“Wow.”
I kissed her forehead. “Yeah. I’m glad we’re here tonight. Instead of the house.”
Her lips quirked. “We could live here permanently, you know. It’s your family’s land.”
I figured I was safe enough from that. “Sure, hon. Whatever you say.”
She pinched my butt. Which, I figured, wasn’t a bad way to end my day. But then Tim groaned and turned over in his sleep. I met Rebecca’s eyes. “Stay safe, hon,” I said. “You and the kids. Stay safe. No matter what happens.”
She hugged me again. “You too, Ash. You too.”
Chapter Five
I’d been watching my house from the woods for a while. It felt like an hour but might have been ten minutes. Nothing moved. I’d promised Tim’s daughters—he was still snoring when I got up—that I’d check for a note from Susie.
Anyway I didn’t want Rebecca to worry, so I’d just told her I needed some equipment. Still, she hadn’t wanted me to go alone. And Robbie wanted to come along. But I couldn’t see risking my kid, and neither could his mom. Also, I didn’t want to take the Sullivan girls’ father with me when their mother was missing. And Rebecca didn’t want to leave all the kids with Tim—she wanted to keep an eye on them herself. So it came down to waking Tim up or letting me go by myself.
So I went. But something about the stillness had spooked me.
At this point in a horror movie, I figured as I crouched behind a hemlock, I’d be sneering at the screen and saying something like: “Oh, great. You split up. Typical. And only an idiot would go back into that house now. Between the guys with fangs, police looking for Tim, and neighbors who’ve seen a truck full of supplies getting unloaded, nothing good’s gonna happen in there. Moron.”
And movie-watching me would be right. I drew the .45, and sighed—then had a thought.
What I really needed was my truck. It seemed to me that if anybody was waiting inside, if I just walked around the house and drove off I’d have a better shot at getting away than I would if I went in. Plus, if I took the truck—well, the house might look abandoned, and it might get ransacked, but it wouldn’t be so obvious we were planning to come back.
Something about that logic didn’t seem right. But…I wasn’t going to crouch here in the woods with the mosquitos all day.
After I thought about it a little more, I circled around through the woods so I could approach my house from the front. It meant walking through the Conways’ yard—they were diagonally across the street from us—but they’d been out of town on vacation when this whole thing started. On the off chance anybody watched my approach, I figured there was no point advertising the direction I’d come from.
But I felt pretty stupid when I got in the truck, started it up, and nobody seemed to care.
I decided I’d check for Susie’s note later, after anybody watching saw me drive off. And felt even dumber. But I put the truck in gear anyway.
* * *
I saw nobody at all on the way to Rose and Hank’s place. A few damaged houses, a few oddly-parked vehicles. But no people. Once I pulled over and ducked down when I heard a police car nearby—they were still warning us all to stay inside, now with added suggestions about plastic sheeting and duct tape on windows—but it turned onto another street.
Their driveway was empty. Steering carefully to avoid Rose’s flower beds, I drove around to the back of the house, shut off my engine, and rolled down my window to listen.
Silence. Maybe nobody had noticed me?
Then Rose opened her sliding-glass back door. “Jacob! What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing? Did you just drive over my azaleas?”
* * *
I hopped out of the truck and trotted to her door. “Can I come in?”
“Well, I never. Of course you can come in. But why’d you park back here?”
I studied her once we were inside. She had what looked like quite a shiner under her left eye. “Um…Rose, how much do you know about what’s going on?”
“Not a blessed thing!” But then she sagged a little. “Oh, Ash. I know enough. The prison’s gone and I figure Hank went with it. Nobody can get out of town unless they’re dead. I have a bit of food here—are you hungry?—but somebody blew up our water tower too. So I don’t have much to drink, do I?”
I hugged her. “How do you know all that? And what happened to your face?” I asked.
She hugged me back for a second, then backed up and swatted my shoulder. “I got robbed in the Walmart parking lot,” she told me. “Like about half the people who were still there after the police left—not that any of us were happy about them grabbing supplies for themselves before telling us we’d need them. Went right in and told the store manager he could complain to the mayor. It was a right mess. And my car’s still there because the durn thing wouldn’t start.” She gave me a theatrical scowl. “Besides that, I live here. Don’t you think I talk to my neighbors? We don’t all have your citified ways, young man.”
I’d left her at Walmart in my rush to get home. At the time I didn’t realize how serious the situation was, but…she’d taken care of me when I was a kid. How could I have abandoned her and never thought about it since?
Rose’s eyes were wet, but she wasn’t acknowledging it so I didn’t either. “Rose, I’m…I wish I hadn’t left you there.”
She patted my arm. “Oh, you couldn’t know it mattered. Let me tell you the rest of it, all right?”
I nodded, more ashamed of myself in that moment than I’d ever been.
But she quirked a smile at me. “All I really know I heard from Jim Connolly over down by the corner. He told me a buddy of his—probably that no-good George Pickens, you remember him, you went to school together before he dropped out to sell dope—anyway he went out hunting yesterday and saw the prison had been blown up. And Jim, well, he tried to drive out toward Martinsburg with his family this morning. That Chief Eisler and a couple of his goons followed them in their cars with sirens a-blarin’ but Jim didn’t stop till he got out to the highway. Jim says the National Guard is all set up there, with everybody wearin’ gas masks and carryin’ guns. Eisler was mad as a hornet but he just waved his hands in the air and drove away. Nobody gets in or out, he told Jim. And Jim says he saw what looked like body bags in a truck.” She met my eye, frowned, and gave an exaggerated nod I remembered from my childhood. “Lots of body bags.”
“I’m sorry about Hank,” I told her. The rest of it…didn’t really surprise me at this point. Except the part about the water tower. Either it was an isolated mistake, or—was there something in our water? I mean, something worse than usual? If so, how did it get there?
“Oh, me too, honey,” she said. “Me too.” Her gaze sharpened. “Now tell me what’s got you driving in my backyard. You ain’t done that since you got off a tricycle.”
* * *
I should have been there just to check on Rose. But she was a Netflix addict. And she got her internet-movie fix via a satellite service. Whatever else was going on, I figured satellites were probably still orbiting the planet.
I got lucky: her dish was fine, and so was its receiver box. Rose had no power to the house, of course. But I’d brought a portable inverter in my truck that converted its 12-volt DC power system to 120-volt AC. So I let the truck idle, plugged in the satellite system and my computer via a couple of extension cords and a power strip, and presto: I was online.
But I’d decided to be careful. Obviously we were being lied to, and there was some kind of information lockdown in place. Fortunately I knew a little about how the internet worked, and I figured I had a good chance of getting around virtual roadblocks. If any existed.
Crucially—maybe—Rose’s internet service provider thought her satellite dish was a hundred and fifty miles away from her house. Hank had carted it from his rental house near Morgantown and done the re-installation himself when he moved in with Rose. Saved himself a bunch of money that way even if it did violate a service agreement or
two. The satellites themselves, I was guessing, would have no idea where the signal came from. If it mattered. If it was just people in Henge who were being fed lies. If it was a local problem.
So…I thought what I was doing ought to work, in principle. But there were a few other things to watch for.
My company, AdNetPlus, was an online ad exchange. Basically we were a middleman, a broker between companies with advertisements they wanted to place and websites that wanted to be paid for hosting ads. We spent a lot of brainpower on building systems to serve ads as quickly as possible—but also on tracking people who saw them, and what they did afterward.
Most people didn’t realize how much information they gave out every time they went online. Our systems nearly always knew, either from data we gathered ourselves or from trading with other companies, exactly who was browsing which websites. So we sold things like “remarketed” ads to our ad-agency customers, where if somebody browsed a retail website we knew what listings they’d looked at—and we’d offer them something related, or the exact item they’d browsed if they hadn’t purchased it. But at a discount, via another ad on a supposedly unrelated site. “Coincidences” like that paid off. A lot.
The thing was…I figured the government would have equally good information. Or better. Lately it had seemed like every month or two there was a new revelation about exactly how much data they were gathering—not that most people cared.
But with the National Guard blocking the roads, and the police driving around lying to us, I had to consider that the government might want to restrict the flow of information to and from our “area,” whatever that meant. I didn’t know just how clever or complete they’d been about restricting our local access to news sources, or vice versa—and what else had motivated someone to set off an EMP bomb, if that was actually what it had been?—so I used some special software to hide my location.
Called Tor, short for “the onion router,” it was an open-source product I used all the time and kept handy on a CD. Essentially it would route all my web browsing via three different randomly-chosen nodes in the Tor network. Traffic within the network was encrypted. Contrary to TV-show common knowledge, the encryption was nearly impossible to break. The idea was that the first node in the network would know where I was connecting from but not what site I wanted to see, the second node would know only that it was routing traffic between two other nodes, and the third would know what site I wanted but have no idea who or where I was. As long as I could find an initial node to connect to, I was golden.
Taking all this a step further, using Tor provided little value if my computer’s virtual “footprint” could be matched to me. Which it probably could. I had browsed the internet from this computer before. But I used a special version of what was called the “Tor browser bundle” so I’d broadcast only and exactly that I was a Tor user.
Except…it didn’t work.
* * *
Two hours later—it was oddly uncomfortable to see a clock in the form of a working computer after doing without all day yesterday—I gave up. I could connect to Tor nodes all over the world, so the physical (or satellite, or wireless) connections themselves seemed to be mostly working. And whatever was going on, it wasn’t a worldwide power outage. Not that I’d thought it would be, but it was a good thing to know. The problem: I couldn’t get a connection from Tor to…anything. The whole world wide web had gone dark somehow. And maybe…everywhere.
Which had to mean there was a much larger problem than whatever was happening in Henge. Not local at all. I’d been in a nervous sweat already, but this was really scary.
I wanted to talk to the people I worked with. I’d started the company by myself, but it had grown. Six of us now, scattered around the country. A close-knit bunch in spite of seeing each other in person only once a year or so. But I couldn’t figure out a way to reach any of them, or even to connect to our company’s servers. Were my friends okay? Did they know what was going on?
I stared at my computer monitor for a long time, thinking. Eventually I decided to attempt what most people would have done first: I tried browsing the net normally, without trying to hide my location or identity.
But of course I couldn’t do it. My best guess was that nobody else could either. I suspected Tor itself was probably being used by the military, since they’d helped to build it initially; otherwise it would be down too. Maybe they had some secret exit nodes that were still working?
But then I remembered: a couple of search engines had addresses internal to the Tor network. Maybe, even if I couldn’t actually see any websites, I could manage to see some slightly out-of-date search listings? Would they still be working?
And there? I struck gold.
Eyes glued to the screen, I wanted to stay and read for hours. But I needed to get back to my family.
* * *
OBAMA: TERRORISTS ATTACK OUR FREEDOMS
The President spoke to a shocked nation today about the latest outrage…
MORE VANDALISM IN ATTACKED ZONES
Out-of-control rioters trying to escape the New Jersey quarantine zone…
POISON GAS SPREADS; CASUALTIES HIGH
Contrary to original estimates, some terrorist gas strikes are still affecting…
MORE DEATHS FROM RADIATION
In the Folsom quarantine zone at least three thousand bodies have been…
ALIENS FINALLY ARRIVED ON EARTH?
But apparently they forgot to tell the White House. “I saw them! A whole…
CONSPIRACY THEORISTS FOUND
Two New York Times columnists were apprehended today after subverting…
PROTESTERS RIOT, ATTACK POLICE
Authorities were forced to fire into a crowd of looters outside the Oklahoma…
GOV’T TO SHUT DOWN INTERNET FOR THE DURATION
For public safety, in a move to cut off terrorist communication, a White House…
* * *
“Rose, please,” I begged. “Come with me. We’ve got plenty of room.”
“Ash. I was born in this house,” she said. “And I’ll happily die here. Today, if I have to. This is my home.” She gave an evil grin. “Besides, I wouldn’t give your great-grandmother the satisfaction of hiding in her house even if it is mostly gone and her dead with it.”
I stared across Rose’s living room at an awful quilt she’d made and hung on the wall years before. My teeth hurt from grinding them…I’d thought I quit doing that when I was a teenager. “Rose. It’s worse than you know. This isn’t just happening in Henge. It’s in at least three other places. The government has shut down the internet, they’re telling people all over its terrorist attacks…this is serious. People are dying.”
“Sonny boy,” she reminded me serenely, “I just said I’ll die here. In my home. Did you think I was joking?”
I threw up my hands, thought about grabbing her forcibly…but I couldn’t make myself do it. “Fine,” I told her. “I’ll leave the truck with you.” I raised a hand when she tried to object. “I need the truck to get online and I don’t want to use my gas for anything but internet access anyway.” Actually I was sure I could siphon as much as I needed from abandoned vehicles, and any 12-volt battery would work as well as the one in the truck. But Rose wouldn’t know that. “If something else happens…in an emergency, you know where we are. Get in the truck, drive like a bat out of hell, and don’t worry about the paint job when you get into the woods.”
She was shaking her head. “Ash. I’m not—”
“Please. Promise you’ll come, if you need to.”
Chapter Six
Walking down the street, I was pretty sure something had died nearby. I was hoping it was a deer. Or even a dog. The stench was awful.
I put a hand over my face, and then heard…singing?…up ahead, and looked for a place to hide. It sounded like some sort of parade. But who…?
“Jacob!” I heard from my left. “Come inside! Immediately!”
Leo Morrison, who’d t
aught all my History classes in high school, had opened his front door and poked his head out. His uncharacteristically spiky comb-over waved at me. He also flapped one hand frantically. “Come, Jacob! Quickly!”
I’d been walking back toward the scrub wood from Rose’s house—I figured I could cut across and save at least a mile of street walking—and so far I hadn’t seen too many people. Morrison looked a little off, but it had been a tough couple of days and he’d always struck me as a level-headed guy. I trotted across his yard. “Hi, Mr. Morrison. Do you have any idea what—”
“Inside, damnit!” He grabbed my arm and pulled. The guy was barely five feet tall…but I let him pull me inside.
“Okay! Okay. What’s going on?” I asked.
He glared at me through his monocle—the only one I’d ever seen in person—and closed the door. “The children, Jacob. They don’t…they don’t always recognize the people who belong.”
“The people who what?”
“Shh!” He motioned to the window. “See for yourself! But be still, Jacob. Please. Don’t draw their attention.”
I moved to the window with him, and we watched the street. For a while, all was silence. I opened my mouth to ask again what was happening, but Mr. Morrison shushed me angrily. I decided to humor him…and then I heard it again: the older, long-disallowed version of the Henge High Barbarians fight song, as always delivered by teenage-or-younger voices. Bemused, I grinned a little…and wondered what was up.
Just as it was ending (“…SWIRLS OF BLUE! EYES OF FIRE! STANDING TALL, WE LIGHT YOUR PYRE! GO…BARBS!”) I saw the first kids come into sight. And my grin went away.
The Secret: A Thriller Page 5