by Mark Gessner
After about forty-five minutes, the tour guide had taken them into the Dunn Solar Telescope control room. There were about twenty-five people in the group, including a group of college kids from Utah State, visiting scientists from Estonia, and a huge clan vacationing from Iowa with a passel of small kids. Halfway through a stimulating presentation on the history of the Echelle Spectrograph, one squirming two-year old decided he'd had enough of science. He pitched a temper tantrum and ran screaming toward the perimeter of the control room. He slapped random buttons on one of the electronics racks, then wet himself.
The tour guide ran over to grab the kid before he ruined a week's worth of observations or a million dollars worth of equipment, and the kid's parents weren't far behind, yelling for their kid to settle down and behave. In the fracas, the tour guide left his key fob and note cards on the spectrometer console. The killer saw his chance and he took it. The tour guide, the college kids, the scientists, and the parents all drifted toward the shrieking toddler to pry him off the electronics rack. The killer dropped back toward the console, then slipped out the door and into the snow, keys in pocket. He was never missed. His plan was to follow Ramona the next day, and see where he might have an opportunity to take her out.
Ramona spent most of the morning alternately in front of the computer terminal and then the optical bench, running diagnostics on the laser sensor array. These checked out, but still the image quality remained fuzzy. The only thing left that could be at fault was the sensor element itself. Since she'd checked her code and software design the night before, it had to be a hardware problem. Most likely static electricity in this cold dry weather had zapped the electronics. She'd have to pull the sensor out of the light path and replace with a spare unit. That would have to fix it. She switched the laser off, and the sparkling red calibration test pattern on the optical bench blinked out, leaving only a fuzzy image of the sun. She was so close to success now, she could taste it. She glanced at the warning sign plastered on the hatch:
[DANGER]
CONFINED SPACE - BURN HAZARD
AUTHORIZED ENTRY ONLY
WARNING
BEFORE OPENING INSTRUMENTATION CHAMBER:
- DROP CHAMBER VACUUM
- DEPLOY AND LOCK UPPER QUARTZ WINDOW SHUTTER
- CLOSE MAIN MIRROR COVER
- POWER OFF TELESCOPE
- ENGAGE TURRET BRAKE
- CHECK RESCUE EQUIPMENT
She opened the vacuum release valve. Air hissed into the chamber. Ignoring the rest of the safety procedures, which she was certain were just mandated by the lawyers to protect the observatory’s ass, she unfastened the three latches on the hatch, pulled her dark red safety goggles down over her eyes, and then swung open the heavy door.
Chapter 28
THE LIGHT WAS BLINDING. Intense. Painful. Even from twenty feet back, in the main doorway to the control room.
He'd been watching her for days, learning her patterns, waiting for some opportunity. His first plan was to push her from the upper platform, but he couldn't figure out how to get up there before she did. The old hoist was noisy and there wasn't any other way up. He'd be spotted up there before he could get his chance. Then he saw her open the chamber.
Why had she ignored the DANGER sign and opened the chamber? Was she stupid? Or just arrogant? On second thought, he didn't give a shit. This was opportunity. He pulled on his leather gloves, threw up a forearm to shield his eyes, and then rushed up behind her silhouette and kicked her hard in her mushy wide ass. She didn't even have a chance to grab the hatch door on the way in, not that it would have done much good. Her knees buckled and her forehead hit the sensor array, tearing her goggles off. She sprawled forward into the instrumentation chamber with a surprised chirp, landing hard on the polished quartz glass floor.
Her hair, cotton blouse, and blue jeans flashed into flames. Her goggles clattered to the floor of the chamber and melted into a bright red sticky pool. Her skin reddened, crackling like crispy fried pork rinds. She rolled over and held up one arm defensively toward the ceiling, to block the light, but it was as futile as holding up a hand to stop a shotgun blast. Her goggles gone, eyes focusing three hundred times the power of the sun onto her retinas, blinded. She moaned a low ululation, and flailed her arms around in a desperate attempt to grab something to pull herself from this oven. Her flesh bubbled, popped, and boiled in a steamy hissing that would continue until the discovery of her blackened corpse. The stench was immediate, vile and unbearable, like burning hair, only a hundred times stronger. Smoke boiled out from the top of the chamber and drifted to the top of the control room.
He stifled a retch as he slammed the hatch. Fingers of amplified sunlight reached out from around the edges of the door, tracing their path through the smoke, grabbing and scraping at the hatch for their next victim. The moan rose to a steady high-pitched note, then abruptly stopped.
He slipped out of the control room and peered out the heavy whitewashed wooden door of the telescope building. Three tall blonde scientists were shuffling up the hill from the mess hall, smoking cigarettes, jabbering in a foreign language, and laughing. Despite the biting cold, they wore only hoodless sweatshirts and jeans, no hats. They were dressed for a spring picnic in the middle of winter. They just had to be Swedish. They could be headed to this telescope, beyond it to the Evans facility, or to the hilltop dome, maybe even to the scenic overlook. If they were coming to use the Vacuum Telescope, they'd be here in less than a minute, in which case he was fucked. There wasn't time to waste, and there wasn't anywhere else in the telescope to hide if they were going to be working here. If they didn't notice the smell, which was possible since they were smokers, they'd find Ramona's charred remains in about two seconds when they saw the smoke leaking out from around the edges of the hatch door. There wasn't any way to sneak out without being spotted. In a panic, he jumped onto the elevator platform and hit the UP button.
Two of the Swedes bid a hearty good day to their comrade, who continued on to the Evans facility and another day of exciting coronagraph studies.
The killer was just stepping off the elevator platform and outside onto the service walkway at the top of the cone as the two scientists entered the building far below. He crouched down onto the platform and watched as the third scientist strolled toward the Evans building, whistling a classical tune as he did so. He thought it might be Sibelius, but he couldn't be sure, maybe Debussy.
Through the trap door, he could hear their excited shouts: “Perkele! Vittu!” Even though he didn't speak a word of Swedish, he knew they'd found Ramona. He was trapped. He looked down the side of the cone. There were no ladder rungs or other service access. The trees were too far away to jump into, and one mistake at this height would be his last. He was trapped. Down the hill and behind the administration building, he saw the cherry-top of the Sunspot Fire Department's emergency medical truck flashing red and white and the siren pierced the frigid morning air. In about two minutes this whole place would be thick with firemen, and another twenty minutes after that, the sheriff would arrive from Cloudcroft. He felt the world close in tight around him. He grabbed the railing and gasped for air.
Chapter 29
"I'M FUCKING BORED," SAID Kyle.
"Me too. Let's go shoot some cans," said Parker. The two boys lay on their backs on the living room floor, each tossing a golf ball up into the air, trying to see how close they could come to the crystal ceiling fixture without actually shattering it.
"Nah, can't. Dad caught me shootin' at the lighthouse from the deck last week. He took my twenty-two and I'm out of CO2 cylinders for the BB pistol," said Kyle. The lighthouse was actually a cylindrical water tower that the neighborhood association considered an eyesore, so they'd had it painted up to look like a lighthouse. The illusion was very good if you were more than a half mile away, but any closer it looked like a cartoon. Still, it was apparently enough to fool the very wealthy who purchased homes in this neighborhood.
"Mmm. Onslaught De
athmatch?"
"Nah, I already beat all the levels on the 'Godlike' setting"
"What about a net game then?" asked Parker.
"Nah, those dicks are all a bunch of team killers and pussies," said Kyle.
"Surf some TnA?" offered Parker, his ball hitting the ceiling and knocking loose some of the texturing material in a shower of gypsum.
"Nah, Mom locked down the proxy so I can't get the good porn sites anymore," said Kyle, brushing the gypsum dust from his hair.
"We could maybe try to hack it?" suggested Parker.
"It's hopeless, she had my cousin patch it through some kind of router or firewall, and it's locked behind the network panel in her closet. I tried," said Kyle.
"Let's go tease your little sister then," said Parker. He’d had a crush on Kyle’s little sister ever since she’d started wearing a training bra.
"Can't. She's away at band camp," said Kyle. Kyle, the older and taller of the two boys, was sixteen. He was muscular with wavy blond hair. He'd just gotten his driver's license and a brand new Lexus SUV for his birthday. They lived in a seven thousand square-foot house on top of a hill overlooking Lake Travis, just down the street from the faux lighthouse. The house had cost Kyle's father a million and a half dollars. He worked eighty-five hour weeks as a Dell operations executive to keep up the payments on this monstrosity. He had ground his lower teeth down to stubs, and his blood pressure was so high that he'd recently begun pissing blood, but he put off seeing the doctor, because in his position taking sick time was frowned upon.
The house had a billiard parlor, a theater complete with about a thousand popular movie titles, two kitchens (one on the main level and one downstairs just inside from the pool), a fully equipped game room including the latest top-end video game console and hundreds of games, a sauna, and a swimming pool overlooking the lake. There was also a small Astroturf putting green out next to the pool, complete with a real sand trap. In the garage there were two tandem sea kayaks and enough camping and hiking gear to outfit an Everest expedition.
Still the boys were bored.
"Hey I know," said Parker, "My uncle's doing this game called Geocaching. Wanna try it?" Parker was small for his age, thin, olive complexioned with short dark hair. He lived in another million-dollar home three doors down. Though he didn't have the guts to get in trouble on his own, coupled with a bolder companion, he could come up with some very creative ways for making mischief. Building the fireplace out on the top of the cliff in the J Canyon preserve had been his idea. They'd spent a weekend cutting trees and making log seats and arranging rocks around the fire pit. They'd had plenty of wild nights camping out there around the fire, drinking Sam Adams beer and passing the occasional joint whenever Kyle could bum some off his older brother Chase. Chase was in finance. Those guys could afford to drink themselves stupid all the way through college, and then when they got out, they were grinding their teeth, pissing blood and making payments on million dollar homes.
"Geo-what? What the hell's that?" asked Kyle.
"Some geek hides a box of junk in the woods and other geeks come out to find it using GPS," explained Parker, his Titleist gracing the chandelier with a glassy ting.
"That sounds gay," said Kyle. "What's in the box?"
"Toys and shit. Mostly junk. Sometimes there's a buck or two. One time my uncle found a hundred thirty bucks," said Parker, sitting up.
"A hundred thirty? No way. How do you know where to look for the box?" asked Kyle. His credit limit was more than a hundred times that amount, still, like Chase was fond of saying, one could never have enough money.
"It's on the net, there's a whole website and shit," said Parker, getting up and heading for the computer room.
"Let me see, what's the address?" asked Kyle, as they scrambled into the computer den and woke the machine.
"Here, let me type it in," offered Parker.
"No fuckhead, I'll type it in," said Kyle, slapping the smaller boy on the back of the head. They pulled up the website, typed in Kyle's zip code, and waited a second as the list of nearest caches filled the screen. They clicked on the nearest cache. It was just outside the security gate to their neighborhood.
"Holy shit, that one's close. What if we went out and raided a few of the boxes, took the good shit and trashed the rest?" said Parker.
"Cool, like pirates," said Kyle.
"Yeah, like fuckin Captain Ahab," said Parker, "Fuck with the geeks a little bit, watch them scurry like ants to see who's pissing in their gay little game."
"Ahab was not a pirate, you dumbfuck," said Kyle.
"Whatever," said Parker, "You know what I'm talking about."
"Maybe we could fill some of them with dog shit or maybe piss in them or something." suggested Kyle.
"Cool," said Parker, "I know where I can find a dead cat too. "
"Fuckin-A, Let's go," said Kyle.
Chapter 30
THE KILLER TOOK SEVERAL deep breaths and wrestled the panic back down. No time for that now. He had no jar ready. He decided he would rather die in an escape attempt rather than be captured. He'd come too far to be captured, and by firemen and scientists. He figured that he could slide down the side of the cone, using friction to slow his descent. The cone was steep though; it was a longshot. The impact would be less than falling one hundred thirty-six feet, but how much less he couldn't say. It depended on the coefficient of friction between his jeans and the concrete surface, his initial velocity, the cosine of the angle that the cone made with the ground, the thickness of the snow bank at the bottom, and a number of other lower-order factors he just didn't have time to compute right now. To maximize the friction, he'd have to spread his arms and legs and hug the cone on the way down. He estimated his landing velocity would be equivalent to jumping a quarter of the height of the cone straight to the ground. Thirty-five feet, give or take. He might break a leg, but at least he had a chance to escape.
He swung a foot out over the service railing on the back side of the cone. He straddled the railing and then swung his other foot and crouched on the outside of the railing. He switched his grip to the lower rung of the railing, lowered himself off the edge, and hung suspended from the railing, feet dangling down the side of the cone.
He let go.
He dropped.
His stomach lurched up into his chest, and he tensed. Free fall. Much too fast. He'd miscalculated.
Suddenly his feet hit something, snagged the toes of his shoes briefly; he continued falling. Whatever it was, it scraped its way up his legs and chest. He caught only a glimpse of it as it slid by his face and up his arms. Instinctively, he grabbed just as it passed his wrists. His left hand missed, but he had it firmly in his right. He bounced and dangled by his right arm, the force ripping and burning at his shoulder. He quickly threw up his left arm and held fast. He had snagged a heavy steel cable. What the hell? He hadn't seen that from up top; the cable was painted white to match the cone. From here he could see what it was. It ran from the twin lightning rods on either side of the top of the cone, down the sides of the cone a dozen feet. The two cables then curved inward to meet at a T-junction, then looking down between his legs, he could see a single cable continued all the way down the back side of the cone to the ground.
He grabbed the vertical part of the cable in gloved hands and half-slid, half-rappelled his way down the back side of the cone. When he reached the ground, he backed twenty feet into the forest, checking to be sure that no one saw his descent. The paramedics had entered the building and the forest canopy and trunks were flashing red with the light from their truck. He continued to back up until he noticed he was on a mulched trail. A trail marker indicated that it was National Forest Trail T234. He wasn't sure where this trail went, but one thing was certain. It went down, away from the observatory. Right now anywhere else was better than up on this mountain.
He hiked five miles through the slush, all downhill. It took two miles of hiking just to clear the smell of burning bitch out of hi
s nostrils. The trail ended up in a remote desert state park in the foothills above Alamogordo. From there it was an easy hike to the state highway and freedom.
Chapter 31
Austin Texas
March 1 - 4A.M.
NO MATTER WHERE YOUR murder spree took you, it was always good to be back in Texas. The mountains of New Mexico were just too fucking cold. That and the air. Something was wrong with the air there. He couldn't put his finger on it but it gave him an uneasy feeling, a feeling of dread. It made his chest tight, like a constant squeezing. The feeling of dread had played hell with his sense of panic. While in the mountains, he'd had to drink from the urine bottle as much as three times a day.
It wasn't the murder of that Willard bitch, that had been easy--too easy--and he'd gotten away clean, no broken bones. But now he was back south where the temperature might get cold, but never too cold or too long. Most of the time it was fine, except in the summer when it was too fucking hot and you'd better not be going around homeless because the homeless don't have air conditioning.
