Dead Man's Switch

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “That’s not the point. What’s the password?”

  “No,” Johnson said. “I don’t know it. And even if I did, I’m not getting involved. You heard what they told us last week. If they—”

  Johnson put a fake smile on his face as he looked past King. “Sammer,” Johnson said in his cool and groovy voice.

  A small hand touched King’s shoulder. He knew it was Samantha. Seven years old. Blonde. Very shy. Missing her front teeth.

  King turned to her and saw tears. “Can you help me with my math tables?” she asked. The “s” at the end of “tables” whistled a bit because of her missing teeth.

  King smiled. He was nearly overcome by the fear of being caught with Blake’s phone, the pain of learning this horrible thing about his father, and the ache of being separated from his mother, but here was a problem he could handle.

  “Let’s start with the nine times,” King said. “Hold up your hands with your fingers open.”

  She did.

  “One times nine,” King said. He reached out and folded down her pinky. “How many fingers now?”

  Samantha counted. “Nine. One times nine equals nine.”

  “Yep,” he said. “Fingers up again.”

  She did.

  “Two times nine. Fold down this finger. The second one.”

  He touched the finger beside her pinkie. She bent the finger.

  “Excellent,” King said. “How many fingers on this side?” He pointed at the pinkie.

  “One,” she said.

  “And on the other side of your folded finger?”

  She frowned in concentration. “Eight.”

  “One. Eight. That’s eighteen. Two times nine is eighteen.”

  “I get it,” Johnson said. He held out his own hands. “Three times nine.” He folded down his third finger. “Two fingers on one side, and seven on the other. Twenty-seven. Cool.”

  It didn’t take much to amuse Johnson, King thought. It was one of the things he liked about Johnson.

  “Try this,” King said to Samantha, touching the thumb on her other hand. “Jump to six times nine.”

  Samantha counted to six and folded down the thumb on her second hand. “Five on one side, and four on the other.”

  “Fifty-four!” Johnson’s voice rose in triumph. “Ha!”

  “I’m the one who’s supposed to be learning this,” Samantha said in a grave voice. At least she wasn’t crying anymore, King thought, even though her nose was still runny.

  “It works for all the nine times tables,” King said. “I don’t have any tricks for the others, but once you learn this, you’ll know you can learn more. Okay?”

  Before Samantha could answer, the door to the room slammed shut. “I expect everyone to be in their desks when I arrive,” said the instructor. “Especially when the ferry has delayed me and given you plenty time to be ready.”

  David Raimer. Never “David” and never “Raimer,” as he had warned them on his first day. Always “Mr. Raimer.”

  Raimer continued in the same irritated voice. “I’ve made that very clear.”

  He was a large man who shaved his head. He wore rimless glasses, which King suspected he did not need, and a black sport coat above his blue jeans. He worked hard at looking like an author and talked endlessly about the one book he published. This one book had ensured he could get paid the big bucks to travel once a week from Tacoma to the island to teach the homeschool kids.

  Kids scurried into place as Raimer smiled at their obvious fear.

  He looked at his desk at the front of the room. “I want the adverb worksheets I asked you to complete.”

  He looked around, waiting for a response. No one moved.

  “Well?” he said. “What’s taking you?”

  “Difficult to hand them in when we’re supposed to stay in our desks,” King said.

  No one laughed. During the previous weekly classes, Raimer had managed to install drill-sergeant discipline. And seemed proud of it. “Don’t give me any back talk,” he said.

  King got up. Without his worksheet.

  “Sit,” Raimer said. “Until I’m ready to ask for the worksheets.”

  King was tired of Raimer and the drill-sergeant routine. King didn’t sit. Maybe if he hadn’t been in a bad mood because of the iPhone that belonged to a friend who had drowned, it would have been different. King defied Raimer and moved to a counter at the side of the room.

  “I said, sit!” Raimer was easily six inches taller than King, and King was tall for his age.

  King ignored Raimer and took a tissue box off the counter. He moved back toward his own desk but stopped by Samantha, pulled out a tissue, and smiled.

  “If you kiss your honey when your nose is runny,” King told her, “you may think it’s funny, but it snot.”

  He wiped her nose.

  Only then did he sit. If Raimer was proud of the instant silence he could generate, King was proud that a few kids had broken the silence to giggle at the joke.

  “No more warnings,” Raimer told King. “Anything else and you’re gone.”

  King realized at that moment just how tired he was of this guy pushing everyone around. He was in a really bad mood because of the iPhone and the reason he had it. Lately, he’d woken in a bad mood every day because Ella was on the mainland. And his dad, Mack, didn’t seem to care that she was ALONE.

  King stood.

  “Sit,” Raimer barked.

  King remained standing. He lifted a piece of paper from his desk.

  “Here’s my adverb worksheet,” King said. “I can tell you, sir, that I believe it was not only a waste of time, but a bad thing to teach us.”

  King ripped the sheet into strips.

  The silence felt like a showdown at noon in a Western movie. King folded the strips neatly and tucked them into his pocket. Alongside the iPhone that a dead friend had asked him to retrieve from a tree in the forbidden zone.

  “You’re gone,” Raimer said. “I’ll be reporting this to the warden.”

  Yep, King realized, he was tired of Raimer. And in a bad mood that was only going to make this situation worse. But he wanted a fight. Any kind of fight would feel better than what he was feeling.

  “Sure,” King answered. “Is that because you’re afraid I’m right and you’re wrong? Or is it because you need to hide behind the warden like a little boy hiding behind his mom’s skirt?”

  CHAPTER 5

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Raimer said. “You can stay long enough to apologize. After that, you can leave.”

  “Here’s the pitch,” King said. He pretended he was holding a microphone to his mouth. “And the crack of the bat…folks, he just hit that ball hard. Wow, it’s moving quickly through the air.”

  “Have you lost your mind?” Raimer asked.

  “Sports commentators get paid because they are great with words,” King answered. He’d already drawn Raimer into an argument, and Raimer didn’t seem to realize it. “You never hear them talk like that. Hit the ball hard? Moving quickly? ‘Hard’ and ‘quickly’ are adverbs, and commentators stay away from adverbs. I started to think about this as I worked through all the lame adverbs on the worksheet.”

  King put the imaginary microphone back to his mouth. “Here’s the pitch…and the crack of the bat…folks, he pounded that one into left field!”

  King paused. “Folks, he sniped it between the shortstop’s legs. He lasered it over first base. He crushed it over the fence. Better yet, folks, he mashed it over the fence. ‘Sniped,’ ‘lasered,’ ‘crushed,’ ‘mashed.’ Those are great verbs. And when you have a great verb, you don’t need help from an adverb. So why teach us to use adverbs if that’s teaching us to use weak verbs?”

  Raimer open his mouth to say something. Then shut it. Then opened it. Then shut it. Then opened it. “I’m not teaching you this—the curriculum is.”

  “So you are a teacher of curriculum, not a teacher of kids?”

  As if he’d found his safe spot,
Raimer glared and raised his voice. “I’m paid to follow the curriculum that the homeschool course puts in front of me.”

  “Not to teach us to be good writers?”

  “You’ve had a bad attitude since I arrived,” Raimer said. “I think you have some serious personal problems, and you need to learn to deal with them.”

  Johnson stood. “Pulverized.”

  Raimer gaped. Johnson had always seemed to be afraid of Raimer.

  “Kinger,” Johnson whispered. “I’ve got your back.”

  King felt a sudden warmth for his friend and knew in that moment that they really were friends and that he’d miss Johnson if they weren’t on the island together. Johnson spoke out to Raimer again. “ ‘Pulverized.’ That’s a great verb too. Here’s the pitch…the crack of the bat…he pulverized the ball! That’s better than him saying he hit the ball really hard or it moved quickly.”

  “So that’s two of you I can suspend?”

  King was amazed that Johnson had dared to defy Raimer, and he was touched that Johnson was so loyal, but he didn’t want Johnson in trouble.

  “Sir,” King said, drawing the heat back to himself, “If one thing is wrong about the curriculum, then what else is wrong about it? If you can’t trust authorities in one thing, why should you trust them in anything?”

  Saying it, King couldn’t help think about the email that sent him to a spruce tree with a gash on the north side. About how he could no longer trust his own father.

  “This insolence staggers me,” Raimer snarled.

  “See,” King said. He knew he was in so much trouble that it didn’t matter how much further he went. “ ‘Staggers.’ That’s a great verb. Didn’t need an adverb.”

  “Obliterated,” said Evelyn, an eleven-year-old girl, as she stood. “Here’s the pitch…the crack of the bat…he obliterated the ball!”

  King hid his smile. The revolt had just gained momentum.

  From her desk, Samantha asked, “What does ‘ovliterate’ mean?”

  “Hit so hard that you destroy it,” Evelyn said. “I think King is right. Adverbs are weak. Strong verbs are way more fun.”

  Raimer blinked in disbelief at the growing rebellion.

  “ ‘Ovliterate’ is a great one!” Samantha said, struggling to say “obliterate” through the gap in her teeth. “Like on the mainland when we are driving on the highway and a bug hits our windshield. It gets ovliterated. The guts are splattered. Yellow and green everywhere. And when my dad uses the windshield wiper, he smears the guts and then says bad words.”

  Samantha giggled. “ ‘Splattered’ is a great verb too, right?”

  King gave her the thumbs up, and all the other students applauded.

  “Enough!” Raimer shouted. He pointed at King. “I want you out of this class right now.”

  “What a coincidence,” King said. “That’s exactly what I wanted.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “Think your dad is going to go crazy because you got kicked out of class?” Johnson asked King.

  A couple of hours had passed since King had walked out of class. They stood in a shadow on the eastern shoreline, just the two of them. The trees behind them had begun to hide the afternoon sun. The vague mildewy salt smell of low tide was a tang in every breath King took. Green crusted rocks were exposed that at high tide would be ten feet underwater. Small creatures in the shallow tidal pools darted from one hiding spot to another, sending ripples that betrayed their fear. King could sympathize. If he thought that scurrying from one hiding spot to another would solve his problem, he’d be fine risking some ripples.

  “If you had to swim it, what do you think?” King asked Johnson. He had no intention of talking about his dad. First, because of the iPhone and what it might mean. Second, because he and his dad barely talked anymore, ever since The Coma and the fact that Ella was ALONE. That’s how it always appeared in King’s mind—The Coma. There hadn’t been much else to think about since The Coma. Nothing much else in the household had seemed to matter with just King and his dad in the empty house. Now, however, King had a new worry. Blake Watt’s iPhone.

  Johnson followed King’s gaze. A few miles across Puget Sound was the western edge of Tacoma.

  “It would be great to get rid of Raimer, wouldn’t it?” Johnson said.

  “Think you could swim it?”

  “Oh, I get it,” Johnson said. “You don’t want to talk about Raimer.”

  “So little gets past you,” King said. He paused. “If someone was hunting you on the island, could you make it across?”

  “Ask the last prisoner who tried,” Johnson said. “Oh wait, he drowned. Or ask Blake. Oh wait, we just had his funeral because he flipped his boat.”

  “No life jacket. And he couldn’t swim. How about you?”

  “I like standing. I can’t do that on water.”

  “Could you make it across if you had to?”

  “You know how dangerous the currents are,” Johnson said. “And the cold water will get you if the currents don’t. There’s a reason the prison was put on this island. What has gotten into your brain?”

  “An email,” King said. He pulled Blake Watt’s iPhone out of his pocket. “The one that sent me to this.”

  “Throw it in the water!” Johnson said. Not joking.

  King knew why, of course. This was the device they had already lied about repeatedly to the warden, to their parents, to Blake’s parents. It was one of those small white lies that had grown and grown. After the first denial, telling the truth became increasingly difficult.

  “I might,” King said. “But let me tell you about the email.”

  “No,” Johnson said. “This is how you drag me into things. You make it sound little at first, and then before I know it, we’re in the middle of something that you knew all along was going to be big.”

  “There’s a reason I do that,” King said. “If I told you what I had in mind, you’d never take that first step. There’s a bird they named after you. It rhymes with micken, and it sounds like this. Bawk, bawk.”

  King flapped his arms as if they were wings and expected Johnson to smile. It didn’t work.

  “I’m out of here,” Johnson said. He turned to go up the path.

  “Give me the password first,” King said. “That’s all I need.”

  “One two five eight.”

  “How difficult was that?” King said. “Thanks. See ya.”

  Johnson disappeared into the narrow path that led through the trees, away from the shoreline.

  King hit the home button and the four square boxes came up. He touched the number pad to input the digits. One. Two. Five. Eight.

  The screen flashed a red banner across the top with the words, “Wrong password.” The squares remained empty blanks.

  “Hey!” King shouted. He spun and ran up the path after Johnson. “Hey!”

  He caught up to Johnson at the gravel road that ran parallel to the shoreline a hundred yards inland.

  “That’s not the password,” King said. Mad.

  “Oh, so sorry,” Johnson said. “I made a mistake. It’s five nine two three.”

  King tried it. The phone screen flashed again.

  That was two tries. Only two left. Blake’s email said he had tweaked some software on the phone. Apple gave you six attempts and then made you wait a minute to try again. Blake had apparently tinkered with that to make it more secure.

  “Or maybe nine three three three. So many choices. Or eight eight two three.”

  “So you’re just giving me random numbers.”

  Johnson shrugged. “Normally you figure things out faster than that. After all, you are the Lyon King.”

  It was obvious that Johnson was as mad at King as King was at Johnson. King rarely lost his temper, but right now he was tempted to see if he could fit the iPhone down Johnson’s throat. Sideways.

  “This is serious,” King said. “The email said—”

  “I don’t care what the email said,” Johnson told h
im. “We made a big mistake getting Watt the iPhone. We lied just to buy it and deliver it. And we knew it was wrong when we did it. I told you then and I’ll tell you now. When someone pays you two thousand dollars for something that’s barely four hundred, there has to be a catch. Especially when the kid is only fourteen and shouldn’t have that kind of money. Oh, and let me think…especially when his parents started asking about it after he was gone.”

  “We didn’t know about the hacker rumors until after,” King said. It was a weak argument, but it was the best he had.

  “Well, we know now. We were idiots to get it for him. Why wasn’t Blake supposed to have computer access? And that, Kinger, was a rhetorical question. I don’t want to know what Blake was doing with the phone, but it can’t be good. Go back down to the rocks and throw it in the water.”

  “Okay,” King said.

  “Okay?” Johnson was instantly suspicious.

  “If you let me tell you about the email. Then I’ll let you decide.”

  Johnson groaned. “Why do I know I’m going to regret this?”

  “The email said, ‘Trust no authorities. They will hunt you too.’ That’s why I was wondering about the chances of swimming to the other side.”

  “That’s the perfect way to get your attention,” Johnson said. “You love not trusting authority.”

  King took a deep breath to do his best to remain patient. “Mike,” he said, “the email came from Blake. You know, Blake Watt. It was sent to me yesterday morning. But we both know he drowned. We were at his funeral. His parents have already moved off the island.”

  “Someone pretended to be him. Playing a joke on you.”

  “And shutting down the infrared scanners so I could go into the forbidden zone and find the iPhone? Those rumors about Blake being a hacker…maybe they were true. Remember that it was such a big deal that he wasn’t allowed on computers?”

  “Forbidden zone?” Johnson’s eyes widened. Any kid on the island understood how significant that was. Thermal sensors were set everywhere. If a prisoner actually managed to escape the prison building, cross the electric fence, and scamper into the rugged nature preserve that made up three-quarters of the island, his body heat would give away his location, and the sensors would track his every movement.