Blood Pact

replaced Donald Li's face with her own. "We have to do something.”

    Celluci continued to stare in the direction of the box. "Do what?" he demanded harshly.

    Vicki fought the urge to turn and run, thankful Celluci seemed frozen to the spot because she didn't have the strength to stop them both. "What he asks. We have to kill him.”

    "If he's alive, killing him is murder. If he's dead . . .”

    "He's dead, Mike. He says himself he'd dead. Can you walk away and leave him like that?”

    She felt the shudder run down the length of his body and barely heard his answer.

    "Vicki, we're out of our depth here." This was the stuff of nightmares. Not demons or werewolves or mummies or a four-hundred-and-fifty-year-old romance writer, this. He'd thought that thirteen years of police work had equipped him to deal with anything and that the events of the last year had covered everything else. He'd been wrong. "I can't . . .”

    "We have to."

    “Why?” Weighed down by horror, his voice hardly rose above a whisper.

    "Because we found him. Because we're all he has.”

    There's a whole world out there. Let someone else deal with it. But when he turned and looked down into Vicki's face, he couldn't say it. He recognized the look of someone very nearly at the end of her resources, someone who'd been hit too hard and too often, but he also recognized the determined set to her jaw. She couldn't walk away leaving Donald Li trapped in his prison of dead meat. He couldn't walk away and leave her. Although he had to force his mouth to form the words, he asked, "How do we do it?”

    Speaking slowly, if she lost control even a little she'd lose it all-Vicki laid out what they knew. "He's dead. We know it. He says so. But his . . ." Twentieth-century attitudes added difficulty to expressing what was so terrifyingly clear. ". . . his soul is trapped. Why?
    The only difference between this corpse and any other . . ." Except my mother's. She felt herself begin to slide toward the edge. No!
    Don't think of that now. ". . . is that someone has given it an artificial resemblance to life. That has to be why he's trapped.”

    "So we unhook his life support?”

    "Yeah. I guess.”

    "Vicki. One of us has to be sure .”

    She lifted her head and met his gaze.

    After a moment, he nodded. "Let's do it.”

    It didn't take long for them to unhook the tubes and hoses, training and practice shoehorning distance in between what had to been done and feelings about doing it. Neither of them touched the body any more than was absolutely necessary. When they'd finished, although Donald Li said nothing, they saw him still staring up out of dead eyes and knew it hadn't been enough.

    "We should've known. The others are up and walking around.”

    Then Vicki found the input jack hidden under a thick fringe of hair and traced the cable back to the computer. She squinted at Catherine's message on the screen and tried to keep her hands from shaking just long enough to work the keyboard.

    "It seems to be loading programming into . . ." There was only one place it could be loading programming. "Okay. Odds are good that if programming can be loaded, it can also be erased." Wiping her palms on her thighs, she dropped into the chair.

    "You sure you know what you're doing?" Celluci asked, grateful for an excuse to walk away from the horror in the box. "This setup's more complicated than the gear you've got at home.”

    "How complicated can it be?" Vicki muttered, making a note of the destination file. "It all comes down to ones and zeros.
    Besides," she added grimly, hitting the reset button, "how could I possibly make it any worse?”

    She scanned the main menu. "Mike, what does initialize mean to you?”

    "Something to do with starting up?”

    "That's what I thought." Under the list of things that could be initialized was the destination code the program had been downloading into.

    "Well?”

    "I just told it to reinitialize Donald's brain.”

    "And?”

    "And that should wipe it clean.”

    "Are you sure?”

    "No, but I wiped my hard drive that way once." Shoving the chair back from the desk, Vicki stood and pushed at her glasses.
    "Hopefully, it'll release him.”

    "And if it doesn't?”

    She shook her head. "I don't know." If it didn't work, they'd have to leave him there and hope that as the body slowly decayed so would whatever held him to it. To know you're dead. To watch your body rot. To have that be your only hope. . . . She clamped