The Blonde

pounds. But she could move. A little.

The Operator was standing over her. “You are there, aren’t you?”

Fuck you, Vanessa wanted to say, but she couldn’t make her mouth move the way it should. She felt drool run down the corner of her mouth. The thought made her gag. She coughed, and coughed again, and the sudden movement racked her with pain.

“Calm down, you’re doing too much. You need your rest.” The Operator looked over at the open door. “Hang on a second.” He disappeared from view. Were her wrists tied to the bed? She couldn’t feel any restraints, but she also couldn’t lift her arms. She heard the snick of a door closing shut. Then he reappeared. “We need a little privacy.”

“F-f-f-f-f- …” Vanessa spat. Clawed at the mattress.

“Shh, blondie. You know, you’re not much to look at right now, but I can’t help but be seriously impressed with you lately. This whole scorched-earth campaign of yours. Very, very bold. And clever. I didn’t realize the brilliance of your airport visits until a few days into the game. You’ve got everything you need. Always a restaurant open. Plenty of places to buy T-shirts. Crowded bathrooms. Sleep on the planes, find a willing stud, get a free hotel room for a night. I may have this wrong, but there are at least five men you did the horizontal mambo with in the past week or so. I have a list on my PDA. Hang on.”

The more she flexed her fingers, the more movement she had. Focus on that, she told herself. The left one. Get it going. Get your hand and wrist working first. Then the forearm. Then find something sharp.

“Yeah, here we go. Donn Moore. Investment banker, looks like. Always insisted on that extra n in his first name. What, Donny not good enough for you? Douche bag. Okay, who else? Jimmy Calcagno, lawyer. Allan Ward, another lawyer, although not as sleazy as Jimmy, who apparently had some real scumball clients. Did you know that? A simple Nexis search turned that up. Meanwhile, Allan seemed more like the tweedy type. Corporate law. I bet he was real sick. It’s always the quiet ones. Anyway, who else, who else? … Rob Ormsby. Oh, a screenwriter. Nice. And finally, Simon Smith, who owned a boutique Web-design company. How delightful.”

Vanessa didn’t want to hear the names. She didn’t want to think about the men attached to those names. She wanted to move the fingers of her left hand, over and over again.

“But I don’t think you’re a slut, blondie. I knew what you were doing. You wanted to attract attention, didn’t you?”

“Y-y-yessss,” she said. Her own voice. It was coming back.

“Yessssssss you did, didn’t you?” the Operator mocked. “Aww, who’s a cute little man-killer? That’s right. My wittle Wanessa Essa.”

“F-f-f-f-f … uck …”

“You did quite enough of that, didn’t you?”

The Operator reached out with his coat sleeve and wiped the drool from her lower lip. She pursed her lips. Then he grabbed her face and leaned in.

“Is that how you infected them? Fucking them? Sucking their cocks? A kiss would have done it, you know. You didn’t have to go all the way. Especially since you never did some of that with me.”

Was this what it was about? Back in Ireland: Matt Silver, the big bad Operator, gently guiding her head down to his crotch. Vanessa refusing. Halfheartedly kissing him on the neck, trying to placate him. Thinking that a few scented candles and an Enigma CD would make her swoon, convince her to blow him.

“You’re a bit weak in the mouth now, aren’t you? Bet you wouldn’t put up too much of a fight. You want another shot at it?”

The Operator squeezed her cheeks, then let go. He moved out of her field of vision. She tried to follow him with her eyes, but nothing. Turned her head slightly to the right, and the room began spinning.

“Thing is, my little Irish slut,” the Operator said, “I wanted you to go out and see other people.”

Oh, bollocks on that. Jealousy was the Operator’s fundamental emotion. Along with envy. It guided everything. In the boardroom and bedroom.

“It’s true. Sure, there was a chance you’d wind up alone somewhere and—kablooie—no more Vanessa Reardon. But I knew you’d try to survive long enough to avenge yourself. And you’d come into contact with a lot of people. Course, I didn’t know you’d be fucking and sucking your way to San Diego and back.”

She could move her left hand now. Pump it into a weak fist. Then release. Pump. Then release.

“Remember how I said Proximity needed another human host to survive? To eat blood cells and other cellular waste? Urn, yeah, well, / lied. They can survive in any fluid environment on Earth. They’re dormant until they reach another human being. Then they replicate like jackrabbits. Upload the DNA sequence to our satellite, which feeds it to our computer.”

Vanessa stopped pumping. What was he talking about now? That was the built-in security feature of the Mary Kates. They needed a human host for power. Piss ‘em out into the toilet, they’d die after a few seconds. That way, they couldn’t replicate unless they were in close prox—.

Oh.

Proximity.

He’d designed it this way all along.

The mad, mad bastard.

“Thanks to your trip around the country, you’ve infected over fourteen thousand people. God bless you, Vanessa. You’ve done the hard part for me.”

The Operator came back into view. Showed her the liquid crystal display of his PDA. A number ticked up, two, three digits at a time.

“See what you started?”

Jackson was amused. “He seems to know you.”

The blonde smiled! wryly. “A lot of people know me.”

        — DAY KEENE

6:01 — 6:46  a.m.

Fifteenth District Headquarters,

Northeast Philadelphia

An hour before shift change, Officer Jimmy MacAdams caught the call: disturbance on the Frankford El. Up until that point, it had been a slow night on the steady out squad. Most exciting call was an abandoned 1994 Dodge Daytona over on East Thompson Street in Bridesburg. Yet another cracked steering wheel column, ignition pulled out and hanging over the top, strip of white fabric tied around the works. He was sitting on it until Major Crimes had a chance to take possession, haul it in. In this neighborhood, probably somebody who was too lazy to call a cab. But you never knew until you dusted for prints. So there he sat.

Then the call came in.

“Transit police: We’ve got a howling blind man up on the El platform at Margaret-Orthodox.”