He nodded, as if expecting that. “I had to check though, just in case they had come back up.” He turned to leave but Ben coughed and made it clear that he had more to say. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to have this conversation right now and the young boy might not like that he started this once it was finished.
“Could you lock the door? I think it’s time you and I got some things off our chest,” the young boy said, as if taking his measure and pointing at the door. His voice sounded more mature, more serious than he had ever heard it before. But at the same time, he sounded weary, as if he was tired of handling things on his own.
“There are no secrets here,” he responded, not moving in the direction the boy was indicating and drawing a smirk from the boy in response.
“Oh, yes there are and you know it. You just think we have time to talk about it later, but I ask you, what if there isn’t a later?” Ben returned, an eyebrow rising. “If when we are done, you want to tell the others what we talk about here, then I leave it to you and your judgment. But until you hear me out, I’d prefer this stay between us.”
“You want to do this now? Then we’ll do it now,” he stated, letting his anger show as he moved to the door and shut it, flipping the lock. It was more of a symbolic thing as most everyone had keys to the door, but if it made the boy feel more like opening up, then what could it hurt? “First I want to know why you didn’t tell us what Sean was doing this morning. You have been at that computer all morning, the security feeds are running, and you can’t tell me you didn’t see him go in there and shoot himself.”
“Actually, I can tell you that,” Ben responded. He pulled up the camera feeds to the other compound, most of the rooms were dark, but the feed that showed the entertainment room was nothing but static. “Now, I could say someone did this or did that, but since we both know who did it I’ll dispense with the third person shit. Sean pulled the plug on the camera in the entertainment room, as well as the rest of the feeds leading from the tunnels to that hallway. So the moment you came near the compound, I lost track of where you were and what you were doing. The bastard just pulled the power plugs right out from behind the cameras, I have video of him doing just that.” He pulled up a recorded feed that showed a very aware and sober Sean stepping on a stool to fiddle with the camera. Then the screen went blank.
“Why would he do that, why would he care if we saw it after it was done?” he asked. “And why didn’t you see him doing it?”
“He made sure to do it while we were at that meeting this morning. Nobody was here to see the feeds start to drop; the bastard timed it that way. That’s why he was the last to show up,” Ben told him with a sneer.
“I don’t understand why, though,” he said shaking his head. Some of the anger he had felt for the boy was starting to slip; Ben hadn’t really known what Sean was up to after all. “If he was just going to kill himself, what was the point? He had to know we’d go looking and find him eventually anyways.”
“How well do you think we knew that guy?” Ben asked him, dodging the question posed to him.
He had to think it through. “We know that he was a famous author, that he had money from investments he had made, and that he seemed like an honest trustworthy man.”
The boy actually laughed at that point. “That he did, but we didn’t really know him, did we? Other than those times we met with him here, we didn’t really see him in the real world, we never got invited to his home; never thought to look at him because the money seemed surreal enough without probing further. But I’m telling you, we didn’t know the first thing about the man and I never truly trusted him.”
“Why not?” he asked, wondering what the boy had seen that he didn’t. He liked to think he was a good judge of character and that Sean had somehow fooled him had never crossed his mind before. Ben paused and fiddled with his mouse. Then he got up, went over to the fridge, and took out a brown bottle with a black label. “Does your father know you have that?” he asked in surprise as the boy set down two glasses and poured them both a shot of Jack Daniels.
“What’s he going to do, ground me?” Ben returned with a smirk. “I’m not the young innocent nerd you all think me to be, I have my vices. I’m almost twenty-one, I’m sure that a few months don’t matter at this point, right?”
He was going to have to make another adjustment to his thinking today; first his daughter and now Ben. When he had first met the boy, he had been seventeen with acne and big horn-rimmed glasses. He just hadn’t been able to shake the first impression he had and should have realized that the boy was no longer there; that he had become a man. That if anything could mature someone, it was the horrible things he had been forced to witness and the deaths he probably felt responsible for.
It would have hit him pretty hard as well.
He fingered his glass as Ben swallowed his down. He took a sip and the boy wiped his mouth, giving him a miserable smile.
“You don’t know what it’s been like, being the lone torch bearer of all this shit. I hate doing this by myself. After I met Sean and started working here, I was taken in like the rest of you. He gave me toys, set me free, and told me that any idea that seemed feasible he’d help make a reality. Who could turn something like that down? Then a year goes by and he approaches me about doing more with the security system I set up than just using it for our purposes; of possibly marketing my work. Well, I thought, why not right? I didn’t think it was on par with a lot of the other security programs out there, but if he wanted to take advantage of my work; which he had essentially paid for, who was I to say no right? So I went about setting up other computer systems for him, always during times that no one else was around other than my parents, and he gave me plenty of praise and perks to keep me busy and happy. I never thought to question any of it.”
“None of us questioned what we were doing, we were all too wrapped up in actually being able to do it, to have the money there to make it happen,” he told the young man, shaking his head in wonderment. “What changed for you?”
Ben poured himself another drink and was silent for a moment. “You know, the network I set up here and the security system I created, they are specific to what we are doing and what we might need it for. You don’t know this, but there have been upgrades to the systems, things none of us ever considered, but Sean did. He sent techies out and did upgrades while he was here at the compound. He’d send my family off on vacation and act like he was only here to help maintain things and to give us a break, but when I got back, I could tell that someone had been in my system and accessing my work.”
“He was getting you guys out of here so he could have someone else come in and change things? Without consulting any of us?” he asked in surprise. “How did he think he’d be able to pull it off without someone figuring it out? What was he doing?”
“I installed a key logger on the system, I never told Sean that,” he smirked, taking another drink. He got up to get a couple of Red Bulls and started pouring part of one into his half empty glass of Jack. “Want another?”
“Got a Coke in there?” he asked, not wanting to drink too much, there were a lot of things he had to do today. He wasn’t so sure he should let Ben get drunk either, but he wasn’t his father and as the boy pointed out, he was old enough to make his own choices. Besides, he had a feeling that this story was going to get quite dark and maybe he needed the alcohol in order to get through it.
Ben handed him a cold can of Coke and he popped it, took a drink, then poured some into his glass of Jack to offset the strength of the alcohol.
“Sean installed upgrades to the compound’s defense systems. We had the basics going, but he brought in some serious hardware and that bothered me; not that he did it, but how could he afford it? He told us he was an author and we actually knew the books that he had written, but even then, there had to be more to his finances than we ever imagined.
“What kind of upgrades?” he asked, trying to think if he saw anything out of plac
e while taking some of his short walks recently.
“You know, turrets along the walls that have motion detection firing, laser perimeters, some real high tech sci-fi bullshit. An electrical grid that is beyond me, something that you and I can look at later if you like. I just know that the solar panels are not generating all the power we’re using and the generators aren’t running. I’m a computer nerd and I need someone else to help me figure it out. I don’t know if any of it works. If they tested it, they did it while we were away. I know that it got hidden in the subroutines to be remotely accessed, probably by Sean, but if I hadn’t had that key logger installed I might not have known they were there. Anyways, my point is, I didn’t understand how he was financing any of this and still had the money to do whatever else it is he does when he wasn’t here,” Ben said, pausing. “So I poked around.”
“Of course you did,” he smirked, taking a drink and feeling the alcohol starting to ease the tension in his body.
“First thing I found when I started looking were dossiers on all of us, everything that ever happened—ever. There were even interviews with people I went to school with; which surprised the shit out of me,” the young man told him, trying to convey just how far Sean had gone on his research. “Credit reports, online activities, and by the way, those are some scary porn sites my friend,” he said with a wink.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied quickly, the blood rushing to his face. Holy shit, had anything been private?
Ben nodded. “He did that with everyone, in depth.”
“The man told me he never did anything without researching it first, but shit, what gave him the right?” he responded angrily.
The young man only nodded in understanding. “He was investing money in this place, but he was also investing with us. If things did go to shit, he wanted to know exactly who he was going to be living with, to weed out any surprises that might crop up later.”
He tried to nod that he understood that, but part of him still felt violated. “No wonder you didn’t want anyone else knowing. I’m sure they’ll feel just as appalled as I do.”
Ben shook his head. “We are not even close to why I want this kept between us at the moment. After I found those, I knew that the man had to have more out there that he was keeping from us, so I kept digging. Before he was an author, he used to run a firm that dealt with weapons manufacturing. Like, defense department shit. He made a ton of money doing that before he sold his company to retire and become an author. That’s why most of his sci-fi books seemed so realistic; he had friends in the industry that were working on some of those ideas already! It’s how he got his hands on the weapons we have in the armory, how he could build those upgrades into our systems; he had friends that helped him get his hands on that kind of equipment. No civilian, even a rich one, could purchase some of the shit we use; there are too many regulations and safeguards out there, too much paperwork. He cut right through it using his connections and he had the money to back the whole thing up from the sellout of his company. He had invested all that money in different industries and had his fingers in a lot of different pockets. I’m not so sure that he wouldn’t have built this place if we hadn’t suggested it; he was the type that would have built it eventually anyway—we just gave him the push.”
“I thought he was moderately rich, not insanely. He didn’t act like anything other than an author getting material for his next book and building toys to play with on the side,” he muttered, trying to absorb all that his young friend was saying.
“Why are there three compounds?” the younger man asked him straight. “Why not just one big one?”
“We wanted to keep the compound we were living in isolated from the one with the gate; since those were usually the weakest point of any fortified structure,” he responded, remembering the exact details of that discussion from so long ago.
“Okay, but then that’s two, why is there a third?” Ben probed, as if trying to make him think it through himself.
“He said he wanted a backup plan,” he responded. “In case things went to shit here, we’d have a place to fall back too.”
Ben took another drink and his eyes were blazing. “Exactly! He loved his redundancies. Everything needed to have a backup, the systems, the compounds, everything. Now, let me ask you this, what would happen if this outbreak started when he was in, say—New York?”
“He’d have a hell of a long flight getting here,” he returned, not sure where Ben was going with this, but getting a tickle somewhere in the back of his mind.
“Do you really think that he’d chance having to travel across the country? Think about his obsessive need for a backup plan. Does it make sense that he’d stop at just building one set of compounds?”
“Wait, what?” he asked, his mind reeling. “What are you talking about? Are you saying there’s some secret tunnel that runs deeper into the mountains to some other base he set up? That would take more than a weekend vacation to hide from you, wouldn’t it? How would we not see it?”
Ben was shaking his head. “I’m not talking about here. I’m saying in general. Does it make sense that he stopped at only building our compounds here in Arizona? How often did he fly this way? It’s like that old saying about not keeping all your eggs in one basket; don’t you think he’s spread his out? Did he give you any resistance at all in building this in your own home state or did it just slide past him like it didn’t matter?”
He was trying to keep up, but maybe the alcohol was affecting him more than he thought because his thoughts were all jumbled and hard to sort out. “You lost me,” he finally admitted.
“You don’t think that Sean put all his money into building just one place, do you? He could be anywhere in the world when this thing broke out and he wanted to make sure that no matter what, he had a place to go. Do you really think he banked on being near Arizona when the shit hit the fan?”
“He came here,” he responded weakly while stroking his temple.
“Yes, he came here. He came here because he was flying home to California and it was the closest place for him to be,” Ben returned. “But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have easily landed somewhere else.”
“Where?” he asked as his fingers worked his throbbing artery. It was all his overloaded brain could manage at the moment.
“You know, I didn’t know the full extent of it at first, so I did some more digging. I hacked into his financial records and was probing through transactions when he caught me in the act and let me tell you, he was royally pissed off. That conversation still gives me chills til this day. Which is why I thought he would be stronger, when all this shit happened, then he turned out to be. I’m actually surprised I never had an accident, not unlike the one his weak ass had this morning. Oh come on,” Ben said when he saw the surprised look on his face. “You were already thinking the same thing. All his preparations, everything he did to survive, and he goes and offs himself?” Ben asked, his voice turning spiteful. This was a part of the young man that had always remained hidden and he wondered how much had festered in the well-kept silence. “But that’s off topic and not even the point. The point is, we are not the only group out there.”
“How many?” he inquired, his mind turning. As hard as it was to hear, it made sense. On some level, he had already expected something like this. Sean was always looking for ways to create redundant systems, fail safes; had he really believed that the man wouldn’t create a backup set of compounds as well?
“Five in the U.S., including ours, and at least three in Europe,” the younger man responded firmly.
“Holy Jesus,” he muttered and found that he needed a stronger drink.
Ben smiled as he refilled his glass for him. “Now you know why I needed one. We were all way too trusting. He had us all fooled. The lengths that the man went through to survive makes you wonder why he would just eat a bullet eh?”
That was something he’d circle back too, there was something in
Ben’s voice that made him realize that maybe the young man knew exactly why Sean had done it. “Have you been able to talk to any of them?” he asked, suddenly curious why the other monitors were turned off. Ben kept them up and running even when he wasn’t in the room, which was a rare thing these days.
Ben nodded. “I’ve been talking to them all along; ever since I knew of their existence. Each of those compounds are set up identically like ours, and like ours, there is a tech-savvy hacker controlling the systems. It helps to have friends to talk to that speak the same language. Also makes our systems stronger as we are not working against each other, but with one another to constantly improve and upgrade our networks. You didn’t think that keeping track of you guys, getting you here, while my main priority, kept me that busy all day, did you? What do you think I was doing while you were driving from that gas station to the point of you pulling up outside? There was nothing going on along your route and I only needed to do occasional checks to ensure that things were still clear. But still, that is like, five minutes’ work in four hours—for each of you. Come on, it’s me we’re talking about here. I had a lot more on my plate than just helping our people; I was also helping theirs. Some of them are in the denser part of the country and Arizona ain’t shit when compared to how close all these east coast cities are to each other. Try helping someone navigate through that shit safely. Getting Ros out of Vegas was the harder of our bunch, but even that—eh, could have been worse.”
It was a sad thing, but he had actually thought that; that his friends and their journey here had occupied Ben’s time; he had no inclination to think otherwise. “How are they?”
Ben shook his head. “We can talk about them later. They are all online and I will introduce you after we are finished here. They don’t know this part, no one does, and I am taking a huge chance in talking to you about it. But fuck, man, I have to tell somebody. I can’t just keep doing this by myself.”
Charon's Blight: Day Two (the Rotting Souls series Book 2) Page 20