The Phone Company

by David Jacob Knight

  “Damn it,” he said, hitting the old cracked dash.

  “What do we do?”

  Steve checked his mirror, saw the road splashed red behind them; brake lights. No room to turn around, not without power steering.

  “The cemetery,” he said.

  “We can’t.”

  Steve started the van. “Hell we can’t. It’s the only way. It’s the closest way to get down to the road we need.”

  “They’ll see us!”

  Steve considered that. “Probably already have.”

  Gawking, crying, sweating, Sarah grabbed for her handle and Steve backed up, back to the tree where he’d spotted the alien head. Back to the cemetery above the enemy camp.

  This night was really shaping up.

  CHAPTER 55

  Graves yawned all around them. Steve drove slowly, quietly, with nothing but the parking lights again.

  Something ahead of them moved, but it was just a moth. The lights of the camp grew brighter through the trees. Sometimes in the switchbacks down the hill, Steve wasn’t facing the camp and couldn’t see it. He kept one eye on his side mirror during these stretches.

  Torches, big groups of townsfolk with pitchforks and axes, maybe a lone guy with a chainsaw—Steve was expecting some sort of welcoming party, but no one was coming.

  Sarah kept squirming in her seat, leaning forward. Steve felt uncomfortable in his, as well, the lumpy cushion, the worn-out springs. Even they were too loud.

  They drove right past the church, past the medical tents and everything, and no one came running. No shots fired. No guards, no lone person smoking. Nothing. Only the fluttering rescue tents, the lit-up church, and the encampment beyond.

  Steve made it to the main road and turned.

  He kept an eye on the mirror.

  PCo, Graham, they could shift time and change the weather. They could shake the earth. Yet they couldn’t catch a measly old moving van belching exhaust right past their camp?

  Ahead, orange cones reflected Steve’s headlights.

  “The roads,” he said.

  Where the storm had washed away huge chunks of pavement and roadbed, The Phone Company had restored the lines of transportation as best they could. Sometimes, where the storm had done severe damage, the road narrowed to a single lane. Despite all that, even new traffic lines had been painted.

  “Maybe for their search?” Steve said. Because the other thought, that this was all too easy, scared the hell out of him.

  “Maybe,” Sarah said.

  Steve eyed the heavy machinery that hulked in the farther reaches. He expected the eyes of the backhoe to flare to life, expected its arm to take a swipe at the van. The cab seemed to watch him as Steve put it in the side mirror.

  Watching, waiting . . .

  “Where is everyone?” Steve asked as they passed through town. Sarah stared at O’Donald’s, as if expecting to see her old co-workers there. The front of the restaurant had been torn off, exposing a jumble of plastic tables and chairs.

  The whole strip mall behind it had been severely eroded. PCo was using what was left of the parking lot to store gravel, concrete mix, and road dividers.

  Farther on, past piles of wrecked cars, downed trees, and heaps of mud and debris, they came upon the other edge of town. Hayworth Diner had been scraped off the face of the planet, leaving nothing but pieces of plumbing and parts of the foundation. Tangles of wood and metal furniture tumbled into the dark field. A whole booth lay out there on its side.

  Opposite the diner, perfectly intact, sat the data center. No cars in the lot, which was brightly lit. No construction materials. Steve was relieved to see it empty.

  He would’ve blown it up anyway, no matter who was inside, but he felt glad he didn’t have to sacrifice anyone he knew. After this, after he blew this popsicle stand sky-high, he believed everyone would wake up. He’d save them the way he’d saved Sarah. He’d hate to break any eggs in the process. He would if he had to, though. He thought he could, anyway.

  Steve pulled into the lot. He parked behind the building where no one could see him and pulled the keys out of the ignition. They jangled in his shaky hand.

  “Ready?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “Keep a watch out for me? I need you to keep watch.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  They got out. Steve threw open the back of the van and hopped up. The smell hit him again. He ignored it and kept his flashlight away from the tie-dyed lump tucked between the fifty-gallon drums.

  With the light, he checked out the burner phone Marv had wired to the dynamite.

  “Sarah. Notebook. Please.”

  She grabbed the backpack from the cab and dug the notebook out for him.

  “Thanks.”

  “Just hurry up,” she said, rubbing her arms.

  Steve flipped the notes open to the detonator. Marvin had diagrammed it hastily, and Bill had scratched in new annotations, but it all made some sort of sense. Steve compared the drawing to the burner phone, a clamshell like his.

  The faceplate of the burner had been removed, exposing the circuitry around the caller ID. The vibrating motor had also been extracted. Its wires plugged directly into the blasting caps for the dynamite, so instead of vibrating . . .

  Following Marv and Bill’s (and Chuck’s) directions, Steve unplugged the wires and powered on the burner.

  the screen said.

  Once it loaded, Steve reattached the wires and stepped back. He compared everything to the notebook one last time.

  It’s all good, man, Marv said, and Steve stole a glance at the tie-dyed lump, further dyed by all the putrid excretions. Chucky says it’s all good.

  Thanks, Steve thought. He wished there had been time. To bury Aaron, to bury Marvin. But maybe this was how the Martian would want to go out. A fitting tribute.

  “Dad.”

  “Coming.”

  He hopped down, shut the door, and pulled Sarah up the hill behind the data center.

  “Whoa,” Steve said, pointing to a landslide a couple hundred yards up. Sitting atop it, its north and south wings sitting at weird angles, was Mrs. Hayworth’s mansion. The huge shattered window at the center of the house stared down at them.

  “Perfect,” Steve said. Far enough away from the blast, and big enough to shield them from it, yet close enough for a spectacular view.

  Like a painting, Steve thought, but that only made him think of Bill and how much he wished he were here to see this. Whatever Bill had done (or hadn’t done), he deserved to see this fireball, too.

  “Dad, Dad, Dad,” Sarah said, stopping him three-quarters of the way up. She was looking at the parking lot, where, striding into the pool of light, was JJ.

  Steve and Sarah watched the boy present his eye to the retinal scanner, then step inside.

  “Come on,” Steve said. He and Sarah hurried the rest of the way to Hayworth’s mansion. They climbed over chunks of the foundation to the back of the south wing, where they waited, they watched. JJ never came out.

  Steve pulled out his cell phone.

 

  His thumb hovered over the call button.

  “Don’t,” Sarah said.

  “I’m not going to.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “I don’t know.” Steve squinted at the data center. “What if it’s a trick?”

  “That was JJ. I saw him.”

  “But he’s one of them now. Or he’s an illusion. Who knows? It’s just weird that my son, my own son, just happens to go into the very building I want to blow up.”

  “They know we’re here,” Sarah said. “If they know we’re here, why aren’t they coming to get us?”

  They both fell silent and peered into the darkness around them. Nothing. Nothing they could see, anyway. Only vague shapes and dark hulks. Creaks coming from inside the mansion; the house was settling.

  Steve turned back to the data center.

  Trick, he thought.

&n
bsp; Had to be.

  He had been fooled once, into killing Aaron. He refused to keep walking into their traps.

  Except what if it wasn’t a trap? What if they only wanted him to believe it was? But why, to what end? To trick him into blowing up his own son?

  They’d tricked him into smoking that cigarette, so Steve had to admit it was possible. The Phone Company was evil. Who could even grasp their motives, their needs?

  He did know, or at least Graham had implied, that PCo needed Steve to make the choices himself. They couldn’t force him. Or so Graham would have him believe.

  Steve’s thumb worried at the raised rubber, the tactile bump of the CALL button.

  “Give me your phone,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  Sarah handed over the home phone, and Steve programmed the bomb number into her contacts. He turned both phones to vibrate before handing hers back.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  “What? No. You can’t leave me here, you can’t.”

  “Sarah, listen. If something goes wrong, if they catch me, you have to blow it up.”

  “No!”

  “Goddamn it, listen to your father. Whether I’m clear of that bomb or not, you blow it up. It’s the only way.”

  “Dad, please.”

  He tore away from her. “Just text me first. Give me a chance, okay? If you can? B for bomb?”

  “Dad!”

  “B for bomb.”

  Steve left. He tucked his phone in his jacket pocket, but left the clamshell open. His finger sought out the tactile bump of the CALL button, memorizing its location on the numpad. Just in case.

  Then he was entering the light of the parking lot and couldn’t see anything beyond his bubble of light.

  Steve crept his way toward the only door, very aware of how his own shadow stretched out and crept up behind him. The security camera stared at him. It didn’t move. It didn’t blink. It stared, as if it had always known he was there.

  No point in it, Steve thought.

  No point in sneaking around.

  He had the upper hand, even if they caught him. One signal to Sarah and Steve would win. He’d save the town and he’d save his daughter, even if they lost him and JJ.

  No point, he thought, and he marched right up to the data center door and pounded. The retinal scan laid out a red beam. He put his eye in it, for fun.

  “See me?” he said, opening his eye as wide as it would go, all bloodshot and roving. “Ding dong!”

  The door popped, swung open. Steve jumped back. The space beyond let out a quiet breath.

  He listened. No other sound. No whir of fans. No electronic crunching of hard drives. He reached out and nudged the door wide. He had expected servers. Racks and racks with cables going everywhere, with scatters of colored lights, idiot, blind, but still somehow sentient in their columns and rows. He saw none of that here, though.

  The brick formed a hollow shell, echoing from wall to wall to wall. Empty, except for an old switchboard in the middle, and an old gramophone-looking contraption on a table. The strange setup sat atop the concrete pad of the First Step.

  “Hello?” Steve said.

  No one was there. And there weren’t any other doors leading into any other rooms. No other exits.

  “JJ?”

  Right behind him, a voice said,

  CHAPTER 56

  “Oh, Steve!” Graham said over the ringing of his Tether. “Hello!”

 

  “Just a sec.” Graham held up a finger and took the call. “Yes? Mmm-hmm? Oh, really? Okay. Okay. Okay.”

  Steve could hear the person on the other end of the line. No actual words. Just a distorted He tried to step around Graham, but Graham jabbed his Tether into Steve’s midsection and shocked him, driving him backward into the data center. Steve went sprawling.

  Gravestones paved the floor of the big empty shell. Gravestones from Harcum. The monuments protruded a bit from the concrete like tiles, engraved with the names of all those great men who had built the town, men who had mountains, streams, and roads named after them, they’d had that much influence on the town. Names of families that, all these generations later, still found their home in Cracked Rock. The edges of these stones bit into Steve’s hip as he crashed to the floor.

  Graham stepped in and shut the door with an echoing slam.

 

  “Yes,” Graham said into his phone.

 

  “I understand.

 

  “Okay. Okay.”

  Click.

  Graham’s phone slipped like a greasy fish from his white-gloved hand into his suit pocket. “Where were we?” he said and walked around Steve, who convulsed on the floor, grating his ribs against gravestones, his spittle pooling in one of the engravings.

  TO EARTH A CHILD IS LOST,

  TO HEAVEN A CHERUB BORN

  “Ah,” Graham said, “yes.” He approached the switchboard and weird antique, which looked like an old phone, only disassembled, its cables and different parts exposed. “Do you know much about the inventor of the telephone? Did you know he had a younger brother, Edward Charles Bell?”

  Steve’s convulsions finally petered to a twitch in his thigh, a tic in his eyelid. He locked on to Graham’s shoes, which were usually polished. Today they looked dusty and scuffed, as if he’d been through a cave. Steve wanted to swipe for them, but couldn’t. Couldn’t control his arms yet.

  “Edward died at age nineteen. Tuberculosis,” Graham said. “You know they cough and cough, and cough up blood.” He stopped at the table and laid a hand on the old antique. “Later, when Bell invented the first working phone, you know what happened?”

  “Screw you,” Steve said. It hurt him to talk. The convulsions had pulled a muscle in his core, and now his leg was cramping. “Give me my son, you son of a—”

  “It wasn’t when he said ‘Watson, come here.’ That was only the cover story. The story for the press. All show. Bell’s first telephone, though, the real invention, actually connected to somewhere much different. And what he heard? Was a wet cough.

  “This,” Graham said, stroking the black mouthpiece of the thing on the table, “is Alexander Graham Bell’s first phone.” He reached to the switchboard and unplugged thick, black cables from their jacks, then rearranged them, plugging them back in. The wires hung fat from the grid, twined this way and that, still wriggling, some of them, from Graham’s adjustment. “It never made it to the public. But later, Edison would steal the design. He lied to reporters, saying he’d played a joke on them; he hadn’t really made a spirit phone. But he only said that because he’d heard something too, something that terrified him.”

  Steve managed to lift himself up off the floor. “JJ.”

  “He’s not here,” Graham said, plugging in the last cable.

  “JJ!” Steve staggered to the door, wrenched on the handle. Wouldn’t open. He pounded on it, hoping Sarah would hear. “JJ, are you there?”

  Graham picked up the antique mouthpiece, black and slick. “I’m afraid JJ is out doing something very important for me. For the company. Actually, that was him on the phone. You should be very proud of your son, Steve. He’s climbed very high in a very short period of time. He’ll be a very good offering to The Provider.”

  Steve hurried around the inside of the data center, running his hand along the brick wall, searching the rough masonry and sharp edges of grout for some hidden compartment. He pounded and yelled and barely slowed down as he reached the back wall where he’d parked the van. “JJ, you there? JJ!”

  His hand brushed his jacket pocket, and he wondered. Had he broken his clamshell in the fall? He didn’t know, couldn’t. If he felt for the phone now, Graham would see it and might try to disarm him. No. Steve could only go for the phone when he was ready. And no way was he doing it standing this close to the back wall.

  “I know
why you’re here,” Graham said. “I know you don’t like us. But I had to show you this first. I had to show you what you’re about to destroy.”

  He pushed a button set into an old wooden box on the table. The antique phone began to ring.

  “Like I told your friend, this place has always been special, a special place of death and after death. The Ebumnanyth knew this. The caul’s thin here, things leak through. Cracked Rock will be a holy place, a Temple Mount, a Well of Souls, for generations to come. You should be proud of that as well.”

  Steve, done with his pointless tour around the data center, reached the front door again. Still wouldn’t budge. He marched toward Graham. Enough dancing around. He’d strangle him with those goddamn cables if he had to.

  “This place,” Graham began, but stopped as a voice bled through the gramophone-style bell of the phone.

  Steve stopped, too, head cocked. That voice. The only sound in the entire world that could’ve stopped him.

  “Hi, Janice,” Graham said.

  Crackling, backed by static and something like the distant ringing of phones, Janice said, “Hello.”

  “How are you, Janice? Are you doing well?”

  “Yes, yes. And you?”

  “Never better. Very excited about the future.”

  “Good,” Janice said.

  “Janice, when we first had this conversation, you were dying of cancer, isn’t that correct?”

  Steve shook his head. “That’s not Janice.”

  But then she said, “Stage four,” and suddenly Steve remembered.

  “That’s pretty serious, isn’t it?” Graham asked.

  “Terminal, yes. Are you coming to see me?”

  Recording, Steve thought. “You, the NSA—whoever. You just found a recording.”

  “Actually, Janice,” Graham said, “I’m here with your husband. I’m here with Steve, Janice.”

  “Steve? Oh my God, are you there?”

  “I don’t believe you!” Steve shouted at her.

  “Steve? Please.”