The Key to Midnight

chair crashed over backward.
        Even as Paz went down, Carrera sprang to his feet.
        That mysterious inner voice whispered to Alex again, Kill him. Before he could think about what he was doing, he obeyed, squeezing the trigger twice more.
        One of the rounds hit Carrera, and he fell.
        Shocked, wide-eyed, terrified, the senator backed away. He held his hands out in front of him, palms toward Alex, fingers spread, as if he thought he might be able to ward off the bullets meant for him.
         Kill him.
        Alex heard the interior voice again, icy and insistent, but he hesitated. Bewildered. Shaking.
        He tried to think through to another, less violent solution: Paz and Carrera had been dangerous men, but they were dead, no longer any threat, and the senator wasn't a threat either, just a broken man, a pitiful specimen, begging for his life, so there was no need to waste him, no justification for it.
         Kill him, kill him, kill him, killhim, killhim.
        Alex couldn't resist that inner voice, and again he squeezed the trigger twice.
        Hit once in the chest, Chelgrin fell backward into the window. His head struck the glass, and one of the thick panes cracked. He dropped to the floor and was as still as stone.
        'Oh, God,' Alex said, and stared at the hand in which he held the gun, as if he couldn't quite believe that it was his own hand. He was out of control, acting before thinking. 'What am I doing? What am I doing?'
        The fat man was still in his chair on the far side of the table. 'The terrible angel of vengeance,' he said with a smile. He appeared to be delighted.
        Bloody but not mortally wounded after all, Carrera launched up from the floor, seized a chair, and threw it.
        Alex fired, missed.
        The chair struck him as he tried to dodge it. Pain speared through his right arm. The pistol flew out of his hand and across the room, clattered off the wall. He staggered backward, collided with the door, and Carrera charged him.

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    71
        
        Gleaming, cold, humming, clicking, the steel hand caressed her. Squeezed her. Patted, stroked, pinched her. Click, click, click.
        She was impressed by her own courage. She didn't flinch. She endured Rotenhausen's obscene explorations and pretended to be doped. She mumbled, murmured, sometimes feigned a dreamy pleasure at his touch, occasionally warned him off as if she had briefly surfaced from her delirium, but then drifted away again.
        She'd just about decided that he was never going to stop petting her with that monstrous hand, when he finally reached across her and disengaged the strap on her right wrist. He freed her left hand as well, and then he moved to the foot of the bed to release her ankles. She was unbound.
        He returned to the head of the bed.
        She still did not make a break for freedom.
        Taking off his white smock and draping it across the cart that held the syringes and other instruments, he said, 'I remember you so well. I remember… how you felt.' He took off his shirt.
        Through half-closed eyes, Joanna studied the mechanical hand. A flexible steel-ring cable trailed up from the metal wrist and terminated in a pair of male jacks that were plugged into a battery pack. The pack was strapped to his biceps.
        'This will be better even than before,' he said. 'With your father just downstairs.'
        Joanna seized the cable and tore the jacks out of the battery pack. The steel metal fingers froze. She rolled away from Rotenhausen. Naked, she dropped off the other side of the bed and ran for the door.
        He caught her with his real hand as she touched the dead-bolt lock. Clenching a handful of her hair, he spun her around to face him, and his pale eyes were full of inhuman menace.
        Screaming in pain and fear, she flailed at him, and her fists landed with satisfyingly hard, flat sounds.
        Rotenhausen cursed her, dragged her from the door, and shoved her away.
        She collided with the bed. Unbalanced, she grabbed the footrail to avoid falling.
        Standing between her and the door, he plugged the jacks into the battery again. The hand purred. The steel fingers moved. Click, click, click.

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    72
        
        Carrera came low and fast, like a human locomotive.
        Without the pistol, Alex had no chance to get the best of the powerful bodybuilder. He had some