The Blue Nowhere

of her excavation programs just yet. He sat down and said, “As far as we know the Trapdoor demon hasn’t self-destructed. I’m going to try to find out where it’s resident in the system.”
    Nolan looked around the damp, gothic room. “Feels like we’re in The Exorcist . . . . Spooky atmosphere and demonic possession.”
    Gillette gave a faint smile. He powered up the computer and examined the main menu. He then loaded various applications—a word processor, a spreadsheet, a fax program, a virus checker, some disk-copying utilities, some games, some Web browsers, a password-cracking program that Jamie had apparently written (some very robust code-writing for a teenager, Gillette noticed).
    As he typed he’d stare at the screen, watching how soon the character he typed would appear in the glowing letters on the monitor. He’d listen to the grind of the hard drive to see if it was making any sounds that were out of sync with the task it was supposed to be performing at that moment.
    Patricia Nolan sat close to him, also gazing at the screen.
    “I can feel the demon,” Gillette whispered. “But it’s odd—it seems to move around. It jumps from program to program. As soon as I open one it slips into the software—maybe to see if I’m looking for it. When it decides that I’m not, it leaves. . . . But it has to be resident somewhere.”
    “Where?” Bishop asked.
    “Let’s see if we can find out.” Gillette opened and closed a dozen programs, then a dozen more, all the while typing furiously. “Okay, okay. . . . This is the most sluggish directory.” He looked over a list of files then gave a cold laugh. “You know where Trapdoor hangs out?”
    “Where?”
    “The games folder. At the moment it’s in the Solitaire program.”
    “What?”
    “The card game.”
    Sanchez said, “But games come with almost every computer sold in America.”
    Nolan said, “That’s probably why Phate wrote the code that way.”
    Bishop shook his head. “So anybody with a game on his computer could have Trapdoor in it?”
    Nolan asked, “What happens if you disabled Solitaire or erased it?”
    They debated this for a moment. Gillette was desperately curious about how Trapdoor worked and wanted to extract the demon and examine it. If they deleted the game program the demon might kill itself—but knowing that this would destroy it would give them a weapon; anyone who suspected the demon was inside could simply remove the game.
    They decided to copy the contents of the hard drive from the computer Jamie had used and then Gillette would delete Solitaire and they’d see what happened.
    Once Sanchez was finished copying the contents Gillette erased the Solitaire program. But he noticed a faint delay in the delete operation. He tested various programs again then laughed bitterly. “It’s still there. It jumped to another program and’s alive and well. How the hell does it do that?” The Trapdoor demon had sensed its home was about to be destroyed and had delayed the delete program just long enough to escape from the Solitaire software to another program.
    Gillette stood up and shook his head. “There’s nothing more I can do here. Let’s take the machine back to CCU and—”
    There was a blur of motion as the door to the computer room swung open fast, shattering glass. A raging cry filled the room and a figure charged up to the computer. Nolan dropped to her knees, giving a faint scream of surprise.
    Bishop was knocked aside. Linda Sanchez fumbled for her gun.
    Gillette dove for cover just as the chair swung past his head and crashed into the monitor he’d been sitting at.
    “Jamie!” the assistant principal cried sharply. “No!”
    But the boy drew back the heavy chair and slammed it into the monitor again, which imploded with a loud pop and scattered glass shards around them. Smoke rose from the carcass of the unit.
    The administrator grabbed the chair and ripped it from Jamie’s hand, pulling the boy aside and shoving him to the floor. “What the hell are you doing, mister?”
    The boy scrambled to his feet, sobbing, and made another grab for the computer. But Bishop and the administrator restrained him. “I’m going to smash it! It killed him! It killed Mr. Boethe!”
    The assistant principal shouted, “You cut that out this minute, young man! I’m not going to have that kind of behavior in my students.”
    “Get your fucking hands off me!” the boy raged. “It killed him and I’m