Weavers

by Aric Davis

  “I don’t know where to start,” called Geoff.

  Jessica stood and yelled over to him. “Start in Des Moines. Work on cash purchases over a thousand dollars, and remember we have federal warrants. Rick, you start pulling surveillance footage from hotels. I want any video of two men checking in together over the last two days. Pat, I need you on crime—anything out of the ordinary. That means a bar that got cleaned out with no one seeing anything, rapes or robberies with no possible suspects—anything at all to confirm that they might still be in Des Moines.”

  “What are you going to be covering, Brinn?” Jessica asked, hoping her new researcher wasn’t getting ahead of herself.

  “All of that stuff, but in a donut around Des Moines,” said Brinn. “I’m scared they already left, even though my gut tells me they stayed for a minute to cool off.” She grinned. “I don’t need sleep—we have coffee.”

  “We’ll sleep when we’re dead,” called Geoff, and he and Rick high-fived. Jessica nodded, more pleased than she’d been in a long time, then took a seat next to Brinn. She understood little of what happened online aside from newsfeeds, but she could pretend she knew what the younger woman was doing as her fingers fed the hungry beast inside of the keyboard.

  CHAPTER 24

  Tom Nichols liked the porno rooms the best—he could normally knock out a stiff one or two playing in there—but the video game chats were useful, too. Like today: Tom needed to know how to unlock Tofu in Resident Evil 2, so he was set up in an AOL-based chat room called RE 2. Right where he needed to be, he knew. The only problem was that he was alone at the moment. Glancing up from his cursor to the clock on the monitor, he could see why: it was still two hours until school, and the whole world was practically asleep. Someone would come on eventually, though, and they’d know exactly what to do.

  Tom yawned, tilting his head toward the ceiling, and when his eyes came back to the monitor he saw there was someone else in the room with him, a person named simply D. Score! Tom bent down to the keyboard. He still had enough time before school that if D could help him, he’d have a few minutes to fuck around on the PlayStation before he had to leave. But as Tom began to type a greeting his fingers grew numb, pounding on the keyboard instead of on individual keys, and the room began to fade around him, the walls spinning and the sound of a swarm of bees coming from deep in his ears.

  / Kill, Tom. You need to kill / Guns. The guns in Dad’s room / Get the guns and go to the day care / Tom, you need to kill / Tom woke on his floor, not quite sure of what had just happened but not really caring, either. He walked down the steps to the first floor and then into the garage. The rest of the family was still asleep. Tom slipped quietly outside and grabbed his little brother Henry’s aluminum T-ball bat. The bat was short and wore a few dents from being knocked around by Henry, but Tom liked the feeling of the weight in his hands. It felt solid; it felt right.

  Tom walked back into the house and climbed back up the carpeted steps toward the rest of the family, still slumbering away in their beds. He walked past Henry’s room, past his own room and the still-glowing screen, and finally made his way into his parents’ room. Tom could feel something in the back of his mind telling him not to do what he was about to do, telling him he needed to hit himself in the head or just run away and keep running, but Tom ignored that voice. Instead, he did as he was told. / Dad first. It has to be Dad first / Tom raised the bat over his head, looked blankly at his sleeping father, and then brought it down on the center of his father’s face as hard as he could.

  It wasn’t like in the movies. Instead of just dying, Dad reared up from the bed, blood pouring from his shattered mouth and nose, and Tom wound up like it was the World Series before driving the bat once more into his father’s face.

  Mom was wrestling with the blankets now, shrieking nonsensical gibberish at him, and Tom gave her a lick with the bat, too. Dad was quivering on the bed, his life draining from him in a bed-ruining mess, but Mom flopped out onto the floor after Tom hit her. He walked around the bed, stalking his mother as she butt-scooted away from him into the hall. Her jaw was shattered and hung off of her face like a ruined marionette’s, and Tom began to swing the bat back and forth as he came for her. She left a bloody trail, a smear and handprints on the floor behind her, and Tom brought the bat down again. Mom had been starting to make sense before he hit her, and that wasn’t going to stand, not today.

  As Tom looked up from Mom’s body, he saw his younger brother, Henry, staring at him from the other end of the hall.

  “Henry, there’s a robber in the house. He hurt Mom and Dad!”

  Henry was frozen in place, staring at his big brother. He knew something was wrong but couldn’t begin to guess what he should do about it.

  Tom knelt next to Mom’s still-shaking body and said, “Come on, Henry. We need to go in my room and call the police.”

  Tom grinned—Henry bought it. Tom dropped the bat as his brother approached him, and the two of them went to his room. Tom sat Henry down at his computer, amid his brother’s sobbing protests, and then sat on his bed with his eyes closed. A few minutes later the boys walked with stone faces into their parents’ bedroom and equipped themselves.

  Neither boy spoke as Tom drove them to the day care. In the trunk of the car were two Glock semiauto pistols, a pair of preban AR-15 carbines, and a number of magazines for both weapon types. All Tom could hear was the crackling of static electricity as he parked in front of the facility, and the two of them walked inside with pistols in their waistbands and long guns in their hands. There was silence in the day care, and then a woman began to scream. Sure that he recognized her from his tenure there years earlier but unable to place her name, Tom stopped worrying about it and cut her down with rifle fire. More adults began to flood the hallway at the noise, and then it was time to get it on.

  Tom and Henry moved from room to room, shooting random victims as they appeared and spraying bullets into cowering children. Tom felt flashes in his head, stark cuts to black-and-white messaging, which would then return him to his mission. Kill, reload, kill. Both boys worked at the task at hand for as long as they were able, and when the SWAT teams finally flooded into the carnage, the Nichols brothers sat down and fed each other bullets.

  Darryl fell onto the floor of the hotel room and began to dry-heave. Terry just stared at his friend, unable and unwilling to help. Finally, after a few minutes of unsuccessful voiding, Darryl dragged himself back to the bed and lay down.

  “Shut off the TV, Terry,” he said, but Terry didn’t respond, nor did he shut it off.

  The talking heads on CNN had given up on the dead girls in Mexico. The death count in Santa Cruz was still rising, and they were expecting it to get much higher than the eighteen deaths originally reported. Darryl watched video footage of a daisy chain of children being led from the building like a morbid conga line, then stood and shut the TV off himself.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” said Darryl. “It was too hot.”

  “Tell yourself whatever you have to,” said Terry. “Blame whoever you want, do whatever you need to so that you can wake up tomorrow, but this isn’t my fault. What happened in Mexico was on me, but this is on you, and you are going to need to live with it. Or not, I suppose. We’ve had a good run, but this planet would probably be better off without us.”

  Darryl left his sputtering friend in his dust, walked into the bathroom, and shut the door after him. He ran water over his face and then looked in the mirror, not even thinking about what he might see there in his dry state. Staring back at him was a man with sunken eyes and a purple topknot coming from his head. Darryl shook his head at his reflection. He knew he’d pushed it too hard with his possession of the brothers and their visit to the day care, but he also knew what he had to do.

  Darryl left the bathroom and immediately went to work on Terry, who fell to his side on the bed as Darryl put the bend on him. Terry was
shivering like the warm room was breath-foggingly frigid. Darryl forced himself to look at the ugly space between them, at Terry’s vibrant and angry red and his own ugly purple, and then slowly did the work of pushing the purple into Terry. This was exactly how the murders in Mexico had happened: he’d filled his friend too high up with the bad stuff, and some of it spilled. Terry shook like he was in the throes of an awful dream, but Darryl knew that when he woke, his friend would remember none of this. Finally, the threads between them were blue, and Terry began to snore on the bed.

  It’s your fault that he is the way he is, and it’s your fault that you had to fix it the way that you did. It was true, and there was nothing to do but accept what had happened.

  Darryl flicked the TV back on as Terry snored on the other bed and then gave a look to the tube. The death toll was up to twenty-six, and the shot from the helicopter showed a triage set up in the day care parking lot. Darryl lay down on the bed, letting the newscasters tuck him in, and when he slept it was without dreams.

  CHAPTER 25

  Mom picked up Cynthia from Mrs. Martin’s after a long day knocking on doors, and the two women exchanged pleasantries while Cynthia busied herself with Stanley and Libby. Cynthia listened to her mother thanking Mrs. Martin for the third or fourth time, and then her eyes caught on the happy green line extending from her own head to the bouncing Libby in front of her. Cynthia closed her eyes and reached out to the dog, not sure what she might find there. As her mind met Libby’s, Cynthia found none of the ugliness that had plagued the knot or the humans beneath it. As far as Cynthia could tell in her brief sojourn into dog territory, Libby was happy about the smells around her, happy about dinnertime, and very happy about the little girl kneeling before her.

  Cynthia broke the connection with the pooch as her mother said, “Cynth, you’re going to give that poor dog a nervous breakdown. Let her get some air.”

  “All right,” said Cynthia as she stood.

  “You be good, dear, and I’ll see you soon,” said Mrs. Martin, but in Cynthia’s mind, she heard / Crayons. Get her to buy you crayons / Cynthia smiled at the older woman, letting her know that she would do as she asked, without so much as a twitch from her lips, and Mom said, “Thanks again, Henrietta, we really do appreciate it.”

  “The pleasure was all mine,” said Mrs. Martin. “Smart, polite little ladies like Cynthia will always have a place at my table.”

  “Well, I really appreciate it. You got me out of a heck of a bind.”

  “It really was no trouble,” said Mrs. Martin, while above the pair of them Cynthia could see Mrs. Martin’s yellow threads wrapping around Mom’s red ones, slowly cooling them to blues and greens.

  Cynthia kept petting the dog and watched as the women talked, wondering what might happen if she was to try and do what Mrs. Martin had called weaving. You could find out exactly what Mrs. Martin is doing to her, exactly what Mom needs to hear and feel to be happy. Cynthia let the thought die a quick death. She didn’t want to spy on them, and besides, what if Mrs. Martin could tell what she was doing?

  Cynthia knew that Mrs. Martin wasn’t telling her the truth about everything but rather was only telling as much of the truth as she was comfortable telling a child. There was something disturbing about that, something Cynthia couldn’t quite put her finger on, but she had done a lot of growing in the last few days, and she wasn’t sure how much she trusted adults or the strange rules that they lived by. Adults get divorce and have affair, made you move on a whim, or see a black knot of pain in the back of the store. Worse, adults had thoughts about money instead of family.

  Cynthia looked down at the dog by her knee. Little Libby was wagging her tail, staring at her with sad eyes, and the strings connecting them were no longer green. Instead, red was pouring from Cynthia’s head, and Libby was sending trails of blue and green.

  Cynthia wanted to burst into tears—even the dog wanted her to feel better. Instead of crying, Cynthia stood as her mother said, “Time to go, buttercup,” and then waved at Mrs. Martin as she left the apartment.

  “I’ll see you soon,” said Mrs. Martin, and Cynthia smiled as the door closed after them.

  “I got us a pizza,” said Mom as she led the way up the stairs. “Half cheese, half supreme, so we can both be happy.”

  “That sounds good,” said Cynthia. “I’m superhungry.” That spun Mom around from putting the key in their door to look at her, and Cynthia didn’t need to see the red yarn to know what she was thinking. “I had plenty to eat, Mom. I’m just still hungry. Mrs. Martin wouldn’t forget to feed me.”

  Mom smiled—a thin one—and Cynthia found it interesting how quickly the older woman’s influence on Mom had worn off.

  “I hope not,” said Mom, “and I am glad that she could watch you, but you would tell me if things were bad there, right, Cynthia?”

  “What do you mean?” Cynthia asked, not sure entirely of what her mother was asking but also knowing that her mother wasn’t just asking if Mrs. Martin had told her to keep her mouth shut or to not drop as many crumbs on the floor. She wants to know if Mrs. Martin hurt you, if she touched you.

  “I just want to make sure that she was nice.”

  “She was really nice, Mom. We had milk and cookies—homemade, I think.” She told me about the Moirai, too, Mom, and she looked scared when I told her about Dad. In fact, I think she even lied a little about that part.

  “That’s good, Cynthia,” said Mom, turning back to the door and unlocking it but then turning again to Cynthia before leading them inside. “But we can always work something else out if you’d prefer not to go back.”

  “I want to go back,” said Cynthia. “I like her dogs, and Mrs. Martin said if I get my crayons that she can help me draw things.”

  Mom nodded and then led the way to the dining room table and opened the pizza box.

  “We’ll get you some new ones at the drugstore after dinner, honey. I’m not sure I have the energy to go see Dad right now.”

  “That would be great. I don’t need a lot,” said Cynthia, thinking to herself that the standard eight-pack would still have a few more shades than she needed.

  “Well, if that’s settled, let’s go ahead and eat,” said Mom.

  Cynthia smiled and sat at the table as Mom passed her a paper plate with a piece of cheese pizza on it, and as she ate, Cynthia felt sure that things were finally going to be OK.

  CHAPTER 26

  When Darryl woke it was still night, and Terry was still sleeping. Darryl looked at his slumbering friend, and then it all came back: Mexico, the murders, the day care, the purple shit coming from his head, and finally, passing that poison on to Terry. Darryl slipped from the bed and walked to the bathroom, telling himself as he made his way there that he was still going to be purple, or would maybe even be black by now. That would be fair, wouldn’t it? You blame your friend for what he does while you shit in his brain and kill a bunch of children so you can stay free.

  Darryl turned to the mirror as he entered the bathroom, not just ready but almost eager to see another premonition of his own death. He didn’t, though. His topknot was red, blue, and green. Darryl waved his fingers through it as though the strands could be physically moved, and he finally accepted there really was no purple or black to be seen. He knew what he’d find if he looked at Terry—a deep shade of violet—but in that moment he didn’t care. If you cared, you wouldn’t put that shit in him in the first place.

  After his shower, he found Terry sitting on the bed with a swirling mess of purple atop his head, grinning at the carnage on CNN like a child watching Saturday morning cartoons. Darryl suppressed the urge to get dressed, make up an excuse to leave, and never come back. What would be the point? You’d just need to find someone else like him to inject your venom into.

  “Dude,” said Terry without looking away from the screen, “you have to watch this.”

  He s
ounded like he was inviting Darryl to watch some gut-busting video of a guy getting accidentally whacked in the nuts.

  “Any updates on the other thing?” Darryl asked as he took a seat on the bed, and Terry shook his head in answer and pointed at the TV.

  The Nichols boys had stolen all of Terry’s thunder. The anchors were talking about gun control and barking about how “something needs to be done.” Darryl smiled at the chaos happening on the screen as an NRA rep was added to the fray via telephone. He had done this. He was influencing a national debate and possibly even driving the creation of some new laws.

  “These assholes act like they can actually stop this from happening, Darryl,” squealed Terry. “I mean, they really have no idea what happened, and they’re trying to play Monday morning quarterback. Fucking hacks, man. Can you even imagine if they knew?”

  Darryl shook his head. He couldn’t imagine the scale of the witch hunt that would begin if anyone had even an inkling of what he and Terry were up to. That wasn’t going to happen, though, not even if they got caught. Darryl wouldn’t let it. He had no doubt that there was a lab in a cave somewhere with a couple of kids who could bend being treated like lab rats, but he doubted the CIA or whoever was working the project had any luck getting their pets to do any tricks. At least not any tricks that matter.