Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester by J. Gregory Keyes Page B

bit.
    “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
    “You know,” Bester observed, “you were cheated. This is a cheap Cote Du Ron, rebottled. I would say you paid ninety-five credits too much.”
    “You’ve got about six seconds to live, old man.”
    “Oh, I don’t think so.”
    He took another sip of wine.
    With a sort of animal growl, Jem jumped forward, swinging the gun at Bester’s face like a club. Bester seized his voluntary nervous system and watched him go down, felt the bright tinkle of pain, like the sound of glass breaking. Only it was Jem’s nose that had broken, on the parquet floor. And several of his teeth.
    “Yes, please, make yourself comfortable,” Bester said.
    “We have a long night ahead of us. At the end of it you will be dead, but I intend to take my time about it. It’s so rare I get to do this, these days.”
    He took another sip of the wine, rubbed his good hand on his permanently clenched one.
    “Shall we begin?”
    He had frozen Jem’s vocal cords, so all the thug could make was a sort of clucking noise. But his brain-ah, that was filled with panic, with a beautiful sort of terror.
    Just a bad trip, Jem was telling himself. Not real…
    Bester inserted his thoughts like a scalpel into butter.
    No, I’m afraid not. This is more real than you can imagine.
    And with the scalpel he began to cut, to whittle Jem away, piece by piece.
    He made sure that the thug felt himself die, watched what he had lost slip away. His wide eyes faded and misted, his throat pulsed with the urge to scream, but Bester wouldn’t give him that.
    And then he was dead, though his body was still working. Everything that had actually been Jem was cut away from him.
    Bester took a break, sipping a little more wine while the breathing corpse stared at the ceiling. He moved away, since Jem’s bowels and bladder had emptied themselves, opened a window for a bit of fresh air. He stretched, tried to work the crick out of his neck, flipped on the TV to see what, if anything, had been reported about the fire. It got a ten-second spot on the local update. The footage showed the hotel, Louise, the fire trucks, but he didn’t see himself.
    He went to the kitchen and made some coffee, then returned to where the body lay, specter-eyed. Then, with due consideration, he started putting Jem back together.
     

     
    It was almost morning when he returned to the hotel. The broken window had been boarded up. He used his key to open the door and was greeted with a pungent, wet, burned smell.
    A single lamp was on, on one of the unburnt tables. Louise sat in its light, an empty bottle of wine in front of her. She looked up wearily.
    “You’ve made other arrangements, I take it, and come to get your things?”
    “No. I thought I would get some sleep, instead.”
    She shook her head.
    “The hotel is closed.”
    “Why? The damage is only cosmetic.”
    “There’s nothing cosmetic about a firebomb tossed through the window.”
    “You don’t want to close the hotel.”
    “Who are you to tell me what I want? You know nothing of me.”
    “I know the woman I first saw, defending what was hers. I know she would not give in so easily.”
    “There’s nothing easy about it. About any of it. For five years I’ve tried to keep this place going. Five years, watching my savings dwindle. It’s enough. I’m finished.”
    “You don’t have the money to clean up a little fire damage?”
    “What would be the point? They’ll only do it again, or worse-unless I start paying them again, which I also can’t afford.”
    “You might be surprised.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Just that you might be surprised, that’s all. Things happen. Things change.”
    “Some things don’t.”
    She patted her hand slowly on the table.
    “You know, at first I thought you were hoping for something from me. To share my bed. Is that it? Is that why you persist?”
    “No.”
    “What, then?”
    “I need a place to stay, that’s all. And I