Though Benny was my only friend, Rick was family. After my father’s murder, I lived with the Levingworths for many years. Even though I begged Mrs. Levingworth to let me move back home, she didn’t let me go until I was seventeen. The result was that Rick was forced to share his house and his parents with me. He’d been an only child and now he suddenly had a brother. And it didn’t help that Mrs. Levingworth, his mom, acted like she was my mom and treated me as if I were her son. When it came to presents, attention, and even love, she never favored him over me.
And not only did I ruin Rick’s home life, but I also ruined his life at school. As soon as I moved in, kids at school started making fun of him. He was permanently linked to the weird kid. They’d taunt him and tease him and when it got to be too much, he’d fight back. Rick was strong and fearless so it was always his tormentors who’d end up with the bloody noses and fat lips. But I knew Rick’s punches were really meant for me. After decking a kid, he’d sometimes scan the crowd of kids watching and he’d lock eyes with me. He didn’t look triumphant. He looked angry as if he were telling me that the punches he’d just unleashed were meant for me instead of the kid on the ground. I was the one who deserved to be laid out flat, dazed and bloodied.
Still, Rick never taunted me or punched me. But he didn’t defend me either. At school, he didn’t speak to me and, at home, he ignored me. And that’s how it stood for the first six years of our forced brotherhood. Then everything changed.
It was the last day of school, eighth grade, and I was supposed to go home with Benny. Jack Forman was having an end-of-school-year party at his house and Rick was heading over there. Benny and I weren’t invited.
After school, Jack changed his mind and invited me. He wasn’t one of the kids who regularly ambushed me, so I wasn’t suspicious. Maybe Mrs. Levingworth had been right all along. She was always saying that one day the kids would come around. Maybe today was that day.
I didn’t have the guts to ask Jack if Benny could come to the party, too. I was too happy for my own reversal of fortune. So I told Benny that I’d come over tomorrow and I ignored his disappointment. I convinced myself that if I made headway with some of these kids, he’d benefit, too.
I took off with Jack and five other kids, and one of those kids was Gary Ledic. That should’ve tipped me off. Before Ledic grew into a nasty adult, he’d been a mean kid. A mean kid who reveled in plotting and executing cruel pranks. In elementary school, he’d told Benny that he’d seen some electronic Remnants in Grainer’s boathouse. The boathouse had been abandoned for fifty years so Benny imagined that it might just hold some hidden treasures. Benny went to check it out and Ledic locked him in. For two days, everyone in Clearview thought marauders had killed Benny. But Ledic bragged so much about his deed that the truth got out and Benny was rescued.
I headed to Jack’s house with Jack, Ledic, and four other kids. We cut through Glenn Field Woods, but when we were crossing the bridge over the Mory Aqueduct, the kids all stopped. I didn’t know why and thought that maybe they were going to do some kind of end-of-school-year ritual. I realized I was completely wrong exactly one second later when Ledic stepped up to me and said, “Why are you always studying?”
“I’m not,” I said.
“Liar,” he snorted, and shoved me into the bridge’s railing.
I looked over at Jack, hoping that the invitation to the party was still genuine, but when he grinned at me and all the kids closed ranks around me, I accepted the harsh reality that I’d walked right into another ambush. And I could tell this one was different. It wasn’t going to be just punches to the gut and face, followed by laughter.
“We don’t want you back next year,” Ledic said.
“Come on, Gary,” I said. “Let’s just go to the party.”
Right then, Bill Ely and Walt Becket lunged for my legs and Ledic grabbed my arms, and they pinned me back against the bridge’s railing. I tried to free myself, but I couldn’t. I could’ve handled any one of them, but all three were too much.
Ledic looked at the other kids and said, “So you got the story down, right? We got here and dared each other to walk on top of the railing. Then it was Roy’s turn and he was doing good until he got all scared and tripped and fell.”
Fear suddenly swept up from the pit of my stomach. It was a hundred foot drop to the concrete channel below and the channel was empty. There’d be no water to cushion my fall. Ledic wanted me dead and he was going to make it happen right here. I tried to think straight.
Ledic repeated, “You got the story down, right?”
The kids all nodded and I kicked out as hard as I could, freeing one of my legs and knocking Bill off balance. Ledic and Walt instantly tightened their grips on me and Bill, now angry, punched me in the balls. I grunted in pain and doubled over.
“Let’s finish this up,” Ledic ordered, and the three of them wrestled me onto the top of the railing and pinned me down. I had to stop struggling. Any wrong move now and I’d tumble off into the concrete below.
Ledic hovered over me, his face lit up with smug satisfaction. I’d die in the Mory Aqueduct and Ledic would be proud of his achievement. He’d relish it for years.
Ledic looked to Bill and Walt. “On three,” he said.
I hoped that a rush of water would fill the aqueduct below, but I knew that no water would flow through the Mory Aqueduct that day.
“One,” Ledic said.
I braced myself.
“Two.”
Bill and Walt moved their arms to my side, ready to shove me over.
“Three—”
“Stop!” It was Rick’s voice, and he sounded angrier than I’d ever heard him. Angrier than when he yelled at his mom for showering more affection on me than on him.
“This is none of your fucking business,” Ledic said.
“Get away from him,” Rick said as he stepped up to Ledic.
“Why you defending this piece of shit? We’re doing you a favor.”
Ledic was right. If I died, Rick would have his life back. But Rick said, “Because he’s part of my family. That’s why.”
And that hit me in the heart. I felt it. It bonded us forever. Not because I thought Rick and I were now friends, but because of exactly what he’d said. I was part of the Levingworth family.
Rick shoved Ledic away from me, grabbed one of my legs, and pulled me off the railing.
I toppled onto the bridge, scrambled to my feet, and saw that all the kids were staring at Ledic. They wanted him to fight back.
Rick was waiting, too, glaring at Ledic, daring him to escalate this.
Ledic swung at Rick who dodged the punch and threw his own. It exploded into Ledic’s nose and we all heard the pop of cartilage as Ledic’s head flew back and he crumbled to the ground.
Rick looked around to see if anyone else wanted a broken nose. None of the kids said anything. They were staring down at Ledic who was looking up at the sky, his eyes watering and glazed over, blood oozing from his nose and running down his face.
Rick turned to Jack, “Benny wants to come to your party, too. You got a problem with that?”
Jack didn’t.
The party was okay. Rick hung out with the other kids and I hung out with Benny. Nothing changed between the other kids and me, but everything changed between Rick and me. It wasn’t that we became blood brothers or anything like that, but his attitude toward me changed. He no longer resented me, he accepted me, and I wanted to pay him back for that. I wanted to show him that, yes, I was part of his family. I paid him back through computers.
Kids resented me, but envied my knowledge of computers. I could fix them better than Jim Givens, whose job it was to fix them. I learned how to fix computers from manuals my dad had salvaged over the years and, for a while, I was obsessed with computers.
A few families in Clearview were lucky enough to have computers that worked and they used them for accounting or watching movies or playing games or listening to music. But that was about it
. And when those computers broke down, these families held on to them, hoping Jim Givens could eventually fix them. But replacement hardware was hard to come by. Those kinds of Remnants turned up less and less, so over the decades there were fewer and fewer working computers.
Computers were also part of Corolaqua’s water purification system. They ran simple software. Simple enough that Jim could work on it if necessary. A set of instructions about the software had been passed down to him from Clearview’s previous computer worker and that worker had gotten it from his predecessor. The focal point of Jim’s job was to keep Corolaqua’s computers working, so the one thing he knew well was this set of instructions. (I’d concluded that fuel towns and electric towns must’ve also had computers that still worked, also with someone in charge of their upkeep, but I didn’t know for sure. I did know that every town in the Territory had a computer connected to the Line.)
Now, when it came to any other kind of software, the story was entirely different. Jim could rarely fix the problem, and knowledge of how to fix software was impossible to track down. Software itself was even more impossible to track down. That’s why Jim’s number one job was to make sure he never lost the knowledge needed to keep Corolaqua’s primitive set-up running.
But I didn’t need to track down new software. I could fix, modify, or improve all kinds of software and I could write new software. My obsession with computers started while I was living with the Levingworths. There, I taught myself programming and learned how to modify the software behind computer games. A few years later, I’d progressed to designing new games.
So I ended up paying Rick back by teaching him about computer games. During the summer that followed the Mory Aqueduct confrontation, I rebuilt a computer and gave it to him. Then I showed him how to play all the computer games I’d collected, modified, or designed. Within a year, his computer ran the best games in Clearview. Every kid wanted to play them.
For Rick and me, those games became our common ground and, as the years passed, computers, themselves, became our common ground. Rick developed a talent for programming and I fed that talent. After we finished high school, he became the go-to guy for software help and, if there was a problem he couldn’t fix, I’d help him.
The day Victor Crow walked into Rick’s house was one of those days when Rick couldn’t fix a problem.
He was working on a project for Ellen Sanchez, the phone operator in Clearview. Before the Virus, parent switches in cities ran all phone service. The parent switches controlled the remote switches in small towns (like Clearview), but after the Virus killed off the cities, no one was left to operate the parent switches, so all phone service broke down.
Decades later, when the Territory finally stabilized, a few towns figured out how to manually operate the remote switches and a basic kind of phone service was restored. But you could only call within your own town. This was the system that Ellen Sanchez inherited from her predecessors. But unlike them, she wasn’t satisfied with running the phone system like it’d always been run. She’d been one of the smartest students in school (though she’d kept that hidden), but now wanted to apply her smarts. She wanted to computerize the mechanical system of switching, so she began to work on an algorithm to do that.
It took her a while, but she came up with one. Then she asked Rick to convert it into a computer program and it took him a while, too, but he came up with one. Ellen implemented the program and it worked pretty well, but it had a few bugs. Some calls weren’t going through. So she asked Rick to do more work on it and he asked me to come over and help.
Rick and I were going through the original coding of the algorithm. We were in the basement and two Fibs were upstairs. These were two of the three dozen in town, preparing for the rumored marauder attack. Mrs. Levingworth was hosting them and so far they’d pretty much ignored Rick, which was fine with him.
I went upstairs to use the bathroom and I heard the front door open and close. Then a voice said, “Are we alone?” The voice was deep and unassailable, the voice of a man who didn’t like to be questioned.
“No, sir,” came the answer.
“Then clear the house,” the voice said.
I headed back to the basement and told Rick that the Fibs were about to kick us out. We’d have to work at my house. So he started downloading the program but didn’t get too far when the basement door opened.
I saw polished black boots descending the stairs. The boots gave way to a pair of crisp brown pants and a pressed brown shirt. The Fib uniform. Only this uniform was more distinguished than all the other uniforms I’d seen around town. It wasn’t decorated with medals or signs of rank, but it still looked like it belonged to someone in command. Maybe it was the silver belt buckle that gave that impression. A polished silver block with no insignia, perfect in its simplicity and beauty.
The man behind that silver buckle made it to the bottom of the staircase. Victor Crow. A big man. Composed, controlled, and confident. But there was an undertone of menace to that confidence.
“Gentlemen, you’re going to have to clear out of the house for thirty minutes or so,” he said.
“No problem,” Rick said, glancing at the computer to see how the download was going. “Another four minutes and we’ll be out of your way.”
Crow’s attention went to the computer. “What are you working on?”
“Helping our phone operator,” Rick said.
Crow’s eyes shifted from the computer to the external hard drives, then to the cables. “How are you helping the phone operator?” he said. The subtext was clear: Don’t lie to me.
Rick, nervous, glanced at me, and I answered, “We’re working on a computer program to route phone calls.”
“Phone switching doesn’t need computers. It’s mechanical,” Crow said.
Right then I knew that the Territory’s top cop was smart. In a time when knowledge was scarce and when workers knew only what they had to know to do their jobs, he knew more than his job required. Way more.
Crow stared at me like he was waiting for further explanation. His expression was hard and I saw that menace wanting to break out.
“She came up with an automated way to do the switching,” I said.
“And why did she bring you two in on it?” he said.
The only answer was that we knew software, but I sensed that blurting that out was a big mistake. Still, I had no choice. “Because I know a little about programming,” I said.
I hoped that by saying ‘I’ instead of ‘we,’ I was protecting Rick. I owed him that and much more.
“That’s a rare talent,” Crow said. He looked at Rick, “Do you have it, too?”
Before Rick could answer, I said, “No.” I was determined to bail him out.
Crow looked back at me. “And the phone operator? Does she know how to program?”
“No,” I said, “That’s why she came to me with the idea.” I was digging my own grave, but I was keeping Rick out of his. And Ellen.
Crow stared at me for a few seconds as if he were preparing to pass final judgment. But before he could, the other Fibs came down the stairs. They didn’t say a word. They probably felt the danger hanging in the air.
“Destroy the computer and other equipment,” Crow said.
The two Fibs moved to the computer and one of them pushed it off the table. It crashed down onto the concrete floor and the Fib kicked in its screen with his thick boot, then stomped on it, again and again, until the computer was nothing but broken pieces of plastic and smashed circuits.
Rick and I tried not to betray any emotion.
The other Fib knocked the external drives to the floor and stomped on them, crushing them into oblivion.
Crow said to me, “We all have jobs to do and I don’t know what yours is, but I know it’s not programming. That’s not a job.” He headed back upstairs with his men in tow. He didn’t have to say anything more.
There was no actual law against working on computers, but everyone in the Terr
itory did their jobs and nothing more. That was the key to order, and order was the key to survival. Crow saw me as a threat to that order and that’s what he’d basically said.
But I wasn’t enough of a threat to follow up on. At least, not yet. He didn’t pursue me, or Rick, or Ellen. And after he left Clearview, I never saw him again.
Until today.
Chapter Twelve
From the cover of the woods, I watched Crow and his men climb into one of the SUVs and pull out of the lodge’s parking lot. I wondered if he’d come to Yachats for the same reason he had come to Clearview. The threat of a marauder attack. Or had he come because of the water? But he must’ve already known about the storage facility. Even though each town didn’t know much about other towns, the Fibs knew everything about each and every town. It was their job to know. That’s how they kept order.
I watched Crow’s SUV drive down the road and out of sight, then focused back on the parking lot. The other SUVs meant that other Fibs were still in the lodge, so stealing a car was out. It’d be safer to continue hiking toward town and check houses along the way for another car. So that’s what I did.
I kept parallel to the road, but stayed hidden in the forest. I passed a few isolated houses, but none of them boasted cars. As I moved closer to town, I started to wonder if turning myself in was a better idea. If the Fibs had bigger fish to fry, like preventing a marauder attack, maybe they’d forgive my panicked escape and overlook the fact that I didn’t have a proper visa. And even if they didn’t overlook it, at least I’d know my fate. Five years in the penitentiary in Devinbridge.
Still, the thought of being locked up wasn’t too appealing. So I convinced myself again that there was just enough chaos in the Territory that if I were able to get back to Clearview without causing any more trouble, the Fibs might forget about me or just let me go. Like Crow had done the first time around. And this line of thinking led to another decision. I wouldn’t steal a car. Stealing a car meant breaking more laws and that played against settling back into Clearview without further trouble.
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