Mind Hive

by Jake Berry Ellison Jr

  “Adam.”

  “Yes! Natalie! You okay? Are with them voluntarily? Just say, uh, ‘deadline’ or 10 p.m. if not …”

  “Good thing this isn’t a spy movie,” she said, very serious but not quiet. He could hear road noise. “We’re on our way back to Seattle. This is an old car with no electronics so we might make it. I spoke to Robert. He’s following in that beater Grant drives. Do what Josh said and do it fast. Okay?”

  “Uh.” The phone buzzed in his hand. A text with a hyperlink, just an IP address, user name and password.

  “Now!” Natalie yelled without command or effrontery, more like raw fear. “And you might want to barricade the building judging by what I’ve seen so far this morning. Bye.”

  She hung up.

  “Well, fuck!” Adam said. The image on the television had nearly snowed over, though he could just make out dense smoke pouring from a building, not the White House. Congress maybe. Or, just the Washington State Capitol building. He did what they asked, beginning the download of entire folders listed at the IP address behind a simple login page. He briefly wondered if he was committing a crime. Then he wondered if he was downloading a virus, perhaps the virus that took out the StreamNet. As the gigabits of files crawled onto his hard drive, he got one last email. This one came from their D.C. bureau reporter: “Hey, I sent this to Henri but haven’t heard back so sending it to you two.” The email was addressed to Adam and Beach. Adam scanned it out of habit. “I was at that StreamNet hearing when everyone, well everyone except us journalists, collapsed and disappeared sort of. Hard to explain. Can I get some backup here to figure out what the hell has just happened. Joke? Some sort of poison? Please call me.”

  Beach opened her door, looked at him with a pained face and fell forward onto her knees, face into a chair seat. Adam, forgetting the conditions or the world for just a split second guffawed since he thought she was making fun of the email they’d just received …

  “I have to go,” she blurted in a ragged whisper. “I have to go home.”

  Adam let the phone drop and ran over to her. He put his hand on the back of her shoulder. Her head lulled onto folded arms. She shook and then a great sob burst from her.

  “What the hell, Beach?” He shook her. “What the hell is going on?”

  “He’s dead.” She said it to the carpet. “They have to be lying.”

  She picked her head up, slumped off the chair and started crawling, reaching out for the corner of a desk. Adam might have laughed, except that Beach was crying. He grabbed her hand and stood, pulling it.

  “Who’s dead?”

  “My husband.”

  “But what? How?”

  “I don’t know!” She started walking, holding his hand so tight it hurt all the way up his arm.

  “How do you know?”

  “Babysitter. He came back from the bank this morning when all hell broke loose, got in the doorway, she said. She said he fell over and started convulsing.” She turned, eyes wild and mouth spread wide, she gripped his shoulder, talon fashion. “She said he stopped breathing. They turned him over and … I can’t make sense of what she said. My son.” She righted herself and marched toward the elevator. “… decomposed.”

  Adam followed behind her.

  She hit the down button and yelled, “I don’t understand!”

  “Let me drive you.” He put his hand on her arm. “Let me get someone to drive you. You don’t even have keys.”

  “Okay.” She froze defensively and faced the elevator number climbing up from P3, P2 …

  Adam scanned the newsroom. It had nearly emptied out. He spotted Ken Bunting in the sports department, head down, asleep or drunk. “Wait, Kristi. Please just wait here. You don’t have keys and can’t drive like you are anyway.” He parted from her. “Ken! Hey, Ken!”

  Ken’s head came up slowly, lips wet from escaped salvia. He wiped his mouth. “Huh?”

  “Are you still drunk?” The sports department had been openly drinking deep into the morning. Ken had stayed to cover the hockey game later in the afternoon. As if. Though, close to Adam’s heart, he had also been sleeping in various locations of the paper since his recent divorce, in which the house went to his ex.

  “No. No. Uh, a little.” His voice shot through with cigarettes and still booze-blurred.

  “Fuck it. Do you have a car here?”

  “Sure but …” he put his hands out over his desk, conjuring an excuse. Sportswriters. They’d shoot themselves to stay out of a news story.

  “Drive Kristi home and then go home yourself.”

  “Still working on getting a home. The …”

  “That’s right.” Adam cut him off to save them from his recounting the woes of finding a place to rent in this damn town. “Well, drive her home and come back here. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Right. Right. Is she okay?”

  They both looked at Kristi standing in the open door of the elevator, red eyes pasted on them, blank.

  Adam pulled Ken to his feet and dragged him a few steps.

  “The SeaDucks are playing …”

  “Maybe don’t talk to her.” He stopped at the nearest desk along their way and wrote her address on a yellow sticky note. He put it in Ken’s hand. “Just get her in a car and get her home. That’s her address. Don’t go in. I need you back here.”

  “Okay, chief.”

  He got in the elevator with Kristi. He did not look at her. The door closed on them. One of the sports writers had left his computer on and logged in, failing at the latest cyber security training. Adam opened a web browser. Searched for “dead” and clicked the news tab. At least some journalists and bloggers on the East Coast, three hours ahead, were doing their jobs. “Unexplained deaths reported throughout the city.”

  “‘He dissolved right in front of my eyes,’ cried the Navel commander’s secretary.”

  Another headline: “Congressional leaders dead on plane bound for Central America.”

  Then, simply: “Federal, state governments in shambles.”

  He clicked the link. The search page disappeared, but nothing loaded in its place. Then came the note saying the website was either down or overloaded.

  XVII

  For just a second, Natalie paused her breathing. Not stopped nor knocked out by the onslaught, just a pause like hitting reset or looking inward. A film of glimmer coated her eyes, unfocussed sparkles that floated throughout her murky field of vision. “Floaters,” her mind said as she drifted in a limbo. No complex thoughts and no emotions, though a generalized whole-being sense of warmth enveloped her as she floated. Three people standing, shimmering within a haloed outline and in front of a rough, earthen wall … didn’t matter who they were or why. A hand, likely hers she reasoned from its position in front of her face, held a smart phone horizontally at the three women arranged around her. The center person reached toward her, with clouds for hands, but not trying to touch. One of the figures next to the center person stepped forward, reached deep into her perspective and lifted her. Natalie knew she felt a grip on her arm, but the feeling didn’t register as pressure just fact.

  As she raised Natalie, The Twin said in the happy voice of someone truly glad to have her aboard: “Welcome.”

  The tone of her voice resonated throughout Natalie’s body, like a bell toll. The vibration of the tone excited her stomach, excited the core of her body, like an energy bubble seeking equilibrium with another orb of energy.

  “Oh my god,” Natalie said at the feeling.

  The cloud around the center person dissipated down to a density around her hands and then that too became absorbed or evaporated. Celestine stepped close to her, stared into the camera lens and said, “Stage two.”

  Natalie looked at Celestine’s face in the screen of the phone. Then the phone stopped recording of its own while focussed on her teeth, flashed through several program screens and sent the video to Adam’s email. The screen went black, power cut off without powering down. Still exper
iencing the full effect, as far as she knew, of whatever Celestine had done to her, Natalie’s mind started working again, less emotion and feeling and more process of thought. At the same time, the world visually intwined with her emerging thoughts to create the impression of … honeycombs. The cave, the three other women, all of it looked as it had but with the added depth of structure, a geometric and fluid structure. The warmth pervading her experience quickly grew in intensity with the focal point centering in her chest. A brief flash of a headache gave way to release, a burst, followed by clarity.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Just wait,” said The Twin holding her arm. “You can move your consciousness from place to place, even to within other members of The Clans. Let me …”

  “Wait!” Natalie said. “I’m not …”

  A flash and a deafening bang resonated throughout the cave. The shock knocked her down, blinded her. Another hand, much stronger, lifted her. Holding her phone in her right hand and her blinded eyes with the other, someone dragged her fast along the pebble and stone strewn floor of the cave.

  “Let go of me, goddamn it!”

  The person dragging her stumbling up a flight of steps. Natalie’s eyes adjusted. Robert and the old Daily photographer Grant stood in front of her, looking over her shoulder. They all emerged onto a yard in a dense neighborhood. The sky above was an early morning, cloud-covered gloom. A voice behind her said, “We better keep going. I doubt they’ll …”

  Natalie spun around and hit the person behind her with the edge of her phone. “Drag me you motherfucker!” The guy was tall and her blow bounced off his shoulder. She reared back to strike him higher up. She recognized him as a member of The Clans. Robert got a hold of her hand gripping the phone.

  “He’s trying to help us!” Robert said, struggling against her arm strength.

  She jerked her other arm loose from the tall guy and faced Robert. “Are you shitting me? He’s with them!” She spun back around, but Robert was able to hold her arm back. The tall guy wasn’t paying her any attention, instead he was waving at three people in full police riot gear running at them.

  “We’ve got to get back to Seattle,” Grant said. “We don’t want to get stuck out here.” He held one of the cameras hanging from his neck up to his eye and snapped the shutter at Natalie. “The roads are going to shit fast.” He turned and walked away, like he’d said nothing.

  Natalie felt jagged. Unfocussed. She looked at her hands, one still held the phone. Something swarmed over them. She started brushing them against her shirtsleeves in a panic. “What the fuck?” She dropped the phone and stared at her hands.

  “Is it contagious?” Robert said stepping back from her. He bent and picked up her phone.

  “I have no idea.”

  The tall guy patted Natalie’s shoulder. “You are definitely infected with Celestine’s nanites.” He leaned into her face. “You are still in control. It’s your body. You are still okay. Right now, you need to ignore it and come with us.”

  “I’m going with Grant,” Robert called.

  “Let’s go, too. Our vehicle is about two blocks from here.” The man stood and reached his hand down to her.

  “I’m not going anywhere until you … ROBERT!” She watched him jog after Grant.

  “Go with him!” he yelled back. “He’ll …”

  A car careened around the corner just missing Robert as it shot across the street and smashed into a parked car. The passenger door opened and a man in a business suit jumped out and ran. Robert made it to the car and pulled open the driver’s door to rescue the person and what looked like black sand poured out onto the ground.

  He yelled back at Natalie: “This is happening all over the place. People just turning to dust, man. It’s insane.” He laughed and trotted after Grant who had snapped several shots and then turned away down the street.

  The tall guy wiggled his fingers at her. She took his hand and stood. Her mind felt clear, like nothing was processing data or forming the words in her head.

  “My name is Josh Fines. I work with the federal government. This is far from over.” He spoke each sentence with clipped clarity. “We have to get back to Seattle. Everything is going to stop working again. Somehow, it’s The Clans. It’s Celestine and the virus, the computer virus, she infected you and the others with. We have to get back to Seattle where we have more resources.”

  The three armored men with Josh trotted back the way they had come. A puff of smoke roiled into the sky a mile away, then the pop of the explosion reached them. Josh turned following the others.

  “Let’s go. Come on. They are going to shut it all down again and we have to get as far as we can before everything stops working.”

  Natalie’s phone buzzed in her hand. An alert on the screen said she’d received a text message from her mother sent hours earlier: A hug and a kiss. She ignored the text. She could do nothing for her mother and suspected she was already running some neighborhood program to survive the disaster. She dialed Adam as she ran to catch up with Josh. As Adam’s phone rang, her mind snapped back over to the latticework, the framework for everything. The Hive. The phone rang a second time.

  “Oh my god!” she said.

  “You’ve seen it …”

  Adam answered the line.

  “Hey! Adam!”

  “Are you …”

  “I’m fine, but listen. It isn’t over yet. It’s not over.”

  “What’s not over? The StreamNet outage?”

  “Yes!” She caught Josh and saw the old station wagon ahead of them that the armed federal agents were clamoring into.

  XVIII

  It was 10 a.m. the morning of the fourth day since Adam first heard of Celestine Wallace and The Clans. So far, he thought sitting at his desk, every single conclusion he’d drawn, every lead they’d followed and every goddamn plan of attack he’d come up with had all gone to shit. He scratched out Gone to shit and wrote next to it Gone to fucking shit.

  “There,” he said blithely, “that’s just right.”

  He tossed the pen against the paper, turned his cellphone off and then back on. When it reloaded, it appeared he had cell service. There was even a G6 network connection. He dialed his desk number, got a busy signal. He tried 9-1-1 and it too was busy. He set his cellphone down, picked up the desk phone, dial tone, and dialed 9-1-1. Busy. He set it back down in the cradle, gently, listening to the dead clack of useless plastic on useless plastic.

  “Well, shit,” he said, unenthusiastically. He looked around the newsroom and saw three people: Kelli McCammon, back in her chair looking blankly at her computer screen, medicated to some nth degree, he surmised; James Wright, a photo tech who came in early on Wednesdays to color correct photos for the weekend magazines; and, well, himself … staring back at him from the face of a dead computer. Kelli’s kid had recently died and her husband was drinking himself to death with the aid of pain killers. So, she was alone. James never had a family and spent his every waking moment off work in the water floating beneath the waves in a world where his weight didn't matter and everyone was alone, where his technical and physical prowess was evident and unchallenged. And Adam: Alone, really, since his mother died.

  From time to time, he communed with friends who shared similar interests, such as the Zombie Victory Association. But take away the zombies and they’ve got nothing to talk about. He’d been accused of and admitted to taking solace in—even hiding behind—his commitment to journalism, a thing transcendent to nations, to cultures, even to people themselves. He has striven and strived both for relevance and service to that cause. But the days of service had accumulated like so many flies on a walking corpse.

  He shook the mouse across the surface of its pad, waking his computer. Download could not be completed. He hit the Okay button to see if anything had come through. There were a few folders on his desktop with codes for names. He hovered the mouse over one. It presented a file size of a few gigabytes. So there were either lots and l
ots of pages of text or some other kinds of media in it. He couldn’t bring himself to open it. Who knows what’s in there. Another virus maybe.

  A biologically human brain can only ask itself what the hell is going on so many times before its befuddlement becomes systemic and gives way to paralysis. Even a loud repeating banging noise from the street outside Kristi’s window couldn’t motivate his curiosity. Whatever the hell it was, what could he do about it? He heard the elevator door open with a boing sound and lolled his head around to look through the window of the newsroom’s entrance, to see who had shown up. As soon as the doors opened a slice, Beach wedged out of the elevator and ran at the door. She waved a card in front of the security reader, pushed hard and with a bang entered the newsroom. Adam nearly stood, nearly. Beach rounded the corner of the room, trotting. She hit her office and slammed the door behind her, hard. Ken had stepped out of the elevator by the time Adam looked back. He looked dumbfounded at Adam through the window of the newsroom door just as it glided shut. He shook his head. He raised his hands.

  He mouthed “Car wouldn’t start!” from the other side of the door, like he was kid in trouble fearing punishment. Adam glanced over at Kristi’s door and winced at her frenetic activity.

  “What can I do?” Ken suddenly standing at his side.

  “I have no idea.” Adam faced him. “I guess you could go see if there’s anyone in the pressroom. I mean, right now, it doesn’t look like there will be a paper.”

  That focused him. “No paper.” Bafflement rang through him. “There has been a Seattle Daily-Record on the streets of this city for nearly two hundred years! We can’t not have a paper for fuck sakes!” His face reddened. The thought did throughly upset him.