by A N Sandra
“No, Kaitlyn is gay, and her father had her taken away. He told the Hollister Foundation that she was mentally unstable because he didn’t want a gay daughter—” Twilight broke down into sobs. Bud hadn’t seen her sob like that since she watched a sad Disney movie when she was four. Even when she’d fractured her arm playing basketball she had bit her lip and shaken off the pain, refusing to let her opponents see her weak.
“Honey…” Bud was suddenly not angry and scared, but worried for his youngest daughter. “That just can’t be true—”
“But it is,” Twilight insisted. Her lovely eyes were suspended in a fountain of tears. “I know it. All the girls at school know it. Kaitlyn’s mom has been trying to get her back, but her dad told some really big lies and according to what I’m learning on the web anyway, it doesn’t matter. They are taking gay people and people who just don’t agree with them.”
“I don’t think—”
“Dad! I’m gay!” Twilight sounded hysterical. “I don’t want to get taken away!”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Bud reached over and pulled Twilight into a very awkward embrace. “You aren’t gay. No one is taking you away. You need to quit taking risks on the internet—”
“I am gay,” Twilight insisted. “Jon Cohen asked me out three times last year, but I don’t like him at all—”
“Jon is really full of himself,” Bud said with a little humor in his voice. Jon was extremely good looking and a star running back who would be looking at going pro in a few years. “He’s just an arrogant jerk. He’s not your type.”
“I never care when he walks by but when I see his sister Marcie, I just… I sweat… I get all worked up. I… I want to kiss her more than anything else in the world!”
“I’m sure you want other things more,” Bud tried a little levity.
“I want Kaitlyn back!” Twilight was nearly yelling. “I spent most of the school year hoping to be wrong… but when Ben got here I found out how to get on the Dark Web without being traced and I’m sure she isn’t coming back! I don’t want that to happen to me!”
“Oh, honey. Even if you are gay, your mother and I wouldn’t send you away—”
“Mom loves the Catholic Church more than life itself!” Twilight insisted. “She might sent me away—”
“That is the silliest fear ever,” Bud asserted. “Your mother loves you no matter what.”
“When I’m with Ben, it seems like it couldn’t happen… But when I’m on my own… I don’t want to lose my life…”
“You aren’t losing anything. You probably aren’t gay. Marcie is awfully cute,” Bud went on. “This is a phase.”
“I don’t want to be gay!” Twilight said very firmly. “I want to like boys. I want to get married and have a bunch of kids. I want a different life than a gay woman will have. I don’t want to move to San Francisco—”
“No one makes gay people move to San Francisco.” Bud tried to get a grip on all his thoughts. He gave up. He took a long swallow of beer and looked Twilight in her red, crying eyes. “If you are gay, your mother and I will still love you just as much as always. We couldn’t love you less. I promise. We will always love you.”
“Good to know.” Twilight tried to get her cocky sense of herself back, but Bud knew from having raised two other girls that once they got upset it was hard to put themselves back together without some space.
“Give me a few minutes to finish this beer and then you need to show me what you’ve been up to on the Dark Web.” Bud grimaced. “I need to know what Pandora’s box you’ve opened.”
“I promise I’ve been safe,” Twilight said in a much humbler tone of voice than she normally used. She turned to go to her chicken coop and Bud went to his truck to get his own box to help him think clearly.
The old chicken coop didn’t smell like chickens anymore. Danica and Twilight had cleaned it and disinfected it and painted it with glossy high varnish white paint. The screen printer took up more than half of the room, with Twilight’s desk and office space along the entrance wall. A huge calendar covered the space over the desk and Twilight had put all her orders and their deadlines in bright blue Sharpie pen. Her laptop sat in the middle of her desk and boxes that would need to be mailed the next day were neatly stacked and labeled.
Bud sighed. She was more organized than so many adults. He had only been in business for himself for a month, but he had a sloppy stack of receipts on his nightstand that needed filing or tax season would bite him in the butt. Twilight had a tidy filing cabinet right next to her desk and Bud knew without looking inside that every file would be clearly labeled and the contents crisp and unstained by fast food drippings.
“Here you go.” Twilight moved from her chair in front of her laptop and allowed Bud to sit in front of it.
“This is disgusting,” Bud said after about ten minutes of reading.
“Keep going… it gets a lot worse,” Twilight told him.
Bud continued to read. The accusations made against the Hollister Foundation and their mental health programs were horrific. They couldn’t all be true. Bud knew that the Hollisters themselves did not appear to be great people. They weren’t the kind of people you would run into at the Maxi mart and think why don’t we hang out with them sometimes? Of course, they weren’t. They weren’t like Hump or other driven people in the community. Everyone could figure that out. Were they really taking mentally ill people away from their families? Were they really conducting medical experiments on them to make the new vaccination chip kill people? No. Mentally ill people died all the time. When Blythe had been full of them they had frozen to death in the winter, killed each other under the bridge, done countless things to endanger themselves daily.
No, no, no. The Hollisters were not buying all the food so that they had a big stockpile for when they killed most people. That didn’t even make sense. How much food could they need? They were making ugly places beautiful again, but people on the web were saying that the ugly places were beautiful so that the Hollisters could turn the world into their own park. That the Hollisters were doing genetic things with animals and making the world into a safari for themselves. The Hollisters were giving parts of the rest of the world away to their rich partners in Europe and Asia and South America who would take control of the whole world when there was no real population left. True, Bud hated Urban Relocation, but he understood why the idea was important to some people. The countryside did look better without trailer trash and mini junkyards caused by people who didn’t actually farm or work but subsisted off of welfare. The only real problem with Urban Relocation was that it almost extended to his family.
Bud felt sick. He had not seen any of this coming… but it probably made sense. It was too big and sinister to be true. Except that big and sinister things had been true lots of times over the course of history. Bud knew that. No one outside Hitler’s inner circle had really believed he had been capable of the Holocaust. After all, Hitler himself was a crazy man. His friends were crazy. They weren’t well educated or smooth; they were rough mannered thugs who ultimately found themselves stopped. But everyone else thought someone would stop them long before it actually happened.
No one will stop the Hollisters if this is true. Bud had to admit that he couldn’t see how, if the allegations were real, the Hollisters could be stopped now. It would be too late. Taking the mentally ill and other members of society was something that people would forgive, evidently, believing that no one was coming for them. But the lesson from history, of course, was that in the face of evil, thinking that the evil will not extend to you is what most people do.
“It’s a lot to think about,” Bud said, finally. Twilight, fussy about waiting for him, had gone over to prepare screens for the next day’s printing. It seemed like he had been reading a long time. He had read pages and pages, links and links. Without the box in his pocket he couldn’t imagine that he would have understood it at all. He knew he still needed to process much of what he had read.
&n
bsp; “I’m not expecting to save the world,” Twilight said. “Maybe the world can’t be saved anyway. But I need to see what’s coming. This started with being worried about Kaitlyn, but it’s way, way bigger than that.”
“It’s been a really, really long day,” Bud said. He had intended to be in bed right after dinner. He had a big load to haul in the morning and he was due to be at the Blaze place at six a.m. “I really love you, honey.”
He crossed the old chicken coop and hugged his youngest child to him for a brief moment. Crushed against him, she smelled like the chemicals she used for screen printing, and fruity hairspray, and Cover Girl makeup. The little girl in her ladybug jammies was inside her somewhere, but she was nowhere to be found right now. Bud would just have to love the girl he had instead of the girl he missed.
“I love you too, Dad,” Twilight told him.
Bud went inside. Danica was too scared about the Dark Web stuff to talk, and Bud was fine with that. There were discussions coming up that he didn’t want to have, that he was going to have to have. Did you know Twilight wants to kiss Marcie Cohen more than anything else in the world? That might make her forget the Dark Web soon enough. He got into bed without a fuss and set his alarm.
“We have to deal with this pretty quick,” Danica said in the dark. “But I feel a weird sense of calm. I’ll figure it out tomorrow.”
Bud knew where the weird sense of calm came from, and he reached out to squeeze her hand in the dark. Even with the air conditioner on, the summer night air seemed to press up around him, but he fell asleep to swirling, colorful dreams.
The dreams made no sense themselves, in the dark. But Bud woke up early and Danica was still getting breakfast ingredients out of the refrigerator when he walked by her and dressed, with the ivory box in his pocket. She was too tired to question him. There wasn’t much coffee missing from her big pink mug, and she gave him a very concerned look.
“Love you, baby.” Bud kissed her cheek and went right to the chicken coop.
With the help of his box and the things in his dreams, which had turned out to be instructions, Bud got on Twilight’s computer and pulled up her Dark Web chat board. He created a user name and wrote a letter to his daughter. It began:
“To my youngest daughter, there is no force that can take you from me—”
In the letter Bud promised complete devotion to his family, no matter what trying times were coming in the future. Then he turned the computer back off and went inside to drink his own coffee and eat his eggs, scrambled fluffy, just the way he liked them.
“Gotta get going!” Bud said heartily, picking up his gloves and well packed lunch.
“Love you, baby,” Danica answered. The events of the night before had caused her complexion to go a ghostly white, but her eye always sparkled.
“I’m counting on it,” Bud replied, pecking her cheek with a quick kiss before heading out the back door.
We have some visitors coming tomorrow,” Twilight said as the family finished their dinner.
Ben was still buttering a third biscuit—Bud could never figure out where Ben put it all—but Danica and Bud were lingering over their mostly empty plates procrastinating clean up. Joshua was getting ready for a gig at the Win Waters, the local casino.
“Who is that?” Danica asked, swishing her iced tea down gently, the ice settling in her glass as she set it on the table.
“Natalie and Jase are coming to give us special flu shots,” Twilight said.
“We’re not getting any shots from a stranger,” Danica began. Her eyes rolled, and Bud could see that she was not down with any unusual happenings the day after she discovered Twilight was a presence on the Dark Web.
Probably not the best time to mention that Marcie Cohen kissing thing.
“They aren’t really strangers, they’re heroic people, risking a lot to help other people,” Twilight said. “Can you please be nice to them and get your shot?”
“Sure, honey,” Bud said calmly.
“What?” Danica was livid. “You’re playing along with this?”
Bud said nothing.
“We don’t know these people at all… Twilight probably met them on the internet.” Danica used the word internet the same way she would have used the word pornography. “And you want to get shots from them?”
“I have a good feeling about it,” Bud said slowly, trying not to add fuel to Danica’s fire. She was being perfectly reasonable after all. “We’ll see how tomorrow goes. If we don’t want to do it, we don’t have to do it.”
“But, they’ll know where we live—”
“They probably know now,” Bud pointed out. “They’re on their way here.”
That made Danica even angrier. Bud wondered if he should take the ivory box out of his pocket and actually wave it in front of her nose. Probably not. She would calm down. She was scared for the moment, but she was never frantic.
“We should go to the garden and check to see if we should turn the squash,” Ben said.
Danica sniffed suspiciously. “Going to the garden with you always calms me down. What if I don’t want to be calm? What if I sense that things are really not okay?”
“Maybe they aren’t really okay,” Ben ate the biscuit that he had covered with raspberry jam after slathering it in butter. “But maybe to deal with the things ahead we need to be centered inside ourselves to make good decisions.”
The whole table was silent.
“Maybe the problem is people are making things seem worse than they are,” Danica told everyone. “Maybe everything is fine, but Twilight is digging up trouble on the Dark Web and bringing people here to do medical experiments on us.”
“I don’t think we’re interesting enough to do experiments on.” Bud tried to sound dry and amusing.
“No one experiments on exciting people!” Danica said in frustration. “We are perfect guinea pigs!”
“We’re going to the garden now,” Ben said in a totally Jedi style voice. He stood up and Danica followed him even though she didn’t look happy about it.
“Here we go,” she said as she slid the glass door to the patio shut.
“I’m leaving!” Joshua burst through the kitchen in a purple plaid western shirt that was pretty flashy, for him. Bud knew that the t-shirt he wore under the shirt said:
YOU HIT
THE TARGET
“Have a great night!” Bud said.
Twilight gave him a fist bump and he grabbed his guitar from beside the back door and headed to his Firebird.
“Who are the people with the shots?” Bud asked as soon as he was sure Joshua was gone and Danica and Ben were clearly seen from the kitchen window massaging squash.
“They are the main people who are letting people know what the Hollisters are up to,” Twilight said.
“Why would such people have any interest in us?” Bud couldn’t understand at all.
“They were touched by the letter you wrote.”
“This isn’t very anonymous,” Bud fretted. Would the Hollister Foundation send people to bust down their door?
“No, it really is. We spent a long time figuring out who each other were today. They were in the Bay Area anyway and they want to come help us. I promise.”
“We don’t have anything to lose, except that maybe your mother is right, and they are mad scientists turning us into Frankensteins.”
“Dr. Frankenstein was the one who made the monster,” Twilight said reproachfully. “I thought you knew that.”
“I guess I did,” Bud said. “These days it’s getting harder to remember what I know or not.”
Bud tried not to think about the upcoming visit the whole day he moved hay. By four-thirty when he pulled his blue semi into the driveway he had almost managed to calm himself. A large RV was parked where he would normally park the semi, and he knew the visitors were there.
“Dad! We’re on the patio!” Twilight called as soon as Bud shut the truck’s door.
“I’m coming.” He
tucked the box into his shirt pocket and moved to the back porch to wash up before walking through the house to greet Natalie and Jase.
“We’re so honored to meet you, Mr. Henderson!” Natalie enthused. She had silky blue hair, chubby cheeks, and thick eyeliner around her blue eyes. She didn’t look like a mad scientist. She didn’t look like a scientist at all. She looked like a Comic Con groupie.
“Mr. Henderson,” Jase nodded and shook Bud’s hand. Bud approved of Jase right away. Jase had a great handshake and he looked responsible. The clean shaven young man was wearing a wrinkle free white shirt and looked a little, just a little, like a young Tom Cruise, who had been a movie hero Bud’s whole life even after Bud found out Tom was a nut job.
“I think we should talk a little about why you are here and talk about whether you even want the vaccinations we are offering today,” Natalie said.
Danica nodded. Ben and Joshua stood next to her, probably to keep her from bolting, and Twilight was so excited she was glowing. Bud realized everyone was waiting for him to give final approval, so he gestured for them to find a seat.
“First, I want to say thank you. Thank you so much for the touching letter that you wrote to your daughter yesterday morning,” Natalie beamed at Bud. “No matter how old she gets, every girl wants to know that her father loves her no matter what and has her back.”
Danica looked at Bud. Because she hadn’t seen the letter, she was in the dark, and she did not like being clueless about what her own family was up to. She liked to think she was the captain of the Good Ship Henderson, and Bud was the helpful first mate. Bud mostly let her think that.
He smiled at Natalie.
“Shortly after the new year, my boss, Christina Harris, found out that Bioline had been compromised by the Hollister Foundation. The Hollister Foundation had promised Bioline that they would be handling the manufacture and distribution of Christina’s lifetime goal of a vaccinated world. At the time, six years ago, it was a dream come true. The Hollister Foundation was new then, few people had heard of it, and Blaine Hollister was a mysterious figure. But Todd Wilson discovered that Blaine Hollister had a large group of scientists in Pakistan create a virus that would go into the manufacture of every chip, detonating at a designated time and leaving the recipient of the chip dead within hours.”
