Twenty-three
Corin relinquished control of his body.
“We have a problem.”
Billy emerged from oblivion and found himself
standing in front of the car. As he watched, the passenger door and trunk
lid slammed shut on the bodies of Noah Darker and his two friends, and he
saw Evie rolling unconscious across the concrete garage floor. Then his
legs gave out, and he fell knowing that Corin was not the infallible god
he had fantasized.
Evie had caught him off guard.
He collapsed with a shriek of protest, not
understanding how his legs could work for Corin and not himself. Corin
had told him that they worked just fine, and he had not wanted to
believe. He pounded the cold stone with his fists, besieged by a anguish
and an anger that had no way to express itself. He screamed his throat
raw. His cries echoed out over the Silver Ridge Valley beyond the opened
garage door. When his rage and frustration vented itself, he lay weeping,
and thinking, forced for the first time to deal with a crisis on his own.
Corin had killed Evie’s brother. He had not known
how he would explain to her how it had happened. All he had was Corin’s
briefing, the shock of which had caused him to dissociate still another
time, running again from reality, and hiding, leaving it up to Corin to
decide what to do and to use his body to do it. He had feared Evie would
flee the mansion in loathing and bring the combined forces of the Darker
brothers and the local law enforcement to his doorsteps should she ever
discover that Noah had died in the same house she now inhabited.
His mother had seen this coming. She had warned
him. His faith in Corin, in his own madness, had been blind.
Evie moaned. He turned his head, startled, and
watched her stir.
“No. Not like this.”
He crawled frantically toward the entrance to his
subterranean fortress, calling frantically for his machines to follow and
to help him. Microphones recorded his cries. A computer program searched
through the sound of his voice, separating commands and funneling them to
the appropriate program.
His wheelchair found its way to his side under its
own power. He returned to his control room and shut off the monitors and
the microphones in the garage. The interior door to the garage closed.
The door to the outside remained open. Evie would want out. She would be
hysterical. She would not want to talk to him. She would need time to
think, and he would need time to explain. If she would ever listen.
He switched on the cameras in the car bearing the
three bodies. How had Corin expected to dispose of the bodies? The car
had a range of only twenty miles, and he could not send enough of the
larger robots that far to remove the bodies from the car once it reached
its destination. Regardless, it would be a cowardly thing to do.
He made his own decision and began the solemn
remote-control drive to Silver Ridge. He parked the car near the
sheriff’s substation and left it there. The Darker family and Sheriff
Krueger could figure out for themselves what had happened, and deal with
the situation in any way they chose.
“I’m finished with this. Do you hear me, Corin?
They never said it directly, but I knew what my mother and the Doc were
thinking. I’m brain-damaged, some kind of idiot savant, with an alternate
personality to boot. A real goof who thinks he can save the world from
monsters.
“I belong back at the hospital. I’m calling Mother
to come pick me up. And her lawyer friend. I think I’m going to need
one.”
