After Midnight, page 3
What mattered was that he could do them.
And now, despite being stuck inside a broken and unsalvageable body, permanently lost and alone, trapped in a situation most people would consider the worst form of inhuman torture, Milo had never been happier. Had never felt more alive.
Because the fact of the matter was that life as he had been living it before, homeless and on the streets, huddled inside an abandoned Boston tenement building with no heat, with hookers, pimps and drug dealers everywhere, had in many ways been its own form of torture.
He had done his best to make life livable by playing his little games, haunting the city, plucking the most vulnerable of the young prostitutes off the streets and making them his pets, torturing them with his knives, scalpels, pliers and other tools, piercing their skin and peeling their flesh, but he realized now how much he had been at risk.
Through his advanced intelligence and a little luck, he had managed to stay one step ahead of the law—at least until the disastrous run-in with the evil bitch in Revere—but looking back at his situation now, with the benefit of time and perspective, Milo knew his fate had always been sealed. Sooner or later his games were bound to end. He had been killing time, in addition to young girls.
But not now.
Now, everything was different.
Now, Milo Cain held the power. It was hilarious, a cosmic joke of the utmost magnitude. From here, helpless and alone in a hospital bed—and not just any hospital bed, a prison hospital bed—Milo could now wreak havoc and destroy the lives of all the people he wanted to, whenever he wanted to.
And who was going to stop him? Hell, who would even suspect him: a comatose patient, unable to move or even communicate, unfeeling and unaware as far as the medical community was concerned? It would never happen. Milo was finally free to pursue his wildest fantasies with impunity, no matter how gruesome the crime or how large the pool of potential victims.
This was what he took from the inane conversation of the two ditzy nurses cleaning him and his room.
Because Mack Pender had been an experiment.
His experiment.
He had pushed the suggestion of suicide into Pender’s brain as the warden prepared for work a couple of mornings ago. Milo had laid out the plan, step by step, being very specific, to see just how far he could go. Whether the power had limits.
Was it a form of hypnosis? Supposedly, no one could be made to do anything under hypnosis they would not do when fully aware. No one could be hypnotized to murder his neighbor or rape his cousin, or so the theory went. Milo had never been sure he believed that, but in the past the issue had always been a theoretical one, had never really mattered because it had not applied to him.
Now it did matter. Greatly. Now he needed to experiment. To test his limits. So he had pushed the suggestion into Pender’s head, specifying the most violent and gruesome method of self-execution he could conceive while also satisfying his predilection for knives and sharp-edged instruments.
And it had worked beautifully. Pender, who as far as Milo knew was a normal (ha!), well-adjusted family man, not suicidal or self-destructive in any way, had slipped under Milo Cain’s spell, not resisting his task in the slightest.
Pender had been miles away at the time the suggestion was implanted, too, telling Milo that physical proximity was not necessary for successful implantation of a suggestion.
This knowledge was critical.
Because Milo had plans. Lots of them.
But before he could begin implementing those plans, he needed to think. And to think, he needed quiet. And since he wasn’t capable of getting up and walking away, it was now time to drive those two chattering magpies out of earshot.
Without much effort, Milo pushed a suggestion into the head of the first nurse, the younger one with the slim build and the blonde hair and the big tits. The two women had been blabbing away while Milo had been thinking about other things.
The blonde nurse had been holding the floor, and the moment Milo pushed the suggestion, she shut her mouth in mid-sentence.
For a second nobody spoke, and then the second nurse, the just slightly overweight one, said, “What is it, Sandy? Is something wr—”
“I’ve slept with your boyfriend, you know.”
Milo smiled deep inside his mind.
“Excuse me? What did you say?”
“You heard me. I’ve slept with your boyfriend, lots of times. He says you’re a nice person and all that, but sex with you is like trying to fuck a dead cow. He says sex with you—”
“Bitch! What the fuck is wrong with you?” The rustle of clothing and an angry grunt indicated to Milo that the girls had begun pushing and shoving each other.
“I’m just telling you the way it is. He says being in the sack with you is like trying to get it up in a freezer, that you’re about as cold as—”
A crunching sound told Milo that Overweight Chick had just struck Blondie in the face. And not an openhanded, girlie slap, but a closed-fist, MMA punch to the nose. She was whimpering like a pathetic little girl, but apparently had decided it was time to take action.
The first girl cried out and fell, hitting the floor with a wet smack. Milo pictured her hands clutching her face in a vain attempt to stop the blood now gushing out of her undoubtedly broken nose.
A rush of rubber-soled footsteps told Milo the aggrieved nurse had stepped over her tormentor and hurried out the door. The blonde nurse lay on the floor, moaning and muttering with the thick, distinctive nasal tone of the deviated septum sufferer who was currently bleeding heavily through the nose.
Milo cursed to himself. As much as he enjoyed violence in general and had enjoyed this little tête-à-tête in particular, his intention had been to gain a little quiet time, so he could think and plan. Now he would be forced to listen to this whiny bitch weep and complain.
But not for long. A chorus of raised voices and clatter of activity in the hallway outside his door told Milo someone would be here soon to rescue the suffering nurse. She would be taken from his room and escorted to the ER for medical attention, and her attacker would be…well, he didn’t know what the fate of the blonde nurse might be.
Didn’t care, either. He had wanted the two tedious little windbags out of his room and he had accomplished that goal, and had had a little fun besides. What could be better?
Now, though, break time was over.
Now it was time to get to work.
5
Milo knew he had to prioritize. There was so much he wanted to do.
The suggestion he pushed into Warden Pender’s head had been so easy to accomplish and so goddamned successful in its execution that he was beginning to think he had just scratched the surface of his newfound ability. As much of a burden as living with Flickers had been in his previous incarnation, his current situation was equally ideal.
Immediately following his unsuccessful attempt to rid the world of his odious whore of a twin sister last summer, Milo had wallowed in the depths of despair. Comatose and unable to move, yet fully aware of his surroundings and in considerable pain, he had suspected that his ultimate destiny was finally being realized: he was living in hell on earth.
And he couldn’t even end his suffering through suicide.
But then, in a moment of inspiration he would forever cherish as fondly as other people recall their wedding day or the birth of their children, Milo had, quite by accident and without even thinking, pushed a suggestion into the head of a young nurse who was busy changing the sheets on his hospital bed. The nurse had immediately dropped to the floor, thrashing and gasping in the throes of a massive orgasm.
And he had been set free.
Now, Milo wouldn’t change his situation for all the tea in China, as the expression went. When you could influence people to do your bidding without even lifting a finger, who cared if you were immobile? Who cared if you were comatose and unresponsive? Who cared about any physical limitation?
Not Milo, that was for sure. He was kept clean and nourished, better cared for in this century-and-a-half-old prison/hospital than he had ever cared for himself when he was mobile. And his current situation eliminated distractions, giving him plenty of time to think.
To plan.
To prioritize.
First things first.
He needed to deal with The Evil Bitch Caitlyn Connelly. He hated to admit this, even to himself, but she frightened him. The petite little prim and proper lawyer from the Gulf Coast of Florida, who had probably never smoked a joint or cheated on a test or driven over the fucking speed limit in her whole privileged life, frightened him.
She scared the shit out of him, actually. And the reason was obvious. She possessed his abilities. Or rather, the abilities he had previously manifested before his life-altering shooting. That fact alone made her extremely dangerous. And until he could ensure his twin was out of the way for good, he would never feel safe.
With her dead and buried, his little parlor tricks like forcing people to saw off their own heads—and so much more he had planned—would never be traced back to him. Could never be traced back to him. But as long as Caitlyn Connelly walked among the living, Milo’s secret was in danger of being revealed. And that was unacceptable.
Her boyfriend would have to be dealt with, too. Milo thought he had killed the wannabe hero once already, back in Revere, but apparently the guy possessed the constitution of a horse. Milo had been forced to listen—over and over, ad nauseum, in those first awful days after being shot, while lying helpless and mostly ignored in his hospital bed—to the incredulous hospital staff’s stories of how the dude had miraculously survived his beating and would likely pull through after surgery.
And, of course, he had gone on to do exactly that, adding to Milo’s despair and humiliation. But as it turned out, Milo had only lost a battle. The remainder of the war had yet to be fought.
He spent the next several hours considering the Caitlyn Connelly situation from all angles, doing his best to avoid the obvious truth. When he had finished fooling himself, Milo reluctantly concluded that he would have to do what deep down inside he had known all along was the case.
He would have to force a suggestion into Caitlyn Connelly’s mind.
See if she could resist it any better than Warden Mack Pender had.
Finish her.
Move on from there.
* * *
Real estate law was all about contracts: reading them, writing them, understanding them and applying them. Sometimes Caitlyn felt that after a week of swimming in the whys and wherefores of real estate contracts for eight to twelve hours a day, by Friday if she were to fall asleep—itself an unlikely proposition, given her insomnia—she would dream about purchase and sales agreements, about escrows and insurance underwriters and all of the other minutiae of her chosen profession.
And she loved it.
She had always craved order and neatness, and polishing a legal document until it was just so, spelling out every last detail so there were no surprises for the buyer or the seller or any intermediaries, was something that never got old for Cait.
Right now, she was working on a lease agreement. A regional dry-cleaning chain was attempting to establish a foothold in the Tampa Bay area, negotiating the potential lease of a prime downtown location. The property owner, though, was playing hardball, attempting to extort higher fees than reasonable for market conditions, and Caitlyn had been crafting a response letter on behalf of the dry-cleaning business all morning.
She leaned back in her chair and yawned—another night of inadequate sleep had left her struggling to concentrate—before focusing again on the draft proposal. She was immersed in considering a strategy of agreeing to a slightly higher fee structure in exchange for the property owner guaranteeing availability of other area locations when she gasped. Raised her hands to her head.
Something was wrong.
She could feel…something…happening inside her skull. It wasn’t a headache. Not exactly. It wasn’t even pain, at least not in the generally accepted sense of the term. It was more like a sense of building pressure, of an invisible air pocket forcing its way into her cranium.
Maybe she was having a stroke. Was that possible? Did reasonably healthy thirty-year-old women suffer strokes? And if so, was this what it would feel like?
Cait didn’t think so. She felt normal, aside from that sensation of pressure, which had now leveled off and was definitely noticeable but still not particularly painful. She lifted her arms above her head and shuffled her feet, just to see if she could, and was relieved to discover that she seemed to have retained full control over her extremities.
She reached for the intercom on her desk and buzzed the firm’s receptionist, Pearl Hinton. After a moment, a disembodied voice replied, “Yes, Ms. Connelly?”
“Pearl, if you’re not too busy, could you come in here for a moment?”
“Of course,” came the reply, and seconds later, a soft knock on Cait’s office door was followed by the appearance of a tall, thin woman, somewhere between the ages of sixty and eighty, who had been employed at the firm longer than anyone could recall.
“Pearl, I…”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“I’m not sure how to say this, but do I sound…I don’t know…normal to you?”
“Normal?”
“Yes. You know, is my diction clear?”
“Your diction.”
“Yes.” Cait was beginning to regret calling Pearl, but the sensation she experienced had been so disorienting, her immediate reaction had been to try to get some reassurance. Now she just felt silly. “I’m talking all right?”
“Yes, Ms. Connelly, you’re talking just fine. Uh…are you feeling all right?”
Cait smiled, embarrassed. She could imagine how she must look to this no-nonsense older woman. “Yes, I’m…I’m fine. Would you mind getting me a cup of coffee, please?”
“Coffee. Of course.” The woman turned on her heel and marched out of the office, clearly prepared to beat the coffee into submission if necessary.
Cait tried to return her attention to the lease agreement, but her brain would not cooperate. She felt logy, slow. While the feeling of pressure inside her cranium no longer continued to build, it had not dissipated, either.
She struggled with the same sentence three times, growing frustrated, and then Pearl was back at her door. In the receptionist’s hands was a large blue ceramic mug emblazoned with the firm’s logo, steam rising lazily from the top.
Rattled now, Cait tried to smile. To act normal. She had already made a fool of herself once; she had no intention of doing so again.
Ms. Hinton started across the office, reaching out with the coffee, and then she seemed to stumble. The coffee mug flew from her grasp, floating almost in slow motion through the air, its trajectory putting it on a collision course with Cait’s computer. Or possibly Cait herself.
She stuck her hand out, knocking the mug away but of course doing little to impede the progress of the scalding-hot coffee, which had begun splashing out of its container the moment it flew out from Pearl’s grasp.
Cait registered a stinging sensation in her hand and forearm as the coffee drenched the sleeve of her blouse before splashing down on her keyboard and computer monitor. She gasped from shock and a millisecond later pain as a single thought flashed through her mind. She did that on purpose.
Then two things happened at the same time: the pain from the burns ratcheted up in intensity, and the bizarre sense of pressure in Cait Connelly’s head vanished.
6
Well.
That was interesting.
Milo took a moment to relax and allow his thoughts to coalesce. There was much to consider. His experiment had been wildly successful, although it had unfolded much differently than he expected it to.
For whatever reason, he could not push suggestions into The Evil Bitch’s brain. Whatever strange psychic connection they shared as twin brother and sister apparently precluded any possibility of him forcing her to cut her head off with a letter opener, or to do anything at all according to his bidding.
Unfortunate.
However, the plus side of the equation was filled with interesting tidbits. Things that, on balance, more than made up for his disappointment in finding out he could not manipulate his nemesis into performing a gruesome suicidal attack on herself while he lay motionless in his hospital bed fifteen hundred miles away.
When he had pushed his suggestion into the nurse’s brain, and then again when he had achieved his greatest accomplishment thus far, pushing the suggestion of suicide into Warden Pender’s head, he had focused on the specific people in his mind. He envisioned them even though he had never actually seen either one. The very fact that he had interacted with them, however passively on his part, seemed to have been enough to forge the kind of psychic connection required for the implantation process.
He already knew he could not push suggestions into the minds of people he’d never interacted with. People like the United States president, Hollywood actors and actresses. He had tried numerous times with them and others, always to no avail.
But that wasn’t a problem with Caitlyn Connelly. It had been even easier to focus on her than it had been on the nurses or Mack Pender. Connelly’s face—her entire odious being, really—was burned indelibly into his consciousness. He knew he would see her in his nightmares until the day he died. His contempt for her was utter and unrelenting.
But although picturing her had been a breeze, the process of implanting a suggestion remained impossible. Instead, when he had pushed with his mind, he was rewarded with something entirely unexpected: he could see through her eyes.
Instantly, his mind was filled with the sights and sounds of her vantage point. She was sitting at a desk upon which stacks of forms and official-looking documents had been placed, and she was working on something on her computer. It was a letter of some sort, comprised of lawyerly mumbo-jumbo the likes of which held absolutely no interest to Milo Cain.
