by Scott McEwen
“Rory,” the instructor said to the girl intensely sweating at the table, “you have one minute left. How are you doing?”
Rory rubbed her temples and stared down, shaking her head. “Not good.”
The instructor glanced at her watch, “You are getting close. Time to act. Or run.”
“I know.” The girl cradled her head, pouring sweat. “I’m thinking.”
As they came closer, Wyatt could see that on the table in front of the girl sat a bomb. Yes, a bomb.
Wyatt didn’t know anything about bombs, but even to his untrained eye, this one looked like it could do some serious damage. There were at least eight sticks of dynamite wrapped in cellophane, all duct-taped together, forming a tight bundle with blasting caps on the ends. Attached to the dynamite by a web of wires was an old cell phone that the girl had opened and the phone’s guts hung out, but Wyatt could see the LED screen was working—forty seconds on the clock ticking down.
The instructor began to pace, visibly uncomfortable, and Wyatt could not help but look at her missing hand and her scarred face and the bomb sitting on the table and think that somehow one of her students had messed up this exact exercise before.
“Rory, you have thirty-five seconds to figure this out or we are dead.” The instructor counted down, “Thirty-four … thirty-three . . thirty-two…”
Instinctively, Wyatt backed up. Hallsy put his hands on Wyatt’s shoulders and stopped him. He didn’t speak but gave Wyatt a look that said stay still.
Wyatt wanted to run. The instructor continued the countdown, “Fifteen … fourteen … C’mon, Rory. Figure it out or we are all dead.”
The girl, Rory, was blinking hard, her eyes red and nervous, moving skittishly in her sockets.
“Seven … six…”
Wyatt strained against Hallsy’s hands, pressing back. But Hallsy’s resistance was firm.
“Hallsy, we gotta run,” Wyatt pleaded.
“Shhh,” hissed the instructor, as Rory angled a set of snips toward a mess of wires coming from the cell phone.
“Three … two…”
Rory turned her face away from the bomb.
“BAM!” A loud crack rattled the Caldera. A spurt of flame raced from the phone to the blasting caps. Wyatt wriggled away from Hallsy and threw himself onto the grass, burying his head and face in his arms, but the blast did not come.
“You’re good,” Hallsy said. “We put a little flash in it to make the deactivation drill a little more realistic. Nice dive, anyway.”
Wyatt peaked out to see Rory trembling and crying weirdly without sound. The instructor stood behind the girl, slapping the table. “You’re dead, Rory. Dead. You’re not even lucky enough to have this—” She stuck the stub of her right forearm under her face for Rory to see. “You gotta put it together or you wind up in the dirt.” She pitched the stopwatch into the ground.
Then the instructor glared at Wyatt, the skin on the left side of her face pink and fresh, the other side scarred like bark of a twisted oak. “You,” she said to Wyatt. “Distract one of my girls again, and you’re going to wish to god you had no mouth to speak from.”
Her furious scowl shifted to Hallsy. “And you—”
Hallsy’s hands went up. “I know. I know. My fault, Cass. Don’t blame the new kid.”
The hard scar tissue lacing her face softened slightly. A long stare and she nodded. She bent down, picked up the watch, and checked the time. “Rory, you can cry and jog, can’t you? We’re due at the obstacle course. Now.”
Rory wiped her eyes and the two jogged away.
Wyatt pushed himself up from the grass, brushing dirt from his new old clothes, now stained green. “Who was that?”
Hallsy stepped over. “Remember Dolly, the girl on the hill?”
“The one with the rocket launcher?” Wyatt said. “How could I forget?”
“Cass is her sister—older sister. She’ll be all right after a while. But for now, you might want to keep your distance. Let her cool down.”
Wyatt sighed. He’d already made an enemy and he’d only been there a day.
Wyatt heard another buzzing sound approaching. “Is that drone back?”
“No, that one’s a helicopter.” Hallsy turned his head to the sky.
The buzzing turned into thudding, and Wyatt also detected a distinctly different kind of sound. “Is that music?”
“My bad,” said Hallsy with a shake of his head. “Never should have told them to watch Apocalypse Now. Show-offs.”
Just then, a helicopter rocketed out over the edge of the Caldera, gunmetal gray, speakers mounted to the landing struts, the gold-and-black Camp Valor logo painted on its doors and belly. It banked hard, descending toward the landing pad, kicking up dust and shaking trees. The music echoed through the Caldera. Wyatt finally placed it. Metallica. “Enter Sandman.”
It was too loud to speak above the rotor wash, so Hallsy signaled for Wyatt to follow him to the landing pad. Campers from around the Caldera left their drills, instructors looking irked. Landing pad crowded, the airship descended. Rotors cut out. Touchdown.
* * *
The doors opened and six passengers emerged. Wyatt’s first thought—did the pilot sit on a phone book or a booster seat? She couldn’t have been more than thirteen, blond hair spilling down when she took off her helmet, pink lip gloss, mouth blowing bubbles with pink chewing gum. Four of the five others were also teenagers, dressed like they’d just left a skate park—cutoffs, running shoes, tank tops, sunglasses, baseball hats turned backward, but they also wore tactical helmets with mounted night vision goggles (NVGs), vests webbed with ammunition, and sidearms. Over their shoulders, they carried AR-15s. Two girls and three boys. Wyatt guessed that most of them were only a few years older than him, but they emanated an air of coiled-up power and confidence. Wyatt had rarely seen this kind of cool self-assurance in adults, let alone teenagers. Given their movement and formation, Wyatt could see that they were guarding the sixth passenger, who emerged last.
The man was old. Late seventies. Tall, lean, craggy-faced, intense. He was dressed like a gym teacher in an ’80s movie—golf shirt, too-tight shorts, running shoes, and socks hiked up to his knees. Wyatt might’ve snickered at him, but the old guy was no joke. He moved smoothly and deliberately, like he was stalking prey, no motion wasted. And his pale blue eyes settled on Wyatt, and instantly the teenagers seemed to draw bull’s-eyes on Wyatt’s forehead.
“Stand down.” The Old Man nodded to his escorts. “Get some food while the bird refuels. You’re going back out before it gets dark.” The Old Man strode away from the helicopter and headed for Wyatt, his lips curling into a cowboy’s smile as he approached. “Welcome.”
CHAPTER 9
1984–2010
Miami, Florida
Upon hearing the news of the death of his friend, Wilberforce Degas’s fragile psyche didn’t just break, it imploded. The sheer volume of tragedies that occurred in his short life—and there would be more to come—would have felled almost anyone. But for a boy as complex and yet as delicate as Wilberforce, the string of tragedies didn’t just crush him or knock him down, or set him back a few years, it rewired him.
Wil changed from the inside out. His entire thinking short-circuited, his history had become hardcoded, and his brain rewrote itself. The father he despised, the one who beat and humiliated him, became his hero, his mentor, his idol. Wil blamed all his sadness in life not on his father’s actions but on the death of his father, which caused his separation from Chris Gibbs, from boarding school, from the outside world, from friendship of any kind. Wilberforce became obsessed with finding his father’s murderer. Wil’s instincts told him Pablo had been the killer, though he had no real proof. Still, Wil did his best to track Pablo’s movements in Latin America in the press and an emerging network called the Internet. Only a few years after his father had been killed, it seemed as though Pablo had deserted Latin America and gone into hiding. Wil suspected in Eastern Europe.
“Something scary has happened to Wil,” he heard his mother whispering to a girlfriend on the phone one afternoon. “It’s like … his DNA has changed.”
It was true that the boy was biologically different. He had always been inclined to stay indoors, but now he had developed a physical allergy to the sun. Never outwardly social, he lost all interest in friends whatsoever. He lost his sense of taste and smell. What he put in his mouth was nearly the same to him as what came out the other end. He got no real satisfaction or pleasure from eating or drinking, but he felt the compulsion to feed. And to consume.
Wil’s favorite means of consumption was through the phone lines. From the increasingly dingy hotels he would occupy with his mother, Wil struggled to earn back his family’s dwindling fortune and power, finding ways to leverage his particular skills and talents to make a buck and win some influence. He became a phone phreak, using tones to hack long-distance carriers and resell their services. But unlike other earlier phreaks like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Wil would place calls and then listen in. As a phone phreak and obsessive electronic gamer, Wil made a natural hacker. From the first time he hacked into a network, Wil figured out how to extract valuable information. And how to make money from it.
Wil would design video games that he released for free, planting malware that would act as a Trojan horse, granting him access to a player’s hard drive and to the hardware itself. Wil would syphon funds, amass data, and blackmail. Wil loved to blackmail his victims. Among hacking circles and even the small group of hackers and game designers he began to employ to help him, he became known as the Glowworm. He never went outdoors, and like the glowworms that lived deep in the pitch-black recesses of caves in Mexico and South America, he used glittery things on the web—money, power, access—to trick his victims into wandering into a snare.
Eventually, the Glowworm’s criminal activities required him to leave the United States and move his organization to Panama, where he ran his elicit gaming empire from a windowless skyscraper overlooking the beach. He had told the realtor who found the building he wanted the best views of the ocean, and right before he moved in, he blacked the windows out, cutting off all light and anything resembling a view. Behind the tower of glass and darkened windows, the Glowworm amassed an army of engineers, hackers … and, of course, some shady fellows with guns and masks. It was a veritable geek death squad. The goal of raising this dark horde was twofold: protection from the law and to exact revenge when he figured out who had killed his father.
If there was one element that seemed to keep the Glowworm human, it was the memory of Chris Gibbs and the understanding that even if human friendships were no longer interesting to him, they were at least possible. To remind himself of this, the Glowworm kept the 8-bit Nintendo video console etched with their initials with him everywhere he went.
* * *
Around 2010, Wil’s long-suffering mother suddenly died. Wil had mentioned that he wanted fresh ground meat, so she had gone out to find him a suckling pig. His mother had found a pig and was chasing it to butcher when she fell over with a heart attack. This loss severed any real contact he had with humanity. With the death of his mother, the last tiny fragment of the little human boy inside Wil died too, and all of the cares and desires of a normal boy ceased to exist for him.
He was now beyond emotional pain or sadness, and his only desire was to inflict pain and sadness on others. He was also a practical creature, and the death of his mother presented the Glowworm with a problem. He still needed to eat. Or rather, to consume. And he needed something else. The Glowworm realized that if he were to remain in the darkness while inflicting true pain on the outside world, he needed something light and glittery that he could use to lure prey to him.
He needed a beautiful, shiny thing that, on the inside, concealed a sharp, barbed hook.
CHAPTER 10
June 2017
Camp Valor
The ancient mining shafts were damp, dark, musty, and lit by a string of old Edison lightbulbs. Drones buzzed past, weaving around Wyatt, Hallsy, and the Old Man like electric bats. They wound past myriad corridors, and storerooms for food and weapons. Wyatt noticed a recharging station within a hangar for the drones in one of the more cavernous rooms. The charging station consisted of a series of copper plates, upon which the drones would land and draw a charge.
They arrived at a large cellarlike room guarded by an old Newfoundland sound asleep on a large Persian rug, mouth open, drool oozing out. Along the far wall stood a long bookshelf, carefully crammed with many volumes of books, National Geographic magazines, and files. A dehumidifier bubbled in the corner. In the center of the room sat a large desk, covered in maps and papers and a laptop that had been pushed to the side.
“Those look familiar?” said the Old Man, motioning to the desk, where an antique brass lamp cast a puddle of warm light onto an open manila file stuffed with a copy of Wyatt’s arrest report and other documentation about his life. His most recent mug shots sat on top of the stack of papers.
Wyatt had never seen this set of mug shots before—there were others he had seen, but this set taken after his last arrest was new to him. In the photos (two in total—one facing forward, one profile), he looked deranged, his long, tangled hair hanging around his sweaty face, framing a screw-you grin. Wyatt felt a tinge of embarrassment to think the Old Man had just been perusing his file and staring at Wyatt’s douchey mug.
“Not my best day,” Wyatt said.
“I agree,” said the Old Man. “But that failure was not entirely your fault. We aren’t born great drivers. You were born with great reflexes, but must be taught skills.” The Old Man fished a pair of glasses off the desk and crossed to the far side of the room. “If you knew what you were doing, you might’ve gotten away.”
Wyatt wasn’t quite sure what to make of this.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Can you repeat that?”
“You’re not much of a getaway driver,” the Old Man said, smiling. He propped his glasses on his nose and scanned spines of the books on the shelf, evidently looking for a certain title. “And you weren’t much better on foot. But we can help with that, too. Here we are.”
The Old Man found the book he wanted. Lord of the Flies.
Wyatt looked to Hallsy. Was this old guy for real?
Hallsy shrugged. “For a kid who doesn’t even have a driver’s license, I was actually kind of impressed with how Wyatt drove.”
“Good point, Sergeant.” The Old Man opened the book and thumbed through pages. “Shows promise.” He stopped thumbing, licked his finger, and carefully turned a page, which looked exactly identical to every other page from the side, except on its surface there was a digital readout and a number pad. The Old Man keyed in a code. “Ruger, move!”
The Newfoundland rose and lumbered aside, just as the desk rotated to the side, revealing a hidden staircase.
The Old Man’s knees creaked as he took the first step. “Down we go.”
* * *
Down they went. Almost immediately, Wyatt could feel the air change. The staircase became drier the deeper they walked. There must have been an AC system somewhere. At the bottom of the stairs, a heavy metal bomb-proof door swooshed open. A head poked out with spiky dark hair with dyed tips. A pair of virtual reality goggles covered the man’s eyes. He pushed them down to his neck and craned up at the threesome coming down the stairs.
The man didn’t speak, he yelled, pointing directly at Wyatt. “He does not have clearance for this area.” It was the voice from the drone, the voice of the Mossad agent with its distinctive accent. “I do not have his biometric data. This is a code 7.2 violation.
Why do we have protocols if we do not keep them?” His pointer finger shifted to Hallsy. “And I told you this. You know better, you’re—”
“Avi,” the Old Man said calmly, “What do you need from the boy?”
“What do I need? I need c-o-m-p-l-i-a-n-c-e from the boy and…” His eyes grew wild. “From my so-called colleague.” He glared again at Hallsy.
Hallsy held his hands up. “Guilty as charged, brother. Not a rules guy.”
Avi shook his head in disgust, then turned back to Wyatt. “But since the boy is here.” Avi tapped his lip, thinking. “Why don’t I get his blood now? And his iris.”
“Sure,” said the Old Man. And without waiting, Avi removed an EpiPen-like device and stabbed Wyatt in the shoulder. Wyatt felt the pen grab a chunk of his flesh and retract.
“Djyayyyyy!”
“Done,” said Avi, pressing gauze against the wound. “Now I have blood and a tissue sample.” He reached for his pocket again. “Hold still, I need to get your eye.”
“Don’t touch my eyes!” Wyatt drew back, just as Avi removed something from his back pocket.
“Sorry, I mean your iris,” said Avi. “Just need a photo. We can do it with a smartphone.” And indeed he held an iPhone. “Hold still.”
Wyatt forced himself to hold still. Avi held the smartphone camera in front of his eyes and scanned the iris. “Okay.” He pocketed his phone and pointed to a door marked “S7.” “If you need something, you can find me in there. But if you are going to disturb me, I ask that you know what you want before you come. I am very busy. I do not like to have my concentration broken. So you are welcome, but be prepared. No funny business.”
Wyatt was thinking, Yeah, I’ll visit you—uh—never.
Avi disappeared behind a door, shifting his virtual reality goggles from his neck to his face.