The Phone Company

Home > Other > The Phone Company > Page 15
The Phone Company Page 15

by David Jacob Knight


  “Sweet,” JJ said, gunning down terrorists on his own phone. He selected his RPG and blew up a spider hole.

  “The book said the Ebumnanyth killed Harcum’s wife, so he had them slaughtered and dumped in this hole. You know, to plug it up. Or ‘put a cork in it,’ is how it’s written in the book. There were some unmarked graves for a few Indians in the woods, too. Apparently, they were buried with diamonds.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “They used to use them for arrowheads. Spearheads. You know, to kill innocent babies?”

  “Yeah, but why bury those, too? Wouldn’t you take them? Go buy a goat or potato? Another rope?”

  “Who cares? Look.” Mini Mark’s character mined a hole in the ground and popped out into a huge digital underground chamber. “That guy they lost to the crack?” Mark placed a torch in the immense darkness, revealing a little patch of the cavern floor. A skull and pile of bones floated an inch above the rock, just hovering there, white in all that black.

  “Creepy,” JJ said. “Any ghosts?”

  Mark’s character traversed the darkness, planting torches as he went. Shadows receded, chamber by chamber, but JJ didn’t see any ghosts.

  “I explored deeper than this. Like, I went into the mine and into the cracks and I found some crazy shit, like cave paintings and stuff. You know, Indian shit. Stick-figure wars. Them dancing around weird spirits and stuff. It’s crazy; they’re Indians, yet somehow they got deeper down than we could ever go. But I finally got there, man, and then . . .”

  Mark glanced at the Dick, who hadn’t really moved or paid any attention to them at all from his bed. “This.” Mini Mark held out his hand.

  “Wow.” JJ’s eyes glittered. “You got these from the game?”

  “Kind of sort of,” Mark said. “I dug ’em up and put ’em in one of my chests. In the game, I mean. Then they were there the next day in my sock drawer. In the real world.” He tucked the sparkling gems back into his sweats. “I think there used to be lava or something down there, but it’s all dark now. It’s all just dark tubes. It’s like Satan’s Butthole down there—I planted a sign.” Mini Mark smiled. Then he started to shift in his sleeping bag. “BRB, gotta take a slash.”

  While Mark slunk for the bathroom, trying not to wake the Dick’s dad, the Dick rolled over in bed. “Psst. Hey, JJ. Think he’ll be, uh . . . heh, think he’ll be pissed?”

  In groups of three, there was always an odd man out. And the Dick was never the odd. He decided who was in and who was out. So for a brief second, as the Dick revealed what he’d been doing on his phone, JJ felt relieved to be an even man. Until he saw what the Dick had been doing.

  “It’s the Griefer app. I used it to hack Mark’s game. See all this dynamite?” He pointed out the explosive bricks he had planted all around Buttcrack Rock. “I’m gonna blow the crap out of his little, uh, crap hole town here.”

  JJ thought of the diamonds Mark had just shown him. He thought of the PCo data center. He’d seen Mini Mark building it right there on his phone, only for it to materialize here in the real world.

  Now the Dick was planting TNT all over the town, creating this giant web with a fuse.

  “The school. The library. The church and the cemetery; your mother’s grave. Marvin’s junkyard, the new data center. Oh, and all over my own house, too, right above our heads right now. This whole suburb, basically. Yours and Mini Mark’s houses out in the sticks; Meg Disney’s, too, the letters on the hill. Heh, kiss your butt goodbye, Buttcrack Rock.”

  The Dick thumbed his touchscreen, each stroke striking the flint against the steel, shedding sparks inches from a red box with three capital letters on it.

  “Let me see,” JJ said from the floor.

  “Okay, sure.”

  JJ reached for the phone, but then the Dick yanked it back.

  “Psych!”

  Standing up from his sleeping bag, JJ reached out again. “Come on, I just want to see it.”

  The Dick shrank against the wall. “What, so you can undo my hard work?”

  “No, I want to add a couple more blocks.”

  “Just tell me where.”

  “I don’t know where, I just want to see it.”

  “Nah.” The Dick sneered and struck sparks.

  “He’s going to be pissed,” JJ said.

  “So? He’s a git.”

  JJ swiped for the phone, but the Dick planted a stinky foot in his chest and pushed him back.

  “Whoa there, don’t go making me roshambo you squah in the nuts, mate. I’m just starting to like you again.”

  JJ wiped sweat out of his eyes. “Just . . . take the ones off the house, okay? I don’t care if you blow everything else up, just take the ones off your house.”

  “Aw, JJ. Run along. Go play swords with your little pee-pal, ’kay? He can cry on your shoulder and you can braid his hair while he pukes.”

  “Just take them off, all right? Just take them off the house!”

  “Sorry,” the Dick said, and he struck his thumb across flint and steel. The explosion shook his phone, vibrated it. He held it up so JJ could see the line of explosions, webbing outward from the school . . .

 

 

 

  . . . toward the Dick’s house.

  JJ grabbed for the phone, and this time the Dick didn’t fight him.

  “You can’t stop it!” he said as JJ opened the menu of building materials, looking for a bucket of water or anything to put it out.

  There was nothing but demolition tools. And this Doomsday Device, a giant bomb with a reaper painted on it; just one of the many tools, one that could end the entire world. That’s what it said in the little help window, anyway.

  The pickaxe, JJ thought, grabbing the tool. He flew ahead of the explosions, trying to chop out TNT blocks, but the destruction was spreading too fast in too many directions.

  His house.

  This house.

  The school and his mother’s grave.

  Gripping the phone, JJ flew to the second-story window, looking for bursts in the night. He saw only his own face in the reflection, with the Dick in the background.

  JJ threw open the sash, listening, watching, breath steaming in the night. He scanned the first-story roof of the Dick’s house, looking for the red explosives. He turned on the Tether’s flashlight.

  Nothing.

  “Don’t pee yourself,” the Dick laughed. “It’s just a game.”

  Indeed, the blasts coming from the phone grew into the distance, then faded away. JJ looked at the Tether: the data center, now just a gaping chasm in the ground; the Dick’s house, just a smoking skeleton. Yet the real town was fine.

  JJ was fine.

  Alive.

  At least he thought.

  “And look at this,” the Dick said, grabbing the phone. He zoomed in on Marv’s junkyard.

  Way out there in the junk, with cubed cars stacked all around, were billions of coins someone had cached, all blown up and running into a deep crack like sand.

  There was a cry from down the hall. Mini Mark came stumbling into the room, pulling up his sweatpants, tripping over their loose, wadded legs.

  “You bastards!” he said while the Dick rolled around on the bed, eyes bulging, laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe.

  “JJ, look!” the Dick said. In his rush, Mini Mark had taken a slash right across the front of his own sweatpants. Mark blushed.

  “I told him not to do it,” JJ said.

  “Screw you.”

  “Hey, screw you. I told him not to!”

  Mark wasn’t listening. He turned around and stomped downstairs.

  “Oh my God, he’s calling his mom,” the Dick said, then quieted down to listen to Mark talking on the phone. “Oh my God, what a buttcrack! Hey, JJ, wanna help me build a giant buttcrack in his town? A giant butthole, too?”

  Something in the hallway glittered on the floor. JJ bent to snatch it up. A gem, fallen from Mini Mark’s sweat
pants. Only this one had the luster and feel of, not diamond, but plastic.

  WTF?

  * * *

  Sarah lay on Anastasia Disney’s floor, listening to her friend sleep. Her phone dinged, and she opened the clamshell. She had texted her bank account to see how much money she had. Not even five hundred dollars.

  she texted back.

  The bank said it didn’t understand her request.

  No job, no money. She would never get a car. She had been saving up for a Tether, too, and she probably had enough to get one now, but after that she wouldn’t have a penny to her name.

  Sarah scratched at her shoulder where she’d stuck the nicotine patch Anastasia had given her. Sarah’s nails accidentally scraped up a corner. It wouldn’t lie back down.

  She tore the thing off, wadded it up, and flicked it beneath Anastasia’s bed. It hadn’t worked anyway.

  God, she thought, realizing something. It wasn’t bad enough she’d lost her job. Now she’d have to tell her dad about it, too.

  * * *

  Later that night, JJ was lying in wait for the Dick to snore before getting up. He’d even put his Tether away and pretended to whir lightly himself, snug in his sleeping bag. The Dick was a silent sleeper tonight.

  JJ thought again about the spyware the Dick must’ve installed. The Enormous TV could tune into everything up until now. Well, almost everything.

  Sometimes it couldn’t hear it all, and sometimes reception stunk, but a picture always came in with a little fine-tuning of all those sliders in the deeper settings.

  The TV saw everything.

  Except his dad.

  And Barksdale.

  And Sarah, still, because she didn’t own a phone.

  Not a Tether, at least.

  Yet now the Dick had fooled the TV, too.

  He knows, JJ thought. Knows I’m awake. Somehow . . .

  The Dick wasn’t a light sleeper—he wasn’t sleeping.

  JJ’s eyes snapped open when the Dick started to snore. Then, when the Dick started to really embarrass himself, JJ’s Tether lit up. He took a picture, and the Dick didn’t even stir.

  Hilarious.

  * * *

  JJ’s breath steamed in the night, and he huddled in his jacket. He didn’t care about the cold, honestly. He was glad to be out of the Dick’s house, breathing fresh air instead of recycling whatever came out of the Dick’s mewling lungs.

  He’d thought about walking home, but decided against it. If his dad knew he and the Dick were still fighting, who knew what other stupid crap he’d make JJ do?

  Lick the Dick’s boot?

  Kiss his ring?

  Screw that.

  JJ would slowly pull away from his so-called friends’ table, then, from both the Dick and Mini Mark. Pull away and see if they care.

  He just couldn’t believe it. At least JJ had tried to help Mark. At least he’d stood up to the Dick on Mark’s behalf. And what had Mini Mark done to stick up for JJ when the Dick had made that auto-tune song? Nothing but laugh. Apologetically, but who cared? So Mark was nervous, so what? He didn’t have to laugh. But they’d all laughed, hadn’t they?

  JJ hated his friends. Hated his entire school. He had watched enough of their lives on The Enormous TV. He knew how selfish, petty, and shallow they all were, how insecure and willing to victimize each other just to be part of the herd. How some of them kicked their pets. And some boys still scorched insects under magnified sun, or raped their sisters. These kids, they complained at home when they didn’t get their way. When they didn’t get to use the bathroom first, or when their little brother stole the charger for their phone.

  Obsessed with their own first-world problems while kids starved or had to run away from irradiated homes. Homes JJ himself had destroyed in the war game.

  He’d seen them. On the news. Homes he’d laid waste to in Drones. At first he thought he was hallucinating, but nope. There they were.

  Then Mark with those diamonds. They’d looked real. They’d turned out to be fake, but that only left JJ with a question.

  Were the homes on the news really what was fake?

  Which had come first? The news or the video game?

  He couldn’t remember.

  If the diamonds were fake, he thought, pulling his coat tighter in the cold. What else is in this world is? He took out his phone.

  Before JJ could turn it on, something golden caught his eye. A giant golden arrow floating above the ground, right there in the road. Right above the painted yellow line. It arced, leaving tracers, indicating a sharp turn with a guardrail at the base of some giant trees. As if indicating where JJ should go.

  He blinked.

  The golden arrow slowed down and separated into five individual arrows, mounted to the guardrail. Not a mission arrow at all, just road signs.

  JJ followed the sharp turn anyway: the arrows pointed toward Meg Disney’s house.

  A short walk down the dark road in the woods reminded JJ of the dangers of being alone at night. Especially in the forest at the edge of Meg’s house. The same forest where they’d found Vedder’s pet cemetery, a housecat named “Whiskers.” The undergrowth misted on the edge of the road. The woods moved. Rustled.

  With his phone, JJ held back the dark.

  Meg’s front porch light was on, spotlighting their sub-developed house. It looked exactly like the house next door to it, and the one next door to that. The only visible personality was in the color of the trim.

  JJ reached into his phone and turned on The Enormous TV. Hmm. Meg’s house was dark. Everyone asleep? Yep, he could hear snoring. Not Meg’s, thankfully, but her parents’ snoring down the hall. Her mother, Deb, especially.

  JJ knew, because he’d seen Sarah do this, that the Disneys didn’t keep the side door locked on the attached garage. The door stood behind a locked gate, which was probably why. It was where they took out their trash and recycling.

  They were still stupid to leave it unlocked, because all JJ had to do was climb into the densely packed woods along the creek, over a shorter chain-link fence. It made a lot of noise, all those limbs scratching against his jacket, but nothing except the garage sat on this side of the lot. Who would hear, except the woods? JJ would find himself on the sidewalk in less than five minutes.

  He punched his own hole into the tight underbrush. It clawed at him, held him back. He stubbed his knee on a shorter shrub, broken off at the trunk.

  The growth was thicker here along the Disneys’ fence. He’d forgotten that. It pushed him farther back toward the creek until he was stumbling along near the bank.

  His breath caught when the woods moved again.

  He lifted his phone as a flashlight.

  There on the other side of the scraggly limbs, he saw the mist of the far bank. And a man standing there.

  The Slender Man, all tall in his suit.

  JJ could barely see him, except for the white collar and white pocket square, and wherever he was silhouetted by the mist: his shoulders, a sliver of his black hat brim and face.

  Just standing there.

  Old black handset pressed to his ear.

  This man—he was the same man from the PCo assembly. JJ remembered the flashing lights, seeing this Slender Man standing there on the basketball court, giving his presentation, nine feet tall. Then he’d disappeared when the lights came back on and it was just that guy Graham. Same suit.

  Same pocket square.

  JJ’s breath steamed, obscuring the light, and he realized . . . the Slender Man wasn’t exhaling any breath. JJ would have seen it.

  The man raised a finger to his lips, and then JJ ducked when someone stepped through the side door of the Disney’s garage.

  Shutting off the flashlight widget, JJ looked back to the other bank, but there was only mist coming off the creek. The white collar, cuffs, and pale face faded away, and he realized the Slender Man had just been the water reflecting his cell phone light all along.

  He heard the sound of
a lighter and saw that it was his sister, Sarah, who had come out of the Disneys’ garage. His sister, smoking a cigarette.

  JJ turtled his head inside his coat, careful not to make too much noise. He brought his phone inside, too, but left the lens sticking out between buttons. From there, hiding the Tether’s light in his jacket, he started to record.

  The Tether highlighted his grin. He hadn’t been able to spy on Sarah with The Enormous TV. This was way better than he could have imagined.

  His smile flagged when she buried her face in her hand and started to cry. JJ thought about turning off the camera. He didn’t want to see this. He knew she cried, she was a girl, but he rarely saw it happen, ignored it whenever it did. Her sobbing brought up memories. Bad ones.

  Thankfully, it didn’t last long.

  Sarah crushed the cigarette against the sidewalk, then tossed the butt into the woods. JJ waited for a few minutes after she’d gone back inside. He pushed through the last of the underbrush and climbed the little chain-link fence to the sidewalk where she had stood. Sarah’s smoke seemed to settle on his jacket.

  Meg’s cat, who looked very much like Grumpy Cat, frowned at him before darting through a little pet door into the garage.

  JJ reached for the garage door, but stopped. He’d never noticed this: a yellow diamond on the white, windowless door. Security? he thought.

  His phone chimed. Apparently, PCo had just released a new app into JJ’s store.

  A scrambler.

  For alarms.

  All he had to do was hold the phone up till it recognized the company sign, and then it ran brand-specific codes like a universal remote until it found the right key.

 

  JJ reached out, twisted the doorknob, and laughed. Even after all the effort of installing an alarm, the Disneys still hadn’t taken the time to check all their locks. Idiots, JJ thought.

 

‹ Prev