Warren Murphy: Killer Watts

Roote picked at the corner of the box, where he'd found a weak spot in the caulking that sealed the wall to the floor.

They had created a monster.

The tattered material came loose in chunks. A monster.

Fingers worked independently of conscious thought as Roote picked at the thin line of flexible caulking. Pick, pick, pick. He rocked back and forth on his naked haunches.

Him. Elizu Roote. A monster.

The caulking came away with ease.

They had confined him here with his demons. Not even granting a merciful death to end his torment.

A yard-long section of caulking pulled up between his fingertips. Roote spun around on the cool rubber floor of the cage. In the darkness he now faced the damaged section of floor. Bracing his knuckles against the rubber matting, he brought the bare soles of his feet down sharply.

Thump!

Muted. It wouldn't even register to their ears. Thump!

A monster in a cage. Again! Thump!

He leaned forward, feeling with his fingertips. Dry. Leaned back again, bracing against the cold far wall. Again.

Thump!

He felt once more. Groping fingertips in the darkness. Did that do it?

Yes. Yes! He could feel it now. He brought his hand up to his face, touching beneath his nose. Definitely. It was on his fingertips. Water.

In the pitch-black center of his private rubber cage, Elizu Roote smiled, The chorus of voices screamed with evil joy, all focused on a single, silent thought.

Monsters sometimes escaped.

When he brought his feet down for the last time, a surge of pressurized water flooded the small cage.

THE SENSORS WERE CONNECTED to the feeding and communications tubes at the top of the submerged chamber that housed Elizu Roote. The green light had been lit for so long that Corporal Elber didn't notice right away that it had gone to red. Bored, he had been staring at the blinking lights on a phone on the other side of the monitoring bank when he gazed back at his own station.

The solitary red light flashed like a warning beacon.

The color instantly drained from the Army corporal's face. Grabbing, fumbling, he dragged the nearby long-stemmed microphone to his mouth. His shouts echoed down the sealed hallways of the Special Projects Unit.

"We've got a red light on the board! Repeat! Red light on the board!"

Even as he screamed the words, his chair was toppling over backward. While he ran to the unmarked steel door near his station, he frantically yanked his semiautomatic pistol free from his hip holster. Before he'd even punched in the proper code, civilian men in white coats were swarming in behind him.

Questions were shouted and ignored as Elber's shaking hands entered the final digits into the touch pad. The red light above the door turned green, and the men piled into the inner room, careful to stay behind Elber and his pistol.

The dimly lit inner room was as big as a gymnasium. A huge water-filled tank-large enough for a school of dolphins-rested in a metal-and-concrete base in the center of the floor. Suspended in the tank was the black rubberized box connected umbilically to the surface via a few simple tubes that were lashed together with waterproof tape. Some of the lines from these tubes ran to computerized stations at the periphery of the room.

They hadn't been monitoring in earnest for quite some time. They saw now that they probably should have been.

The seam at the bottom of the box had been broken open.

The pale, naked body of Elizu Roote bobbed at the surface of the tank. From the angle of the men in the room, he was looking down at them. He made not a move as they cautiously approached the tank, bunched up behind the corporal and his gun.

Roote's pinkish eyes were open, staring at nothing. The mouth was an empty black cavern. No bubbles escaped from between the pale, slack lips.

"Is he dead?" asked one of the five civilian scientists.

"He looks it," offered another in a whisper.

"Could I have some quiet, sir?" asked Corporal Elber of the last man who had spoken.

The corporal's breathing came with difficulty. His heart pounded as he crossed over to the side of the tank. A metal ladder scaled the high plastic wall. Gun in hand, Elber began climbing. Below him, the nervous scientists began whispering among themselves once more.

"We should have drugged the water," said one. He bit the already chewed skin around the remnants of his thumbnail.

"I suggested that," said a voice from the rear of the crowd. He was ignored.

"They said he wasn't supposed to get out," challenged yet another. He was referring to the Army Corps of Engineers, who had constructed the tank.

"They didn't even know what we were putting in there."

At this they fell silent.

Corporal Elber was at the top of the ladder by now. High above the floor, he stepped over the upper lip of the tank, placing a boot on the plastic platform connected to the interior wall. One hand trained his semiautomatic pistol squarely between Roote's shoulder blades. The fingertips of the corporal's free hand snaked slowly out to the floating body, brushing the ghostly white back.

The skin was cold and clammy. Like touching a corpse.

"He's dead!" Elber called down to the scientists. Exhaling his anxiety, the corporal holstered his gun.

Reaching, somewhat off balance, he grabbed Roote by the right bicep and tugged the limp body toward the platform.

The relief below was palpable. Two of the scientists scurried up the ladder. They joined Corporal Elber on the platform just as he was hauling Roote up from the water. He dumped the lifeless body onto its back.

"Are you going to try to revive him?" Elber asked.

The two scientists who had climbed the tank looked at one another. Their hesitation spoke volumes.

Elber paused, as well. Ordinarily he would never have let someone slip away like this without at least attempting mouth-to-mouth, but Elizu Roote was different. Elber had seen with his own two eyes the horrors the private was capable of.

After an awkward moment punctuated only by the lapping water at the edge of the big tank, one of the scientists cleared his throat. "We, um. Ahem. We should think about an autopsy."

"Mechanical failure, you think?" asked the other, as if they were discussing a defective computer sound card and not a human being.

"Could be," said the first man seriously. "I'll have to let the general know. We'll autopsy as soon as we call in the rest of the team."

"Don't I get a say?"

The three men on the platform froze. The voice had come from below them. As one, they looked down.

Elizu Roote's eyes were open, alert. Smiling. Corporal Elber was first to react. Twisting, he grabbed desperately for his gun. Another hand was already on his holster. He felt the metal pads at the fingertips.

Elber struggled, but he was fighting the strength of a madman. The hand didn't budge.

Roote sat up. "You look shocked," he said, grinning.

As he spoke, Roote swung his other hand around.

More metal pads. Elber saw them recessed into the puckered white flesh at Roote's fingertips. They took the place of fingerprints.

The fight for the gun became more frantic. As Elber struggled to remove Roote's hand from his holster, Roote placed his free hand over the corporal's chest. He looked for all the world like a faith healer at a revival meeting. The image couldn't have been further removed from reality.

As the three terrified men on the platform watched, Elizu Roote's hand jumped. What happened next would have stunned anyone outside that room.

Five blue arcs of electricity launched from each metal fingertip. The surge of raw power punched Corporal Elber solidly in the chest.

His skin had little time to singe as the powerful shock overloaded the soldier's suddenly frail heart. The pumping muscle was jolted into a burst of frenetic activity.