After waiting on pins and needles, I now present the conclusion to this wild, exciting story!
Waking the Dead Part Ten
Rated R (Conclusion)
He couldn’t move again. No matter how much MacGyver struggled, his body remained motionless and stiff. His jaws and eyes were once again clamped tightly shut, preventing him from crying out or seeing. A heavy weight felt as if it was crushing his chest, and he felt that he had been placed inside a tiny compartment, the walls closing in around him, further restricting any possible movement he might attempt. Murdoc’s maniacal laughter echoed around him, followed by the sound of dirt thudding on top of him. He was being buried alive again! Somehow, Murdoc had once again managed to escape death, and he had found MacGyver, injecting him with the hateful poison to finish what he had begun.
No! No…please…no! No! “No!” MacGyver shouted.
He shot up in his bed, his eyes darting wildly around his room, trying to reorient himself to his surroundings. Gasping and shuddering, profuse sweat rolling down his face and soaking his sheets, he clutched them tightly as if for security, knotting and twisting them in his hands, trying to remain upright and calm himself. The house boat was dark and silent, rocking gently in the water, working to ease him back into reality, the comfort of his home base slowly relaxing him.
“MacGyver!” Pete shouted from downstairs. He had been staying with MacGyver at the house boat since his release from the hospital as a precaution, despite his friend’s objections. His heavy footsteps pounded on the spiral staircase as he ran, hurrying into MacGyver’s bedroom. Quickly, he switched on the light, seeing his friend looking pale and terrified, staring blankly ahead. “MacGyver, are you all right? Was it another nightmare?”
“Yeah,” MacGyver said, sighing. “Accompanied by sleep paralysis.”
“Sleep paralysis?”
“It’s common during REM sleep,” MacGyver said. “The theory is the brain paralyzes the body during the dream state to prevent injury from excessive movement that could be made to act out the dream. Sometimes, the person awakens and finds that they’re still paralyzed, and it can last for a few seconds to a few minutes. You…hallucinate vividly during sleep paralysis. I thought I heard the sounds of Murdoc…burying me alive. I couldn’t move again, Pete. It all seemed so real. I…I was…well, I was terrified.”
“I can imagine,” Pete said, sitting beside him on the bed, placing his arm around him for support.
MacGyver buried his face in his hands. He rubbed it and then moved his hands back to his sweat matted, unruly hair, pushing it back. Once he was done, he dropped his arms into his lap.
“I wouldn’t have needed to suffer from sleep paralysis to make it any less frightening or real though,” he said, his dark, intense eyes staring ahead again at some distant point. “I keep reliving what I went through, how close I came to being lost forever…” he looked at Pete, sadness in his eyes. “I’m still traumatized by it. Maybe I do need you here for awhile after all, to help me through this.”
Pete pulled MacGyver closer to him in a hug. “I’ll stay here as long as you want me to,” he said.
“Thanks, Pete,” MacGyver said, managing a small smile.
“The important thing now is that Murdoc is dead. It’s confirmed. We can finally close our files on him, and he can no longer harm you.”
“I still can’t believe it,” MacGyver said, closing his eyes, remembering the white sheet being draped over his body.
“I know. I can’t, either, but he is officially dead, no doubt about it this time. We have his body as evidence. You did it. You killed him, and he’s gone, never to stalk or torment you again.”
“It’s a funny thing,” MacGyver said, looking at Pete again. “A part of me doesn’t want to believe he’s dead, even though we’ll all be better off now that he is.”
“I know what you mean. All these years, you’ve waited for him to die, only to learn that once again he slipped away from us. Now that he won’t come back, you find that disappointing as well. You’re not used to the outcome. It feels unnatural to you.”
MacGyver’s lips quirked into a grin. “Quite a contradiction, isn’t it?” He asked.
Pete shrugged. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Consider that you got used to him resurrecting. You kept expecting him to return. It became a normal routine with him. It was what was expected. It was unpleasant, but expected. You braced yourself for his next visit. Now that he’s actually dead, it’s going to take awhile to get used to the idea, especially since all those other times it appeared to be so impossible that he would ever die. You won’t have the strange feeling of lying in wait anymore, preparing for his next strike against you. You can relax, and even that might feel unusual for awhile.”
“I guess so,” MacGyver said. “For awhile, it took me some time to get used to him coming back to life on a regular basis. Now, I’ll just have to get used to him finally being dead.”
“That’s right.”
“I never thought I would want to see another person dead in my life, but Murdoc…I always wanted him dead. He was the only person I had no compassion for, feeling no reason for him to be alive. Pete, he made me get in touch with my most loathsome feelings. It was almost as if…he brought out something evil in me, as well. Am I wrong for wanting him dead?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Pete said. “Listen, he put you through undeserved hell for several years. It was about time he was killed in order to leave you some peace.”
MacGyver nodded, staring at the floor and working his jaw in contemplation. Pete could tell he was still uptight, and he knew that his friend wouldn’t be able to fully relax for some time. After all, he had just endured something unimaginable, something nobody had ever undergone before. He had almost been buried alive, and his body had been tested and paralyzed for days, pushing it to the limits of survivability. On top of it all, he had succeeded in killing Murdoc, and although he was relieved, a part of him felt strangely conflicted about it as well. It was normal and expected that he would remain in shock for some time, desperately trying to grapple with everything he had experienced, trying to make some kind of sense out of it and unsure if he ever would.
“Dr. Carr is getting closer to learning the composition of the chemical that Murdoc used to poison you,” he said, trying to offer MacGyver more good news. “He says that eventually he even hopes to develop an antidote, so that other victims won’t have to suffer as long as you did.”
MacGyver looked down at his fingers and watched them wiggle. Even that small action made him smile. His body was once again under the command of his mind, not disconnected from it. The whole process of transitioning from complete immobility to being restored to full life, while terrifying, was still amazing to him.
“That’s great, Pete,” he said.
The phone rang shrilly, disrupting the peace of the house boat. MacGyver looked at Pete, his eyes filled with alarm, already sensing and dreading the worst.
“I’m sure it’s only Dr. Carr with more information on the poison,” Pete said, placing his hand on MacGyver’s leg to reassure him. “I’ll answer it, okay?”
MacGyver watched him as he left the room, remaining completely still as if he had been affected by the poison again except this time his heart hammered with fear in his chest and his breathing quickened. He knew something had gone wrong, even before Pete answered the phone.
“What? NO, that can’t be!” Pete said loudly from downstairs. “All right. I’ll have the police conduct a search for him, although I doubt it will produce any results. MacGyver? No, he’s here. He’s safe with me. He’s doing fine, although I don’t know how he’ll take this. Okay…thanks.”
After Pete hung up, the silence in the house boat that had once been peaceful now seemed ominous. Every dull, thudding step Pete took back up the stairs sounded like a death march, bringing him closer to delivering the news that MacGyver knew by now to expect, yet hearing it never made it any less shocking or any easier. When Pete reached the room again, slightly out of breath, MacGyver could see the seriousness of the situation reflected in his eyes.
“Murdoc…” MacGyver said. “Don’t tell me…”
“His body is gone, Mac. Dr. Carr tells me he doesn’t know what happened to it, or how it could have happened. He was clearly dead this time! He had to be!”
MacGyver arched an eyebrow, a thought occurring to him. “Unless…” he said.
“Unless what?”
MacGyver shuddered again with revulsion when he realized the brilliance and deviousness of Murdoc’s plan.
“He injected himself with the poison to make himself appear dead,” he said.
“But he fell out of a tall building!”
“A fall like that would kill a normal man, true…”
“But Murdoc is not normal.”
“Exactly.”
Pete sighed. “I’m sorry, Mac. I really thought he was gone this time.”
“I did, too.”
“Just to think that he’s out there, planning his next move…”
“I’ll be okay, Pete. This has happened before, after all.”
“I know, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Me, either. But it’s not as if we have many alternatives. Murdoc is out there. The game continues. Someday, we’ll win it.”
Pete nodded, but he wasn’t convinced, and he knew MacGyver wasn’t, either. All they could do was wait, uncertain about his next move.
The End
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer."
--Henry David Thoreau
brains+brawn+beauty+personality=MacGyver
Good ending! The mysterious Murdoc continues to haunt the dark corners of MacGyver's mind! 
