For the fever.
Back in the bathroom, Steve found half a bottle, along with some acetaminophen. He took them both. He looked for a thermometer, but couldn’t find one.
“Sarah, sit up.” Steve propped up her head and worked his way underneath her onto the couch. Her head now lay in his lap. He’d set two pills and a glass of water on the coffee table. “Sarah.”
She trembled and moaned and tried to turn away. She wasn’t waking up enough.
“Sarah, just . . . don’t fight me.” He stuck the pills in her mouth, and she bit at him. Out of a dead sleep, she snapped. He barely got his fingers out.
She moaned and fell back asleep.
Steve could see the pills still in her mouth. When he thought it was safe, he poured in a little water. Sarah swallowed, coughed, and slumped back on his lap.
He didn’t know what else to do.
Sit here, wait out the freaking monsoon.
Then what?
Guns, Steve thought.
Whatever else he decided, he’d need guns.
He went downstairs to the basement, which Bill had converted to a den. A bedroom and a bathroom sat on each side. Bill had done a lot of work on his house, improving it a little each year till he was sitting on half a million, in the right market. Steve had done a bit of the work himself.
He found the gun safe in Bill’s room. Bill’s key ring didn’t seem to have the emergency override key on it, so Steve tried a few different codes, like Bill’s birthday. Nothing cracked the safe.
Janice’s, he thought and punched it in.
Didn’t work.
Steve searched Bill’s room for the key or anything else. He checked the sock drawer, rummaged through the closet, ran a hand along the top shelf. He found an old Polaroid camera up there, a backpack, and a few boxes. He pulled down each box.
Nothing useful. Mementos, mostly. A gold belt buckle depicting a golden duck, which Bill’s grandfather had won shooting skeet. A box of stuff Steve didn’t want to know about, complete with a pair of fuzzy handcuffs. And a shoebox full of old Polaroids.
One of the pictures caught Steve’s eye.
Pain, he thought, gritting his teeth, but no matter how much pain he willed upon himself, he couldn’t stop from focusing on the photograph of Sarah floating naked in the deep blue quarry. She didn’t even know she was being photographed, the creep. He had taken it from above, on one of the steep cliffs and . . .
Wait, Steve thought. He flipped the photo and checked the caption on the back.
This wasn’t Sarah. This was actually the day Rat had stolen Janice’s clothes. Steve remembered that. He didn’t remember Bill taking a picture, though. God, she and Sarah really did look alike.
There were more old photos. Bill and Steve climbing trees. Janice with a snapdragon in her hair, standing on the deck of this very house, the old deck, the one that used to be here back when Bill’s folks owned the place. Pictures of their old friends like Mick, who later died fighting fires.
Steve also found a letter. Handwritten. Folded, as if hand-delivered as well. Steve recognized the penmanship. It was younger, but it was the same. An elegant print with just a wisp of cursive.
He dropped the letter, unfolded, into the box.
This wasn’t right.
Going through Bill’s things.
He went through mine, Steve thought, thinking of Dragnet, thinking of Sarah. Bill had violated more than Steve’s privacy. He’d violated Steve’s trust.
Screw him, he thought and opened the note. Janice must have sent it to him back in high school.
Dear Bill,
Thank you for the letter. Remember those old days where we used to do that?! Write each other letters?! We were such goofy kids.
No, Steve thought, letting the major fold of the note flap closed. He blinked at the ceiling, conjuring the pain through the numbing barrier of painkillers.
Bill hadn’t hurt Steve at all. He kept forgetting that. It was PCo that had turned Steve’s loved ones into masks. This letter, though, in response to whatever Bill had written to Janice—this predated The Phone Company. Steve’s memory of Bill was already screwed up enough.
Lovingly, he folded the note and put everything back into the box on the closet shelf. Looking for survival gear was one thing. He rifled quickly through Bill’s nightstands, stared at the gun safe one last time, then left.
Then came right back.
Steve grabbed the backpack and fuzzy handcuffs, but that was it. Whatever Janice had said in that letter, Steve already knew. She’d chosen him.
On the couch, Sarah had stopped moaning. Steve touched her forehead and thought her temperature had gone down. She looked fast asleep. Good, he thought. He had one more thing to do.
The fuzzy handcuffs came with a key. Steve pulled Sarah’s arm down to the foot of the couch, but hesitated with the cuffs, staring at the pink fuzz, imagining all the ways Bill could have used these, and on whom.
Steve ripped the pink fuzz off the bracelets. He popped open the footrest on the couch and cuffed his daughter to the mechanism beneath.
Just in case.
A laundry room led to a door into the attached garage. Steve opened it and took the first step down, flipping on the light. He stopped on the steps when he saw.
Bags.
Hundreds upon hundreds of bags, cartons, and cups from O’Donald’s littering the entire garage. Mixed in, he saw stale french fries and bits of unfinished burgers. The whole place reeked of old grease, fetid meat, and motor oil. It was as if this past month all Bill had eaten was fast food.
Parked in the middle of it all was, not Bill’s jeep, but the USCONN moving van.
Steve fished the key ring out of his pocket. Bill, bleeding to death on the driveway, had told him something. Steve couldn’t remember what, he’d been so terrified, so wretched, so deafened by the storm.
It’s in my garage, Bill had said.
Steve singled out the key with the letters stamped into the grip: US.
He waded out through the pool of O’Donald’s trash and unlocked the back of the van. He took a deep breath and rolled up the door.
One summer when Steve was young, his mother’s outdoor freezer had gotten unplugged and no one had noticed until it started to stink. Steve had been the one who’d opened it. A cloud of mold spores and stink had belched in his face, so foul he’d puked. Opening the USCONN van was a lot like opening that freezer. He retched and looked in again.
If not for the tie-dyed shirt and remaining Birkenstock, he might not have recognized Marvin Jones. Bloated, liquefying, leaking a green liquid.
Steve retched up bile this time.
Marvin lay tucked between five fifty-gallon drums. Steve spotted the bundle of dynamite, wired to an old cell phone sort of like his, maybe a bit newer. Disposable. Probably pay-as-you-go. A burner, Steve thought.
So this was what Bill was talking about. This bomb. Marvin had built it. PCo had confiscated it. Why?
Steve couldn’t look at this anymore, couldn’t stomach the sight of Marvin. He shut the back and locked it, then opened the cab of the van.
On the passenger part of the bench seat, he found a notebook filled with scribbled notes on how to operate the fertilizer bomb. Steve recognized Marv’s handwriting, with Bill’s own notes scribbled in the margins.
“Chuck says relay the vibrating motor to the blasting cap,” Marvin wrote. Steve frowned at that.
Hadn’t Bill said something about this? About how Marvin believed his dead son could talk to him? Apparently, Chuck could relay instructions from The Anarchist Cookbook as well.
“WARNING: Chuck says unplug relay before powering on. Phone vibrates on boot-up. Could go badly.”
Next to that, Bill had doodled an explosion, captioned, “Chuck says KABLOOM!”
On the front of the notebook, Bill had scrawled the phone number for the detonator.
No indication of what Marv had been targeting, though. No clue about what he’d been planning to b
low up. All Steve knew was that The Phone Company would come looking for this.
Bill had said they had Marvin killed because he was planning something. This bomb, for whatever target it was intended, scared The Phone Company. And if PCo was scared, that meant they had a weakness.
Curious, Steve checked the van’s glove compartment. Inside, he found a flashlight and two pairs of binoculars; one was the novelty flask he’d given Bill. They’d gotten drunk more than a few times out of that thing. They’d looked pretty conspicuous at more than one funeral.
“Oh, man,” Steve said, taking the flask. Suddenly the physical pain wasn’t enough.
* * *
Wiping at his eyes, Steve came back through the laundry room and checked on Sarah.
“Oh my God, are you all right?” he said, hurrying to her side. She had fallen to the hardwood floor and was jerking at the handcuff manacling her to the footrest of the couch.
Shaking, sweating, wincing from cramps, Sarah glared at him. “I hate you. Hate.”
Steve nodded, sniffed, tried to keep a neutral face. He nodded again, this time more firmly. “We can’t stay here,” he said, putting the medical supplies and pills into the backpack.
“Why?” Sarah said. “Can’t stand the fact you murdered your best friend? And Mom! And now you’re stealing from him?”
Steve stopped and stared at her. Knives, he thought, going for the kitchen.
“As soon as the storm stops,” Steve began.
And then it did.
CHAPTER 46
At a conference one time, over chicken pilaf, a science instructor from Burnt County Community College had told Steve the tale of the haunted soap dispensers.
In Tasha’s labs after hours, someone would sneak in and trigger the soap hung next to the sinks. They’d pump out so much, the soap would foam, run, and drip onto the floor.
“Totally ruined the cabinets,” Tasha said. “Wood? Overnight? Exposed to that much soap? They warped.”
“I bet.”
“I complained to Dave. You know what he told me? To get off my soapbox.”
Steve nearly spit up beer. “Hah!” Dave was Tasha’s department head, and they’d always had differences. “He really told you that?” Steve asked. “Heh. That’s almost glib.”
“It’s totally glib!
“Dave’s not usually glib.”
“No! Not at all! He said if I’d wanted new cabinets, I could’ve just done like his wife and ask!”
Steve laughed. Everyone at dinner was carrying on, having a good time at their own table, using up the tickets for free drinks. Even the loud ones glanced at Steve.
“Then one night when I was all alone,” Tasha said, “in that big old building all by myself, I heard the soap dispensers. You know, ZZT ZZT!”
“What? Oh my God.”
“Yeah.”
Up on the third floor of the education center where Tasha worked, it could be a spooky place at night. The freeway bridge ran parallel to it, at the same height as her office and lab. Every time a truck went by, the upper floors thrummed and filled with lights. “You know how trucks make that lonely sound,” Tasha had said.
Well, there she was, grading lab results late at night when—“Zzt! Zzt!” The buzz of the four soap dispensers going off all at once.
“Ghosts is what I thought,” Tasha said.
“Never believed in ’em.” Steve sipped his porter and took another bite. Mmm. Good pilaf. Good beer.
“But my next thought was, who the hell’s in this building with me? Who else would be there that late at night? But there it was again.”
And the lonely sound of trucks.
Steve felt a chill.
“You know what it was?”
Psycho killer? All a dream? Steve had no clue.
“Those things aren’t really motion sensors,” Tasha said.
“Wha . . .?”
“Yeah, they’re more like shadow detectors. Put your hand up there, it throws a shadow. Pull it away, and let there be light.”
“Wow,” Steve said. “So it was the semis?”
“Yeah. All through the night. Driving by, ruining our cabinets, making everyone feel lonely. And you want to know what?”
“What.”
“They’re probably some the same trucks that delivered our new cabinets!”
“Hah!” Steve said. “Along with bar soap.”
Tasha laughed this time, and, touching his arm, finished her third glass of wine.
* * *
Bill’s Sun Dial filled with dawn. Steve had said they were going to leave as soon as the storm stopped, and just like that, the clouds parted and the sun came up. Even though it was supposed to be no later than midnight on All Hallows’ Eve.
Steve checked the clock on his cell. It always used to sync with the network; it kept good time, usually.
Today the digital numerals on the phone formed symbols he didn’t recognize: a little box that looked like half an eight or the bottom half of a six; a straight line; a dash; a zero without a bottom. In a blink, the numerals switched back to normal.
“They’ll come for me,” Sarah said, smiling out at the new Burnt Valley of huge sinkholes, lakes, and mudslides.
The trees closest to Bill’s place had all uprooted. The smaller ones had been carried off downhill.
“They’ll come for their virgin queen.”
Steve crept over to Bill’s huge vaulted window and stared at the valley.
He almost didn’t recognize it. His hometown, the place he’d lived his entire life—where he’d fallen in love and had lost his love and had raised their kids alone—the whole town had been replaced overnight with an alien landscape. Everything glistened with the membranes and snot of the storm. Huge, ropy strands of green stuff, like kelp, had been threaded through the valley.
The houses visible from this distance looked torn apart, timbers exposed, roofs torn off. Some of them had washed down the hill, or had fallen into the cracks—like a rolling, fissured expanse of serpentine rock, the valley was riven with cracks.
Steve thought that maybe he and Sarah should stay. Maybe there wasn’t anywhere else to go and Bill’s was the safest. It certainly didn’t look safe out there beyond the window. Who knew in what condition he’d find the roads? Washed out? Trees lying across them? Maybe even ships blocking the way?
Sarah laughed and moaned and curled up, shivering. “They’ll come,” she said. She tried to say it again, but shuddered.
Steve’s phone beeped. Low battery. His charge usually lasted a long time. After the first warning, he typically had an hour or two left. He shut the phone off to conserve power.
He couldn’t stay. If The Phone Company knew as much as he suspected, if they had as much power as he feared. . . . He at least had to hide the bomb. But he couldn’t parade the thing down Main Street, couldn’t just . . .
His eyes snapped to the mountain, to a dirt line running along its flank. Steve traced the logging road down to the old ruined ramparts of HMS, which the storm had made visible. The citadel, like most citadels, sat on a hill. Steve couldn’t be absolutely sure, but it looked as if the storm had mostly rushed around it.
He traced the logging road again, mentally mapping it. All along the mountain and down into the valley, a system of BLM roads coursed, and Bill’s property connected into the grid. He used logging roads to maintain his back acreage, pulling out trees, burning brush, shooting the shit with the boys.
Steve, Bill, and the gang had messed around on those roads their entire lives. Hiking. Driving 4x4s. Shooting shotguns into trees, banks, and whole pyramids of cans. Nearly every piece of property in Cracked Rock had an old road running behind it, if only to service the telephone lines.
And they were all connected.
“I’ll be back,” Steve said. With the backpack, he went out and climbed into the USCONN van. Bill had clipped his garage door opener to the visor. Steve punched the button and started to back out.
> Easier this way, he thought. Sarah was closer to the carport than she was to the garage. Steve would pull around like some chauffeur and escort her out to the . . .
“Holy shit!”
The van went skidding for a second in blood and entrails as Steve slammed on his brakes.
In the mirror, he could see the burst midsection of a killer whale lying in Bill’s driveway. The orca’s belly had popped on impact, and now the driveway was awash in chum. At least it hadn’t blocked the driveway.
Driving over a few big chunks, Steve pulled into the carport and propped open the passenger door.
“Get your hands off me!” Sarah said as he uncuffed her and scooped her off Bill’s couch. “Killer. Thief! Blasphemer.”
He had expected her to fight him, but despite her protests, Sarah had no strength to resist. Her claws came up to rake out his eyes, only for her arms to fall away like old shoelaces. Even her objections were breathless.
Grimacing at the pains in his arms and back, Steve carried his daughter out of the house. All the way to the van, she spat nasty things in his face.
* * *
“I’ll bite your fffffingers off iffff you don’t stop,” Sarah said, trembling. Looking at her, one would think the van was icy cold, but it was actually hot. Cold as hell outside, cold as space, but the sun poured right through the windshield.
Sarah’s hands hung cuffed from the oh-shit handle above the window. She barely had enough energy to hold herself up.
As much as he wanted to avoid his daughter biting off all his fingers, Steve kept tuning the radio, searching for a signal but finding only static and dead air.
Every now and again in the static, he heard a voice and tried to hone in. Sometimes he’d hear a whole gathering of voices, whispering amongst themselves, conspiring, sometimes shouting. Sometimes he thought he heard them talking about JJ or Graham. But each time Steve tuned in, the voices quieted down and became static. He’d lose reception.
The Phone Company Page 44