I frown, confused. “What’s it like?”
“They’re reeling from…” From the loss of my mother, and Will, both professors there. From the fallout of my brother. From a student who turned a weapon against his teacher, and his mother. And where must that leave Joe? I’ve never even thought about it. What this must be like for him now.
I nod, feeling like everything is slipping from my grasp.
Fingers shaking, I leave the flash drive on the laminate tabletop, an offering. I go to my room, to bed, but I don’t sleep. I think of Nolan, and everything he’s feeling, and how cut off from the world he must be, over there right now, alone.
“I know,” I whisper to the dark night.
* * *
—
The next morning, Joe has uncharacteristically beaten me to breakfast. He has the flash drive in his hand, twirling it between his fingers. “I will take it to a guy I know, Kennedy.”
I suck in a gasp, reaching for his arm. “Thank you, Joe. Thank you.”
He stares at my fingers on his sleeve, and he nods. His throat moves as he swallows, but he slides the flash drive into his pocket. “I will do this one thing for you. And then, after, you will do something for me.”
I step back, already leery. “What?”
“You will let the house go.”
I open my mouth, but he puts up one hand.
“Kennedy, you have to let it go.”
I tip my head in the faintest nod. If it can even be perceived as that. But once he sees the signal, he’ll believe me. Once we do the first part, he won’t demand the second. He’ll understand.
The house is important. This is important.
At school, I can finally log in to my account, ready to send Kennedy an email to apologize for last night. In the stark light of morning, I think about what I must’ve seemed like, showing up at her house unannounced, on the edge of panic, or worse.
I only know that I felt calmer as soon as I saw her, and by the time I left, this felt like a problem we would deal with together, like everything else. That is, if her uncle will ever let me near her again.
But as soon as I log on, I see I’ve already received a note from Kennedy.
8:03 a.m.: Joe’s finding someone to check the signal at the college. Stay tuned.
The stay tuned makes me grin. Half the time, I can’t decide whether she’s being ironic or serious.
PS—please let me know you receive this. AKA that you made it home last night.
I write back: Got it. Will do. And yes, made it.
PS—thank you
At the end of the day, I log on again and see a string of new messages.
1:22 p.m.: Joe says he’s picking me up after school. Says the guy he knows wants to show us something.
But I didn’t see that message earlier, and there’s a follow-up now:
2:12 p.m.: Meet me at the campus at 3 if you can. I’ll wait for you in visitor parking.
I look at my watch. It’s already 2:48. I send her a message, hoping she’ll get it, but I’m definitely going to be late: on my way
I race to my car, and I honk at the pickup truck in front of me, sitting in the back of a long line of cars waiting to exit the student parking lot. The two girls rammed into the front seat with some guy turn around, and both of them give me the middle finger through the back panel. I give up, K-turning out of the line of cars, hooking it around the back lot of the school, where I make an illegal exit from the bus lot.
I drive right by the teacher lot on the way out. I’ll deal with the fallout from that later.
* * *
—
I don’t know the college campus well, but figure I can’t go wrong by following signs for visitor parking. I ease my car into a spot under a giant oak tree in a half-empty lot, trying to figure out if Kennedy got my last message, but she’s nowhere. There are maybe four other cars scattered around the lot, and I don’t know which of these cars belongs to her and Joe.
Looking around, I see that the campus is an expanse of green grass and leafy trees and brick buildings. There do not appear to be any signs directing me.
It’s 3:03 and she’s probably already in there, meeting with some guy, and I’ll have to hear about it secondhand, filtered Kennedy-style.
And then I faintly hear my name in the background, from the direction of one of the brick buildings. Her image comes into focus next—dark hair loose, wearing shorts and a bright blue T-shirt, waving frantically as she races into view from farther down the brick path. “Come on!” she shouts.
She waits until I’ve caught up, then drags me by the hand as she veers onto a paved path, toward a nondescript building up ahead. It’s not until we’re climbing the wide front steps that I see the name of the building carved into the stone above, barely noticeable until you’re already upon it.
Inside, the building feels colder, and empty. The halls are dark, and our steps echo. Kennedy finally lets go of my hand, clearing her throat, as if she just noticed. “The students are on summer break,” she says. “It’s just the researchers. Faculty, postgrads. We’re on the second floor.”
We pass a wall of windows, which look into classroom lab spaces. Behind the glass, there’s a robotic device in a darkened room. In the next, there’s a flat table, a mechanical arm hovering, immobile, over the top. It’s obvious this is a building for engineering, or physics, or something.
My hand shakes when I grip the banister in the stairwell.
I get this feeling that everything’s about to change. I try not to get my hopes up. But I can feel my heartbeat in my palms, down to the soles of my feet.
* * *
—
Inside room 243-A, the first person I see is Kennedy’s uncle—Joe. It’s obvious from the way he frowns at us, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, that Kennedy did not tell him I was coming.
The second thing I see is a man sitting in front of a massive display of computer monitors. Cables running over the desktop, and a few larger unknown electronic things set up around the room. I realize the fact that I refer to them as unknown electronic things means I am probably not cut out for this endeavor. But the signal was coming to me, and so here I am.
The other man turns around, looking over all of us. He looks eerily similar to Joe, as if there’s some dress code that people here have to adopt. Or maybe it’s just because they’re friends. But they both have this overlong hair, not quite professional. And this casual way of dressing. And they’re both skinny, with angular faces. But Joe has darker hair, more like Kennedy. And he seems older in the way he acts. Maybe just because he’s had to, as guardian to a teenager.
“Everyone here now?” the other guy asks.
“Yes,” Kennedy says. “This is Nolan.”
I wave. The man doesn’t wave back.
Kennedy sighs. “This is Joe’s friend, Isaac. He said he found something in the readout.”
Isaac swivels his chair back and forth, chewing on an overlarge piece of gum, looking decidedly uncomfortable. “Look, I don’t know exactly how this was set up.”
“My brother did it,” Kennedy says, and the room changes. Isaac looks quickly off to the side, and Joe shifts on his feet, and I remember that her brother, Elliot, was a student here, while her mother and the boyfriend were both professors. It’s a tragedy that has affected the entire campus—teachers and students alike—with everyone looking for some sign of what was to come, in hindsight.
“Right.” Isaac scratches his head, sliding his chair in closer. “I’ll just get right to it, then. It’s an audio signal?” Except he says it like a question, which doesn’t instill the greatest confidence.
“What?” Kennedy says, and Joe steps closer to the machinery.
“What does that mean?” Joe asks quietly.
“Like, radio signals. There’s plenty goin
g right by us all the time. I don’t know what happened with this one, why it’s displaying like this in the program, but anyway, it’s really broken up.” His hands fly over the keyboard. “But I pieced it together.” He gives Joe a meaningful look, which could be interpreted as a warning.
“Do you want me to play it for you?” he asks.
“Yes,” Kennedy answers before Joe can get a word in.
Isaac takes a deep breath and turns back to the computer. A second later, the sound fills the room.
There’s some static first, and then we hear a voice. “Is anyone there?”
My head jerks up. The air chills. It’s Kennedy. It’s her voice, except faster, higher-pitched. Panicked.
All the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The whole room narrows to a point, and that point is Kennedy. She tenses, becomes a statue, her eyes empty.
The static cuts in and out. “Can anyone hear me?” Then it’s just the sound of her breathing, like her mouth is pressed too close to a microphone. Then movement, like things are being slid across a table, or a floor. More static, and then her voice again. “Something’s happening in my house. Something terrible. Help us. Please—” The transmission cuts off, and the sound of static fills the room, until a robotic voice gives the time stamp in stilted syllables. “December fourth. One-oh-three a.m.” And then it starts back up again, on a loop. “Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me?”
“Turn it off,” Joe says, his tone furious.
Isaac presses a button, and the room falls silent. We remain silent. Isaac turns in the chair, looking at the floor. “Did your…uh, was the setup, did it have, like, a radio transmitter?”
“I don’t know,” Kennedy says, speaking in a whisper. She’s practically out the door already. I think she’s going to be sick. I wonder if this is what I looked like when Abby told me about the email.
Isaac continues, like it’s not a big deal. Not enormous, the size of the universe. “Was there, like, you know, an antenna…?”
No one answers him. I’ve seen the antenna on the top of the shed, though. I’m guessing the answer is yes.
Isaac takes a deep breath, moving the gum to the side of his mouth. “What I’m guessing is that you transmitted a signal. And this is the bounce back, playing.”
Joe steps toward her. “Is this some sort of joke?”
Isaac frowns. “Depending where it was transmitted, it could bounce back off the moon. Or off something closer. A satellite, even, the atmosphere…I don’t think this was intentional….”
Her eyes are wide, panicked. She shakes her head, but she doesn’t speak. There’s something familiar, like a sense of déjà vu, itching at the back of my head.
“December fourth?” I ask. “Are you sure?”
“That’s why I called you in,” Isaac says to Joe quietly. “It must’ve been transmitting on some sort of loop.”
Joe whips his head from Kennedy to Isaac. “Is this the nine-one-one call? She made it at one-eighteen a.m.”
Isaac presses a button, to start replaying the message. But we’ve already heard it once. Kennedy is moving back, like she can’t possibly sit through it once more. I reach an arm for her, but she doesn’t notice me there. “One-oh-three a.m.,” the recording tells us again, at the end.
Fifteen minutes before the call to 911. We all turn to look at Kennedy, but she’s gone.
“Dammit,” Joe mumbles under his breath. And then he takes off after her, and it’s suddenly just me and this dude in the room. I hear her words again. So familiar. I close my eyes, and I see my brother, as I saw him in the fever dream, standing across the room, moving his mouth: Help us. Please.
“Play it again,” I say.
No.
That’s the only thought in my head. No.
That cannot be all that’s out there. Nothing but my echo, reflecting back.
Standing outside Elliot’s window that night, I peered into the shadow house. And then I ran. Soaking wet, under the storm, I took shelter in the shed.
And that’s all this is: my shout into the abyss, when I hid in the shed, when I tried to get help, when I had no phone but saw the microphone. I knew Elliot had added an antenna to the shed over the summer, when he was out here working. I hoped it would work like a radio transmitter, like those things truck drivers use. That someone would pick up the signal and call for help.
A shout into the abyss, and no one answered. Is anyone there?
The answer is the same as it’s always been: No.
* * *
—
I’ve run clear across campus. I have no idea where I am. The trees cover the ground in overlapping shadows. I want to sink into the earth.
And then I’m back, with the smell of dirt and dust, inside the shed with the computers running over the top, the wires trailing under the ground, my back pressed against the wall while I’m sitting under the desk, shouting those words. Help us. Please.
I said them to myself even after I stopped broadcasting. I said them over and over, in case anyone, anywhere, was listening.
* * *
—
Joe has called me four times in the minutes it has taken me to sprint across the campus. I look around me, but it’s only more of the same. The ground curving away, in every direction, at the horizon.
There’s no place to go. The earth is finite, I can’t escape my existence here. Or the things I did, and the things I didn’t do.
Eventually, I stand, brushing the grass from my shorts, and I circle back. There’s nowhere else to go. Run forever, and the earth curves back around.
On and on it goes. The same thing over and over.
I head back to the parking lot and see a shape waiting for me there. When I get closer, I see it’s not Joe, but Nolan. He pushes off his car, standing there, looking at me like he doesn’t recognize me.
I stop in my tracks, halfway across the lot. “I didn’t know,” I say. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“I know,” he says.
He opens his mouth to say more, but we’re cut off by a booming voice in the distance.
“Kennedy!” It’s Joe, jogging down the path from the other direction.
I turn back to Nolan. “You should go,” I tell him.
“No, I want—”
“Please, Nolan.” Because I don’t want him to hear this, the things Joe is about to ask me. I don’t want him to know what really happened that night.
* * *
—
At first, Joe doesn’t say anything. He just gestures to his car, and we drive in silence, except we’re not heading toward his house, or mine. We’re just on a highway, signs designating east.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
He taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “You know, the first week you were at my house? I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and I’d see you sleeping, and I just…I didn’t know what to do. I would get in the car and just drive. For hours.”
I twist in my seat. “You snuck out?”
He presses his lips together, but it’s almost a smile. “It’s not sneaking out when it’s your own house. I even left you a note on the kitchen table in case you woke up.” He cuts his eyes to me. “A courtesy you might want to take into consideration next time.”
“I’m sorry.”
He lets out a slow breath and merges onto some other road, less traveled, nothing but trees surrounding us. “Me too, Kennedy. Truth is, I didn’t know what to say to you.” He grips the wheel tighter. “I still don’t. Right now, I want to ask you what happened, but I don’t even know where to start.”
“I tried to get help,” I say to Joe again, and this time, he understands. He pulls the car over onto the shoulder, in what feels at that moment like the middle of nowhere.
He takes a deep breath, then turns to face me. Hi
s voice low, and calm. “It’s just us, Kennedy. Just me and you, for real this time. Anything you say to me, it stays right here. And we’re nowhere. Okay?”
He’s right; it feels like nowhere. I didn’t think I’d be able to find this exact spot ever again. There were no mile markers. Just road and trees and a sun dipping lower on the horizon.
I stare out the front windshield, my eyes watering from the glare.
It had been dark and raining that night, and I was waiting for the distance between the lightning and thunder to spread out so it was safe to race across the open field, to my house. And then I ran, sprinting through the storm.
“When I was coming back home,” I tell Joe, “I could see, from a distance, a light was on. In Elliot’s room. I was all the way across the field still, though.”
I heard a loud boom, and then, a little while later, a second one. The first I could explain away, as a trick of thunder, and the distance. But at the second sound, I jumped. The noise felt closer than the storm. Sharper, something that gripped my heart, turning everything still.
It was enough to keep me from going to my room, sliding open the window, and crawling inside. Some deep-buried instinct. It was like, even then, I knew.
“When I reached the house, I looked into Elliot’s room first—where the light was on. His desk chair was empty, but the light over the desk was on.” The headphones had been sitting beside his laptop, like he’d just been sitting there a moment ago. His bedroom door was open, and I could see the hallway. “Out in the hall, I could see the handprint on the wall. Red, a streak of blood below.” I shiver, and Joe closes his eyes. “And I could see Elliot, crouched down, but I didn’t know what he was doing. I hit the window with my palm.” Fast, an open slap, to get his attention. “When he stood up, he was holding a gun. He was covered in…his hands were…And he was pointing it straight at me.”
Come Find Me Page 17
