by Bobby Adair
He shoved the phone back into his pocket.
Tommy didn’t care what Summer had to say. He already knew the answer they were both trying to find. He just didn’t know it certainly enough to give it to her. Not yet.
He surveyed the line, bunching and snaking to the other side of the gym. People at the head of it were sitting at a table. They had papers and pens, computers, and tormented brows. Men in police’s and sheriff’s uniforms were up there, making everything official as they watched the crowd with faces that looked ready to lead a lynch mob down Main Street. Those Battalion 704 thugs or volunteer heroes, whatever they were, loitered with their rifles and stiff new shoulder patches.
Who the hell are those guys?
It occurred to Tommy that the phone having buzzed a message delivery implied something important—he had an internet connection.
As the line lurched a few steps forward, Tommy pulled his phone back out of his pocket. Four bars of strong wifi. He was in the high school. That made sense.
The message from Summer obnoxiously begged a response.
Tommy wasn’t in the mood for any more of her shit, but the ride down to town, and her help in searching the hospital, obligated him to say something.
He messaged back.
Tommy: At the high school gym. Command center here. I’m reporting them missing.
Summer: For the bomb?
“Duh. Fucking of course.”
The woman in front of Tommy turned and scolded him with her downturned lips and judging eyes.
“Sorry,” said Tommy, showing her the phone. “Just… you know.”
Summer: Faith never mentioned going to the meeting.
Tommy labored through a long, angry breath. Were those Emma’s shoes? Was that Emma lying on the courthouse lawn? Doubt and certainty wouldn’t resolve.
Summer: What about the house? The blood?
Tommy: I have to file a report. I have to do something!
Summer: Sorry. I know. Don’t lose hope. <3
The noise of pushy voices brought Tommy’s attention back to the stinky gym.
The 704 boys were herding the throng into divided lines as careworn volunteers unfolded more tables.
Tommy flowed with the people around him until the shuffling stopped and he was much closer to a pseudo-official plastic counter and a chance to tell an unofficial-looking authority about his missing family.
Tommy opened his Mail app and saw a dozen messages from Marty mixed in with all the usual inbox crap. He closed the app. He didn’t want to think of anything having to do with work. He checked his incoming calls and voicemails. Nothing from Faith or Emma. Only Marty, unable to leave him alone.
He opened an internet browser, curiosity pressing him to run a search on Battalion 704. Google returned a long list of items that appeared to have nothing at all to do with a law enforcement auxiliary in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. He refined his search, adding in terms for Spring Creek and Summit County.
“What the hell?”
The woman ahead of him in line looked back, again.
Tommy silently dared her to say something. She didn’t.
Tommy tried a few more combinations, and finally came across a website that had something to do with the terms ‘political action committee’ and ‘Battalion 704’. Unfortunately, the page the search result linked to came up with a 404 error. That frustrated Tommy. As far as he could tell, Google didn’t think ‘704’ existed.
He opened his News app, looking to see what the 24-hour cable channels were saying about the bombing.
Secret Service Arrests Congressional Leadership, Hazelton Behind It
Tommy scrolled past, not in the mood for a click-bait political headline that was 90% hype.
Country in Flames
“Jesus.” Tommy almost clicked the link but didn’t recognize the source. He’d been duped by propaganda masquerading as news before. Now, he didn’t trust anything from the sites he didn’t frequent.
NonCons Attack News Headquarters
Tommy rolled his eyes. The story was from another dubious source.
He quickly scrolled past the headlines, barely reading them while he looked for his trusted outlets, but there was nothing. Nothing new, anyway, only the links from earlier in the day. Tommy clicked one of those, hoping to follow it to a site he trusted.
Error 404
Tommy groaned as he closed the app and shuffled forward with the line.
The nosy woman in front of him turned to pry into Tommy’s noisy personal conversation.
Irritated with her, Tommy shouldered to the side, as he opened his Facebook app. He hated having to depend on social media for information, but he didn’t want to stay in the dark.
His Facebook Messenger displayed a badge for an unopened message and Tommy tapped, hoping again.
Ugh, Marty!
Tommy opened the message from his boss, ready to type an angry note in reply, but the first line of the message hinted at compelling content. It contained Emma’s name. Tommy opened it and his face reddened as he skimmed through another of Marty’s hyperbolic warnings attached to a photo of Emma standing on the amphitheater stage beneath a large banner for the Blue River Art Walk. She was holding a mic in one hand, anger on her face, her fist raised in front of the sunset-splashed mountains behind her.
The headline on the linked post stopped Tommy cold.
Teen NonCon Cunt Spills the Beans
Tommy typed fast and hard in reply to Marty’s message: Cunt? Are you fucking kidding me, Marty? If you ever say one more word to me about my daughter, I’m going to come to your house and shove your phone up your ass. Go fuck yourself!
Tommy’s nostrils were flaring and his hands were shaking as he hit send. He was ready to kill someone—the guy who wrote that headline about his daughter.
He clicked the link, determined to employ his formidable tech skills to track the shithead down.
A video auto-played as Tommy read the paragraph.
Hearing his daughter’s voice, Tommy paused the video and pulled out his earbuds. It didn’t matter what the douchebag poster had to say about Emma; what Summer had said earlier made him want to hear her speech.
Once plugged in, Tommy hit play again.
The crowd was roaring their approval. Clearly the video had been cut from somewhere in the middle of Emma’s speech.
Emma shouted, ‘Fuck Hazelton!’
Emma never swore. Tommy could barely believe what he was seeing.
‘Who thinks Hazelton and all his moronic minions should go straight to hell?’
More cheers.
‘Give us our country back. No, let’s raise our guns and take it. Burn the Congress. Hang Hazelton.’
Who the hell was this? It looked like Emma. It sounded like her, but at the same time, it didn’t, not really. It was like she’d been possessed by a demon, one that didn’t know how to move her just right, didn’t know how to speak exactly like her.
Emma shouted another incendiary curse and called for armed rebellion. The crowd cheered wildly.
Tommy felt like he was watching Hitler wearing an Emma costume exhorting endless ranks of Nazis at a pre-war Nuremberg rally.
And then the truth occurred to him.
He stopped the video.
Was his daughter’s transformation his fault? Had he been so focused on earning enough money to pay down his debts, he’d neglected his responsibility to be there, to participate in her life, to sit at the dinner table every night and ask, ‘Hey, how was your day?’ But that wasn’t the relationship he’d had with Emma, not for a long time. They’d been so close. Things had been so perfect.
But those debts, they had to be paid, and he only had one way to earn, whoring himself out to a consulting firm, and the endless hours on the road flying from one job to another, hoping to make it home on the weekends, but failing more often than not.
In that vacuum of his absence, Emma must have fallen under the influence of Faith’s addiction to politics, and she
’d been brainwashed by Summer. That’s why Emma didn’t seem like herself. Not at all. She was repeating hate rhetoric she’d probably heard from Summer—the gestures, the passion, and all.
That had to be it.
***
As the line crawled forward, pushing Tommy nearer to the tables and his turn to make it official that his family was missing, he watched the snippet of Emma’s video, over and over. He was looking for some sign that Emma was still his sweet princess, still the girl he’d read to every night until that day when she decided to do the reading herself while he listened. That was around third grade, when Harry Potter became her obsession. He’d had to sit through the entire series twice.
By fifth grade, Tommy’s work schedule and the drama overflowing from the divorce pushed nightly reading time off the daily do-list. It wasn’t that Tommy had trouble adjusting to being a single parent, he felt like he’d been one since the beginning. Well, by the end of the toddler phase, anyway. That was about the time Emma’s mother had given up resisting the vodka bottle’s siren song and seemed satisfied pickling herself into oblivion.
Despite the split, Tommy had tried to help Emma’s mother, though when he was adding up outlays every month and trying to see how his money was helping, it seemed more and more that he was only postponing the inevitable, buying extra weeks or months of misery for someone who only wanted life to end.
He sent her to rehab more times than he could count, paid in full, cash up front. She never finished one program. He forked over tens of thousands for her escalating attorney’s fees when the DA threatened to incarcerate her over one too many DUIs. Perhaps that would have been the best course of action, but at the time, the thought of Emma seeing her mother go to jail kept Tommy’s money flowing. Having seen his own father cuffed and carted away, Tommy didn’t want his little girl to feel the shame of having a convict parent.
Tommy’s phone buzzed.
Another text message.
Summer: Are you still at the gym?
Tommy: Yes.
Summer: Are the 704 guys there?
Tommy: Yes.
Summer: Are they in charge?
Tommy: Get to the point, please.
Summer: You have to leave.
Tommy: I’ve been in line for two hours. I’m almost up.
Summer: Leave now.
Tommy: No.
Summer: Meet me at the bike path where I dropped you. HURRY.
Tommy: Maybe a half hour. I’m almost to the head of the line.
Summer: You’re in danger.
Tommy: I’m sure.
Summer: Sarcasm won’t help. Those 704 guys are part of an extremist paramilitary group.
Tommy: I thought you said they were heroes helping out the local police.
Summer: I was only saying we didn’t know for sure. Please trust me, you have to go.
Tommy didn’t see any point in arguing about it. He didn’t reply.
Summer: I know what happened to Emma and Faith.
Tommy felt his heart skip.
Tommy: Are they at the hospital?
Summer: No.
Tommy: Dammit! Tell me!
Summer: They’ve been disappeared.
Tommy stifled an angry laugh.
Tommy: Like this is a third world country. LOL!!!!!!!!
Tommy: Political factions don’t haul their rivals out to an onion field and throw them in a hole. This is America. People don’t get disappeared here.
Summer: Trust me on this.
Tommy: Like I trusted you with my daughter?
Summer: What’s that supposed to mean?
Tommy: I saw the speech Emma gave at the Art Walk. My God, you and Faith brainwashed her. You taught her how to hate?
Summer: What?
Tommy: I don’t need you to meet me on the bike path. I’ll find my own way home.
Summer: If you saw a video on the internet, you can’t believe it.
Tommy: What? I shouldn’t believe what I saw with my own eyes? I should believe what you tell me to believe instead, so I can end up just as brainwashed as Emma? I’m not stupid.
Summer: I’m trying to save you and you’re being petulant.
Tommy: I’m with the people who can actually help me find Emma. I have to file my report. Leave me alone.
Tommy put his phone on silent and slipped it into his pocket.
A 704 guy keeping order at the front of the line waved Tommy over to the table.
Not knowing how to begin, Tommy told the pair of amateur bureaucrats, “My wife and daughter are missing.”
***
“ID and voter registration card.”
Reaching for his billfold, Tommy looked at the black-shirted man who’d asked. “Voter registration card? Who carries that with them?”
The guy shook his head that way people do when they’d rather call someone an idiot.
“What?” asked Tommy, feeling his temper starting to flare. Tommy realized he was about to do something stupid, and tamped his temper back down. He tried an alternate approach. He reached out a hand to the man in the black shirt. “I’m Tommy Joss.”
Irritated, the guy put half an effort into shaking Tommy’s hand. “Mitch. I need your ID and voter registration.”
As Mitch wrote down Tommy’s name, Tommy introduced himself to the other man at the table. His name was Keith. Neither gave a last name.
Handing his driver’s license over, Tommy said, “I don’t carry my voter registration card with me. I don’t see why that would be necessary.”
Keith, the guy with the laptop, took Tommy’s license and started to type.
“Who’d you vote for?” asked Mitch.
“What?” The question derailed Tommy, as he looked around, like he’d missed a sign explaining the purpose of the gathering in the gym. “The policeman over at the—”
“If you don’t have your voter registration card,” said Mitch, pencil hovering over his paper, “I need your voting history.”
“Ah,” Tommy shook his head.
“Which primary did you vote in?”
“I didn’t vote in a primary,” Tommy told him. “Are you going to write down my daughter’s name?” He looked over at Keith whose attention was solely on his computer screen.
“No primary.” Mitch wrote that down on the line beneath Tommy’s name. “Did you vote for Hazelton?”
“Nobody voted for Hazelton,” Tommy snapped. “He was the Speaker of the House.”
“But you support him?”
“I didn’t come here to be interrogated about my voting choices,” argued Tommy, “If this isn’t the place where I report my missing family, then tell me where that is, because that’s what I need to be doing right now, not whatever the hell this is.”
A sheriff’s deputy stepped close, hand on his gun. Two of the 704 line monitor guys closed in.
Tommy drew a deep breath, put his hands on the table, and leaned over Mitch.
“Back off,” said the sheriff. “Hands off the table.”
Tommy raised his hands, palms up.
“Voting history?” asked Mitch.
Tommy reasoned that it was faster to answer than argue. He had important matters to get to, like his wife and daughter. “I haven’t voted, since, I don’t know, ten or twelve years back.”
“You haven’t voted?” Mitch made it sound like an accusation of pedophilia.
“I travel a lot. I work.”
“Everybody works,” Keith chimed in, apparently listening.
“You’re an Apathist,” said Mitch, writing it down on the paper.
Tommy pointed. “Wait, what? An Apathist?”
“Apathy,” explained Mitch. “Somebody who doesn’t give half a rat shit for their country.”
“No,” said Tommy. “I told you I—”
“Work,” snorted Keith, still looking at his screen.
“I just need to report my daughter, Emma Joss, and my wife, Faith, missing. I got home today from—” Tommy stopped. Keith was pointing at his
screen and showing it to Mitch. This new information furrowed Mitch’s brow.
“What?” Tommy reached toward the computer, eager to see.
“Sir,” said the sheriff.
Tommy froze, fearing the worse about the information Keith had found. “My daughter. My wife. Do you know something?”
Keith lifted Tommy’s license off the desk and read from it. “You are Tommy Joss, and this is your correct address?”
“Of course.”
Mitch turned to the sheriff and nodded.
The sheriff raised his hand and waved Tommy around the table. “Could you step this way, please?”
Tommy’s knees felt like they were turning to water. His stomach knotted up and tears filled his eyes.
“Sir,” said the sheriff.
They knew. It was bad news. They were taking him to the back to tell him so he wouldn’t create a scene in front of all the grieving parents and wives and brothers and everybody.
Tommy’s feet shuffled him around the table.
The sheriff’s firm grip took his arm and led him along.
Just as well, Tommy wasn’t sure he could keep himself upright. He didn’t know if he could find his way to a door even if the deputy pointed at it. Everything in his world was collapsing around the grief again, and they were about to tell him 100% for sure, and then he’d be alone with two more tragedies stacked on a life that had more than its share already.
With more of a shove than was necessary the strong-handed sheriff guided Tommy through a door and into a room that smelled like sweaty socks and mildewed towels. Tommy's eyes were on the floor watching his toes step on the grout lines between institutionally bland tiles. He saw a bottom row of vented lockers, scratched and dented.
“Got one,” said the sheriff letting go of Tommy’s arm.
Papers flapped as a man perused a stapled stack. “Another A-lister?”
“E,” said someone behind.
The door closed with a heavy click, and a hand pushed Tommy forward.
“Against the wall,” said the sheriff.
Tommy turned his back to lean on the wall.
“Is he on drugs?” asked another guy.