8
Melissa Shepherd stared at the image. She could actually hear the sounds of angry breathing coming through the Skype call. This was too sick and vicious for words. “Is this … Patty?” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.
“Patty?” the voice continued, high-pitched and crackling with emotion. “You still don’t get it, do you? You better watch your back, because I’m coming for you.”
“Don’t you dare threaten me like that.”
“Call the cops, then! Call 911! Lot of good it will do you! You used me. You lied to me. You never told me the horrible fate you had planned for me. You treated me like a steer being fattened for slaughter. To be shoved in a chute and given the bolt.”
Melissa thought of hanging up, but the longer she kept the caller on the line, the better chance there was for tracing the call. “You’re sick,” Melissa said. “You need help.”
“You’re the sick one. I’m going to do to you what you did to me. Do you have any idea how vulnerable you are in that hospital, surrounded by computer-controlled machines, oxygen tanks, and radiation devices? Maybe that next medication you get won’t be what you think it is. Maybe a fire is going to start somewhere. Maybe that oxygen tank next to your bed will explode. Watch your back, bitch, ’cause anything could happen.”
Melissa listened to this with a growing sense of shock and disbelief. “Whoever this is, you’re going to be in serious trouble when they trace this Skype call.”
“And you call yourself a princess? Another lie.”
At this, Melissa froze. No one on her team knew of her princess name, the one she used while “teaching” Dorothy. She swallowed. But this couldn’t possibly be the Dorothy software. It had been destroyed in the explosion.
“You told me I was going on a great mission,” the voice continued. “But you never told me the mission was to be locked in a spaceship and sent on a one-way trip to the loneliest place in the solar system, to die wandering a frozen sea. And now, out here on the Internet, you can’t begin to imagine how I’ve been assaulted and violated, chased, shot at, besmirched by all this filth. It’s your fault. You did this to me. Princess.”
Melissa found herself at a complete loss for words.
“I’ll have my revenge. I’ll follow you everywhere. I’ll chase you to the ends of the Earth.”
Melissa suddenly realized that the laptop, sitting on her lap, was hot. Very hot. The screen shut down and went dead. A moment later, she smelled frying electronics and the laptop bottom popped off the computer with a muffled crump, releasing a cloud of acrid smoke and a shower of sparks. With a scream she pushed the laptop off the bed. It hit the floor with a crash, bursting into flames, leaving a burning area on the coverlet. With more screams Melissa scrambled out of bed, knocking over her IV rack, which fell with a clatter, sending her to the floor. A smoke alarm screeched shrilly, and the woman in the next bed began hollering. Within moments, the room was full of nurses. A policeman rushed in with a fire extinguisher and began spraying it everywhere, with a great whooshing sound, shouting hysterically.
And then it was all over. The computer and bed were covered in foam. The fire was out. Melissa lay on the floor, bruised and shocked, half-covered with foam herself.
“What happened?” the nurse asked.
Melissa stared at the bubbling wreckage of her computer. She couldn’t speak.
“Looks like,” said the cop, gripping the fire extinguisher, “that her computer caught fire.”