Death Dream (12 page)

"You shouldn't have scared her so bad." Jace's voice was so low that Vickie barely could hear it through the door.

"I didn't mean to scare her. It won't happen again, I swear," Muncrief said, smoothly reasonable. "We needed her reaction and now we've got it. I'll make it up to her. Now I can be nice to her."

Their voices dropped lower and Vickie heard nothing more. She waited in the conference room, her thoughts whirling. They were talking about the student who fainted.

Kyle's interfering with the VR games at the school.
She realized that the girl they were talking about must be Dan Santorini's daughter. That's not smart, Vickie said to herself. Definitely not smart.

When Dan came through the breezeway door into the kitchen he could hear the TV: some stupid kids' cartoon show, from the sound of it. There was Angie in the living room, sitting on the sofa with her bare feet tucked up under her, the remote control grasped in her right hand, staring rigidly at the screen but otherwise looking completely normal. Susan must be in the baby's room.

Angie seemed transfixed by the cartoons, seeing or hearing nothing else.

"Hi, Angel," Dan said as brightly as he could manage. "How are you?"

She glanced up at him, then swiftly returned her gaze to the TV. "Okay I guess."

Dan tossed his jacket onto one of the armchairs, thinking that their Dayton furniture looked dull and heavy and totally out of place in this Florida house.

"Where's Mom?" he asked.

Angela shrugged.

Not quite knowing what to do, Dan went back toward the bedrooms. Sure enough, Susan was standing in the doorway of the baby's room, watching little Philip sleeping in his crib.

"I thought I heard him wheeze," she whispered.

Dan stared hard at the baby. He had spent many painful nights in Dayton helplessly watching his son struggling to breathe, his tiny shoulders hunched, his frail little chest heaving. Dan knew what the baby was going through. He knew what it was like when you couldn't lift your chest to get air into your lungs. Watching Phil suffer made him feel worse than having an asthma attack himself.

"He looks okay to me," he whispered back.

"I had to take him with me to the school. I thought maybe it bothered his breathing."

Nearly a month we've been in this heat and she still thinks like we're in Ohio in the middle of the winter
, Dan groused to himself. "He's okay," he said.

"Yes, I think he is," Susan said with some relief.

"What happened to Angie?"

Susan's face was tight with worry. "Her teacher called me and said she had passed out while she was in one of the VR booths."

"Fainted."

"Eleanor said she heard Angie scream and by the time she opened the booth door Angie had fallen off the bench and was on the floor, unconscious."

"Electric shock?" Dan wondered aloud.
Could there have been a short in the circuitry?

"The school doctor didn't find any physical signs of anything."

"I'll tell Kyle to send a technician over to check that—"

"It's already been done. Eleanor got the principal to call Vickie Kessel before I left the school with Angie."

"Eleanor?"

"Mrs. O'Connell," Susan said, with just an edge of impatience in her voice. "Angie's teacher. You've met her."

"Oh. Yeah."

"They couldn't find anything physically wrong with Angie. It must have been something in the VR game she was playing."

"What's she doing playing a game in school?" Dan asked.

Susan huffed, "I wish you'd paid more attention at the PTA meeting. They allow the students to play games if they finish their lessons ahead of schedule."

"Oh."

"Angie did very well in her chemistry lesson, so she was allowed to play 'Neptune's Kingdom'—which is really a biology/ecology lesson, not just a game."

"Yeah, I remember now."

He turned away from his wife, who looked as if she wanted to scream rather than whisper. "I'll go talk to her," Dan muttered.

Back in the living room he sat beside his daughter on the sofa and said as cheerfully as he could, "So you had some excitement in school, huh?"

Angie kept her eyes on the TV screen. Phil Donahue held a microphone in one hand and was pointing to someone off-camera with the other.

Dan picked the remote control from the end table. "Do you mind if we shut this off and talk for a while, Angel?"

Angela nodded glumly.

Clicking off the TV, Dan asked, "What happened to you this afternoon, honey?"

"I don't know," Angela said.

"You fainted."

"Uh-huh."

Susan came into the living room and sat on the armchair facing the sofa, looking drawn with anxiety.

"Can you tell me about it? You were playing a VR game, weren't you?"

"Uh-huh."

"Which one? Do you remember?"

" 'Neptune's Kingdom.' It was all about fish and the ocean and stuff like that."

"Your teacher said you screamed. What made you scream?"

Angela's lip began to tremble. Her eyes filled with tears.

"Honey," Dan began, "whatever it is that's bothering you, we—"

"I saw you dead!" she wailed. "I saw you in a coffin and you were dead!" The child broke into heavy terrified sobs.

Dan stared at his wife. Susan sat open-mouthed, round-eyed with stunned surprise. Angela cried as if her world had come to an end and buried her face against her father's chest.

"But that's silly, Angel," Dan said as soothingly as he knew how. He wrapped his arms around her. "I'm not dead, you can see that. I'm right here."

"But I saw you!" Her voice was muffled, tear-filled. "You were in a coffin and your face was all gray and cold and your arms were folded over your chest and the mermaid princess was crying for you and she was me! The princess was me and her father was you and you were dead!"

Dan held his daughter tightly and rocked slowly back and forth with her. Susan, white with shock, came from her chair and sat on the floor at his feet. She too enfolded Angela in her arms and laid her head against the child's sob-racked body.

"It's all right, baby," she murmured. "It's all right—"

For several minutes the three of them sat there entangled in Angela's fear and grief. Dan felt increasingly uncomfortable. This is all a mistake, he said to himself. If we can just calm her down enough to talk logically to her I can show her that it's all a mistake.

Slowly Angela's sobs subsided. Susan whisked a wad of facial tissue out of nowhere and helped the child dry her eyes and blow her reddened nose.

Dan took her gently under the chin and lifted her face up to look at him. Angela's eyes were swollen from crying.

"I'm right here, Angel," he said. "See? I'm really alive." He wiggled his eyebrows. She smiled weakly.

Susan got up from the floor and sat on the sofa next to her daughter. "There must be something wrong with that VR game," she said.

A flash of anger blazed in Dan's gut.
There's nothing wrong with the damned game!
he snarled inwardly. But he suppressed his anger immediately.

To Angela he said, "When you're in that game it seems like you're really in the ocean, doesn't it?"

"Yes." She sniffled slightly.

"You know, we make those VR games to feel as realistic as possible. we work very hard to make them seem real."

Angela said nothing. Susan was giving him a doubtful look.

Dan went on, "Sometimes they can be so real you imagine things that aren't actually in the game."

Susan's expression was going from doubt to anger.

"Like your game today, Angel. It seemed so real to you that you thought you saw yourself as the mermaid princess, didn't you?"

She sniffled again and nodded.

"But that's not you in the game, honey. It's just a picture that an artist drew. It's very realistic but it's not a picture of you."

"It was me," Angela said, her voice barely audible.

"No, it wasn't," Dan insisted. "It wasn't you, and the mermaid's father wasn't me."

"But—"

"It really wasn't, Angel. Believe me."

"But I saw it!"

"You thought you saw it."

Susan said, "Dan, really! If that's what Angie saw—"

"Listen," he said. "Once, when I was a kid in Youngstown, I was sneaking through the alleys behind the houses on our street. I forget why; maybe I was trying to get home without running into any of the tough kids on the block.

"Anyway, there I was, going down this narrow alley. It had big tall wooden fences on both sides of it."

Angela was looking up into his face, fascinated that her father was telling her a story about himself. Susan was watching too.

"All of a sudden a big dog starts barking and running down the alley after me. I was scared to death! I looked over my shoulder and there was this dog! He looked as big as a lion and he had horns on his head! Like a bull! Honest, that's what I saw, big black sharp horns on his head. I can still see that dog and his horns, right now."

"Dogs don't have horns." Angela said weakly.

"I know. I even knew it then. But I was so scared I thought I saw horns. And when I think about that dog even today my mind still shows me that same picture, with the horns."

"Did the dog catch you?"

"No, honey. I ran faster than I ever had in my whole life and got to the door in the fence of our own house and went inside and locked that door tight!" He looked up at Susan. "Then I came down with an asthma attack that kept me in bed for a week, almost."

Angela seemed to perk up after that. Dan stayed with her, telling stories and even breaking out an old jigsaw puzzle that they spent the rest of the afternoon on. Susan ignored the messages piling up on her phone machine and took care of things around the house that she had been putting off for days. The baby woke up and for almost a whole hour the four of them played together on the sun-warmed floor of the living room, almost like a family in a television commercial.

By supper time Angela seemed to be behaving normally, her trauma forgotten. But after the children were put to bed and Dan was stretched out on the sofa watching the local weather forecaster talking gloomily about the drought affecting Florida, Susan came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel.

"Can we talk about it now?"

Dan swung his feet to the floor and sat upright, clicking off the TV with the remote controller. "About what?"

"Angie."

He made a wry face. "Those VR games can be very realistic. She just got carried away."

"Maybe they're too realistic. For children."

"Aw hell, honey. How many kids in that school have used the games and how many have been affected the way Angie was?"

"I don't know."

He blinked at her. "You mean you think other kids might have been affected too? No, that can't be. The school would've shut the games down. They'd be yelling bloody murder at us."

"Maybe."

"No maybe about it."

Susan asked, "Do you think she really saw you in the game?"

"Couldn't have," he said gruffly. "You think we paint in every kid's picture and run their own special version of the game? Get real!"

"But she seemed so certain," Susan said. "I mean, it scared her so much she fainted!"

Dan looked up at the ceiling, his way of signaling that he thought his wife was being ridiculous. "Okay, look. Tell you what I'll do. I'll check out the game myself. We've got all the CDs at the office, so I'll just run through that one during my lunch hour tomorrow. Okay?"

"All the games are kept at the office?"

"Sure. The VR booths in the school are just the output sites. We keep all the computer hardware and software at the office. They pipe the programming to the school over a dedicated phone line. A fiber optic line. Didn't you know that?"

"No." Susan's brow furrowed slightly. "So all the games are actually run from your office, then."

"From Vickie Bessel's office," Dan said. "Vickie's in charge of the school programs."

CHAPTER 10

It was full dark when Jason Lowrey finally left the ParaReality building. Other employees left by the rear entrance, through the double metal doors that bore the company's logo in stylish gold lettering. Other employees walked out into the parking lot and got into their cars and drove home.

Not Jace. He went back through the storerooms and workshops to the loading dock, where he kept his battered old ten-speed bike leaning against the wall beneath the overhang so it would not get rained on. In spite of that the bike was blotched with ugly patches of rust; Jace laughingly called it eczema whenever someone told him he should clean it up or get a new bicycle. In the humid Florida air the gearshift had rusted, too. He had not used the gears since he had arrived in this flat land around Orlando; there was no need to.

Jace flung one long lanky leg over the saddle seat and pushed away from the wall, coasting down the loading ramp and out onto the back driveway, heading for the little bungalow that other people called his home. Back in Dayton, Dan—always the worry-wart—had bought him a chain and padlock to protect his bike while it was parked outside the Wright-Patterson lab during the day.

Jace had laughed his head off.

"Who the hell would steal my eczema special?" he asked Dan. "Anybody needs a bike so bad they're willing to steal my junker, they're welcome to it."

Jason Lowrey was the only son of a university professor of mathematics and a San Francisco socialite who had been beautiful enough to be a fashion model. Not that his mother chose to work; she regarded a job as beneath her station in life. But she did pose for photographers now and then in connection with charity drives to raise money for the homeless or other good causes. Jace's father doted on his mother but, with his teacher's income, he could not afford to show his love in any solidly visible form, such as jewelry or a fine home or even a ski condo up in the Sierras. She bought those things for herself, constantly reminding her husband that he was not enough of a man to provide for her in the manner she expected.

As Jace grew up he began to realize that love meant pain. Not physical pain, perhaps, but constant mental and emotional torture. His mother seemed a coldly unattainable goddess: distant, haughty, demanding, often stern, occasionally brutal, never willing to give the warmth and affection he craved. Jace watched his father grovel before his beautiful, demanding mother. As he grew older he wondered why his father would behave so.