The Phone Company
Page 1
A DAVID JACOB KNIGHT book
The Phone Company copyright © 2014
by David Snell & Jacob Kier.
All Rights Reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER 0
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Mary Ford for the missing persons help. Holly Zaldivar, thank you for the beta reading and for making me take a break to see the world.
Mark Petersen, you helped with the education and union info; thanks also for your construction stories. To Jason Hornsby and his wife Megan, who helped with the Mandarin, xie xie.
And finally a heartfelt thanks to my Samsung Galaxy. You truly are a life companion.
“I’ve always wanted to own and control the
primary technology in everything.”
—Steve Jobs
“There’s an app for that.”
—Apple
CHAPTER 0
(Five Years Ago)
“Hello.”
Steve Gregory awoke in his chair to find his wife, Janice, sitting up in her hospital bed, talking on the phone.
“Honey?” he said, scrambling to her side.
Janice laughed at whatever she heard on the other end of the line. “Yes, yes. And you? Good.”
“Kids,” Steve said. He shook Sarah awake. The girl sat up from the window seat, blonde hair matted on one side. “JJ.” He reached over to the sleeper chair and shook the boy’s sneaker.
Janice had been on pain medication for the last few days and had slept nearly the entire time, except for a few moments of blurry-eyed mumbling. The doctors had said she probably would never wake up, and Steve had begun to believe it. Yet here she was, holding a perfectly normal conversation. He wanted the kids to see her like this. To remember her like this.
“Stage four,” she said, still smiling. “Terminal, yes. Are you coming to see me?”
“Honey,” Steve said, “who are you talking to?”
Janice didn’t respond. Her eyes didn’t even flick toward him. She just stared off at the counter full of flowers and cards, absorbed in her conversation.
That’s when Steve heard it. “Honey?” He took the phone from her and put it to his ear.
< . . . and try again> the automated voice was saying.
Steve frowned and hung up the receiver.
“Mom,” Sarah said. She sat on the mattress next to Janice and scooped up the bones of her hand.
“Oh, honey, your hair,” Janice said, smiling vaguely. She picked at her daughter’s mussed locks.
Sarah grinned, blushing, tearing up. “Yeah. Yours, too.” They’d always had the same hair. Janice had lost most of hers.
JJ, stretching his bleary eyelids as wide as they would go, stood by his sister, hands in his pockets, shoulders high.
“Jeremiah,” Janice said, smiling at him.
“Hey, Mom.”
“You took off your hat inside.”
“Yeah.”
“Good boy.”
Janice reached out with her other hand, and Steve could see JJ recoil. Janice had lost so much weight they could see the smile of her skull. And she smelled. Not only of sweat, but of something fouler. The only thing left that looked remotely like Steve’s wife were her eyes, and even those had grown filmy and flat.
“Where is he?” Janice asked, looking around.
“Who, Mom?”
“Is he here, is he . . .?”
“I’m here,” Steve said. He massaged her leg through the blankets, feeling just a shinbone. He tried not to think about it. “I’m right here.”
Janice stared at him a moment, her lips peeling back in a grin. “No,” she finally replied, shaking her head slowly. “He’s gone, isn’t he?”
“Your nurse? You want your nurse?” Steve reached for the CALL button.
“No, there was a man.”
“Uncle Derek?” JJ asked.
Janice’s head floated for a moment, and she looked like she might pass out. “A tall man, he. . . . Steve,” she said, clamping down on JJ’s hand and pulling him close. “Steve, I don’t want to see him again. Please, don’t let him in.”
“Mom—”
“Don’t let him come back here.”
“Janice, honey,” Steve said, gripping her foot. “That’s your son. That’s JJ. I’m right here, honey, I’m Steve.”
Janice stared at him then, and the fear began to melt from her face. JJ tore his hand free, and Steve started to wish Janice hadn’t come to.
It wasn’t fair. Whether she was nodding off or sitting up talking, one minute Janice was there, and another she was a shell.
Finally, she lay back against her pillow and shut her eyes. “Oh, JJ, I’m so sorry. Things are so foggy, sweetheart, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” JJ said, but his shoulders never loosened.
“Janice, honey, are you all right?” Steve said.
She nodded and her tongue rasped against her peeling lips. “Water.”
Steve looked around for her graduated cup. He found it on her overbed table behind a vase of snapdragons. “Ugh,” he said, looking at the film on the water. “I’ll be right back, I’ll . . .”
In the little kitchen down the hall, he got a new cup from the dispenser and filled it with ice water.
Disoriented, he thought on his way back. Janice had been asleep so long she would need time to figure out how many different puzzles she’d mixed up in the same box. Steve would help her sort it out. And he was glad she was awake, he really was. He had so much to tell her. He’d gotten the teaching award. Her sister was having a baby.
Steve stopped at the door to her room, ice shifting abruptly in the cup. Sarah looked at him from Janice’s bed. The girl’s eyes were overflowing, and JJ stood off to one side, run
ning his hand through his hair.
Somewhere, an alarm was going off.
“Dad,” Sarah began.
Steve looked toward the bed, then away.
“Dad, oh my God.”
He nodded.
A nurse rushed in around him. Steve felt the wind of it, but little else. The alarm sounded like a busy signal.
* * *
Deputy Bill Biggs unscrewed the cap on his flask, but then just sat there in his cruiser, staring into the mouth of darkness.
He realized he could still hear the siren. He’d turned it off a while ago, but he could hear it. Kind of the same way you still see the sun after you’ve closed your eyes.
The flask was in the shape of binoculars, a gag gift from Steve when Bill had made deputy. Today, years later, it was no less a joke. Just a darker one.
Bill had read somewhere that drinking alcohol released feel-good juice into your blood: endorphins. Just the smell of the bourbon did it for him. And he had every reason in the world right now to make himself feel good.
He knew he’d reduced himself to a stereotype, but he hadn’t started drinking because of the job. He hadn’t even started because of what was happening with Janice. No, he’d started long before that, back on those hot summer days in the quarry when Janice had picked Steve.
Bill hated himself for this, and he loved Steve—he wouldn’t trade Steve and Janice’s kids for the world—but he had to wonder, would Janice be dying right now if she’d picked Bill? Everything might have been different. He would’ve exposed her to different things.
Should be at the hospital, Bill thought.
He’d exhausted his leave, though, and the Family Medical Leave Act didn’t apply because Janice wasn’t family. Not technically. Even though they’d known each other half their damn lives.
Bill tipped the fake binoculars for a swig, but just as he was looking for any reason to drink, he was also looking for every reason not to. His cell phone buzzed in his pocket, and he lowered the flask.
The Blackberry even showed a little picture.
Alcohol released endorphins; dread released something else. Bill stared at his phone. He knew what the call meant. He didn’t know if he could handle it. Not now.
Call him back, Bill thought. But then he thought, no, he wasn’t a coward. He’d taken on bank robbers. He found people smeared across the road, for God’s sake.
Bill capped the flask, but Steve’s call went to voicemail.
Damn it.
Bill waited, then listened to his friend’s message. He held the phone to his ear long after it ended.
< . . . for more options.>
Bill punched his horn.
He sat there, gripping his steering wheel, trying to get his heart rate down. He stared at his flask. Looking at it just made Bill angrier. At life. At Steve. At himself. At Janice, even.
He threw open his door, took a few steps, and hurled the fake binoculars into the mountainside pines. Instantly, he thought about retrieving it—or filling it so full of lead that he never could.
As his foot crunched forward in the gravel, a call came in from dispatch, and Bill found himself racing toward Harcum Middle School, HMS. Shots fired.
He’d been up Cracked Mountain and halfway across Burnt Valley when he got the call. It was a big valley. Lots of hills. Country roads as twisty as a snake. Thing was, he shouldn’t have been this far out. Shouldn’t have been hiding.
He spun out onto a paved road and sped around a corner.
“Shit!” he said. A deer spiraled away from the cruiser, leaving a shattered headlight and a dented fender. Luckily, the animal twirled off into the ditch. It tried to get up, but its leg was flopping.
By the time Bill reached HMS, Steve’s substitute, Mr. Diehl, lay bleeding in the entrance.
Bill touched Diehl’s neck. Dead.
Three shots to the chest.
Bill drew his gun and entered the school. He could hear other sirens approaching—fire truck, ambulance—and alarms blared throughout the brick building. The school intercom had been left on. Whispers bled in and out like radio stations; paper rustled like static. Beneath it all, there were screams.
“Freeze!” Bill shouted, training his gun on a boy wandering out of a classroom. Bill recognized him. Jaime Vedder, dressed in tactical gear and, underneath that, a shirt sporting a green alien head. The boy had always looked weird: lanky, tall, his face stretched, his eyes almost perpetually wide.
He held a Glock.
The boy ducked back into the classroom, slamming the door shut behind him. You couldn’t lock it without a key.
Bill heard Vedder at the back of the room and peeked through the door’s meshed lancet window.
“Freeze!” he said again, bursting into the room.
The windows here were up high, near the ceiling. Vedder had shot one out and was standing on a chair to climb through. Mercifully, the room was empty.
“I will shoot!” Bill said, though he didn’t know if he could do it, didn’t know if he could really gun down a kid.
Vedder turned on him then, pressing the Glock to his own temple. Tears streaked down his face, which had gone eerily blank.
“Don’t,” Bill said, holding up a hand. “You don’t—”
The kid looked sideways at the gun. “Is this real?” he said. He turned the gun on Bill and a shot rang out.
In his pocket, Bill’s cell phone buzzed again while he stood there, watching through his gun smoke as the child’s blood ran down the world map.
COLD CALLS
“It’s coming from inside the house.”
“Can you hear me now?”
—Verizon
CHAPTER 1
(Present Day)
Kong heard the many hellos every morning he entered the factory. They played over a speaker to anyone who walked through the door.
This morning, Kong dreamed about the voices. He still lay in bed while the hellos looped in his mind. Male, female—each spoke at a different pitch, but they all sounded clinically polite.
The speaker even played a snippet of a Beatles song.
Kong rolled over in his cot, sweating, blankets tangled around his hips. He moaned in his sleep, and saw his wife and child, their bodies reduced to ticking metal parts, gears for jaws. They both were mouthing the word “Hello.”
His phone buzzed against his leg, and Kong snapped awake. It buzzed again, and he reached for it. Except instead of jeans, he felt bare skin; no pocket, no cell.
And yet the muscles in his thigh vibrated right there, right where his pocket would have been; the spasm had the exact same cadence as his phone.
Kong stared at the huge water stain on his ceiling. Every morning he felt would be his last. He would rise at five, bathe from a bucket, wish he had the stomach to eat, wish he had time to. Alas, every morning his belly was a vat of churning acids, and he was always running late.
This morning, it was already ten to six.
“Ai ya!”
Kong jumped out of bed and into his uniform, skipping the bath and blowing right through the tarp that covered the missing face of his house. It was a short burst to the factory from there, kicking through weeds and trash.
The many greetings echoed after him as he scurried through the glass doors, their voices bouncing around in the rafters of the large metal shell.
After gearing up in his static-proof bodysuit and latex gloves, Kong rushed through the metal corridor lined with air jets, which blew off all the dust. A minute later, he exited onto the giant floor of the cleanroom, squinting beneath the scrutiny of low fluorescent lights.
The factor
y already teemed with life, machines humming and hissing, white bodysuits scuttling everywhere. Hundreds of curious eyes peeked at him from between face masks and little white hoods. He recognized Hsiu Mei by her eyebrows, and he smiled.
Her eyes smiled back. They did this each morning, except today Kong had to force his grin. His stomach was not settling well.
The foreman, marked by his blue cleanroom suit and blue eyes, noticed Kong’s late arrival. Kong tried to avoid eye contact.
“Herro, Donkey Kong!” Randy shouted through a megaphone app on his cell. “You very rate! You very bad worker, Kong! No rice for you!”
The put-on accent bothered Kong today more than any other day. Randy knew it, too. His blue eyes glittered in his sickly white face.
Putting the loudspeaker of his phone right up to Kong’s ear, the foreman continued to shout. “Herro?! Can you hear me now?!”
Kong hurried down his row of workstations, where long tubes and grids of fluorescents beat down on hundreds of white-hooded heads bent studiously to their tasks. The entire way, Randy hounded him with his phone.
“Time to throw barrels, Donkey Kong! Jump, jump, jump!”
Kong sat at his station and began to pluck camera modules from a reel, using tweezers.
Carefully but efficiently, he installed each module onto a printed circuit board before passing each unit on for the next phase in the process.
Randy watched over Kong’s shoulder for several minutes, breathing heavily through his megaphone. Kong didn’t look up. He stayed focused on his work, scanning the intricate circuitry of the chips, double-checking connections.
Finally, when the foreman moved on to blast someone else with his megaphone, Kong felt the muscles in his back loosen up. He settled into a groove of pluck and plug.
Sometimes while he worked, he liked to zoom out and think about the larger machine, all the functions of the factory, all the young men and women screwing cases together, or wiping a screen, right down to the packaging at the end as conveyor belts rolled on and on. He even imagined that fembot voice echoing endlessly as workers scanned labels, or plugged in diagnostic cables—that robotic, Mandarin-accented voice repeating a single word . . .