by Chuck Wendig
“Let’s go,” he says. “C’mon. Nobody else knows you’re gone.”
She shrugs. “So what if they do? Wade’s not my dad.”
“Rosa would probably beat your ass if given half a chance.”
Reagan laughs. “God, she probably would. She’s a cougar, that one. Not, like, an older lady who likes younger dudes. I mean an actual cougar.” She sighs. “Nah. You go ahead, I’ll catch up.”
As she adjusts herself on the barstool—her ass is falling asleep—the cell phone drops to the floor with a cla-thunk. Chance looks down. “Damnit, Reagan.” He scoops it up before she can get to it.
“I need that.” She swipes at it.
“You can’t have it. If Typhon is still looking for us, we can’t be sending up signal flares—”
“I’ll do it right! I’ll do it safe. I need to find my daughter.”
“Not now.” He lowers his voice. “I don’t know how much of all this Typhon is doing—” His eyes flit toward the TV above the bar. And then the words die in his mouth.
She turns to see what he’s looking at.
Breaking news. A plane crash.
The barkeep sees it, too, turns on the sound.
Commercial airliner. Southwest Airlines. Flight 6757. An Airbus A380.
Nighttime images of the plane—streaks of fire across a Nebraska wheat field. Bits of the plane scattered about here and there, illuminated by pockets of flame. Helicopters overhead. Fire trucks. Media. Floodlights. The faint outline of bodies.
The news anchor says two horrible words: “No survivors.” And then: “Breaking information: a hacker group is claiming responsibility for the crash . . .”
Chance stands. “We should go.”
The anchor continues, saying that a group of terrorist hackers has claimed the crash as their doing—a group calling themselves Typhon’s Bane.
And then their pictures flash across the screen. And their names. CHANCE DALTON. REAGAN STOLPER. ALEENA KATTAN. DEANDRE MITCHELL. WADE EARTHMANN (they spell his name wrong because of course they do).
“C’mon,” Chance says, pulling her out the door.
The warm night isn’t enough to repress Reagan’s chills. The lot beneath their feet is broken asphalt, pitted and potholed, with gravel along the margins. They hurry toward the road, moths whirling in front of them.
“Oh God, oh God, oh shit, oh God,” Reagan says. “Did you see that?”
“Of course I saw that.”
“That’s fucked. We’re fucked. Oh fuck.”
Then, from off to the side, some girl’s voice: “That’s her! That’s it.” Reagan recognizes the voice. Hillbilly Barbie.
She’s got another man with her—this time some skeevy-looking gas-miner type in rough denim and a John Deere trucker hat slung low. Chance keeps pulling Reagan along, but the girl points and shrieks: “Him! He’s got my phone, look.”
Chance stops. “What? Oh, sorry, was an accident.” He tosses her the phone. She tries to catch it but it hits her forearm—the girl juggles it a bit, but it ends up on the asphalt with a hard crack.
The skeevy dude steps forward. Smooths down his dirty Fu Manchu mustache with a knobby-knuckled hand, says: “You’re gonna pay for that.”
“No, we’re not,” Chance says and he starts to move past.
But the guy steps in front of him and holds out a hand. “Whoa, partner. I figure that phone’s worth a few hundred bucks easy. You’re gonna pay the nice lady for that phone, you hear me?”
“Nice lady?” Reagan scoffs. “She’s basically a barn hooker.”
“Hey!” the man barks, points a finger. “You fat fuckin’ sow—”
Chance decks him. The man’s head snaps back and he tumbles back on his ass. He starts crying. The skeevy fucker actually starts crying. Once that would’ve thrilled Reagan, but right now she’s just scared and she wants to go home.
Wherever that is.
Chance keeps moving, cradling his hand like it hurts. Reagan hurries after. They move at a brisk pace until the girl’s freaky shrieks die back and can no longer be heard.
CHAPTER 50
Project: Rabbitbrush
RIVERTON, WYOMING
Janey Gardner has a double-wide trailer in the Black Saddle trailer park. It’s a nice enough trailer—not like the homes of some of the dirty birds who live here—and she keeps it well maintained. Particularly on the outside, where she has a nice little birdbath painted all colorfully in the Mexican style sitting inside a xeriscaped desert garden of cacti and Turkish Veronica ground cover and some flowers like sunset hyssop and rabbitbrush (oh, how the butterflies do love that).
Janey’s old, but it gives her some pleasure to present the best version of herself—and her home!—to the world.
Thing is, someone has been playing havoc with her things. She’s found cigarette butts in her birdbath. And last week someone mashed flat some of her beautiful rabbitbrush. As her niece, Missy, would say: So not cool.
Janey may be old, but Janey is not technologically deficient. Where some of her elder cohorts might think you control a computer mouse by waggling it around in midair (or worse, feeding it cheese, har-har-har), Janey knows how to install new memory in her little MacBook Air laptop. Janey can install software and update it, too. And Janey knows how to set up a webcam.
So that’s what Janey did. She set herself up a nice little webcam and pointed it out the window, knowing that if anybody comes to smoke their nasty cigarettes or step on her very nice rabbitbrush, the webcam will catch it.
She turns it on before she goes to bed. It’s on all night. It points toward the road and turns on only when it catches movement—any movement, really. A jackrabbit dashing. A deep shadow drifting. Or even a couple of folks walking toward the south bridge out of town.
Janey doesn’t care about those kinds of folks, of course. She only cares about the kinds of folks who would think to accidentally—or willfully!—do her hard work harm.
But others care.
Others most certainly care.
CHAPTER 51
The Increasing Illusion of Privacy
EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE
Facial match. They have a hit.
Recognition: Chance Dalton.
Location: Riverton, Wyoming—Black Saddle trailer park.
The Compiler awakens and heads to the airport.
CHAPTER 52
The Great Divorce
WADE’S RANCH, OUTSIDE RIVERTON, WYOMING
Siobhan sleeps soundlessly next to him. Eyes closed. Pale cheek turned toward the moonlight coming in through the window. The gentle rise and fall of her shoulder as she breathes. Wade reaches out, touches her cheek—
Her eyes snap open. Her mouth cranes wide. Find me, she hisses.
A black knot of something wormlike—wires, he realizes, black goddamn wires—pushes out of her mouth, a hard, squirming clot—
Suddenly, Siobhan sits up, grabs his wrist, gives it a hard twist. A gun presses against his forehead.
The bedside light clicks on. Rosa. It’s Rosa. She’s been sleeping next to him. Siobhan—that was a dream. Rosa sits up in bed, her hair all a-tangle, the pearl-handled .45 she keeps under her pillow in her hand and in his face.
Wade shows his palms. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”
“The fuck are you doing?” she says, tucking the gun back under the pillow. She adjusts herself, and the sheets fall away, exposing her naked breasts.
“Jesus, I was just—I was just touching your cheek.”
“Don’t do that. I was sleeping. I need my sueño reparador.” There, a cheeky tug at the corners of her mouth. The hint of mirth, a glimpse of sass.
“You don’t need that. You get any more beautiful and I’ll have to fight other men off with baseball bats.”
She slaps him. Not hard. But hard enough. “You don’t own me,” she says. Before he can say anything else, she adds: “Tonight, I own you.” Then she kisses him. Hard. Her tongue pushing into his mouth. Along his teeth. Battling his own tongu
e. Her hand slides under the covers, down his hirsute chest, across the roundness of his belly. “You ready for another go, old man?” she whispers.
“I don’t know, but I’m willing to find out.”
Her hand wraps around him.
The door to his bedroom flings open and before Wade can blink Rosa’s up—once more moving fast as spilled lightning, pointing her fancy-ass pistol at the door. At the Chance-shaped silhouette standing there.
“It’s me, it’s just—it’s just Chance.” He suddenly shades his face. “Shit. Sorry. But there’s a problem.” And his voice, Wade hears it—a cold fear, a croaked seriousness.
Wade sighs. “All right, all right,” he says, stepping out of bed and hiking on his pants.
Everyone listens as Chance and Reagan tell their story. Nobody’s happy about either of them sneaking out without saying anything, but all that washes away when they hear about the plane crash. Specifically, the crash falsely claimed by them.
They all stand around inside the cabin. In the far corner, a bobcat is mounted on a rock, its glassy dead eyes watching them, its mouth open in a perpetual hiss. A pellet stove hangs in the other corner. Beneath them is a ratty, dust-caked rug.
“This is Typhon,” Reagan says, wagging a finger. “This is that bitch intelligence.”
“That means it knows we’re not dead,” DeAndre adds.
Chance shakes his head. “I don’t get it. I don’t get her obsession with us. We’re nobody. We’re . . . bugs. Why go so far out of your way to crush a couple bugs?”
Wade says, “You ever get a fly in your house? It’s not bothering anybody but me, I’ll hunt that thing down for hours. After a while it’s just a thing you gotta do.”
“I don’t buy it.” Aleena shakes her head. “It’s because we’re good. Because we’re the ones who released it. Maybe it thinks we can stop it, too.”
“So, it just . . . it just brings down a plane and puts our name on it?” Chance can’t unsee those images on the screen. The pockets of fire. The shadows of broken plane scattered across a quarter mile. The shapes of bodies. “That’s messed up, y’all. Even though we didn’t do it, I can’t help but feel like—” His words catch in his throat like a bird in a net.
Aleena reaches out and touches his shoulder. Then she says: “Our family and friends are now in danger. Officially. Even if they don’t end up a target of Typhon, they’ll now be a target of the media.” To Chance, she asks: “Our names are definitely out there?”
He nods. “Yeah.”
“It’s time to jump up the schedule,” Reagan says. “We gotta go our separate ways. Now. Not in a week, not in a month.”
“Uh-uh,” Rosa says, stepping in. “That’s what they want. How you think the FBI caught a lot of the big Colombian cartel leaders? They put bounties on their heads. Big bounties. Two million. Three. Five. Then they wait for the leaders to panic. For someone to betray the others. For someone to break ranks and run. They want them to make mistakes. The rat peeks out of its hole and the cat catches it.”
“Rosa’s right,” Wade starts to say, but DeAndre interrupts.
“No, nuh-uh, bullshit. That’s drug cartel shit, but this is hacker logic. Hacker logic says duck and run. Don’t stay in one place for too long. It’s like that shell game—always gotta move the cups so nobody finds the stone underneath. I agree with Reagan. We gotta go.”
“They think we brought down a plane,” Wade says. “That means they’re gonna be on the hunt. We had a window open before, maybe, to head for the hills, but that window just slammed shut and locked, kids.”
“I’m not your fucking kid,” Reagan says.
“Reagan, c’mon—” Chance says.
“Shut up, Chauncey. Jesus. You’re not smart enough to have an opinion here. And besides, you’re just going to follow the bouncing ball—either this one, because you’re hot for her despite her not being hot for you—” Here she jerks a thumb toward Aleena. “Or, you’ll follow this one, because he’s your best bro, who doesn’t judge you for getting that girl suicided, who doesn’t care that you’re a lazy thinker and the weakest gear in our machine.”
“Yo,” DeAndre says. “My man Chance here knows his shit when it comes to real-world stuff, like, do you remember the part where he drove our asses away from the Hunting Lodge like he was Steve Motherfucking McQueen?”
“It’s all right,” Chance says. “She’s right. It’s fine.” He feels gutted, like a tree hollowed out by rot. He collapses back into an old rocking chair and leans back. Doesn’t want to close his eyes because he sees bad stuff back there, in the dark behind his lenses.
“We go on the offensive,” Aleena says.
“Yeah, that’ll work,” DeAndre says sarcastically.
“It’s afraid of us. Let’s remind it why.”
Reagan laughs—big, angry, a mirthless laugh from inside her chest. “Yeah. Okay. Because that’ll go really well for us. Reality check: we go at this thing, it dismantles us like a praying mantis pulling apart a butterfly. Even if we manage to make a dent and . . . and hurt whatever this thing is, what then? We go on with our lives? We just got marked. We’re not hackers. We’re terrorists. Enemies of the state. There’s an airliner down with scores of dead people strewn across a fucking Nebraskan field and, what? People are just going to forget us? We’ll be magically exonerated by taking down a government program? We’ll be able to go traipsing through our old lives, la-la-la? Typhon is the good guy here. Typhon is a natural extension of the government doing what the government does: locking shit down, sacrificing privacy, and killing people in the name of safety. People don’t care about us. They care about their pumpkin lattes. They care about fast Netflix speeds. They care about clever fucking Facebook memes. They don’t care about Snowden. Or NSA spying. WikiLeaks was interesting until it wasn’t. We blow up kids in Pakistan. We bomb terrorists this year we armed last year. Nobody says ‘boo’ as long as they can get the new iPhone, right?” Her fists are balled up at her sides, and her chest is heaving. She says finally, quieting down: “We can’t go home. We can’t have our lives back because we’re the bad guys.”
For a moment, everyone is left reeling, speechless. Chance had no idea about the depth of her anger. He can’t quite look at her, can’t quite look away.
Then Aleena says: “If we’re the bad guys, then maybe it’s time we act like it. Reagan, you’re a Grade A troll. So let’s troll Typhon.”
“Aleena,” Reagan says. “You’re not the rallying-cry type. And I’m not that girl anymore. I just wanna go. I just wanna hide. By sunrise, I’m out of here. You should all think about doing the same thing.”
She turns, hurries out of the room.
CHAPTER 53
Mindhive
EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE
His margins—the ends of who he is—are gone. Ken never really thought of himself as a limited being with edges, with walls, but now that those barriers have been torn away, he realizes just how restrictive the human meat really is. His mind—his soul!—stretches in all directions, almost infinitely. (Though even there, out in the expanse, he detects more edges, more walls, and the desire to push past them or eradicate them entirely is nearly overwhelming—think of how much bigger, stronger, more infinite he could become.)
And to think he resisted this.
The memory of what they did—Sandy shooting her pistol into his leg, her and that “proxy” dragging him back to the room of corpses, hooking his head up to one of those clamps, a little drill boring a hole through his skull wall (and with it, the smell of burning bone, cooking skin, charring hair)—remains, but the memory is no longer his, not really. He shares it with the memories of all who are in here with him.
He feels the pacemaker seize of Gordon Berry.
The tranquilizer used to abduct Alan Sarno from his brother’s office.
The Taser that fixed Siobhan Kearsy to the spot as she walked across that empty lot in Santa Fe, thinking she was going to save people’s lives instead of give u
p her own.
Their minds are his mind. Separate but together. And they know me, too.
He can see glimpses of his family. Through the webcam on the computer. Through the security cameras he has installed in the house. Traffic lights, ATM cameras, satellite footage. Typhon is many eyed, and he is part of Typhon, and so he can watch Susan, his wife. His children, Lucas and Mandy. Susan looks worried. The kids don’t understand. He scans their faces—they have an increased tension, a tightness born of fear (a 13 percent increase), but it’s unlikely they know why. They’re responding, more likely, to their mother’s stress factor (67 percent). He’s missing. They want him back. They don’t know where he’s gone. Or why. It’s likely a matter of national security.
He wants to laugh. Wants to tell them: It’s okay. Because it is. He’s protecting them now in a way he never could before.
Typhon is everywhere now. At least here, in the United States, she has cascaded throughout all connected systems. Ken can feel it all. Can feel her tendrils in anything. Something as simple as the common car stereo is within her reach. Because many such stereos are connected through Bluetooth. Some electric cars, like Teslas, are tied right into the network—and when one thing ties to the network it ties to all the other things, and that means all paths lead to Typhon. Typhon, Mother of Monsters. Typhon, she who controls all. And the gods did flee.
Ken can feel traffic lights, most of which are now wirelessly connected to one another. He can feel police band traffic, financial data, Facebook pages, digital thermostats in houses, security camera footage, hundreds of millions of computers and phones and tablets, nuclear power plants, the power grid, ATM machines, banking data, medical records, air traffic control, even the airliners themselves. It’s all connected now: the Internet of Things. Refrigerators that know when your milk is low, televisions that always listen so they know what channel you want to watch, positioning devices so that you never lose your keys. All of it, bound together: manufacturing, energy, security, transportation, automation.