The Extinction Files Box Set

by A. G. Riddle

  “She’ll have to sign them, Desmond.”

  “I know. It won’t be a problem.”

  “You’re a brilliant young man, but I think you’ve got a lot to learn about women.”

  Desmond’s will was the easiest part. In classic Orville Hughes fashion, it read:

  To Peyton Adelaide Shaw, I leave everything.

  The other forms were a series of assignment agreements that gave Peyton ownership of half of all the options and securities he owned.

  That night they celebrated the IPO with a dinner out. After dessert, Desmond showed her the will, which, to his surprise, sort of freaked her out.

  “I just want you to be taken care of,” he said. “What if I fell over dead? Got hit by a car?”

  “Don’t say that, Desmond.”

  “It’s true. You’re all I’ve got, Peyton. You’re the only person in my life I’m really close to.”

  “Really close to? Is that how you’d describe us?” She chugged the rest of her wine.

  This conversation hadn’t gone the way he’d planned. He had thought she’d be relieved.

  At her apartment, he showed her the assignment agreements that gave her half of all his stock and options.

  “It’s what’s fair,” he said. “You saved me, Peyton—when I wanted to put it all in xTV. You introduced me to the first people I bought options from. You’ve been the only constant in my life since I’ve been in California. You practically supported me after xTV, kept me from starving. You’ve been my partner in this whole thing, and you should have half.”

  She exploded. “Your partner? Is that what we are? Business associates? Is that all this is?”

  “No, Peyton—”

  “Then what are we?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “You know exactly what I want.”

  He did know. It wasn’t stock options or any written agreement. It was three words he couldn’t seem to say. After a few months she had stopped saying them, but he could tell when she wanted to. That hurt him too.

  “Will you please sign them?” he said.

  “Get out.”

  “Peyton.”

  “You heard me. And take all your… legal documents with you.”

  Peyton didn’t return his calls or emails for two weeks. They were the longest weeks of Desmond’s life.

  He also had problems at work. SciNet was nearly out of money. They arrived at a seemingly counterintuitive solution: go public. The IPO, if successful, would raise over fifty million dollars for the company. It would also make Desmond rich.

  He watched in wonder as the finance department dressed up the books. Management asked him for endless reports, cutting and shuffling the data for the road show. There were all sorts of disclosures and disclaimers in the prospectus, verbiage about the risks to their business and things outside their control. But those dense sections weren’t what investors saw. They stared at the graphs on the projection screen that showed rapid growth and read the parts that described a company with massive profit potential.

  SciNet entered its quiet period and waited. Every person in the company was on edge. To Desmond it felt like being trapped in a submarine at war, knowing there were mines floating everywhere in the water around them, the entire crew holding its breath, waiting to see if they would hit one and sink or if they would make it out, to freedom, as heroes.

  Every day, Desmond wrote another email to Peyton.

  When she didn’t reply, he camped out at her front door. He was nervous that the neighbors would call the police, but they must have had some sense of what was going on. They looked at him with sympathy as they passed. One guy said, “Good luck, buddy.”

  When Peyton opened the door that morning, she tried to slam it in his face, but he held it open.

  “Please, just talk to me.”

  “You talk, I’ll listen.”

  She stood in the living room, hands on her hips.

  “I want you to try to imagine things from my perspective.”

  She was a statue.

  “There is something broken inside me. Deep down inside. In a place I never knew existed before I met you. I never needed it before, because anyone who ever loved me was ripped out of my life before I could love them back.

  “I watched my family burn to death. I was raised by one of the meanest guys I’ve ever known. He never loved me. I don’t think he could, or maybe he couldn’t show it. I never knew love as a child. I’ve never known it before. Until I met you. I don’t know what to do or how to feel, because this is completely new to me. I care about you more than anything I’ve ever cared about in this world. You’re my whole life, Peyton. But you need to know that I’m not a whole person. I’m not the person you want me to be.”

  The tears began streaming down her face. She put her arms around him, pulled him close, and pressed her body tightly into his. He could feel the tension drain out of his body. The release. The void filled with a desperate hunger. His body reacted. So did hers. His hands moved across her body as they kissed. They were naked a few seconds later, her walking backwards into her bedroom as they kissed, sloppy, hungry kisses.

  They lost track of time. She never mentioned class, and he didn’t say a word about work. In the living room, he could hear his Nokia cell phone ringing. He wouldn’t have answered it if the world was ending.

  When they were spent, they lay in bed, staring at the ceiling the same way they had that first night.

  Her voice was soft, barely over a whisper. “I thought you were pushing me away.”

  That confused him. He propped himself up on an elbow.

  She continued, still staring at the ceiling. “I figured you had what you wanted—the money, the stock that would make you rich. You wanted to give me my share so you could walk away with a clear conscience that you had done the right thing.”

  The attorney had been right: Desmond really did have a lot to learn about women.

  “That’s the last thing I want,” he said. “I want to take care of you no matter what, no matter what happens to us, or to me. I’m sorry I hurt you.”

  He was terrified that he would hurt her again. He feared that this was the first of what would be recurring missteps.

  “I meant what I said: I’m not a whole person, Peyton. Your friends, the couples we go to dinner with—those guys are what you want. Someone normal.”

  “I’ll be the judge of what I want. And it’s not normal. Plus, I’ve got news, Des. Nobody on this earth is really normal. Everyone is faking it to some degree. Especially around here. Lot of freak flags flying on the inside.”

  They got dressed then. Neither said a word, but there was a serenity in the air he’d never experienced.

  Before he left for work, he asked her again if she’d sign the documents.

  “I need to know you’re taken care of. Please.”

  “Okay.” She took his face in her hands. “If it’s what you want.”

  She signed her name in beautiful cursive letters, and Desmond kissed her before he left.

  She asked him again to come to Christmas at her mother’s house that year. This time, he accepted, but he wasn’t looking forward to it. He still didn’t feel comfortable around her family. But things had changed for him. He was a success now, with one IPO behind him and another looming.

  Her sister’s husband treated him differently, though he suspected he knew the series of events that had led to that: Peyton had prevailed upon her sister, who had then spoken with her husband. Derrick quizzed him about SciNet and his other investments with the zeal of a kid trying to glean clues about his gifts under the tree.

  Their family was tight, Desmond could see that, and Peyton had told him the reason: the death of their father had brought them closer. Her brother’s passing seven years before had also strengthened their bond. Peyton said it had made them more thankful for each other and every year they had together. The tragedies were a reminder to them of what was truly important.

  Her entir
e family couldn’t have been nicer to him. He still felt out of place, like an actor in a role that was wrong for him. “Fraud” was the word that kept running through his mind. He told himself that there was simply a wall inside of him, that the emotions were there, behind it, waiting to come through. When it came down, everything would be fine.

  He would soon learn the truth.

  Chapter 73

  Desmond felt a hand on his shoulder, shaking him. He opened his eyes. Avery loomed over him, her pale skin and slender face like a ghost in the green glow of the plane’s safety lights.

  Peyton lay in a sleeping bag beside him, fast asleep. Avery hadn’t woken her and apparently didn’t want to. Her voice was barely over a whisper.

  “You okay?”

  He felt feverish and achy, he assumed from the memory, but he didn’t want to give her any indication that he had recalled anything. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Avery studied him. “You were feverish earlier. Anyway, we have a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “The life-or-death kind.”

  Avery informed him that they were about to leave Africa, cross over the Mediterranean, then into European airspace on their way to Scotland.

  “And?”

  “And,” Avery said, stretching the word out, “if the Europeans have sealed their borders like the US, like they did in Kenya, they might shoot us down.”

  That was a problem.

  “Can we go around?”

  “Not enough fuel.”

  “Refueling—”

  “Is a bad idea,” Avery said. “Every time we land, we take a risk. If we land at an airport, the host nation will probably take the plane and throw us in a cordon zone. That’s best case.”

  Avery motioned toward Peyton. “Want me to wake Sleeping Beauty?”

  “No,” Desmond said quickly. “And don’t call her that. She’s tougher than you think.”

  Avery seemed annoyed. “It’s not her toughness I have a problem with.”

  “She was just protecting her people on the ship, same as you would have done.”

  Avery ignored him. “What do you want to do?”

  “Who’s the most likely to shoot us down?”

  “What? I have no idea.”

  “Who has the biggest air force?”

  “I don’t know. The UK. Germany. France. Italy.”

  “What about Spain?”

  Avery thought a moment. “They’ve got the planes but not enough money to repair them and keep them flight-ready. Their economy has been in crisis for years.” She nodded. “So we fly over Spain, roll the dice, try to get to Shetland.”

  “Speaking of which, what happens then? Surely they’ll shoot us down.”

  “I’m working on that.”

  Before he could ask, she stood and made her way back to the cockpit.

  Desmond adjusted the rolled-up blanket under Peyton’s head and watched her sleep for a moment.

  He closed his eyes, trying to remember his past.

  The SciNet IPO was a turning point in Desmond’s life, in ways he never anticipated. The stock soared. On paper, his stake, a little less than one percent of the company, was worth 3.29 million dollars. In reality, all of his options were subject to an employee lockup provision that prevented him from selling shares or exercising options for six months after the IPO. They were the longest six months of his life, and everyone else’s at SciNet.

  Going public changed the company. The management team now constantly obsessed over the stock price and investor relations. Quarterly earnings became the only events that really mattered. They issued press releases all the time, hoping to garner more media attention.

  Where they had thought strategically before, taken risks, and tried to build the business for the long term, now they played it safe, trying to hit their growth and revenue numbers (there were still no profits to report). It was the beginning of the end, and Desmond knew it. When the lockup period expired in August, the stock had drifted higher. A rising tide in 1999 had lifted all boats, most of all shares of hot dot-com companies. His shares were worth $7,840,000. He sold every one of them and resigned. Including the proceeds from his stock options in two other companies that had gone public, and one that had been acquired, he had netted just over nine million dollars in the last year.

  Peyton had insisted that whatever he did with his shares in the companies, she would do too. He sold everything and put the proceeds in two separate bank accounts.

  Separate wasn’t what she wanted—in banking or otherwise. She had recently asked him to move in with her. He was hesitant, still afraid he would hurt her. But saying no would hurt her too. They bought a small cottage-style home in Palo Alto Hills. For him, it was the easiest move ever. He simply hooked up the Airstream, backed it into the driveway, and carried his few belongings inside.

  Despite their windfall, Peyton didn’t change one bit. She kept going to med school, studied her heart out, and decorated the house in her free time. She painted every room. Put wallpaper in the half bath. There was always a home improvement project for the weekend. Desmond was pretty good at them, but he figured half of her motivation was to give him something to focus on. In the months after he quit SciNet, he mostly lay on the couch and read. Or surfed the web. The last six months while SciNet was public had been grueling. He’d worked long hours on endless deadlines. The year before hadn’t been much better. Taken together, he felt like he’d crammed twenty years of work into eighteen months. He was burned out. But that wasn’t the full extent of his problems.

  He had believed that financial freedom would be a breakthrough for him. That he would feel differently. He’d thought that on the other side of that train tunnel he’d finally relax and open himself fully to life—and in particular, to love. Love without fear, love with Peyton. But the wall was still there. He felt like a greyhound that had run the racetrack his entire life, chasing a stuffed rabbit, and had finally caught it—only to discover that the thing he had been chasing was of no use to him, that it had all been a fool’s errand. He now knew the truth: his true issue was far deeper, at a more fundamental level.

  He read texts on psychology and researched it on the internet. Peyton became increasingly worried, and presented a myriad of solutions.

  “You need to exercise more, Des. You’ve been physically active your whole life.”

  He got a gym membership and began running with her every morning. They swam every Saturday. It didn’t help. Neither did getting outside.

  “Maybe you need to actually interact with people,” she said. “I mean, being here all day alone would be tough on anyone.”

  He joined a book club. Began taking classes at Stanford on subjects that interested him: astrophysics and psychology. He went to lunch at least twice a week with old colleagues. But he felt no different.

  Peyton begged him to see a doctor.

  “I feel like I’m watching you slip away, Des. Please. Do it for me.”

  At the family physician’s office, he filled out a questionnaire. Inside the exam room, the doctor sat across from him and said, “First, know that what you’re experiencing is very common. Depression affects people of all ages, all races, and at every socio-economic level. Sometimes it’s temporary, sometimes it’s a chronic medical condition that must be managed throughout a person’s life. And it is that: a medical condition. I’m going to prescribe a medication: a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI. Many patients improve on SSRIs. In your case, with the severity of your symptoms, I would also strongly encourage you to see a psychotherapist who can identify other underlying issues that could be at play and help you identify triggers in your life that you can manage. I’ve seen many patients improve on medicine alone, but many more benefit from a combination of medicine and therapy.”

  The psychotherapist the doctor recommended was named Thomas Janson. He was in his sixties, with short gray hair and a kind smile. He listened as Desmond recounted his childhood and
every major event up until he had walked in Dr. Janson’s door. The man took copious notes, and when Desmond had finished, Dr. Janson told him that he believed he could help him. He just needed a few days to consider what he’d said.

  When Desmond returned, the man sat in a club chair, a notebook in his lap, and spoke slowly, his voice even.

  “I believe you have a disorder we call post-traumatic stress disorder. Or PTSD.”

  That surprised Desmond.

  “I suspect you developed the condition after the bushfire that killed your family and very nearly you as well. I believe you never recovered from that event. You never came to grips with that severe trauma. In fact, you were placed in a new environment with its own dangers and hostility: your uncle’s care. Those first years were spent in near-constant fear of starvation or verbal abuse from your uncle. In your work on the rigs, you were in physical danger; your injuries attest to how real that threat was. And in the days after, when you and your uncle were,” he glanced at the notebook, “blowing off steam, that is, drinking and fighting, the danger and fear never went away.

  “You also never got to mourn your uncle’s death—or frankly to unpack your feelings about him at all. You were in danger the instant he passed, even having to fight for your life, to kill a man, which is in itself an incredibly traumatic event. The fact that you processed it with little emotion at all is evidence of the vast amount of pre-existing emotional scar tissue.

  “Our brains are like a muscle, Desmond: they become conditioned to the strain they must endure. We are an exceptionally adaptive species. We change to survive in the environment in which we exist. For you, that environment has been one of near-constant danger. From the moment that fire took your parents, you have been in physical or emotional danger your entire life. Even after you came to California, you feared someone from Oklahoma would find you, arrest you. You feared you’d lose the money your uncle left you.

  “But I believe perhaps the greatest issue affecting you is the people you’ve lost in your life. Your family. The librarian,” he peeked at the notebook again, “Agnes. Your uncle. Everyone you’ve become emotionally invested in has been taken from you. Not just taken, but taken at a moment when you least expected it. Your mind, subconsciously, is now trying to protect you. It has seen this pattern before: you want to love, to care. But the moment you do, the object of your affection is ripped away. It won’t let you. You are at war with your own mind.”