by The Behrg
An ache grew in the back of his eyes like a physical weight. There was a good chance Blake wouldn’t be coming back around. Jenna was a mess, and Adam couldn’t imagine living with her alone. For the first time in a long time, he thought about his sister.
Blake had been right. He should run away.
He opened a new window and began searching for wheelchairs. The door to the garage opened, and Joje entered from the connecting hall. Blake and Drew weren’t with him.
“How’s my dad?”
“Bweathing,” Joje said, which didn’t say much. “And how’s awe good docto feewing?”
The doctor was tied to a chair in front of the broken TV, duct tape covering his mouth. A true kidnapping. His white eyes bulged from his wrinkled and saggy cheeks, his bald and spotted head shiny from all the sweat. He stared at Adam, begging, pleading.
Adam wondered if the doctor had known when he woke that morning that today would be the last day of his life. He couldn’t even pronounce the guy’s name.
The doctor squirmed in his chair, beating against the back of it, as Joje approached.
“Can I go for a swim?” Adam asked. The question clearly caught Joje off guard. Adam kept himself from smiling.
“Sawee, I need Dwew wight now.”
It always took Adam a minute to understand Joje. “I’m bored. I already ordered the TV and wheelchair. They’ll be here tomorrow. I just need to get out of the house for a bit.”
Adam could almost see the turning gears behind Joje’s eyes as he considered the possible outcomes. “That’s fine.”
Joje came forward, putting his hand on Adam’s shoulder. “Thank you again, fo’ expwaining about the phone. I’m pwoud of you.”
Adam shrugged, letting Joje’s hand slip off his shoulder.
“I want my son to be just wike you.” As he returned to the family room, Joje pointed at Jenna on the couch. “Stay,” he said, laughing as he continued back to the garage.
“Bye, Jenna,” Adam said in a whisper. He went to the back door, passing Conrad’s empty cage, and stepped outside. Joje’s misplaced trust was something he had worked hard to earn, but Adam was beginning to realize how much he had underestimated their kidnappers.
With Joje, he felt like he had fallen into a wormhole, popping out and meeting his future self. It had been intoxicating at first—frightening, sure—but no different than smoking his first joint or bedding his first girl. A fear more thrilling than it was scary. But soon he’d be alone with that future iteration, his parents out of the equation, and he was no longer sure that mirrored projection was who he wanted to be.
First his sister, now his parents.
And it was all his fault.
He ripped off his shirt and dove into the pool. The collision with the water cleared his mind, ideas floating to the surface like rising bubbles of air.
Blake’s words, “Take the first chance you get and run.”
Joje telling him, “I’m pwoud of you.”
And Adam left with nothing to say for himself.
He broke the surface, swimming to the far side of the pool. Maybe there was nothing left to say. Had he known when he woke that morning that today would be the last day of his life? Joje’s pwoject would soon be coming to an end. At least for him.
4
Blake awoke with a gasp. From the base of his skull running to the middle of his forehead, it felt like someone had pried their fingers deep into the spongy tissue of his head, and was about to peel it back like the skin of an orange. It was a new and much more intimate acquaintance with the term “splitting headache.”
Water poured over his face, which had most likely ripped him from unconsciousness. He tried to shake it off, but its source was bent on drowning him. He coughed, his lungs suddenly burning. With dread, he realized it wasn’t water.
It was gasoline.
Fumes climbed down his throat and nose, causing Blake to choke and snort. At last the flow of liquid stopped, his clothing drenched and sticking to him as he lay in a gathering puddle of fuel. It took a moment for his eyes to focus, even longer to connect image to thought. Speckled pavement, artificial light, shelving filled with boxes . . . and a twisted and bent bicycle lying on the floor.
His garage.
He rolled to a crouching position, rising to his hands and knees. His head hung, eyes closing to stop the dizzying effect of the room spiraling beneath him. It didn’t help.
“I’m only going to ask this once, Bwake, so pay attention,” Joje said.
Blake hacked through another bout of coughing, his lungs trying to eject the fumes inhaled with every breath. When he was through, Drew bent down, forcing Blake’s head up.
“Where are the files stored?” Joje asked.
His sight was so blurry Blake barely recognized Joje, though it could have been because he wasn’t smiling. He blinked through the pain, the burning sensation in his eyes making him wonder if they hadn’t already lit a match.
“From your phone,” Joje continued. “Where are they stored?”
“Go to hell—”
Drew’s fist cuffed Blake across the chin, and his head lolled backward. He could have sworn he heard marbles clicking around somewhere inside his skull. More gasoline poured over his face, the toxic air doubling him over, a wretched and wet cough forcing its way out.
“Let’s try again. Where do they keep the record of the files from your phone?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t—”
Air shut off like a valve closing as Drew’s hand clamped over Blake’s mouth. His neck was forced back, eyes squinting at the blinding lights overhead. Just as Blake felt unconsciousness circling above him, Drew removed his hand.
Blake gasped for air. What he found instead was gasoline.
Liquid flame fought its way down his throat, into his lungs, gasoline dribbling through the passageway of his nose. He felt it floating in his head, his throat burning from the inside out; if there had been a flame, he could have spewed fire. Chortled gags and the painful wrenching of stomach muscles no longer in his control brought up meals in puddles of blood-ridden fuel.
“Please,” Blake said, a line of spittle hanging from his open mouth. “I don’t know where—”
A match burst alive in Joje’s outstretched thumb and forefinger. Blake could smell the burning sulfur, see the flame’s sway in both of Joje’s eyes.
“Do it,” Drew said, backing away from Blake. “We can take care of the others, be gone before anyone finds out.”
“We still have unfinished business.” The flame climbed down toward the bottom of the match, lighting upon Joje’s fingers. He didn’t so much as flinch.
Blake sputtered, trying to catch his breath. “There are . . . warehouses—it could be anywhere or backed up at every one. I have no idea. I’m not involved in any of that.”
Joje dropped the match.
Blake’s heart fluttered, a miniscule comet breaking Earth’s atmosphere, carrying with it only death. The last of its flame snuffed out a second before striking the ground, its smoking top put out by the puddle of gasoline.
“You’re going to fix this, Bwake. And I’ll show you why. Bring him.”
Drew lifted Blake from his armpits, dragging him toward the front of the garage. They crossed from where the Escalade was parked over to the back of Blake’s midnight blue M6.
“Pop the trunk,” Joje said. Drew dropped Blake to the floor, moving to the driver’s door and reaching in. “I believe you know a bit about poker, Bwake? Have even played in a tournament or two? You probably know the old saying, never show your cards unless you have to. If everyone folds and you take the hand, you drop the cards facedown. But I believe there’s power in showing your hand. In letting your opponent know you’re not bluffing.”
Blake felt Drew’s hands pick him back up, dragging him toward Joje. Toward the trunk.
Drew lifted him to his feet. Blake had to catch himself from falling, placing his hands against the rail of the open trunk. The smell
hit him before he could register what he was seeing.
Legs. Arms. Detached from a thick torso that was cut into fourths like a sandwich. And tucked beneath the crook of an elbow, the back of a head, a mass of matted black hair like lichen crawling upward.
Blake bent forward, vomiting onto the side of his car, then backed away, the garage door clanging as he smacked into it.
“You said you were tired of games, right? So no more games. Find a way to fix this, or you’ve just seen what becomes of your lovely wife and son.”
Wuv-wee indeed.
Inside the house the first thing Blake noticed was the rolling metal arms with hanging bags of clear fluid, wires and tubes snaking over to Jenna’s arms, one biting into her neck. He approached her hesitantly, every step wobbly, aware of the fumes and stink of gasoline surrounding him like a cloud. Her eyes were closed, and as much as he wanted to put his hand on her head and run his fingers through her hair, he stayed himself.
Drew was unwinding a rope Blake had used to tie down a Christmas tree to the top of their Jeep one year back in West Virginia. The tree had only made it halfway to their house, sliding from the roof of the car and bouncing along the barren curved road of slush behind them. They had gone fake every year since.
Beneath the rope was a frail, wizened old man. Drew ripped the tape from his mouth with a stinging pull that stole the color from the man’s cheeks. He raised his hands tentatively, the wrinkles in his forehead spreading like ripples in a pond as he arched his eyebrows.
“Please? I can leave?”
Dr. Cheverou was a relic from another age caught in a world moving too fast. And this time it was bound to get him hurt.
“No leave,” Joje said. He pointed to Blake. “Make sure he’s . . . okay in the head.”
Dr. Cheverou smiled as if he were used to people speaking to him like a three-year-old.
“Make it quick,” Drew said.
“Sit please?” The doctor’s thick accent rolled his sentences into one continuous word.
Blake lowered himself onto the loveseat perpendicular to Jenna. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to get back up. “Where’s Adam?” he asked, suddenly realizing his son was missing.
“In the pool,” Drew said. He must have seen the fear sweep over Blake’s face because he added, “He’s just swimming.”
“I need my tools?” the doctor asked.
“No tools,” Joje said.
Dr. Cheverou turned back to Blake with a scowl that had been perfected over a lifetime.
“Thank you for helping my wife,” Blake said. “She looks better, her face . . . it has color.”
Dr. Cheverou only grunted.
“Where are you from?” Blake asked.
“Look up,” the doctor intoned. He moved his face forward, mere inches from Blake’s. Blake could smell the musk of the doctor’s cologne over the reek of gasoline, an odd cocktail of engine oil and old man smell mixed with sweat. And fear.
Dr. Cheverou’s fingers prodded around Blake’s eyes. “I am from Ukraine. Lugansk. Is like little Los Angeles.” He turned Blake’s head to the side, massaging around the back of his skull. Blake winced, a piercing spike spreading forward all the way to his eyes. “Fingers.”
Blake held out his hands, not understanding it was a question until the blurring of his vision settled to a more muted amplification.
“Oh, uh, three. Two. Six . . . or seven.”
Dr. Cheverou’s face back in Blake’s. Their eyes met, and in the doctor’s Blake saw pity. Then the doctor slapped him across the face, hard—jolting.
“You bring me here? To these monsters?”
Another slap, Blake too slow to stop it or move out of its way.
Maybe it hadn’t been pity.
“Whoa, whoa, Doc!” Joje was suddenly there, grabbing the doctor’s upraised hand and saving Blake from . . . what? Shame?
Dr. Cheverou spat in Blake’s face, then glared at Joje. “Let me go. No one will know about this. I know to keep secrets.”
Blake watched as the doctor’s face turned from a grimace of hate to pain. He bent downward, Joje no longer holding his hand, but squeezing it—crushing it.
“I don’t want to hear you asking to leave again, Doc. Understand?” Joje said.
Dr. Cheverou nodded through welling eyes.
Joje stood over the now-kneeling doctor, not an edge of menace in his voice despite his vice-like grip on Dr. Cheverou’s hand. “You’re a guest and this . . . is like a vacation. Well, more like a staycation. I’m going to need the password to your phone as well as your e-mail so we can make sure your staff knows you left town.” Dr. Cheverou nodded. “Now how’s our boy doing? Is he okay?”
“Is poor light . . . difficult without tools,” the doctor said.
“You’re not getting your tools,” Joje said.
Dr. Cheverou snorted. “He has concussion.”
“Will he be okay?” Joje asked.
“Please. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Joje twisted the doctor’s hand so abruptly the string of bones snapping sounded more like a line of firecrackers, one going off after another. He released the hand, and the doctor crumbled to the floor, weeping.
“Thank you, Doc,” Joje said. “And remember our rules.”
“You are a small man with small dreams,” the doctor said, spit flying with his words.
Joje’s tic was back, his right eye blinking, mouth twitching in spasms. “This, Bwake, is the kind of fight I had hoped you would have.” He spun on the doctor with such speed, foot rising to Dr. Cheverou’s chest, it lifted the doctor almost completely from the floor as he barreled into the wall, wheezing.
The doctor reached for his fallen glasses with his good hand, bringing them slowly to his face, hand trembling. He had barely caught his breath when he looked back up at Joje. “I was wrong, not small man. Puny.”
Joje just smiled. “Tie him back up, Dwew. And mind the doc’s hand. Bwake and I need to do some planning.”
5
There were two main warehouses where Symbio housed servers in California, one in Lancaster, the other in Indio, and while they were only separated by about 150 miles, the amount of time to cross that distance in traffic would be more akin to six hours. Give or take an hour. Add the fact that if the files had been requested, they’d already be in someone’s hard drive in the Westlake office, and they needed to be in three places at once. Salvaging what remained of Joje’s “pwoject” would be more difficult than resuscitating Betti on Blake’s shattered Cyborg phone.
He shared with Joje his honest opinion: they were too late. There was no way to know where the information was being housed, at whose terminal, on which server or location. They were looking for a needle in the sewage tunnels of Los Angeles, and in the sewers of LA, there was an abundance of discarded needles.
“If you can’t find a way, we’re going to need a larger trunk,” Joje said, arms folded as he sat across from Blake at his office desk. “Are we clear?”
Yeah, we’re queer, Blake thought.
He had a way, it just wasn’t one he was comfortable employing. But it wouldn’t be the first time he had been left with no options. “I’ve got a guy,” he said.
“How long will it take?”
“Depends. On what he wants.”
Joje’s mouth began to twitch, his lip riding down the side of his face. “Whatever you need can be arranged. Your money’s safe.”
It was Blake’s turn to smile. “It won’t be that easy.”
Rory Shepherd was the Neo of hackers. In the early 2000s, he had hacked his way into the top ten companies of the Fortune 100, sending the CEO of each company an interoffice e-mail from the former CEO demanding their immediate resignation. A third of those e-mails had been sent from the grave. In ’06 he breached the security of the top twenty universities, lowering tuitions by sliding a decimal point one step to the left. In the twenty-four to forty-eight hours it took for the universities to become aware, there was a combined total o
f over fourteen million in lost revenues, though most universities had gone back and successfully litigated the difference from those enrolling. In 2009 Rory stormed the gates of Google, sending, albeit for a brief minute and six seconds, users of the one box search engine giant to an “under construction” page. Rumors abounded that Mark Zuckerberg had sent the request to Rory as a dare, one to which Rory responded by simultaneously sending Facebook users to the almost-abandoned wastelands of Myspace. To Zuckerberg’s credit, the lapse in time of that leap was a fraction of Google’s, lasting just under twenty-four seconds.
That Rory and Blake were on a first-name basis was something Blake both was proud of and despised. It also meant Blake’s chances of getting his help would be next to impossible.
A paranoid recluse, Rory had a system that prevented him from being discovered by authorities and those who would have loved to extradite him, among other things. He only worked with a client once. No exceptions.
And somehow Blake needed to change his mind.
“I’m going to need to break some of your rules for this to work,” Blake said.
Joje looked at Blake with skepticism. “Go on.”
“There’s only one person I know who could get what we want out of Symbio. The problem is, I don’t think he’ll do it.”
“Unless?”
“I tell him what’s really happening,” Blake said. “I don’t think he’ll do anything about it, like calling the cops. I’d stake my life on it. This guy—he’s . . . disconnected from the world in a way that’s hard to explain. It’s like everything to him is a big video game. People’s lives—they’re just actors, mannequins. He doesn’t care about anyone or anything.”
“So why would he care about you?” Joje asked.
“He won’t. But maybe he’ll be fascinated enough to want to watch, to be a part of it, and that’s what we need. He doesn’t do jobs for money. What he requests, it’s . . . well, it’s always something you’ll regret giving. He wants people to pay for his service. And the people that know him or how to reach him? Let’s just say money would be too easy.”
