Rachel Caine: Two Weeks' Notice

The door was closed.

Carl walked out ten minutes later, and she sat for a while, sipping the last of her drink and feeling a little comforted by the busy, self-absorbed bustle of those around her. Like Carl, she felt like a ghost, an alien, a fake. And they come to me for help, she thought. As if I had any idea what I was doing.

Her phone rang. Oh God, it was Lynnette, again. Damn. Bryn felt a bright, sudden burst of fury, and answered. “Mrs. Renfer, I mean it. You need to stop calling—”

A scream exploded out of the phone, wordless and full of horror, and Bryn almost dropped it. “Lynnette?” She stood up, shoving the table back as she did so. Her almost-empty cup tipped over and spilled milky fluid. “Lynnette! What’s going on?”

It was chaos on the other end of the phone, screaming, shouting—a man’s voice—Lynnette begging don’t, don’t, don’t …

And then an ear-shattering blast of sound.

Lynnette’s screaming stopped.

Bryn stood very still, unable to breathe. She could still hear the man’s hoarse, half-sobbed curses.

And the sound of children crying.

And then two more quick blasts.

Only the man’s sobbing now.

And then one more blast.

And silence.

Bryn numbly hung up the call, stared at the phone a moment, then dialed Patrick McCallister’s number. He answered on the second ring.

“Lynnette Renfer,” she said. “Meet me at her house. Pat? I think it’s bad.”

He didn’t ask. He just said, “I’m on my way.”

Bryn made it to Lynnette’s small suburban home on the northern outskirts of San Diego in ten minutes, but she didn’t remember the drive. All she could hear was the sound of the crying, the shots, the silence. When she pulled in at the curb, she saw that Patrick McCallister had arrived ahead of her, in a nondescript dark sedan.

There was another car already there—like Patrick’s, it was a dark sedan, and it had a government plate on the back. Bryn wasn’t too surprised to see the front door open and Riley Block step out. “You’d better come inside,” she said to them. “This isn’t a discussion we should have in front of the neighbors.”

“Police?” Patrick asked as they crossed the threshold.

“Called off,” Riley said. Up close, Bryn could see the lines of stress around her eyes, her mouth, although she was doing a good job of holding her poker face. “It’s just us chickens. Come on. She’s going to wake up soon, and I’ll need some help.”

Riley had brought along another FBI agent Bryn didn’t know, but he was clearly read in on Pharmadene or he wouldn’t be here. He looked up and nodded as the three of them entered the Renfers’ living room, and Riley went to talk with him quietly in a corner.

Bryn didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see , but she forced herself to do it. Two small bodies lay near the sofa. Lynnette was dead on the blood-soaked cushions, the phone still clutched in her hand.

The husband, unrecognizable, lay with the shotgun fallen next to him. The place smelled like fresh hot blood, loosened bowels, gunpowder, and…obscenely…fresh cinnamon.

“He saw her cut herself and heal,” Bryn said. “Last night. She told me. I kept telling her she had to bring him in. I told her that…” She felt…well, she didn’t particularly feel anything, at the moment. Just revulsion, with an edge of horror that only sliced when she looked at the bodies straight on. So she focused on the walls. Safe enough, until she saw the big, framed formal portrait photo. Lynnette and her husband, sitting with hands clasped. The two little girls in their laps.

A simple, adorable family, glowing with happiness.

The breath went out of her in a rush, and she felt her knees start to give. Patrick’s hand was right there when she needed it, bracing her elbow, giving her an anchor to cling to as the world began to drift dizzily away.

“I was on the phone with her,” Bryn said softly. “When this happened. She was begging him not to…Why? Why would he do this?”

She thought it was a rhetorical question, but Riley answered it. “He wrote a note on his laptop, time-stamped about thirty minutes ago. According to him, this was the only way. He thought some kind of demon had taken over his wife,” Riley said. “He didn’t want it to get into him and his girls. He was so scared he thought death was better.”

For a long moment, nobody spoke, and then Patrick said, “She’s going to come around soon. It shouldn’t be here, looking at her kids.”

Bryn moved in to help. She was politely but firmly pushed back. Riley and the nameless FBI agent picked Lynnette up by the shoulders and feet and carried her off to another room—the bedroom, hopefully.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Pat said, and Bryn looked up at him, startled. “You should go. The FBI can handle this.”

“No,” she said. “Pat, I was talking to her . And he killed her. He killed himself. He killed their kids .”

“And there was nothing you could have done to stop it,” he said, and took her in his arms. She hadn’t even known she was shaking until she felt the warmth of his body against hers, and his hand cupping the back of her head. She squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in the soft material of his suit jacket. “Lynnette was supposed to tell him, but she didn’t. You tried to help her, Bryn. Some people—some people just won’t listen.”

She nodded, and after that precious moment of letting herself feel safe, she pushed back. She didn’t feel like crying, oddly enough; there were no tears in her, not for this. Just…silence. And a heavy feeling of inevitability.

“She’s going to come back any minute now,” Bryn said. He was watching her with a complicated mixture of worry and exasperation.

“You don’t have to be the one to tell her they’re gone,” he said. “Let Riley.”

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just that Riley doesn’t understand how it feels to wake up…like this. It’s not the same.”

She walked into the bedroom, and Pat didn’t try to stop her, even though she could tell he was tempted. Riley was sitting on the side of the bed, sponging blood from Lynnette’s face with a damp cloth; her eyes looked darker now, and the lines around her mouth deeper. The other agent had backed away to lean against the wall next to a dresser. A clumsy papier-mâché plaque behind him had two sets of small handprints, with names doodled on them in awkwardly shaped letters. That hurt so much that Bryn felt short of breath.

She waited with Riley as the seconds ticked by, and suddenly, Lynnette’s bloody body convulsed, thrashed, and she took in a breath so deep it seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room.

And then she shrieked.

It was a familiar scream; Bryn heard it in her head every day, that waking-nightmare sound they all made when they woke from death. Like the cry of a newborn, but filled with horror none of them could explain.

It faded, and Lynnette opened her eyes. Riley put the cloth aside. There was still a wound in Lynnette’s head, but it was closing fast now, and Bryn could almost see the silvery flash of the nanites weaving together tissue and bone.

Lynnette asked, “Ted? Where’s Teddy?”

Bryn said, “He’s in the other room, Lynn.” She kept her voice low, warm, soothing. “Give it time. Try to stay calm.”

“Teddy had a gun,” Lynnette said. “Is he okay? Is everything okay?” She reached out and grabbed Bryn’s hand with sudden strength. “Please tell me everything’s okay. I promise, I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him everything.…”

It was too late for that, and Bryn suddenly, horribly wanted to blurt that out. She was angry, she realized. Angry with Lynnette for bungling this, and angry at Teddy for descending into this hellish cauldron of lunacy. Maybe he’d been on to something about the demon possession, because she wanted so badly to lash out at those who couldn’t defend themselves.