"Yes."

"Do you have a heart condition of any sort?"

She looked at me, puzzled.

"No .. . ?"

"Do you have any sort of condition that might endanger your life should you suffer a form of body trauma?"

"No."

I exhaled, nodded my head, made sure my gloves were still firmly covering my hands, then took her gun from her hands and shot her in the shoulder.

She fell off the chair with a shriek.

I stood over her.

"Listen to me, Joyce, listen very carefully. You came here to confront Buchanan about what he had done. You were out of your head with anger--that's why you knocked out the security guard downstairs. You came up here and the two of you argued."

I picked up her handbag and slammed it against the side of Brother Tick-Tock's head.

"He came at you and you hit him in the head with your purse." I jumped back over to her and punched her in the nose.

"He hit you in the face and you went down right where you are--don't move. Still with me?"

".. . yes .. ." she said through a haze of pain.

"Good." I went behind the desk and began opening the drawers, hoping to find a concealed weapon of some sort. I did, second drawer on the left, in a metal box that was unlocked. I removed the pistol and shoved it through my belt under my coat, then pressed Joyce's gun into Tick-Tock's hand.

"He went for his gun and shot you in the shoulder," I hauled Ticklock's limp form from his chair, Joyce's gun still in his hand, and threw him on the floor beside her.

"He came around after you went down and you kicked him in the b.a.l.l.s."

I kicked Tick-Took in the b.a.l.l.s.

"He went down, and the two of you struggled with the gun." I placed her hands on the pistol as well.

"You shot him twice, once in the chest, and then--" I put the gun up to Tick-Tock's face and pulled the trigger. Blood spattered Joyce's face and clothes and my gloves. I dropped their hands and the gun, then quickly removed my gloves and shoved them in my pockets.

"You killed him in self-defense, Joyce. I came in here just in time to see the end of it, understand?"

".. . yes .. ."

"Can you remember all that?"

"Yes." She was recovering from the pain somewhat.

This was one tough lady.

"I'll get rid of the bodies in your cellar later, don't worry about that, I hate to admit it, but I've got friends who have experience in that area." I scooped up her purse and removed all the credit chips, shoving them into my pockets. There was still enough junk inside--medicine bottles, makeup, checkbook, etcetera--to give it some good weight.

"You're going to keep this money, Joyce, because you'll need it."

I heard the elevator bell.

She looked up at me, then at Brother Tick-Tock's body.

"Why did you do this?"

"Because you're right, he didn't deserve to live .. .

and every little boy deserves to see whether or not John Wayne rescues Natalie Wood."

She smiled at me, and as Sherwood and his men came running from the elevator, I went into the small room to untie the little boy whose childhood would not be stolen from him for the sake of false G.o.ds and their followers.

I held the child in my arms, and in the darkness I wept, thinking, / can feel you breathe like the ocean, your life burning bright, all the unlived moments before you; may that fire be your friend and the sea rock you gently.

I don't do as much fieldwork these days; that I leave to Sherwood, who retired from the force a few years ago and came to work with us. Mostly I trace cybertrails, gather info, make calls. Every once in a while I'll go on an a.s.signment with Sherwood, but my conscience always manages to get in the way.

When at last it all becomes personal, you're no good in the field.

And I am a murderer whose greatest guilt is that he feels no remorse for his crime.

Jimmy and his mother are doing fine. I stop by their home frequently, and I'm glad to report it's a happy home.

Happy enough.

Joyce now has the mantel filled with photos of her and Jimmy. It looks like a family has lived their whole life there.

Jimmy loves his VCR. We have now watched The Searchers twenty-six times. He never gets tired of it.

Come to think of it, neither do I. Amen to that, pilgrim.

by Alan Brennert Alan Brennert is a Nebula award-winning author who has also worked in the television and film industries. He was a contributing writer and producer of the The New Twilight Zone television series. His work has also appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and other magazines. He lives in California.

I'VE never seen his face; his real face. Sometimes he wears one of those malleable Fun Flesh masks, the kind kids wear on Halloween, its features molded into the likenesses of people I recognize vaguely if at all; Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Albert Fish. So long ago, such distant infamy. Sometimes he wears white robes and a squared-off hood, a ghostly evocation of someone he calls "Zodiac"--like all his heroes, a psychopath dead two centuries or more--and when I look through the ragged eye holes of the hood, I see clear, blue, intelligent eyes; eyes that even seem for a moment warm, and friendly. And that's when I'm most afraid. That I'll never leave this place alive.

Today my captor is a dapper man in what looks like a nineteenth-century business suit--dark wool pants, vest, jacket, a derby hat atop a mustached face, a black doctor's bag swinging from one hand. He stands in the open doorway of my brightly-lit cell; smiles at me, as I lie immobile on my cot.

"Good morning." Cheerful. Hail-fellow-well-met, I think they used to call it.

"Sleep well?"

Sleep? I sleep only when I can no longer stay awake, when my exhaustion is greater than the torments of my body. Sometimes only a few minutes; sometimes close to an hour; rarely longer, before the pain wakes me again. But sleep well? I offer up an obscenity to him, and he laughs what anyone else might take for a good-natured laugh.

"Can't say I blame you, old man," he says, approaching.

Even if the mag straps binding me here were to suddenly fail, I doubt I'd have the strength to attack him; he's seen to that. Above me the ceiling is a jigsaw of video images barely three molecules thick, dozens of angles and amplifications, all of the same depressing subject: my own wasting, emaciated body.

Here a view of my swollen, nearly useless feet; there a shot of sunken cheeks and shadowed eyes. How long have I been here, like this? Four weeks? Five? There's no telling. No windows, no sunlight, no way to measure the pa.s.sage of days except in escalating degrees of pain.

He is at my side now; he smells like apples, isn't that strange? Above us I can see the crown of his hat reflected in one of the video fragments.

"Breakfast?"

He opens his little black bag, takes out a syringe, presses it against my arm; with a hiss a nutrient solution penetrates my skin, finds its way into my bloodstream.

Electrolytes, amino acids, saline .. . just enough to keep me alive and conscious, in delicate equilibrium between life and death.. ..

Another smile.

"Do you know who I am today?"

I don't know. I don't care. I close my eyes as he tells me about somebody named H. H. Holmes, a nineteenth-century physician whose Victorian home in Chicago was a house of horrors--many of his victims 266 Alan Bremen were lodgers in Holmes' mansion, dying in sealed rooms pumped full of poison gas, bodies dumped like so much laundry down long metal chutes and laid open like crayfish on dissecting slabs in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

"Many of them were tourists," he says, reaching again into his medical bag.

"This was 1893; Chicago was hosting the World Columbian Exposition what was once known as a "World's Fair." Interesting to think of these hapless travelers as they rode the world's first Ferris Wheel, or watched a demonstration of Electricity, or marveled at the sparkling collection of buildings known as the "White City' marveling at the future! And when they return to their rented rooms, why, the future is waiting for them there, too, though not one that the Utopian architects of the Fair could possibly have antic.i.p.ated.. .."

He changes the fluid in his syringe with a casual dexterity that makes me wonder if he, like Holmes, is a doctor. Another jolt of injection; this time it is almost certainly not nutrients but the opposite, genetically engineered organisms designed to slowly eat away at specifically targeted organs pancreas, liver, spleen. Or nannites that even now cl.u.s.ter inside the veins of my heart, deconstructing them slowly, stripping away cell by cell the inner layer, the connective tissue, the smooth muscle .. . even as other nannites work to keep my mind clear and unclouded, alert and aware of all that's happening to me. He explained as much to me early on, a bright darkness in his eyes as he detailed the microscopic tortures he's devised.

The cloud of pain which envelops me seems suddenly to grow sharper; stronger. As much as I don't want to, I cry out. My captor smiles an anaconda smile; starts to turn away.

"Kill me," I say, and he stops, looks back, eyes wide and innocent.