The Phone Company

by David Jacob Knight

  Sarah saw someone standing in the crowd, and suddenly she knew who was watching her.

  Anastasia Disney.

  She looked terrible. Pimples. Bags under her eyes. Nicotine patches all over her bare arms, a couple on her face.

  “Cigarette?” Graham reached up with his chauffer’s glove, holding out a fresh pack. Montclairs.

  Smiling, Sarah took one and leaned down so Graham could light it for her. Sitting up, she blew out smoke, blowing it toward Anastasia, who, by the time the smoke cleared, was no longer there. Anastasia had disappeared into the crowd.

  “Let the fun begin,” Graham said, and drove the convertible out of the lot.

  CHAPTER 38

  It was the end, but the parade still hadn’t caught up. “Excuse me,” Steve said, pushing his way through the crowd. He had tried to drive closer to the data center, but PCo had blocked everything off. He’d been forced to park at O’Donald’s.

  People couldn’t see the parade approaching, but it built like thunder somewhere around the bend. A rumble at first. You could feel it in the ground and in the air around you.

  The noise felt giant, the way a train feels giant on its long approach. Steve felt like no matter where he stepped, he’d feel a railroad beneath him—its resounding bed of trap rock, its thrumming rails—locking him onto a one-way track.

  “Excuse me, coming through.”

  County ordinance required all residents of Cracked Rock to maintain their own sidewalks. Of course, one of the only real sidewalks in town was in front of O’Donald’s. And, of course, the sidewalk was packed; usually was, during parades.

  Local government was thrilled to build infrastructure for corporations; they brought jobs. But ask for the same benefits for a local diner, a community establishment, a home away from home, and you get squat.

  Way over in the opposite crook of the valley, Hayworth Diner suffered crumbling sidewalks and old roads. The walkways had shifted in big plates, as if something giant were moving below them, but slowly, year after year. Weeds clung to the faults.

  The parade had started down on that end of the valley. The data center was the beginning. O’Donald’s was the end. And the parade was just now catching up.

  Steve could hear the music and the cheers as spectators held up their Tethers to get a better shot.

  The marching band sounded like a phone: dial tone, ringtone, busy tone, all sorts of default chimes. The drums sounded like a vibration motor, lots of snare with deeper rumblings from the bass. Even the feet, the pounding feet, contributed to the effect. Steve felt a phantom ring in his leg where he usually kept his phone.

  Someone was calling.

  The parade.

  The parade was the mouthpiece.

  Over the top of the crowd, Steve spotted the beginning.

  The marching band paraded by, with the PCo guy, Graham, as the bandleader. He was decked out in uniform and a giant, fluffy hat, conducting the band with a baton.

  Behind them, giant head and headdress flopping, the mascot for Burnt Valley High ran from a foaming pack of Doberman pinschers.

  The dogs caught up to the Indian, and, snarling, growling, they snapped at his ankles. They snatched mouthfuls of his leather pants and dragged him to the pavement.

  Then the dogs scattered at the feet of equally rabid men dressed like dirty miners and rugged pioneers. One of the men looked like Graham. Steve didn’t understand. He’d just seen Graham leading the band, yet here the PCo rep was, dressed now as a soldier with a bayonet on his gun.

  The settlers fell upon the Indian, their fists, boots, and shovels thwacking against the padded costume; their pitchforks prodding. The man cried out in pain from inside the giant foam head.

  “Stop it!” Steve said, pushing even harder through the spectators. “Leave him alone!”

  The crowd laughed as Graham poked the Indian in the butt with his bayonet and got him running again, limping now, bleeding from his ankles where the dogs had ravaged his skin to loose deli meat.

  Tesla, Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell drove by on a float, talking on various types of old phones, all wood cases, weird wires, and exposed bells. Edison, a younger version of Edison, seemed to be portrayed by Graham himself, as if he could be in three places at once.

  Thick black cables spooled from the men, from under their suit jackets. Workers ran in the street behind them, wearing PCo uniforms and PCo hardhats, and Graham was in that group as well, threading the telephone lines up the street parallel with the median stripe, so that they stretched for miles, stretched all the way back to the data center probably. The oncoming floats drove over them.

  Steve reached the front of the crowd. The townspeople stood so tightly packed shoulder-to-shoulder, were violating each other’s private space so intimately, Steve had to shrug to fit in.

  He could smell them. Their cologne, their perfume, their deodorant; the alcohol, cigarettes, and weed. And something worse, like they hadn’t bathed or wiped. The pungent smell of urine, the thicker stench of shit.

  Steve started to feel sick and looked down the long procession of floats for Sarah.

  A bunch of HMS students marched by, holding a banner.

  THAT DAY

  Cute kid drawings decorated the canvas. Yellow suns, happy stick figure families.

  Behind the banner, a bunch of students scurried and screamed while one of their classmates, a boy with an alien head on his T-shirt, soaked them with a squirt gun filled with red fluid.

  “JJ?” Steve screamed.

  It was his son.

  His son was the shooter.

  Steve stepped into the street, but the bloody kids ran over and started pushing him, pushing Steve back into the crowd, which held him, a dozen hands gripping Steve’s jacket, belt loops, arms, and hair. The kids left red handprints on Steve’s chest and belly, and from the coppery smell, from the look, he was positive the liquid was blood.

  JJ waved to his dad, then sprayed the crowd, getting it in people’s eyes and mouths before marching on, laughing while the crowd laughed, too.

  “Let me go!” Steve cried, trying to pull away from the people, wincing as his hair pulled tight, so tight he couldn’t move at all from all the gripping hands.

  A beefy arm constricted around Steve’s throat, pinching his voice. “Quiet,” the strangler whispered, breathing hot against Steve’s ear. “Enjoy.” The voice sounded just like Graham.

  Tethers pushed between the bodies all around him, aimed at the parade. Some of the phones turned like heads to look at Steve, too, and some part of him worried that everyone online would see him crying, partly from pain, partly from fear, reduced to some horrible meme like Huan Kong.

  A few semis, pulling long flatbeds of junk, honked at the kids. One of the truck drivers yelled out his window, veering left, then right, trying to cut around.

  “Look,” someone said, “the plane!” and all the Tethers focused on the flatbeds. The semis were pulling the twisted, scorched remains of the regional airliner that had crashed into HMS.

  As the truck driver tried to cut around the kids again, a charred log tumbled out of the wreckage and flopped onto the road, shedding bits of char. It took Steve a second to realize what it was.

  Part of the leg still had skin on it, a nugget of burnt fat, plus a burnt shoe with a melted sole.

  Kelli Anderson and a few men ran out, racing each other, grabbing at each other, trying to reach the limb first.

  Kelli pulled ahead, but the men tried to yank her back by the dress. The shoulder straps snapped and she was kicking free of it, fully nude.

  She snatched the leg off the road and held it up, exposed to the cheer of the crowd. She scuttled back to the sidewalk with her prize and disappeared as Bill drove by, guiding the moving van as if it were part of the parade. He was drinking, swigging from his binocular flask, his glasses blinking.

  “Bill!” Steve cried, but Bill didn’t seem to hear him.

  Steve shook his head despite the pinpoints of pain as all
the hands uprooted his hair. He didn’t want to see this, didn’t believe he was seeing this, couldn’t believe everyone in town—everyone—was celebrating and cheering at the floats, recording, laughing, prying open Steve’s eyes so that he was forced to watch, forced to cry from the stinging air.

  He screamed at them to stop, but they wouldn’t stop. He cursed at them, called them names, and all they did was turn their Tethers toward him for a second to capture his outrage.

  A hand wrapped around his face and muffled his mouth. Steve continued to scream into the stinking, salty palm. He tried to blink, tried to clear his vision, but the many fingertips held his lids in place.

  Like a mirage on a hot day, a red convertible wavered into existence. The car was a block down, driving over the cables in the road, but Steve saw enough that his gut clenched up, and chills, followed by hot flashes, shook through him.

  Graham was driving.

  He had two passengers.

  “No,” Steve said, staring at the woman, at the queen sitting with Gary Pervier on the back of the car, their throne. “Please, God, no.”

  Janice in her wedding dress, sans the veil. Janice in the familiar Marilyn Monroe wig she’d worn all through her treatments. Janice, who’d died, and then . . . Steve didn’t want to think of what had happened directly after she passed; the sound, the smell, as foul as these people—as if the sickness hadn’t degraded Janice enough. No death was ever dignified.

  Many times Steve had wished he didn’t have all these terrible memories mixed in with the good, as if two completely different sets of photographs had been dumped into the same box. Their wedding day, Steve running icing through Janice’s hair; Steve, years later, pulling that same hair slick and gummy from the drain.

  Janice smiled and waved like a queen, regal, reserved, falsely happy, and Steve realized it wasn’t Janice at all.

  “Sarah!” he screamed, still muffled by the hand. He pleaded with her. He sobbed. Sarah smiled and waved while “Frère Jacques” boomed from the car stereo.

  The float passed, and Steve couldn’t even turn to watch his daughter recede. The crowd held him rapt, so all he could see was the oncoming parade.

  Silence washed over the people as the last float approached, so that the only sound was Steve screaming his daughter’s name.

  “Shhh,” his strangler said, as quiet and sweet as a lover. The smooth, hairless, totally tattooed biceps and forearm squeezed Steve’s throat shut.

  Way, way off in the distance, farther away than any train, yet ten times more intimate; from somewhere off around the bend beyond the trees, maybe beyond space itself, there came a sound. Familiar, insistent.

 

  Steve waited and watched the bend, where the cables wriggled briefly in the street. A thousand collective breaths were drawn all around, all down the sidewalk. Steve could feel the whole crowd swell against him as it inhaled.

  Around the bend, white fluffy shapes came prancing and dancing and bounding along, playful as lambs.

  “Ba-a-a-h!”

  Men, women, even little kids; the elementary children, kindergarteners, too: they all came frolicking down the road over the cables, dressed in sheep suits and throwing handfuls of something to the crowd.

  “Ba-a-ah, baaaah!”

  Some of the sheeple wore twisted horns and black goatees or waxed-up mustaches, and their wool looked matted, dark, and unclean. When they got closer, Steve saw what they were throwing from their bags. Handfuls upon handfuls of nicotine patches, little bottles of alcohol, and various colored pills, unknown pharmaceuticals. Adults, and even kids, ran out into the street to scoop them up.

  “Blaaah,” one of them said, blowing his liquor-soaked smoke in Steve’s face, burning Steve’s pried open eyes. The man’s lips were cracked with a giant open sore. “Blaah ah-ha-ha-hah!”

  Then the sheeple herded past, except for a little five-year-old lamb, moving forward in little hops and saying “ribbit” like a frog.

  Silence fell over the crowd one last time.

  Please, Steve thought, please, God, let this be it.

  Trying desperately to blink and wash the sting out of his eyes, trying desperately to wet them, Steve saw something in the distance. A man, a tall man, standing there at the bend. A man in a long black suit and hat.

  The tall man lifted something to his ear, something black, and Steve felt it again, felt the buzzing in his leg; the phantom ring, the phantom caller. The crowd took another breath, and Steve nearly screamed when the cables in the street breathed too, rasping against the pavement before jumping up from the ground.

  The cables vibrated midair like a dog’s chain pulled taut. Steve’s eyes reacted so violently to the surprise, his eyelids slipped out from under all the fingers and he squeezed them shut, crying from the burn.

  This time when he opened them, he opened them of his own accord, afraid to see what was coming but too afraid not to watch. Steve needed to see everything that was coming at him.

  The cables, still taut, tight enough that a high-wire act could walk along them, began to move forward, began to slide forward through the air as something reeled them in. Steve’s eyes momentarily tracked scratches, dents, and bits of gravel in the cables as they coursed by.

  The sound grew louder—

 

  —and as it moved around the bend with the cables, words materialized, still far enough away that Steve only heard snippets, scraps. They were all different voices, carrying on different conversations.

  < . . . and Mrs. Hayworth was telling me she’s spoken to her husband and he says . . .>

  < . . . cheating on me, I can’t believe you, Clive!>

  < . . . and then I’ll go down on you and . . .>

  Steve recognized the voices. These weren’t just conversations, these were recordings. Private phone calls, aired for all the world to hear.

  The words became clearer as the ends of the cables revealed themselves from around the bend in the road. The things tethered to the ends of the cables looked like people, about a dozen in all, except Steve was certain they were walking backwards toward him, being inexorably drawn by the cables plugged into the backs of their skulls.

  A new voice boomed.

 

  The tethered people had giant tin-can heads, pointing away from Steve, facing back the way the parade had come so that each tin can was shouting at the crowd behind them, and, oh Jesus, God, one of them, one of the men was Graham; he was staring sideways at Steve as the tin-can men walked backwards by.

  “Hey!” Gary Pervier shouted up the street. “Hey, move your piece of shit!” A horn blared.

  The crowd turned, and their Tethers turned too, to look and record. The cables, stretching as far forward as the Nikola Tesla float, parted around the various vehicles in the parade, strapping snug against the fenders, doors, and sides.

  Bill sat in the moving van, blocking the road, pushing the cables apart and mashing one beneath his front tire. He had pulled sideways right in front of the convertible, and Pervier was leaning over Graham’s shoulder to lay into the horn.

  Steve could see Bill through the driver’s-side window, through the crisscross of cables, and Bill was sitting there, not looking at anyone, just staring out his windshield or maybe into his glasses, his lips moving.

  Something outside caught Bill’s attention.

  One of the dogs, a sleek, snarling Doberman pinscher, ran into the street, dodging between legs, ducking under one sagging cable. The Doberman jumped onto the hood of the convertible, scrabbled up the windshield, and launched itself at Gary Pervier, who screamed, “Holy fu—!” before being cut off by the savage teeth sinking into hi
s throat.

  * * *

  Sarah watched Gary fall into the backseat, losing his crown. The dog landed on his chest, its snout buried in Gary’s neck.

  Seconds before, Sarah had been screwing around on NV Me. The app had told her that if she wanted to get rid of Anastasia as a rival, Sarah should lie to her, tell her to kill herself because suicide would make Anastasia more popular. So Sarah had forwarded the suggestion. That’s when the Doberman had come running at the car.

  The dog bit down and shook its head, and Gary gurgled and wheezed, hammering at the dog’s shoulders and spine.

  Sarah screamed so loud she felt something break inside her skull, some membrane. Cold and hot tendrils trickled into her brain, attaching here and there, soaking in, using the network already in place, branching and branching again as it infiltrated everything.

  She was still screaming, even after the headache receded to a dull fire, even after her terror had burned away to nothing. The screaming was just something her body was doing now, based on some old reflex. She found she was posing for the cameras that were snapping shots all around her—

 

 

  —stealing her soul, capturing the blood as it arced between the dog’s mouth and Gary’s neck. It was almost beautiful.

  The dog looked up, ears perking, snout completely red, and Sarah fell down onto Gary, trying to hold his neck, trying to hold the blood in his body, because his eyes were already glazed and his lungs were wheezing, venting wet and labored breaths through the hole in his throat. And as Queen, Sarah had to be the most beautiful thing of all as the blood pumped up into her face, stinging her lip.

  Bill! she thought as he came running. The dog wagged its tail, panting, scrabbling over the door toward Bill.