by Stephen King
Only he’s curious about the green Zappit.
Too curious, it turns out, to wait. Halfway between Allgood Place and Harper Road, he pulls into a strip mall, parks in front of a dry cleaning shop that’s closed for the night, and powers the gadget up. It flashes bright white, and then a red Z appears, growing closer and bigger until the slant of the Z colors the whole screen red. A moment later it flashes white again, and a message appears: WELCOME TO ZAPPIT! WE LOVE TO PLAY! HIT ANY KEY TO BEGIN, OR JUST SWIPE THE SCREEN!
Hodges swipes, and game icons appear in neat rows. Some are console versions of ones he watched Allie play at the mall when she was a little girl: Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and that little yellow devil’s main squeeze, Ms. Pac-Man. There are also the various solitaire games Janice Ellerton had been hooked on, and plenty of other stuff Hodges has never heard of. He swipes again, and there it is, between SpellTower and Barbie’s Fashion Walk: Fishin’ Hole. He takes a deep breath and taps the icon.
THINKING ABOUT FISHIN’ HOLE, the screen advises. A little worry-circle goes around for ten seconds or so (it seems longer), and then the demo screen appears. Fish swim back and forth, or do loop-the-loops, or shoot up and down on diagonals. Bubbles rise from their mouths and flipping tails. The water is greenish at the top, shading to blue farther down. A little tune plays, not one Hodges recognizes. He watches and waits to feel something—sleepy seems the most likely.
The fish are red, green, blue, gold, yellow. They’re probably supposed to be tropical fish, but they have none of the hyper-reality Hodges has seen in Xbox and PlayStation commercials on TV. These fish are basically cartoons, and primitive ones, at that. No wonder the Zappit flopped, he thinks, but yeah, okay, there’s something mildly hypnotic about the way the fish move, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, every now and then in a rainbow school of half a dozen.
And jackpot, here comes a pink one. He taps at it, but it’s moving just a mite too fast, and he misses. Hodges mutters “Shit!” under his breath. He looks up at the darkened dry cleaning store’s window for a moment, because he really is feeling a trifle dozy. He lightly smacks first his left cheek and then his right with the hand not holding the game, and looks back down. There are more fish now, weaving back and forth in complicated patterns.
Here comes another pink one, and this time he succeeds in tapping it before it whisks off the left side of the screen. It blinks (almost as if to say Okay, Bill, you got me that time) but no number appears. He waits, watches, and when another pink one appears, he taps again. Still no number, just a pink fish that has no counterpart in the real world.
The tune seems louder now, and at the same time slower. Hodges thinks, It really is having some kind of effect. It’s mild, and probably completely accidental, but it’s there, all right.
He pushes the power button. The screen flashes THANKS FOR PLAYING SEE YOU SOON and goes dark. He looks at the dashboard clock and is astonished to see he has been sitting here looking at the Zappit for over ten minutes. It felt more like two or three. Five, at the very most. Dinah didn’t talk about losing time while looking at the Fishin’ Hole demo screen, but he hadn’t asked about that, had he? On the other hand, he’s on two fairly heavy-duty painkillers, and that probably played a part in what just happened. If anything actually did, that is.
No numbers, though.
The pink fish had just been pink fish.
Hodges slips the Zappit into his coat pocket along with his phone and drives home.
3
Freddi Linklatter—once a computer-repair colleague of Brady’s before the world discovered Brady Hartsfield was a monster—sits at her kitchen table, spinning a silver flask with one finger as she waits for the man with the fancy briefcase.
Dr. Z is what he calls himself, but Freddi is no fool. She knows the name that goes with the briefcase initials: Felix Babineau, head of neurology at Kiner Memorial.
Does he know that she knows? She’s guessing he does, and doesn’t care. But it’s weird. Very. He’s in his sixties, an authentic golden oldie, but he reminds her of somebody much younger. Someone who is, in fact, this Dr. Babineau’s most famous (infamous, really) patient.
Around and around goes the flask. Etched on the side is GH & FL, 4Ever. Well, 4Ever lasted just about two years, and Gloria Hollis has been gone for quite awhile now. Babineau—or Dr. Z, as he styles himself, like the villain in a comic book—was part of the reason why.
“He’s creepy,” Gloria said. “The older guy is, too. And the money’s creepy. It’s too much. I don’t know what they got you into, Fred, but sooner or later it’s going to blow up in your face, and I don’t want to be part of the collateral damage.”
Of course Gloria had also met someone else—someone quite a bit better-looking than Freddi, with her angular body and lantern jaw and pitted cheeks—but she didn’t want to talk about that part of it, oh no.
Around and around goes the flask.
It all seemed so simple at first, and how could she refuse the money? She never saved much when she worked on the Discount Electronix Cyber Patrol, and the work she’d been able to find as an independent IT when the store closed had barely been enough to keep her off the street. It might have been different if she’d had what Anthony Frobisher, her old boss, liked to call “people skills,” but those had never been her forte. When the old geezer who called himself Z-Boy made his offer (and dear God, that was really a comic book handle), it had been like a gift from God. She had been living in a shitty apartment on the South Side, in the part of town commonly referred to as Hillbilly Heaven, and a month behind on the rent in spite of the cash the guy had already given her. What was she supposed to do? Refuse five thousand dollars? Get real.
Around and around goes the flask.
The guy is late, maybe he’s not coming at all, and that might be for the best.
She remembers the geezer casting his eyes around the two-room apartment, most of her possessions in paper bags with handles (all too easy to see those bags gathered around her as she tried to sleep beneath a Crosstown Expressway underpass). “You’ll need a bigger place,” he said.
“Yeah, and the farmers in California need rain.” She remembers peering into the envelope he handed her. Remembers riffling the fifties, and what a comfy sound they made. “This is nice, but by the time I get square with all the people I owe, there won’t be much left.” She could stiff most of those people, but the geezer didn’t need to know that.
“There’ll be more, and my boss will take care of getting you an apartment where you may be asked to accept certain shipments.”
That started alarm bells ringing. “If you’re thinking about drugs, let’s just forget the whole thing.” She held out the cash-stuffed envelope to him, much as it hurt to do that.
He pushed it back with a little grimace of contempt. “No drugs. You’ll not be asked to sign for anything even slightly illegal.”
So here she is, in a condo close to the lakeshore. Not that there’s much of a lake view from only six stories up, and not that the place is a palace. Far from it, especially in the winter. You can only catch a wink of the water between the newer, nicer highrises, but the wind finds its way through just fine, thanks, and in January, that wind is cold. She has the joke thermostat cranked to eighty, and is still wearing three shirts and longjohns under her carpenter jeans. Hillbilly Heaven is in the rearview mirror, though, that’s something, but the question remains: is it enough?
Around and around goes the silver flask. GH & FL, 4Ever. Only nothing is 4Ever.
The lobby buzzer goes, making her jump. She picks up the flask—her one souvenir of the glorious Gloria days—and heads to the intercom. She quashes an urge to do her Russian spy accent again. Whether he calls himself Dr. Babineau or Dr. Z, the guy is a little scary. Not Hillbilly-Heaven, crystal-meth-dope-dealer scary, but in a different way. Better to play this straight, get it over with, and hope to Christ she doesn’t find herself in too much trouble if the deal blows up in her face.
<
br /> “Is this the famous Dr. Z?”
“Of course it is.”
“You’re late.”
“Am I keeping you from something important, Freddi?”
No, nothing important. Nothing she does is particularly important these days.
“You brought the money?”
“Of course.” Sounding impatient. The old geezer with whom she had commenced this nutty business had the same impatient way of speaking. He and Dr. Z looked nothing alike, but they sounded alike, enough to make her wonder if they weren’t brothers. Only they also sounded like that someone else, the old colleague she used to work with. The one who turned out to be Mr. Mercedes.
Freddi doesn’t want to think about that any more than she wants to think about the various hacks she’s done on Dr. Z’s behalf. She hits the buzzer beside the intercom.
She goes to her door to wait for him, taking a nip of Scotch to fortify herself. She tucks the flask into the breast pocket of her middle shirt, then reaches into the pocket of the one beneath, where she keeps her breath mints. She doesn’t believe Dr. Z would give Shit One if he smelled booze on her breath, but she always used to pop a mint after a nip when she was working at Discount Electronix, and old habits are strong habits. She takes her Marlboros from the pocket of her top shirt and lights one. It will further mask the smell of the booze, and calm her a little more, and if he doesn’t like her secondhand smoke, tough titty.
“This guy has set you up in a pretty nice apartment and paid you almost thirty thousand dollars over the last eighteen months or so,” Gloria had said. “Tall tickets for something any hacker worth her salt could do in her sleep, at least according to you. So why you? And why so much?”
More stuff Freddi doesn’t want to think about.
It all started with the picture of Brady and his mom. She found it in the junk room at Discount Electronix, shortly after the staff had been told the Birch Hill Mall store was closing. Their boss, Anthony “Tones” Frobisher, must have taken it out of Brady’s work cubby and tossed it back there after the world found out that Brady was the infamous Mercedes Killer. Freddi had no great love for Brady (although they did have a few meaningful conversations about gender identity, back in the day). Wrapping the picture and taking it to the hospital was pure impulse. And the few times she’d visited him afterwards had been pure curiosity, plus a little pride at the way Brady had reacted to her. He smiled.
“He responds to you,” the new head nurse—Scapelli—said after one of Freddi’s visits. “That’s very unusual.”
By the time Scapelli replaced Becky Helmington, Freddi knew that the mysterious Dr. Z who took over supplying her with cash was in reality Dr. Felix Babineau. She didn’t think about that, either. Or about the cartons that eventually began arriving from Terre Haute via UPS. Or the hacks. She became an expert in not thinking, because once you started doing that, certain connections became obvious. And all because of that damn picture. Freddi wishes now she’d resisted the impulse, but her mother had a saying: Too late always comes too early.
She hears his footsteps coming down the hall. She opens the door before he can ring the bell, and the question is out of her mouth before she knows she is going to ask it.
“Tell me the truth, Dr. Z—are you Brady?”
4
Hodges is barely inside his front door and still taking off his coat when his cell rings. “Hey, Holly.”
“Are you all right?”
He can see a lot of calls from her starting with this exact same greeting. Well, it’s better than Drop dead, motherfucker. “Yeah, I’m good.”
“One more day, and then you start treatments. And once you start, you don’t stop. Whatever the doctors say, you do.”
“Stop worrying. A deal is a deal.”
“I’ll stop worrying when you’re cancer free.”
Don’t, Holly, he thinks, and closes his eyes against the unexpected sting of tears. Don’t, don’t, don’t.
“Jerome is coming tonight. He called from his plane to ask about Barbara, and I told him everything she told me. He’ll be in at eleven o’clock. A good thing he left when he did, because a storm is coming. It’s supposed to be a bad one. I offered to rent him a car the way I do for you when you go out of town, it’s very easy now that we have the corporate account—”
“That you lobbied for until I gave in. Believe me, I know.”
“But he doesn’t need a car. His father is picking him up. They’ll go in to see Barbara at eight tomorrow, and bring her home if the doctor says she can go. Jerome said he can be at our office by ten, if that’s okay.”
“Sounds fine,” Hodges says, wiping his eyes. He doesn’t know how much Jerome can help, but he knows it will be very good to see him. “Anything more he can find out from her about that damn gadget—”
“I asked him to do that. Did you get Dinah’s?”
“Yeah. And tried it. There’s something up with the Fishin’ Hole demo screen, all right. It makes you sleepy if you look at it too long. Purely accidental, I think, and I don’t see how most kids would be affected, because they’d want to go right to the game.”
He fills her in on the rest of what he learned from Dinah.
Holly says, “So Dinah didn’t get her Zappit the same way as Barbara and the Ellerton woman.”
“No.”
“And don’t forget Hilda Carver. The man calling himself Myron Zakim gave her one, too. Only hers didn’t work. Barb said it just gave a single blue flash and died. Did you see any blue flashes?”
“Nope.” Hodges is peering at the scant contents of his refrigerator for something his stomach might accept, and settles on a carton of banana-flavored yogurt. “And there were pink fish, but when I succeeded in tapping a couple—which ain’t easy—no numbers appeared.”
“I bet they did on Mrs. Ellerton’s.”
Hodges thinks so, too. It’s early to generalize, but he’s starting to think the number-fish only show up on the Zappits that were handed out by the man with the briefcase, Myron Zakim. Hodges also thinks someone is playing games with the letter Z, and along with a morbid interest in suicide, games were part of Brady Hartsfield’s modus operandi. Except Brady is stuck in his room at Kiner Memorial, goddammit. Hodges keeps coming up against that irrefutable fact. If Brady Hartsfield has stooges to do his dirt, and it’s starting to seem that he does, how is he running them? And why would they run for him, anyway?
“Holly, I need you to heat up your computer and check something out. Not a biggie, just a t that needs to be crossed.”
“Tell me.”
“I want to know if Sunrise Solutions sponsored the ’Round Here tour in 2010, when Hartsfield tried to blow up the Mingo Auditorium. Or any ’Round Here tour.”
“I can do that. Did you have supper?”
“Taking care of that right now.”
“Good. What are you having?”
“Steak, shoestring potatoes, and a salad,” Hodges says, looking at the carton of yogurt with a mixture of distaste and resignation. “Got a leftover apple tart for dessert.”
“Heat it up in the microwave and put a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. Yummy!”
“I’ll take that under consideration.”
He shouldn’t be amazed when she calls back five minutes later with the information he requested, it’s just Holly being Holly, but he still is. “Jesus, Holly, already?”
With no idea that she is echoing Freddi Linklatter almost word for word, Holly says, “Ask for something hard next time. You might like to know that ’Round Here broke up in 2013. Those boy bands don’t seem to last very long.”
“No,” Hodges says, “once they start having to shave, the little girls lose interest.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Holly says. “I was always a Billy Joel fan. Also Michael Bolton.”
Oh, Holly, Hodges mourns. And not for the first time.
“Between 2007 and 2012, the group did six nationwide tours. The first four were sponsored by Sharp Cereals, which
gave out free samples at their concerts. The last two, including the one at the Mingo, were sponsored by PepsiCo.”
“No Sunrise Solutions.”
“No.”
“Thanks, Holly. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yes. Are you eating your dinner?”
“Sitting down to it now.”
“All right. And try to see Barbara before you start your treatments. She needs friendly faces, because whatever was wrong with her hasn’t worn off yet. She said it was like it left a trail of slime inside her head.”
“I’ll make sure of it,” Hodges says, but that is a promise he’s not able to keep.
5
Are you Brady?
Felix Babineau, who sometimes calls himself Myron Zakim and sometimes Dr. Z, smiles at the question. It wrinkles his unshaven cheeks in a decidedly creepy way. Tonight he’s wearing a furry ushanka instead of his trilby, and his white hair kind of squishes out around the bottom. Freddi wishes she hadn’t asked the question, wishes she didn’t have to let him in, wishes she’d never heard of him. If he is Brady, he’s a walking haunted house.
“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” he says.
She wants to let it go and can’t. “Because you sound like him. And that hack the other one brought me after the boxes came … that was a Brady hack if I ever saw one. Good as a signature.”
“Brady Hartsfield is a semi-catatonic who can barely walk, let alone write a hack to be used on a bunch of obsolete game consoles. Some of which have proved to be defective as well as obsolete. I did not get my money’s worth from those Sunrise Solutions motherfuckers, which pisses me off to the max.”
Pisses me off to the max. A phrase Brady used all the time back in their Cyber Patrol days, usually about their boss or some idiot customer who managed to spill a mocha latte into his CPU.