The Phone Company

by David Jacob Knight

“Well, I was just wondering. I know some of my friends will be there, so . . .”

  “Yeah. Hey, Aaron, listen. I kind of quit drinking.” Like, an hour ago, Bill thought.

  “Oh, Bill, good for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Oh my gosh, that’s so great.”

  Bill scrubbed the playhead back and forth over Graham’s test. “Well, don’t wait up for me. Go have a blast, okay?”

  “Yeah, maybe I will,” Aaron said.

  “You ought to call Steve. You don’t need a chaperone, he’s nice.”

  “All right, Bill. Be safe.”

  “You too. Night, Aaron. See you tomorrow.”

  “Oh, hey, Bill?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I just wanted to say . . . I’m sad about Candy, too.”

  Bill felt it stab through him, gut to mouth. He knew if he didn’t say something, Aaron’s eyes would start to burn, and he didn’t want to let her ruin a perfectly good night like that.

  “If you ever need to talk,” she said.

  Bill blinked, surprised, finding that his own eyes had started to water. “Yeah, well, have a good time, you hear?”

  “I will. Goodbye, Bill.”

  He sat there for a while longer, massaging his breast pocket, lightly crunching the wrappers of his cough drops.

  Bill’s phone blinked off and got his attention. He continued to review Graham’s test. Obviously, the polygraph had been equally as baffled. It could only suggest follow-up questions.

  Wait, Bill thought, rewinding.

  There.

  A few beats back.

  One solitary spike.

  Graham had told Bill that Barksdale always slipped out a crack near the back of the mine; when Bill asked what was back there, Graham had said, “The other side of the mountain.” Which was true, but then Bill had asked, “That all?” and Graham had said, “Yes.”

  Which was a lie.

  Bill puzzled over the results until it was practically dark and his head began to hurt. He finally said screw it and went inside.

  He’d told both Aaron and Steve he wasn’t going out tonight. Bill took a quick shower, jumped into some plainclothes, and tore off in his jeep. Not for Sherry’s, but the Speakeasy. He wanted a place where nobody knew his name.

  * * *

  JJ’s Tether dinged: a reminder from Drones. He still needed to complete his mission. He opened The Enormous Television and checked on his sister.

  Yep, snoring.

  JJ wished he could check in on his dad as well, but his dad had never activated his Tether, so . . .

  JJ checked the time.

  Midnight.

  Avoiding the creaky floorboards, he crept downstairs.

  After school, Dad had fixed them dinner, had drunk a few beers, and had passed out in bed watching TV. He was still passed out in there, his face changing color with the little flat screen, first white, then splashed completely red.

  Outside, JJ’s breath steamed. He opened The Wand and prowled the neighborhood.

  Earlier in Drones, he’d walked Jaime Vedder around this same area, wanding houses, garages, and cars.

  He’d actually found quite a few weapons. It turned out good old Red Beard did have something under the seat of his truck.

  JJ wanted to confirm the weapons were actually there, that it wasn’t all just some plastic diamond. He walked the same route Vedder had walked. He scanned the same houses.

  Yep, all the guns were there. One of the houses, Mrs. Hunnicutt’s, had a few M16s tucked away in the attic. How to get at them, though? How to get at any of them?

  JJ hoped his Tether would spit out some convenient new app, but nope. He browsed his store, but nothing there either. The Enormous Television could show him inside houses, if the residents owned Tethers (which all of them seemed to so far, no trouble there). The scrambler could bypass any alarms as well.

  And if the people owned pets, JJ could probably silence them. He didn’t necessarily want to do that, though. He would rather find a house without barking, biting dogs.

  Not for the first time, he wished his dad owned a gun. Barksdale never barked.

  Breaking into a house would be too difficult, JJ decided, sizing up the tall fences around the yards, the motion lights and neighbors in proximity.

  A short walk through the woods, then. That gap between here and there, over near Meg Disney’s, that bit of wilderness before the housing development where they’d found Whiskers the housecat.

  The woods seemed to creep over the bank and close over him as JJ took the stretch of road. The floaters in the darkness melted and morphed before his eyes, then bled into Rorschachs, cackling silently before yawning away.

  Meg Disney’s house didn’t harbor any guns.

  Red Beard’s, though, JJ thought. Red lived just behind the subdivision, up in the woods. His truck would be an easy mark.

  JJ found Red’s mailbox and started the hike. The only sounds up the long, dark snake of a road were JJ’s shoes crunching gravel and the hiss of the night.

  Red’s truck sat in front of his little shack. The place looked like Marv’s, what with all the rusty old cars and random piles of tires. One light, attached to the power pole, spilled out over the property.

  JJ hid outside the light. He cocked his ear, trying to hear over the sound of his heart.

  Red had a dog. JJ was pretty positive it was old and deaf, though, maybe even blind. He took a deep breath and strode into the light.

  Near the house a trashcan exploded, spilling beer cans into the drive. JJ broke into a dead run, glancing back. He stopped when he saw the eyeshine.

  Only a startled cat.

  He watched the house for several minutes from the dark.

  His Tether vibrated. Somehow, it had detected the stupid cat.

  the profile said. The cat’s status bar added,

  WTF? JJ thought. He couldn’t see anything but the cat’s eyes in the dark. Wait a sec.

  He opened Drones and loaded Cracked Rock. The cat had given him an idea.

  In Drones, the playable characters always moved around on their own while JJ was logged off. He pictured them living these little lives, somewhere off-screen. Maybe they were in the bunks back at base, staring at pictures of their families; maybe they were marching by day and taking names. The trick was, JJ never knew where he was going to spawn in the game.

  One time he’d spawned into a playable character who’d just lost his legs. JJ could do nothing to control the body at that point. He’d been forced to sit there and watch as shock pulled the strings.

  Tonight when his character spawned, JJ could see himself on his own screen.

  He whirled around.

  A pale shape twitched in the woods. Vedder’s shirt, his glow-in-the-dark tee, moved as JJ played his thumb across the Tether. Now he could see the whole glowing alien head on Vedder’s chest, aligned through the branches of the trees.

  JJ grinned and moved Vedder toward Red Beard’s truck.

  I don’t want to see him, he realized. He didn’t want to come face to face with . . .

  What was Vedder now, a robot?

  The real Jaime Vedder was dead, JJ knew that. But JJ also knew about the drones you could fly with your phone. Plus, the Japanese had created this pretty realistic fembot, so, yeah, there was that. It wasn’t beyond possibility.

  It didn’t matter, though. The light on the power pole was old, with only a metal hood to protect the bulb. Edging the driveway were rocks of varying size. The glowing alien head stopped to pick one up.

  Whiskers the cat watched on with glowing eyes as Vedder threw a few rocks and shattered the light.

  JJ looked down at the screen of his phone as the glowing alien head reached the truck. Right there, he could see through Vedder’s eyes, could see what Vedder saw—a dark reflection in the driver’s-side window, an almost alien head elongated even further by the bend of the glass. He couldn’t tell whether the head was blown apart.

>   With a few strokes of his thumb, JJ made Vedder hold up his own Tether to scan the truck.

  There.

  Right there.

  Right under the seat.

  A freaking sawed-off shotgun.

  In his other hand, Vedder’s reflection raised a rock. JJ thumped the Tether’s glass with the pad of his thumb and jumped at the loud crack.

  Glancing at Red Beard’s house, JJ thumped again. This time the cracking sounded duller. The glass spiderwebbed. JJ and Vedder took one last strike, and the window shattered all over the bench seat of the truck.

  Vedder popped the lock and yanked open the groaning door. As the dome light flicked on, Red Beard burst out of his house, holding another shotgun.

  “What in the Sam Hill?”

  JJ took off at a dead run, darkness rushing past him at a hundred miles per hour down the mountain. He heard Red Beard’s truck roar to life behind him.

  The main road was so flat compared to Red’s, JJ stumbled through the transition. He fell, skinning his palms on the country road. His Tether went skating.

  Red’s headlights had yet to hit the road, but his truck was coming, snarling around corners and barreling downhill.

  Cursing, JJ climbed to his feet and snatched up his Tether. He tumbled into the ditch on the other side, crawling into the culvert there just as Red Beard’s beams set fire to the weedy bank above his head.

  The truck rumbled at the end of the drive.

  Why hadn’t Red gone after Vedder?

  And what was he doing up there?

  A bubble of light formed in the culvert around JJ’s phone. This time when Vedder spawned, he stood in the middle of the road, about a hundred yards from where Red Beard was idling.

  The TV, JJ thought.

  He turned on the app and punched in Red Beard’s name. Like everyone else at HMS, Red Beard owned a Tether. The Enormous Television showed him sitting in his truck, squinting down the road, first left, then right.

  JJ switched to Drones.

  He took control of Vedder again, making him cross the road into the neighboring field.

  Red must have seen the glowing alien head. His tires kicked up gravel and he took off in that direction, opposite JJ’s route home. JJ shut off Drones, knowing Vedder was fully capable of getting lost himself. He wormed his way out of the culvert and disappeared into the dark.

  * * *

  Bill hopped into his jeep and rested his head against the cold glass. After a minute he opened his eyes, hoping the spins had stopped. They hadn’t.

  The brick façade of the Speakeasy seemed to slip sideways, forever in a landslide. He’d even splashed cold water on his face before leaving the bar. Hadn’t helped.

  Bill waited about fifteen minutes before deciding, Screw this. It was too cold out here to wait for his body to metabolize everything he’d put in it. Bill fired up his jeep.

  Aaron 2 said. Bill swatted at his earwig. He had completely forgotten it was in.

  “Whatever, C-3PO. Goodnight.”

 

  Bill threw his earwig onto the dash, wondering how the hell it had detected his BAC. Did it have sensors in the mouthpiece or something?

  Great, he thought, one more thing to show up on his background check.

  Bill’s tires chirped a bit as he pulled out of the lot. Drive the speed limit, take the back roads. For Bill, the same rules applied to drunk driving as they did for dump runs. Sometimes he even drove with his hazards on.

  Tonight, he had a hard time mastering the throttle. Erratic speed fluctuations were a huge indicator of drunk driving, one that Bill always watched for whilst on traffic duty.

  The way he was driving tonight? Floating along at seventy only to suddenly zone out at a little over thirty-five? Bill would’ve pulled himself over. Not a good start. And since the Speakeasy was all the way in a different county . . .

  Bill took nearly an hour for a half-hour drive. On the bright side, it felt like some of the booze had burned off by the time he pulled into Cracked Rock.

  Home stretch, he thought, picking up speed. He loved this road. Windy, hilly, and densely wooded for the first part. Then, on the final approach, the centerline looked straight enough it could’ve been drawn using a chalk box, with nothing but fields on either side.

  A kid ran out in front of him.

  Bill had cleaned up enough wrecks where people had swerved to miss deer, he knew not to swerve. He swerved anyway. This wasn’t a deer, it was a kid!

  He ended up with his back passenger tire in the ditch. The jeep climbed right out of it, though. He threw on his hazards, grabbed his flashlight, and hopped out.

  The kid had gotten tangled up in the barbwire fence on the other side of the road.

  “JJ?” Bill said, shining his light on the boy. He heard a curse, followed by the ripping of the kid’s hoodie. “JJ, freeze. Your dad’s going to know anyway.”

  The boy stared at him a second. He cursed again and continued to struggle with the fence.

  “Here,” Bill said, walking over to help.

  Apparently, Bill was drunker than he liked to admit. It took two whole minutes to figure out which way JJ’s sweater was wound up in the wire, and a whole minute after that to figure out JJ could just step out of the sweater.

  He and Bill stood there for a second, huffing and puffing white breath into the beam of the flashlight. JJ still looked like he was ready to run.

  Bill decided to skip the part where he asked and JJ lied about what the hell he doing out this late.

  “Well,” Bill said, “let’s get you home.”

  He sneaked a hand inside his secret pocket while JJ climbed in through the driver’s side. Bill had transferred some of the cough drops from his uniform to his flannel. He popped one out of its wrapper, tossed it in his mouth, and climbed in behind the wheel.

  It took him a second to realize it wasn’t a cough drop he was sucking. It was a little strawberry candy.

  Suddenly Bill could feel the effects of going off the road, doubled by the nausea of the alcohol poisoning. He glanced at JJ, who was staring at the double lines.

  Single line, Bill thought. Christ.

  With a deep breath, he put the jeep in gear and drove off, praying he didn’t kill Steve’s kid.

  * * *

  Crap, crap, crap, JJ thought as they approached the driveway. His dad was going to kill him. Ground him for life. A year, at least. Worse, his dad would probably take his phone. And if he ever found out what was really on JJ’s Tether . . .

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Bill stopped in the driveway, and JJ looked around.

  “Home schweet home,” Bill said, still slurring his words around whatever he’d been sucking on the whole drive.

  JJ tried to dash the brains of Little Bunny Hope bounding free in his chest. “You’re not gonna . . .”

  “Just don’t let me cashew doing it again,” Bill said around the lozenge.

  “Thank you,” JJ said. He couldn’t stop fidgeting with the door handle, wanting nothing more than to get it open, nothing more than to run.

  “Well?” Bill said. “Get!”

  “Thank you, thank you.” JJ opened the door and started to hop out when something caught his eye. He had been so terrified he hadn’t noticed them at first, but now, spotlighted by the dome light, the two hunting rifles mounted to the frame of Bill’s ceiling looked easy enough to steal. And Bill’s jeep was the kind with plastic windows.

  “Better get going,” Bill said, “before I schange my mind.”

  Nodding, JJ hopped out of the jeep and started running down his drive. He heard Bill tear off down the road.

  JJ stopped. He opened Drones.

  He didn’t know how he’d dodged a bullet only to find a magic one, but this time he had a plan.

  A plan that changed the moment Drones loaded and he discove
red Vedder’s phone had a copy of the war game as well.

  CHAPTER 23

  I told you, it’s now or never, Chuck said.

  Marvin lowered his binoculars and squinted into the night; he couldn’t even see the mountain above Mars’ Greenhouse Gas Terraformer, Autowreckers, and Scrap Metal Yard, it was so black. “There’s light up there.”

  So?

  “What if he’s staking me out?”

  He’s not.

  “What if he’s got the whole Terraformer bugged and I—”

  Bill isn’t that stupid. You really think he’d use light?

  Marvin had to admit Chuck had a point.

  Deputy Bill seemed to be gripping a rung only slightly higher than the guy who came to deliver Marv’s mail, or the meter gal who recorded the Terraformer’s connection to the grid. Yet Bill was one of the craftiest company men to step foot in the Terraformer in a very long time. Marv couldn’t risk making a move, not now. He’d only almost just got caught.

  They’re working up there, that’s why there’s light. If you don’t do this now, you won’t ever.

  Again, Marv agreed. Thank God he’d only been doing a dry run when Bill had followed him home and searched the van. In fact, the reason Marv had gone home was to load up the van for real. He’d been bringing the first barrel out when he’d spotted Bill and had hid in the junk.

  If you don’t do it now—

  “Look, man, just . . .” Using his hat, a Craft International, Marv scratched at his rats of red and gray hair. “Quiet for a sec, okay? I’m trying to think.”

  He stared at the mountain, at the spot of light floating there in a dark ocean. Marv could hear the distant buzz of machinery, and, deeper, the thrum of the tower.

  The voice in his head sighed.

  “I’m thinking,” Marv said.

  Think faster.

  The Craft International cap, despite its bitching logo of a Punisher skull and bloodshot-crosshair eye, had never generated a strong enough Faraday cage to drown out his son’s voice. Maybe because the tinfoil lining wasn’t properly grounded? Marv didn’t know.