The Phone Company

by David Jacob Knight

  The gunshot shook Sarah.

  For the first time in days, she felt normal. She felt like herself. She realized there had been voices in her head, hundreds of thousands of voices, maybe more, all talking at once, but now they were silent and all she could hear was the whistling and gurgling of Gary’s throat and the dog slumping over as smoke poured out of Bill’s revolver.

  Sarah tried to get away, tried to escape. She fell over the door, fainting, but Graham was suddenly there and catching her, holding her, shushing her while the convertible seemed to spin donuts beneath her. Sarah felt something sliding off her head and reached up, felt the crown, felt a wig and didn’t remember why, until she did.

  She’d shaved her head.

  When had she shaved it?

  Why?

  Somewhere far away, her dad was screaming her name, even as Sarah was forgetting it again.

  CHAPTER 39

  “She had a hard time,” Doctor Medley said. “With the baby.”

  Steve sank back in the waiting room chair. “Jeremiah.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s his name. Jeremiah Johnson.”

  Dr. Medley nodded.

  “After an old friend,” Steve said.

  “It’s nice.”

  Dr. Medley stood as if she were holding a clipboard, except she wasn’t. She went on to tell Steve how there had been some tearing, some bleeding, and Janice was having issues after the anesthetic. The baby wasn’t breathing well, either. Preemie.

  No, Steve reminded himself, he has a name.

  They let Steve in to see Jeremiah, but not his wife, not yet. Steve was glad Sarah had spent the night with her grandparents. His daughter was only four; she wouldn’t understand.

  A nurse led Steve down to the NICU, where little JJ looked like a shriveled-up lung in a bubble. Steve was so sleep-deprived he hadn’t wept, looking in, watching the little chest get pumped.

  Afterward, after seeing his baby, his first and only son, Steve went outside and looked up at the stars. He lit a cigarette and made a promise. He didn’t know to what. The stars, maybe. Janice’s god. This would be his last cigarette.

  “Please,” Steve said, finally crying.

  In the stars above, all he saw was a satellite.

  * * *

  Steve noticed the state trooper a few cars back. The cruiser had been buzzing in and out of traffic like some black wasp, but now it had disappeared behind a truck.

  Making a nest back there, Steve thought and focused on the highway. The cars moved as if they communicated with each other to avoid accidents, as if they drove themselves.

  Watching them, Steve mulled things over. Was that a good way to explain it? Whatever was happening in Cracked Rock? A hive mind? Except the hive had gone insane?

  The highway to Helena, US-12 E, ran parallel with the railroad, rolling past forests and farms and mountains for miles. Usually Steve enjoyed the drive, but now the entire world terrified him.

  Montana was called “Big Sky Country” for a reason. When he was a kid, Steve had learned the Ebumnanyth name for sky—the Giant Empty. So now he knew how else Montana could be described.

  It certainly was beautiful country. The clouds today had cracked opened, and Steve found himself getting hot from the yolk of sun spilling into his lap.

 

  His hand went to his thigh, but no one was calling. It was just that weird spasm.

  Steve had felt it first at the parade, and he’d worried. Have I started to change? Had even his ancient phone started to alter him? His clamshell.

  Or was it opening him up to his true nature? Was he like them now? Subject to some queen? Some fat wasp building her nest in the crevices of Cracked Rock?

  Steve felt another buzz, his actual phone this time. “Hey, Bill, I’m driving. What’s up?”

  “Oh yeah? Where you headed, buddy?”

  “Uh.”

  Steve had debated taking the call. For one, he didn’t have an earwig and there was a cop behind him. And two, the real reason, Bill had killed that dog. Bill loved dogs. Barksdale was his best friend.

  But in the week since Homecoming, no one in Cracked Rock seemed to care about what had happened at the parade. No one except Steve. In fact, they had posted funny videos of Gary Pervier’s death online.

  One clip documented Bill executing the Doberman pinscher, except Bill’s voice had been dubbed in, like Dirty Harry but gruffer: “Beg . . . for your life.” Then Sarah was screaming and covered in dog brains, and Bill was saying, “Atta boy,” as he patted the dog’s ruined head.

  Steve didn’t remember that part; the patting. Had that really happened? The footage looked entirely real.

  Destroying an animal like that, in front of children, in front of everyone, in front of cameras, too—Steve had known Bill for half his life, and right now he didn’t know who he was talking to.

  “You going to the union?” Bill asked.

  Steve actually flinched.

  How the hell . . .?

  His eyes flicked to the rearview, searching for the trooper. He saw other drivers instead, completely absorbed in their Tethers. Was someone spying on him? The trooper, the fat guy in the hybrid: was that how Bill had known where Steve was headed?

  He searched for the USCONN van but didn’t see it.

  Just the thought of the old van reminded him of something Marv had said. Something about telemetry in newer vehicles. Something about scanners posted on roadsides to collect data from cars. He remembered JJ’s app, too, the one that allowed him to generate an entire diagnostics report just by scanning Bill’s cruiser with his phone.

  “Uh, yeah,” Steve said. “Headed out to Helena. I have an appointment with the state exec.”

  “Oh, yeah? How is Casey?”

  “You know Araho?” Steve said.

  “You’ve talked about him. Couple times.”

  “Oh,” Steve said, wondering if he had. He and Bill both worked union positions, so they talked shop quite a bit. It was more than possible.

  “Why couldn’t you just call him?” Bill said. “Why drive all the way to the capital just for a chat?”

  “He insisted.”

  “Huh. Some kind of emergency then? You guys striking?”

  Steve thought he could hear a deeper question: Are you going to be trouble, Steve?

  “No,” he said, checking his mirrors, constantly looking over his shoulders. All he could see around him were bees. Every car, angrily buzzing.

  He hated that he couldn’t share everything with his friend, his best friend, his only friend, really, aside from the people he got along with at work. Steve and Bill had always been confidants. But after Homecoming, Steve couldn’t pretend. “Just union stuff,” he said.

  “How are the kids holding out?”

  “Fine, they’re fine.” It certainly seemed to be true. Both kids were acting as if they couldn’t be happier. The plane crash, the parade—everything they feared in the big bad world, and the kids were singing, “Oh, what a wonderful day.”

  “You catch wind of who Sarah’s been seeing? This JJ character?”

  “No,” Steve said. “But at least I can rule out Pervier.”

  “Heh.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s funny,” Bill said.

  “Defense mech?”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing,” Steve said. He didn’t think it was funny at all. He didn’t even know where Gary had been buried. Had they planted him up there at Mountain View, out by Steve’s wife? Was Gary yet another monument to a brief existence? Or had they covered the boy’s remains in shit like they’d done at Harcum?

  To defile human remains. Steve wasn’t a total materialist; that had to be some kind of sick magic, smothering old bodies in excrement as part of a game, part of some larger move.

  It’s all connected.

  “JJ seems to be doing well,” Bill said. “He did a sermon at church. He really seems to be healing.”

  “Real
ly?” Steve said, unable to bite down the sarcasm; he might as well have bitten his own tongue, he had such an aversion to holding it. “I thought, up there in that head of his somewhere, JJ still had a bit of separation of church and state. But it looks like they got to him, too.”

  “Huh,” Bill said. “Well, you should’ve heard him, you would’ve been proud. Urging people to sink their teeth in the fruits of knowledge like that. To know good, to know evil. To know everything and everyone. Just like The Provider, he said. You should’ve heard him.”

  “Should’ve,” Steve said. He didn’t say it, but it hadn’t been that long ago Bill had been terrified of the invasive nature of those glasses he wore all the time now.

  At first Steve had wanted to believe he was being paranoid, that perhaps recent traumas had driven him temporarily insane, but, no—everyone else had gone insane around him. The Tether—The Phone Company—had brainwashed them. Indoctrinated them.

  Subliminal messages.

  School.

  Follow.

  Steve didn’t know how else to explain it.

  At the parade, the sheeple had thrown pharmaceuticals to the crowd. And on that day when JJ took Bill’s gun to school, he had been suffering from an overdose of antidepressants. At least that’s what JJ claimed. Steve had to wonder what kind of communion all these zealots were taking at church.

  They know, he thought.

  That was why Bill was mining for information.

  They know I’m trying to break the hive.

  An orange Humvee veered toward Steve from the oncoming lanes. The driver was gripping his Tether with both hands and cackling maniacally at his screen, laughing so hard his eyes bulged and his zany red bangs were blowing in the wind.

  “Whoa!” Steve said, swerving, barely missing the Humvee. “Watch the road, asshole!”

  He checked his rearview again, hoping the trooper would stop the Humvee. The black cruiser didn’t even slow down. The Hummer, still partly in the wrong lane, raced by.

  Steve wiped sweat out of his eyes. “Look, Bill, I have to go. Call me later?”

  “Sure, buddy. Sherry’s tonight? Speakeasy?”

  “Eh, I’ll call you.”

  “Okay. Meantime, I’ll keep on keeping tabs on your kids. Barks, too.”

  “No, they’re fine. But thanks, Bill. Thanks.”

  They hung up. Steve watched the other cars carefully, surprised at how many of them were driving outside the lines, completely oblivious, and yet they all seemed in sync. He had hoped the world outside Cracked Rock would be normal, but the madness had bled into everything.

  Billboards had gone up along the highway, promoting either PCo or Frederick Hill’s presidential campaign, whose slogan had become, “Over the divide we’ll all connect.”

  Pure insanity.

  Some boards sported huge QR codes, which made Steve wonder: Were drivers snapping pictures of the codes as they travelled by at highway speeds? And then what, were they behind the wheel, browsing websites?

  And what did the QR codes link to, exactly, once you scanned them into your phone? Steve’s clamshell could barely take pictures bigger than a stamp, so it wasn’t as if he could investigate. He had the same problem with his kids as he had with his enemy: no way of getting up to speed.

  I just hope Araho’s okay, he thought, passing a road sign. The teachers’ union was the biggest organization with political connections Steve was tied to. His hive. It was a start. Araho certainly had seemed concerned over the phone.

  US-12 took Steve straight into Helena, and the cruiser followed him.

  So this is Bill’s spy, Steve thought.

  Maybe.

  He made sure to follow the speed limit either way.

  The union’s state office lay just beyond the shadow of the capitol building, where Lady Liberty stood atop the copper-jacketed rotunda, holding her torch.

  Mr. Super Trooper followed Steve into the union lot. The guy eyeballed him from behind dark Dragnet glasses as Steve got out and walked to the double glass entrance.

  He didn’t like this.

  “Steve, hey!” Araho said, throwing on his blazer. Steve had run into Araho in the lobby. “Ready? Don’t want to miss our flight.”

  “Uh,” Steve said, pointing toward Araho’s office. “Aren’t we going to. . . . What flight?”

  Araho, a short, dark-haired man, gave Steve one of his patented looks, confused yet amused: a shake of the head, a furrowed brow, a cock-eyed smile. “Didn’t your son tell you?”

  “No. Why would he—”

  “Fred Hill’s giving a campaign speech. You and your son are going to meet the man who built your new school!”

  “What? No. I dropped JJ off at school this morning, he didn’t say a word—”

  Araho reached up and draped his arm around Steve, so that Steve could smell the sophisticated cologne Araho wore to mask that same sickly smell from the parade.

  “Hah! Kids! You love ’em as much as you’d like to kill ’em, am I right? Come on, we booked you a ticket. But I bet JJ didn’t tell you that either, did he?”

  “No, he did not,” Steve said. “Give me a second, all right?” He stepped off to one side and called JJ. His call went straight to voicemail.

  “He’s probably on airplane mode,” Araho said. “Come on.”

  “Just . . .” Steve held up a finger. Thumbing the directional pad on his phone, he scrolled down to the number for HMS. Ahead of him, the front door sucked in a breath. The cop stood there holding it open, staring through his dark Dragnet glasses at Steve.

  “Ah,” Araho said, “our ride.” Casey took Steve by the shoulder and tried to escort him toward the cop, who stared and stared and occasionally chewed his gum.

 

  “Goddamn it,” Steve said into his phone.

 

  Steve mashed the button.

 

  Steve almost entered the numbers himself, he was so conditioned. But then it sank in what the voice had said. The phone was entering the numbers by itself.

 

  A click.

  Then: the voice said.

  Steve sighed. “This says he’s at sc—”

 

  “Wait, what?”

  “Told you,” Araho said. “Kids.”

  The cop walked over, thumbs hooked in his belt, hand near his gun.

  Araho turned to him. “You got kids, Officer Murphy?”

  The trooper didn’t look at Casey, too fixated on Steve. “Mr. Gregory, I’m going to have to ask you to put your phone away and come with us.”

  “What is this?” Steve said, holding his phone to his shoulder while it went into his collarbone. He looked from Araho to the cop. “What’s going on here?”

  Officer Murphy chewed his gum. “Mr. Gregory, please. We would hate for you to miss your flight.”

  * * *

  Araho made Steve sit by the window. “I don’t like heights,” Casey said, but Steve wondered whether Araho had a different motive for boxing him in.

  When the flight attendants gave the safety demonstration, they didn’t even stand up front with the demo seatbelt and oxygen mask. Instead, they broadcasted a video to everyone’s phone.

  “At this time,” the flight attendant said over the loudspeaker, “we request that all Tethers and other electronic devices be powered on for the full duration of the flight.”

  “Excuse me,” Steve said, raising his hand.

  Everyone turned to look at him. He blushed. When he flew, Steve hated causing problems of any kind, hated the way people regarded him with such naked suspicion. He hated it w
orse now, though, being recorded by more than half a dozen phones. These days people saw the entire world through their phones. Just hold them up and walk.

  “Don’t you mean power them down during takeoff?” Steve asked. Araho cleared his throat and shifted in the seat beside him. “Don’t they interfere with the navigational equipment or something?”

  The flight attendant blinked at him, giving him the same public smile that had been straining her face since he’d boarded. “Sir, if we couldn’t use our Tethers, how would the pilot fly the plane?”

  Araho chuckled, and Steve felt the world shrinking around him. The world shrunk, and yet at the same time it felt infinitely more vast, unknowable, and violent.

  Aaron was right.

  Bill was right.

  Someone with a Tether was behind the crash at HMS.

  The little prop plane jerked forward and started to taxi, and nearly every passenger lit up a cigarette. The plane turned onto the runway and paused for a minute before accelerating. As the thrum of the propellers grew, Steve could feel it build up in his chest, faster and faster, and he couldn’t breathe for all the smoke; he was gagging, trying to hold his breath, and then he nearly screamed when the plane lifted off the tarmac.

  “Relax,” Araho said, offering him a cigarette.

  Steve shook his head and made the mistake of looking out the window. The airport fell out from under him, and the patchwork of fields and suburbs expanded as they shrank. The Missouri River fattened into Canyon Ferry Lake behind the dam.

  After reaching a certain altitude, the plane leveled out and Steve’s grip on the armrests relaxed.

  As soon as the seatbelt light went off, he excused himself to the bathroom. Araho let him up and everyone stared at Steve as he made his way through clouds of smoke to the back of the plane.

  He stared at himself in the mirror, trying to calm down, trying to explain everything in his own head. Did he really believe this? Mass mind control. Phones piloting planes. With how sweaty he looked, and how bloodshot his eyes were, Steve felt as if he might be going a little bit Martian.

  After a while, someone knocked and Steve returned to his seat.