch Armstrong. Role models, dating back to the era of
The Six Million Dollar Man
. His main man, Steve Austin. The man Kowalski had wanted to be when he grew up. Even if it took a grisly M2-F2 rocket crash, and parts of his mangled body needed to be replaced
with bionic ones.
We can rebuild you. We have the technology
.

Well, here was his crash. Thrown from a moving train. His skin cut to ribbons, his right leg broken in at least two places, his wrist snapped. And a gash in his scalp so bad, he could feel the blood oozing past his hair and down into the dusty wooden floor, soaking it. Come to think of it, the wetness on his face might not even be sweat.

Where were the bionic parts now?

Where was Oscar Goldman?

Oh, that’s right. He’d dumped his Oscar last year for the sister of a bank robber.

Katie.

Enough of that already. Get the fuck up. Kowalski rolled over, threw out a hand. Grabbed the edge of a splintery floorboard. Pulled himself forward about six inches. Then he had to stop. Getting dizzy. The pain in his leg was unbelievable. Must have been how he’d landed on it. He pushed toys aside. Chrissy dolls. White marbles. Shattered, yet still hungry, plastic hippos. Kenner mini sewing machines. Wacky Packs. Micronauts. Milton Bradley board games, whose cardboard boxes had blown out. Remco Mc-Donaldland characters. The stuff was everywhere. He must have knocked over a set of steel shelves when he came through the window. It felt like his body was pressed against shag carpeting, the kind his parents used to have in the living room. He crawled a bit farther and found himself eye-to-eye with Mayor McCheese. He used to have a Mayor McCheese doll. Normal body, big cheeseburger for a head. Never knew what happened to it. Maybe it had ended up here. Maybe he’d ended up wherever
it
had gone. Maybe he was dead. Maybe he had been hurled through the air and had landed in his childhood version of heaven: his parents living room, Christmas Day, 1977.

Stop it.

It took him ten minutes to reach the other side of the room, where the gym bag containing the head of Ed Hunter had landed.

Behind it was a shimmering play mirror, about as reflective as a sheet of aluminum foil. But Kowalski was able to see his face.

He saw it.

And he screamed.

His body shook, raging against itself.

He pounded the floor with his right fist, clawed at the wood with the damaged fingers of his left hand.

He had been so good about keeping everything together. Because he was a trained professional. Guy who didn’t let anything in. But the truth was, he was the same kid who’d played with a Mayor McCheese doll, the kid who would grow up to meet a woman and fall in love and make a baby with her, and both of them were dead now because he hadn’t been there to save them, and now look at him, covered in blood, flesh of his cheeks torn and mangled, pieces of his ear missing, but those eyes, oh yeah, those eyes were the same he’d had since Christmas morning, 1977, and they looked back at him and they knew.

They knew what it was like to be trapped inside a monster.

V
anessa could move. Finally. The room came into focus. She wriggled her fingers, felt them scrape against fabric. Moved her elbows. Then her neck. Just a little. Her head felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. But she could move. A little.

The Operator was standing over her. “You
are
there, aren’t you?”

Fuck you
, Vanessa wanted to say, but she couldn’t make her mouth move the way it should. She felt drool run down the corner of her mouth. The thought made her gag. She coughed, and coughed again, and the sudden movement racked her with pain.

“Calm down, you’re doing too much. You need your rest.” The Operator looked over at the open door. “Hang on a second.” He disappeared from view. Were her wrists tied to the bed? She couldn’t feel any restraints, but she also couldn’t lift her arms. She heard the snick of a door closing shut. Then he reappeared. “We need a little privacy.”

“F-f-f-f-f- …” Vanessa spat. Clawed at the mattress.

“Shh, blondie. You know, you’re not much to look at right now, but I can’t help but be seriously impressed with you lately. This whole scorched-earth campaign of yours. Very, very bold. And
clever
. I didn’t realize the brilliance of your airport visits until a few days into the game. You’ve got everything you need. Always a restaurant open. Plenty of places to buy T-shirts. Crowded bathrooms. Sleep on the planes, find a willing stud, get a free hotel room for a night. I may have this wrong, but there are at least five men you did the horizontal mambo with in the past week or so. I have a list on my PDA. Hang on.”

The more she flexed her fingers, the more movement she had. Focus on that, she told herself. The left one. Get it going. Get your hand and wrist working first. Then the forearm. Then find something sharp.

“Yeah, here we go. Donn Moore. Investment banker, looks like. Always insisted on that extra
n
in his first name. What,
Donny
not good enough for you? Douche bag. Okay, who else? Jimmy Calcagno, lawyer. Allan Ward, another lawyer, although not as sleazy as Jimmy, who apparently had some real scumball clients. Did you know that? A simple Nexis search turned that up. Meanwhile, Allan seemed more like the tweedy type. Corporate law. I bet he was real sick. It’s always the quiet ones. Anyway, who else, who else? … Rob Ormsby. Oh, a screenwriter. Nice. And finally, Simon Smith, who owned a boutique Web-design company. How delightful.”

Vanessa didn’t want to hear the names. She didn’t want to think
about the men attached to those names. She wanted to move the fingers of her left hand, over and over again.

“But I don’t think you’re a slut, blondie. I knew what you were doing. You wanted to attract attention, didn’t you?”

“Y-y-yessss,” she said. Her own voice. It was coming back.

“Yessssssss you did, didn’t you?” the Operator mocked. “Aww, who’s a cute little man-killer? That’s right. My wittle Wanessa Essa.”

“F-f-f-f-f … uck …”

“You did quite enough of that, didn’t you?”

The Operator reached out with his coat sleeve and wiped the drool from her lower lip. She pursed her lips. Then he grabbed her face and leaned in.

“Is that how you infected them? Fucking them? Sucking their cocks? A kiss would have done it, you know. You didn’t have to go all the way. Especially since you never did some of that with
me
.”

Was this what it was about? Back in Ireland: Matt Silver, the big bad Operator, gently guiding her head down to his crotch. Vanessa refusing. Halfheartedly kissing him on the neck, trying to placate him. Thinking that a few scented candles and an Enigma CD would make her swoon, convince her to blow him.

“You’re a bit weak in the mouth now, aren’t you? Bet you wouldn’t put up too much of a fight. You want another shot at it?”

The Operator squeezed her cheeks, then let go. He moved out of her field of vision. She tried to follow him with her eyes, but nothing. Turned her head slightly to the right, and the room began spinning.

“Thing is, my little Irish slut,” the Operator said, “I wanted you to go out and see other people.”

Oh, bollocks on that. Jealousy was the Operator’s fundamental emotion. Along with envy. It guided everything. In the boardroom
and
bedroom.

“It’s true. Sure, there was a chance you’d wind up alone somewhere
and—kablooie—no more Vanessa Reardon. But I knew you’d try to survive long enough to avenge yourself. And you’d come into contact with a
lot
of people. Course, I didn’t know you’d be fucking and sucking your way to San Diego and back.”

She could move her left hand now. Pump it into a weak fist. Then release. Pump. Then release.

“Remember how I said Proximity needed another human host to survive? To eat blood cells and other cellular waste? Urn, yeah, well, /
lied
. They can survive in any fluid environment on Earth. They’re dormant until they reach another human being. Then they replicate like jackrabbits. Upload the DNA sequence to our satellite, which feeds it to our computer.”

Vanessa stopped pumping. What was he talking about now? That was the built-in security feature of the Mary Kates. They needed a human host for power. Piss ‘em out into the toilet, they’d die after a few seconds. That way, they couldn’t replicate unless they were in close prox—.

Oh.

Proximity
.

He’d designed it this way all along.

The mad, mad bastard.

“Thanks to your trip around the country, you’ve infected over fourteen thousand people. God bless you, Vanessa. You’ve done the hard part for me.”

The Operator came back into view. Showed her the liquid crystal display of his PDA. A number ticked up, two, three digits at a time.

“See what you started?”

Fifteenth District Headquarters,
Northeast Philadelphia

A
n hour before shift change, Officer Jimmy MacAdams caught the call: disturbance on the Frankford El. Up until that point, it had been a slow night on the steady out squad. Most exciting call was an abandoned 1994 Dodge Daytona over on East Thompson Street in Bridesburg. Yet another cracked steering wheel column, ignition pulled out and hanging over the top, strip of white fabric tied around the works. He was sitting on it until Major Crimes had a chance to take possession, haul it in. In this neighborhood, probably somebody who was too lazy to call a cab. But you never knew until you dusted for prints. So there he sat.

Then the call came in.

“Transit police: We’ve got a howling blind man up on the El platform at Margaret-Orthodox.”

Howling blind man
.

Oh yeah, MacAdams thought. He should have seen this one coming.

MacAdams crossed Torresdale and raced up Margaret, cherries flashing, no sound. He was at the El station in sixty seconds. Guy
looked ordinary enough, except for the face full of Mace. Transit cop said he’d been raving but that he’d calmed down in the meantime. Even better. MacAdams read him Miranda, put him in the back of the squad car. Apologized for the lack of air-conditioning. That and the laptop had been down since start of shift.

“I don’t care about the air,” the guy said quietly. “Whatever you do, don’t leave me alone.”

Looked like he’d had quite a night.

“I’m just taking you in, okay? You won’t be alone.”

He escorted the guy, who said he was a Mr. Jack Eisley, up to the Fifteenth District building at Harbison and Levick. Walked him up to Northeast Detectives HQ on the second floor, which was done in navy blue with gold bands.

Then the guy started raving again, which surprised MacAdams. He’d been docile the whole ride up. Now he was screaming about not being left alone, needed to speak to someone right away, or else many people would die—all of the usual psycho crap. MacAdams was glad to step clear of that shit.

“All you guys,” he said, and went back downstairs. Only a half hour before he clocked out.

But something made him hang around. He put a few coins in the honor box, popped the lock, and took a Diet Coke from the squad fridge. Drank it and savored how cool the can felt against his hand. He’d been in a slow simmer all night. Listened to the usual banter in the squad room:

“You’ve got a cold.”

“Come over here, give me a hug.”

“You always have a cold.”

“And yet I love skiing.”

Beat as he was, MacAdams admitted it: He was curious. So he finished his Diet Coke, tossed the can, and popped back upstairs to see what was going on. Through the one-way glass, he saw the guy talking to Detective Sarkissian.

Howling Man was saying, “… tell you everything, but you have to promise one thing: You won’t leave me alone. I don’t care who you have in here with me. The chief of police, one of you guys, a secretary, anybody. Bring in a homeless guy.”

“I’m right here,” Sarkissian told him.

“I know this sounds crazy, but please believe me. You leave me alone in this room, you’ll come back and find me dead.”

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself, Jack. I want you to tell me what happened.”

“I want to, believe me. Maybe some of it will make sense to you. Maybe you’ll be able to help me figure it out. Because the way things are looking, a lot of people are going to die today.”

“Hey. Come on, now.”

“That is not a threat.”

“Calm down.”

“I’m perfectly calm.”

Sarkissian waited him out.

“Hey, could I have something for my eyes? A bottle of Visine or something? My contacts are shot to hell, but maybe I could see something if I wet them down.”

“Tell me a little first, and I’ll get somebody to get you Visine.”

“Okay. But…”

“Start from the beginning.”

“I don’t even know …”