The Phone Company

by David Jacob Knight

  “You find something? You find . . .” Marvin stopped when he saw what Chuck had discovered. It wasn’t tracks, or space currency, or some technologically advanced monolith.

  This space alien from last night had left a skinned cat tied spread-eagle on a tire rim.

  * * *

  BEWARE OF DOG

  NO TRESPASSING

  NO CELL PHONE ZONE

  NO PHOTOS

  NO SHIRT NO SHOES NO SERVICE

  Some of the signs posted all over the fence and trees delimiting the back of Marvin’s property weren’t even legitimate. They were just some scraps of wood he’d painted.

  Marv had also blocked the telephone access road onto his land with brambles of fencing and barbwire—and actual brambles. He had probably pruned the blackberries to grow that way, too.

  Farther down, the ruts of the access road forked. Left, the dirt road cut farther up the mountain, ending in a huge landslide mixed with giant rocks, painted white.

  The letters, Steve thought. His gaze slid farther uphill, where the mountain monogram had washed down, just one more landmark scraped clean from the face of Cracked Rock.

  The other dirt road, barely a set of ruts cutting through dense undergrowth, led down the mountainside. It terminated at the main road where the ditch was kind of washed out.

  Steve took to the road.

  A few minutes later, he parked in the gravel lot of Mars’ Greenhouse Gas Terraformer, Autowreckers, and Scrap Metal Yard (Or Anything Else You Don’t Want). He glanced at Sarah as they came to a stop.

  After HMS, she had screamed and thrashed and cried about how she never wanted to go back, and please don’t make her go to school that day—she was sick and her stomach hurt!—but now all the energy had bled from her, leaving a pale sheet of a girl, sweaty and sagging and breathing raggedly while she slept. The van reeked of the mess she’d made on the seat.

  Water, Steve thought.

  She’d need fluids soon, what with the way she was shedding them. They both would. Hopefully Marvin had an emergency cache somewhere in the junkyard.

  Aside from tropical fish scattered like confetti in the trash heaps, all reds, oranges, yellows, and blues, Marvin’s Terraformer looked relatively the same.

  The pathways seemed a little cleaner, the little bits of plastic, metal, and rubber swept away by the rain; otherwise, it was the only landscape in the valley Steve fully recognized. The rest of Burnt Valley had looked naked where it shouldn’t be, and full of cracks, cars piled deep enough you could see them from Bill’s.

  For a long time, Steve sat there watching the yard, staring down the various pathways between boxes of old light fixtures and sinks, down corridors formed by dumpsters brimming with poles, bicycle rims, and other random scraps. He watched Marvin’s complex of trailers. The doors, the curtains.

  Marv called the little housing complex Cydonia—Steve had forgotten that. A face from outer space.

  His eyes fixed on the entrance to the Dead Zone. A Faraday cage, Marv had called it. Lead, copper, and foothills of foil hats. Steve had ventured into the Dead Zone twice before, once while chasing Bill. It was like entering another dimension, one where all your calls got dropped.

  It was worth a shot.

  Steve stared at the tower for a moment, looming the way it did way up on the hill, like some skeletal pyramid made of smaller repeating triangles, still standing, still working, transmitting data even after the storm.

  He could hear it, even in the van. A low hum as its beacon flashed. That tower, the company behind it, had turned all of Cracked Rock into Mars. Steve just had to find a cave for the night that wasn’t already occupied.

  Yes, he decided, the Dead Zone was worth a shot.

  Putting his daughter on speakerphone, Steve left the van to patrol the junkyard, carrying a length of pipe. Marv’s trailers were all empty. In the back one, shattered dishes lay everywhere, empty food boxes tossed around. A plate, a cup, and a bowl sat on the table, with crumbs and little puddles of a finished meal.

  Steve had a weird feeling. He couldn’t quite describe it. Partly déjà vu from Rat’s trashed trailer, or the O’Donald’s trash flooding Bill’s garage—but it wasn’t a feeling of familiarity alone, it was a tingling along his spine.

  Outside, Steve ventured into the Dead Zone, and, sure enough, his connection with Sarah crackled and cut out.

  He glanced back at the van, the pale crescent of Sarah’s face behind the reflections. Safe, she was safe. That feeling, though, like cold feelers running along his back.

  His eyes flicked again to the tower. They’re the same thing, he thought, the feeling and the hum. But the deeper he went into the Dead Zone, the less he felt watched.

  Placebo? he thought.

  He didn’t really know. He just knew he couldn’t be off the grid long, not if it meant losing touch with Sarah. In and out, then, just long enough to check Marvin’s shed.

  With a deep breath, Steve hurried forward.

  He didn’t like the energy in here, didn’t like how it canceled everything out. The air was heavy with the smell of old metal, antique plumbing, and worn fishing tackle, and all that chipping lead paint. He didn’t like thinking about the layers and layers of lead dust, poisonous and heavy in the lungs.

  It reminded him of something else he didn’t want to think about, something JJ had told him atop George Washington’s head. How some of the workers had died, years later, of some kind of lung thing. Like asbestos workers, a worthy sacrifice.

  A slow, terrible death from exposure to hazardous dust was the least of Steve’s worries, though. He accepted the risk.

  Deeper in the maze, some of the pop cans of the Dead Zone had washed in through the door of Marvin’s Shack of Silence. They rattled as Steve kicked them aside.

  On the back wall of the shed, the conspiracy web hung more like a cobweb, the data center still poised at the center of it like some dried husk.

  Steve scoped out the shed’s interior.

  Yep, he thought, pulling on one of the supports to give it a little test. Composed of lead-acid batteries, held in place by metal grates, rebar, and wooden struts, the walls offered plenty of spots to cuff Sarah. Plenty of room for him to lie next to her, too. But, how to get her here, Steve thought.

  He wasn’t carrying her again, no way.

  He couldn’t.

  Over by the heaps of scrap wood, he found a platform cart, the kind used to transport lumber. Steve kicked the dead seahorse off the flatbed, then wheeled the cart over to the van. He paused for a minute, staring through the passenger window at his daughter.

  Just bunker down for the night, he thought. Rest. See her through this . . . whatever this is, and then figure things out.

  “Rest,” he repeated, but then it hit him, how heavy his daughter was, and how sore his entire body was too, and how far he was from true reprieve. His shoulders slouched under the anticipated weight of her.

  No matter how old your kids got, no matter how independent, you still ended up carrying them at some point, some kids more than others. You’d keep fooling yourself into believing maybe if they made better life choices, or maybe if they’d listen once in a while, maybe then they’d stop and think before doing something stupid. But they always did, didn’t they? Inevitably, they screwed up. Because they were kids, and kids were stupid.

  And then what? Steve thought. When a kid makes a mistake, whose job is it to fix it? And what if you don’t know how?

  Goddamn it, if she had just listened, Steve thought, but shook his head. He was angry, but not at her, not really. More at himself. Which was even more frustrating, because here he was, an adult, just as stupid as any kid.

  The pain, the pain, he thought, but even that no longer offered solace. The pain meds had seen to that. He was forced now to face the reality of it.

  Unfortunately, this problem wasn’t like bailing Sarah out of jail or supporting her through a teen pregnancy. It wasn’t anything solvable. Whatever was wrong with her, it was l
ike Janice all over again. A sickness with a mind of its own. Death, clipping his nails. And Steve could do nothing to stop him.

  So he had dealt with everything else first, thinking that if he couldn’t save his daughter’s soul, he could at least save her life. He’d focused on the mission at hand.

  Step 1: Get from Point A to Point B, preferably without driving all the way to Point E first, because routes C and D were both blocked or washed out.

  Step 2?

  Who the hell knows?

  Steve told himself he ignored Sarah’s problem because he couldn’t do anything about it. He’d learned that lesson with Janice. Sicknesses had to run their course. All you could do was make her comfortable.

  But then what was his excuse for ignoring what had happened with JJ? Steve had lost his own son to the enemy and he’d been purposefully avoiding the subject ever since.

  He’d been ignoring a lot of things. The time jump. The storm. Barksdale and Bill. Even Marv back there, hitching a ride on his own bomb. How was Steve supposed to deal with all that and Sarah’s problem too? If he couldn’t even let his wife go after five years?

  He peered again through the van window, through the reflections, like seeing his daughter’s face on the moon.

  Briefly, in a moment of laziness, of neglectfulness, of pure fatigue, Steve thought about saying forget it, just sleep in the van. It would afford them a quicker getaway if things went south. But in so many ways, the van wasn’t safe. And it stank. Which reminded him of too many things he couldn’t afford to dwell on right now, so . . .

  The Dead Zone it was.

  With an emptying sigh, Steve opened the passenger door and caught his daughter’s body when it tried to fall out, swinging low on the cuffs.

  “Ah, damn it,” he said, getting her piss all over him as he moved her to the cart.

  Oh, the things we do for our kids.

  * * *

  Sometimes Steve would wake alone in bed. He would reach for Janice’s freckled shoulder, or a tangle of hair, and he’d find empty space.

  In dreams, as in memory now, the present and past were the same thing, so even when Steve was with Janice, he missed her. She wasn’t even gone yet, and there was this terrible ache.

  Steve would often contemplate the rest of his life without her, and he’d think, after the kids are gone, what is there? More cold empty space? A house that echoes too much?

  Tonight, Janice’s side of the bed was empty. A seam of light glowed around the door into the master bathroom. He could hear her in there, miserable, sick, but trying her best not to disturb his sleep.

  And then Steve’s hand hit a bare leg, cold as the bed. Someone was in there with him.

  Yelping, recoiling, he heard someone else shrinking back, too, a raspy wooden sound like cloth constricting on plywood.

  “Hello?” the woman in bed next to him shrieked, and Steve realized where he was.

  Not in bed, but on Mars.

  “Hello?” Sarah said again.

  Steve sprang upright from Marvin’s covers, banging his knee against the door of the shed. He flicked on the flashlight, nearly blinding Sarah.

  She had kicked off her own covers, blankets Steve had stolen from Marvin’s “couch.” They kind of smelled like dog, but . . .

  “Who’s there?” Sarah said, cocking her ear and looking around.

  She had pulled herself into one corner, her bare legs drawn up to her chest, trembling, the gym clothes Steve had put on her soaked and reeking of sweat.

  Her hands remained cuffed around a support beam and could only slide up and down.

  “Where is it?” she screamed, kicking her blankets over to look underneath them. They constricted themselves around her ankles. “Where?”

  “Sweetheart?” Steve said, reaching out for her. “I’m here.”

  “Hello?”

  “Dad’s here.”

  “I can hear you! I can—Bill, are you there?”

  It’s like she doesn’t even . . .

  She didn’t even blink from the flashlight.

  She doesn’t see me, Steve thought.

  He laid a hand on her leg, and she kept screaming for Bill.

  “Honey, Bill’s not . . .” Steve stopped himself, wondering what was better for her current mindset, reality check or illusion. “Sarah, Sarah, calm down. It’s all right.”

  Finally she saw him, fixed him with a wild stare like a frightened horse. “You took it, didn’t you?”

  “What?” Steve said.

  “You stole it! You read my messages!”

  “What? What’re you—”

  “It’s ringing, I can hear it! Where is it? Give it!”

  “Your phone? Honey, it got burned. Don’t you remember? It got burned.”

  She was ignoring him again, still kicking at her blankets. “He’s calling, he’s . . . oh, Bill, don’t hang up!”

  “Honey,” Steve said. “Bill’s dead. Barksdale, he—”

  Sarah suddenly noticed Steve’s hand on her leg. She screamed and kicked it away as if a tarantula had landed on her. Thrashing, shrieking, she banged her bald head against the bars and batteries of the shack, again and again.

  “Stop!” Steve said, pulling her back by the shoulders. She got in one more head-butt and then her forehead started pushing out a giant, bloody goose egg.

  Steve cradled her and was rocked by her shudders, her tremors.

  “Just, please,” she said, muttering now, staring blankly at the ceiling. “Let me answer, I need to . . . just make it stop, Daddy, please.”

  Finally, she lay still, snotty, bleeding, and feverish, yet wracked by chills.

  Steve reached across to his side of the shed and dragged Bill’s backpack toward him. He fished out the ibuprofen and a bottle of water he’d found in Marv’s trailer; he’d found almost half a carton, along with some canned food. Not much, though. Not enough.

  With numb, trembling fingers, Steve fed Sarah the ibuprofen. He poured in some water to help her wash it down. She choked.

  “No, no, no,” Steve said, pushing her over so the water would drain out of her mouth.

  Wrapping his arms around her from behind, he got in place to perform the Heimlich, but then Sarah gasped and breathed again all on her own. So Steve sat there, rocking her, rubbing the stubble on her head and pleading with the ceiling.

  You took JJ, goddamn you. Please, please, if you’re there, if you even give a crap . . .

  “Me,” he said. “Take me.”

  CHAPTER 48

  The next time Marv saw the glowing alien head, he also found a cache of guns and supplies on the outskirts of Mars. The stash was tucked away in the rusted-out husk of a car over in the weeds by the access road to HMS.

  Marv found an AK-47, about ten cans of beans and rice, and for some reason a Pokémon collection all in one big bag, as if someone were preparing to bug out. The glowing alien head had dropped it off last night. Marv had seen it.

  He ran to get Little Chucky and his plaster casts, but it was a school day, which Marv always forgot. He searched through the trailer Chucky lived in, but couldn’t find the plaster, so Marv waited around all day for Chucky to get off the bus.

  Except the bus never came home that day from HMS.

  Neither did Chuck.

  Later, when Marvin heard the news, he thought, Nah, man, just another cover-up, covering their asses up. Those company men, man. Not a school shooting, something else. And they killed him, they killed Chuck.

  But what were they covering up?

  That single question would haunt Marv for years. What was the Great Secret? The Big Lie?

  Then one day it hit him.

  Freaking aliens, man.

  As Marvin’s conspiracy web grew, he became convinced Chuck had been the target all along. They’d left the guns there for that Vedder kid. They’d set him up. And like some kind of cult member, Vedder had worn their image on his shirt, off to send Marv a message: “Don’t tread on me, man. Don’t you dare.”

 
; * * *

  A couple days passed, and it was the same thing. Sarah screaming for her phone, crying for Bill, torn between several personalities, some sad, some suicidal, some vicious beasts.

  She’d made a mess in her gym shorts, and since she wasn’t ambulatory, Steve had resorted to cutting up Marv’s old shirts to make tie-dyed diapers. Sometimes she’d mess them on purpose, grinning, strained. She’d cry like a baby before passing out, a petulant toddler who hated to nap.

  She’d been like this as a baby. Steve remembered now. The terrible late nights. The terrible mornings. They were all back. Had she really regressed that much?

  One night, she’d grinned at him while he was wrapping up a soiled diaper in a plastic sack.

  “You know it’s all your fault.”

  “Go to sleep,” Steve said, tying the sack.

  “You gave up on him, just like you gave up on Mom.”

  “I didn’t give up on Bill.”

  “Not Bill.”

  Steve almost asked who she meant, but stopped himself. He refused to engage her in a pointless argument.

  “You were sick of him. Sick of her too, or else you never would’ve kissed that convention slut. That’s why JJ ran away. At least The Provider was like Mom and actually wanted him.”

  Steve stood up, ready to throw out the sack, ready to get away from this nasty little brat. He tried to tell himself it wasn’t Sarah, it was PCo. He could see it in her face more and more, how stretched it looked, how sharp the grin. It wasn’t her. Yet it was.

  “You never wanted him—”

  Steve smacked her.

  Hard.

  No stinging, satisfactory slap on the cheek. A regrettable thud of fingers against her lower jaw.

  The way her face changed as the red handprint boiled up to the surface . . . it was like watching a dish break. The heat instantly fled Steve’s chest.

  “Honey, I’m so sorry, I—”

  “Don’t touch me,” she said, shrinking up against the wall. “Neglecter, murderer. Child beater.”