by Derek Milman
Shiloh isn’t just undercover—this is definitely something else.
“I, uh, have eyes on Shiloh,” I say, under my breath. “He’s alive… but…”
The caresses are soft and meaningful. Shiloh’s little nibbles on Scotty’s ear fill me with a primal envy, an uncomfortable recall to the emotionally humid days after my breakup with Tom, when everything felt like moving through thick mud and I could barely get myself out of bed, or keep myself upright in the shower without collapsing into noiseless sobs that hurt the muscles in my lower gut.
I had to choke back all that crying so my family wouldn’t hear me.
But why do I even care… I don’t care about Shiloh… I barely know him. And he lied to me. Over and over.
I hate this thing inside myself, this need to become attached to people, this brutal loneliness that drives me, drives all my mistakes. I hate that Digital Dust saw all that. Everything that’s wrong with me appealed equally to the feds and to the Swans, everyone doing amoral things—to me—for their own gains.
I hate that this is happening, that I’m here, that I’m seeing this.
Maybe it was on purpose. Maybe they wanted me to see them together to hurt me, some sort of revenge.
But it doesn’t matter anymore—I’ve just been spotted. Scotty and Shiloh sit up, untangling their legs, and stare at me, an overdressed anomaly in a sea of dry, shirtless bathers who are all skittering around the edge of the pool like no one ever learned how to swim.
Then Scotty and Shiloh get distracted, because Hardy Boy Joe, also unmasked, walks outside, holding a white rabbit in a cage, and everyone oohs and ahhs, forming a loose circle around the edge of the pool—a throng of bunny faces peering at a real bunny, all tense and twitchy in his cage, nervously staring back at everyone.
This would seem like a death cult—like some sort of deeply creepy ceremonial offering or witchy animal sacrifice—if there was any kind of hushed reverence to the proceedings. But instead there’s Donna Summer blasting, drinks being swilled, and a lot of stifled giggling. Still, Scotty takes the cage with the rabbit, steps forward in front of the pool like a Grand Wizard, and displays the rabbit for everyone.
“Noooo,” a kid whines, burying his head in the shoulder of another boy, who comforts him by running a hand through his hair.
The music is turned down as Scotty opens the cage. He holds the rabbit out by the scruff of its neck, like he’s a magician at a kid’s birthday party. There’s an air of malevolent anticipation. And then, without a word, Scotty drops the little white bunny into the pool.
My first thought is: Can rabbits swim?
I think they can, actually. But we never get a chance to find out. As soon as the rabbit hits the water, it makes a horrible screeching sound, contorts, goes instantly still.
There are a few soft gasps from some of the boys in bunny masks, and some of them look away.
The rabbit floats there, twisted in on itself in a really disturbing way; its eyes black marbles, reflecting the dying firepit and the embers unleashed into the night sky. One would know what happened only from the tiny plume of smoke and the faint hiss.
Suddenly I understand why no one’s swimming in the pool.
It’s electrified.
Well, that’s one way to have a pool party, I guess. Get people drunk, give them pills, gather them around an electrified pool, and hope no one slips.
“Our hacker brothers can do amazing things with their code,” Scotty announces. “Our brave soldiers stormed the battlefield in Kansas.”
I think of those photos of a young Scotty at a lake with his parents.
… His family owned a summer home in Kattskill Bay, New York. That’s near Mohawk State Park and Lake George, Aidan. Where he lured you…
Schwartz wasn’t lying about that after all.
Scotty spent summers in the Adirondacks. He knew the lay of the land there better than anyone.
I think back to the Mandarin Oriental with Shiloh and Tats.
We’re so sorry, Mr. Jamison, there must have been a mix-up on our part…
We have a message for you… from the other guest.
From who?
A… Mr. Preston.
The Swans are the expert hackers, able to scramble anything—not the feds, who have been playing catch-up this whole time. They said so themselves. The Swans latched onto Digital Dust’s bullshit and took things into their own hands.
Everyone used the empty shell of Mr. Preston to their own advantage and simply filled in the blanks.
The Swans are the ones who led me to the Adirondacks.
They’re the ones who tried to kill me.
And Shiloh helped.
He was curt. He gave me directions to a location. As well as info on a bus you’re supposed to take to get there. And he said no matter what: come alone.
Shiloh argued with me, told me I shouldn’t go. But that was an act.
He knew I’d go. He knew I had no other choice.
“While we wait for Phase 3 to be finalized,” says Scotty to the rapt crowd, “turns out all I needed was a blueprint, a well-placed sympathizer, and a really good electrician.”
Shit. Phase 3. They already figured out how to hack military drones.
Hopefully the feds heard that. It’ll look suspicious if I keep talking to myself.
Scotty walks away and Shiloh follows, leaving everyone to silently stare at the dead rabbit floating in the pool. After a moment there’s a needle scratch and Donna Summer comes back on. People start murmuring again. Two boys even start to dance again, reluctantly. A few people mosey over to the bar.
The dead rabbit floats away, toward a corner of the pool where I hadn’t noticed a giant white inflatable swan. A heavy hand lands on my shoulder. I turn around and see my old crime-solving pals, the Hardy Boys, standing behind me.
“Scotty wants to see you,” says Hardy Boy Frank.
I really don’t want to be alone with Scotty, but this whole place is a terrorist cell, so it’s not like I’d be safer anywhere else on the premises.
And this is what I came here to do, so…
“Are we having chlorinated rabbit stew for supper?” I mutter as they lead me inside the house. I’m amped up on fear. The possibility of my impending death ripples through every cell of my body. I’d rather go out a hero, but if this is what it takes, I’m not sure I fit the definition. My knees are shaking so bad I can hardly walk.
CHAPTER 16
Heaven-Ender
I’m led into a different, larger room this time. It’s more of a library—tall bookshelves line the walls. There is an antique chess table. But the room’s biggest quirk is the vintage-looking sky-blue globes on every surface. Maps and atlases are draped everywhere, too—on a large oak desk, over chairs.
Wraparound windows face a giant yard on a different part of the property, the moonlit night partially curtained by scarlet velvet drapes. There’s soft gray carpeting and the walls are painted a plum color, with more yellowed maps framed on them.
One of those pricey HD home projectors, perched on a shelf, splashes an old movie across a large screen in the front of the room. The sound is off; I don’t recognize the film. There’s a woman with intense lipstick, screaming at everyone.
Scotty is sitting in a leather chair in front of the screen, but facing me. Shiloh, still in his bathing suit but now also wearing a white shirt, unbuttoned, stands behind him, portrait-like.
“You can take off the mask,” says Scotty. I do, and place it on an upholstered armchair in the corner of the room. “We should chat, face-to-face, both of us unmasked. Don’t you think?”
“Sure,” I reply. I’ve grown used to Scotty’s voice lately. It’s almost comforting.
He regards the mask on the chair for a moment, then turns back to me. “I cleared the room of any stray paper clips.” He laughs, brushing a sweep of hair behind his ear.
“So, the feds…” he says, comically looking all around the room.
I wait.
>
“… know where I live, who we are,” he goes on. “They know close to everything there is to know about me. Yet they don’t… want… to… move… in.” He makes a face, shoots his hands out: a flamboyant show of bewilderment.
I keep trying to hold eye contact with Shiloh, but his eyes are iced over like he’s in some kind of trance. Every time our eyes meet, his gaze flits away.
“Why do you think that is?” says Scotty.
I shrug. “Do you have a mole in the FBI or something?”
Which side is Shiloh on?
He glances at Shiloh. “I knew a lot because of what this one was feeding me. For a long time they had no hard evidence of anything. Their hands were tied. And we know how to stay invisible. But now they’re afraid to move in because they know we’re about to pull the trigger on something. It’s like we’ve wrapped the world in a bomb and they don’t want to snip the wrong wire. We’ve just tied their hands in a different way.”
I wonder if Shiloh appreciates the bondage symbolism as much as I do.
“So here we are… drinking mai tais by the pool,” he says, smugly.
I never got my cocktail, but sure.
“What is it you have planned, Scotty?”
“I am a twenty-first-century Queer Nation soldier,” he announces, plainly. “There was a manifesto already written and waiting for us, long before the Swans took flight.”
I’m feeling more and more uneasy by everything happening in this room right now, which honestly I have no right to be surprised by. “Yeah, ‘An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose.’ I read it online.”
“Oh, good for you,” he says, and points at me. “That’s the Aidan I know.”
“Well, you texted it to me—right before sending me threatening photos of my parents.”
The door swings open and a dark-haired boy in a rabbit mask comes into the room. He’s holding a silver tray with lines of crystalline yellow-brown powder on it. Scotty leans forward and snorts a line with a thin metal straw he takes from a pocket. Shiloh does the same. I didn’t expect this at all. Drugs, seeing people using, freaks me out.
Bunny Boy heads over to me with the tray but I quickly wave him away; he plops the tray down on a coffee table and leaves the room. Scotty stands and does a shake-out, whipping his hair around, making little gasping sounds.
The movie flickers across his body.
He grins at me and points at the projector playing behind us. “Mommie Dearest. Faye Dunaway playing Joan Crawford? It’s a camp classic.”
He looks disappointed by my non-reaction.
“We used to have a real culture,” he says. “It had some bite to it. We created these icons so their glow would shine on us, and we’d be lifted by their light, and out of the shadows. Judy. Liza. Bette. Cher. Madonna…”
I nod along.
“We’re partially responsible for allowing ourselves to be victimized. There’s no real unity, no community, no depth anymore—it’s all falling to pieces.” He mimes someone looking vapid and texting.
How dare he bemoan gay culture with Lady Gaga walking the earth?
Scotty sits at the chess table and starts moving the pieces around in a frenzied way. “Some of us have to do all the work. And not one of them”—he holds up a finger—“not one of them will even say thanks.”
Shiloh sits on the edge of the desk, violently running his fingers through his scalp.
Scotty studies me. “Sometimes I think we can’t win, and that’s why I work so hard. But Aidan,” he flashes me a mischievous smile, “look where we invaded.” He raises his arms triumphantly. “The very place that symbolizes the Family and All Its Precious Little Values. American suburbia!”
In my head I hear a thunderclap.
Soft target, Schwartz had said.
I narrow my eyes at him. “What’s your plan here, Scotty?”
C’mon, c’mon, c’mon…
He rises, walks over to me. “Tom became your emotional link to the rest of the world, didn’t he?”
I didn’t expect to hear Tom’s name, and it feels like suddenly being throttled.
“Your umbilical cord,” says Scotty. “There to feed you all the love you were starved for once your heteronormative nuclear family dissolved after your brother’s tragic death. And then he, too, was gone.” He snaps his fingers. “I’ll bet it felt, at times, like you wouldn’t survive the pain.”
I feel like a judge at a trial: I’ll allow it. “I thought it might break me,” I admit.
“Especially when you keep blaming yourself.”
I glance over at Shiloh. He just watches Scotty talk, his eyes wide, empty, bloodshot.
“I understand,” says Scotty, nodding, rubbing his chest in wide circles.
“This isn’t some gift you have,” I tell him in a clipped, salty way. “You only know all this shit about me because the feds put my whole life on the fucking internet.”
“They reduced your pain to ones and zeroes! Well. I’m just saying I relate.”
“What are you planning next?” I counter.
Scotty sticks his tongue through his teeth, lasciviously, and makes a wet sucking sound. “I feel like The Lavender Scare isn’t being taught in schools these days,” he says, his eyes wild.
Jesus, what?
“In the fifties they purged homosexuals from the federal government, linking them to communism, claiming they posed security risks. Everyone’s forgotten, it’s so terribly sad—we’re losing our grip on our own history, which then mercilessly repeats itself. Seventy years later, our rights are still being carved up, siphoned away.”
“But are you going about this the right way? Killing innocent people?”
Scotty either didn’t hear me or is ignoring me. “Do they protest the death penalty? Are the right-to-lifers rioting in the streets over gun control? Why is it us they hate so much?” He glides around the room. “I think their hatred becomes a kind of addiction. It turns into a thirst that gives their empty lives a bit more meaning. If I were wrong, they’d be passing legislation to ban psychics and gossip sites. The Bible isn’t so keen on those, either.”
“You’re not wrong.” And he isn’t. Their hypocrisy is pitiful—these knuckle-dragging politicians who speak reverently about the sanctity of religion, hiding behind their phony devout veil to curtail the rights of others—rights they so freely enjoy themselves. Whenever one of these voices rises over the rest, you can pretty much bet this closet-case homophobe will be found in a bathroom stall at a rest stop doing the nasty with some trick. They think they can repress that part of themselves by hurting those like them, those who trigger their unwanted desires.
Scotty’s brilliant at making his rage infectious. He knows how to weaponize his intellectualism, his privilege, and his snobbery, distilling it into its own unique poison.
And it works because he’s basically right.
Scotty is fulfilling so many fantasies of destroying these bullies and everything they stand for. He’s onto something for sure, and I sympathize with their cause, I really do. But I’m not willing to kill innocent people and have their blood on my hands. I’m not one of those weak, damaged runaways so easily seduced by Scotty.
Digital Dust saw only metadata, but that doesn’t make up a person. It didn’t—couldn’t—see what’s inside my heart. I feel too much for people, even awful people, because they’re just… people. Human beings are frightened, ignorant, complex creatures. I’m only seventeen, but I know that much.
I got hella educated on that shit early on.
My shattered parents; poor, tormented Tom; confused Darren Cohen; the feds lost in their ethically questionable maze. They all hurt me, in different ways, to different degrees. But we can’t hold on to so much fury that we succumb to pure evil and become worse than those we hate. Then we’re the hypocrites.
If this is going to be an epic religious war, it didn’t end with the Crusades, and Scotty’s not about to end it now with his cabal of puppyish hackers and creepy midnight parties.
<
br /> Scotty’s gotten up real close to me now. He hasn’t raised his voice once; he’s kept his white-hot anger contained to a low boil. “They want us to lie down while they choke us with their legislation,” he says. “Time to rise up. Let’s make them feel vulnerable in the way they’ve made us feel vulnerable for decades.”
I take a breath. “How?”
“Our cyber-warriors can get inside their computers, their bodies, and every place they go to practice their religious freedom.” He puts those last two words in mocking air quotes. “Those places won’t be safe anymore. And, just like a throng of Pied Pipers, we’ll finish off the rats, then take their children.”
I lick my lips, anxiously. “What does that mean?”
“We are an army of lovers because it is we who know what love is.”
The room gets brighter as the night outside improbably gets even darker, the moon moving behind some night clouds. Shiloh looks up at me, his face a watery blank, and I give him a sad, weary look. Something in his eyes softens. Scotty—who even hopped up on drugs is hyperaware of everyone and everything—notes this.
He looks at Shiloh, and back at me.
“You want to ask Shiloh something?” he says.
“I want to know where he stands… on all this. You make some valid points, but we could just protest in the streets. Stand in front of government buildings. ACT UP did it. They got in people’s faces. They made change.”
“Aidan, I appreciate your historical and cultural knowledge—I do. But you can be a bit lacking in the broader-view department. That’s a flaw I’ll chalk up to your feckless youth. These are different times we’re living in.”
I smile in spite of myself. “If you can use your hackers to get inside their computers… and expose their hypocrisy, you can out every closeted senator who supports anti-gay legislation. The world can know about every homophobic baker who actually has that secret boyfriend. Right? You can use what you do, your gifts, to destroy these people’s lives and their shams without murdering them.”