Prey

"There's nothing else," Julia said, "except aspirin."

"Aspirin is fine."

"I'm worried it won't be-"

"Aspirin is fine."

"You don't have to bite my head off."

"I'm sorry. I don't feel well."

"Well, I'm only trying to help." Julia stepped back. "I mean, if you two want to be alone, you should just say so."

"No," I said, "we do not want to be alone."

"Well, I'm only trying to help." She turned back to the medicine kit. "Maybe there is something else…" Containers of tape and plastic bottles of antibiotics fell to the floor. "Julia," I said. "Please stop."

"What am I doing? What am I doing that is so awful?"

"Just stop."

"I'm only trying to help."

"I know that."

Behind me, Mae said, "Okay. All finished now. That should hold you until tomorrow." She yawned. "And now, if you don't mind, I'm going to bed."

I thanked her, and watched her leave the room. When I turned back, Julia was holding a glass of water and two aspirins for me.

"Thank you," I said.

"I never liked that woman," she said.

"Let's get some sleep," I said.

"There's only single beds here."

"I know."

She moved closer. "I'd like to be with you, Jack."

"I'm really tired. I'll see you in the morning, Julia."

I went back to my room and looked at the bed. I didn't bother taking off my clothes.

I don't remember my head touching the pillow.

DAY 7 4:42 A.M.

I slept restlessly, with constant and terrible dreams. I dreamed that I was back in Monterey, marrying Julia again, and I was standing in front of the minister when she came up alongside me in her bridal gown, and when she lifted the veil I was shocked by how beautiful and young and slender she was. She smiled at me, and I smiled back, trying to conceal my uneasiness. Because now I saw she was more than slender, her face was thin, almost emaciated. Almost a skull. Then I turned to the minister in front of us, but it was Mae, and she was pouring colored liquids back and forth in test tubes. When I looked back at Julia she was very angry, and said she never liked that woman. Somehow it was my fault. I was to blame. I woke up briefly, sweating. The pillow was soaked. I turned it over, and went back to sleep. I saw myself sleeping on the bed, and I looked up and saw that the door to my room was open. Light came in from the hallway outside. A shadow fell across my bed. Ricky came into the room and looked down at me. His face was backlit and dark, I couldn't see his expression, but he said, "I always loved you, Jack." He leaned over to whisper something in my ear, and I realized as his head came down that he was going to kiss me instead. He was going to kiss me on the lips, passionately. His mouth was open. His tongue licked his lips. I was very upset, I didn't know what to do, but at that moment Julia came in and said, "What's going on?" and Ricky hastily pulled away, and made some kind of evasive comment. Julia was very angry and said, "Not now, you fool," and Ricky made another evasive comment. And then Julia said, "This is completely unnecessary, it will take care of itself." And Ricky said, "There are constriction coefficients for deterministic algorithms if you do interval global optimization." And she said, "It won't hurt you if you don't fight it." She turned on the light in the room and walked out. Then I was suddenly back in my Monterey wedding, Julia was standing beside me in white, and I turned to look back at the audience, and I saw my three kids sitting in the first row, smiling and happy. And as I watched a black line appeared around their mouths, and swept down their bodies, until they were cloaked in black. They continued to smile, but I was horrified. I ran to them, but I couldn't rub the black cloak off. And Nicole said calmly, "Don't forget the sprinklers, Dad."

I woke up, tangled up in the sheets, drenched in sweat. The door to my room was open. A rectangle of light fell across my bed from the hallway outside. I looked over at the workstation monitor. It said "4:55 A.M." I closed my eyes and lay there for a while, but I couldn't go back to sleep. I was wet and uncomfortable. I decided to take a shower. Shortly before five in the morning, I got out of bed.

The hallway was silent. I walked down the corridor to the bathrooms. The doors to all the bedrooms were open, which seemed strange. I could see everybody sleeping as I walked past. And the lights were on in all the bedrooms. I saw Ricky asleep, and I saw Bobby, and I saw Julia, and Vince. Mae's bed was empty. And of course Charley's bed was empty. I stopped in the kitchen to get a ginger ale from the refrigerator. I was very thirsty, my throat painful and parched. And my stomach felt a little queasy. I looked at the champagne bottle. I suddenly had a funny feeling about it, as if it might have been tampered with. I took it out and looked closely at the cap, at the metal foil that covered the cork. It looked entirely normal. No tampering, no needle marks, no nothing.

Just a bottle of champagne.

I put it back and closed the refrigerator door.

I began to wonder if I had been unfair to Julia. Maybe she really did believe she'd made a mistake and wanted to put things right. Maybe she just wanted to show her gratitude. Maybe I was being too tough on her. Too unforgiving.

Because when you thought about it, what had she done that was suspicious or wrong? She'd been glad to see me, even if she was over the top. She'd accepted responsibility for the experiment, and she'd apologized for it. She'd immediately agreed to make the call to the Army. She'd agreed with my plan to kill the swarm in the comm room. She'd done everything she could do to show she supported me, and was on my side.

But I still was uneasy.

And of course there was the matter of Charley and his swarm. Ricky's idea that Charley had somehow been carrying the swarm inside his body, in his mouth or under his armpit or something, didn't make a lot of sense to me. Those swarms killed within seconds. So it left a question-how did the swarm get into the comm room with Charley? Did it get in from outside? Why hadn't it attacked Julia and Ricky and Vince?

I forgot about my shower.

I decided to go down to the utility room, and look around outside the comm room door. Maybe there was something I had missed. Julia had been talking a lot, interrupting my train of thought. Almost as if she hadn't wanted me to figure something out…

There I was again, being hard on Julia.

I went through the airlock, down the corridor, through another airlock. When you were tired, it was annoying to have that wind blowing on you. I came out into the utility area, and went toward the comm room door. I didn't notice anything.

I heard the sound of a clicking keyboard, and looked into the biology lab. Mae was there, at her workstation.

I said, "What are you doing?"

"Checking the video playback."

"I thought we couldn't do that, because Charley pulled the wires."

"That's what Ricky said. But it isn't true."

I started to come around the lab bench, to look over her shoulder. She held up her hand.

"Jack," she said. "Maybe you don't want to look at this."

"What? Why not?"

"It's, uh… maybe you don't want to deal with this. Not right now. Maybe tomorrow." But of course after that, I practically ran around the table to see what was on her monitor. And I stopped. What I saw on her screen was an image of an empty corridor. With a time code at the bottom of the picture. "Is this it?" I said. "Is this what I shouldn't deal with?"

"No." She turned in her chair. "Look, Jack, you have to go through all the security cameras in sequence, and each one only records ten frames a minute, so it's very difficult to be sure of what we're-"