Opening various panels that encircled them, Sam showed the internal workings, explaining to the women in some detail the technical and mechanical workings of the system. It was highly innovative, he said, cutting-edge technology designed by a team of men and women he had paid handsomely.
This is my baby, he said proudly, and with a twinkle in his eye, he added, “My s-u-n.”
Meredith chuckled a little at his quip, but she was having trouble absorbing all the technical information, so stunned was she by her narrow escape from death and the peculiar, thankless behavior of Sam’s seismic expert.
CHAPTER 42
The bitch expects me to thank her, Tatsy thought, as Sam Howe droned on about the technical aspects of constructing and operating his artificial sun. That will never happen.
Inside the enclosure with them, one of the tecks was in com-contact with people on the ground, while his companion was outside on the platform, waiting for the plazchain escape ladder to be lowered from above.
“This sun will be just as efficient as the real thing,” Sam said. “It’ll warm sunbathers and transmit energy and nutrients to them. All the good things a real sun can do, with the harmful ultraviolet rays screened out. Of utmost importance, Sunny contains no fire. Did you hear that, Meredith? Don’t increase my fire insurance rates!” He grinned.
Tatsy didn’t care what he had to say at the moment. Instead, she was watching the pretty, dark-skinned risk manager, who was etch-penning notes on a little pad.
Meredith looked up with her brown eyes. Her lids narrowed when she saw Tatsy Cosmo watching her.
She’s wondering about me, Tatsy thought, thinking I’m... different. She doesn’t understand me.
To Tatsy, it was becoming increasingly apparent from Meredith’s expression that her brain was working on overtime, reviewing all she knew about Tatsy Cosmo, trying to decipher it. Fortunately, the woman didn’t know much. Even so, she was a part-time writer, and might be good at figuring people out. Tatsy didn’t intend to underestimate her.
I don’t resemble my brother that much, Tatsy thought, except from some angles, or in low light. The color of my eyes is the same as his, but mine are larger. Has she noticed any similarity?
Tatsy studied her closely. Meredith held gazes with her, not showing any emotion, then looked away.
Hard to tell, Tatsy thought. Perhaps not, but maybe in her subconscious. My eyes?
It was well-illuminated inside the bubble, and fortunately for Tatsy she’d noticed that the resemblance between her and Riggio was most apparent in certain shadows and half shadows, or if a person squinted. Meredith was not squinting at the moment, but she did glance intermittently at Tatsy, with mounting interest.
When Sam finished his presentation and they stepped outside the sun, he looked up, and shouted to the men above them that they were ready to leave. The plazchain ladder was only partway down, with the bottom end still around twenty feet above them.
One of the men shouted back, saying, “It’s jammed, sir. I’m sorry, if it’s not one thing today, it’s another.”
“Well get the damn thing working!”
They waited for half an hour, and then the worker said the whole mechanism would have to be taken apart to see what was wrong. The ladder would not go up or down. He said they were going to get a rope ladder and lower it for them.
“All right, but hurry up!” Sam shouted.
The backup ladder was long enough, and the tecks were able to secure it to the railing up at the top of the hole. Sam told Tatsy to go first.
She hesitated, but he lifted her up onto the ladder, despite her protestations. She looked down at him in irritation, then up, to the hatch above and the workers up there, urging her on. To her own surprise, she began climbing without another word. Meredith followed, and then Sam. The thick rope ladder was plenty strong enough to hold all of them.
Reaching the top and stepping off onto a firm floor, Tatsy was angry that she had not been able to accomplish anything. It had not been a good kill opportunity on her primary target, Lamour, so she had abandoned it. The witnesses might have trapped her down there.
She was also confident that the cautionary voice-within had not really been Riggio. She must have only imagined it.
In her mind, she tried to duplicate the pitch and cadence: “Don’t do it, Tatsy!” Yes, she had only been talking to herself in her thoughts, protecting herself.
Tatsy was thinking of other opportunities to terminate Lamour, where there would be no witnesses. Maybe tonight in the darkness, and then she could make good her escape before anyone found the body.
CHAPTER 43
After the events that afternoon, her narrow escape from death and that strange, ungrateful woman, Meredith had gone to her room and ordered dinner to be brought to her. The food still sat on the table, untouched. Too upset to eat, she’d paced around for a long time, and then had gone to lie on the bed, fully clothed. She’d pulled the blankets over herself and just lay there for hours, thinking and brooding.
She heard a howling wind outside, and finally drifted into an uneasy slumber.
~~~
Zack psi-linked to slow the vehicle, decelerating and braking. The van slowed on the dark highway, and he turned right onto a paved road that became gravel after a mile. In the headlights, he saw that the gravel had ended, and the road was dirt with bone rattling, muddy chuckholes.
“Fully loaded logging trucks have taken their toll on this road,” Nolan Hagel said.
Zack grunted in agreement, but didn’t want to talk now. He was concentrating on the road, didn’t want to plunge off into the darkness—not so much for his own sake, nor even for his passengers, but for Meredith. He had to get to her in time.
He’d sneezed earlier, and had hoped he wasn’t coming down with something. Now he felt much better and stronger, as he needed to be for Meredith.
I’m not going to let her down, he told himself.
Zack had been on this road before, and in this forest on backpacking and rock climbing trips. He glanced at the computerized console map, and veered left at a “Y” in the road, going onto a bumpy road he’d never been on before. The road curved and then went steeply uphill.
It was almost midnight. The sky was overcast and gusts of wind buffeted the van. The rain had let up in the past few minutes, but the wipers had automatically gone on low. A thick dampness hung in the air and dripped from trees, causing thick water droplets to fall on the windshield when Zack drove under overhanging branches.
He glanced at the console map again and saw it flicker, but was able to read it. “Keep your eyes peeled for Road 237-T,” he said.
The lighter rainfall did not last long, and when it started to come down again it was worse than ever. The wipers were going at top speed, but it was still hard to see, and he had to slow way down.
The screen on the console flickered again, then went to static images and sounds. The GPS system was no longer working, but he still had a compass.
Since he’d been here before, he told himself that he should be able to figure this out. On backpacking trips, he’d developed a good sense of direction (for the sake of his own self-survival), but this weather was making it much harder.
For forty minutes Zack drove into the darkness of the woods, taking one logging road and another in a dizzying maze, making so many turns that he began to question his ability to find his way out of this place, or to locate Sun Under. He was having trouble figuring out which roads to take. Everything looked the same in all directions.
He fought panic.
I must remain calm, he told himself as he steered around a deep rut. This isn’t doing Meredith any good.
“I think the forest service changed the road numbers since the last time my GPS was updated,” he said, “but we’ll get there, don’t worry.”
The others were silent, yet he knew they were growing increasingly concerned, as was he. Though it did not seem possible, the weather worsened. Rain slammed the vehicle with a ve
ngeance. A blanket of darkness was fully upon them, with the van’s headlights casting eerie light upon the surroundings, not shining very far ahead.
Finally, the solargy receiver on the van began to register stronger signals, though the navigation console was still filled with static images and sounds. He drove over a wooden bridge, and remembered being this way before. He recalled the road climbing in elevation, and seeing Sun Under in the valley below, before turning into a parking area for a trailhead, where he and his friend Nolan Hagel hiked up to an even better vantage point.
“I remember this bridge,” he said. “We’re getting close.” But he was not entirely certain if it was the same bridge.
Half an hour later, with the top of Zack’s head pounding he drove over a rise. To his great relief, in the valley below he saw an array of dimly-illuminated Solar Collector Units, towers with blinking red lights atop them.
“We found it,” he said, with a deep sigh.
The passengers clapped and cheered, but for only a few seconds before remembering the gravity of their mission.
~~~
Lying on the bed in the guest room Sam had provided for her, Meredith thought she heard voices. She could not make out the words. Were they far away, or up close, speaking low? She couldn’t tell. A man and a woman? It was pitch black outside, and the storm had hardly abated all day long.
She opened her eyes in the low light, made sure the shadows were not moving.
Wind noises continued from outside, and Meredith decided she must have mistaken them for voices. She drifted into an uneasy slumber. Seconds later she awoke again. A face was next to hers, breathing on her. Unfamiliar smell.
Animal.
Meredith sat straight up and suppressed a scream.
For a moment, she thought it was Riggio Tarizy, but then she realized it was Tatsy Cosmo—it had been a trick of light and shadows.
And she saw Tatsy smiling at her in a cruel way, her face partially illuminated in light that was coming in through the window.
“It’s time to die, Meredith,” she said.
Meredith scrambled out of bed on the other side, ran to the door and turned the handle. It stuck, then finally opened, and she was in the hallway of the barracks building, running in her socks.
“Come back, Meredith!” Tatsy shouted. She was close behind.
Meredith burst outside, into a cold, wind-driven rain. Without shoes but otherwise still dressed, she ran through the middle of the construction yard. Her feet hurt from sharp stones, but she couldn’t slow down, had to get away. The shadow-forms of dump trucks were ahead, parked in a row. She was getting soaked to the skin. The ground was soggy, and there were many puddles on the uneven surface.
At this hour she didn’t see anyone to help her. The workers’ quarters were on the other side of the yard, quite a distance away, and she wished she’d made a commotion back at the barracks, trying to awaken someone there. She’d been rousted from bed, with no opportunity to think.
The cafeteria trailer was ahead, but no one was visible inside. Lights flickered off, then went back on. Beyond, she saw a darkened dome-shape, the large structure over the roof of the cavern and the artificial sun. No one was in sight in any direction. On her left a faint, barely discernible glow came from the excavated hole that led down into the Sun Under cavern.
Behind her, she heard Tatsy curse, and looking back she saw a shadowy figure stumble and fall.
On impulse, Meredith dodged to the right into the darkness behind a storage trailer.
~~~
Rising to her feet, Tatsy surveyed the rain-smeared terrain, saw the dark, looming shadows of construction equipment and the lights of the cafeteria trailer, with the central dome just past it. She wore only light clothing, with no jacket, but didn’t feel cold, and didn’t care about being soaking wet. The frenzy of the chase had warmed her. A heavy rain pattered against her exposed skin.
It angered her that she had stumbled, and now Lamour was gone. She chastised herself for not striking when the bitch was half-asleep, but had wanted to toy with her and make her suffer before dying. Now Tatsy looked around; her prey could not have gone far. The bitch was in her stocking feet, should be easy to catch.
Storage trailers were parked on one side of her, and road graders on the other. Tatsy’s mind worked quickly. Lamour probably dodged into darkness on one side or the other.
Tatsy knew she was stronger than the one she pursued, and had been running smoothly on the terrain, until suddenly tripping.
Her mind was blank at first, then grew clear when a thought pressed against hers, one she didn’t want to have. Riggio had done it! She sensed him inside her mind, struggling to exert himself, trying to take charge. Internally she heard his voice, murmuring and whispering and getting louder, though she could not make out any words.
He was fighting for control, trying to take the body back from her. That’s why she tripped. He’d done it! Trying to focus her anxious thoughts, Tatsy’s mind whirled.
Damn you!
And she realized that the maleness of her body needed to survive, that it would continue trying to assert itself.
From within Tatsy’s mind, the presence became louder. She tried to silence it, but words flowed through her anyway. His words, coming from his thoughts. So he had been there when she had a grip on Meredith on the scaffold, when Tatsy was trying to figure out how to kill her. He’d protested, interfered, the bastard!
“I’m going to beat you,” he whispered, managing to use Tatsy’s vocal chords to create sound, more than just in her thoughts.
The whispering became a female voice, also using Tatsy’s vocal chords, and her sister Lizbeth said, in a low tone, “Let me kill Lamour. You had your chance, and now it’s my turn.”
So Lizbeth was still alive, too! This was good news, because of the cooperation they’d had for years, but Lizbeth was not nearly as strong as Tatsy. Lizbeth’s embryo had barely survived in Riggio’s abdomen for years, and physically she had eyes, but only a shriveled body with stunted arms and legs. When Tatsy was an embryo inside the body herself, larger than any of her sisters, she’d been able to see and communicate with her, but now she could not see her at all. As sisters with a common survival goal they wanted to eliminate Riggio, but Tatsy was most qualified to do that. She was the best chance for the sisters. She wondered if Callie and Anneya were also alive, but could not tell.
Now Tatsy transmitted a thought over the paranormal linkage she shared with Lizbeth, commanding her to be silent, and Lizbeth did as she was told. The rain drummed on the metalloy roofs of the storage trailers. Soaking wet, Tatsy crept across the mud, toward the last place she had seen her prey.
She reached the corner of a trailer, peered into shadows on the left. No movement was apparent in the gloom. She ran for the corner of another trailer, making no sounds that could be heard above the weather.
Tatsy visualized Meredith dead, crushed and bleeding in the rain. There was power in positive thinking.
And Tatsy thought forward to what her new life would be like, with uninterrupted killing pleasures. First Meredith, because she deserved to die and could not escape. After that, there would be many others, an ongoing orgy of carnage.
It occurred to her she might enjoy killing women the most, since they were easiest to subdue, and there would be a higher body count. She intended to go out and do it as the opportunity arose, sometimes listening to the counsel of Lizbeth if she offered it, and sometimes not. She’d also been thinking of ways to kill hundreds or thousands of people in explosions, crashes, destroyed buildings and collapsed sports stadiums. The possibilities were endless.
Hearing a metallic clatter by the cafeteria trailer, Tatsy hurried over there. She didn’t find anything, but felt sure she was getting closer. She sensed it, and smelled fear in the moist air.
Tatsy had a powerful ability to improvise. She enjoyed the unknown aspects of the killing game, things that kept her on her toes. She should be enjoying this.
&n
bsp; But she harbored an encroaching doubt, a feeling that Riggio was about to make an even stronger move from within, an attempt to take over in some devious, unfair manner. She tried not to think about the ways he might accomplish this, fearing he could read her mind.
His presence washed over her. Maybe I’ll help you kill her, Riggio thought. If you let me.
It infuriated her that he could read her thoughts, while she was unable to read his. It had been that way in reverse when Tatsy was physically no more than a fetus. Was he occupying her former tiny body? Did he have an independent, corporeal form of his own? She didn’t know.
I don’t trust you, she replied.
Riggio: I could kill Meredith for you.
You’re trying to trick me.
Don’t forget we have Lizbeth to help us, Riggio thought. She’s smart, can get us out of bad scrapes.
You don’t care about Lizbeth or me. You never did! Shut up!
Then Tatsy shouted into the darkness, words that were swallowed by the storm. “Where are you, Meredith Lamour? You can’t escape!”
To her delight she saw movement by one of the storage buildings, only a short distance away. Tatsy was getting closer....
~~~
Through a veiled but clearing memory, Riggio shared his sister’s recollection. During Tatsy’s inspections of the premises she had seen the domed structure over the artificial sun that was the centerpiece of Sam Howe’s unique enterprise. He saw that this was a key part of the diabolical plan she was formulating, the way she wanted to kill Meredith.
“I know where you’re hiding!” Tatsy shouted at her as she ran, her voice full and excited.
“I’m helping you run now,” Riggio whispered. “I’m not holding you back.”
“You couldn’t if you wanted to.”
“Are you absolutely certain?”
Just as his sister suspected, Riggio could read her thoughts now, all of them. Though Tatsy was still dominant and working desperately to suppress him, he was gaining strength, and he needed to stop her.
The Unborn Page 26
