The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  Because the man is moving toward her. His arms are out, lashing the air, reaching for her. His face is masked in blood, making him appear all the more inhuman in the half-dark.

  She backs toward the entry door, the hallway, but can’t leave despite every nerve in her body crying at her to go, go. At the last second, she darts into the kitchen. The man follows. She dives over the counter and into the dinette, circling back into the living room. And still the man follows. She dodges one way, then the other to grab the neck of the telescope. She wrenches it off its stand and takes a batter’s stance. The man reaches for her and she swings. The telescope clangs the side of his head, and only then—in the stunned silence that follows—does she recognize him.

  Doughy-cheeked. Wild-haired. Ink-stained fingers. He wears a cardigan and corduroys and wingtips. “Daniel,” she says.

  He has lost his glasses. His eyes are capillaried with the infection. His face matches their color—reddened with blood—his own or someone else’s. He opens his mouth, but not to stammer out a hello. His intention is to bite. When he creeps toward her, she says, “Don’t,” but he doesn’t slow, so she swings again, and then again, striking him across the belly, the shoulder, the wrist. She hears the glass inside the telescope tinkle, and something damply crack inside his body, but not even that stops him, so she puts her whole body into a swing to the temple.

  He falls to the floor in a heap. She waits for a moment, trying to decide whether to check for a pulse, when she sees his chest expand with breath. She retrieves the pistol from the floor and tucks it in her belt. Even if he stands up and lurches toward her, even if he means to kill her, she won’t use it. She tells him that she’s sorry, that she hopes she can make this right.

  ❖

  In the room of doors, Hannah creeps toward the red one. The floor is tacky and fluorescent with the many worm trails leading from it. A sound comes from the other side, a squelching and popping, like tongues moving in mouths. There is no knob to turn, no lock to pick. She pushes at it and it won’t give. Tries to pry it open with the blade, with her fingers. Nothing. So she waits. Knowing it will be only so long before they find her again. The fanged and winged guardians of this place.

  At last the door coughs open and a worm pushes through, nosing the air, blindly creeping forward. She hacks at it and steps over the spasming remains and enters the room before the door can close.

  The space opens up into a high rocky chamber with a vast red lake at its center. The surface bubbles and steams, appearing volcanic. From it breach the worms. They slime onto the shore and glop and twist their way toward any of the hundreds of exits. The light makes her squint. The sulfuric reek makes her gag.

  A worm rolls toward her and she slashes at it. And then another. And then another. Trying to hem her in, to tangle her legs, bring her down. She slices and stabs her way toward the lake. Before her the worms bleed out and crumble, the digitized code of them scattering like kicked LEGOs. And the more she swings, the longer and sharper and faster and hotter the sword seems to grow in her hands. A white light comes off it, and within that light—in the very grain of the sword—exists the code, honed to deadliness, weaponized to counter the virus.

  But there is no end to the worms. She can track hundreds of them, and every second another breeds its way from the muck. She could swing the blade until her arms fell off and not make enough of a nick.

  Her whole life she had felt powerless, because of her age, her gender, her dead eyes, and her broken family. She isn’t a kid anymore. She’s no longer a girl. She doesn’t wear secondhand clothes or stumble around with a cane and pretend not to hear people whispering about her. Her father didn’t run away and her mother didn’t die. She isn’t even human. She has no limitations. This world is hers to own.

  So she tightens her grip. Turns in a half-circle. Swings. And releases. The sword spins through the air in a flashing arc. Headed toward the womb of the thing, the core of it all. When the point plunges into the lake, white lines zigzag outward from it, as if she has tossed a stone onto ice. There is a sizzling sound. The white streams continue to zigzag and cross and expand, gradually lighting up the lake, the walls, the ceiling with a multiplying force.

  In this chamber, the worms slump and crumble, while elsewhere spiders curl up, bats fall, skeletons collapse, fleshy curtains blow off their rods, clocks chime midnight, and shadows limp to the corners and die. The Dark Net is suddenly and completely aflame with light.

  But Portland remains infected. To cure the real world, Hannah must escape the digital. So she follows Derek’s beacon program onto the thumb drive.

  And when her aunt Lela steps again into Cheston’s apartment office, she finds the computer terminal aglow—no longer red, but white—and the thumb drive so hot the sun might be trapped in it.

  Chapter 30

  THEY WALK DOWN the middle of the street, through the Pearl District, a familiar place reduced to ruin. Lela, Juniper, and Derek, with Hemingway trotting beside and before and behind them, perking his ears and sniffing at the rubble, the crashed cars, the occasional body. The wind pushes trash around, cartwheels the Metro section of The Oregonian, which Lela stomps in her passing. Dawn is coming. A pink light rashes steadily across the lane of sky above them. If not for the growing brightness, they would not be able to see the crows that follow—hundreds of them—silent except for the beating of their wings. Feathers pinwheel down like black snow. The birds are a boiling confusion. To look at them causes motion sickness.

  They remind Juniper of the threat they face. The milling, roiling uncertainty of the virus as it channels through the digital landscape, hunting for someplace to roost. It’s difficult to fight and comprehend in that way. He remembers a verse from Proverbs: The locusts have no king, yet all of them go out in bands.

  At first that might seem the case—that the virus is a kingless horde—but would the Nazis have risen to power without Hitler, would the heroin trade have flourished without Pablo Escobar or Al Qaeda without Osama bin Laden or the Red Skeletons without Sam Creel? A monstrous face anchors every evil, makes it feel singular and conquerable. Even a hurricane has an eye.

  And Juniper knows the eye of this storm is the one who goes by Cloven. Every time Juniper pulls the trigger—shooting more than sixty people who come racing out of doorways and alleys, their eyes giving off a faint red light—he hears that subterranean voice, he sees that pale, bent face.

  Juniper tries not to kill, aiming for the knee, the thigh, the shoulder. There has to be hope for them yet, some sort of salvation, even if they appear doomed by the infection. In the five blocks they travel, he leaves behind a wake of brass cartridges that smoke and glint and litter the street. Lela hands him fresh magazines to slam into place.

  Something is burning nearby. The smoke gives the air the quality of an erased chalkboard. The data center looks like any other building—squat and brick, the sort of place you’d expect to house a small-town DMV or post office. They only know they’re in the right place because of the Paradise service vans parked in the lot. When Derek named the address earlier, Juniper noted it was directly above The Oubliette. That’s why Babs stationed his club there, and that’s why Cheston wished to take control of it—to tap into the digital artery overhead.

  As they start for the building, a voice sounds behind Juniper, deeper than any human register, the voice he has been waiting for. “Timothy Milton,” it says.

  They turn to see the thing that speaks. A man. He wears a black suit with a narrow red tie. His hair is slicked back into an inky ponytail. His face is obscured by a set of VR goggles that emit a red quavering light. He is flanked by two hounds, their snouts bristling with teeth. “Or would you prefer Timmy? Tim Tim?”

  He, Cloven, looks different than he did twenty years ago. Not older. But updated. Yet even from here—twenty yards away—Juniper can hear the tendons that creak like old ropes when he lifts an arm and curls his fingers in a wave.

  “I go by Mike these days,” Juniper s
ays.

  The air trembles with his words. “You think that makes you a new man? You think that beard or that muscle makes you any different? I see the same lying selfish weakling as before.”

  A deep-bellied growl rolls off Hemingway. Lela tries to grab his collar, but it’s too late. He springs toward Cloven, and the hounds leap to meet him midway. Hemingway rises up on his haunches and captures one of them in a snarling embrace. They drop almost immediately when Hemingway clamps his jaws around its neck and shakes. The other hound scratches and snaps at his hindquarters until Juniper knocks its flat with a bullet to the ribs.

  Hemingway readjusts his grip, drawing the neck deeper into his mouth, when Cloven takes two steps forward and kicks the dog in the belly. Hemingway yips and flops through the air and comes to a rolling stop. Lela calls out to him, and he struggles to stand and then limps back to her with his ears flattened and his tail tucked.

  The hounds begin to dry out and crack and sink, and when a wind rushes through the buildings, a few flakes of their skin peel away.

  “You’re supposed to be dead, Timothy.”

  “Decided to stick around.”

  “I always knew you were a threat. That’s why I wanted to end you. But I never would have dreamed you’d grow into such a ridiculous do-gooder, a toxic pain in my ass.”

  Juniper realizes he is slumping, as if ready to curl in on himself, and makes an effort to square his shoulders. “We’re going to stop you.”

  “Me?” Cloven crouches and punches through the shell of one of the hounds and scoops out the ash to filter through his fingers. The air flecks black, like a staticky screen. “Don’t you remember what I told you before? I’m one of many. And we’re all around you.”

  Lela clutches Hemingway. The dog trembles in her arms. “Who is he?” she says to Juniper. “Why is he calling you Timothy?”

  Juniper can’t answer. The man is smiling at him, and he feels reduced by his red gaze. Brackish water bubbles in his mouth, lily pads and frogs and mud choke his throat. He feels like he is shrinking, like he is becoming that boy in the lake again, as if the body and the life he has built for himself are all merely a costume, easily removed. “Go,” he says to his friends. “Run.”

  Derek starts immediately for the data center, but Lela hesitates and Juniper says, “You’ve got to go. Hurry. I’ll hold him off as long as I can.”

  ❖

  The inside of the building is as plain and anonymous as the outside. There is a reception desk with a phone and a mug of pens and a dish of mints and a Far Side day calendar. Its chair lies on its side. The tiled foyer opens up into a carpeted office area segmented into cubicles. She takes one last look at the street—where the two men remain footed in place—before following Derek, dragging Hemingway along by the collar.

  Among the cubicles, they find two bodies, one of them the security guard. Derek kneels beside him. At first she thinks he is retrieving the gun, but he is not. It’s a keycard bound to a spiral cord. He holds it up with a smile. “Phew.”

  She asks why he is relieved, and he says that without the card, they’d never get into the vault, not without a jackhammer. The database is protected by a two-challenge system. The keycard and a key code that swings open the steel door. “I was betting on us being able to find one. We got lucky.”

  They will need to be luckier. Once they get through the vault door, they will need a twenty-two digit password to access the system. For this, he has a password generator program—that should take five minutes or less. “Should?” Lela had said earlier, and Derek firmed his chin and said, “Will.”

  The program is stored on the same thumb drive as Hannah. Or Hannah’s consciousness. Lela isn’t sure how to refer to her niece anymore. Even before she vanished into some trapdoor of the Internet, she seemed to have exceeded her body. Lela keeps the dongle in her pocket and every now and then touches it to reassure herself it’s still there.

  They head down a hall, past a water cooler, a potted fern, the restrooms, to a windowless door with a scanner and a keypad housed on the wall beside it. “Let’s see if we get lucky again.” Derek explains that every keypad—on elevators, routers, gated communities, even ATMs—comes with the same factory default setting—0911—which most administrators are too lazy to change. “Given the lackadaisical security of this place, I’m hoping we’re in business.”

  Derek slides the card and then blows on his hand as if it held a set of dice. He punches the four-digit passcode and says, “Come on, baby.” The light blinks red three times. He tries the door and it clunks, locked in its frame. He pinches the bridge of his nose. “We might be here for a very long time.” He wears a backpack and swings it off now to remove his laptop.

  Lela peers at the keypad and he says, “Don’t touch that. Leave this to the experts.”

  The security card lies on the floor, and she snatches it up and runs it through the slot and punches in four digits, and Derek says, “What are you doing, you idiot? You only get three tries on these things before they lock down for—”

  But he never finishes the sentence because the light blinks red twice before turning over to green. The lock thunks open, and she twists the handle and yanks open the door and makes an underhanded motion with her arm as if to say voilà.

  Hemingway trots inside the room and she follows him, and Derek lingers in the doorway. The storage center is about the size of a low-ceilinged basketball court. Before her is a cross connect that reminds her of an old operator’s booth, with different colored wires yarning into different ports. And then there are the cabinets—taller than her, winking with lights, a mess of inputs, jacks, cords, USB connectors. Each cabinet is labeled odd or even. Alleys run between them. Fans whir.

  Derek remains in the doorway as if he can’t quite believe they’ve made it inside. “But how?” he says, and she says, “An old Luddite hack. You just check to see which keys are smudged from repeated use. I got lucky on the order.”

  Derek gives her an appraising smile and wags a finger. “After this is all over, you and me are doing some kamikaze shots. You are my lucky charm!”

  It is then his smile fails and his body shudders as if run through by a current. A wheezing sound comes from his mouth, where a moment later a bubble of blood swells and pops. When he falls to his knees, she sees the reason. Behind him stands the small man with the old face. His clothes are singed and the skin along his right side chewed up like hamburger. In his hand he grips the ceremonial knife used during the bomb-blasted Sabbath.

  By now she should be attuned to danger. She remembers what Juniper told her—“Paranoia is a requirement”—and knows she should have expected this. Something will always go wrong. A threat will always be lying in wait. With that kind of defensive mindset, you’re always ready to slam on the brakes, strap on a Kevlar vest. She thinks of herself as vigilant, but she has been pushed too far. To an emotional brink. Death is starting to feel less like something to fight than accept. Because then all the pain and anxiety would simply vanish.

  A very real part of her wants to push back her hair, reveal her neck to his blade. But then Hemingway gets in between them and bunches his shoulders and growls so deeply, she can feel it in her teeth. By putting himself in danger, he forces her to care. She still has someone to look after.

  Hemingway hunches low to the ground, his whole body coiled, when he tests his way forward. The small man slashes the blade as a warning. Lela remembers her pistol then, and pulls it from her holster and empties every last bullet into the small man. He jumps and spins and tremors, and when he collapses, there is less of his body than when he was standing a few moments before. Her finger keeps snapping the trigger after the magazine empties.

  It takes a while for her hearing to come back, and when it does, a voice burbles out of the tinny whine, and she realizes she is talking to herself. “What do I do?” That’s what she keeps saying. “What am I supposed to do now?” To stand alone in a room such as this. Surrounded by equipment whose function el
udes her. She turns in a slow circle, taking in the many cabinets. The vault reaches no more than a thousand square feet, but she couldn’t feel more lost if dropped blindfolded in the Mount Hood wilderness.

  Derek lies in the open doorway, and Hemingway stands over his body. The dog whines. She calls for him, but he ignores her, dipping his head to nuzzle Derek, lick his cheek. She assumed him dead, but he stirs in response. Lifting a hand and dropping it as if in protest. “Derek,” she says, repeating his name as she rushes to him. His skin is ghost-white. Offset by his blood-painted lips. His eyes flutter open and closed, and she slaps him across the cheek. “You need to stay here. Stay with me. Tell me what to do.”

  His eyes focus and slide from her to a nearby cabinet. “That’s the one. That’s it.”

  “The master cabinet?”

  “Just like we talked about. Insert the thumb drive.” He swallows. “And pray for a miracle.”

  She shoves a hand into her pocket and closes it around the thumb drive, around Hannah. We’re going to take care of each other, she thinks. The master cabinet is a metal tower stacked with black metal boxes, some of them knobbed and slotted, and others crazed with yellow wire. Red lights flash their warning. It makes a chittering noise as if geared by a thousand insect mandibles. She points at various USB ports until Derek nods his head weakly, Yes, that one.

  If they unleashed Hannah into this system, then supposedly she could stream into every home, every phone, every tablet and television and device connected to it, as human software, the anti-virus, a digital rite of exorcism. It seems the stuff of miracles, impossible.

  Pray? That’s what Derek wants her to do? She pauses her hand as all the nerves in her flare at once. “It’s not going to work,” she says. How can it? She wasn’t even a teenager when people started referring to her as cynical, biting, sarcastic. She has always seen the world through a darker veil. There must have been a time when she looked at an ornamented Christmas tree with wonder, when she heard a concert and felt overwhelmed by the sound. But she has since lost her ability to hope and her capacity for awe. The death of her parents secured this, and every year since has whittled away whatever faith and reverence she retained until she feels there is nothing left but her black, rotten, pessimistic core. Nature is the closest she gets to astonishment anymore. When she wanders the tide pools beneath Haystack Rock or splashes through the headwaters of the Metolius River or takes in the banded color of the Painted Hills. But every day on the job, she creeps further away from that feeling as she visits the morgue, a crime scene, the site of a seven-car pileup on the freeway. She knows too well the awfulness of the world. Indifference or outright hostility feels like the safest response. Why would she bother voting? Or use less water or recycle or eat organic, humanely raised livestock? People like her sister and Juniper always strike her as blindly hopeful, unable to recognize that people are hell-bent on killing themselves and ruining the planet. So this is hard for Lela. Making a leap. Extending her whole body in a kind of prayer. Even on a good day, it would be hard. But now, surrounded by so much despair, how can she believe she might make a difference? How can this thumb drive in her hand hold any promise?