by Nick Thacker
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s — it’s just that I still don’t get you. I am sorry, I truly am, but you don’t really hate people. You just said it, you know? You like those guys you work with, and you know it. You care for them, but you won’t let them in. Right?”
Ben felt again, for the third time in many years, his face redden. “Yeah, I get it. Listen, Julie, here’s what people like you — people who have that weird hope in humanity — don’t get. You know what causes pain? True, real pain? People do. You get rid of people, you get rid of pain.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Stop thinking that the world works some other way, Julie. Stop trying to make it work the way you want it to.”
The waitress came around and refilled their coffee, while Julie and Ben sat silently at the small table. Julie held back tears as she gazed out the window. Ben simply faced straight ahead, not making eye contact with the waitress.
When he finally looked up, he found the woman staring down at him knowingly, eyeing him strangely. “Let me know if you two need anything,” she whispered. Ben nodded.
“Come on, Julie, what’s wrong?”
Julie turned her head. “You need to grow up, Ben.”
He frowned.
“People care about you. People love you, and you push them away because you got hurt once. I get it, but you’ve got to let it go.”
He stood up to leave, but she reached out and grabbed his arm. “Stop. Don’t walk away again, Ben. You need to hear this, talk through it.”
He wanted badly to continue, to walk out of the room. Then keep walking.
But he didn’t. He wasn’t sure why, but he agreed with her. He needed her to call him out. Or was it more than that?
Before he could consider an answer, Julie’s phone rang. She held it up and read off the name: Randall Brown.
31
“DAD! BREAKFAST IS READY!”
RANDALL Brown heard his son yell from the dining room. His wife had clearly told their son to get him for breakfast, and this was his interpretation. Seconds later he heard his wife, Amanda, yell back to Drew.
“Come on, Drew, get him. I could have done that myself.”
Randy smiled, knowing the exchange between his family members all too well. He knew what was next: “Then why didn’t you?” Drew asked.
He shook his head, knowing that Amanda would now really be upset at the disrespectful comment. She would probably revoke his rifle-shooting privileges, or worse.
When do they grow out of it? he wondered. Drew was a good kid, but Randy was regularly surprised by the fleeting attitudes and phases of teenage boys. Drew kept them on their toes, and Randy was positive that Drew was the cause of the majority of the gray hairs on his head.
“I’ll be right there!” he called back. Surprisingly, he didn’t hear his wife reprimand their son. She must have decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. Still smiling, he turned back to his cellphone and dialed Julie’s number.
It rang three times before she picked up. “Hello?”
“Hey, Julie, it’s me — Randy.”
“Hey, Randy, good to hear from you. We’re just finishing up breakfast. Anything good?”
“Might be helpful, but I don’t know if it’s good.”
“We’ll take anything you’ve got, Randy.”
“By the way, who’s we? You working with Stephens on this one?”
“Uh, no, a guy I met at Yellowstone actually. Stephens is back home. What did you find?”
Randy considered this for a moment. Some guy? Julie wasn’t careless, and she certainly wasn’t promiscuous, but he didn’t question her. “Oh, uh, I found her — Diana’s — assistant. Charlie Furmann, lives in Mud Lake, Idaho with his parents and has an apartment in Twin Falls.”
Julie paused a moment, and he assumed she was taking notes. “Mud Lake? Is that a real place?”
“It is. Town of about four hundred people from what I gather. Shouldn’t have much trouble finding him there.”
“Ok, great. Anything else on him?”
“Not much. He was a PhD candidate in something called ‘molecular modeling’ and worked with Diana as a sort of work-study.”
Again, a pause.
“Listen, Julie. I really need to go.” He thought about his son in the dining room, waiting with Amanda to start breakfast. Amanda. She was already upset that he was gone for a few hours yesterday, and she wouldn’t be happy with him for this, either. At the very least he could tell her what had happened at Yellowstone and hope that it explained why he had been absent.
“Right, yeah, sorry. Randy, thanks for this. Seriously.”
“No problem.” He began to hang up, but heard Julie’s voice again from the small speaker.
“Oh, hey. Have you heard anything from Stephens?”
Randy frowned, but placed the phone back up to his ear. “Stephens? No, why?”
It wasn’t abnormal for Randy to not be in contact with Benjamin Stephens. Randy was the office IT specialist, not a regular team member. Most of the time he was in charge of setting up and maintaining the company’s intranet server, SecuNet, and setting up email addresses and providing other IT support. In some cases, he had played a more active role by providing on-the-fly information updates and logistics, but his was mainly a hands-off job.
“I just haven’t heard anything from him either, and he’s usually inundating me with emails and keeping me in the loop with things. I figured that with a case like this, my inbox would have four hundred emails in it from him.”
“Weird. No, I haven’t heard anything.”
“Okay. Is the server up? Any major downtime?”
Randy was almost insulted. “Of course not. Why would there be? You know I’ve got 24/7 alerts that would get to me even if I was in an Afghani cave.”
“Woah, chill. I figured, just couldn’t hurt to ask,” Julie said. “Sorry — I know you’re on top of it. It’s just weird that Stephens hasn’t tried to email me.”
“Yeah, it is. Give me a minute. I’ll remote in and see if there’s anything wonky going on. I’ll text you in five.”
“Thanks, Randy. I owe you one.”
“Buy me a beer sometime, and we’re even.” He clicked off the phone and walked out to the dining room. “Amanda, Drew. Yesterday a bomb went off at Yellowstone. Something was released into the air there at the same time, and no one knows what it is, but it’s killing people.”
His wife’s eyes grew wide, and Drew’s mouth hung open.
“We’re fine here, but that’s what I’ve been working on. The CDC’s got people in the field, but I need to keep checking in every now and then. That okay with you?”
His wife nodded, still taking in the horrible news.
“Okay. Give me five minutes to check something, then I’ll be back out.”
He left the room and used the remote desktop application on his phone to access his terminal at the office.
Everything checked out — servers were up and running, intranet cabling didn’t appear to have any glitches, and the inbound internet connection was functioning properly. He scanned through the list of configuration files, finding no problems.
Lastly, he clicked on the email server link and browsed the inbound and outbound connections. Through this portal, he could see every email sent and received by every member of his access group — twenty-five people in total. It was a security protocol, one that had required him to maintain a level of security clearance to remain employed. He browsed the list, reading the names of the senders and receivers of each email.
He saw names of other employees sending and receiving emails from other members of the staff regarding the current state of affairs at Yellowstone. He saw emails from Stephens sent to Julie’s email address, and he saw emails to David Livingston.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Except…
He didn’t see any received emails with Julie’s name or email address. Though Stephens had sent them, th
ey seemingly had never reached her inbox.
Randy was immediately concerned. This was his area, his responsibility. If there was something wrong with the mail server…
Then he saw something even more puzzling.
For every sent email from Stephens to Julie, there was a duplicate received email with Livingston’s address on it.
Definitely puzzling.
He opened the configuration file for the mail server, just to see if there was anything strange going on with the routing. Everything checked out. He found nothing wrong in the name server settings, either.
There was one more place to check. Randy opened the forwarding section of the SecuNet admin portal and read down the list. Most entries were auto-responders set up for staff who were on vacation, working remotely, or otherwise wanting to receive their email through another provider’s account. But one was a specific forwarding address that he recognized.
Benjamin Stephens.
Randy saw the man’s name as an address that was being forwarded, and he clicked through to see exactly to whom his emails were being forwarded.
He was shocked when he found the answer. David Livingston.
The forward was also set up by Livingston. For whatever reason, Livingston had set up an email forwarder on the SecuNet server for all of Stephens’ mail. Anything the man sent out was received by his boss.
It was done poorly, as well. Randy couldn’t find any sort of encryption on the forwarding record, nor was the address masked in any way to a vanity email address. It was as if the man didn’t care who was watching, or more likely, didn’t care why anyone was watching.
It was certainly like Livingston to be so distrustful of his staff that he’d set up an email forward on an account, but why Stephens? And why not just ask Randy to monitor it for him?
Randy knew why: because Livingston wanted the power trip. He wanted to feel in charge, and letting Randy into his little game was like letting someone else drive the train. Randy was immediately disgusted, but he was now faced with a bigger dilemma: should he remove the forward?
If he did, Livingston would know soon enough that the forward was no longer working. But if he didn’t, Livingston could just log in to SecuNet and see that ‘rbrown’ had recently logged in and seen the forwarding page.
It was a tough decision, but he had a little time to think through his options. There was, however, one decision he’d already made.
He closed the remote desktop application on his phone and dialed Julie’s number.
32
“SEEMS LIKE ALL WE’RE DOING is driving,” Julie said from the passenger seat of her truck. The road they were on had narrowed to a two-lane highway surrounded by farmland.
“You mean all I’m doing is driving,” Ben answered. They’d left the hotel that morning, heading toward Mud Lake, Idaho, after Julie received the tip from her computer guy, Randy Brown.
“I told you earlier I don’t mind — just let me know when you want to switch.”
Ben laughed. “It’s fine, really. I like driving, and I like the scenery.”
“You mean cornfields as far as the eye can see?” Julie snickered. “I could go for anything else.”
“They’re soy beans, first of all, but yeah. I like it. It’s open, and there aren’t buildings everywhere. And I told you earlier you can fly wherever you need to go. I just prefer driving.”
They came to a cross street and turned right onto a farm-to-market road that apparently led farther into the great expanse of fields and farms. According to Ben’s map, they were about ten minutes from Mud Lake. Julie had chided him for almost an hour about the map — a Rand McNalley road atlas he’d purchased at the hotel’s gift shop — but he was the one laughing now.
Never one to trust technology, Ben bought the map “just in case,” having a hunch that neither of their cellphones would pull a decent enough data connection to get them to Mud Lake, and then to Charlie Furmann’s parents’ place outside of town. As of about thirty minutes ago, he was proven correct.
“I don’t mind driving, especially when I’m not, uh, actually driving.” She turned and grinned at him, then continued. “The CDC isn’t huge on flying, since it happens to be one of the best ways to spread airborne diseases, but they’ll opt for that when we need to set something up in a hurry. By the way, what’s up with your fear of flying?”
“It’s not a fear of flying,” Ben shot back. “I just don’t… like it.”
“Oh, right, and people who ‘just don’t like’ heights say they’re not ‘afraid’ either.”
“It’s different. I swear. I just don’t like feeling so… helpless.”
Julie thought a moment, looking out the window. “I get that. Makes sense — all those tons of metal, breaking the laws of physics —”
“Hey, I don’t need to be reminded of it.”
“So you are afraid of flying! I can’t even mention flying without you getting all bent out of shape.”
“You’re relentless, you know that?” Ben said.
“I do. How much longer?”
“About ten minutes, I think. Check the map.” Julie grabbed the open atlas spread out on the center console and frowned at it for a few seconds.
“What? Haven’t had to go tech-free in a while?”
“Shut up. I can use it. I just need to get my bearings.”
“I literally outlined the route we’re on. Just look at the red line — we’re toward the end of it.”
Julie contemplated the map for a few more seconds, then threw it back down and looked back out the window.
“Well?” Ben asked.
“Yeah, about ten minutes.”
Ben laughed.
Ten minutes later, they saw a lone silo stretching out over a field of deep green, leafy plants. As the silo grew larger, they could see a few smaller buildings spread out over the expanse of soy fields, including a yellow farmhouse. But it was the vehicles in front of the farmhouse that made Ben’s skin crawl.
“Are those police cars?” Julie asked.
“Yeah. Four of them.”
“Oh, man, this just keeps getting better.”
Ben navigated down the road a little farther until he saw a dirt road leading to the farmstead. He started to slow the vehicle, preparing to turn, but Julie stopped him.
“Don’t. They’re not going to let us just walk around there, and if something did happen, we’re not helping ourselves by showing up on the doorstep.”
Ben knew she was right.
“Besides, the police aren’t going to give us anything until they’ve figured it out. Especially if there was a crime. Let’s head back into town and see if anyone knows what’s going on.”
Ben sped up again and grabbed the atlas. “This road intersects with another farm road that runs parallel to the main highway. Should take us back toward Mud Lake.”
They found their road in another minute, and ten minutes after that, they were on the outskirts of town.
Town, however, was too strong a word.
“Good night! This place barely counts as a city,” Julie said. “What’s the population here? Four?”
Mud Lake, Idaho, seemed like not much more than a rest stop on the way to something bigger. A few stoplights, a general store with a few gas pumps, and a large industrial facility of some sort was all the small town’s main street offered.
Ben pulled the F450 into the small lot in front of the general store and parked.
“Is it open?” Julie asked.
“No idea. Let’s see.” They got out and walked to the front door. Ben grabbed the handle and was surprised to see it give easily, letting out a series of dings from a group of bells that hung on a string attached to the door.
“One minute!” a voice called out from somewhere in the back of the store. They waited at the counter for a few more seconds until a short, rotund man with reddened cheeks and wispy white hair appeared from around a corner. He shuffled along, appearing almost weightless as his upper body hardly
moved. He wore an impressive smile, aided by his large, jolly eyes, and his overall impression told the couple they’d found the right place to ask for help.
“How may I help you?” the man asked. His voice matched his appearance in every way. Crisp, light, and nuanced in a way that only an older man with years of communication experience could portray.
Julie smiled back, and Ben also immediately felt at ease. “We’re looking for some information. About someone that lives here.”
The man nodded slowly, eyeing each of them for a brief moment. “It’s a small town, as you’ve no doubt gathered,” he said. “We do tend to know one another quite well.”
Ben sensed a bit of hesitation in the man. Maybe this was a bad idea…
“His name’s Charlie Furmann,” Julie said. “I think he lives here with his parents, just outside of town—”
The man held up a hand, halting Julie. Ben watched as the man’s expression and stature changed almost instantaneously, going from a peaceful, inviting shop owner to a ruffled, bothered old man. “Get out. Now.” He pointed to the door. “Please leave.”
“Sir — we’re just—”
“No. Out.”
Ben clenched his teeth and tried to interpret what had just happened. The man clearly knew Charlie, or knew of him. Maybe he knows his parents?
“Sir, we’re sorry to intrude. Really. But we’re with the CDC… the Centers for Disease Control.” The man’s face softened slightly, but he still looked about three seconds away from grabbing a broom handle and shooing them out of the store. Ben continued. “There’s been an outbreak of something, and we’re trying to figure out what it is. We think Charlie might know something about it—”
“It doesn’t matter what he knew,” the shopkeeper said.
“Wait,” Julie said. “What do you mean? Is Charlie…”
The man nodded.
“My God,” she said. “We’re so sorry. We drove by his parents’ farm and saw the police cars… where… how?”
The man sighed, realizing that he wasn’t going to get rid of these patrons as easily as he once thought. “He was found in his apartment, in Twin Falls. Had that rash on him — the one that’s been going around east of here.”