“Wow.” Steve tried to imagine it, a melting, burning diamond deep in space. “You find any life?”
Aaron frowned, staring off into her memory. “No. I don’t think so. I don’t remember any life. I did get some sort of signal. Like, from way out there. I don’t know. Dragnet couldn’t even read it, so . . .”
Steve swallowed and found his throat dry. The smoke wasn’t helping. He found he could barely draw in a breath, he was so averse to it.
Aaron shivered in her padded flannel. “Steve?” she said in a lost little voice. “Will you kill him for me? You have to promise you’ll kill him.”
At first, he didn’t know who she was talking about. Then he thought maybe she meant Graham. If there was anyone on Earth Steve really wanted to kill, it was that son of a bitch. The magician behind the parade and assembly, the terrorist behind the plane crash and the video game Drones—if it all truly connected, as spastic as the Martian’s Gordian web, then certainly the web all spun back to Graham.
He sighed and slouched back, resigning himself to Aaron’s secondhand smoke. “I’m working on it,” he said.
Aaron finished her cigarette quietly. At the end, she squeezed off the coal, but she was barefoot, so Steve ground the cherry beneath his heel for her.
Her hand lit on his coat. It hurt, just for a moment. Her touch was light, and, really, she hadn’t shown this side of herself since he’d found her. It was nice to be reminded of who they’d been before, even if it hurt.
“You know, Bill was right.”
Oh no, Steve thought. Bill had always been trying to set up Steve and Aaron on a date. He wondered what Bill had told her.
“You’re easy to talk to,” she said, and it actually hurt. He’d expected something pat like “you’re nice,” but Bill had nailed Steve’s character right to the quick.
Aaron lifted her hand, leaving a dull throb in the dog bite.
“I’d keep watch, but yaaaaah.” Aaron stretched and yawned.
“Go,” Steve said. “Get some rest.”
“Okay, well, goodnight.”
Aaron got up, took two steps, and stopped.
This time when her hand lit on Steve’s arm, it was like Barksdale all over again. Steve could feel pockets of infected flesh rupturing and tissues compressing, could feel the trickles of his own blood.
On the far side of the Shack of Silence, a huge roadblock of crushed pop cans, copper pipes, and lead weights obstructed the path leading deeper into the Dead Zone. Aaron was staring at something atop the blockade. Steve saw it too, something watching. A glowing alien head.
He shot it with his flashlight, but the dark figure ducked behind a tangle of pipes. A crunch, a rattle. The hollow clatter of cans, then nothing but Steve’s beating heart.
“Aaron,” he said, whispering in her ear. “Guard Sarah.” He grabbed the lead pipe from beside his chair and slinked away to a stack of old refrigerators.
He’d found it earlier. The fridges formed a sort of buttress to shore up miscellaneous lead, copper, and aluminum shielding. On the backside, an aluminum ladder leaned against the refrigerators. Steve climbed to the top and peered down at the roadblock.
The alien head stopped and looked back, a hovering green oval. Black eyes, blacker mouth.
Vedder’s T-shirt, Steve thought.
JJ’s.
The alien sneaked out of sight behind a bend in the junk. Steve climbed down and chased after it, deeper into the winding passageway, past coils and springs and chassis of junk. He wanted to call out, but the flashlight was bad enough. Clattering through the pop cans was bad enough. He was giving himself away.
The glowing alien peeked around a corner before disappearing.
Trap, Steve thought.
But he didn’t go back.
He couldn’t.
What if it was JJ?
What if he was like Aaron, and the storm had knocked his phone out?
Steve reached the corner and stopped. The pathway opened into a larger arena, totally framed by stacks and stacks of cars. The stacks bowed out, like an exterior wall for something larger.
The arena was completely deserted. Steve turned. Nothing lurking behind him, either.
Steve flicked off his flashlight and backed up, hiding behind a stack of car doors that stood against the far wall. He let his eyes adjust to the dark.
No glowing alien head.
That’s when Steve realized: the head was on a shirt. Not on the back, but on the front of it. The rest of the shirt was black. So JJ could’ve been standing anywhere out there right now with his back turned, just another piece of the black.
Backing up more and more, Steve inched his thumb to the button on the flashlight; his fingerprint rasped over the crosshatched grip.
The alien popped up atop the huge ring of cars.
Steve splashed it with light.
“JJ?”
He was sure it was his son, although his son looked healthier and better groomed than he’d looked his entire life. No hat, his face pulled tight and his hair nicely combed, not matted and frayed like Aaron and Steve’s.
The voice was JJ’s, but digitized. The boy grinned even wider, if that was possible, then jumped down behind the cars.
Steve clambered up the far side, keeping his distance, denting fenders and hoods and stepping onto doorframes and nearly twisting his ankle in the pancakes of metal.
“Holy shit!” he said, teetering at the top. The earth disappeared below him. Coins littered the rim of the hole, and he could see more glittering at various depths in the crack. Cars had crashed down into the pit, too. Steve’s light couldn’t reach the bottom.
“JJ?”
The boy was gone. Not hiding amongst the cars, or on the glittery ledge ringing the hole. He’d vanished into the crack.
Steve heard screaming and scrambled back toward the shed. Down the caldera of cars, through the twisted passageways, over the mountain of cans and jabbing pipes.
He ran as fast as his heart could pump blood to his legs, and still the alien head beat him to the shed. It slinked away before Steve could hit it with his light.
Gripping the lead pipe, Steve threw open the shed.
This close, Sarah’s screams hurt his ears.
In nothing but the slip of her dress, Aaron crouched over Sarah. One of the knives Steve had stolen from Bill’s house lay next to Aaron’s bare foot.
Bloody.
Aaron looked back just as Steve hit her with the pipe.
It jarred his arms, the way it connected with the whole side of her skull, right over the temple.
Aaron fell and her legs sprawled out in a spasm, kicking Steve, kicking Sarah, catching the side of the shed.
Steve didn’t want to hit her again, didn’t want to, but she was one of them. So he hit her again, this time smashing her forehead, the bridge of her nose, which crumpled and squirted blood.
Aaron’s body trembled, and she stared through stringy bangs into the slice of light. Steve picked up the flashlight from where he’d dropped it. The beam bounced from Aaron’s brightening blood to Sarah’s wad of blankets and tangle of legs.
Each scream came in a short pulse, timed to the rhythm of Sarah clawing at the side of her head. Her fingers came away bloody, like the knife.
“Sarah, Sarah, Sarah,” Steve said, kneeling beside her, trying to pry her hand away.
Her ear.
Something in her ear.
A slick black shell of a thing.
A PCo earpiece, ripped halfway out. Bloody tentacles, or maybe wires, clawed for her ear canal, suckering to take root. Some of them had already been cut.
Steve ripped the thing out and stomped it over and over, and it cracked like a snail shell, with something like snail guts inside it.
It got wrapped up in the blankets with all Steve’s flailing, so he kicked the whole lump out of the shed.
“Sarah, can you hear me? Are you all right?” Steve l
eaned down to help her, but Sarah sat up and pushed him aside, staring at Aaron.
“Oh my God, what did you do?”
“Sarah, please—”
“She was helping me!”
“What?”
Sarah’s eyes welled over. “Oh my God, Dad, she was helping!”
CHAPTER 53
Cutting it out, Steve thought while Sarah sobbed in a corner. He was putting together the puzzle of Aaron’s death, and the bloody knife was the first edge piece.
Steve looked at the lump of blankets, remembering the tentacles he’d seen, remembering how some of them had been cut, and then there was that thing JJ had said before disappearing into the crack, and Steve roared, tearing at Marvin’s conspiracy web because he’d been fooled.
Color-coded strands popped loose into string, and newspaper clippings ripped. Pictures fluttered to the ground, but Steve kept tearing, knowing he was messing everything up, but perhaps mutilating it for that very reason. Because there’s that dark little streak that hopes everything dies or gets worse, that nasty little part that prays for the flood to keep flooding and destroy everything.
Sarah screamed at him to stop, but Steve didn’t stop, not until his fingernails raked open corkboard.
He slid down the wall, tangled up in strings. He kept tearing at his sweaty hair while Sarah wept and Aaron stared at the ceiling.
Below his feet, pictures had fallen in random patterns. Steve saw a picture of the data center, a picture of Graham.
Kidnapper.
Corrupter.
Deceiver.
Steve had told Aaron he would kill him. The pictures on the floor showed him just the moving van to do it with.
PCo was going down.
CHAPTER 54
Steve stared at his clamshell’s tiny screen, checking the new contact against the number on the front of Marv’s notebook. He’d been keeping the book in Bill’s backpack.
“Save,” he said. He had to narrate what he was doing sometimes. Burning through one life-or-death choice right after another was like programming a VCR; it didn’t come naturally to him. Today, Steve was being forced to do both.
He pressed SAVE. His tired old eyes had finally found it. “How do I put this on speed dial?”
Sarah shook her head, which wobbled as if completely empty. “You’ll butt-dial it.”
“Look.” Steve clapped the phone shut. “Butt-proof.”
Sarah shrugged. She, too, looked tired. Rings around her eyes. If they weren’t both so damned tired, the conversation might actually have been funny.
“Your butt’s called me before, so. . . . Just saying.” Sarah drifted off. She stared at the sunny wad of the dress where Aaron had shucked it. Next to the dress lay a comforter and, beneath it, a lump.
Steve couldn’t look at the lump. He had to do what he did best and compartmentalize it, shove it in the back of the van along with Marv’s corpse and everything else he wanted to forget.
Later, he would force himself to feel it, all of it. Right now he had to steer his mind back to the anger. Had to honk its goddamn horn and peel out in it.
First, though, he had to get the hell out of the Terraformer without running into any floating alien heads.
“Can you walk?”
Sarah sniffed. Tears hung from her eyelashes in shiny drops, but she had stopped crying. “Where’d she go?”
“Sarah? If you need help, I can help.”
“Where is she?”
Steve followed her gaze to the dress. “Listen, I saw JJ. They’ll be coming. Let’s go.”
“Where is she, Dad, why won’t you tell me?”
Sarah seemed more frightened of this question than of anything else. Not about Graham, not about PCo, not about the fact that her brother was lurking outside and Sarah now had a bloody ear and bloody hair, and there was a lump and a summery dress discarded near a bloody pipe. Steve didn’t understand it. Was she talking existentially, or just being obtuse?
“I remember I could call Mom,” she said, “like on my Tether. She wouldn’t tell me, either. Like, I would ask but she’d never say where she was. She’d talk about anything else.”
“Sarah, this isn’t even . . .”
Honk.
Run ’em over.
Shove the rest in the back.
“Listen, we have to leave—”
“But where is she?”
“Mom?”
“Aaron, Anastasia, Mom. Me. I mean, she always believed in going to church. She’d taught me the whole time I was growing up. That’s what we do, we go to church. But on my phone, it was like she couldn’t even say it, couldn’t even say His name, like she was being watched. The sound, like she was in some kind of call center, in a cubicle or something with some manager breathing down her neck. But where? I’ve never even heard of a place like that.”
“I honestly don’t know,” Steve said. It hurt him, the shattered look in her eyes; the abject hopelessness. She needed an answer from him, the one person she relied on most, and Steve had nothing.
He couldn’t tell her the deeper truth, his growing fear. What was he supposed to say? Maybe there’s only evil? Maybe there’s only one place?
“I don’t know,” he said again. “Other than into the ground, I don’t . . .”
They both zoned out.
It was getting bad, the shock. Steve had almost forgotten he was in a hurry.
“Can we at least bury her?” Sarah asked.
“We’ll come back.”
“Dad—”
“I promise. We have to go. Can you walk? Do you need help?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “I can walk.” But she couldn’t. Sarah grabbed at the wall of batteries and rebar and pulled herself up.
Steve grabbed the backpack and guided her to the van. No alien head. No movement in the junkyard. Everything as still as Mars.
The moving van sat in the niche of junk where Steve had hidden it. He stopped dead when he saw a face in the driver’s seat.
No, not a face.
The moon.
A few minutes later, the van’s headlights were cutting through the woods of the logging road, and the fuel drums were sloshing happily in back.
“Here,” Steve said. He offered Janice’s home phone to Sarah. “Take Mom’s. Just in case.”
Sarah eyeballed it, as if it had tentacles and could destroy entire schools. “Does it even work?”
“Roaming, but yeah. It’s still got a little bit of life left. It’s not dangerous. It was Mom’s.”
“I know.” Sarah took it.
“I’m on speed dial,” Steve said. “Number two.”
For a fraction of a second, he expected JJ to chime up from the backseat with a wisecrack.
Sarah tucked the home phone deep into the pockets of her baggy tie-dyed sweats, which they’d taken from Marv’s. Steve focused on the drive.
Earlier, before finding Aaron, he had found a BLM road near Mountain View. It dumped out over by O’Donald’s, if he remembered correctly. Steve and his motley crew used to smoke cigarettes out there, littering the shoulders in soda bottles, candy wrappers, and butts.
From there, Steve was hoping to find back roads to the data center on the other side of town. These roads had steered him straight so far. Sure, they got a little too narrow. Sometimes it was hard without power steering, but he took his time and went slowly and he was good. He wanted to avoid Main Street, if there still was one.
Over the hills and through sloppy mud holes, Steve guided the van. Sarah stared at a dark shape below them.
The McLeans’, Steve thought.
Sarah had spent time there as a kid. Barbecues, birthdays; that one time Steve and Bill went to help build a deck. Mr. McLean had gotten drunk that day. It was the first time Steve had heard the old coot cuss.
He didn’t tell Sarah about the X-code he’d found by the McLeans’ door. That, too, could get crammed into the back.
Before the long slalom down to the
cemetery, Steve turned off his lights and crept to a stop behind a large deposit of muddy trees and root wads. He peered with the binoculars into the dark.
From here, Mountain View was smaller than a square in a quilt. The encampment and stained glass of the church had become a field of stars guarded by glowing angels.
“She said they were handing out Tethers down there,” Sarah said, gazing at the church. “Aaron.”
Steve lowered the binoculars and looked at her. He saw the need in her eyes and sighed. “If we can see them from here, they can see us. Probably hear us, too. This old bastard barely has a muffler.”
“What’re we going to do?”
Steve turned on the parking lights and crept forward in minimal light. “Drive.” There was no other choice.
“Dad,” Sarah said, fumbling for the oh-shit handle; the van bounced through big sloppy potholes. Didn’t matter. Steve kept chugging along in low and crept his way through.
Down around a hillside, over ruts clogged with bits of rock and mussel shells, he and Sarah passed the cemetery. The camp was right down there. Through the woods, he could see the lights.
A glowing alien head stepped behind a tree.
Steve nearly braked.
Alien head, or just more smoke and mirrors?
He couldn’t be sure.
The anger, he thought, reminding himself, trying his best not to flip on the lights and lunge his way out of there like some startled boar.
A few thousand feet from the cemetery and the camp, Steve decided it was safe to flip on his lights. A chasm gaped directly ahead of him, the dirt, roots, and rock of the opposite cliff exposed in the headlights.
“Dad!” Sarah screamed.
Steve had to pump on the brakes before he could slam them. The old van slid to a stop. Gravel crumbled out from under the tires and bounced once before plummeting. The fuel drums thumped around in back, almost pushing them forward, over the edge.
“Back up, back up!”
Steve ground the gears into reverse, and the vehicle jerked backwards, skidding out before cutting out completely. He’d killed it. But they were safe.
The Phone Company Page 50