Bad Glass Part 22

He didn't respond when I tried to talk to him, when I asked after Taylor. He didn't even look up. I'm not even sure he knew I was there. He just kept staring off into the distance-down the hill, across the river, out toward the heart of the city. I didn't try very hard to get his attention. I just left him sitting there.

As I made my way through the park, I didn't see any dogs. In fact, except for the old man, I didn't see anything alive. No animals. No people.

I stayed away from Amanda and Mac's tunnel.

After about an hour, I gave up the search and started home, hoping Taylor had beaten me there.

Charlie was in the kitchen, and Sabine was upstairs, locked in her room. The rest of the house was empty. There was no Floyd, no Devon, no Amanda, no Mac.

And no Taylor.

I stood in Taylor's doorway for a while, staring at her empty bed. Her smell was thick in the air. It wasn't a particularly clean scent-we were living rough here, after all-but there was a hint of sweet amber and rose beneath the smell of sweat and dirt. It smelled like flowers, I thought, sprouting from rich soil; this was a horribly romantic notion, and it left me feeling a bit disgusted at myself.

I was losing my focus, my drive-I should be hunting down photographs, looking for images that will rock the world!-but it seemed like there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I couldn't put Taylor out of my mind. No matter how many times she ran away, no matter how distant she remained.

I gave the room one last look, then shut the door.

Before heading back downstairs, I gulped down a Vicodin. Then, after a moment's hesitation, I chased it with my last oxycodone.

I found Charlie sitting at the kitchen table. "It's getting lonely here," he said when I entered. He sounded wistful. "Sabine's hiding upstairs. Floyd and Taylor are off doing their own things. Amanda and Mac ... well, they're just gone." He shook his head at the word gone. "And Devon-I haven't seen Devon in days and days."

"Yeah, Devon," I repeated, remembering the conversation Taylor and I had had with Terry, right before we found Weasel's disembodied fingers.

Devon. His tunnels. His radio. The subject was a welcome distraction. It was something I could grasp hold of, something relatively solid.

"Remember that networking hub I showed you? You said you could access it, get information. Can you still do that? Can you figure out what it is?"

"Now?"

"Yeah, now."

"I can try. If it's standard hardware, standard networking, I should be able to just plug right in." Then he shrugged. "What that'll tell us, however, I have no idea. Maybe nothing."

"Then get your stuff," I said. "It's time to go."

The house across the street was filled with a still and unnatural silence. There were muddy footprints leading back and forth from the front door to the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs. Did Floyd and I leave those behind the last time we were here? No, I realized. Our tracks would have only been going one way, from the muddy tunnel out to the street. Someone else must have been here.

Charlie crossed the threshold behind me and then pulled to a stop. He looked around the empty house, perplexed. "There's a networking hub in here? Right across the street? But why? And who?"

I shrugged. "I don't know, Charlie. Those are the million-dollar questions."

I led Charlie to the room upstairs. The radio was still there, but the binoculars were gone. So somebody had been here. Devon, maybe? Come back to collect his property? They were nice binoculars; I probably would have come back for them myself if they were mine.

"Do you need the hub, or can you work with this?" I asked.

Charlie shrugged and headed straight for the radio. He sat down at its side and bent low over the matte-black console. "This should work," he said, unhooking the cable with a soft click. There was a small box at the end of the line and a couple of different wires sprouting from its end. "I don't even need to dig out a connector. This thing goes straight from coax to cat-5."

He set his shoulder bag down at his side and started setting up his computer. "Did you listen to it?" he asked as he went to work. "It's some type of networked radio, right?"

"There's nothing but static."

"Static?" he said, glancing up. There was a perplexed look on his face. "Like white noise? Hiss?" I nodded. "That doesn't really make any sense. There'd be nothing like static on a network like this. Unless ..." The lines on his face softened as a new thought erased his confusion. "Unless this network connects up with a broadcast node somewhere else, somewhere outside the range of interference."

"So this could actually contact the outside world?"

"Maybe. If the cable ..." He lifted it toward me briefly before plugging it into the side of his notebook. "If the network and the hubs lead all the way outside of Spokane-miles and miles away-if it's hooked up to some type of broadcast antenna or a satellite somewhere. If that's the case, this thing could be linked almost anywhere. Anywhere on the planet." Charlie paused for a moment, and we both let that sink in. Then he continued. "The military's using something like that for their data traffic, but according to Danny, it's all aboveground, stretching straight down the middle of I-90. And they've got a fleet of engineers maintaining the lines."

"So what is this s.h.i.+t?" I asked, but I didn't really expect an answer. I was just giving voice to my confusion.

"It's a darknet," Charlie said.

"A what?"

"A darknet. A private, secret network-something not hooked up to the world, isolated and secure, running on its own wires, using its own protocols."

"Who would do that?"

"I have no idea," he said, once again bending low over his computer. "But there's a ... fanciful notion out there-nothing real, you understand, nothing concrete, just whisperings-about a shadow Internet. A network running parallel to the Internet we know, but somehow different, and very, very secret. Controlled by financial giants, the people who'd have the resources and the power to do something like that. It's all real illuminati stuff, you know, just paranoid speculation. But if it existed, I imagine it would be something like this-all hidden wires and clandestine hardware." Charlie looked up from his notebook and smiled slyly. The computer had finished booting up, and a multiwindowed program now filled the screen. "But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Perhaps it's just a couple of lines connected to an antenna outside of the city. h.e.l.l, maybe it's just feeding someone's addiction to NPR."

I knew better. I'd been down in the tunnels. I'd seen the wires sprouting out in eight different directions.

Charlie was silent for several minutes as he scrolled past screen after screen of numbers and acronyms, arcane listings that looked like nothing but gibberish to me. "It looks big," he finally said. "I don't know how big. Depending on what type of router they're using and how many they've got, I might only be seeing a small corner of the network here. But there's traffic ... a fair amount of traffic." He opened a command window and typed in a string of letters, and a media player appeared in the center of his screen. After a couple of seconds, an error message popped up, accompanied by a soft bing. "It's encrypted. I can't get at it."

Abruptly, he unplugged the network cable and slotted it back into the radio. "The radio's just a very specialized computer, set up to isolate and decrypt an audio feed that's been meshed inside the network traffic, and maybe broadcast back out. There's got to be hardware decryption somewhere inside this thing."

He turned the radio on and immediately jumped back, startled by an insistent voice that leaped from the speaker. Beneath the voice there was a whisper of static, a low ebb and flow, like water and gravel echoing down an empty pipe.

"-three things we need to look out for: an expanding border, changes at a cellular level, and communication. If it breaks through to the populace, we need to know immediately. It's getting worse-that much is certain-but we're not quite sure how it's getting worse, we're not quite sure in what manner, and we have no idea what that might bode for the future."

Charlie shot me a startled glance. "That's Devon," he hissed. "That voice, I'm sure of it ... but what he's saying, that doesn't sound like him, not at all." I nodded in agreement. I'd only spent a matter of hours with Devon, but I recognized his voice. And this clear, quick delivery couldn't have been further from the stoned, incoherent ramblings he'd subjected us to at the house.

After a pause, Devon continued, his disembodied voice filling the room. "Containment is another matter. One we can actually do something about."

"Don't worry about Charles." This was a new voice-a man's voice-barely rising above the hiss of static. It sounded faint and distant, a trickle of words beamed from the other side of the world. At the sound of the new voice, Charlie blanched, literally blanched, his face turning a sickly shade of gray. The voice continued, "If it comes down to it, we'll deal with Charles."

"I'm sure you will, but just in case, I've got my own contingencies moving into place," Devon said. "No offense intended. I'm sure you can do your job, but I did not get to the place I'm at by taking other people at their word. We've got to plug these leaks, no matter what your familial concerns may be."

"I understand," the man replied, his voice still a muted whisper. Static and distance had stripped away all hint of emotion.

Devon's first words had knocked Charlie back on his heels, but this second voice hit him even harder, leaving him perched motionless on his folded knees, his mouth hanging open in a lowercase "o." Now he broke his paralysis and scrambled forward, his hands darting across the front of the radio. Finally, he managed to find the big red "transmit" b.u.t.ton.

"Dad," he called, his voice catching on the final note, the raised lilt that would have transformed the word into a question. "Dad, it's Charlie. Is that you?"

The static continued for a couple of seconds-tense seconds-as we both waited for the voice to respond. Then the static stopped, and there was only silence. Devon and the mysterious voice-Charlie's father, I thought. Is that even possible?-were gone, leaving behind the sound of mute wires.

Charlie sat still for a couple of seconds, and then he turned his ashen face toward me. His eyes were wide, and he looked stricken, shocked absolutely senseless.

"How could you be sure?" I asked. "It was a whisper. I could barely hear him. It could have been anyone."

Charlie shook his head. "No, I know that voice. It was him."

And then, more quietly, "It was him," he repeated. He dropped his eyes back to the radio and stared at it expectantly, as if he were still waiting for it to resume speaking, waiting for it to morph into the face of his father. There was a lot there in that look: confusion, expectance, fear. Hope.

"Why would your father be talking to Devon?" I asked. "You said your parents were here, in the city. You've been looking for them. Why? What are they doing? What does this mean?"

He glanced back up at me, but his eyes remained distant. There was little there but shock and, just maybe-deep down inside-a dawning horror, a seed of understanding that was just now starting to take root. I could see it: a widening of the eye, a quiver in the lip.

And I wondered again, What does this mean? If anything, that look of horror on Charlie's face said that his father's voice coming from that radio meant something, something important.

"What's his job, Charlie?" I asked. "What does your father do?"

He didn't respond to my question. His eyes just slipped back down to the radio. And he continued to wait.

I tried to wait him out. I tried to wait for the shock to subside, for the answers to start coming, but Charlie remained mute. He just sat there in the middle of the room, fixated on that matte-black radio.

After a couple of minutes, a sound erupted in the quiet house, and it made me jump. It was a loud, prolonged creak, like a tight hinge slowly swinging open, and it came from downstairs.

I jumped to my feet and started toward the door. Charlie remained seated. He didn't even raise his eyes. I didn't even think he'd heard the sound. I left him sitting in front of the radio and quietly moved out into the hallway.

My nerves were frayed by the time I reached the top of the stairs, and my heart was beating hard. I had no idea what I might find downstairs. Maybe Devon, I thought. Maybe he heard us and he's sneaking up from the tunnels, setting up an ambush, getting ready to deal with us. Maybe this is what he meant by "containment." Or maybe it's not Devon. Maybe it's something else, something much, much worse. Amanda's dogs or Weasel's disembodied fingers. Ghosts. Monsters. Swarms of mutant spiders.

"Hi, Dean." The voice was quiet and subdued, drained of all energy. It was the type of voice a sponge would have, if the sponge had been taking sedatives for a month straight. "I didn't know you were here."

It was Floyd. He was in the downstairs hallway, sitting with his back against the front door, the exact same spot I'd found him in the last time we were here, after he'd fled the tunnels in absolute horror. The cellar door stood open across from him, and a fresh trail of mud stretched from the gaping dark maw to his muddy boots.

I made my way down the rest of the stairs and stood over him for a moment. When he didn't look up, I sat down at his side.

"I found a flashlight," he said, lifting a large metal Maglite from his lap. After a moment, it dropped back down to his thighs, his arm collapsing under its weight. "Much better than your camera screen."

"I thought it scared you," I said, trying to keep my voice calm and soothing. "I thought we couldn't drag you back underground."

He shrugged. "I had to. It was ... calling to me." He laughed, a cold and lifeless chuckle. "Isn't that stupid? It called, and I came, again and again. And here I am, the king of running away. But I just had to see. I had to see him."

"Who?"

He looked up from the flashlight in his lap. His eyes were out of focus.

"They aren't working anymore," he said, ignoring my question. He dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pill bottle, shaking it upside down to show me it was empty. "I've taken, like, six now, and I'm perfectly sober."

I nodded, humoring him.

His shoulders slumped even lower. "It was my brother," he said. "When we were underground before, I swear I saw my younger brother down there, in those tunnels. He was sitting there, cross-legged in the middle of one of those offshoots-you know, the one I was looking down when you were taking your pictures? When you hit your flash, I saw him sitting there, in the dirt. And then the next flash, he was starting to stand up, heading toward me." Floyd tilted his head back against the wall and sighed. I could hear energy seeping out in that exhausted breath. Pretty soon he'd be an empty husk, puddled on the floor like a deflated balloon. "So I ran. That's me. I always run. But now ... now I can't stop thinking about it, about him. No matter what I f.u.c.king do, what I f.u.c.king take."

"What happened to your brother?" I asked. "Why was he down there?"

Floyd tilted his head toward me and smiled. "I killed him, Dean-that's what happened. I f.u.c.king killed him."

There was a surprising warmth in his voice and a tiny little smile on his lips as he talked, as he tried to explain. And those two things remained even as his words turned to horrible things. Warm voice and tiny smile. They were a jarring contrast to the tears clinging to his cheeks and the pain and helplessness in his roving eyes.

"Byron. His name was Byron. And he idolized me. He wanted to hang out with me and talk like me and skate like me. And I tried to make time for him, really I did. I tried to look out for him. My father left when we were both pretty young, and my mom, she had her own problems-trying to support us and raise us right-and I wanted to take some of the weight off her shoulders. You know how it is, right?" He looked up at me, pleading, and I nodded. I could understand, even if I'd never had a brother, or a sister, or a parent who'd had to sc.r.a.pe and sacrifice just to make my life a little better. "I let him tag along when I went skating. Me and my friends ... he was like a f.u.c.king mascot or something, and it kept us both out of my mom's hair, so she didn't complain. He was a pretty good skater. Not great, but good. I don't know if he could have really gone pro, but being my brother and all, that certainly helped. The company reps took him seriously, and when we hung out, they always wanted to give him free stuff. I worked some consulting s.h.i.+t for a company called F*ckstick-kind of a poseur company, with a little f.u.c.king star instead of the 'u' in their name-but they had me testing boards, giving input on design and image and stuff. h.e.l.l, they were even going to release a signature deck under my name, put my face in the ads and the whole celebrity endors.e.m.e.nt shtick. Bulls.h.i.+t like 'Ride Pretty Boy Floyd's pretty-boy stick.' And G.o.d, man, isn't that just about the most awful thing you've ever heard?" Floyd let out a little laugh. It ended in an abrupt, wheezing gasp, as if he'd just been punched in the stomach. "Byron would tag along whenever I went to their offices in San Diego. This was right after I dropped out of high school, so he couldn't have been more than thirteen. He was there so much, they ended up making him his own board. Probably just trying to kiss up to me, really-b.u.t.tering up my brother and all that-but he was so f.u.c.king proud of that board. Their graphic designer even did a caricature of him, in midflight, with wings sprouting out of his back, like a motherf.u.c.king angel-it was right there, blazed across the hardwood. It's corny, I know, but really, I've seen worse. They probably could have sold it in stores. Anyway, they never did release my deck-I think they were just stringing me along, really, trying to get my expertise on the cheap-but Byron still loved that board. He kept it pristine, never wanting to ride it. He just kept it propped up on top of his dresser, standing there like an icon, like some type of religious shrine." Floyd shook his head. "I don't know, maybe it was his future he saw up there: flying through the air on a skateboard, f.u.c.king angel wings on his back. Just like his motherf.u.c.king brother."

He paused and reached up to touch the side of his face, brus.h.i.+ng his fingers against his cheek. His grin remained, but it had turned hard, an expression of perplexed bittersweet nostalgia. He ran his fingers from his temple down to the curve of his lips. His touch was light, as if he were exploring a brittle ceramic mask, something ready to crack and crumble and fall away.

After a moment, his eyes looked up and found me, locking on my face for a second before swiveling back to the cellar door.

"We lived in Santa Cruz at the time, and my friends and I had this little place in the woods, just off 17, near the base of the foothills. It was just a little clearing where we hung out, drank and smoked. Where we talked about boarding and tried to hook up with the skater chicks that were always hanging around. There was a fire pit out there, and most nights we had it burning. It wasn't far off the road; it was just a little country lane type of thing, branching off of the highway. And the clearing was so close, if you stood on the shoulder, you could see the fire sparking down in the mess of trees and brush, just down an incline and a hundred yards away. f.u.c.k, I'm surprised we didn't burn down all of California with those fires." He paused and was lost in thought for a moment. "But anyway, I took him there a couple times. Not a lot. Not often. And I didn't let him drink or anything. Just ... we'd just be hanging out there with all of my friends, and that was something he really loved.

"He was just trying to be close to me. I know that. The kid f.u.c.king idolized me. And I humored him. I looked out for him. I tried to include him. That was my job. I figured it was my duty. But it was more than that, I guess. I guess it was something I loved. I was his big brother, man, and I loved being his big brother. I loved that look in his eyes, that simple adoration." Floyd's smile widened, and for a brief moment it didn't seem quite so creepy.

"And then ... one night-this was in late September-he got in a fight with my mom. It was all your typical teenage bulls.h.i.+t. He was concentrating too much on skating, and his grades were starting to slip, yadda yadda yadda-spending too much time out on his board or daydreaming about his board and not enough time studying. My mom was smart. She'd seen it all before-it was the exact same thing that happened to me-and she didn't want that for him. She didn't want him dropping out of school and wasting every last cell inside that thick teenage skull of his. So she grounded him. He b.i.t.c.hed and moaned and kicked and screamed, and really, like I said, it was all your typical whiny teenage bulls.h.i.+t. But he knew I was going out with my friends, so he snuck out and tried to join us. But ... he never made it there."

Floyd paused. The mask cracked a bit, and there was a flicker of movement in the corner of that horrible grin. His eyes were gla.s.sy and br.i.m.m.i.n.g with tears.

"Have you ever heard a mountain lion scream?" he asked. I had a hard time parsing the question. It seemed like such a non sequitur, just random words strung together. "It's a type of mating call that the females make-a shrill, yowling sound. And in the dark, it can sound like a human scream or a baby crying. Well, I heard some that night, out by the fire, and it was like an omen. It set my teeth on edge and had my arm hair standing up straight. I turned and mentioned it to one of the girls we were with-how creepy it was, how scary-and she just laughed and called me a p.u.s.s.y. But there was another scream right then, shrill and labored, and that shut her up real fast. It was a very, very creepy sound, just this loud yodeling howl out there in the woods, all pain and horror. After a while, though, we managed to laugh it off, and we went back to our drinking and bulls.h.i.+tting. Mountain lions are pretty common in Santa Cruz, after all, and we knew that as long as we stayed by the fire, we'd be fine ... no matter how scary they might sound, screaming out there in the dark.

"Byron didn't show up that night, and I had no reason to think there was anything wrong. The world felt the same to me, even though it had changed, even though it had become something fundamentally different. There was no thunder in the sky, no proclamations, no buildings cras.h.i.+ng down around my head. But things had changed. I just didn't know it yet; I couldn't know it. Not then. I just went back home and crashed. I didn't even know he was gone until the next morning, when my mom woke me up. She was p.i.s.sed off, and she started calling around to all of his friends. She grilled me-like I might have something to do with it-she tried to pump me for information. She thought-we both thought-that he'd just run away, that he was hiding somewhere with his friends, that he'd make his way back home any minute now.

"We didn't report him missing for three days. Jesus! Three f.u.c.king days! What kind of monsters are we?" he asked. Then, without skipping a beat, he went on with his story. "It was raining pretty hard by then, and we were both getting nervous. His friends hadn't seen him. n.o.body had seen him."

Floyd paused. His mouth opened and closed, and it looked like he was having trouble picking out the right words.

"I ... I ..." He paused again and then changed tack. "The police released information, and there were blurbs on the local news. Someone reported seeing a kid hiking along the shoulder of 17, and the police organized a search of the woods. We found him almost immediately. I was in the dragnet. I heard the yells and came running. He was right near the clearing, right near the fire pit-this place that I'd f.u.c.king shown him, this place where he knew I would be!" The edge of Floyd's mouth was quivering now, and emotion was starting to leak through. "He was maybe a dozen feet off the path, at the bottom of the hill. He'd fallen in the dark, and he must have hit the ground just horribly wrong, just the worst possible way. His arm was shattered, and when I got there, I could see the bone sticking out-the f.u.c.king thing had torn through his long-sleeved s.h.i.+rt. His leg was bent backward, and there was a ma.s.sive hole in his chest. The cloth around it had dried into a rain-washed red ... He was dead, of course. He'd been dead for days. A f.u.c.king stick had punctured his abdomen. After the fall, he managed to pull it out-it was still there, clenched in his hand-but he'd bled to death in less than an hour."

"The medical examiner ... he timed it, he placed the time at ..." Floyd's mouth once again began to quiver, and then, finally, it collapsed into convulsions and he was sobbing. I moved to put my hand on his shoulder, but he batted me away. His hand stung against my chin, and I dropped back onto my heels.

"I was there, at the fire, while he was out in the woods," he finally managed, rubbing his palms against his wet cheeks. "And the mountain lions ... there was absolutely no sign on his body, nothing, nothing trying to ... trying to eat his body. There was no f.u.c.king ... no f.u.c.king mountain lion out there in the night." He paused once again, and after a final heave, the sobbing stopped. His face settled back into an emotionless mask. Thankfully, there was no hint of a smile this time, no eerie grin. "He was there as I was walking out. He was less than a dozen feet from the path. Bleeding. Unconscious. Dying. And I was stupid and oblivious, a little bit drunk, a little bit high. And he was there. f.u.c.king dying. Alone. Alone in the woods. Alone in the dark."

He shook his head, a slow arthritic shake.

"Jesus f.u.c.king Christ, I was probably laughing at the time, as I walked by. I was probably f.u.c.king laughing. And those mountain lion screams? Out there in the night?" He closed his eyes and let his head drop forward. "How ... how could I be so stupid?"

He was silent for a time, and then he looked up. There was anger on his face as he turned toward me.

"What the f.u.c.k, Dean? Things were fine before, in the city. Things were cool. And then we had to go down there. Jesus Christ! Why the f.u.c.k did we have to go down there?" He picked the flashlight up off his lap and threw it across the entryway, through the cellar door. I heard it cascade down the flight of wooden stairs, and there was the sound of cracking concrete when it finally hit the bottom. "I was free, right? I was away from it all. Away from that house, away from my mom's bland words and her distant eyes-it was like they wouldn't focus anymore, at least not on me. I think she thought she had forgiven me, I think she genuinely believed that, but there was that look in her eyes. And she didn't know about the screams. I never told her about the screams." He shook his head angrily. "So I move on to San Diego, New York, motherf.u.c.king Brisbane. And then ... I'm falling through the air, toward that wooden ramp, and f.u.c.k it if that plummet doesn't feel right. And maybe I don't turn when I should. Maybe I don't go limp. And then I come here ... and I'm away. Finally. I'm free! And I'm barely thinking about him. This place here-I don't know-the weight of the air, the quality of the light ... it's not all that easy to think, you know? And I'm free."

He nodded toward the cellar door. "And then we had to go down there," he repeated. He closed his eyes and heaved a brief sob. "Why'd you take me, Dean? Why'd I have to follow? And should I curse you for that, or should I thank you?" After a moment, he looked up and managed a tortured little smile. "Right now, I'm thinking I should just shank you in the f.u.c.king face."

His eyes held mine for several seconds, and then his shoulders collapsed. I could see all of that animation, all of that emotion, draining away, leaving behind an empty vessel. I moved closer and put my hand on his shoulder. This time he didn't push me away.

"Maybe you shouldn't be here," I said, keeping my voice low, trying to radiate calm. "Maybe you should leave, get out of the city. It's not good for you here." And after a prolonged beat, I added, "It's not good for any of us."

"But he's down there."

"He's dead."

He shook his head. "But he's down there. And I'll find him this time. I won't run away."

He turned away from me and reached through the living room door on his far side. "Look," he said, pulling something back into the entryway. "I found this. He wasn't there this time, but I found this, down in the tunnels." He handed me a skateboard. It was cracked in the middle and covered with mud. "It's his, the one he loved. See-" He brushed aside some of the drying dirt, revealing a picture on the bottom of the board. "-it's him. See? He's flying."