End of Watch

  Al enjoyed a few of the games, like the one where you had to get Pitfall Harry safely past the crevasses and poisonous snakes, but what he enjoyed most was Fishin' Hole. Not the game itself, which was stupid, but the demo screen. He supposed people would laugh, but it was no joke to Al. When he was upset about something (his brother yelling at him about not putting out the garbage for Thursday morning pickup, or a crabby call from his daughter in Oklahoma City), those slowly gliding fish and the little tune always mellowed him out. Sometimes he lost all track of time. It was amazing.

  On an evening not long before 2012 became 2013, Al had an inspiration. Hartsfield in 217 was incapable of reading, and had shown no interest in books or music on CD. If someone put earphones on his head, he clawed at them until he got them off, as if he found them confining. He would also be incapable of manipulating the small buttons below the Zappit's screen, but he could look at the Fishin' Hole demo. Maybe he'd like it, or some of the other demo screens. If he did, maybe some of the other patients (to his credit, Al never thought of them as gorks) would, too, and that would be a good thing, because a few of the brain-damaged patients in the Bucket were occasionally violent. If the demo screens calmed them down, the docs, nurses, and orderlies--even the janitors--would have an easier time.

  He might even get a bonus. It probably wouldn't happen, but a man could dream.

  *

  He entered Room 217 one afternoon in early December of 2012, shortly after Hartsfield's only regular visitor had left. This was an ex-detective named Hodges, who had been instrumental in Hartsfield's capture, although he hadn't been the one who had actually smacked his head and damaged his brain.

  Hodges's visits upset Hartsfield. After he was gone, things fell over in 217, the water turned on and off in the shower, and sometimes the bathroom door flew open or slammed shut. The nurses had seen these things, and were sure Hartsfield was causing them, but Dr. Babineau pooh-poohed that idea. He claimed it was exactly the kind of hysterical notion that got a hold on certain women (even though several of the Bucket nurses were men). Al knew the stories were true, because he had seen manifestations himself on several occasions, and he did not think of himself as a hysterical person. Quite the opposite.

  On one memorable occasion he had heard something in Hartsfield's room as he was passing, opened the door, and saw the window-blinds doing a kind of maniacal boogaloo. This was shortly after one of Hodges's visits. It had gone on for nearly thirty seconds before the blinds stilled again.

  Although he tried to be friendly--he tried to be friendly with everyone--Al did not approve of Bill Hodges. The man seemed to be gloating over Hartsfield's condition. Reveling in it. Al knew Hartsfield was a bad guy who had murdered innocent people, but what the hell did that matter when the man who had done those things no longer existed? What remained was little more than a husk. So what if he could rattle the blinds, or turn the water on and off? Such things hurt no one.

  *

  "Hello, Mr. Hartsfield," Al said on that night in December. "I brought you something. Hope you'll take a look."

  He turned the Zappit on and poked the screen to bring up the Fishin' Hole demo. The fish began to swim and the tune began to play. As always, Al was soothed, and took a moment to enjoy the sensation. Before he could turn the console so Hartsfield could see, he found himself pushing his library cart in Wing A, on the other side of the hospital.

  The Zappit was gone.

  This should have upset him, but it didn't. It seemed perfectly okay. He was a little tired, and seemed to be having trouble gathering his scattered thoughts, but otherwise he was fine. Happy. He looked down at his left hand and saw he had drawn a large Z on the back with the pen he always kept in the pocket of his tunic.

  Z for Z-Boy, he thought, and laughed.

  *

  Brady did not make a decision to leap into Library Al; seconds after the old geezer looked down at the console in his hand, Brady was in. There was no sense of being an interloper in the library guy's head, either. For now it was Brady's body, as much as a Hertz sedan would have been his car for as long as he chose to drive it.

  The library guy's core consciousness was still there--someplace--but it was just a soothing hum, like the sound of a furnace in the cellar on a cold day. Yet he had access to all of Alvin Brooks's memories and all of his stored knowledge. There was a fair amount of this latter, because before retiring from his full-time job at the age of fifty-eight, the man had been an electrician, then known as Sparky Brooks instead of Library Al. If Brady had wanted to rewire a circuit, he could have done so easily, although he understood he might no longer have this ability once he returned to his own body.

  Thinking of his body alarmed him, and he bent over the man slumped in the chair. The eyes were half-closed, showing only the whites. The tongue lolled from one corner of the mouth. Brady put a gnarled hand on Brady's chest and felt a slow rise and fall. So that was all right, but God, he looked horrible. A skin-wrapped skeleton. This was what Hodges had done to him.

  He left the room and toured the hospital, feeling a species of mad exhilaration. He smiled at everyone. He couldn't help it. With Sadie MacDonald he had been afraid of fucking up. He still was, but not so much. This was better. He was wearing Library Al like a tight glove. When he passed Anna Corey, the A Wing head housekeeper, he asked how her husband was bearing up with those radiation treatments. She told him Ellis was doing pretty well, all things considered, and thanked him for asking.

  In the lobby, he parked his cart outside the men's bathroom, went in, sat on the toilet, and examined the Zappit. As soon as he saw the swimming fish, he understood what must have happened. The idiots who had created this particular game had also created, certainly by accident, a hypnotic effect. Not everyone would be susceptible, but Brady thought plenty of people would be, and not just those prone to mild seizures, like Sadie MacDonald.

  He knew from reading he'd done in his basement control room that several electronic console and arcade games were capable of initiating seizures or light hypnotic states in perfectly normal people, causing the makers to print a warning (in extremely fine print) on many of the instruction sheets: do not play for prolonged periods, do not sit closer than three feet to the screen, do not play if you have a history of epilepsy.

  The effect wasn't restricted to video games, either. At least one episode of the Pokemon cartoon series had been banned outright when thousands of kids complained of headaches, blurred vision, nausea, and seizures. The culprit was believed to be a sequence in the episode where a series of missiles were set off, causing a strobe effect. Some combination of the swimming fish and the little tune worked the same way. Brady was surprised the company that made the Zappit consoles hadn't been deluged with complaints. He found out later that there had been complaints, but not many. He came to believe that there were two reasons for that. First, the dumbshit Fishin' Hole game itself did not have the same effect. Second, hardly anybody bought the Zappit game consoles to begin with. In the jargon of computer commerce, it was a brick.

  Still pushing his cart, the man wearing Library Al's body returned to Room 217 and placed the Zappit on the table by the bed--it merited further study and thought. Then (and not without regret) Brady left Library Al Brooks. There was that moment of vertigo, and then he was looking up instead of down. He was curious to see what would happen next.

  At first Library Al just stood there, a piece of furniture that looked like a human being. Brady reached out to him with his invisible left hand and patted his cheek. Then he reached for Al's mind with his own, expecting to find it shut to him, as Nurse MacDonald's had been once she came out of her fugue state.

  But the door was wide open.

  Al's core consciousness had returned, but there was a bit less now. Brady suspected that some of it had been smothered by his presence. So what? People killed off brain cells when they drank too much, but they had plenty of spares. The same was true of Al. At least for now.

  Brady saw the Z he had
drawn on the back of Al's hand--for no reason, just because he could--and spoke without opening his mouth.

  "Hey there, Z-Boy. Go on now. Get out. Head over to A Wing. But you won't talk about this, will you?"

  "Talk about what?" Al asked, looking puzzled.

  Brady nodded as well as he could nod, and smiled as well as he could smile. He was already wishing to be in Al again. Al's body was old, but at least it worked.

  "That's right," he told Z-Boy. "Talk about what."

  *

  2012 became 2013. Brady lost interest in trying to strengthen his telekinetic muscles. There was really no point, now that he had Al. Each time he got inside, his grip was stronger, his control better. Running Al was like running one of those drones the military used to keep an eye on the ragheads in Afghanistan . . . and then to bomb the living shit out of their bosses.

  Lovely, really.

  Once he had Z-Boy show the old Det.-Ret. one of the Zappits, hoping Hodges would become fascinated by the Fishin' Hole demo. Being inside Hodges would be wonderful. Brady would make it his first priority to pick up a pencil and poke out the old Det.-Ret.'s eyes. But Hodges only glanced at the screen and handed it back to Library Al.

  Brady tried again a few days later, this time with Denise Woods, the PT associate who came into his room twice a week to exercise his arms and legs. She took the console when Z-Boy handed it to her, and looked at the swimming fish quite a bit longer than Hodges had. Something happened, but it wasn't quite enough. Trying to enter her was like pushing against a firm rubber diaphragm: it gave a little, enough for him to glimpse her feeding her young son scrambled eggs in his high chair, but then it pushed him back out.

  She handed the Zappit back to Z-Boy and said, "You're right, they're pretty fish. Now why don't you go hand out some books, Al, and let Brady and me work on those pesky knees of his?"

  So there it was. He didn't have the same instantaneous access to others that he'd had to Al, and a little thought was all it took for Brady to understand why. Al had been preconditioned to the Fishin' Hole demo, had watched it dozens of times before bringing his Zappit to Brady. That was a crucial difference, and a crushing disappointment. Brady had imagined having dozens of drones among whom he could pick and choose, but that wasn't going to happen unless there was a way to re-rig the Zappit and enhance the hypnotic effect. Might there be such a way?

  As someone who had modified all sorts of gadgets in his time--Thing One and Thing Two, for instance--Brady believed there was. The Zappit was WiFi equipped, after all, and WiFi was the hacker's best friend. Suppose, for instance, he were to program in a flashing light? A kind of strobe, like the one that had buzzed the brains of those kids exposed to the missile-firing sequence in the Pokemon episode?

  The strobe could serve another purpose, as well. While taking a community college course called Computing the Future (this was just before he dropped out of school for good), Brady's class had been assigned a long CIA report, published in 1995 and declassified shortly after 9/11. It was called "The Operational Potential of Subliminal Perception," and explained how computers could be programmed to transmit messages so rapidly that the brain recognized them not as messages per se, but as original thoughts. Suppose he were able to embed such a message inside the strobe flash? SLEEP NOW ALL OKAY, for instance, or maybe just RELAX. Brady thought those things, combined with the demo screen's existing hypnotics, would be pretty effective. Of course he might be wrong, but he would have given his mostly useless right hand to find out.

  He doubted if he ever would, because there were two seemingly insurmountable problems. One was getting people to look at the demo screen long enough for the hypnotic effect to take hold. The other was even more basic: how in God's name was he supposed to modify anything? He had no computer access, and even if he had, what good would it be? He couldn't even tie his fucking shoes! He considered using Z-Boy, and rejected the idea almost immediately. Al Brooks lived with his brother and his brother's family, and if Al all of a sudden started demonstrating advanced computer knowledge and capability, there would be questions. Especially when they already had questions about Al, who had grown absentminded and rather peculiar. Brady supposed they thought he was suffering the onset of senility, which wasn't all that far from the truth.

  It seemed that Z-Boy was running out of spare brain cells after all.

  *

  Brady grew depressed. He had reached the all too familiar point where his bright ideas collided head-on with gray reality. It had happened with the Rolla vacuum cleaner; it had happened with his computer-assisted vehicle backing device; it had happened with his motorized, programmable TV monitor, which was supposed to revolutionize home security. His wonderful inspirations always came to nothing.

  Still, he had one human drone to hand, and after a particularly infuriating visit from Hodges, Brady decided he might cheer up if he put his drone to work. Accordingly, Z-Boy visited an Internet cafe a block or two down from the hospital, and after five minutes on a computer (Brady was exhilarated to be sitting in front of a screen again), he discovered where Anthony Moretti, aka the fat testicle-punching cocksucker, lived. After leaving the Internet cafe, Brady walked Z-Boy into an Army surplus store and bought a hunting knife.

  The next day when he left the house, Moretti found a dead dog stretched out on the welcome mat. Its throat had been cut. Written in dogblood on the windshield of his car was YOUR WIFE & KIDS ARE NEXT.

  *

  Doing this--being able to do this--cheered Brady up. Payback is a bitch, he thought, and I am that bitch.

  He sometimes fantasized about sending Z-Boy after Hodges and shooting him in the belly. How good it would be to stand over the Det.-Ret., watching him shudder and moan as his life ran through his fingers!

  It would be great, but Brady would lose his drone, and once in custody, Al might point the police at him. There was something else, as well, something even bigger: it wouldn't be enough. He owed Hodges more than a bullet in the belly followed by ten or fifteen minutes of suffering. Much more. Hodges needed to live, breathing toxic air inside a bag of guilt from which there was no escape. Until he could no longer stand it, and killed himself.

  Which had been the original plan, back in the good old days.

  No way, though, Brady thought. No way to do any of it. I've got Z-Boy--who'll be in an assisted living home if he keeps on the way he's going--and I can rattle the blinds with my phantom hand. That's it. That's the whole deal.

  But then, in the summer of 2013, the dark funk he'd been living in was pierced by a shaft of light. He had a visitor. A real one, not Hodges or a suit from the District Attorney's office, checking to see if he had magically improved enough to stand trial for a dozen different felony crimes, the list headed by eight counts of willful murder at City Center.

  There was a perfunctory knock at the door, and Becky Helmington poked her head in. "Brady? There's a young woman here to see you. Says she used to work with you, and she's brought you something. Do you want to see her?"

  Brady could think of only one young woman that might be. He considered saying no, but his curiosity had come back along with his malice (perhaps they were even the same thing). He gave one of his floppy nods, and made an effort to brush his hair out of his eyes.

  His visitor entered timidly, as if there might be hidden mines under the floor. She was wearing a dress. Brady had never seen her in a dress, would have guessed she didn't even own one. But her hair was still cropped close to her skull in a half-assed crewcut, as it had been when they had worked together on the Discount Electronix Cyber Patrol, and she was still as flat as a board in front. He remembered some comedian's joke: If no tits count for shit, Cameron Diaz is gonna be around for a long time. But she had put on a little powder to cover her pitted skin (amazing) and even a dash of lipstick (more amazing still). In one hand she held a wrapped package.

  "Hey, man," Freddi Linklatter said with unaccustomed shyness. "How're you doing?"

  This opened all sorts of poss
ibilities.

  Brady did his best to smile.

  BADCONCERT.COM

  1

  Cora Babineau wipes the back of her neck with a monogrammed towel and frowns at the monitor in the basement exercise room. She has done only four of her six miles on the treadmill, she hates to be interrupted, and the weirdo is back.

  Cling-clong goes the doorbell and she listens for her husband's footsteps above her, but there's nothing. On the monitor, the old man in the ratty parka--he looks like one of those bums you see standing at intersections, holding up signs that say things like HUNGRY, NO JOB, ARMY VETERAN, PLEASE HELP--just stands there.

  "Dammit," she mutters, and pauses the treadmill. She climbs the stairs, opens the door to the back hallway, and shouts, "Felix! It's your weirdo friend! That Al!"

  No response. He's in his study again, possibly looking at the game-thing he seems to have fallen in love with. The first few times she mentioned Felix's strange new obsession to her friends at the country club, it was a joke. It doesn't seem so funny now. He's sixty-three, too old for kids' computer games and too young to have gotten so forgetful, and she's begun to wonder if he might not be suffering early-onset Alzheimer's. It has also crossed her mind that Felix's weirdo friend is some kind of drug pusher, but isn't the guy awfully old for that? And if her husband wants drugs, he can certainly supply himself; according to him, half the doctors at Kiner are high at least half the time.

  Cling-clong goes the doorbell.

  "Jesus on a pony," she says, and goes to the door herself, growing more irritated with each long stride. She's a tall, gaunt woman whose female shape has been exercised nearly to oblivion. Her golf tan remains even in the depths of winter, only turning a pale shade of yellow that makes her look as if she's suffering chronic liver disease.

  She opens the door. The January night rushes in, chilling her sweaty face and arms. "I think I would like to know who you are," she says, "and what you and my husband are up to together. Would that be too much to ask?"