by Matt Kilby
“Nothing,” she said. “So if it was so important to keep what happened a secret, why are you telling me now?”
“It sometimes helps to remember where I came from and where I’m going. Sometimes it makes the journey easier.”
“Sometimes?”
“Each time we meet, I tell you. Sometimes what I’ve done weighs heavier in my mind.”
“How does it feel this time?” she said, humoring him.
“I’ll tell you when I get there.”
“Ready when you are,” she shrugged.
“No more today,” he shook his head. “You need rest.”
She pulled the covers over her shoulder. As she did, a shiver ran from her neck to the small of her back. The pain built, hinting at sharper spikes that made the idea of sleep as ridiculous as being nursed by John Valance. Still, he stood over her as she moaned and put a cool hand to her sweat-drenched forehead. When he did, she closed her eyes and drifted off.
3
The fact Ben Tolbert escaped adversity—from poverty to child abuse—and ended up lead scientist in charge of energy research for the largest government contractor in the world should have made him lucky. On the outside, people would consider him that, but they didn’t live in his skin. They were the lucky ones.
Take today, for example. He showed up to work only to realize he misplaced his identification badge. No big deal. After all, he went to the same security post every day for the past eight years, holding the same card out to the same guard. But policy was policy, so he had his entire car searched as if he wore a “Death to America” t-shirt. Of course, on a Wednesday that would be in the wash, but the guard wouldn’t care for the joke, eyeing the soft smile he wore as proof he hid something terrible. It made his search more thorough, and he found the missing ID lodged between the driver’s seat and center console. Without a hint of apology, he waved Ben through with a huff that might have resulted from wasted time or another routine day. Ben didn’t tell him he should be the one huffing because he was now late for a meeting with senators and Army generals who’d come all the way to Creek Hollow to see him.
Other checkpoints waited between him and his lab—on the other end of the parking lot and inside the building. He swiped his key card at the elevators and outside the lab itself, each time with another guard looking over his shoulder. He wondered what it said about Orion’s security staff that it took so many to check each other’s work but understood better than he let on. Orion had to make sure their data and research didn’t end up in the wrong hands. Military technology. Cyber security. Space exploration. All ripe targets for terrorism and espionage, though he doubted they would swing by his office anytime soon. Renewable energy didn’t have the same romance. Terrorists focused on tearing the present world down, not making the future one better.
It was why no one bothered to wait for him, though he was only half an hour late. He was never athletic by any definition of the word so spent every sprinted step with a hand to the sharp pain in his side, lungs feeling like they might explode with every breath. Security didn’t care for that either but at least had the decency to slam his back to a wall instead of tackling him. When he got to the lab, panting and half-dead, he found his assistant Angela with their boss, a slick-haired middle manager named Buck Davis who wouldn’t know an Erlenmeyer flask from a test tube. Ben struggled for composure as he caught his breath and listened to the prick dress him down in front of a girl who often looked at him with such shy respect he summoned her face in the best of his dreams—innocent fantasies about asking her out and being seen with her in public, where everyone would admire his luck. His chances were better with a supermodel as Buck swore at him for the next fifteen minutes.
“I’m sorry,” Ben said, adjusting his glasses. “It won’t happen again.”
“It better not,” Davis said and ran his eyes down Angela’s backside before walking out. Ben gave her a soft smile when they were alone.
“I wonder how he’d like it if I told him to run the meeting,” he said, and it sounded more clever in his head. Still, she laughed.
“I stalled as long as possible,” she told him.
“It’s fine. Thanks for trying.”
“Should I reschedule?” she asked.
“If he’s so bent out of shape, let Davis figure that out. We have real work to do.”
“Yes sir,” she said and couldn’t know the pleasure the words gave him.
They would all come back. His work was Orion’s future—clean, renewable energy that could fuel every project and be sold to other countries. A world saved and sustained by their brand. Davis and the apes like him had marketing plans and revenue projections ready for the science to catch up. They waited on him to deliver as if he could conjure materials and bend them to his will, but few things did for him. Look at sweet Angela, for example, at her laptop, reviewing data collected from solar farms and wind turbines in Orion’s private swamp. In his mind, their first dates were the textbook ideal of budding love: longing stares across a table and nervous hands clasped in the moonlight. Reality wouldn’t pan out like that. She might tell him no or their first date end in disaster. Maybe she wouldn’t marry him or laughed when she saw him naked. The thought made him blush, but he was a long way from asking her to dinner. First, their work should finish, the two of them king and queen of the world they were saving. The rest would be semantics.
Davis came back with a stiffer suit: Arthur Carver, head of the entire research division that made up half of Orion Corporation. His official title was Vice President of Developing Projects, and Arthur recruited Ben from his research position at Berkeley, offering him freedom. He called him best in the field, getting him drunk on ambition and ego before sliding a contract across the table. Ben signed without time to consult his brother, not that he needed to. Robert would go wherever he told him, knowing the other option was being alone.
Arthur wore the same serious look as Davis, though his was more terrifying. Ben stared through the window between his office and the lab and sat heavy in his chair with anticipation. They couldn’t fire him. He had gotten them farther than they could have ever managed without him, but the panic wouldn’t listen. His heart pounded and breath abandoned him, making him sweat and then shiver from it. By the time they crossed the lab, he was a trembling wreck.
“Davis tells me you missed your meeting,” Arthur stopped in the doorway with his arms crossed, his lackey disappointed at being blocked out of the action.
Under the desk, Ben pressed his hands on his knees, pulling himself together as he nodded. “Security held me up.”
“How many times have you come to this facility?”
“A lot,” Ben said, “but—”
“I want a number,” Arthur narrowed his eyes. “You’re paid for that, and you weren’t here to give numbers to the people who pay your salary, so I want some now.”
“I’d say somewhere around 1900,” Ben said in a breath.
“1900?” Arthur repeated. “Seems like a lot. Now, we’ve had those checkpoints in place longer than that and you were given a clearance badge your first day. Does that sound right?”
“Yes sir.”
“How many days would you say you’ve forgotten that simple fact about working here?”
“Just one,” Ben said.
“One?”
“Today.”
“Which happens to be the most important day in any given year for Orion. You know that, right? Senators came to decide if your progress is enough to warrant more or less money from the federal budget. My guess is they’re on their flights back to Washington right now, wondering, if the meeting wasn’t important to our lead scientist, why it should be important to anyone else. Taxpayers, as an example. Maybe they’ll shop around for someone who’ll do the work cheaper.”
“That would be a mistake,” Ben shook his head and his confidence grew, if only in fractions. “No one is as far along. Those other groups are shaving turbine blades to make them spin faster and
building photovoltaic cells to catch more sun.”
“And you?”
“I have the Olympus,” Ben said and heard Davis chuckle.
“The Olympus is a theory. An eight-year-old one at that.”
“I’m getting closer. We’ve got the data to start a prototype soon.”
“When?”
“Next year,” Ben said, though it was a stretch.
“No,” Arthur shook his head. “Get it done by the end of this one or I’ll start looking for someone who’ll shave turbines and build solar cells.”
Ben’s stomach festered, the bile boiling the lining to see him in the hospital again. The timing couldn’t be worse. Robert couldn’t manage the house, and now he had a deadline. He wanted to hide under his desk but remembered Arthur watching so instead faked a smile.
“Okay.”
“Good,” Arthur turned to leave. “I’ll call them back for some time next week so you can tell them yourself.”
Davis set his eyes on Ben as Arthur walked past. With an inaudible laugh, he shook his head and followed like a well-trained dog.
As soon as they left, Angela came into his office. She looked as if lightning struck inside the lab.
“Did I just hear what I think?”
“I bought us time,” he said and avoided looking into her face. “If I hadn’t, they’d shut us down today or maybe just fire me.”
“Then you did what you had to,” she said, and he imagined her sympathetic expression but didn’t dare find out. “But a year?”
“Less,” he corrected.
“I can’t decide if I’m excited or terrified,” she huffed and sat in one of the chairs in front of his desk. “Do you think we can?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” he looked up then, something clenching inside his chest at the sight of her smile and wide eyes, as if a vacuum sucked the blood out of his heart. A moment later, it pumped again and hard, his thoughts racing through his dizzy head as if he would ever ask her out. He debated for what seemed like hours, though only seconds passed before he talked himself down and slipped on that soft, knowing smile that felt more fatherly than romantic.
“There’s work to do,” he told her and saw her eyes focus, knowing the fantasy she fled to didn’t resemble his. “We should get started.”
She nodded and stood, gone before he changed his mind. He watched her leave and reminded himself it was best. If she stayed, he would maintain his awkward silence until she felt too weird to give him any chance if he did dare to ask her out. But a dare like that risked too much. Someone had to know him to love him, but no one who did could. That was his mantra, his life’s motto, and the only thing to cure him of the love-struck daydreams threatening the rest of his day. Putting Angela out of his mind, he took out a sketch pad and thought about the prototype until time to go home. The blank page he slapped on the desk before he left didn’t make him feel better about the future.
He attempted to focus on the Olympus as he walked back through all those security checkpoints, but his thoughts slipped away like a well-oiled pig. There was too much competition in his head. His life had become more complicated in the eight years since he started at Orion. Back then, anyone who told him his pet project would be a slow-fading dream would be written off as a visionless fool. Driving the long private road away from the facility, he fought to find the basic idea again.
The Olympus was meant to be a device that pulled stimuli from the world, harnessing the energy to create functional power. During the day, it captured sunlight. In a storm, it gained power with the wind. A person could feed its battery with the static electricity from their fingertips and the thermal energy in their hands. Even the electromagnetism that turned the Earth and kept feet planted on its soil could be captured. But the real magic would be in the way it took the smallest energy and built it like a snowball down a mountain. In theory, something the size of a paperback novel could power a city, maybe even a country.
The potential fascinated the Orion board, and the way Ben went on about it then, fever growing to mania, made it impossible for someone to avoid the same obsession. His enthusiasm recruited Angela and convinced the US government to fund his research, but along the way, that research became research alone. As with any suggestion of a romantic future with Angela, the thought of failing kept him from trying, but now he didn’t have a choice. At the last gate before the gravel turned onto paved road, a video camera on top blinked red until some guard in a private room set him free. When the light lit green, the fence slid away. As he drove through the outskirts of Creek Hollow towards home, his lack of control over the future made him nervous.
On the highway, he couldn’t concentrate, repeating the word “Olympus” like he sometimes would Angela’s name. He built both into unattainable myths that would make him a wreck when he tried to pursue them. He set himself up to fail and knew he would if he didn’t pull it together, but doubt crippled him by the time he turned onto his driveway. Like at Orion, a fence blocked the gravel lane, but this one was simpler, forcing him to get out to unlatch it and again when through. As annoying as it was when his head was as scrambled as today, the fresh air and short walk did him good. Behind the wheel again and driving past empty fields to the small farmhouse he shared with his brother, the day fell behind and left only night ahead.
At the sound of the car, Robert came out to meet him, the porch’s boards creaking under his weight. Sturdy as an oak, he looked more like their father, Ben frail like their mother. She used to call them Conan and Pee Wee and set about defining those roles throughout their childhood. She’d tell their dad, Better take Conan to haul those hay bales. I don’t think Pee Wee’s little hands can take it. That was on the California farm where they grew up and lived until well into their twenties, when Orion came calling. Back then, she made sure they knew their place, though Ben suspected it more their dad’s doing. She just said it. But when he died, she changed her mind. Their physical condition shouldn’t define them but their temperament, so she set to making Ben strong and Robert weak. The way things turned out, she had some talent for that.
On the porch, Robert stood with only the grinding boards giving away the fact he swayed. His hands were folded in front of him, his eyes on his feet. He waited for Ben like every night and, when his small brother stood in front of him, put his hands on his cheeks in a most gentle way.
“Did you fish?” Ben asked as he set down his briefcase.
“I caught five catfish,” he said with a voice like a bass drum. “They were small but enough.”
“Excellent.”
“I was good,” he added.
“That’s good,” Ben nodded with a slow breath. “I don’t think I could take it if you were bad today.”
Robert raised his eyes to the thin space between them, ashamed though he was months past forgiven.
“Hey,” Ben kissed his hand. “The past doesn’t matter. Only the future.”
Robert nodded, but Ben knew it bothered him. He pulled him into an embrace, drawing his head to his shoulder like their mother used to. By the hitch of Robert’s breath, he wept.
“There, there,” he patted his back and tried to sound like her too. “Everyone has their purpose, but it’s not our job to put ourselves to it. All we can do is obey the wind that blows us. You did, so you are good.”
“Do you want to see her?” Robert whispered.
“Not tonight,” Ben glanced to the shed beside the house. “A bath and then bed for me, but maybe tomorrow.”
He closed his eyes and listened for the girl’s screams but found only the sound of wind cutting between the trees. Either his brother lied and already damaged her or she was tougher than the others. As he picked up his briefcase, all thoughts of Angela and the Olympus faded into the dark, distant corners of the day.
4
Brandon Marshall avoided the attic after his talk with Eric. He brought food three times a day to the bottom of the staircase with a wary glance up, convincing himself that was en
ough. What else could he provide besides shelter and food—time to work out his problems in peace?
There were explanations for Eric knowing his name, the one he used as a child. Someone might have taken him in a few days before pointing him to Brandon’s church, letting slip the pastor was Tuck Marshall. It happened every once in a while. At the grocery store, deciding which cereal to buy, someone would stop to talk, calling him his old, cast-off name. He let it slide once or twice, but after three, he reminded them he wasn’t that mean-spirited kid anymore.
Still, he couldn’t walk up those stairs. In his desperate moments, he decided he didn’t need to. The Lord didn’t send the boy to fix his problems. If he did, the trouble would find him within a month of leaving the attic. No, better to give him space. If he needed him, he would ask. All the excuses seemed valid to avoid the responsibility.
He managed a full week before God knocked harder. It started at the post office, waiting in line for the automated stamp machine. There were two people in front of him, and he passed the time coming up with a grocery list for his next stop at the Nice Price Grocery. Someone called his name and he sighed on instinct, as if some subconscious part of him knew it was Iva Lefitte. She waved as she closed in to stand beside him, the first words out of her mouth “My daughter” before his attention sought some distraction to escape the rest. It didn’t take long to find something, a board on the wall with various pages tacked on to advertise local bands and landscaping crews. Outnumbering the others were those looking for people who went missing, so many over the years, Creek Hollow had a reputation among the surrounding towns as Louisiana’s black hole—the kind of place people walked into to never come out the other side. It had been that way since Brandon was young, back when people called him Tuck and whispered he had something to do with some of the disappearances. He couldn’t blame them for that any more than their skeptical glances when he came home and swore he was changed for the better. The only way was to prove it, so he became a preacher. As Iva gave her sales pitch about her daughter, he nodded and scanned the faces on the board until an all too familiar one caught his eye. The young man only took up half the page, but Brandon recognized him easy. The face belonged to Eric Vanger, and the photograph looked like it might have been taken the day he showed up at the church, his eyes carrying the same unshakeable worry. If nothing else, it proved he carried his burden longer than he claimed, well before Pine Haven burned and something else came to live inside him. Before Brandon decided what to do with that knowledge, Iva cleared her throat.