What to do—keep driving around aimlessly until you happen upon some semblance of residency?
(Sure. Why stop the horror movie now? Find a deserted farmhouse while you’re at it. Preferably one with sounds of a chainsaw coming from within.)
“Fuck,” he muttered.
And then his cell phone rang and scared the crap out of him.
The number was restricted. He answered on the third ring.
“Lost, ain’t ya?” Ray.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because I’m watching you, son.”
Caleb killed the ignition and quickly exited the car, began looking in all directions. Farmland as far as the eye could see; the moon, full and bright, the only thing separating his post from total darkness.
“See me?” Ray asked, chuckling.
“No…” Caleb replied distractedly, eyes still going in all directions, still seeing nothing across the silhouetted country horizon. “How can you see me?”
“I see everything, son. That’s why you’re coming to see me, ain’t it?”
“I…yes.”
Ray chuckled again. “Just sit tight, partner. I’m gonna go take a shit, and then I’ll come get ya.”
• • •
Not a single car passed Caleb on the side of that rural road before Ray made an appearance. And what an appearance. For a man as renowned as he was concerning all things technology and surveillance, Caleb was expecting…well, he didn’t really know what to expect. Certainly not a man appearing in a battered pickup truck, dressed in attire more fitting for mucking out stalls, hygiene seemingly just as fit for those stalls.
But then a part of Caleb supposed the man’s appearance did make sense. To a man with his capabilities, whose work clearly consumed him, materialistic things and hygiene were simply not a priority, but just a distraction that got in the way of bigger things. Add nutrition to that list as well. The man was coat-rack thin.
“Tried using your phone to find me, didn’t ya?” Ray asked the moment he climbed out of his truck. He was grinning a big scruffy grin. Even blinded by the headlights of his still idling truck, Caleb could tell he was missing teeth.
Caleb held up a hand. “Guilty.”
Ray seemed delighted by this. Not so much by Caleb’s admission, but by the fact that Caleb had failed to locate him with the app on his smartphone.
“Told ya it wouldn’t work, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did.”
Ray looked Caleb up and down. “Christ, you are just a kid, aren’t ya? Jack told me you were young.”
“What else did Jack tell you?”
“Just that I’m supposed to give you whatever you want. Said he’d owe me one.”
Caleb considered the relationship between Jack and Ray. The two couldn’t be any different. Jack was meticulous and disciplined, by the book—barring this little addendum to that book, of course.
Ray was, well, who knew what the hell Ray was just yet. He certainly appeared to be the antithesis of Jack.
“You guys close?” Caleb asked.
Ray laughed. “Me and Jack? Hell no. Jack can’t stand me. Doesn’t approve of what I get up to one bit—”
What he gets up to?
“—but even a Boy Scout like Jack Dixon knows you got to break the rules every now and then if you want to win. What’s the old saying? If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying? Jack knows who his daddy is. He hates it, but he knows who to come to when he’s out of his Boy Scout options. I suppose he made another exception to that rule when referring me to you.”
“I suppose he did.”
Ray grinned again. “Okay then—you ready to get a move on?”
Caleb nodded.
“Well, you got two choices. You can leave your car here and hop on in the truck with me, or you can follow—”
“I’ll follow you,” Caleb said. “I don’t feel comfortable leaving my mother’s car out here.”
“Mother’s car. Jesus. Just where the hell is this night gonna lead us, I wonder?”
• • •
Caleb had joked to himself earlier about happening upon an isolated farmhouse with a chainsaw-wielding killer within. Now, as he followed Ray’s pickup down the long gravelly road towards the man’s isolated farmhouse, he hoped the coincidences stopped there.
Obviously, Jack would not have led Caleb into the arms of a complete lunatic, but as they say, there was a fine line between genius and insanity. And there was still that whole “what I get up to” business the man had mentioned that Jack didn’t approve of. Caleb only hoped the man loitered on the genius side of that fine line while he was in his company. Let the man be insane on his own time.
• • •
Parked in the driveway now, Ray leading Caleb towards the rear of the farmhouse—the enormous home yet another testament to Ray’s philosophy on the importance of material things; it was a dump—they stopped at two large wooden doors angled up just slightly from the ground that led down into a cellar.
The doors were beaten and weathered like the rest of the house, yet the two giant padlocks to the doors appeared brand new; their shine was evident in the moonlight. Odd, Caleb thought. Why spring for new locks if the doors themselves were so battered? One or two good kicks and the wood would give, sending those fancy locks flying. Did the man’s genius see fit to neglect materialism, hygiene, nutrition, and common freaking sense?
Yet when Ray fished the keys out from his pocket and turned to Caleb before unlocking, it was as though he’d read Caleb’s mind. “Locks are just for appearance’s sake to deter looky-loos,” he said. “Still, I keep ’em new because if they rust over, then I got to get my bolt cutters.”
This still made no sense to Caleb. The appearance of a locked cellar would hardly deter a determined intruder. And then there was Ray’s mentioning of bolt cutters. If someone didn’t feel like kicking the locks off, they could surely scout the place out first and then bring along some bolt cutters to make the job easier and quieter.
Ray unlocked the padlocks, pocketed them, swung the heavy wooden doors open, and guided Caleb down a small flight of concrete steps. Before them was an iron door. Nothing fancy, just one big iron door. Still not a deal breaker to a determined intruder, Caleb thought. There were heavy-duty tools for such a job.
“Open her up for me, will you?” Ray asked Caleb, gesturing towards the iron door. He held up a spindly hand, the knuckles on his fingers bulbous. “Arthritis.”
“You got a key?”
“Nah—she’s unlocked.”
Zero sense.
Caleb reached for the door’s equally iron handle and got the shock of a lifetime. Literally.
Caleb stumbled backwards and grabbed his chest. It felt like he’d been hit by a damn fireball out of a video game.
He instantly spun on Ray and grabbed him by the throat, ramming him backwards against one of the stone walls within the cellar entrance’s small enclosure.
And Ray laughed wildly, even as he struggled to breathe within Caleb’s grip.
“What the fuck was that about?!” Caleb screamed.
Ray continued to laugh manically, albeit in sputters and gurgles now as Caleb’s grip tightened, seemingly without concern for his dwindling air. Tears still fell freely from the man’s eyes; he still grinned that
(crazy, fucking CRAZY)
grin of his.
Caleb let go. Ray bent over and began something that was a mix of coughing and laughing.
“Why did you do that?” Caleb said. His right fist was clenched, ready to remove the rest of Ray’s teeth the moment he stood upright. Jack Dixon vouching for this guy as a means to Caleb’s end or not, he was not about to let the crazy bastard fuck with him for his own amusement. Nobody fucked with a Lambert for their own amusement. Not anymore.
Ray eventually stood upright, the coughing done, but the laughter—giggling now—remaining.
“Oh, it was just a little fun, partner…” he said. “I thought you Marines were tough.”
“Oh my, you do got a dark side, don’t ya?”
Dark side? What DID Jack tell him about me?
“Just don’t pull any shit like that again,” Caleb said.
Ray waved an apologetic hand at him. “All right, all right. You’re lucky I had the voltage turned down as low as I did. If I cranked her, you’d be a rib roast right about now.”
“So, I guess this is your true line of defense against ‘looky-loos,’” Caleb said.
“One of many.” He pulled a small remote control from his pocket, fiddled with a few buttons—minute beeps could be heard from the other side—and then reached for the door’s handle, shock free. He then put his shoulder against the heavy iron door and began pushing it open, its sheer weight slowing the process. “Like I’m keen on telling Jack—and I’ll bet good money he agrees—when the end of days is upon us…”
The iron door now completely open, Caleb stepped inside the cellar. What he saw dropped his mouth.
Behind him, Ray finished with: “…I’ll be the last motherfucker standing.”
30
Caleb continued to just stand and stare, absorbing it but ignorant to exactly what he was absorbing. Something big. Something huge. Something beyond his scope of comprehension.
He flashed on the iconic scene in The Wizard of Oz, his mother’s favorite film. The scene when a bewildered Dorothy first steps into the mysterious and colorful world of Oz, leaving the simple gray of her previous world behind.
Did that make Ray the wizard?—
(does that make you Dorothy?)
Fuck off.
—If you asked him, Ray would almost assuredly say he was. Only he’d be the first to tell you that unlike Emerald City and the phony wizard therein, flashing his superficial scares and such to keep the mythos alive, he and his cellar in Bumblefuck were the real deal. The Wizard of Bumblefuck, was Ray.
Only Caleb would soon find out that was wrong. Ray, it would seem, was wizard of far more places than Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania.
Ray’s magic stretched continents.
• • •
Wall-to-wall technology as far as Caleb’s eyes could see. Monitors, hundreds of them, small and large, color and black and white, displaying everything from international news, to running lists of code, to internet exchanges between strangers via email and social media and message boards and everything else in between, to CCTV and other video footage. Video footage tracking bird’s-eye views of random cars in transit. Exteriors and interiors of bars and restaurants and hotels and offices. Exteriors and interiors of people’s homes, from backyard to front door and every angle in between. From bedroom to den—
(interior? How the hell…???)
—and every nook without a name. All of this footage somehow capturing audio, many displaying that audio in subtitles at the bottom of the screen.
These things, save for multiple keyboards broad and small, here there and everywhere, were all Caleb could really identify. The rest of the machinery throughout the cellar, no less abundant, no less large and small, no less here there and everywhere, Caleb likened to the idea of a computer’s guts, spilled out and stuck onto all four walls of the cellar, each piece’s purpose as much of a mystery to him as the next.
And this analogy, like the Wizard of Oz one he’d just summoned, was equally apt; Caleb felt as if he’d stepped inside a freaking computer the size of a cellar. Which quickly begged the question that had been eating at him ever since Ray spoke—
(“Jack can’t stand me. Doesn’t approve of what I get up to one bit…”)
—it. Just what the hell did Ray do? And why didn’t Jack Dixon approve?
“Grab a seat, partner,” Ray said, motioning to a chair before the largest wall of monitors in the cellar. “Mi casa es su casa.”
Caleb absently took the seat offered to him, his eyes stuck to the wall of monitors like a fanatic at a sports bar.
Ray came right out with it. “I’m a man who gives few fucks about few things. You’re here to find people, yes? A particular type of person?”
Caleb took his eyes off the screens. “What exactly did Jack tell you?”
“Does it matter? You’ve got your reasons, and I just told you I don’t give a shit about them.”
“It matters to me.”
Ray sighed. He gave Caleb the face of a man roped into some drama he would have otherwise avoided. “He told me you were keen on pulling some Dexter shit. Finding and punishing the naughty folks in the world. That sound about right?”
“I…yeah, I guess it does. But the reason I—”
Ray held up a hand. “Don’t care. You got your reasons, and that’s enough for me. I’m not one to judge. Christ, the shit I get up to in here, I’m the last to judge.”
Ask already. “Just what the hell do you get up to?”
Ray grinned his grin. “Blackmail, partner. If someone out there’s got a secret they can’t afford the world to know about, you can bet your ass I know about it—” His grin was now his whole face, missing teeth and all. “And I make ’em pay—big-time.”
31
“Blackmail?” Caleb said.
“Yep.”
“Why?”
Ray cocked his head. “Does it matter? You’ve got your reasons; I got mine.”
Caleb said nothing.
Ray then laughed. “Just kidding, partner. The money! I do it for the money. I gave up on humanity a long time ago, partner. Nothing but useless wads of flesh, all of them.”
“So, then what? Is it a ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ kind of thing?”
Ray shrugged. “You could look at it that way, if you want. Don’t really care how you look at it, to be honest.”
Caleb looked at the largest wall of monitors again—countless stories, countless lives being displayed and watched by one man who had the capability of altering their existence forever.
“Do you at least target the true assholes of the world?” Caleb asked, still looking at the monitors.
“We’re all true assholes, partner. We’re born into this world as selfish creatures, and we die as selfish creatures. Don’t be fooled into thinking the masks we wear are who we really are.”
Those last words punched into Caleb. Who we really are.
But wasn’t Caleb somewhat of an exception to Ray’s cynical view of mankind? Caleb wasn’t exactly sure who he was, but he did know his urges were bad. And wasn’t that why he was here? Hadn’t he accepted those urges, accepted who he really was? And now he was here to make it right?
(By taking lives to fulfill those urges? Sounds selfish to me.)
By taking lives of bad people. Bad people who hurt good people.
(Only Ray says there ARE no good people.)
And we’ve enrolled in Ray’s fucked-up school of philosophy already, have we? There ARE good people in this world. But like any endeavor in life, being good takes work.
Caleb flashed on the novel The Exorcist. To a part in that novel that he felt was the most brilliant part of the story. A part that elevated the book above the standard horror story and into what many coined an actual love story.
The elder priest, Father Merrin, explains to the younger Father Karras how he had nearly lost his faith. How Father Merrin was tormented by the fact that his love for his fellow man did not come naturally to him. That some people actually repulsed him. How, Merrin wondered, could he be a messenger of God if he was secretly disgusted by those he was supposed to love?
And then Father Merrin’s revelation had occurred. He realized it was not practical—basically impossible—to be born as such a benevolent figure. That God would not ask of him such an impossible task. That such a status required effort. And it was that effort which made one a truly good person. To express love to your fellow man in spite of any revulsion or distaste. Just as God would always love us in spite of our ma
ny faults.
While Caleb found no use for organized religion, and his belief in God rivaled his belief in Bigfoot, that particular part of the novel had resonated so strongly with Caleb at the time—he was seventeen when he’d read it, in the throes of his current torment—because it brought up one exceptionally painful, at least to Caleb, caveat.
What about psychopaths?
Being good might require work for—for lack of a better phrase—a normal mind. But what about a mind that was already born altered? Born—again, for lack of a better phrase—bad? A bad mind that is helpless to bad urges? A bad mind that ultimately succumbs to those urges no matter how much its owner might try to resist them?
What did that make Caleb? Was he beyond hope? Or was his being here his Father Merrin way of doing good despite his selfish needs? He liked to think it was the latter. Although Father Merrin would undoubtedly tell Caleb that the methods by which he was going about it were more than a little fucked up, but wasn’t he at least trying? How many other psychopaths
(ARE you a psychopath?)
of the violent kind did not even try to battle their urges? How many actually delighted in them? He sure as hell knew the fucking Fannelli brothers had.
Wasn’t that worth something? Anything?
Perhaps Caleb had been looking at this in a far too dreary light. Perhaps he should be looking at his current predicament as a calling. To use his terrible urges to punish the wicked.
And then Jack Dixon’s words immediately coming back to him: “And who are you to decide who deserves to be hurt and who doesn’t?”
Caleb’s reply to Jack during that lunch that day was still truer than ever. More so. He reiterated it now: And who the fuck decided it was all right to take my father’s life? Domino’s life? The countless others lost at the hands of evil men? And to answer your question, Jack: ME. I decide. I will be the one who decides who deserves to be punished. I’ve earned that right. I have fucking EARNED it.
“You may just be on to something there, Ray,” Caleb said. “I suppose we all wear masks to some extent. Either way, I don’t give a shit.”
Ray laughed. “Now you’re getting it, partner.”
Bad Games- The Complete Series Page 107
