by Неизвестный
“Eli.” He heard movement at the back of the shop—shoes on hard flooring, and the sound of someone slurping a very hot beverage. “Valentine, are you pulling my leg? Is Khan back there? I don’t believe in gho—gho—gick.” He couldn’t finish the sentence. The chip that prevented him from lying apparently knew him better than he knew himself.
A deep and manly voice boomed from the darkness. “Valentine, my love, save your charms for the ones with money.” Khan emerged from the back and joined them at the counter, steaming mug in hand. His eyes went right to Eli’s knees, which were visible, because Eli had donned his delivery uniform that morning—an act he now intensely regretted.
Khan finished, “The ones with money don’t wear short pants made of polyester.”
She smiled sweetly at Khan. “Good point, my love.”
He set down his mug and gazed into her eyes. “Darling, you look ravishing today. May I kiss you?”
She looked up at him with alluring eyes as green as sea glass. “If you must.”
Khan pressed his hand over her mouth while she pressed her palm over his lips, and they pretended to kiss noisily, like two teenagers in a school play.
This carried on for several uncomfortable seconds that felt like hours to Eli, and it only stopped when Khan dipped Valentine, lost his balance, and dropped her. She wheezed with laughter as she got to her feet.
Khan grinned at Eli. “I see you’ve met my sister.”
“Your sister?” Eli tried to control his glee. He didn’t really think he had a chance with lovely Valentine, in her bright blue button-down shirt, tied at the waist to accentuate her trim waist, but it made him happy to know she was Khan’s sister. When he and Khan became best friends, they would see each other all the time. And if Brenda happened to suddenly die of a painless yet fast-acting disease, well, Eli could hope.
As for Khan, just being in his physical presence put Eli in a forgiving mood. So what if he’d nearly died last night, thanks to a demon-ghost or a powder-delivered hallucination. The events would one day make one heck of a campfire story.
The siblings gave each other playful punches on the shoulders, and then Valentine excused herself to do some paperwork at the back.
“What was the phone call about?” Khan leaned nonchalantly on the counter and sipped from his steaming mug. “You were awfully worked up over something this morning, my man.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He really didn’t. Especially not with Valentine in earshot. “Can you assure me the same thing won’t happen tonight? I didn’t tell you on the phone, but it affected my girlfriend as well. I guess some of the powder transferred from my hands to her… never mind.”
Khan’s dark eyebrows pushed together in earnestness. “Tell me everything, starting with this powder transfer. I need to know where your hands went.”
Eli hissed, “I said I don’t want to discuss it.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Brenda made me.”
“Is she your boss?”
“Yes.”
“Does she keep your manhood in a glass box?”
“Not literally.”
“You’re an interesting guy, Eli.”
“You’re not too dull yourself, but your sister’s cuter.”
Khan laughed. Eli hadn’t meant to crack a joke, but he was pleased to have his words taken that way.
Eli joined in the laughter.
Khan stopped laughing abruptly, his dark green eyes flashing a warning. “Nobody touches my sister.”
Over at the desk in the corner, Valentine groaned. “The stapler’s empty again!”
Khan called over his shoulder, “I told you. We have a stapler ghost. They’re pesky things.”
Eli stared at Khan in wonder, as he spun a tall tale about stapler ghosts and office supply poltergeists. The man lied so easily, and convincingly. Eli shuddered at the thought of a stapler ghost. Oh, the things it could do to stretched webs of human skin. For an instant, Eli recalled the horror of being suffocated repeatedly, and his chest felt heavy, his heart like rusted iron. The horror. If ghosts were real… he’d never feel safe again.
Khan snapped his fingers in front of Eli’s face. “Wake up, sleepyhead. Guess what time it is.” He didn’t wait for an answer, he just showed his forearm to Eli. Yesterday’s hand-scrawled address had been washed away to a ghostly shadow, and a new address stretched across the muscular forearm. “It’s ghost hacking time,” Khan said.
“Ghost hacking time,” Eli said weakly. He could still feel last night’s darkness, and its cold, undead fingers on his mouth.
“My truck’s in the shop,” Khan said.
“Yesterday you said you had a car in the shop, not a truck.”
“Maybe I have both. Getting a double tune-up.”
“Maybe you’re lying.”
Khan blinked, his face free of expression. “You’re calling me a liar.”
“I’m suggesting you’re a liar.”
“I don’t like your tone.”
“I don’t like being lied to.” Eli felt a tingle of satisfaction in his scalp. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but it pleased Eli greatly to suggest someone else was lying, because he knew—he knew!—he was above reproach.
“But you like fairy tales and comic books,” Khan said. “And movies about superheroes, and true love, and one brave guy who’s nothing special at first, becoming a hero and saving the whole world. You like those things.”
“Of course I do.”
“Then you do enjoy being lied to. You’re no different from anyone else.”
“I don’t like be—” His voice cracked.
Just like the plucky hero who trips up the evil supercomputer with its own logic, Khan had defeated him. He could no longer claim he didn’t like being lied to.
Eli looked to his left, at the rows of ancient computers. Did Khan know Eli’s weakness? This street was on Dave’s regular route, part of the Zombie Run. It was hard to say how many of Eli’s coworkers knew about the microchip, or how many random people they had told.
Eli held his tongue and didn’t speak of his suspicions. He wouldn’t give Khan the satisfaction.
He started again. “I don’t like to be… standing around in this dusty old shop when it’s ghost hunting time.”
“Ghost hacking, not ghost hunting.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Trademark, mainly.”
“Oh.” Eli hadn’t expected such a straight-forward response. He touched his fingers over the phone in his leather holster, hoping Brenda would call and pull him away with an errand. She had a special sense for when he was doing something interesting without her. The phone didn’t ring. The battery was probably dead. That was the only logical explanation.
Khan slung his bag onto his broad shoulder and came out from behind the counter, pushing through a low swinging gate. “My car-and-or-truck is in the shop,” he said.
“My van’s out front. I’m free to give you a lift, since I have the whole day off work.”
Khan grinned. Like his sister, he also had a dimple, but it wasn’t as cute. With exaggerated guilelessness, he said, “Golly gee, that would be swell, friend.”
They stepped outside just in time to see a parking attendant place a ticket printout on the van’s windshield.
As Eli cursed under his breath, Khan grabbed the yellow ticket and gallantly said, “Don’t worry about this. Parking’s on me. It’s the least I can do.”
He regarded the ticket with the pretend seriousness of someone who has no intention of paying the fine, and then tucked it into a pocket on his cargo pants.
Eli opened the driver’s side door, but before he could climb in, Khan dove into the leather seat and snapped the keys from Eli’s hand. “Thanks, my man.”
He started the engine and began adjusting the mirrors. Eli gently closed the door and muttered, “Shotgun.” He walked around the vehicle and got in the passenger side.
The seat was springy and felt brand new, because for the past five years, nobody but Brenda had sat there, and she weighed almost nothing.
So what if Khan wanted to drive? It was just a van, and, more importantly, Eli had the whole day off work. He blinked up at the blue sky between the downtown buildings. In that moment, he couldn’t remember what month it was, and if this was spring weather or fall. Whatever it was, the sun was just right—not too bright.
Khan guided the van out of the parking space with the same care one takes guiding a stray possum out of one’s house.
Eli was surprised that he did not mind the sound of his van’s tires squealing. Maybe it was the lack of sleep making him delirious, or maybe he was tired of having to make all his own poor life decisions. For once, it was nice to have someone else in the driver’s seat.
They drove past buildings with reflective glass, public art in the form of sculpture, and postage-stamp-sized green spaces. Eli enjoyed the downtown scenery, along with the intense pleasure of not knowing what this ghost hacking expedition would entail.
As an adult, there would be no more exciting Christmas mornings or completely new experiences. He had very few firsts ahead of him. He savored this idea of Khan being an actual ghost hacker, because how many more mysteries like this was he bound to encounter?
Khan careened the van the wrong way down a one-way street and had to quickly pull a U-turn amidst a flurry of honking. He cursed, blaming everyone but himself, then hit the gas harder. As they wove from lane to lane, he adjusted the bucket seat a few times, then complained, “Hey, this seat is all worn out and lop-sided.”
Eli smiled inwardly, knowing that he had the comfortable seat and Khan did not.
Chapter Seven
The van hurtled through the city, over the bridge and beyond, where the ratio of green to gray reversed.
Khan checked the address on his arm against the in-vehicle navigation system’s map.
Eli helpfully offered to punch in the address so the system would guide them, but Khan preferred to navigate his way. They drove through the countryside, past farms full of dairy cows, and then fields of green-hued grains.
They opened the windows and enjoyed the fresh air. Eli squinted at the fields. Pale green. So, it was spring, after all.
“How old were you?” Khan asked, breaking the silence. He didn’t need to clarify that he was asking how old Eli was on Crashdown day. People in the city asked each other some version of this question all the time, and everyone knew what it meant.
“I have no memory of it,” Eli said. “I was about four.”
“So was I, but I remember. My father thought we should evacuate, so he loaded the four of us into the car. Wait, I mean the three of us. My mother was still eight-months pregnant with Valentine, but she already had a name, and was already part of the family. She and I talked late at night.”
Eli got a chill that ran up his arms, making the fine brown hairs stand on end. “You had conversations with your unborn sister?”
“We’ve always been close.” Khan’s face in profile gave away no hints as to whether or not this was another tall tale of his, another con. “Valentine was excited about the Crashdown, and didn’t want to leave the city. She kept kicking my mother in the bladder. The car got caught up in the gridlock, of course. My mother made the trek once an hour to use the bathroom in a motorhome stuck about ten vehicles back.”
“Did you make it out of the city?”
“We were lucky. Dad acted fast, and we were the first wave out. He already had bags packed and stored on a shelf in the garage. I guess he and his survivalist buddies had been waiting for something like that to happen.” Khan chuckled to himself at the memory. “Man, some of those guys were crazy.”
“Sounds like fun,” Eli said.
“You know how when you’re a kid, summer vacation seems to be an entire lifetime? It was like that, up at the cabin. I caught fish in the river with my bare hands. When Valentine was born, they let me cut the cord. My hands were shaking, and I was scared, but then she reached out with her tiny pink hand and clutched onto my finger. That was when everything changed for me. I couldn’t let myself be scared ever again, because I had to look after her.”
Khan leaned over and checked the navigation map again. He’d been rough on the controls before, but after talking about his sister, he was gentle with the buttons.
Eli leaned his head out the window and let the wind move through his hair and whistle in his ear. He’d never had a sister, or a brother. Maybe that was why he felt scared sometimes.
“We came back after thirty-seven days,” Khan said. “Looters had broken the windows at the shop, but to add insult to injury, they hadn’t stolen anything except for the food in the kitchenette, and a pair of sunglasses.”
“That was the same shop we just came from?”
“Yup. Family business. Back then we just did appliances, of course, not paranormal work. It was called Hart Repairs at the time. That was Mom’s idea. She liked puns.”
Eli puzzled over the name for a moment. “But that’s not a pun. It’s not a pun if you didn’t repair hearts.”
“Sure, we did, probably. My dad could fix anything. Ever hear of a mechanical heart? He could fix one of those. My dad could fix anything.”
“I’m no doctor, but I’m pretty sure nobody’s walking around with a mechanical heart in them today, let alone twenty-six years ago.”
“Are you saying my mother didn’t know what a pun was?”
“I’m saying nobody repaired mechanical hearts at that shop, or anywhere else.”
Khan turned away from the road to look directly at Eli. “Nobody knows exactly what my father did, because repairing people’s small appliances didn’t generate enough revenue to keep the lights on in the shop, let alone pay for the nice house I grew up in.”
Eli took the hints Khan was feeding him, and tried to piece together a picture. Mr. Hart Senior must have been running scams, just like his son.
“What’s he up to these days?” Eli asked casually. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Mr. Hart Senior was now a CEO or a politician or in jail.
“This and that. My mother passed away a few years ago, so Valentine and I took over the shop, just as the bank accounts were running dry. My sister’s a genius, but we’re still running on fumes.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your mother. I never had one, so I don’t know what losing one would feel like. I was raised by…” He didn’t want to get into the whole topic of his adoption, or the experiments, or the chip in his head. “The man I called my father,” he finished.
“Is the old man still around?”
“In spirit only.”
Khan grinned. “I thought you said ghosts aren’t real.”
Eli rolled his eyes. “I didn’t say he was haunting me. And ghosts aren’t—” His throat closed off. “—scientifically proven.”
“Neither’s gravity.”
Eli wished physics had interested him in school. He’d love nothing more than to whip out some big, fat, smart-sounding physics talk and win this argument with a knockout punch. He’d love to give someone a concussion from whacking them on the head with knowledge. Where had this passion been when he was in high school? It was too late for him now.
“Proven or not, I like gravity,” Eli said.
“And I like stripper bars.” Khan cranked the wheel hard and turned the van onto a gravel driveway leading to a farmhouse. “So let’s do this job, get paid, and support the city’s stripper economy.”
Eli glanced over at Khan’s backpack of supplies. A tingle of childhood-first-time excitement ran through his veins. What was in the bag? It could be anything. Oh, happy day.
Khan slammed the van to a halt and jumped out. Through the open window, he instructed Eli to grab the bag of supplies, follow him in, and not speak until he was spoken to.
Still tingling with excitement, Eli did as he was told.
The farmhouse had once been a modest ranche
r-style home, maybe a thousand square feet by the look of the exterior. Now it looked more embarrassed than modest. The exposed wood siding held a few flakes of paint near the window trim, but most of the exterior was as bare and gray as an abandoned barn.
“Are you sure someone lives here?” Eli asked.
Khan rapped on the door, ignoring him.
Eli stepped back off the porch and looked up at the sky, at a single, wispy cloud. There were worse ways to spend a day.
With a creak, the front door opened slowly to reveal a pale, thin man who looked older than time.
Chapter Eight
Eli stared, open-mouthed at the ancient man who’d opened the farmhouse door.
The white hairs on the man’s head were as wispy as the lone cloud in the sky overhead. Over his thin frame, he wore a button-down shirt, several sizes too large, and a pair of workman’s pants held up by suspenders.
Was this the ghost they were here for?
No, he was being silly.
Eli forced himself to walk back up the stairs to the porch. Khan introduced himself and then Eli.
Eli noticed the old man’s pants were so loose, he could see the striped inner lining of the waistband. A memory of his father’s final days came back to him, unbidden. Eli’s stomach roiled and his head swam, his blood pressure rapidly dropping. He steadied himself with an elbow on the doorframe as he shook the man’s hand, skin soft like tissue paper.
The man, referred to as Mr. Quentin by Khan, invited them inside. The home’s interior smelled as bad as Eli expected. There was mildew, spoiled milk, and menthol.
“The microwave is the main problem,” Mr. Quentin explained in a croaking voice as he lead them to the kitchen. “I’m not the superstitious type, but my housekeeper, she’s Catholic. It’s hard for me to get help to come out this way, and she’s a good woman, so I’d rather keep her.”
They entered the kitchen, which was yellowed but orderly. The appliance sat in the corner. Khan reached out and swept his fingertips over the button panel on what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary, twenty-year-old microwave.
“I’m familiar with this particular model,” Khan said, his deep voice deep and reassuring. “Mr. Quentin, I’m not surprised you’re having problems.”