by Stephen King
OPEN LINK TO ZEETHEEND? Y N
He centers the cursor on Y, hits the return key, then waits. The worry-circle goes around and around and around. Just as he's begun to wonder if something has gone wrong, the laptop flashes the message he's been waiting for:
ZEETHEEND IS NOW ACTIVE
Good. Zeetheend is just a little icing on the cake. He has been able to disseminate only a limited number of Zappits--and a significant portion of his shipment was defective, for Christ's sake--but teenagers are herd creatures, and herd creatures are in mental and emotional lockstep. It's why fish school and bees swarm. It's why the swallows come back each year to Capistrano. In human behavior, it's why "the wave" goes around at football and baseball stadiums, and why individuals will lose themselves in a crowd simply because the crowd is there.
Teenage boys have a tendency to wear the same baggy shorts and grow the same scruff on their faces, lest they be excluded from the herd. Teenage girls adopt the same styles of dress and go crazy for the same musical groups. It's We R Your Bruthas this year; not so long ago it was 'Round Here and One Direction. Back in the day it was New Kids on the Block. Fads sweep through teenagers like a measles epidemic, and from time to time, one of those fads is suicide. In southern Wales, dozens of teens hung themselves between 2007 and 2009, with messages on social networking sites stoking the craze. Even the goodbyes they left were couched in Netspeak: Me2 and CU L8er.
Wildfires vast enough to burn millions of acres can be started by a single match thrown into dry brush. The Zappits Brady has distributed through his human drones are hundreds of matches. Not all of them will light, and some of those that do won't stay lit. Brady knows this, but he has zeetheend.com to serve as both backstop and accelerant. Will it work? He's far from sure, but time is too short for extensive tests.
And if it does?
Teen suicides all over the state, maybe all over the Midwest. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. How would you like that, ex-Detective Hodges? Would that improve your retirement, you meddlesome old fuck?
He swaps Babineau's laptop for Z-Boy's game console. It's fitting to use this one. He thinks of it as Zappit Zero, because it's the first one he ever saw, on the day Al Brooks brought it into his room, thinking Brady might like it. Which he did. Oh yes, very much.
The extra program, with the number-fish and the subliminal messages, hasn't been added to this one, because Brady doesn't need it. Those things are strictly for the targets. He watches the fish swim back and forth, using them to settle and focus, then closes his eyes. At first there's only darkness, but after a few moments red lights begin to appear--more than fifty now. They are like dots on a computer map, except they don't remain stationary. They swim back and forth, left to right, up and down, crisscrossing. He settles on one at random, his eyes rolling beneath his closed lids as he follows its progress. It begins to slow, and slow, and slow. It stills, then starts growing bigger. It opens like a flower.
He's in a bedroom. There's a girl, staring fixedly down at the fish on her own Zappit, which she received free from badconcert.com. She's in her bed because she didn't go to school today. Maybe she said she was sick.
"What's your name?" Brady asks.
Sometimes they just hear a voice coming from the game console, but the ones who are most susceptible actually see him, like some kind of avatar in a video game. This girl is one of the latter, an auspicious beginning. But they always respond better to their names, so he'll keep saying it. She looks without surprise at the young man sitting beside her on the bed. Her face is pale. Her eyes are dazed.
"I'm Ellen," she says. "I'm looking for the right numbers."
Of course you are, he thinks, and slips into her. She's forty miles south of him, but once the demo screen has opened them, distance doesn't matter. He could control her, turn her into one of his drones, but he doesn't want to do that any more than he wanted to slip into Mrs. Trelawney's house some dark night and cut her throat. Murder isn't control; murder is just murder.
Suicide is control.
"Are you happy, Ellen?"
"I used to be," she says. "I could be again, if I find the right numbers."
Brady gives her a smile that's both sad and charming. "Yes, but the numbers are like life," he says. "Nothing adds up, Ellen. Isn't that true?"
"Uh-huh."
"Tell me something, Ellen--what are you worried about?" He could find it himself, but it will be better if she tells him. He knows there's something, because everyone worries, and teenagers worry most of all.
"Right now? The SAT."
Ah-ha, he thinks, the infamous Scholastic Assessment Test, where the Department of Academic Husbandry separates the sheep from the goats.
"I'm so bad at math," she says. "I reek."
"Bad at the numbers," he says, nodding sympathetically.
"If I don't score at least six-fifty, I won't get into a good school."
"And you'll be lucky to score four hundred," he says. "Isn't that the truth, Ellen?"
"Yes." Tears well in her eyes and begin to roll down her cheeks.
"And then you'll do badly on the English, too," Brady says. He's opening her up, and this is the best part. It's like reaching into an animal that's stunned but still alive, and digging its guts out. "You'll freeze up."
"I'll probably freeze up," Ellen says. She's sobbing audibly now. Brady checks her short-term memory and finds that her parents have gone to work and her little brother is at school. So crying is all right. Let the bitch make all the noise she wants.
"Not probably. You will freeze up, Ellen. Because you can't handle the pressure."
She sobs.
"Say it, Ellen."
"I can't handle the pressure. I'll freeze, and if I don't get into a good school, my dad will be disappointed and my mother will be mad."
"What if you can't get into any school? What if the only job you can get is cleaning houses or folding clothes in a laundrymat?"
"My mother will hate me!"
"She hates you already, doesn't she, Ellen?"
"I don't . . . I don't think . . ."
"Yes she does, she hates you. Say it, Ellen. Say 'My mother hates me.'"
"My mother hates me. Oh God, I'm so scared and my life is so awful!"
This is the great gift bestowed by a combination of Zappit-induced hypnosis and Brady's own ability to invade minds once they are in that open and suggestible state. Ordinary fears, the ones kids like this live with as a kind of unpleasant background noise, can be turned into ravening monsters. Small balloons of paranoia can be inflated until they are as big as floats in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
"You could stop being scared," Brady says. "And you could make your mother very, very sorry."
Ellen smiles through her tears.
"You could leave all this behind."
"I could. I could leave it behind."
"You could be at peace."
"Peace," she says, and sighs.
How wonderful this is. It took weeks with Martine Stover's mother, who was always leaving the demo screen to play her goddam solitaire, and days with Barbara Robinson. With Ruth Scapelli and this pimple-faced crybaby in her poofy-pink girl's bedroom? Mere minutes. But then, Brady thinks, I always had a steep learning curve.
"Do you have your phone, Ellen?"
"Here." She reaches under a decorative throw pillow. Her phone is also poofy-pink.
"You should post on Facebook and Twitter. So all your friends can read it."
"What should I post?"
"Say 'I am at peace now. You can be, too. Go to zeetheend.com.'"
She does it, but at an oozingly slow speed. When they're in this state, it's like they're underwater. Brady reminds himself of how well this is going and tries not to become impatient. When she's done and the messages are sent--more matches flicked into dry tinder--he suggests that she go to the window. "I think you could use some fresh air. It might clear your head."
"I could use some fresh air," she says, throwing back th
e duvet and swinging her bare feet out of bed.
"Don't forget your Zappit," he says.
She takes it and walks to the window.
"Before you open the window, go to the main screen, where the icons are. Can you do that, Ellen?"
"Yes . . ." A long pause. The bitch is slower than cold molasses. "Okay, I see the icons."
"Great. Now go to WipeWords. It's the blackboard-and-eraser icon."
"I see it."
"Tap it twice, Ellen."
She does so, and the Zappit gives an acknowledging blue flash. If anyone tries to use this particular game console again, it will give a final blue flash and drop dead.
"Now you can open the window."
Cold air rushes in, blowing her hair back. She wavers, seems on the edge of waking, and for a moment Brady feels her slipping away. Control is still hard to maintain at a distance, even when they're in a hypnotic state, but he's sure he'll hone his technique to a nice sharp point. Practice makes perfect.
"Jump," Brady whispers. "Jump, and you won't have to take the SAT. Your mother won't hate you. She'll be sorry. Jump and all the numbers will come right. You'll get the best prize. The prize is sleep."
"The prize is sleep," Ellen agrees.
"Do it now," Brady murmurs as he sits behind the wheel of Al Brooks's old car with his eyes closed.
Forty miles south, Ellen jumps from her bedroom window. It's not a long drop, and there's banked snow against the house. It's old and crusty, but it still cushions her fall to a degree, so instead of dying, she only breaks a collarbone and three ribs. She begins to scream in pain, and Brady is blown out of her head like a pilot strapped to an F-111 ejection seat.
"Shit!" he screams, and pounds the steering wheel. Babineau's arthritis flares all the way up his arm, and that makes him angrier still. "Shit, shit, shit!"
19
In the pleasantly upscale neighborhood of Branson Park, Ellen Murphy struggles to her feet. The last thing she remembers is telling her mother she was too sick to go to school--a lie so she could tap pink fish and hunt for prizes on the pleasantly addictive Fishin' Hole demo. Her Zappit is lying nearby, the screen cracked. It no longer interests her. She leaves it and begins staggering toward the front door on bare feet. Each breath she takes is a stab in the side.
But I'm alive, she thinks. At least I'm alive. What was I thinking? What in God's name was I thinking?
Brady's voice is still with her: the slimy taste of something awful that she swallowed while it was still alive.
20
"Jerome?" Holly asks. "Can you still hear me?"
"Yes."
"I want you to turn off the Zappit and put it on Bill's desk." And then, because she's always been a belt-and-suspenders kind of girl, she adds: "Facedown."
A frown creases his broad brow. "Do I have to?"
"Yes. Right now. And without looking at the damn thing."
Before Jerome can follow this order, Hodges catches one final glimpse of the fish swimming, and one more bright blue flash. A momentary dizziness--perhaps caused by his pain pills, perhaps not--sweeps through him. Then Jerome pushes the button on top of the console, and the fish disappear.
What Hodges feels isn't relief but disappointment. Maybe that's crazy, but given his current medical problem, maybe it's not. He's seen hypnosis used from time to time to help witnesses achieve better recall, but has never grasped its full power until now. He has an idea, probably blasphemous in this situation, that the Zappit fish might be better medicine for pain than the stuff Dr. Stamos prescribed.
Holly says, "I'm going to count down from ten to one, Jerome. Each time you hear a number, you'll be a little more awake. Okay?"
For several seconds Jerome says nothing. He sits calmly, peacefully, touring some other reality and perhaps trying to decide if he would like to live there permanently. Holly, on the other hand, is vibrating like a tuning fork, and Hodges can feel his fingernails biting into his palms as he clenches his fists.
At last Jerome says, "Okay, I guess. Since it's you, Hollyberry."
"Here we go. Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . you're coming back . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . waking up . . ."
Jerome raises his head. His eyes are aimed at Hodges, but Hodges isn't sure the boy is seeing him.
"Four . . . three . . . almost there . . . two . . . one . . . wake up!" She claps her hands together.
Jerome gives a hard jerk. One hand brushes Dinah's Zappit and knocks it to the floor. Jerome looks at Holly with an expression of surprise so exaggerated it would be funny under other circumstances.
"What just happened? Did I go to sleep?"
Holly collapses into the chair ordinarily reserved for clients. She takes a deep breath and wipes her cheeks, which are damp with sweat.
"In a way," Hodges says. "The game hypnotized you. Like it hypnotized your sister."
"Are you sure?" Jerome asks, then looks at his watch. "I guess you are. I just lost fifteen minutes."
"Closer to twenty. What do you remember?"
"Tapping the pink fish and turning them into numbers. It's surprisingly hard to do. You have to watch closely, really concentrate, and the blue flashes don't help."
Hodges picks the Zappit up off the floor.
"I wouldn't turn that on," Holly says sharply.
"Not going to. But I did last night, and I can tell you there were no blue flashes, and you could tap pink fish until your finger went numb without getting any numbers. Also, the tune is different now. Not much, but a little."
Holly sings, pitch perfect: "'By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea, you and me, you and me, oh how happy we'll be.' My mother used to sing it to me when I was little."
Jerome is staring at her with more intensity than she can deal with, and she looks away, flustered. "What? What is it?"
"There were words," he says, "but not those."
Hodges heard no words, only the tune, but doesn't say so. Holly asks Jerome if he can remember them.
His pitch isn't as good as hers, but it's close enough for them to be sure that yes, it's the tune they heard. "'You can sleep, you can sleep, it's a beautiful sleep . . . '" He stops. "That's all I can remember. If I'm not just making it up, that is."
Holly says, "Now we know for sure. Someone amped the Fishin' Hole screen."
"Shot it full of 'roids," Jerome adds.
"What does that even mean?" Hodges asks.
Jerome nods to Holly and she says, "Someone loaded a stealth program into the demo, which is mildly hypnotic to begin with. The program was dormant when Dinah had the Zappit, and still dormant when you looked at it last night, Bill--which was lucky for you--but someone turned it on after that."
"Babineau?"
"Him or someone else, if the police are right and Babineau is dead."
"It could have been a preset," Jerome says to Holly. Then, to Hodges: "You know, like an alarm clock."
"Let me get this straight," Hodges says. "The program was in there all along, and only became active once Dinah's Zappit was turned on today?"
"Yes," Holly says. "There's probably a repeater at work, don't you think, Jerome?"
"Yeah. A computer program that pumps out the update constantly, waiting for some schlub--me, in this case--to turn on a Zappit and activate the WiFi."
"This could happen with all of them?"
"If the stealth program is in all of them, sure," Jerome says.
"Brady set this up." Hodges begins to pace, hand going to his side as if to contain the pain and hold it in. "Brady fucking Hartsfield."
"How?" Holly asks.
"I don't know, but it's the only thing that fits. He tries to blow up the Mingo during that concert. We stop him. The audience, most of them young girls, is saved."
"By you, Holly," Jerome says.
"Be quiet, Jerome. Let him tell it." Her eyes suggest she knows where Hodges is going.
"Six years pass. Those young girls, most of them in elementary or middle school in 2010, are in hi
gh school. Maybe in college. 'Round Here is long gone and the girls are young women now, they've moved on to other kinds of music, but then they get an offer they can't refuse. A free game console, and all they have to do is be able to prove they were at the 'Round Here show that night. The console probably looks as out-of-date to them as a black-and-white TV, but what the hell, it's free."
"Yes!" Holly says. "Brady was still after them. This is his revenge, but not just on them. It's his revenge on you, Bill."
Which makes me responsible, Hodges thinks bleakly. Except what else could I do? What else could any of us do? He was going to bomb the place.
"Babineau, going under the name of Myron Zakim, bought eight hundred of those consoles. It had to be him, because he's loaded. Brady was broke and I doubt Library Al could have fronted even twenty thousand dollars from his retirement savings. Those consoles are out there now. And if they all get this amped-up program once they're turned on . . ."
"Hold it, go back," Jerome says. "Are you really saying that a respected neurosurgeon got involved in this shit?"
"That's what I'm saying, yeah. Your sister ID'd him, and we already know the respected neurosurgeon was using Brady Hartsfield as a lab rat."
"But now Hartsfield's dead," Holly says. "Which leaves Babineau, who may also be dead."
"Or not," Hodges says. "There was blood in his car, but no body. Wouldn't be the first time some doer tried to fake his own death."
"I've got to check something on my computer," Holly says. "If those free Zappits are getting a new program as of today, then maybe . . ." She hurries out.
Jerome begins, "I don't understand how any of this can be, but--"
"Babineau will be able to tell us," Hodges says. "If he's still alive."
"Yes, but wait a minute. Barb talked about hearing a voice, telling her all sorts of awful things. I didn't hear any voice, and I sure don't feel like offing myself."
"Maybe you're immune."
"I'm not. That screen got me, Bill, I mean I was gone. I heard words in the little tune, and I think there were words in the blue flashes, too. Like subliminal messages. But . . . no voice."
There could be all sorts of reasons for that, Hodges thinks, and just because Jerome didn't hear the suicide voice, it doesn't mean that most of the kids who got those free games won't.
