by Julie Hyzy
“Where’s Mom?” Werner asked.
“Getting dressed,” his father said, gesturing toward the bedroom with his head. “Why are you home so early? She said you don’t get in until three.”
“Short day.” Werner tried to peer around his father’s bulky form. “Mom?” he called. “You okay?”
“She’s fine. Sleeping off a little too much of this.” His father winked as he hoisted his glass and took a deep gulp. “You know how she is.”
“What are you doing here?” Werner asked again.
The elder Trutenko bounced Paddy, who glanced around expectantly. Probably looking for food. “How come you never told me about this little guy?”
“What about him?”
“Your momma seems to be keeping secrets from me. Now, I know this rug rat ain’t mine, so I gotta ask, who’s the daddy?”
“What difference does it make?” Werner stammered. Why did confronting his father always make him so nervous?
“Don’t you mouth off to me, boy.”
Werner worked his jaw. Drawing a deep breath, he dropped his backpack to the floor and reached for Paddy. “Here, I’ll take him.”
His father stepped back. “Not so fast. Who’s the daddy?”
Werner wanted to tell him to put two and two together. But the last thing they needed was for him to beat up their red-haired landlord. Mr. Danaher would kick them to the street, son or no son.
The elder Trutenko swirled the whiskey in his glass before draining it and slamming it down on the kitchen table. “I’m waiting.”
Werner was saved from answering by the appearance of his mother stumbling out of the bedroom. Barefoot and clad only in a T-shirt, she kept her face down as she made her way toward them, one hand plastered against the wall for support. Her hair was tousled and her well-worn T-shirt, emblazoned with a local bar’s logo, was ripped.
“Whatcha doing home s’early?” she asked. Her words were slurred, but not the way they usually were when she had too much to drink.
Werner took a step toward her. “Mom, are you all right?”
When she looked up at him, he had his answer. Her bottom lip was fat and blood-crusted—the left half of her face, purple, swollen, scratched.
Werner started for her, but his father stepped into his way. “No, no. Not until you tell me more about this here toddler.” Again, he jiggled the little boy. “Your momma couldn’t seem to remember.”
Patrick, possibly sensing the escalating tension in the room, began to whimper. He reached for his brother. “Woonoo?”
“Listen,” Werner said. “He’s…uh, mine. I got my girlfriend pregnant and, well, that’s what happened.”
The elder Trutenko curled his mouth to the side. “Oh yeah? This is your little brat?”
“You’ve been gone so long, you couldn’t know anything about this,” Werner said as he reached for Patrick again. “Yeah, he’s mine. Hand him over.”
His father cracked him across the face. Werner stumbled backward. “Don’t you lie to me, boy. Your momma’s been stepping out on me, and you’re trying to protect her.”
Werner cupped a hand across his mouth. Blood dripped between his fingers. His mother slunk along the wall, wide-eyed and silent.
Patrick’s whimpers grew. “Woonoo,” he cried. “Woonoo.”
“Pause program,” Werner said.
Like that, the room went silent. His mother, father, and little Patrick froze in place. Werner took his time, examining each of them. This was the moment. This was when he should have grabbed Patrick, gotten him out of harm’s way, and beaten his father’s face into dog meat.
And yet, he hadn’t. He’d yielded to his teary-eyed mother begging him to let it go, just this once. It was her fault, she promised.
“It was your fault, Mom,” he said to her image. “Even after you knew what a monster this man was, you allowed him back into your life. Into your children’s lives.”
None of the images moved.
“You were a terrible mother,” he went on. “But you were all we had.” He walked closer to his father and lifted Patrick out of his arms. The little boy came alive again.
“Woonoo!” he said, wrapping his soft arms around Werner’s neck.
“I got you, buddy. You’re okay now.” He pointed to their mother. “You see? She chose booze over us.” He pointed to his father. “She chose him over us.”
Patrick rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.
Werner rubbed his little brother’s back. “Like most of the brainless fools in the world today, she made terrible decisions that affected people around her. People she swore she cared about.” Patrick blinked at him, confused. “Don’t you see? This is why we have to take control. We can’t allow society to be guided by people like her.”
Patrick pointed. “Momma sad,” he said. “Momma owwie face?”
“Yeah, buddy. Momma has an owwie on her face.” He pointed toward his father. “Bad guy.”
Patrick stared at the large man. “Bad guy?” he repeated.
“Yeah, you understand? He thinks he can control all of us. Even though he left us years ago, he believes he can step into our lives and order us all around. That’s wrong. I have my life. You have yours.” He glanced at their mother. “And even she has hers, such that it is. He needs to butt out.”
Toddler Patrick disappeared from Werner’s arms.
“Patrick?” He turned side to side. Their mother was still there, battered, teary, silent. His father still there, too, but motionless and looking ready to crush anyone in his path.
A second later, his brother reappeared, this time as an adult.
Werner took a step backward. “What the hell?”
Patrick raised both hands. “Don’t worry, I’m still just an image. You created me—or at least part of your brain did.” Grinning, he glanced at his upraised hands and turned the palms inward. “All grown up now, am I?”
“I don’t understand.”
Patrick tilted his head. “Look, I only know what your mind wants me to process. Apparently, I’m here to argue with you.”
“About what?”
Patrick pointed to Werner’s father. “What did you just say a minute ago, when you were holding me? That he believes he has the right to control all of us? And how that’s wrong?”
“Yes, why?”
“If you really believe everything you just said, how do you reconcile that with helping Celia with her mind-control plans?”
“You’re just an image in a VR scenario. How do you know about that?”
“Werner,” Patrick said, not unkindly, “your mind created me. I know everything you do.”
Werner studied their mother and his father again. “She should have stood up to him.”
“I know.”
“She should have tried harder; she lived her whole life in the bottle.”
“I know that, too,” Patrick said.
“I couldn’t protect her.”
“You were a kid,” Patrick said.
“I’m not a kid now. I have power. The power to protect the world from itself.”
“The world needs to find its own way. How else can you expect humans to learn and evolve?” Patrick shook his head slowly. “But you’re right: You do have power to protect the world. You can save us from Celia.”
Werner sat on the floor. “You’re telling me that I should abandon the Virtu-Tech initiative. You’re telling me it’s wrong.”
“Technically,” Patrick said, “you’re telling yourself.” He jerked a thumb. “Back in the real world, your flesh-and-blood brother tried, but you didn’t want to listen. You hate that you’ve made mistakes. I understand that. But instead of recognizing how to make things right, you’re doubling down on bad decisions and making things worse.”
“But we’re the good guys,” Werner
said. “Aren’t we?”
“We were.” Patrick drew a breath. “Not so much anymore.”
“Patrick is working with the dissidents, isn’t he?”
Patrick shrugged. “I’m just an image. I don’t know. But I have my suspicions. Which means so do you.”
Werner dropped his head into his hands. “End program.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Vanessa left the bedroom lights on this time. When Adrian climbed on top of her, she noticed a blue tattoo near his left shoulder.
“What’s this?”
Ignoring the question, he grunted, spread her legs, and pushed inside.
Vanessa stiffened at the sudden onslaught. It hurt. He hadn’t so much as even tried to make her ready. She struggled to force her body to relax as he began moving. A puff of air shot into her face with each thrust and the pungent tang of body odor assailed her nose. His eyes were clenched, and he moved into a too-fast rhythm. In no time, she’d be raw.
“Could you,” she kept her voice low, but it wavered. “Could you slow down, just a little?”
Pale eyes flipped open to stare down at her. His face, unusually pallid, took on a grotesque, furious expression—but he didn’t stop his hurried thrusts. “I only need a couple more minutes,” he said, then closed his eyes again. “Enjoy it.”
Chastised, she bit her lip and looked away. She wondered why he kept his eyes closed. Maybe he was picturing someone else. The thought made her want to shove him away, but his angry outburst made her afraid. She kept silent and turned her head.
Vanessa took a deep breath when he rolled off. She took a better look at him. The blond hair flat against his head and the sheen of grease on his skin made it obvious he hadn’t showered today. She wrinkled her nose.
“Yessss.” He sprawled across the bed. Lacing his fingers behind his head, he stared at the ceiling for a half minute before closing his eyes. “It’s been a helluva day,” he said.
The throbbing pain, his casual disregard for her comfort, and the fact that he’d never so much as offered to take her out anywhere, to dinner, to a concert…to anything…suddenly bubbled up in a flash of indignation. “So who were you thinking about just then?” she asked him, knowing she sounded petulant. Wanting him to hear the sarcasm in her voice.
He opened one eye and looked at her sideways. “I was thinking about my girl,” he said, turning to face her. He propped his right elbow on the pillow and rested his head in his hand. A smile broke out over his relaxed features and he ran a hand along her bare belly. “You’re my girl, aren’t you?”
Hardly mollified, Vanessa nonetheless mirrored his position. As she faced him, the blue tattoo caught her eye again. She touched his arm. “What’s this?” she asked as she boosted herself up to see.
Adrian’s face split into a grin. “That,” he said, his voice a notch higher than before, “is my badge of honor.”
Vanessa knelt next to him, tilting her head to make the design out better. The bright blue infinity sign with the company name split between the two bubbles surprised her. “This is the Virtu-Tech logo,” she said. “Why in the world would you have that tattooed onto your skin?”
The wide grin drooped a little. “Why do you think? I’m damn proud of what I do. This tattoo,” he said, lifting his head enough to allow the fingers of his right hand to reach around and finger the design, “represents all the work I did to get where I am today.”
“You never told me you worked for them.”
Settling his head back onto his right hand, Tate nodded. “Must have forgotten to mention it.” He chuckled as though he remembered the punch line to a joke he hadn’t told her yet. His eyes clouded as he continued. “I dropped out of envoy school to join them. Best decision I ever made.”
Vanessa had never heard of anyone dropping out of envoy school of their own volition, but she let that slide.
“And so you took up with these guys?” she asked, touching the tattoo again.
“Yep,” he said. “Soon as I was on board, I celebrated by getting myself this tattoo. I look at it in the mirror to remind myself of all I’ve accomplished.”
She nodded, eased herself back down. “What do you do for them?”
“What do I do? Everything,” he said, lifting both eyebrows and glancing away long enough for Vanessa to imagine that he was revisiting some recent memory. His free hand wandered down his body to scratch. “I’m damn good, too.”
“I bet you are,” she said, suppressing a shudder from the memory of their recent coupling. Maybe over time she could get him to be more attentive, get him to slow down. Or maybe she should dump him and be done with it.
“Take these damn dissidents for example,” he said. He was suddenly animated, more alert than ever. “You know what they’ve been up to, don’t you?”
“I know what I’ve read. They’re protesting Virtu-Tech’s monopoly. They’re calling for a boycott,” she said. “But there’s only a handful of them out there. I doubt they’ll have much impact.”
“Nah, that’s nothing. I mean the real stuff.”
Vanessa shook her head, not understanding. She stared up at him. “What real stuff?”
“They’ve been blowing up VR centers across the country. People are getting hurt. Some are even dying. Why? Just because the dissidents believe that VR is bad for you. Is that a good enough reason to go around killing people?”
“Whoa.” Vanessa shook her head again. Her voice edged with sharp skepticism before she could quell it. “I haven’t heard about any VR centers being blown up.”
“Yeah, well, the media keeps stuff like that quiet.”
“Give me a break. These dissidents are passive folks. Nobody’s gotten killed because of them. Nobody even gets hurt. The whole point of the movement is to protest violence and the simulated brutality in VR scenarios. Sure, they’ve tried to hack into VR systems, but so far they haven’t had much luck,” Vanessa’s words trailed away as she remembered the blip of static in Charlie’s final scenario. “Except…”
“What?” he asked.
“Probably nothing,” she said. “It’s just that I found something today that makes me think our place was recently hacked.”
“Yeah?”
“It happened during the scene where Cha—one of our envoys—was killed.” She grimaced. “I mean, I tried to trace it down, but it looks like whoever got into our system came through Virtu-Tech’s mainframe first.”
Adrian had a peculiar look on his face. Vanessa couldn’t read him.
He pursed his lips for a moment. “You say you found this today?”
“Yeah,” she answered, wishing she hadn’t mentioned a word of it. “A couple of minutes before you called.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“I’d hate for you to talk to the wrong people about this.” Adrian continued looking at her in that peculiar way. “You could get into trouble.”
She decided to change the subject. “So why did you drop out of envoy school?”
“It was boring,” he said. “I’m smarter than they are, and they knew it. I needed a bigger challenge, so I figured I’d work in the private sector. Best decision I ever made.”
His gaze had wandered somewhere over her shoulder, but now he brought his attention back to her.
Vanessa sat up. “Sounds like fun,” she said. Yawning, she glanced over at the clock. “I have a busy day tomorrow, so maybe we ought to call it a night.”
“Kicking me out?” he asked.
For the first time, Vanessa felt as though she held the upper hand. “I wouldn’t put it that way.”
He rolled off the bed and got to his feet. “All right. Have it your way.” He picked up his underwear and threw it out the bedroom door.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“You said you have a busy day tomorrow, right?”
“Right.”
Next, he picked up his khaki pants, then changed his mind, dropping them to the floor by his bare feet. The pants hit the ground with the sound of a landing brick.
“What do you have in there?” she asked.
Tate stood for a long moment, staring down, apparently deep in thought. He picked up the pants but didn’t put them on. Still naked, he remained motionless, intent, as though he were working out a problem in his mind. Finished, he lifted his face, and grinned at her. It wasn’t a pleasant look, but Vanessa didn’t understand it, so she smiled back. “What’s in there?” she asked again, trying to sound playful.
“In here?” He shoved his right hand into the pants pocket.
“Yeah.”
“Who else knows about this hacker trail you found?”
Vanessa stopped herself from mentioning Kenna. Her gut shot the lie up to her lips. “Nobody. Why?”
He shook his head, slowly, from side to side. “I can’t have you tracing that down,” he said.
“What’s going on?”
He grinned again, and just as Vanessa wondered how a person could look so crazed when smiling, he pulled a thick-barreled revolver out and pointed it at her.
Vanessa screamed.
“Shut up,” he said.
She screamed again, pulling the covers tighter as though they’d protect her. Frozen, she couldn’t run, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t even think.
“Shhhh,” Adrian said, moving closer. He moved onto the bed with one knee and grabbed a pillow with his free hand. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Close now, he shoved the pillow against Vanessa’s bare chest, pushing her up against the grooved headboard. She was acutely aware of its hard and uneven surface against her back even as she stared at the firearm’s barrel pointed straight at her. Instant sweat popped from every pore on her body. Streams leaked down her face from her forehead, stinging her eyes.
With the gun tight into the pillow’s center against her breast, Adrian yanked Vanessa’s protective sheets away and straddled her.
For a wild, hopeful second, Vanessa thought maybe this was some weird game he liked to play, and if she went along he’d finish and let her go and she’d never have to see him again. The gun couldn’t be loaded. It couldn’t be. This had to be some sort of twisted, sick fantasy.