Stephen King - End of Watch

He drops his coat and does a nimble little dance on the bearskin rug. It tires him out fast – when he makes his next switch, he’ll be sure to choose someone in their twenties or thirties – but it warms him up nicely.

He snags the TV remote from the buffet and clicks on the enormous flatscreen, one of the camp’s few nods to life in the twenty-first century. The satellite dish pulls in God knows how many channels and the HD picture is to die for, but Brady is more interested in local programming today. He punches the source button on the remote until he’s looking back down the camp road leading to the outside world. He doesn’t expect company, but he has two or three busy days ahead of him, the most important and productive days of his life, and if someone tries to interrupt him, he wants to know about it beforehand.

The gun closet is a walk-in job, the knotty-pine walls lined with rifles and hung with pistols on pegs. The pick of the litter, as far as Brady’s concerned, is the FN SCAR 17S with the pistol grip. Capable of firing six hundred fifty rounds a minute and illegally converted to full auto by a proctologist who is also a gun nut, it is the Rolls-Royce of grease guns. Brady takes it out, along with a few extra clips and several heavy boxes of Winchester .308s, and props it against the wall beside the fireplace. He thinks about starting a fire – seasoned wood is already stacked in the hearth – but he has one other thing to do first. He goes to the site for city breaking news and scrolls down rapidly, looking for suicides. None yet, but he can remedy that.

‘Call it a Zappitizer,’ he says, grinning, and powers up the console. He makes himself comfortable in one of the easy chairs and begins following the pink fish. When he closes his eyes, they’re still there. At first, anyway. Then they become red dots moving on a field of black.

Brady picks one at random and goes to work.

Hodges and Jerome are staring at a digital display reading 244

FOUND when Holly leads Freddi into her computer room.

‘She’s all right,’ Holly says quietly to Hodges. ‘She shouldn’t be, but she is. She’s got a hole in her chest that looks like—’

‘Like what I said it is.’ Freddi sounds a little stronger now. Her eyes are red, but that’s probably from the dope she’s been smoking. ‘He shot me.’

‘She had some mini-pads and I taped one over the wound,’ Holly says. ‘It was too big for a Band-Aid.’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘Oough.’

‘Fucker shot me.’ It’s as if Freddi’s still trying to get it straight in her mind.

‘Which fucker would that be?’ Hodges asks. ‘Felix Babineau?’

‘Yeah, him. Fucking Dr Z. Only he’s really Brady. So is the other one. Z-Boy.’

‘Z-Boy?’ Jerome asks. ‘Who the hell is Z-Boy?’

‘Older guy?’ Hodges asks. ‘Older than Babineau? Frizzy white hair? Drives a beater with primer paint on it? Maybe wears a parka with tape over some of the rips?’

‘I don’t know about his car, but I know the parka,’ Freddi says. ‘That’s my boy Z-Boy.’ She sits in front of her desktop Mac – currently spinning out a fractal screensaver – and takes a final drag on her joint before crushing it out in an ashtray full of Marlboro butts. She’s still pale, but some of the fuck-you attitude Hodges remembers from their previous meeting is coming back. ‘Dr Z and his faithful sidekick, Z-Boy. Except they’re both Brady. Fucking matryoshka dolls is what they are.’

‘Ms Linklatter?’ Holly says.

‘Oh, go ahead and call me Freddi. Any chick who sees the teacups I call tits gets to call me Freddi.’

Holly blushes, but goes ahead. When she’s on the scent, she always does. ‘Brady Hartsfield is dead. It was an overdose last night or early this morning.’

‘Elvis has left the building?’ Freddi considers the idea, then shakes her head. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice. If it was true.’

And wouldn’t it be nice I could totally believe she’s crazy, Hodges thinks.

Jerome points at the readout above her jumbo monitor. It’s now flashing 247 FOUND. ‘Is that thing searching or downloading?’

‘Both.’ Freddi’s hand is pressing at the makeshift bandage under her shirt in an automatic gesture that reminds Hodges of himself. ‘It’s a repeater. I can turn it off – at least I think I can – but you have to promise to protect me from the men who are watching the building. The website, though… no good. I’ve got the IP address and the password, but I still couldn’t crash the server.’

Hodges has a thousand questions, but as 247 FOUND clicks up to 248, only two seem of paramount importance. ‘What’s it searching for? And what’s it downloading?’

‘You have to promise me protection first. You have to take me somewhere safe. Witness Protection, or whatever.’

‘He doesn’t have to promise you anything, because I already know,’ Holly says. There’s nothing mean in her tone; if anything, it’s comforting. ‘It’s searching for Zappits, Bill. Each time somebody turns one on, the repeater finds it and upgrades the Fishin’ Hole demo screen.’

‘Turns the pink fish into number-fish and adds the blue flashes,’ Jerome amplifies. He looks at Freddi. ‘That’s what it’s doing, right?’

Now it’s the purple, blood-caked lump on her forehead that her hand goes to. When her fingers touch it, she winces and pulls back. ‘Yeah. Of the eight hundred Zappits that were delivered here, two hundred and eighty were defective. They either froze while they were booting up or went ka-bloosh the first time you tried to open one of the games. The others were okay. I had to install a root kit into each and every one of them. It was a lot of work. Boring work. Like attaching widgets to wadgets on an assembly line.’

‘That means five hundred and twenty were okay,’ Hodges says.

‘The man can subtract, give him a cigar.’ Freddi glances at the readout. ‘And almost half of them have updated already.’ She laughs, a sound with absolutely no humor in it. ‘Brady may be nuts, but he worked this out pretty good, don’t you think?’

Hodges says, ‘Turn it off.’

‘Sure. When you promise to protect me.’

Jerome, who has firsthand experience with how fast the Zappits work and what unpleasant ideas they implant in a person’s mind, has no interest in standing by while Freddi tries to dicker with Bill. The Swiss Army Knife he carried on his belt while in Arizona has been retrieved from his luggage and is now back in his pocket. He unfolds the biggest blade, shoves the repeater off its shelf, and slices the cables mating it to Freddi’s system. It falls to the floor with a moderate crash, and an alarm begins to bong from the CPU under the desk. Holly bends down, pushes something, and the alarm shuts up.

‘There’s a switch, moron!’ Freddi shouts. ‘You didn’t have to do that!’

‘You know what, I did,’ Jerome says. ‘One of those fucking Zappits almost got my sister killed.’ He steps toward her, and Freddi cringes back. ‘Did you have any idea what you were doing? Any fucking idea at all? I think you must have. You look stoned but not stupid.’

Freddi begins to cry. ‘I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to.’

Hodges takes a deep breath, which reawakens the pain. ‘Start from the beginning, Freddi, and take us through it.’

‘And as quickly as you can,’ Holly adds.

Jamie Winters was nine when he attended the ’Round Here concert at the Mac with his mother. Only a few subteen boys were there that night; the group was one of those dismissed by most boys his age as girly stuff. Jamie, however, liked girly stuff. At nine he hadn’t yet been sure that he was gay (wasn’t even sure he knew what that meant). All he knew was that when he saw Cam Knowles, ’Round Here’s lead singer, he felt funny in the pit of his stomach.