The Phone Company

by David Jacob Knight

  All he knew was that ever since The Phone Company had started messing around with frequencies in Cracked Rock, his son, Chuck, along with all the other voices in Marv’s head, had gotten unbearably loud. And demanding.

  Mrs. Harcum herself had come to him one night to announce that she didn’t like what they’d done to her husband’s graveyard. Marv had noticed at the time she hadn’t said “town.”

  PCo was conducting signals right through the veins of gold in the ground, threading Cracked Rock like some giant circuit. He was certain of that.

  We don’t have time for this, Chuck said.

  “Man, I don’t know about this whole thing. I don’t . . .”

  Come on, not this again.

  “If it hurts someone—”

  It won’t.

  “People who work there?”

  At night?

  “Security or something. PCo’s always got someone working night shift, you know that. They’ve always got someone. I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

  They’re the enemy, Dad. They’d hurt you, kill you if they could.

  “Not them, the little guys. It’s like a cult, you know that. You can’t hurt the sheep, man, just for being sheep.”

  Dad . . .

  “You can’t blame them, the wolf keeps them safe. Least till he’s hungry. We should be opening their cage, man, not turning ’em into steak.”

  Dad!

  “What?”

  It’s mutton.

  “Whatever. I’m just saying . . .”

  They’re sheep. I get it. Dad, you have my word. We’ll save any sheep that want to be saved. But this has to happen. Tonight.

  Marv blew air out of his nose and started to pace. He kept thinking about some poor sap with his legs blown to stumps and jags of bone. He’d seen enough of those images lately. It was all over the place. War, terrorism, violence of all kinds, streaming all around them in invisible waves, bombarding them, all the way to their DNA.

  Don’t forget what they did to me, Chuck said.

  Marv stopped pacing.

  This is their fault.

  “I know that.”

  Well then . . .

  “Not all of them, though. Not all of them did that.”

  Does it matter? I’m dead. They took me from you.

  Marv’s stare grew a little glassy. “Not all of them,” he said again, lowering his eyes.

  It’s the right thing to do, Dad, and you know it. It’ll happen all over again if you don’t.

  “I know.”

  They’ll take everyone.

  “I know that.”

  Finally, Chuck fell silent and let Marv think. The voices had been right all along. Like when they warned him the company was going to make its move, and the next day PCo came to town. The voices had even told him how to make the bomb. Hopefully Chuck was right about this as well.

  A minute later, Marv was in his crane, unstacking junk with the magnet. He moved a wall of cubed scrap, and there, in a little recess, was the moving van.

  Keeping the headlights off, Marv steered the van down one of the perimeter roads of the Terraformer, avoiding the pools of sodium light coming from the line of telephone poles, the company’s easement, the company’s lights. He parked at the mouth of the Dead Zone.

  Every time he entered his maze of copper, aluminum, and lead, Marv could feel all the harmful waves melting off him like snow. Inside his head most days, it sounded as if all the world’s radio stations were shouting over each other, and all at once, some of them clear, some of them bleeding in and out of static. But as soon as he entered the Zone, there was golden, blessed silence.

  It was the one place on Earth Marv felt he could take off his hat and really give his scalp a good scratch. Even PCo’s cell tower couldn’t irradiate him here. The only thing that could reach him was the dead.

  There, Chuck said, helping Marv find one of his little caches in the dark.

  Tackle box by tackle box, Marv moved a wall of spent slugs and copper jackets, stored in each box. He popped a padlock and opened his aluminum shed, his Shack of Silence.

  The bomb, spread out between five fifty-gallon drums, sat inside like some sleeping giant. The shed reeked of the diesel he’d spilled. Making the thing had been like Goofy Gymnastics.

  Marv grabbed a handcart and ramped each barrel up into the moving van. He caught himself wincing every time the fuel-and-fertilizer mix sloshed.

  It’s not like old dynamite, Chuck said. You could drop it off a cliff, you’d be all right.

  “I know that.”

  Then hurry it up.

  “Hey, don’t you talk to me like that.”

  Chuck didn’t say anything for a second. When he did, he sounded small. Sorry, Dad. I’m just scared.

  Marv grimaced. Sometimes he forgot he was talking to a child, his child. “It’s all right. Everything will be all right.”

  Don’t forget the detonator, Chuck said.

  The boy had never talked this much in real life. He’d been born with a type of aphasia, and the kids at school had tormented him into silence. Marvin blamed himself for the language disorder, for having a kid in his late forties. More than that, he blamed the company. He blamed vaccinations (even though he and Chuck never were vaccinated).

  As an outcast, Chuck had spent his days exploring and making forts in the junk, using pots as helmets, rims as armor, and pipes for epic swords.

  Marv had taught him once how to tune into the voices and make friends. Chuck had refused to talk to them at first, shaking his head violently. Then one day he’d uttered something to them, only to immediately shy back, dreading their taunts. No one, not even speech therapists, had ever been able to decode Chuck’s tongue. But the voices could. They greeted him with a friendly Hello.

  After a few months, Chuck realized the voices would never make fun of his broken speech. And they would always understand him. The revelation had freed Chuck.

  Whenever anyone called Marvin insane, whether it was at the courthouse, City Hall, or the movie theater, he’d go home and listen to the yawps of his beautiful little redhead boy carrying from all corners of the Terraformer, and Marv would think, You’re crazy, man. You are.

  Without the voices, Chuck would’ve never been heard. Now, five years later, Marv often wished the dead didn’t always find their voice.

  This part you should be careful with, Chuck said as Marvin arrived at the storage shed for the detonator.

  “Yeah, yeah, man, I know that.” Marv picked up the old waxy tubes of explosive. “I’m the one who told you that.”

  The detonator consisted of three sticks of dynamite, acquired from different prospectors over the years.

  With Chuck’s guidance, Marv had taped the sticks together and had strapped a prepaid cell phone to the front, wired umbilically to the blasting caps. He checked that the phone was shut off for now, then delivered it like some sleeping baby to the van.

  Hurry, Chuck said.

  “Damn it, I’m going as fast as I can!”

  No, you don’t understand.

  “I understand perf—”

  He’s coming.

  Marv felt the thunderclap, an adrenaline surge like lightning. “Who?”

  There’s no time.

  “Is it Bill? Man, I told you. I told you he’d—goddammit!”

  You need to hide everything. NOW.

  “Crap, crap, crap,” Marv said, fast-walking but stiff-legged, on eggshells yolky with old nitroglycerin.

  Back in the moving van, he slid the bundle of dynamite into a harness he’d attached to the middle drum. He hopped out and lifted the ramp, sliding it back into its slot. It got caught up on the frame. With a cry and a few good wrenching motions, Marv got it to slide back in.

  The dynamite shifted in its harness, and Marv winced. All that wrenching. He really needed to play it safe.

  Gently, he pulled down the rear door, hopped into the cab, and, lights off, pulled the van back into its hole in the junk. He climbed into the
crane.

  Dad!

  “Yeah.”

  Dah!

  “What is it?”

  Dah-duh!

  “Huh?”

  Marv cocked his head, trying to understand. He could hear Chuck’s mouth struggling to make the right sounds, and he realized what was happening: for the first time since his son had been gunned down at HMS, the aphasia was making mush of his mouth.

  “Chuck!” Marv said when the boy fell completely silent. “Talk to me!”

  Nothing.

  Shuddering, glancing around, Marv pulled off his hat. “Hello?” Only dead air answered back.

  Something farther in the Terraformer clanged, and Marv’s head whirled around.

  With a shaky hand, he turned on the crane and maneuvered the magnet into place. It was like a game of speed Tetris, rebuilding the wall of cubed junk. Twice, he nearly knocked the whole thing over.

  Done except for a few blocks, Marv powered down the crane and jumped to the ground, afraid to be seen anywhere near the area. Something flashed ahead of him.

  A badge, he thought. Catching the light. Pinned to a shifting piece of the dark.

  “Hey, man, didn’t you read the sign?” Marv called. “No Hunting, No Trespassing, No Remote Viewing!”

  The dark shape stood there unfazed, its breath rising into the sodium light cresting a heap of cars. A red LED blinked near its temple.

  The explosion was so sudden Marvin was certain the old dynamite had gone off. All that wrenching.

  Something whizzed past his head less than a second later, and his mind finally registered the muzzle flare.

  “Yeow!” he cried, and he took off running, screaming as another slug buzzed past him, ricocheting somewhere in the guts of the junk.

  Marv ducked down a corridor of flattened cars, tripped over a heap of mufflers and caught his balance only to stumble through an obstacle course of tires he’d set up but had never used.

  The intruder’s boots clomped full bore behind him. Marv could see him now, decked out in full uniform but no hat, his face catching a bit of light from the lamps.

  It really was Bill.

  Marv knew the junkyard better than he knew the back roads of Cracked Rock. He knew all the shortcuts, both those he’d discovered and those he’d made. This shortcut was one he’d discovered: an RV just happened to be parked with its ass-end sticking out of the cars.

  Marv scrambled up the ladder to the roof, nearly losing a Birkenstock on the top rung. With a leap, he landed atop the hood and fell to the ground. Footsteps pounded up the ladder behind him.

  Panting, Marv ran. He bolted past rack upon rack of assorted car parts, everything from alternators to fans, to mixing bowls filled with lug bolts. On a rack farther down, one of the shelves was empty. Marv wormed his way through it and rolled out onto another path.

  Flailing, his sandal knocked over a tackle box, and hundreds of lead slugs—smashed, mushroomed, split, and mixed with real copper pennies—thudded down all around him.

  Bill, unlike radio waves, could penetrate the Dead Zone. Marv saw him peek through the shelf, just a moon waning with a crescent grin.

  “Chuck!” Marv cried, running again. “Why’s he doing this, man? Make him stop!” But Chuck was gone.

  Something had changed, Marv knew that now. The Bill he knew would never have taken a shot at him. Whatever had happened, whatever change the company had made, Bill was not the same man.

  Marv reached a section in the maze marked by lead and copper shavings all over the ground.

  “Where is it, where is it?”

  Poultry netting clashed beneath his hand.

  Yes!

  The netting bulged around a wall of something. A few aluminum cans rattled against short lengths of pipes, both copper and lead.

  Right around here somewhere . . .

  This time, the bullet pinged off the fence and a piece of pipe, spitting sparks at Marvin’s hand. Big as the Minotaur, Bill filled the pathway behind him.

  There, Marv thought.

  The rope.

  Connected to a linchpin.

  Holding a support in place.

  Which held the fencing in place.

  And the fencing held back tons of aluminum cans, pipes, and a couple hundred pounds of cylindrical lead weights. Enough to crush a man’s skull.

  Bill took aim in the dark, and Marvin Jones yanked the rope just as the muzzle flare lit up the copper sheets lining the wall on either side of the gun. The support popped out and the fencing fell flat beneath the sudden landslide of metals filling the space between Marv and Bill.

  CHAPTER 24

  The yolk of the sun broke over Cracked Rock, tentatively at first. It checked to see whether all the scary things had fled for the night. They hadn’t. There were still people.

  Jaime Vedder hated people. He started the last quarter mile toward JJ’s house, holding a backpack to drop off.

 

  Vedder grinned down at his copy of Drones. He had the Cracked Rock battlefield, too. Vedder was just at a higher level than JJ. He had everything unlocked, his own unique set of playable characters.

  Cops. Bomb squads. Some National Guard. Air Force, even. Montana was like one big base. And Vedder controlled everything.

  He was connected to everything.

  Drones began to vibrate and play a song, annoying yet eerily familiar. Vedder couldn’t place it, but he knew it was an alarm. The description said .

  “JJ?” someone shouted. The voice echoed in the neighborhood all around him, along with a hollow knocking in the sky.

  Vedder stopped and spun around. The street. The windows of all the houses, still sleeping inside the trees. The voice continued echoing, yet he couldn’t see anyone.

  “¡Hola!”

  “Guten tag!”

  Shrugging the backpack higher, Vedder muttered “ni hao” and hurried down the country road.

  He’d heard voices since he was a child. Cracked Rock had always been full of echoing cracks. These voices, however, were new.

  The alarm went off again, that terrible, alien song, yet so familiar, like one of his earliest memories he couldn’t quite grasp. “JJ, wake up!”

  Vedder blinked and . . .

  * * *

  JJ dropped his Tether. He almost rolled off his bed, he was so turned around.

  “JJ?”

  “Um uph,” he said, grabbing for his phone and sitting up in the dark.

  “Did you forget it’s a school day? Your sister and I would like to stop for breakfast!”

  “No, I’m up,” JJ said again. “I’m awake.”

  His eyes began to adjust, and in the dim gloss of his Portal poster (THE CAKE IS A LIE), JJ could see a dull green glow in the shape of a guitar pick.

  his Tether said, blaring the song. JJ shut it off, and the green shape in the poster moved, too.

  WTF?

  He sat there for half a minute, staring at the shape, challenging it to move again, daring it to reveal itself. Then he noticed the green glow on his bottom lashes as well, and flinched so hard he tweaked a muscle in his back.

  Shivering, legs pimpled in the early morning chill, JJ scrammed out of bed and tripped over a backpack on his way to the light.

  Dirty, wrinkled, and a size too small, somehow, at some point last night, Jaime Vedder’s T-shirt, the one with the green alien head, had found its way onto JJ’s body.

  The alien head stared back at him beneath the harsh bedroom light. In one of its eyes, there was a spot of blood.

  * * *

  Frowning at the empty side of the booth, Steve peppered his eggs. Well, technically just the whites, he reminded himself. That wasn’t why he was upset. Not entirely.

  Bill always showed up to the diner first. Part of it was Bill didn’t have kids. No significant other, either. Steve had always envied him that: Bill got a bathroom all to himself. Not some flowery retreat shared with a teenage girl who’d freak out if you used her loofah. Bill had t
he luxury of being punctual.

  Today, though, Deputy Right on Time, Deputy Quarter Till, was close to twenty minutes late.

  Work emergency? Steve thought.

  He picked up his toast and butter knife. “Ugh. Hey, Sarah, I’m sorry, would you put in another order? They never gave me my I Can’t Believe It’s Better Blood Pressure.”

  “I’m updating my Follow,” Sarah said from the other booth. “Have JJ order your fake butter.”

  JJ, for his part, lay slumped in one corner of the bench, his hat pulled over his eyes.

  Usually it was Sarah drooling on the table, her hair matted to one side. JJ was usually bright-eyed and chewing waffles and jam, raring to go. This morning, the world had changed.

  Steve had nearly slipped in his socks, he was so startled by his wife, Janice, sitting there at the kitchen table. It turned out it was only Sarah, drinking a protein shake.

  By some miracle Steve’s teenage daughter had beaten him out of bed. She’d done her hair and had put in her contact lenses. She resembled Janice enough as it was—the glasses, the mussed hair—but this morning was enough to make Steve miss his wife, that she wasn’t here to witness the transformation of their beautiful bookworm into a monarch.

  Janice had looked the exact same way on special occasions. Bill had once said Steve had two wives. One of them was a librarian.

  “Here you go,” Cathy said, setting down a saucer of butter substitute.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” Sarah said.

  Steve frowned at her. “That was for Cathy. But thank you, too. Again. I’ll get you money after work, I swear. Right now I only have enough for the tip.”

  “I already tipped.”

  Steve gave Sarah a look.

  She shrugged and turned back to her phone as if she could care less what he thought about the app and where it sent its tips. “Get your Tether activated,” Sarah said. “That’ll be thanks enough.”

  “You know what, I’m going to call him,” Steve said, pulling out his old clamshell. “He’s going to be late.”

  Bill’s number rang and rang. Steve tried a couple more times during breakfast, but each time he got voicemail.