The Hollow Skull

by Christopher Pike

  “I wonder where it’s going,” Cass whispered.

  Jill was a bundle of nerves. “Maybe we should follow it.”

  “Why?” Cass paused. “All right. But I have to take Mary with us.”

  The three of them jumped into Jill’s car and sped after the ambulance. Jill floored it, her dusty Toyota shaking from the sudden acceleration. The town was not that large, they knew everyone in it. They were surprised when the ambulance pulled into Mr. Chavez’s driveway. He was the owner of the local McDonald’ s. He had twelve kids and two wives and was highly respected. The girls figured one of the kids had fallen and broken a bone or something. They were shocked when Mr. Chavez ran out of his house carrying Tim in his arms.

  Tim was naked and covered with blood.

  “Oh God,” Jill gasped, and it was well she was parked because she looked as if she was about to faint. She lost all her color and her head slumped forward. Cass reached for her door handle.

  “Mary, stay here, take care of Jill. I’ll see what’s happening.”

  Cass ran toward the paramedics and Tim. They didn’t immediately put him in the ambulance but had Mr. Chavez set him down on the grass. The men in white went to work with stethoscopes and a blood pressure wrap. All the while Tim thrashed, coughing up more blood. The sticky red liquid was all over his chest and legs. He seemed to be in a convulsion rather than in actual pain. His eyes were closed and he kept jerking his head from side to side.

  “What happened to him?” Cass cried..

  Mr. Chavez gestured helplessly, himself covered with blood.

  “We found him this way at the reservoir. He was rolling in the sand and coughing up blood. He was all alone, we don’t know how he got there.”

  “His vital signs are failing,” one paramedic snapped. “We have to get him to the hospital.” The two medical workers began to lift Tim.

  “Which hospital?” Cass asked.

  “Taylor Memorial. Are you family?”

  “No. But we’re close friends. His girlfriend is over there. We’ll drive behind you.” She stopped as she turned away. “Is he going to live?”

  The paramedics glanced at each other. “We don’t know anything at this point,” one of them said.

  Back at the car Cass forced Jill into the passenger seat and pushed in behind the wheel. The ambulance was already rolling away. Cass started the car and sped after it. Jill was bent over and sobbing quietly, still a bedsheet. Mary was sitting tensely in the back.

  “You got your seat belt on?” Cass called.

  “Yes,” Mary said, shaking. “What’s wrong with Tim?”

  “They don’t know. He’s throwing up blood. They’re taking him to the hospital.” Cass glanced at Jill. “But they think he’ll be all right.”

  Jill raised her head and miserably shook it. “He’s going to die.”

  “He’s not going to die!”

  Jill waved her hand helplessly. “You saw all that blood. Nobody can bleed that much and live.”

  “It just looked like a lot of blood because you were scared,” Cass lied. “His vital signs are stable and he’s going to be fine. Now let me concentrate on driving, that ambulance is doing a hundred.”

  In reality she was unable to keep up with the ambulance, it was a new vehicle and Jill’s car was as old as all their cars. But Cass knew Taylor, knew the hospital. The ambulance got to the town ten minutes before her but that was all. They parked outside Emergency and dashed inside. Jill was not coping well, running into things, walls and chairs. Cass left Mary with her while she went to find Tim. She ran into him abruptly. Stumbling through the emergency wing, she turned a corner and came across a team of eight nurses and doctors working on him. If he had been thrashing before, he was digging a hole through his bed now. They had to restrain him with straps so that they could work on him. Yet it was obvious they didn’t know what his problem was, except for the fact that he was throwing up tons of blood. At least they had covered him with a green sheet. A harried nurse glared at her.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “His friend.” Cass said.

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

  “No. Is he going to make it?”

  “We don’t know. Were you with him when this started?”

  “No.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Tim. Tim Hale.”

  “Is he allergic to any kinds of medication?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is he diabetic?”

  “No.”

  “Does he do hard drugs?”

  “Pot. Cocaine—not much.” Cass grimaced as Tim’s spine spasmed and his whole body lifted off the table. He let out an unearthly yell, a rolling screech, yet it was not a scream of pain. It was more as if he were having an incredible orgasm with more blood spurting from his mouth. It projected across the room and spattered Cass. She wiped it off in horror.

  The situation was deteriorating. The team of doctors and nurses shouted back and forth in frantic med speak, but it was clear they thought they were losing him. His blood pressure was falling rapidly and his heart was skipping stones on the pool of his own blood. His horrible thrashing began to slow, and for a moment he seemed to stop breathing. Cass instinctively pushed forward, she had to be by his side if he was going to die. A doctor snapped at her but she ignored him and somehow found Tim’s hand. To her immense surprise he opened his eyes and stared at her. His eyes—they were blue no more, but dark gray, a cloud over an angry sea. Yet he smiled when he saw her, a lopsided kind of grin.

  “Cass,” he gasped. “She fills the emptiness.”

  Then he closed his eyes. Just stopped breathing.

  “Tim?” she whispered. “Tim?”

  She was pushed aside, they tried to revive him but could not. Cass leaned against a cold wall in the corner and felt like a bit part on a TV hospital drama. She couldn’t comprehend that this was reality, that the blood on her shirt wouldn’t just evaporate. But Tim continued to lie peacefully, not minding when they shocked his chest with high voltage. They stuck two more long needles into his ribs but it made no difference. Slowly they began to step away from his body, as if they might catch something from him, death perhaps, the inevitable disease. A green-masked doctor noticed Cass frozen in the corner and went over to her. She could see his dark eyes, little else.

  “We did everything we could,” he said gently.

  She nodded weakly. “Do you know what was wrong with him?”

  “No. We need to perform an autopsy. We need permission from the family.”

  An autopsy? They were going to cut Tim open and pull out his guts and examine them under a microscope? The images were too gross for her to maintain her composure. Yet she did somehow and managed to nod again.

  “I’ll call his mother, tell her to come,” she said.

  The doctor patted her on the shoulder. “It’s never easy, situations like this.”

  “Yeah. This sure ain’t easy.”

  The emergency room cleared. They didn’t seem to mind that she stayed with Tim. Although still splashed with blood, he looked at peace, his messy blond hair hanging over his tanned face. She took his hand once more and stroked it.

  “Bad day, Tim,” she whispered. “Bad day for all of us.”

  She buried her face in his hand and wept.

  Then she heard a beep from one of the monitors. Her head snapped up. His heart was beating. “Hey!” she screamed. “He’s alive! Get in here!” The medical team poured back in. They worked on Tim another twenty minutes. Then the doctor who had pronounced him dead came back up to her shaking his head.

  “Sometimes you get lucky,” he said.

  Cass burst into a smile. “Thank God.”

  None understood that luck had just departed the planet. That God had closed his eyes on mankind.

  6

  Sio sat in her laboratory and contemplated the syringe in her hand. The fluid inside was clear to the naked eye; no one could ever have imagined t
hat it was filled with billions of tiny cell-size computer chips. To Sio’s right, in a glass cage, was one remaining mouse, Harve—she had not killed and dissected him, perhaps because he had a cute way of staring at her, perhaps because he was using some kind of psychic power to bend her will. Definitely, Harve had been the smartest of the mice; he had not only been able to solve every maze she constructed, he had designed a few of his own. Maybe he had understood that the only way to survive her wrath was to be better than the rest. Yet as he watched her, it was almost as if he were challenging her to inject herself with the exotic solution. It was as if he understood her anger and her fear, that they were somehow partners in a crime that might spin wildly out of control if pushed too far.

  Yet Sio felt justified in taking the risk. She had been pushed too far, she could not get the image of Tet’s kissing that woman out of her mind. But he didn’t know that she was upset with him. The night of her birthday, she had called and told him she was sick. Seven days had passed since then and they talked twice more on the phone. She had acted loving and he had sworn to her he loved her. All she could think about was how nice it would be to watch him die slowly.

  But to do such a thing, she needed an edge. Sio took up the syringe and injected herself. The liquid burned as it went in and she fainted.

  When she awoke, on the floor, she felt good. Better than she had ever felt. It was as if she had just returned from a lengthy vacation. Her head was clear and she felt stronger physically as well. Sitting up in her chair, she suspected her brain was already working at a higher level. The first thought that came to her was a better way to make her molecular microchips. She realized in a flash that she had overlooked a simple way to improve the chip’s efficiency tenfold. Hardly taking stock of the changes in her, she started to work.

  Two days later Sio reinjected herself, first with a solution that destroyed the existing chips, then with a syringe of new chips. These didn’t knock her out. Indeed, almost immediately she felt a tremendous surge of power sweep through her. She actually felt as if she were much larger than her body, as big as the building in fact. And everything in her aura, she felt she could control. She wasn’t so much surprised as pleased when she focused her mind on a pen and was able to move it through the air to the far side of the room. She understood that the chips had boosted her brain power so much that every latent human ability was now at her disposal.

  She could also read minds. The thoughts of the other people in the building flickered in and out of her consciousness like glimpses of torn and typed paper. Their ideas were fragmented, she got the sense of what they felt, not the specifics. She was disgusted to see that some people she considered friends really thought so little of her. Even the elderly building janitor, who always gave her a kind word, was having a fantasy of having sex with her that very minute. In her mind she snapped at him to stop and watched how he staggered as he swept the floor. She had almost killed him, how fascinating.

  Harve, the mouse, stared up at her. If a mouse could smile, he would have been grinning. She understood now that he was thinking he was the most powerful mouse in the whole world. She would take it a step further—she felt like the most powerful creature in the universe. It was interesting, she thought, how Harve didn’t appear to be aging. She wondered if she was immortal, a delicious idea.

  Sio decided to pay Tet a visit.

  When he answered his door, she knew immediately that he was not alone. Very clearly she could see the image of his student lying naked in his bed. He had told her to not make a sound while he answered the door, to hide in the closet if she had to. Yet from his physical appearance he was calm; he even invited her into his apartment and asked her if she’d like a drink. But he didn’t kiss her hello as he usually did—he had forgotten to do that. Not that she wanted his affection, she didn’t want to smell the other woman on his breath.

  When they were seated and having drinks he asked how she was.

  She smiled. “Fine. But I’ve missed you.”

  He also smiled. “I had such a big night planned for your birthday.”

  “I can believe that,” Sio said.

  While they chatted Sio’s mind went out to the young woman in the next room, who had refused to hide in the closet. She hadn’t even bothered to dress, she was a rebellious sort. Sio appreciated that quality, although it didn’t give her enough reason to show the woman mercy. Sio felt as if her mind were a thick hand of magnetism. Her psychic fingers moved as she willed, and she focused in on the young woman’s throat. Slowly but firmly, she began to squeeze, to shut the trachea. The reaction was immediate, the woman began to choke.

  Tet came over and sat beside Sio on the couch. “You’ve caught me at a bad time, honey,” he said sincerely. “I have a paper I must finish tonight. I was in the middle of it when you knocked.”

  Sio was pleasant. “Let me leave you to finish it.” She sipped her drink and stood. “I know you’re a very busy man.”

  He showed her to the door. He cracked it slightly. “May I call you tonight?”

  “Please do, I love to hear your voice in the middle of the night.”

  He leaned over to kiss her. “You are so dear.”

  She sighed with pleasure. “You are precious.”

  A naked young woman stumbled out of the bedroom and collapsed gagging in the center of the floor. Tet stared at her in horror and Sio was barely able to suppress a smirk. She did not have to concentrate too hard to keep the woman’s trachea closed, she realized that she could probably have killed ten people simultaneously. The young woman had long red hair and a gorgeous body, but she was losing her lovely color as she thrashed on Tet’s carpet.

  “Glor!” Tet cried as he knelt by her side. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Glor did not answer; she could not. She kept gesturing to her throat, and Tet could see that she was choking, but there was nothing he could do to open her windpipe. As oxygen deprivation began to slow her movements and close her pretty eyes, he bent over and gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But he was blowing into a blocked tube, and after a few minutes she lay dead and blue. Sio was surprised when he burst into tears—he must have really cared for the woman.

  “A friend of yours?” Sio asked pleasantly.

  His face was ashen. He stared at her as if she were a stranger.

  “She was a student of mine,” he mumbled.

  Sio closed the apartment door and took a step toward him.

  “Why is she naked?” she asked.

  He was in shock. He held Glor’s head in his lap. “What?” he asked.

  “Why do you have a naked woman in your apartment?” Sio repeated.

  He shook his head. “She was resting here, it is not as it appears.”

  Sio was amused. “It appears much worse, now that she is dead.” She paused and spoke as if to herself. “What am I going to do with the bodies?”

  “Sio,” he said desperately. “This poor girl is dead. We have to call the authorities.”

  Sio came closer, her expression still cheerful.

  “I don’t think so, Tet. I believe the authorities should discover your bodies here. But that might not be a for a few days, they might be smelling bad by then.” She paused. “I think it will be the stink that finally alerts them to what went on here. But I doubt they will ever figure out how you died, or Glor.”

  Tet’s face darkened. Placing Glor’s head gently on the floor, he slowly stood and pointed to the door. “I want you to leave now,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked sweetly. “Do you want to be alone with your lover? She can’t do much for you now, I’m afraid.”

  Tet grabbed her by the arm and ushered her toward the door.

  “You are to get out!” he shouted.

  She shook him off, hard. Her strength startled him and he took a step back. Her eyes narrowed on his angry face and fear sprung across his brow as he no doubt felt a strange sensation deep inside his skull.

  “I do not like to be pushed,” she said c
oldly. “I do not like to be lied to.”

  His face flushed. He backed into the wall. He didn’t understand what was happening, but it scared him. She mentally tightened her grip on his brain, it felt like a damp sponge beneath her unseen fingers.

  “What are you doing?” he gasped.

  “I’m not going to do anything, you are going to do it. I am not going to get my hands dirty. Now I want you to go into the kitchen and get your biggest and sharpest knife and return here with it.”

  He trembled. “Sio?”

  “Do it!” she snapped.

  He went into the kitchen and got the knife.

  He wept as he returned. “Please don’t do this. What are you doing?”

  She stood back. “Sit beside Glor, by her head.”

  He had to obey—he was an uncoordinated puppet on metal strings. He could not stop crying. But he could not keep the knife down either, without even speaking she was forcing him to bring the blade close to the dead girl’s neck.

  “Sio!” he moaned.

  “Sever her head,” she ordered.

  His arm convulsed to disobey. “No!”

  “Lower your voice! Cut off her head! And when you are done, cut off your own and let it drop to the floor Try to finish the task before you die. I want the authorities to find you both that way.” She turned toward the door as she burned her instructions deep inside his skull, a laser of domination that fused synapses into the pattern she desired. It was all so easy to do, now that she had the power. She continued, “I am going to leave now, I do not need to see this. But you are not to stop until this floor is soaked in blood.”

  He had begun to cut into Glor’s throat when he spoke.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” he asked pitifully. She smiled as she paused at the entrance.

  “Do not feel so bad, my love,” she said gently. “I am probably going to do it many more times before I am through. And next time, I think I will watch. I think I will like that.”