After midnight, p.18
After Midnight, page 18
“Normal” people walked around all day with their shields up but their guard down, convinced of their own invincibility for no good reason.
For people like Milo, the reality was the opposite. When you lived on the street, there was no opportunity to become soft if you expected to survive. Every day was a struggle, every meal’s availability a questionable concept, each night’s sleep restless and guarded.
A large percentage of the homeless population suffered from mental illness and/or addiction. But the ones who survived possessed an almost feral quality, an animal-like cunning. The rest were swallowed up quickly by the casual brutality of life on the street.
Milo had been far above the typical street person on the evolutionary chain. He suffered from no addictions, at least none of the chemical kind, and while he fully recognized that his unusual “hobby” was likely an indication of mental illness—sociopathy if not full-fledged psychopathy—he didn’t consider that factor to be a negative.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Milo Cain had lived on the streets because he chose to live on the streets, not because he had no reasonable alternative. And what some would consider to be unhealthy choices—his compulsion to cut and stab and pierce and rend and watch in rapt fascination as the subjects of his ministrations eventually, inevitably, stopped breathing—Milo regarded as the ultimate proof of his advanced evolutionary state.
So, after prowling the streets and back alleys of Boston for so long, every day filled with life-and-death challenges, to wind up paralyzed in a hospital bed and lost inside his own head in a comatose state had been a torture worse than any he had perpetrated with blades and pliers on his unwilling victims. Milo had wished desperately for death, for a way out of the living hell that had become his existence.
Then everything changed. When he discovered his unique ability to push suggestions into people’s brains, and not only did the people accept the suggestions but then acted on them as well, Milo had instantly discovered a new lease on life.
Discovering the ability to transport himself inside The Evil Bitch Caitlyn Connelly’s head, though, was when he had truly started living again. To leave the dreary confines of Bridgewater State Hospital and his endless personal darkness behind was so liberating that it was almost as delectable as the realization he could still destroy The Evil Bitch’s life and then, once she was out of the way, move on to bigger and better adventures.
So to be fortunate enough to escape his dying body and then take up residence inside the head of the person who had suffocated him should have been the adventure of a lifetime. Not only did the unlikely situation represent the ultimate opportunity for revenge, but it kept him here, on earth, where he would continue to wreak havoc.
But this wasn’t the adventure of a lifetime. This was sheer torture. Riding in a taxi, heading to the airport—Providence, not Boston, a bit of misdirection the police would never expect from the old bird Virginia Ayers, and one for which his former status as a decade-long outlaw gave him an appreciation that would have been lost on most people—was just about the most uninteresting thing he could imagine.
On the other hand, this boring slice of middle-class travel hell gave Milo plenty of time to think. And that was something he desperately needed to do.
Because he had a problem. A big one.
He had escaped the destruction of his physical body through sheer dumb luck—with the lights going out he had done the only thing he could think of at the time—but while the result had been satisfactory, it represented at best no more than a temporary reprieve.
He was alive, if you could call it that, inside a sick old woman’s head. She was not even sixty, but looked and acted decades older. And she was clearly on the downhill slide. There was no telling how long it would be before her heart simply exploded inside her old biddy chest.
And when she croaked, then what? The only heads he had been able to jump into were those of blood relatives: Caitlyn, his sister, and Virginia, his mother. He was committed with all his heart to the destruction of The Evil Bitch, so after he eliminated her, and then Mommy Dearest’s physical deterioration was complete and her stain was finally removed from the earth, what would happen to Milo?
He chewed on the problem as the miles flew by. Soon they would arrive at the airport in Providence, and a couple of short hours after that they would be in Tampa.
Where Caitlyn was.
He couldn’t wait to see Caitlyn. Couldn’t wait to end her existence.
This was his dilemma. The smart move would be to swallow his hatred of her and allow her to live. Suck it up and deal with the unquenchable fury he felt whenever he saw her or even thought about her. By allowing Connelly to live, he could live on as well. It was the only reasonable strategy. Occupy Mommy Dearest’s head until her inevitable end, and then jump into The Evil Bitch’s skull when the old lady croaked.
There was only one problem with that strategy, but it was a big one. Potentially a deal breaker. Caitlyn Connelly made his skin crawl. From the very moment he had first laid eyes on her, Milo had despised the little bitch with an intensity that had shocked even him.
He hated everything about her, from her perfect skin to her lovely figure to her smug self-assurance to her success in life to her wannabe-hero boyfriend. Everything. He was certain if he knew more about her, he would hate those things, too.
The notion of spending several decades trapped inside her head was simply more than he could bear. It would drive him mad. It was unacceptable.
But if nothing else, Milo Cain had always been one adaptable motherfucker. Working the system was how he had lived his entire life, and he wasn’t about to stop now.
There was an answer to this little conundrum, he was sure of it. All he had to do was keep working the issue and eventually the solution would present itself. It always had.
In the meantime, Milo was content to look out through the rheumy eyes of his murderer as she left Massachusetts behind and made her escape. The old broad had shown a lot more gumption than he would ever have given her credit for, and while he couldn’t say he was exactly happy to have had the life choked out of him by his own mother, it was an eye-opening experience, no pun intended.
After more than thirty years walking this earth, most of it feeling as unconnected to the rest of the human race as an alien from outer space, Milo had finally learned where he had picked up his penchant for killing.
From Dear Old Mom.
37
Cait barely noticed the phone when it started ringing. The sound was irrelevant, like the buzzing of a mosquito just as she was about to fall asleep, back in the days when she actually could sleep.
She was still seated at her kitchen table. She tried to figure out how long she had been zoned out here and realized she couldn’t. But that was fine, because what difference did it make, anyway?
An old rock album her adoptive dad used to listen to flashed into her head. It was by John Mellencamp and was titled Nothin’ Matters and What If It Did? She was starting to understand the sentiment.
The phone continued to ring and Cait continued not to answer it. After the prescribed six rings, the answering machine clicked on and Cait heard herself say, “Kevin and I are either not here or too busy to get to the phone right now. Please leave a message, and we’ll call you back as soon as we can. Unless you’re a telemarketer, in which case, go away and don’t call back.”
The message made her heart ache, as did just about everything else in this apartment. She had recorded the message with Kevin sitting next to her goading her on. He laughed like hell when she added the business about the telemarketers, because it had been so unlike her. Uptight lawyer chick telling the telemarketers off.
Now, as she listened, Cait made a mental note to change the message. It reminded her too much of Kevin to leave it. Maybe she would simply unplug the damn answering machine, ignore the phone, and hope people would eventually get tired of calling and leave her alone.
Right now, though, the machine rolled through its spiel and after the beep, Cait heard the voice of her mother through the tinny speaker. She sounded tired, stressed. “Hello, Caitlyn, are you there, honey? Please pick up if you are.”
She sighed and pushed back from the table. She reached for the phone and glanced at the clock, shocked to discover she had been sitting immobile for more than three hours. Her back ached. Her knees cracked as she stood.
She picked up the phone. “Hello?” Her voice sounded hollow and uninterested, even to her.
“Hello, dear, how are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” she answered automatically. “How’s your visit going?”
There was a short pause and then Virginia said, “I’m on my way home. Remember I told you I’d call you from the airplane?”
“Oh. Yeah.” The conversation came back to her now. It felt as though it had taken place a hundred years ago. She was exhausted but couldn’t sleep, worried about Kevin but unable to do a damn thing to help him. She wondered if she would ever get a truly good night’s sleep again.
She remembered her mother asking for a ride home from the airport and she said, “What time will you be arriving in Tampa?”
“I’m not flying into Tampa. I’ll be landing at Sarasota in exactly two hours, as long as the flight doesn’t get delayed.”
“Sarasota? Why aren’t you coming into Tampa? Couldn’t you get a flight?”
“It’s complicated,” she said. “I’ll explain everything when I see you.”
“Uh…okay,” Cait said, looking at the clock again and trying to figure out how long it would take to get to Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport. It was a minor relief just to be able to think about something mundane for a few seconds. “I’ll have plenty of time to make it to the airport before your arrival.”
“No, honey, I’ve changed my mind. You sound like someone who’s been up for forty-eight hours. I want you to get some rest. I’ll take a cab from the airport and come straight to your apartment. We can talk then.”
Cait blinked tiredly. Her eyes felt scratchy and her mouth dry, and she realized her mother’s forty-eight hours comment wasn’t all that far off. “No, Mom, I want to come and pick you up. I need to get out. It’ll be good to have something to do, and I’m fine to drive, I promise. I’ll grab a coffee on the way and I’ll be good as new.”
Virginia blew out a breath. It was clear she was unconvinced. “I suppose,” she said, “but if you change your mind, just text me. Taking a cab would be absolutely no problem.”
That wasn’t going to happen. She agreed to let her mother know if she changed her mind, only to ease her concerns. But now that she had said it, Cait really did believe that she needed to get out, to get moving, to do something, even if it was something as simple as driving to Sarasota and back. It might not make her feel better, and it certainly wasn’t going to make her any less frightened—she doubted the fear would ever go away until Milo finally got what he wanted and put her in the ground—but sitting at her kitchen table like an extra from Night of the Living Dead wasn’t accomplishing anything, either.
She hung up the phone and sat for another minute, elbows on the table, chin in her hands. Then she got up with a sigh and started getting ready to go out.
38
Virginia stared at her cell phone for a long time after hanging up with Cait. Her daughter sounded nothing like the person she had gotten to know so well over the last six months. Following the violent confrontation with Milo Cain last summer, during which Cait had been brutalized and disfigured, Virginia had wondered whether her personality would be forever altered.
But although she had suffered through painful skin grafts and a long and still-ongoing recovery, Cait had for the most part responded well. Bouts of insomnia came and went, as did the occasional nightmare, but Caitlyn had focused on her career and her relationship with Kevin, and her basic optimistic nature had remained intact.
This was different. By focusing his destructive power on Kevin, Milo had wounded Cait in the worst possible way. Her physical injuries were relatively minor, at least compared to last summer, but having to watch her lover’s life and career be torn apart was devastating to her.
And she blamed herself. She was adrift, wracked by guilt and tortured by fear. She was convinced Milo Cain would not stop until he had ruined everything in her life and then killed her, and nothing Virginia had seen to this point had given her any reason to question Caitlyn’s theory.
Hence, Virginia’s visit to Bridgewater State Hospital and her attempt to solve the problem, an attempt that had only complicated matters even more.
But although Virginia knew Milo was lurking inside her head, waiting like a coiled cobra to strike, she knew also that as much as he sometimes seemed omnipotent, he most certainly was not. Maybe he could latch onto her sight like some kind of human leech to see the world through her eyes, but he could not read her mind. He could not know what she was thinking or planning.
In a way, this morning’s trip to Bridgewater had been liberating. She would never be able to overcome the grief and revulsion she felt at suffocating her own child while he lay alone and helpless, chained to a hospital bed, but she was comfortable with her decision. At peace. She would do whatever it took to protect Caitlyn.
The muted hum of a dozen individual conversations wafted around Virginia as the plane cruised straight and level down the East Coast. Her concern about what Milo might do next, what suggestion he might decide to push into some innocent bystander’s head just for fun was tempered with her certainty of his one overriding aim: to destroy his twin sister.
To that end, he was not about to direct the pilots to fly the plane into the ground, or to force a passenger to leap out of his seat and attack a flight attendant, holding a pen to her throat while screaming that he was hijacking the plane to Cuba. None of those things would get him any closer to realizing his goal, and Milo Cain was nothing if not dogged and single-minded.
So for now, Virginia felt no particular anxiety. That would change when she got on the ground in Florida, of course, especially if Cait kept to her word and drove out to Sarasota to pick her up. Then things might get dicey.
But Virginia had been using her anonymity and the solitude of the Boeing 757, three-quarters filled with strangers, to do a lot of thinking. She was starting to believe she had a pretty good handle on Milo’s destructive new abilities, the ones he had only developed since being shot in the face.
Her first and most obvious theory regarding her son was that whatever psychic wavelength Milo was using to push suggestions into people’s heads was useless when dealing with his own bloodline. It had to be true, otherwise he would simply have pushed a suggestion into Cait’s head that she kill herself and been done with it.
The intensity with which Milo hated his twin sister left no room for doubt on that score. If he could have forced her death by her own hand, he would have done so. This also explained why he wouldn’t have simply implanted a suggestion into Virginia’s mind to kill Cait. They spent so much time together now that it would have been a simple thing to do.
If he could have.
As the plane floated south, oblivious passengers dozing or reading or chatting or watching a movie, Virginia mulled over the precious few bits of information she possessed. She looked at them from as many different angles as she could conceive and tried to think the way Milo Cain would think, as awful as that seemed.
And she began developing a plan. She didn’t know much, but it might be just enough to allow her to take action. It would be up to her to end the nightmare and, in so doing, protect Caitlyn. No one else could do it.
On reflection, that seemed only fair. Fitting. She had birthed Milo Cain and, in so doing, unleashed his evil on the world, however unwittingly. It would fall to her to put a stop to it.
And she now knew how she would do it.
The Boeing 757 began descending, the skies so smooth the drop in altitude was almost imperceptible. But Virginia could feel it. The implications of that descent were huge. Soon they would be on the ground in Florida and for better or worse she would put her hastily devised plan in motion.
It wasn’t complicated. In Virginia’s experience, the best courses of action never were. In fact, her plan was damned simple. There weren’t many details. But she used the rapidly evaporating time to chew at those details like a dog worrying a bone.
She was playing with fire; she knew that. All of her theories regarding Milo Cain’s destructive abilities were just that—theories. Milo was inside her head now, with no body, no physical anchor, no place else to go. He was like a deadly cancer in her brain, waiting to strike, but instead of inflicting suffering on her, he could lash out from her head at anyone she spoke to or looked at as they passed on the street.
He was a ticking time bomb. If her theories about what he could and could not do were wrong, even if she misjudged just a little, the result could be a barrage of devastation and suffering more horrifying than anything she could imagine.
But she had to try. She was inextricably linked to one of the most dangerous and frightening men in America, and she was the only person alive who even stood a chance of bringing his reign of terror to a close.
If only she could reach inside and summon the courage her plan would require.
39
Virginia pulled her wheeled suitcase behind her as she walked through the terminal building. The sense of calm she experienced on board the flight from Massachusetts had vanished, disappearing in the knowledge of how much damage Milo could do in this crowd of people if he chose to.
She spotted Cait almost immediately upon exiting the jetway. Even though she had known her daughter was depressed and exhausted from the earlier phone call, she recoiled in surprise at exactly how depressed and exhausted she looked. Cait’s face was pale and drawn, and she moved with the tired, deliberate motions of someone twice her age.
