by A N Sandra
“Eggs aren’t vegan,” Sadie accused Doctor Justin as he bit into a huge breakfast sandwich loaded with eggs. She sipped some coffee and remembered his order. “And you didn’t go no mayo, so you’re eating eggs and mayo, which is made with eggs. You are a double egg eater!”
“Time to come clean,” Doctor Justin had a small smirk across his well-chiseled face. “I’m not really a vegan.”
Sadie put down the muffin she had been lifting to her lips.
“But… that’s the whole reason Molly had you on One Tough Customer!”
“I made sure her assistant thought I was a vegan to get on the show,” Doctor Justin said, watching Sadie’s face carefully.
“Molly told everybody she knocked herself out to get you on the show!” Sadie was indignant. “She had her father make a big donation to your research! Is that why—”
“The donation hasn’t come through yet,” Doctor Justin said. “I’m not sure that it ever will. If you win One Tough Customer I wouldn’t be shocked if your check doesn’t bounce.”
Sadie felt her jaw drop, but in a microsecond, she remembered she was having breakfast with the most handsome eligible doctor in the US, if not the world, and slid her face back to neutral. She waited for him to continue his thought, and he did.
“I wanted an in to get to know Molly. We’ve struck up a casual friendship. I’ve pretended to be very interested in the show. There are rumors about the Hollister Foundation and the Global Alliance in the medical community that I need to investigate.”
“Rumors about their vaccination chip?”
“Partly. Their most important researcher, Christina Harris, who developed the chip almost completely by herself, disappeared recently. Not just her, but her ex-husband, her children, the head of IT for Bioline, her ex-husband’s company, and his wife and son. Even Christina’s ex-husband’s new wife and children have disappeared.”
Sadie made sure that her face stayed engaged and not shocked, but she was more than shocked, she was intrigued. That was a large amount of people to disappear in the modern era.
“Before Christina Harris disappeared she tried to give the media information about the Hollisters. But since the Hollisters control the media and the internet far more than people realize, I have been unable to find out what really happened.”
“Why do you think you need to know what happened?” Sadie said. “Why are you so worried about rumors?”
“The rumors are pretty vile.” Doctor Justin looked very serious for someone with a little speck of egg at the corner of his mouth. “They are worse than vile. If even a very small part of the rumors are true… then I need to know. We all need to know.”
“You sound so cryptic.” Sadie felt cold just listening to him.
“I am worried. I built a great career by going ahead with the things I needed to do and not letting ordinary worry stop me from doing anything. I don’t worry about nothing.”
Four shows down,” Tilly leaned back in the limo resisting the urge to pour a drink from the bar next to her. The bar was there for a reason and Tilly had been careful of it from the very beginning. There were cameras in the limo, and she wasn’t getting caught off guard. There were also cameras back in her room at Hollister Manor, but Dan had given her equipment to identify them and she had mostly disabled or avoided them. To give the Hollister IT people credit, they sure kept trying. At least not drinking for the duration of One Tough Customer had made it easy to stay slender and healthy. Tilly knew she looked great.
“But twelve more to go,” Sadie sighed. “Toward the end we’re going to have two shows a week.”
“Only four more weeks with only one show a week.” Maddy commented, her brown eyes clouding over with veiled frustration. “After that, the show will fill up all our time completely.”
That was a little rough for the whole group. Maddy, Tilly, and Sadie were all doing well at filling in the spare hours they had at Hollister Manor. Sadie was keeping up her performance skill set, Maddy was studying so she could move ahead in college, Tilly was having a wildly creative streak with designing. Dan had brought her sewing machine to Hollister Manor and Tilly was making some amazing clothes. On one hand it would be good to be done with the show. On the other, those four weeks were going to be worse than anything they had ever experienced. All of them had seen enough reality television to know that things were going to get really ugly toward the end.
“There’s some kind of disturbance ahead,” Annalise said. The limo was not moving, and Annalise was toying with a second bottle of beer. The pressure Annalise faced, being on television with an ex-husband who would stop at nothing to take her child was wearing her out. Tilly hadn’t seen Annalise drink anything other than what she drank in the limo after every show, but then it was hard to know what anyone was doing in the privacy of their hotel rooms.
All three of them tried to look out the window, but it was hard to see anything other than flashing lights straight ahead. Suddenly people were running down the street. All kinds of people. Women in heels and pencil skirts, men stripping their jackets off, so they could run better in the city heat of mid-July, blue collar people in work clothes, all running, pushing each other, terrified of something ahead.
The sense of fear seemed to creep up from the street and everyone in the limo was caught in the wave of terror. It was hard not to feel vulnerable as the crowd swelled and it became easy to imagine that soon those people would be in the street and they would be truly caught in the flood of humanity.
“What the hell—”
“Oh God…”
“This is crazier than the drunk Santa parade—”
Suddenly, the limo was surrounded by flashing lights.
“We have a police escort back to Hollister Manor,” the driver told them on an intercom. “We’ll be taking a small detour.”
Annalise didn’t hesitate to open her second beer. Tilly cracked under the stress and poured a vodka soda. Maddy also poured a vodka cranberry juice, but Sadie shook her head when Tilly waved the Grey Goose bottle in her direction.
“I’ll be the designated sober one today,” she told them.
“Probably we owe you,” Tilly said, the vodka hitting her senses almost instantly after weeks of no alcohol at all. The sense that the limo was moving, and they weren’t stuck helped her calm down as much as the drink. “We’re going to be okay… I think.”
“What do you think it was?” Annalise sounded even more like a young girl than she usually did. Sometimes Tilly worried that Annalise was not grown up enough to have kids, much less protect the one she had from an abusive jerk.
“A flash mob gone bad?” Sadie wondered.
“I don’t have a better guess,” Maddy added. “They seemed so scared.”
Tilly pulled up her phone that had no connections to the Hollisters and checked the news. She took another large icy swallow of vodka and let it wash over her. Nothing came up. No major acts of terror were coming up in Manhattan, but it had just been a few minutes since the crowd had started running by.
“How many people do you think it was?” Tilly asked.
“Hundreds at least,” Sadie said.
“It was so hard to tell because they were moving so fast,” Maddy said.
Annalise finished her beer and opened a third.
“I know it’s late, but I’m going to get the concierge to let me use the hot tub even though it’s closed,” Tilly said when the limo pulled up in front of Hollister Manor. “I’m still pretty tense.” And I can’t drink it away. I’m sunk if I start doing that.
“I hate the hot tub here,” Maddy said. “Whatever chemicals they use to clean it ruined my grey swimsuit. They stink.”
“I haven’t noticed,” Tilly said.
“I have,” Sadie said. “I’m gonna pass too.”
Nelson was happy to open the hot tub for Tilly. When she asked him if he knew about some kind of mob freak out, he had no idea, but he said he would let her know if he heard anything. Tilly went up to
her room to put on her swimming suit but when she came downstairs Daniel was waiting for her. Nelson was busy, it was almost ten at night by that time, and Tilly pulled him outside into the spa area to talk.
“I just had to make sure you’re all right,” Daniel told her. He bit off his sentences, speaking as if he were dazed. “After what happened. And nothing is on the news, so I couldn’t talk about it on the phone. Even your untapped phone.”
Tilly felt like she might throw up.
“What happened?”
“Some of us are sick of the Global Alliance controlling all the media and the internet—”
Tilly instantly felt her whole-body tingle with fear. Even though she had pulled Daniel down to talk by the hot tub and put her legs in the scalding water, an icy finger ran up her spine. She clutched his arm.
“It’s just wrong!” Daniel told her, sensing her objections. “The internet wasn’t like this five years ago… Well, they’ve been making their moves longer than five years, but programmers don’t have any real power any more. No one can put anything up that disagrees with any Hollister or Global Alliance position—”
“The Hollister Foundation put together the Global Alliance and a lot of good things have come from that,” Tilly began, making her own argument. “People around the world have clean water, better air quality, access to health care and birth control. Even here, the streets are clean, homeless people are taken care of—”
“Well, that’s debatable,” Daniel broke in. He had been patiently letting her talk. He knew she was nervous and would take his news better if she aired her own thoughts first, but what she had just said angered him. “The Dark Web is full of stories about homeless and mentally ill people being experimented on. Like Nazi Germany. People are disappearing and lots of people can’t find their loved ones—”
“If they were so loved, why were they living in Central Park?” Tilly countered.
“—and word on the street is the Hollisters have an army of doctors making crazy viruses that will exterminate the world population, and they do their experimenting on people they pretend are in group homes-”
“I don’t believe it—”
“Because you damn well don’t want to,” Daniel hissed. “All those people in Germany didn’t want to see what was right in front of them either. Genocide still happens in the modern age—”
“So, what do you want to do then?” Tilly felt hysterical. Her feet were too hot. She pulled herself completely out of the water into the sticky night air. The oppressive city heat heightened the uncomfortable conversation.
“Well, a bunch of us gathered together outside a server farm the Hollister Media keep secret under the city streets. It’s supposed to be a secret, but someone on the Dark Web gave us the location and we were going to gather and peacefully protest. It wasn’t supposed to get out of hand—” Dan got a glassy look in his eyes, but Tilly was perfectly sure he wasn’t high.
“But it did get out of hand somehow,” Tilly verbally nudged him. “All the people running through the streets… it’s was nuts.”
“The security people for the server farm tried to make everybody go away. The police came and were trying to drive us down the street, but we didn’t want to go… The security people pulled someone from the crowd and… cut their throat in front of everybody. It sounds nuts… At first, we all thought it was some trick or illusion, but they pulled another person out of the crowd, and it was Pauly Banks. You wouldn’t know him, but he’s kind of a famous programmer and he was one of the organizers who gave the whole protest some credibility, and they… cut his throat too. Just right after the other guy. We all kind of froze, and then we all started to run…Maybe the police arrested the security people, but I didn’t see, we just ran.”
Tilly couldn’t believe that the Hollister security people had killed two people in front of the NYPD and it wasn’t on the news. Of course, it wouldn’t be, the news is all owned by the Hollisters. Such an event should be on the internet. The whole protest was because the Hollisters control the internet. Tilly wanted to argue with Dan, but he wasn’t even being crazy enough to argue with. The last time Dan looked so dazed was when Stacie Brown broke up with him in tenth grade after he had put how much he loved her all over social media. It was really touching that he was worried about Tilly, but it wasn’t surprising. He’s worried about me because I’m completely under the control of Molly Hollister.
“Did any of your friends go with you to this server farm?” Tilly asked.
“No one I really know outside the Dark Web,” Dan said. “Nick works for a company that’s Hollister affiliated, I couldn’t even tell him I was going. All my friends make too much money to care. They say they care, but they’re not going to do anything to change the status quo.”
“But you care more about internet freedom than money?” Tilly asked. “You make a lot of money yourself.”
“Yeah. But I knew in my gut that this situation was getting scary, and it’s worse than I thought.” Dan’s hands were lifeless in his lap. “When I was trekking in the Annapurna Range I once was at a funeral where they were burning someone, and his widow rushed into the fire. Everyone stepped back and let her do it. I thought that was terrible. This was even worse than that.”
“Maybe I can get Nelson to get you a room here tonight,” Tilly said. She didn’t have anything comforting to say, but she didn’t want him to be alone.
“No, this place is owned by the Hollisters and I don’t want any part of that. I’m going home, I’m only telling you this, no one else, okay?”
“Lots of people must know,” Tilly pointed out. “You weren’t the only one there.”
“But it won’t be on the news, it won’t be on the internet. It’s going to be like it didn’t happen and talking about it might get you killed.”
“I really hope this is a misunderstanding.” Tilly reflected on that understatement. That was like pointing to the wrong thing on a dinner menu and being disappointed when the server brought you exactly what you had indicated, but not what you wanted. Two people getting their throats cut to make a point and the police not doing anything at all was more serious than that. You couldn’t just say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t want my throat cut, I didn’t know it meant that much to you. I’ll just go away now.” But no one did get away from the Hollisters.
“Should we just run away then?” Tilly asked Dan.
“Probably,” Dan said. “But if you leave now it’ll really make Molly mad. I’m thinking of leaving the city, though. Maybe go stay with Dad.”
“That sounds…”
“I know. Dad is a workaholic jerk, but he lives in Florida, and that’s a long way from here.”
“What about Mom?”
“Mom is so wrapped up in Eric,” Dan said. “Eric never wants me around. I don’t want to make trouble for her.”
“You could go see Gramps.”
“Vermont isn’t as fun without you.”
“Maybe I’ll come too!” Tilly laughed a little. Suddenly the small hobby farm Gramps had in Vermont seemed irresistible. New York and the fashion industry paled in comparison to pancakes with Gramps’s homemade syrup in that moment. Gramps’s “girlfriend” Margie, always made grilled cheese sandwiches when she came over for lunch, and her tomato soup was thick and chunky with a mysterious heat. That soup was worth putting up with her annoying Chihuahua, Cheeto, who yipped constantly from the minute Margie would set him down in Gramps’s kitchen. “Let’s just go!”
“Maybe I will,” Dan took a deep breath. “But you need to finish this show.”
The oppressive trapped feeling that had been lurking since the day Molly Hollister’s assistant Becky had made the lunch reservation got so much stronger that Tilly felt like she was choking. It’s just this summer. Molly was paying every contestant twice what they had been making at Crackhouse before the show, so all Tilly’s bills were paid, and her checking account was very flush. Just a little longer. It’s just eight more weeks.
“Please be safe,” Dan said, standing up. “The minute the show is over we’ll get away from here, okay?”
“Okay.” Tilly stood up and hugged Dan. Why had she thought that getting in the hot tub on a hot night after a stiff drink was a good idea? She felt like she was melting. “Go to Gramps, and I’ll see you there when the show is done.”
“If you’ll really come, that’s where I’ll go,” Dan said. “But I’m going to wait until you can come with me. I’m not leaving you here alone. I’ll manage until you’re good.”
“I’ll really come,” Tilly promised. “I’m sick of New York. I’m not alone, though. I have my friends.”
“Deal.”
Dan walked away, and Tilly tried to process the idea that the Hollister security guards were cutting people’s throats like religious zealots from another age. That was ISIS stuff, not what happened in Manhattan. She couldn’t do it. Her mind wouldn’t settle enough on such thoughts to make sense of them. If she hadn’t seen the mad rush of people running by the limo two hours before she wouldn’t have believed Dan’s story at all.
“Maybe I’ll wake up and it’ll be on the news. The Hollisters will apologize for the evil thing their security did, there will be arrests and public outrage,” Tilly told herself.
Zing….Zing….Zing… The landline telephone in Tilly’s room wouldn’t quit ringing. Finally she answered it.
“This is Morgan at the front desk, letting you know that Molly Hollister has a special surprise for all the contestants on One Tough Customer in the Plaza Level Ballroom at eleven o’clock. There will be a film crew, so make sure you are prompt and dressed for filming! Thank you so much and have a wonderful morning!”
Before Tilly could ask any questions Morgan had hung up, probably to “delight” the next person on her list. Tilly turned on the television and clicked through news stations. Nothing at all about last night’s events was anywhere on television, but the time floated across the bottom of the screen of every news channel. It was already nine o’clock. Getting ready for television would take two hours. Many curse words of many varieties came out of Tilly’s mouth as she headed for the shower. Whipping herself into shape was complicated by memories of her conversation with Dan the night before. She alternately tried to convince herself that last night was a bad dream, or that last night was a sign she needed to get off the show.