One Wrong Move

by Shannon McKenna

  Tully is handling my care, I’d rather you discuss it with her.

  Preferably with me present.”

  Dr. Granger’s eyes flicked to his colleague. “Of course,” he said smoothly. “I admit, this is irregular, but, well . . . there’s no way to put this delicately. I’ve worked with Dr. Tully for years.

  She’s a capable doctor, but strictly by-the-book. Even, well, plod-ding. Though I hate to critizice a colleague. A situation like yours, with so much at stake, calls for outside-the-box thinking.

  Are you going to risk your health, maybe your life, out of politeness?”

  Nina gasped for breath as the pain squeezed harder. “I—I, ah—”

  “If the tests we run help, Dr. Tully will probably think she ordered them herself,” Dr. Granger said. “If they do not, I will accept all the blame for any improper professional behavior. Your life and your future is worth it to me, Ms. Christie. Is it worth it to you?”

  Cold sweat pooled on Nina’s forehead. The doctors’ puzzled faces swam in her vision. “I . . . I don’t feel well,” she squeaked.

  “I’m not surprised.” Dr. Woodrow took Nina’s hand. “Please, Ms. Christie. Come with us upstairs. We also want to know everything this woman who attacked you with the needle said to you. Every single word. We want to help you. Help us help you.”

  Her hand felt so . . . cold. Even with the squeeze.

  Like a corpse.

  The thought flitted through Nina’s head. Her head swam.

  The room spun. Her blood pressure plummeted. Her stomach flopped. . . .

  “Excuse me.” She lunged for the connecting bathroom, got there just in time. There wasn’t much inside her, just coffee, but it went on and on. The blond doctor sidled in, making sympathetic sounds. She stroked wisps off Nina’s sweaty forehead, and patted her back.

  Her hand was cold, even through the layers of Nina’s blouse and her loose over-dress, as if it were sucking out Nina’s vital warmth.

  “These new symptoms are all the more reason to move fast.”

  The doctor dampened a paper towel in the sink and passed it to Nina.

  Nina straightened, mopping her face. Her stomach still twitched, though there was nothing left to toss. She pressed the towel against hot eyes, and tightened her belly against that free-falling feeling.

  Was it a panic attack? The drug Aunt Helga had attacked her with, finally taking hold? Oh, God. She was so scared. She did not want to die. Yes, she’d go to that lab, and do more tests. Hell, yes. She’d do anything. She needed all the help she could get.

  She let the towel drop, looked in the mirror, into her pallid face, her red, blinking eyes—

  A corpse stood behind her. A skull, with rotting flesh and peeling skin. The hand on Nina’s shoulder was a skeletal claw.

  She flinched away with a shriek, cowering back in the corner—

  And Dr. Woodrow was abruptly normal again. Her beautiful face was fresh, pink, and blooming; her blue eyes were soft with concern.

  “Ms. Christie?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

  “I . . . but you . . .” She panted, gulped. “I must have had . . . a hallucination. I thought I saw . . .” She glanced back at the mirror. Dr. Woodrow was normal in the reflection, now. Nina’s heart galloped.

  “What?” Dr. Woodrow’s voice was sharp. “What did you see?

  Tell me!”

  “I, um . . . I . . .” Nina floundered. The doctor advanced upon her, her gaze intensely focused. “Try to relax,” Dr. Woodrow crooned. “Just breathe. What did you see? Picture it in your head. Describe it to me.”

  Nina cowered back. No one touched her, yet she felt . . .

  groped. A rough hand pinching and prodding, but not her body.

  In her mind.

  She clenched her teeth, and generated a burst of mental energy. Imagined swatting the offending, prurient hand away.

  The sensation eased. Dr. Woodrow blinked, frowning. “Roy!”

  she called. “Get in here! I think she’s going into shock.”

  The two doctors muscled her out of the bathroom, seizing her by the elbows and hustling her along and out the door of the medical suite.

  What the hell? Did she have a hallucinogen in her system?

  The rotting corpse image had been bad enough, but the sensation of groping in her mind made her feel violated, unclean. She wanted to bathe.

  Lights reflected off the floor in a blinding streak that made her eyes sting. She coughed. “Didn’t you say that your lab was upstairs?”

  “Yes, it is,” Dr. Granger said.

  Nina craned her neck as the doctors muscled her along, pulling her almost off her feet. “But the elevators are in the other direction.”

  “Oh.” Dr. Woodrow’s laugh tinkled like out-of-tune bells.

  “The elevator are out of order. We’ll take the stairwell. It’s quicker.”

  Nina had left her glasses on the bedside table, but through the myopic fog, she could see people walking into elevators, others walking out. These people were lying to her.

  She twisted out of their grasp. “Just a second. Let me run back to my room. I feel naked without my glasses. And my phone.

  And purse. I’m expecting a call. An important one. It can’t wait.”

  “I’ll get them.” Dr. Granger’s deep voice made shivers ripple up her spine. His pale eyes were laser pinpoints. “Wait here.”

  She took off. “No, I’ll do it!”

  She sprinted back, the soles of her sandals squeaking as she spun around the doorjamb, and lunged for her glasses, phone and purse. She shoved the glasses onto her face with hands that shook violently. When she burst out, the doctors were closer, and oh God, both were corpses now, rotting skull faces contrasting grotesquely with their spotless white doctors’ coats. Orange nylon ribbons with name tags hung around necks with peeling skin, de-caying flesh, exposed tendons. The smaller corpse had straw-like tufts of blond hair adhered to her red-smeared, discolored skull.

  “Ms. Christie? Are you all right?”

  The bell-like feminine voice issuing from that skeletal maw was the final jolt that set Nina sprinting, a blur of raw panic.

  Thrumming heartbeat, pounding legs. People veered out of her path if they were lucky. Many weren’t. She plowed into several, veered around rolling gurneys. Narrowly missed running down an old man tottering on crutches. The corpses gave chase, calling to her. She sacrificed a fraction of a second to check how close they’d gotten when she neared the elevator. About four yards behind her, human again, but the feral glint in their eyes was as chilling as the festering ghoul faces had been.

  Who the hell were they? What were they?

  She timed her pounding progress toward the elevator. People filing out, now in . . . the click, the hum, door starting to close—

  now!

  Suck in the gut. Slide in sideways. Yelling faces, thudding feet, bore down on her as it closed. They pounded the door, from the outside.

  Nina fell against the door, panting. Sweat ran down her back.

  Her raw, whooping gasps filled the silent elevator. All eyes were on her.

  She wanted to beg for help. But no one had seen those walking corpses but her. That was her own private hallucination, and the medical personnel here would stick a needle in her arm and tie her down to a gurney if she started babbling about it. And who could blame them.

  She stabbed at the button for two floors below, and caught sight of herself in the shiny panel. She looked crazy. Sweaty, white-faced. Staring, shadowed eyes; wild, touseled hair. Rasping pants, gulping for air. Hell, she was crazy. Zombies? What the hell was that about?

  Didn’t matter. She could lecture herself all she wanted. She had no control over the urge to flee. She’d keep going until whatever drove her allowed her to stop. She sidled out of the elevator, and bolted down the hospital corridor. Heads turned, eyes on her. . . . You OK? . . . need help? She activated her trick. The one she’d used back in the bad old days, when Stan was in one of his
moods. When not being noticed meant not getting screamed at, or hit, or kicked. Or worse.

  She’d learned to disappear. She’d learned it so damn well, in fact, that she’d been chipping doggedly away at unlearning it ever since. For her entire adult life. For all the good it had done her. And check her out. After years of therapy, her disappearing trick was still in perfect working order. All that careful, system-atic dismantling of “outdated survival mechanisms.” Hah. She slipped so smoothly into the familiar pattern. Nobody here. Nobody here. She locked on to the frequency, made it strong and steady. It throbbed off her while she gathered herself inside, tucking in everything that stuck out, everything that fluttered or glinted.

  She tucked it up tight, hiding it behind a thick, soft, gray fuzz of no thoughts, blank mind. Nothing at all. Nobody here.

  She forced herself to walk normally. Inquiries just stopped.

  Heads stopped turning. No eyes snagged on her. People walked on by, intent upon their own business. Nothing to see. Nobody here.

  Nothing to see.

  She zigzagged to the stairwell on the opposite end of the building. Three floors up. Then the elevator again. Four floors down. Hoping the random pattern would be in her favor. She found a stairwell, reached the ground floor. Nobody here. Nobody here. Slunk out the entrance onto Ocean Parkway, feeling horribly exposed. Nobody here. Nobody here. The sidewalk was hot. Her knees wobbled. Car horns blared, but the sound was muffled by the fuzzy blur of nobody here. She had to dodge people. They did not see her. She ran across Ocean Parkway, dodging cars. A couple of heart-stopping near misses got her across the road. She ducked up the first residential street she found, squeezing her brains to orient herself. This was a part of Brooklyn she didn’t know well, but she thought there was an F-train stop on Avenue X. Fifteen minutes, ten if she sprinted. Nobody here, nobody here.

  She didn’t want to wait in line for a MetroCard with her heart thudding like that, so she used a trick she’d learned as a teenager when she was short on cash. A guy with two huge suitcases was being buzzed through the service gate, so she just followed him through, using her invisible trick. Nobody here. Nobody here. No one saw. Not the subway attendant, or even the suitcase guy himself, though he walked backward facing her, red-faced and cursing as he dragged his bags up the staircase onto the elevated platform. Once there, one of his suitcases spun and fell on its top-loaded front, plop.

  . . . sweating like a pig, gonna smell like a dead dog on the plane . . .

  should’ve taken a goddamn cab . . . transfer at Atlantic Avenue going to kill me . . . just to save fifty measly bucks . . . old man could just open his damn wallet, help me out for once in his life, but no way, not him . . .

  Nina reeled back, disoriented, at the voice blaring in her head.

  But the man was not speaking. His mouth was a hyphen, sealed and tense. He dragged his suitcases toward the edge of the platform. The nattering hum of old, toxic anger subsided as the distance widened.

  What the hell? She stared at the guy’s hunched back, gulping, but her mouth was dry as sand. Had she just heard . . . no, that was absurd. The train roared into the station. Her heart thudded, fluttered. She was hallucinating again. Yes, that had to be it. That was all it was.

  Even so, she kept as much distance as humanly possible between herself and everyone else as she boarded the train.

  Chapter 4

  “Lost her?” Rudd’s voice over the cell phone was glacial.

  “You lost this one, too? ”

  “I don’t know what happened! We were taking her into the stairwell, and suddenly she freaks and bolts—”

  “And you just let her run away?”

  “We were in a crowded hospital corridor! It’s not like I could tackle her! I was grabbing her, and she ducks into an elevator!”

  “And your tracking skills? Why do you think I wasted eighteen hits of our precious dwindling store of psi-max on you?”

  Roy spun, staring up and down Ocean Parkway, groping for the woman’s elusive frequency. “I don’t know what happened!

  She winked out of existence! She was in the fucking building! I should have felt her! I should feel her now, anywhere in Brooklyn! She winked out on me!”

  “You’re slipping, Roy.”

  Rudd’s gentle tone was the most chilling thing Roy had ever heard, and after six years of working for the guy, that was saying a lot. “No, boss. Kasyanov shot her up with Psi-Max 48. The drug made her strong, and she blocked me, that’s all. I’m not slipping!”

  “Two hours after initial dose?” Rudd snorted. “Get real. She has no idea what’s happening to her. She can’t control the psi at this point. She’s on the roller coaster, remember? The spikes, the hallucinations? You were a maniac yourself, as I recall. We had to confine you physically. You wore restraints for twelve hours.”

  “That was normal psi-max! This is the new stuff, and it’s—”

  “Even stronger, yes. So the spikes should be stronger, too.

  She’ll be experiencing all kinds of phenomenon before she settles, and it will be even harder for her to control them than it was for us. You know how long that learning curve is, Roy. It takes years. She doesn’t even have the benefit of knowing what’s happening to her. Even normal psi-max drives most people batshit.

  Before they die.”

  Roy bit his fist to keep from screaming as he cast his feelers wide, wider, wider than he’d ever tried to feel. Still. Nothing.

  “It’s that bitch’s trick,” he snarled. “I’m not slipping. She’s blocking me.”

  “Come on, Roy, just accept it.” That gentle voice made his guts loosen. “There’s a point of diminishing returns with this stuff. You need to start thinking about retirement, my friend.

  You’ve had a good run.”

  The image formed in Roy’s mind, as if Rudd had sent it there telepathically. Himself, with a bullet hole between his eyebrows.

  “No way. I’m in great form,” he said hastily. “I’ll find her, boss. I’ll get her. It’s not me. Who knows what this bitch will be able to do, if Kasyanov dosed her with the new shit? Could be anything!”

  “The real question is, Roy, who else will soon know what she can do if she isn’t stopped? I don’t have time to listen to your excuses. Was Anabel with you when you spoke to her? What did she get?”

  “Nothing, boss!” he burst out eagerly. “She blocked Anabel, too! She said it was like getting whapped in the face! It pissed her off.”

  “I can well imagine. A double failure, then. Where is Anabel now?”

  “She went to the ICU to see what she could get out of Kasyanov.”

  “You’ve covered her workplace ? Her house? Nina Christie’s andering the streets of Brooklyn somewhere, Roy. She doesn’t know what’s happening to her, so she’ll probably end up in a psych ward, and once she’s in an institution, it will be more complicated to do what needs to be done.”

  Roy felt compulsion flailing his mind, though he knew it was just conditioning. Rudd couldn’t do his badass juju over the phone, only in person. “You want me to off her?”

  Rudd sighed. “I always have to spell it out for you. Do you want to read about the amazing effects of psi-max in Time and Newsweek? What would that do to our edge? Have your Arbatov friend and his thugs help you if your balls aren’t hairy enough. If you can make her tell what she knows, so much the better.

  Everything Kasyanov told her. Who else knows. If there are any doses of the new formula left. Where they are. But after she spills, she dies. Have I made myself clear?”

  “I’m on it,” Roy said hoarsely.

  He broke the connection. His head throbbed. He got the headache often these days. The more psi-max he used, the more it hurt. It was so worth it, though. He reached into his shirt, clutched the vial. Out of eighteen pills, he’d taken one and given six to Dmitri, in exchange for his backup and his personnel. Only eleven left. Fucking shit.

  It drove him nuts, that the bitch could block him. He was not slipping!
He was red-hot! A super-hound. Loyal like a hound, too, though all he got for his loyalty was abuse and contempt.

  If Kasyanov’s fairy tale of stabilizing the psi was true, oh God it would be sweet. To be able to use his gift without having to scramble for a dose, to beg and plead and bargain. No headaches.

  No side effects.

  And no Rudd, either.

  If he didn’t need the drug, he wouldn’t need Rudd. In fact, if he were free, he would start making some careful plans for Rudd.

  Plans that involved large amounts of C-4 and det cord. Yeah, that’s right. Boom. Suck my dick, boss. President, his ass. Psi-Max 48 was too good to be true. He hadn’t believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy for some time now, but just look what this Nina Christie chick could do. Blocking him and Anabel both, just two hours after initial dose. And look what Kasyanov had done to him that morning.

  The memory still made him shudder, swallowing bile. He rubbed the old scar on his neck. It itched, uncomfortably.

  Too good to be true. But a guy could dream.

  A sense of desperate urgency prodded Helga from below.

  Wake up.

  She resisted. Nothing awaited her up there but pain and terror. She wanted to let go and fall back, arms out. Like she had into the water of the lake, as a child, long ago. Letting the cool dark catch her, embrace her. She’d been dreaming of that deep lake. So cold. So clean.

  Lara. Nina. Not yet. Not yet!

  She rose up, by slow, agonizing increments, as the black turned to angry, pounding red. Every part of her hurt, but para-doxically, her senses were very keen. She heard the breathing of the woman in the next bed, every word spoken in surrounding rooms, wheels on the gurney a hundred yards away. Every beep and whir of monitoring machinery. She was in a hospital. It hardly mattered. She was dying. Day five. The process could not be ar-rested now. Too late. She was just a corpse that still breathed.

  Just a matter of time. And not much time.

  She should be dead already. Deserved to be, certainly, after what she had been forced to do. She’d lasted longer, now, than any of her unfortunate test subjects. It tormented her, that it had been she herself who had identified all those wretched people, gathered their names and addresses into a database in the course of her studies. Before she knew what Rudd was. Before she knew what he would make her do to them. Her own original parapsychological talent was in identifying people with enough latent psi to survive pharmacological enhancement.