Riker's Apocalypse (Book 1): The Promise

by Chesser, Shawn

  Tara was standing on the concrete walk. Her stocking cap was soaked and listing to one side. Water dripped from the small eave overhead, further wetting her hat and face and beading up on her red North Face jacket. She shook some of the water off then bugged her eyes. “Before we have a Jinga moment, will one of you strapping gentlemen take some of this crap off my hands?”

  The handles of two overstuffed plastic shopping bags were looped over each arm. Said arms were curled up in front of her bosom and struggling to keep hold of the rectangular cardboard box balanced there.

  Riker craned to see past Steve-O. Once eye contact was made with Tara, he pointed to his stump to let her know he was in one-legged mode.

  Without a word, Steve-O grabbed the box and placed it on the bed next to Riker.

  “Better grab her a towel,” said Riker as he picked the box up and placed it across his legs. The rain-dampened box was three feet end to end, nearly two front to back, and four inches tall. Scrawled in Sharpie across the lid were the words Open Box Return. There was a sticker on the side, but the size of the font made it impossible for Riker to read. Looking up, he asked, “The suspense is killing me. May I open it?”

  Tara had already shrugged the bags off her arms and was dabbing at her face with a hand towel Steve-O had brought her. “Be my guest.” She tossed the towel aside and turned the flimsy bags inside out, depositing their contents on the floor in a wide spray from end to end. She kicked off the fake Crocs and slipped on a fresh pair of socks. Over those she laced up a new pair of Merrell hikers. Finished, she tossed a package of white tube socks and men’s boxer shorts onto the bed next to her brother. Steve-O’s socks and boxers, she took from the Target sack and hand-delivered.

  Addressing Riker, who was just working the tape off the end of the box, Tara said, “Both are extra-large. And if they don’t fit, tough shit.” She smiled and regarded Steve-O. “I know, feed the swear jar.”

  Steve-O smiled and rubbed a thumb and forefinger together. “Pay up,” he said, smile broadening.

  “You have nothing to worry about,” she said. “Because if things work out tomorrow the way I think they’re going to, I could channel a salty Merchant Marine sailor and curse for an entire year and still not run out of cash for your imaginary jar.”

  Steve-O reached for the dresser and took a wrapped plastic cup off a tray home to an empty ice bucket, a single-serve Keurig coffee maker, and all of its accoutrements. He slipped the cup from the plastic slowly and set it upright next to the television.

  Removing her new coat, Tara said, “I’m good for it, Steve-O,” then looked to Riker. “What do you think of the purchase?”

  “The coat, boots, undergarments, or computer?”

  She pointed at the shiny black laptop.

  Turning the DELL over in his hands, Riker said, “Why do we need a computer?”

  “Let me tell you. How long do you have?” Suddenly, as if a light switch had been flicked, Tara’s eyes narrowed and she clamped a hand over her mouth and nose. “What is that smell?”

  Without missing a beat, Steve-O said, “Lee’s been farting.”

  Tara slowly panned her head and fixed Riker with a sour look. “Really, Lee? You couldn’t go in the bathroom and do that?”

  Again Riker pointed to his stump. “No crutches, Sis.” Then he looked to Steve-O. He was wearing the best poker face Riker had ever seen. After staring at the older man for a beat, Riker received a conspiratorial wink.

  Gasping for air, Tara started for the front door but paused midstep. Remembering the face-shot slogger from the corn maze near Daleville, she decided rather than cracking the door to ease the bathroom fan’s work load, she’d open the bathroom window a few inches instead.

  “This computer,” pressed Riker. He had it hinged open and powered on. “Why do we really need it? And how did you afford it? You only took out fifteen hundred dollars at the Iron Pan.”

  “We need it to see what’s really going on out there,” she replied. “I could afford it because it was a returned item and only a fraction of the cost of a new one. I figured it’d be easier for you to access your bank account on that than on my tiny phone screen. Besides, if the previous owners set it up already, it won’t be connected to either of us.”

  Wearing a knowing look, Riker nodded. “No way for the MIBs to track us.”

  “Exactly.” She removed her damp hat and donned Riker’s Braves cap. She waggled her fingers at the computer in a give it here manner then sat on the bed opposite her brother.

  After passing the computer over, Riker said, “I don’t even do the computer banking thing.” He glanced at the window. Steve-O was peering out between the curtains. Addressing Tara, he went on, “I call the bank because I’d rather try to understand a person in a call center in India than try to get a robot to understand me.”

  “We’re in.” Smile quickly disappearing, she added, “But it’s wiped. The Geek Crew kid warned me that it probably had already gone through their re-shelving procedures.”

  “What do we do then?”

  “Make shit up.”

  “Swear cup,” called Steve-O.

  Riker asked, “What do you see out there?”

  “Rain,” said Steve-O.” And some lightning up by Lake Erie.”

  Riker said, “No monsters?”

  “Negative, Ghost Rider.”

  Tara said, “Keep us informed.”

  Steve-O didn’t reply.

  Tara whipped through the setup process.

  “Minnie Mouse … really?”

  Tara chuckled. “I live on Disney Lane, too.”

  “You already said the social media sites are probably scrubbing any video proof or news segments before they post.”

  She nodded.

  “How are you going to get around that?”

  “Same way I’m going to share my video: The Deep Web.”

  Deep web sounded ominous, to Riker. Like somewhere Indiana Jones might reside if he was an avatar. He opened his mouth, then closed it without asking about it.

  Anticipating the question, Tara said, “The Geek Crew kid was more than eager to help direct me there.” She pulled up Wi-Fi in Windows Settings.

  Abruptly, Steve-O stood up from the bed and declared himself “Bushed.” He stretched, shucked off his Wrangler’s, and laid them on the chair between the bed and wall. While they didn’t quite stand up on their cuffs as Riker had predicted when he’d first met Steve-O, they still retained most of their form. In fact, as they settled in the chair, it almost seemed as if they were actually taking a load off.

  Tara said, “I bought you a toothbrush and toothpaste. They’re in the Rite Aid bag with the thumb drives and charging cables I bought for our devices.”

  “Thanks,” said Steve-O. “I brush in the morning.” He removed his glasses and set them on the nightstand beside the digital clock. His Stetson went atop his jeans and he unbuttoned his shirt, taking care to snap the pearlescent buttons before carefully placing the denim number over the chair back. Without another word, he crawled between the sheets and rolled over to face the clothes-laden chair.

  Riker shrugged. Then he looked at the bed and walked his eyes to the plush chair beside the window.

  Sensing her brother’s unease, Tara moved over to the chair, computer in hand, and told him to take the bed. “I don’t plan on sleeping anyway.” She nudged the NRA bag under the table with the toe of her hiker. “And if I get lonely, I’ve got Mom to keep me company.”

  Riker propped the shotgun muzzle down against the headboard. Since he was in trustworthy company, he left the prosthesis on the nightstand, standing up and ready to be thrown on in a moment’s notice. Lastly, he recapped to Tara everything he’d seen on television while she was gone, making a point to mention his problem with Romeo Victor as well as just how oddly calm he felt the President had come across in his speech given the ramifications of another terrorist attack in Manhattan. Finished, he pulled a Steve-O and abruptly shucked his pants and sweatshirt, lea
ving the twin pools of fabric where they had come to rest on the floor. Wearing only boxer briefs and a worn gray tee shirt, he took station between the sheets dead center on the bed closest to the front door.

  Tara set the Dell on the small oval table in front of the window and started tapping away at the keyboard.

  Propped up on one elbow and watching over his sister’s shoulder, Riker said, “How’d you get so good at typing? That’s got to be way more than thirty words per minute.”

  “Sixty or so,” replied Tara proudly

  “Where’d you learn that?”

  “I’m younger than you, Lee. For as long as I can remember, everything electronic has had a real or virtual keyboard.”

  He watched as she entered the Elvis-inspired login and password on the King’s Court Wi-Fi launch page. She consulted a piece of paper with the Best Buy logo as masthead. Copied the string of letters written in pen into the web browser bar.

  “Yeah. I just hunt and peck,” admitted Riker.

  Tara didn’t seem to hear that. The address she had just inputted landed her on a site with instructions on how to download something called a TOR browser. After jumping through the hoops and waiting a couple of minutes for the new browser to come online, she typed in the browser’s bar the next provided address. It took less than a second for a dog breeder’s web page to fill the screen. The thing was plain and looked to have been designed by an amateur. Splashed haphazardly on a black background were pictures of different breeds of dogs standing stiffly in show-pose positions meant to show off their proportion and lines. The aquamarine text was small and hard to make out despite its stark contrast against the background.

  Tara scrolled down to the bottom of the home page where a number of colorful badges suggested the breeder was in good standing with the American Kennel Club, Golden State Breeder’s Association, Silicone Valley Humane Society, and the Cupertino Chamber of Commerce. She enlarged the screen and positioned the arrow pointer over a blue dot wedged in the lower right corner.

  Riker heard a click and saw the screen go dark.

  “You killed it, Sis.”

  “Nope,” she said. “I just accessed the Deep Web.” No sooner had she turned back to the computer screen than it flared bright blue. Dead center on the field of cobalt was a rectangular white box. Inside the box, in bold black Times New Roman font, the words Who Are You? flashed incessantly.

  Tara consulted the Best Buy stationary as she typed a new string of letters and numbers into the box.

  The blue screen became black again. Hovering in the center was a logo eerily similarly to YouTube’s iconic red and white Play button floating on a white background.

  “That Geek Crew kid … did you have to—”

  “No,” shot Tara. “No skin was exposed.”

  A stifled laugh sounded in the back of the room.

  Ignoring Steve-O, who was obviously not asleep yet, Tara clicked on the arrow, bringing up a number of panes stacked in a vertical column. The clips were ranked from top to bottom, with the most viewed at the very top.

  “Twenty-two thousand views,” said Tara as she clicked on the top pane.

  The pane grew to fill the screen. The beginning of the clip had a jittery Blair Witch feel to it. It was dusk and the shooter was breathing hard while apparently backpedaling. Then Riker saw a blurry image in the distance take on human form. As the blob drew nearer, the camera’s autofocus feature began to catch up with it. At the three-second mark of the eight-second piece of footage, a piercing scream rang out and the advancing form launched itself at the person holding the camera. As the shooter pitched backward, she brought her arms up defensively, crossing them in front of her chest just as the violent impact with the ground stole her wind and sent the recording device flying from her grasp. As the device tumbled end-over-end, the image on the laptop screen matched its rotation while still catching snippets of the woman’s demise.

  Exhaling sharply, Tara scrolled the footage back a few frames to the point in the camera’s rotation when it recorded the attacker’s face.

  Riker asked, “Can you enlarge that?”

  “Let me see.” Tara moved the pointer to the taskbar and clicked repeatedly. Once the image of a sneering, blood-streaked face filled up the screen, she leaned back and rotated the laptop left a few degrees.

  Riker said, “That’s a Bolt. And like the others, it’s a younger male.”

  Tara said, “Scary thing is”—she paused to take a breath—“it’s tagged Cannibal Killer.”

  “Where was it shot?”

  Tara exhaled sharply. Swallowed hard, then said, “Fort Wayne.”

  “It’s jumped their perimeter.” Riker tossed the extra pillow aside and lay back. Staring at the ceiling, he said soberly, “So much for Romeo Victor.”

  Tara said nothing. She spun the laptop so it was facing her, donned Steve-O’s earbuds, and plugged the jack into the computer.

  The box spring squeaked as Riker rolled over and closed his eyes against the strobe effect of the footage playing on the screen. He was asleep in less than two minutes, entirely unaware of the morbid sights and sounds Tara was experiencing after having nudged that first domino the clip from Fort Wayne represented.

  Chapter 58

  Dawn didn’t break over Akron, it crept in from the east gray and heavy, like a fogbank at sea, but on a much grander scale. Riker had slept fitfully until four in the morning when he jolted awake sweaty and tense. He had remained prone and watched silently over Tara’s shoulder as she pulled up video clips from a Deep Web site, watched them, and moved on. For a full hour, during which the rising sun illuminated the gun-metal-gray clouds ever so slightly, he was bombarded with images similar to the ones that had come in the night. Things that he couldn’t unsee.

  ***

  The dull ache culminating from the nightmare and exacerbated from him craning his neck to see the computer screen was still with Riker two hours later when he sat up and plucked his prosthesis from the bed stand.

  Startled, Tara came off the chair and closed the screen partway. “Damn, Lee. I thought you were Steve-O. There’s shit on here he shouldn’t see.”

  “I know. I’ve been watching over your shoulder for awhile now,” admitted Riker. “How do you know he hasn’t already seen it all. He was in the school basement, too.”

  Tara removed the Atlanta Braves cap, leaned back in the chair, and stretched her arms toward the ceiling.

  Riker said, “He’s a grown ass man, remember?”

  Tara tossed the cap on the bed, looked to the ceiling, and began to worry her braids. After a few seconds in the same pose, she leaned forward. “I’ve got something you need to see.” She plugged a thumb drive into a port on the side of the computer. Tapped a few keys and brought up the video player. Without letting on what was about to play, she tapped the touch pad and started the clip rolling.

  On the screen was a twenty-something woman with a blonde bob hairdo being interviewed by a male reporter. Microphone inches from her lips, the woman shared her version of what went on inside the Middletown University foyer directly behind her. Stabbing a thumb in the direction of the blurred elevator bank, she implied she was making a pumpkin spice latte for a customer when the bus shooter entered from the hallway next to the elevators and “Just started spraying bullets.” She went on to say it was her first day working the kiosk and she had never seen the shooter before. When pressed by the reporter whether she thought the shooter was a student, she confidently dismissed it as “Crazy. Because dude was old. And white. Fit the profile of those mass shooter types. Probably an NRA member, too.”

  Once the camera swung a one-eighty, Tara paused the video with a stainless-steel kiosk dead center. It was wedged against a cement planter with a wall of windows behind it.

  Riker noted that the windows in the frame were all intact. Not a bullet hole punched through that he could see.

  “Is that MU?”

  “Yep. That’s my kiosk, too.”

  “And she
’s a coworker of yours?”

  Tara shook her head.

  “Never seen her?”

  “Nope,” said Tara, her hands beginning to shake. “Never.”

  “Crisis actors,” said Riker. “I thought that was all a bunch of tinfoil hat bullcrap.”

  Tara looked a question his way.

  “There are conspiracy theorists out there who think that several events … that big school shooting, the Boston bombing, the Orlando nightclub, are all false flag events orchestrated by our shadow government. They supposedly use crisis actors and film them in ways that will evoke emotion when plastered all over the newspapers, cable, and social media.”

  Tara’s brow furrowed. “Why?”

  “It’s a sick way for them to nudge public sentiment one way or the other at a time of their choosing.”

  “Crisis actor or not,” said Tara, “that bitch is full of shit.”

  “I have a feeling this is their last gasp at keeping this thing in-house,” said Riker.

  Tara glanced at the digital alarm clock.

  “Think the transfer’s going to come through today? It’s almost eight,” said Riker. “Don’t most of them open at eight?”

  Tara shook her head. “Bankers’ hours are usually nine-to-five.” She smiled knowingly.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “I have a feeling the transfer went through at midnight.”

  “How much?”

  “Scout’s honor. I didn’t look.”

  “Why? You always peeked at your Christmas presents early.”

  “I was waiting for you to wake up, Lee.”

  “Must have been difficult.”

  “Not really. You know how Mom operates. We could be getting a dollar, a thousand dollars, or a hundred thousand each.”

  “But Dad had all those patents.” Riker leaned over and scooped his clothes from the floor. “She sold them all, didn’t she?”

  “She alluded to it,” answered Tara. “This is just another one of her games. Sure you don’t want to tell me where we’re going today?”

  Riker shook his head. “I can’t. But I do want to know what our inheritance looks like.”