Killer watts, p.1
Killer Watts, page 1
Killer Watts
The Destroyer #118
James Mullaney
Created by
Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir
For John, Erin, Liam, Sean and Molly.
And for the Glorious House of Sinanju.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgement
Errata
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Epilogue
Read More
Identity Crisis
About the Authors
Also by Warren Murphy
The Destroyer Series (#1-25)
The Destroyer Series (#26-50)
The Destroyer Series (#51-75)
The Destroyer Series (#76-100)
The Destroyer Series (#100-120)
The Destroyer Series (#150-174)
The Trace Series
Copyright
Special thanks
and acknowledgment to
James Mullaney
for his contribution
to this work
Errata
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Chapter One
He couldn’t stand up without hitting his head. He couldn’t lie down—at least not to stretch out. The way a real human being stretches out to sleep.
Awake, he would sit. Asleep, he would curl in the fetal position on the rubberized floor of the box.
He had been this way for several weeks, isolated in his madness since the experiments had ended in failure.
They kept him like an animal.
An animal. That was what they’d called him when they found out what he’d done. Animal. He had heard that countless times. It was a control mechanism, he knew. And that was not all they had said.
“You’re going to die, boy,” the MPs who arrested him had promised Private Elizu Roote. Hardly a dispassionate statement from a couple of trained professionals. But Private Roote couldn’t blame them. They’d seen the body.
She was a girl from town he had picked up in a bar. Barflies were always the best. They never asked many questions and they were hardly ever missed.
This one had allowed him to lead her out behind a U-shaped cinder-block garbage area in the empty parking lot of an abandoned restaurant. It was just on the civilian side of the chain-link fence near the officers’ quarters. That had been his first mistake: doing it too close to the base.
The MPs had spotted him as they toured the perimeter of Fort Joy Army Base, near the border of New Mexico and Texas. They caught his frightened-rabbit eyes in the small yellow searchlight mounted on the side of their drab military jeep. Captured in the blaze of lurid, uncompromising light, Elizu did the only thing he could. He bolted.
Mistake number two.
As he fled, the MPs spotted his bloody clothes, then traced his path back to the body.
At the gruesome discovery, alarms had gone off immediately.
They caught him, of course. After a helicopter search of nearby Alamogordo.
He’d had too much time to work on this one, which was a mark against him. If he hadn’t had so much time, maybe he could have claimed that she was one of those women who liked to be choked when aroused. That it was just some rough sex that had gotten a little out of hand.
But try as he might, Roote knew he could never make this a sex-related case. No one, but no one, liked to have their head cut off while doing it.
It wasn’t long after his capture before the authorities began linking him to the other bodies. One in Maine. Three in Oregon. They even suspected him of a few others around his home state of West Virginia, but they could never be sure of those. He didn’t decapitate his victims back then.
But even without those confirmed murders, there was enough evidence to convict him of at least one capital offense. Private Elizu Roote was headed for a military discharge, a civilian trial and a likely death sentence. At least that’s where he thought he was heading.
But at the point when execution seemed inevitable, Private Elizu Roote had found a savior. And it wasn’t any of that jailhouse-religion crap. His personal savior appeared before him in an olive-green army uniform with colored bars over his breast pocket and a couple of shining stars on his shoulders.
He was a general, about sixty years old. He carried a gleaming mahogany riding crop with a leather strap at one end. The stick was pressed so far up in his armpit he looked like the victim of an Indian attack in an old western. He weighed three hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce and stood just over six-feet, six-inches tall. His head was as crimson as a sunburn as he stood framed in the cell doorway.
With tiny black eyes that looked to have been chiseled from coal, the general regarded Private Roote. Roote, sprawled on the bare metal bed of the military prison, never moved. The general’s eyes darted back to the two men who had trailed after him into the room.
“Dismissed!” he boomed in a gravelly voice.
The soldiers who had been standing guard at the door knew enough not to hesitate. Though it was against their better judgment, they left the general alone with the prisoner.
Once the guards were gone, the general closed the steel cell door gently behind him. He turned back to Roote, a smile cracking his bright red face.
“You’re in a bit of trouble, eh, son?” the general asked. He toyed with the leather strap on his riding crop.
From his bunk, Roote shrugged. “Guess so.” Eyes narrowed below the general’s close-cut white hair, heavy red lids squeezing a pair of shiny black olives.
“What was that, soldier?”
Roote was at a loss. After the night he had just been through, the last thing on his mind was military protocol. He shrugged his round shoulders again in helpless confusion.
The general seemed to accept Roote’s befuddlement for a moment. He stepped farther into the cell, massive chin jutting forward pensively. When he was close enough to Roote he drew his riding crop from beneath his arm with the speed of a striking serpent. It was up, around and down in a shiny blur, striking the private in the meaty part of his thighs. The blow brought the younger man to his feet.
The general grabbed Roote by the front of his pale green T-shirt. “As long as you are in this man’s army, you will address a superior officer as ‘sir,’ is that clear, soldier?”
Roote nodded, the light of understanding suddenly sparking in his sleep-deprived brown eyes. “Yes, sir!” he shouted. His legs smarted where they’d been struck. At attention now, he dared not rub them.
“See this hand, soldier?” the general queried. He held the side of his hand—fingers extended crisply—against his huge bobbing Adam’s apple.
“Yes, sir!”
“This hand is shit and you’re this deep in it.”
Roote didn’t know what else to say. “Yes, sir!”
The general lowered his hand to his chest. “What would you do to be only this deep, soldier?” he asked slyly. The hand strayed down to his broad paunch. “Or this deep?”
Roote blinked. He wasn’t certain what to say, but he dared not remain silent. “Sir?” he asked, confused.
The general sighed impatiently. “I’m offering you a choice, son,” he said. “A choice you probably don’t deserve, from what I’ve heard about your extracurricular activities. How’d you like me to reach over and yank you right out of that neckdeep pile of shit, soldier?”
Roote hesitated only a second. The general could be pulling his leg, but what did he have to lose?
“Yes, sir!” The words echoed up the dank cinder-block hallway of the dingy military prison. General Delbert Xavier Chesterfield smiled broadly.
“I had an inkling you might say that,” he said proudly.
. . .
I had an inkling you might say that.
General Chesterfield’s voice echoed in the dark recesses of Roote’s mind, mingling with the other voices.
He’d been so damned smug. He knew Private Roote had no other choice. It was either join or hang.
There were times during the ensuing months when Roote wished he had allowed the authorities to prosecute him. The pain was sometimes more intense than he could bear. And then, when the surgeries were all over and the scientists had created their miracle, Roote had stepped over the line once more.
She was just a nurse. No big deal. They were a dime a dozen. And it wasn’t like his keepers couldn’t cover up his crime as they’d done with the others. But Roote had been stupid. He realized too late that he was merely the prototype, and the scientists could repeat the procedure with others. A rational man might have known that he had become expendable. For Roote, however, that revelation came as a surprise.
After the nurse’s charred body had been found, his food was drugged. When he awoke, Roote was trapped in the box.
And here he sat. For weeks on end. No company save the endless, deafening chorus of voices inside his head.
They knew now what they had done.
Roote picked at the corner of the box, where he’d found a weak spot in the caulking that sealed the wall to the floor.
They had created a monster.
The tattered material came loose in chunks.
A monster.
Fingers worked independently of conscious thought as Roote picked at the thin line of flexible caulking. Pick, pick, pick. He rocked back and forth on his naked haunches.
Him. Elizu Roote. A monster.
The caulking came away with ease.
They had confined him here with his demons. Not even granting a merciful death to end his torment.
A yard-long section of caulking pulled up between his fingertips. Roote spun around on the cool rubber floor of the cage. In the darkness he now faced the damaged section of floor. Bracing his knuckles against the rubber matting, he brought the bare soles of his feet down sharply.
Thump!
Muted. It wouldn’t even register to their ears.
Thump!
A monster in a cage.
Again! Thump!
He leaned forward, feeling with his fingertips. Dry. Leaned back again, bracing against the cold far wall. Again.
Thump!
He felt once more. Groping fingertips in the darkness. Did that do it?
Yes. Yes! He could feel it now. He brought his hand up to his face, touching beneath his nose.
Definitely. It was on his fingertips. Water.
In the pitch-black center of his private rubber cage, Elizu Roote smiled, The chorus of voices screamed with evil joy, all focused on a single, silent thought.
Monsters sometimes escaped.
When he brought his feet down for the last time, a surge of pressurized water flooded the small cage.
. . .
The sensors were connected to the feeding and communications tubes at the top of the submerged chamber that housed Elizu Roote. The green light had been lit for so long that Corporal Elber didn’t notice right away that it had gone to red. Bored, he had been staring at the blinking lights on a phone on the other side of the monitoring bank when he gazed back at his own station.
The solitary red light flashed like a warning beacon.
The color instantly drained from the Army corporal’s face. Grabbing, fumbling, he dragged the nearby long-stemmed microphone to his mouth. His shouts echoed down the sealed hallways of the Special Projects Unit.
“We’ve got a red light on the board! Repeat! Red light on the board!”
Even as he screamed the words, his chair was toppling over backward. While he ran to the unmarked steel door near his station, he frantically yanked his semiautomatic pistol free from his hip holster. Before he’d even punched in the proper code, civilian men in white coats were swarming in behind him.
Questions were shouted and ignored as Elber’s shaking hands entered the final digits into the touch pad. The red light above the door turned green, and the men piled into the inner room, careful to stay behind Elber and his pistol.
The dimly lit inner room was as big as a gymnasium. A huge water-filled tank—large enough for a school of dolphins—rested in a metal-and-concrete base in the center of the floor. Suspended in the tank was the black rubberized box connected umbilically to the surface via a few simple tubes that were lashed together with waterproof tape. Some of the lines from these tubes ran to computerized stations at the periphery of the room.
They hadn’t been monitoring in earnest for quite some time. They saw now that they probably should have been.
The seam at the bottom of the box had been broken open.
The pale, naked body of Elizu Roote bobbed at the surface of the tank. From the angle of the men in the room, he was looking down at them. He made not a move as they cautiously approached the tank, bunched up behind the corporal and his gun.
Roote’s pinkish eyes were open, staring at nothing. The mouth was an empty black cavern. No bubbles escaped from between the pale, slack lips.
“Is he dead?” asked one of the five civilian scientists.
“He looks it,” offered another in a whisper.
“Could I have some quiet, sir?” asked Corporal Elber of the last man who had spoken.
The corporal’s breathing came with difficulty. His heart pounded as he crossed over to the side of the tank. A metal ladder scaled the high plastic wall. Gun in hand, Elber began climbing. Below him, the nervous scientists began whispering among themselves once more.
“We should have drugged the water,” said one. He bit the already chewed skin around the remnants of his thumbnail.
“I suggested that,” said a voice from the rear of the crowd. He was ignored.
“They said he wasn’t supposed to get out,” challenged yet another. He was referring to the Army Corps of Engineers, who had constructed the tank.
“They didn’t even know what we were putting in there.”
At this they fell silent.
Corporal Elber was at the top of the ladder by now. High above the floor, he stepped over the upper lip of the tank, placing a boot on the plastic platform connected to the interior wall. One hand trained his semiautomatic pistol squarely between Roote’s shoulder blades. The fingertips of the corporal’s free hand snaked slowly out to the floating body, brushing the ghostly white back.
The skin was cold and clammy. Like touching a corpse.
“He’s dead!” Elber called down to the scientists. Exhaling his anxiety, the corporal holstered his gun.
Reaching, somewhat off balance, he grabbed Roote by the right bicep and tugged the limp body toward the platform.
The relief below was palpable. Two of the scientists scurried up the ladder. They joined Corporal Elber on the platform just as he was hauling Roote up from the water. He dumped the lifeless body onto its back.
“Are you going to try to revive him?” Elber asked.
The two scientists who had climbed the tank looked at one another. Their hesitation spoke volumes.
Elber paused, as well. Ordinarily he would never have let someone slip away like this without at least attempting mouth-to-mouth, but Elizu Roote was different. Elber had seen with his own two eyes the horrors the private was capable of.
After an awkward moment punctuated only by the lapping water at the edge of the big tank, one of the scientists cleared his throat. “We, um. Ahem. We should think about an autopsy.”
“Mechanical failure, you think?” asked the other, as if they were discussing a defective computer sound card and not a human being.
“Could be,” said the first man seriously. “I’ll have to let the general know. We’ll autopsy as soon as we call in the rest of the team.”
“Don’t I get a say?”
The three men on the platform froze. The voice had come from below them. As one, they looked down.
Elizu Roote’s eyes were open, alert. Smiling.
Corporal Elber was first to react. Twisting, he grabbed desperately for his gun. Another hand was already on his holster. He felt the metal pads at the fingertips.
Elber struggled, but he was fighting the strength of a madman. The hand didn’t budge.
Roote sat up. “You look shocked,” he said, grinning.
As he spoke, Roote swung his other hand around.
More metal pads. Elber saw them recessed into the puckered white flesh at Roote’s fingertips. They took the place of fingerprints.
