Death Dream (63 page)

It was like being bound and blindfolded. Dan could not move his arms or see anything but blank darkness. He stood there waiting like a prisoner facing a firing squad. Nothing to be afraid of, he told himself. He's just using his remote control box to set up the programming. Maybe he's taking his time just to make me sweat. He's enjoying this cat-and-mouse stuff. All those years and he never really saw me as anything but a fucking mouse for him to use.

Well, we'll see about that soon enough.

"Okay, Danno, we're off to the Moon."

The darkness lightened, but not much. Dan saw that he now wore a bulky space suit of gleaming white. He was standing on the utterly barren landscape of a lunar plain. The uneven ground was bare, crusted over like a poor blacktop job, pockmarked with little craters as if somebody had been poking fingers into the surface.

Rocks and pebbles everywhere, some considerable boulders a hundred yards or so away. Tired old smooth-worn mountains slumped over by the horizon. A gibbous blue and white Earth hung in the black sky, fat and glowing.

Is this the version with Chan's gravity subprogram? Dan took a few tentative steps. Yes! His booted feet seemed to float off the ground; each stride was like a broad jump.

"Hey, I'm over here," Jace called. "This-a-way."

Dan turned and saw a dim figure standing amid a jumble of house-sized boulders, half the distance to the horizon.

Jace was encased in a shiny black spacesuit with a bubble helmet that glinted slightly in the wan earthlight. It was night on the Moon, but in the airless lunar landscape the glow from the daylit side of Earth made an eerie twilight.

"A black spacesuit?" Dan said.

"That's 'cause I'm the baaadest badass this side of Copernicus."

Dan realized that although Jace was standing amid the boulders, he himself was out in the open with nothing bigger to protect him than a scattering of fist-sized rocks strewn along the ground.

"Your spacesuit is nice and white," Jace said. "I can see you fine."

Dan saw that Jace wore a metallic holster fastened to his left hip. Reaching down with his gloved right hand, Dan felt the butt of a pistol.

"So what do we do?" Dan asked. "Count to three and draw?"

"Sure. But let's do it like a countdown, NASA style."

Without waiting for a reply Jace swiftly counted, "Three, two, one, draw!"

Dan was still tugging at the pistol clipped to the flank of his spacesuit when a pencil-thin beam of ruby red lanced through the darkness and exploded at his feet. Startled, Dan jumped sideways, a long lunar jump, like floating in a dream. He had time to realize that the beam of laser light was an artifact Chan had put into the game; on the airless Moon any light beam would be invisible. Landing on the thick soles of his boots Dan staggered and struggled to stay upright.

"That's right, buddy! Dance!" Jace laughed wildly and fired again at Dan's feet.

Dan dodged backward. Jace's having fun, is he? Dan held his arm out straight and fired his laser pistol. A beam of electric blue light shot out and hit the boulder nearest Jace. His black-suited figure ducked behind the boulder.

"Come on, chicken!" Dan yelled, forgetting that they were speaking to each other over their suit radios. "Don't hide. Come on out and fight!"

"No more Mr. Nice Guy," Jace's voice replied, flat and hard.

Dan had no cover. He knew that if he tried to run in this low gravity he would end up floating like a balloon from one stride to another, an easy target. Got to get him out from behind those rocks. Got to get him before he gets me. Carefully he got down on his hands and knees and began crawling slowly, hoping that Chan hadn't made the simulation so realistic that he could tear his space suit and kill himself by blowing all the air out of the suit.

A glint of light off Jace's helmet warned him. Jace popped out from the other side of the boulder, fired, and ducked back again. The beam went wide.

"Is that the best you can do, chickenshit?" Dan called as he inched carefully toward the boulders.

"I'm just giving you a chance to say your prayers, pardner," Jace retorted.

"The hell you are." Dan fired at the spot where he had last seen Jace. Then he squirted a blast at the other side of the boulder. The rock exploded where the blue beam touched it, puffing out silent bursts of gas and rock chips in the airless vacuum.

Hoping that would keep Jace behind the boulder, Dan crabbed sideways, scuffing his boots and one gloved hand across the lunar soil, scraping up clouds of dust that blossomed and fell back to the ground with the slowness of a dream.

Got to get to those boulders so I can have some protection, Dan thought. But the closer I get to them, the closer I get to him.

He didn't see Jace this time until the red laser beam seared the left shoulder of his suit. There was no impact, but from inside the suit Dan heard the hiss of escaping air. How long before the suit decompresses? He had no idea.

"How's that, wiseass?" Jace taunted. "Got you, didn't I?"

He had ducked behind the boulder without looking to see how much damage he had done.

Dan stretched himself onto the ground face down. He lay sprawled on the cold lunar dust, the only sounds he could hear were his suit air hissing away and his own terrified breathing.

"Dan?" Jace called.

He said nothing. Let him think I'm dead. Or passed out, at least.

"Dan?" That was Sue's voice! "Dan, it's me! Susan! Are you all right? We're going to get you out of there!"

"No!" Jace yelled. "Anybody touches the controls and Dan gets fried! Understand? Don't touch a friggin' thing or you'll kill him!"

Stretched out on the ground, his chin plastered against the transparent plastic of his helmet, Dan looked up and saw Jace pop up from behind one of the boulders, waving his arms, screaming:

"Stay out of it! This is between him and me. Don't touch any of the controls. None of 'em, you understand?"

Jace was bobbing sideways as he yelled, floating in the low lunar gravity like a scarecrow being blown by puffs of wind.

Sighting carefully, Dan squeezed the trigger of his laser pistol. The blue beam struck Jace's suit squarely on the chest. Dan moved the beam upward to his helmet. It exploded in a silent shower of air and blood and brains.

And Dan was lying face-down on the floor of the simulation chamber in his slacks and sweat-soaked shirt, his data-gloved hands empty, the helmet on his head the one he had put on to get into the VR simulation. Dan felt weak, drained, but he found that he could move his hands.

He pushed himself to a sitting position and slid the visor of his helmet up, squinting to focus his eyes in the dim lighting of the VR chamber.

Jace was across the room, slumped against the wall in a sitting position, chin on his chest, VR helmet twisted slightly awry.

"You cheated," Jace accused, like a sullen little boy. "Susie distracted me."

"Give it up, Jace," Dan said.

"Like hell."

"Susan must have brought the police with her. It's all over now."

For several moments Jace said nothing. He just sat there limp as a scarecrow, staring at Dan, his narrow eyes red with something close to hatred.

"I'm gonna kill you, pal," Jace said at last. "This is the end of the game."

Dan saw that Jace held the remote control unit in his left hand. He tried to scramble to his feet and take off his VR helmet at the same time, but suddenly his legs would not work and his arms were once again too heavy to move. He flopped to the floor with a painful thump.

"Dan! Are you all right?" Susan called.

"Don't touch any of the controls," Jace warned again, scrambling to his feet. "They're slaved to my remote unit. If you try to change 'em it'll kill Dan."

"Dan?"

"I'm all right, Sue," he said, still lying on the floor helpless as a boated fish. "Do what Jace says, leave everything alone."

Dan watched, paralyzed, as Jace slowly walked over to him. Jace dropped to his knees beside Dan and carefully, almost tenderly, adjusted Dan's helmet.

"We coulda done really big stuff, Danno. I would've let you be my number one man, my friend. But it's not gonna work out like that, is it?"

"Jace, you need help—"

He snorted angrily. "I don't need
anything
! Or anybody. I've got the power of life and death in my hands, pal. Just like God."

He slid the visor of Dan's helmet down over his eyes.

"Time to get this over with," Jace said.

Dan lay there, immobilized, waiting for the inevitable.

He knew what Jace was setting up. The gunfight. He's going to kill me again. Only this time it's going to be for real.

Susan and Sergeant Wallace watched the two men capering in the simulations chamber. To Susan it looked like two little boys playing a game of imaginary cops and robbers.

Bang, bang, I got you! No, you missed!

But that was her husband in there and Jace had gone insane. Could he really kill Dan? Is there any way I can stop this game and get Dan out of there? Jace said if we touched the controls we would kill Dan. Is he bluffing or did he really kill Ralph and Kyle?

The outside door of the control booth squealed open and a young Chinese-American stepped in. He had obviously been rousted from his bed; eyes still puffy, stiff black hair uncombed, wrinkled white shirt tucked unevenly into his dark slacks. He looked terribly worried, almost afraid.

"I'm Gary Chan," he said in a whisper. "You must be Dan's wife. What's going on?"

"Can yew turn off this machinery?" Sergeant Wallace asked curtly.

"I don't see why not." Chan slid into one of the chairs and looked over the control board.

"Jace said if we touched the controls it would kill Dan," Susan blurted.

"That's Jace and Dan in there?"

"Yes!"

Chan pulled his hands back from the board as if it were a hot stove. "Who's been running the controls?"

"Nobody," said Sergeant Wallace.

"I think Jace has some sort of remote control in there with him," Susan said.

Chan blew out a breath and tugged at his ear. "And Jace said if we tried to shut down the sim it would kill Dan?"

"That's what he said."

He kept scratching at the ear. "Let me think about this. Jace must have rigged the controls in some way, but it'll take a while for me to figure out what he's done."

"Can you undo it?" Susan asked.

"I don't know. First I've got to see what he's done."

Sergeant Wallace said, "Well, get to it, son. From what we've overheard on this intercom, this man Jace is going to murder Mr. Santorini."

"For God's sake, Jace," Dan was saying, "Susan's in the control booth watching us. The police must be here by now. You can't get out of this. Give it up."

Jace giggled. "Let 'em watch. I'd like to see them try to prove I murdered anybody."

Dan was still sheathed in darkness, unable to move.

Except for Jace's voice in his helmet earphones he was totally cut off from the real world.

"I can just see 'em all in court, saying they saw me kill you," Jace said. "Some big deal eye-witnesses. Did you see a murder weapon? I'll ask 'em. No, the defendant did not have a weapon in his hands. What did the deceased die from? A massive cerebral hemorrhage. So how could the defendant have murdered the bum when he didn't have a weapon and the guy died of a friggin' stroke?"

"You know that's all a lie," said Dan, desperately stalling for time, hoping to find a way out of this endless cycle of killing.

"Prove it," Jace taunted. "Get the best friggin' lawyers in the world and they won't be able to prove it. Perry Mason couldn't pin a thing on me, pal! And besides, I've got the White House to protect me. Nobody's gonna lay a finger on me, Danno. I'll dance on your grave, buddy."

Before Dan could reply, the darkness began to shift. Grays and milky whites flowed softly before his eyes, slowly turning to colors, shifting, melding, blending into a wide billowing ocean. Dan felt a jolt of surprise; he had expected the western town, the OK Corral gunfight. But he found himself bobbing up and down in the middle of an endless sea, nothing but surging deep blue waves no matter where he looked. No land, no ships, no birds in the air, an empty horizon beneath a cloudless sky of purest azure with a brazen hot sun blazing down.

Terrified, Dan tread water, flailing his arms and legs. His feet could not feel the bottom. His clothes sagged and pulled at him. Salt water splashed his face, stinging his eyes, sloshing into his gasping mouth.

I can't swim! I don't even know if I can float for long.

"This is my version of Neptune's Kingdom, pal," said Jace's voice out of nowhere.

Something touched Dan's leg. He twitched in sudden fear and thrashed about clumsily, swallowing more salt water, coughing, sputtering, desperately struggling to keep his head above water.

"Down you go, pal."

A tentacle wrapped itself around Dan's leg and pulled him under. He wanted to scream. It wasn't an octopus but a gigantic squid, platter-sized round eyes staring. Dan tried to hold his breath, flailing and straining against the tentacle's strong grip, bubbles gurgling in his ears as the squid dragged him deeper and deeper.

Can't breathe! and then it let go. The squid simply disappeared. Dan felt as if his lungs were bursting.
Can't breathe
! The sunlit surface of the ocean was miles above.

Sharks! Sleek, voracious killing machines gliding swiftly toward him. Three, five, a dozen, each of them huge and deadly, slicing through the water with terrifying ease. He wanted to scream. He wanted to get up into the air where he could breathe. Thrashing arms and legs pitifully he tried to get away from the sharks. But they were circling, circling, drawing closer while the pain seared Dan's chest and the fear thundered in his ears so loudly he thought his heart would explode.

One of the sharks nudged him with its snout. He flailed out at it. Then he saw another rushing at him like a torpedo, its huge mouth opening wide, thousands of sharp white teeth like the gateway to hell rushing at him. Dan screamed as the shark bit him almost in two. Salt water filled his mouth, filled his lungs as the ocean reddened with his blood while the shark tugged and waggled back and forth, tearing off a chunk of meat, of Dan's body. Then the next shark hit.