displayed the same image.
His daughter’s face.
Her face, marked with heavy black lines.
But it wasn’t possible — none of it was possible!
Yet even as he tried to reject the reality of the scene, he found himself charging toward the glassed-in enclosure and pounding on it with both fists. “Alison!” he howled.
He moved around to the outer door of the airlock and wrenched at its handle, but it was locked. Swearing, and bellowing his daughter’s name again, he scanned the area for something to smash the glass with. On one of the stainless steel counters there was a metal stand holding some kind of beaker. Michael seized the stand, knocking the beaker to the floor, and ignored the shards of the shattered object as he swung the stand at the glass.
Nothing — not even a chip, let alone a crack.
THE SCALPEL IN CONRAD DUNN’S RIGHT HAND STOPPED in midair, barely a millimeter above the cut line he’d so carefully drawn on Alison’s face. The noise that had penetrated the strains of Vivaldi filling the operating room had come from behind him, and now he turned and looked for its source.
The ex-husband.
How had he gotten in here?
Not that it mattered. The surgery had already begun, and there was no point in stopping now. Even if the ex-husband were to call someone, he would be far enough along by the time they arrived that no one would dare stop him.
If they did, they would not only destroy Alison Shaw’s beauty, but might easily kill her as well. And when he was finished, and everyone saw what he had accomplished — saw that he had once again created perfection — that would be the end of it.
Taking a deep breath to recover the total concentration he needed to finish the surgery, Conrad turned back to his patient.
He gazed at the monitors for several long seconds, rehearsing each careful incision in his mind.
Using the remote control to turn the Vivaldi up enough to cover any further commotion from outside, he used the fingers of his left hand to pull the skin taut around Alison’s upper lip.
Once again he readied the scalpel.
MICHAEL SEARCHED for something else, and spotted a chair almost hidden by a large bundle wrapped in a plastic sheet. In two steps he crossed to the chair and yanked it off the floor. The bundle tipped over and the plastic sheet fell away, and he was staring into Risa’s face, ashen in the pallor of death, her empty eyes staring up at him.
It froze him for a moment, and he was seized again by the certainty that none of this could be real, that it was all a terrible dream from which he would awaken and find himself home in bed, with Scott sleeping peacefully next to him.
He took an involuntary step back, his heel catching in the plastic sheet and pulling it all the way off Risa’s body, and now he saw her ruined torso, slashed open from just above the pubis all the way up to her chest.
Her ribs had been cut open, and what had once been her internal organs lay in a bloody heap on her thighs. Michael’s gorge rose and a wave of towering fury came over him. Turning away from Risa’s body, he crashed the chair against the wall of the operating room, but instead of the glass shattering, the chair’s frame broke.
The figure on the other side of the glass turned, and Michael found himself staring into Conrad Dunn’s darkly hooded eyes. The surgeon held up the scalpel in his right hand as if it was explanation enough, then shifted back to his unconscious patient.
Michael dropped the broken chair, already searching for something else to use against the barrier between him and his daughter.
The computer stand! It was big, looked heavy, and had enough sharp angles on it that—
He swept the computer off the stand and sent it crashing to the floor.
Every monitor on every wall in both the laboratory and the operating room instantly went dark.
Now Conrad Dunn whirled around to glower furiously at him, his eyes dark and menacing above the white surgical mask.
“I’m coming for you, you bastard,” Michael whispered, and seizing the heavy computer stand in both hands, lifted it up. Using every bit of strength he could muster, he swung the stand against the glass wall. A searing pain shot up Michael’s arms as the shock of the blow knocked the stand out of his hands and sent it crashing into the racks of test tubes on the countertop behind him. Though Michael was knocked almost to his knees, the heavy tempered glass held.
Taking a deep breath, and wiping the sweat from his palms, he pulled the stand from the countertop, gripped it even tighter than he had a moment ago, and swung it again.
The stand hit the glass and bounced back, but this time Michael let it go and ducked out of the way.
A small crack appeared in the lower right-hand corner of the glass panel.
Michael took a deep breath, heaved the computer stand up for a third time, and swung it once more into the glass.
CONRAD DUNN STARED at the crack in the glass panel with unbelieving eyes. The glass was supposed to be unbreakable — bulletproof!
And now Alison’s father had broken it.
Broken it!
Suddenly everything he’d been working on for so long — every careful plan he’d laid, every perfect feature he’d collected,
Everything—
All the work he had done could be ruined right here, right now.
But that wouldn’t happen — he wouldn’t let it happen.
Not now, not in the final moments, not when he was on the verge of creating perfection.
So he would deal with it.
He would deal with — what was his name? Michael! — yes, he would deal with Michael Shaw just as he had dealt with Daniel DeLorian.
The way he had dealt with his wife.
Nothing — nobody — would stand in his way. Not now, not when he was so close.
Not when everything could be so easily ruined.
Conrad Dunn took a fresh grip on the scalpel just as the computer stand crashed through the wall, showering shattered glass everywhere.
Over him.
Over his instrument tray.
And — worst of all — over his patient’s unfinished face.
MICHAEL LEAPED into the operating room, but his pant leg caught on a thick shard of glass still jammed in the window frame. He tripped, his pant leg tore loose, and he skidded over the thousands of pieces the single pane of glass had exploded into.
Trying desperately to hold his balance, he slammed into the operating table, sending it crashing against a glass-sided tank filled with the same greenish substance he’d seen in the lab. The tank shattered and the green stuff spilled out onto the floor.
But the green slime wasn’t all the tank had contained.
Against his own will, Michael’s eyes closed against the gruesome sight of the fragments of human flesh that were now mixed in with the broken glass on the floor.
• • •
A ROAR OF PURE FURY FORMED in Conrad Dunn’s throat as he watched years of work spew across the floor. But even before he gave vent to his rage, he’d already repressed it.
Not now!
