He rarely saw anyone on the north end. Not even Mr. Smith, especially since he wasn’t talking to Reed anymore. Mr. Smith didn’t show up when the last round ended. Reed walked back to his room and curled up under the covers, chattering in and out of fitful sleep where he dreamed of turning blades and endless rain.
Reed came to the beach just before the sun rose, when the sky was glowing orange and purple. He sat, watching the waves come in. There was a time when he decided escape was impossible but still looked for a sign that he was wrong.
Not anymore.
Now he just watched the waves crash, reminding him of the one sustaining lesson: hopelessness.
Reed had given up hope that he would one day find a way off the island, to discover home somewhere out there, to be rid of the ceaseless random thoughts churning in his head. Because to hope was to reject the present moment, the only thing that was real, regardless of its misery. Reed clung to the present moment like a buoy. Reality had frayed. He didn’t know who he was.
He hadn’t given up, only the hope that things would be different. He found his suffering was bearable when he did so, that he accepted the totality of life, regardless how he felt about it, whether he liked it or not.
And like it, he did not.
______
Reed couldn’t look at Danny. If he did, he would risk clinging to hope again.
He wasn’t surprised he’d come. He had an intuition that he would seek him out. Reed’s intuition didn’t come in words or thoughts, it came in dreams. The only consistent thing about them was the image that followed them: red hair.
He didn’t know who she was. He sensed her presence the day he woke up in a lab staring at Mr. Smith’s hopeful grin. Her essence warmed him. At first, he thought he’d imagined it like all the other random thoughts, but the essence that accompanied her was different than all the others.
It was fragrant.
He didn’t know her name. Didn’t know if she meant anything to him or if she was real. He may have given up hope for escape, but he wasn’t able to expel hope concerning her, hope that she was real, hope that he meant something to her. When things were darkest it was hope that he would see her one day that warmed him.
But that was as far as he hoped. That was it.
He couldn’t look at Danny because he’d see the hope in his eyes. Danny needed to accept and understand where he was. This was the island. It was the end of the world. Home didn’t exist, not anymore. If he hoped to find something better, he would eventually look inside the needle. But the answer wasn’t in there.
But he would go inside. They all did.
Reed wasn’t disappointed when he did. Danny confirmed what he suspected. She’s in there, too.
It was harder to know that she was in there than suffering through the Haystack, knowing that if he took the needle he would find her. But he would have to stay strong. In his dreams, she told him to resist. She told him that someone would come for him and show him the way.
And then Danny appeared at the beach and he knew it. He just knew it. Maybe he was the one that would put an end to all the suffering. Maybe he would give them hope.
That was why he couldn’t look at him.
13
Class was in session.
About thirty of them in small desks arranged in tidy rows and the teacher discussing the world economy. He was propped on the corner of the desk. He was mostly bald and his bottom lip glistened when he took a moment to gather his thoughts.
Some of the guys in the back row were asleep, carefully hiding their faces behind the people in front of them. Danny was up front and had taken to doodling on a piece of lined notebook paper. It started out as a tapestry of curly lines, but then a face took shape in the middle of it all. First the eyes, then the petit nose. He began to darken the hair—
“Danny Boy?” The teacher had crossed his arms, scowling over his glasses. “Art class is not today. I’ll advise you to join the discussion or I’ll be forced to report you to your Investor for tutoring.”
Danny folded the paper.
After a long, uncomfortable pause, the teacher continued in the same droning tone about the recent flash crash of the New York Stock Exchange. Millions of dollars were lost in a matter of moments. The market closed early that day and all trading suspended. A week later, the culprit was found: some dopey day trader that lived in his parents’ basement that hacked his way into the market and over reached.
“You don’t mess with money, boys,” the teacher intoned with a gurgle. He cleared his throat. “Money is power and it will find you.”
The teacher asked for questions. He was answered by the sound of soft snoring somewhere in the back but didn’t hear it. He had no idea why everyone started laughing.
“Okay, I understand this is not a stimulating topic,” he said, finally standing up with a grunt, “that’s why I got special permission to do an exercise today.”
Their interest piqued.
“We’re going to use tablets for our class discussion today.”
There was no buzz, no excitement. There was a fully-loaded game room in the next building, why would anyone care about a tablet?
The teacher unlocked a cabinet in the corner of the room. He pulled a box off the bottom shelf and slid it across the floor. The guys sleeping in the back continued sleeping. The others looked bored. Danny listened.
They were going to begin a business in a simulated program. It could be anything: services, goods, investing, whatever. All they had to do was show they could create a fake business that made fake money in the fake world inside the tablet and that would prove they had some understanding of economics.
A few of the guys started taking them out of the box. The teacher stopped them by holding up a knobby finger. “And remember, these tablets are not allowed out of this room. The repercussions of such an infraction will be severe.”
Ass = grass.
When he dropped his hand, Danny was the first one to the box. He found a seat next to one of the Sleeping Beauties. The tablet felt warm in his hand. It fit nicely.
The teacher got stern with the rest of the boys barely making an effort.
“We’ll be here all day,” he said. “Until you finish, I swear to God.”
Every second in the class was a second away from the game room. They began breaking down into small groups. Even woke up the sleepers. The teacher advised them on how to begin. Danny, though, stroked the smooth glass as instincts bubbled inside him. He ignored the instructions and, with all the excited chaos, called up a virtual keyboard on the touchscreen.
His fingers raced over the keys with the tablet snuggly cradled in his left hand. He swiftly hit a combination of keys to override the operating system. The screen went black. A cursor blinked in the upper left corner. He began typing again.
The commands came from somewhere deep in his subconscious. He didn’t stop to think about the letters or the meaning of what he was writing, he just let it flow through his fingertips until line after line of code began scrolling rapidly from top to bottom. He was looking for a combination of words that would give him an encrypted password. He didn’t know what it was, just trusted he’d know it when he saw it.
AW34uT!69fEW&8990.
There it is.
He tapped the glass and stopped the word flow, then dragged his fingertip over the password and dropped it into the upper right corner. The screen went black again. One second. Two. Three.
And then color swirled into focus.
A light blinked in the upper right. He had hacked into the network. That blinking light meant he had access to the Internet. To the world outside.
Danny began to download a browser from an FTP site that popped into memory—
“Aw, what?”
Every single tablet went blank.
Danny looked up. The class was moaning, some of them trying to shake their tablet back to life. “What happened?” someone whined.
“Class! Class!” The teacher held up
his hands. “I need you to hand the tablets back to me in an orderly fashion…”
Danny quickly slipped into the middle of the room and exchanged his tablet with one of many abandoned on a desk. Then he switched with another one, careful no one was watching.
“Class, please!” The old man cleared his throat. “Please! It’s important you give me your tablet so we don’t lose your data. Line up, keep orderly, please. Keep orderly.”
Danny did what everyone else did and began moaning. He told the guy next to him about the idea he had for a lemonade stand. When he was checked off and dismissed, he left the classroom smiling.
We’re not alone. There is an outside world.
14
They had a match in the game room in an hour.
It had only been a week since Danny woke from his first round and he’d put them firmly in first place. In fact, they were so far ahead they would still be in first after the second round. Sid didn’t even pretend to be running the crew anymore. When they talked about strategy, he got everyone quiet and then looked at Danny.
They were in the cafeteria, talking about the second round only days away. Most had met new girls in the first round and Sid was having a hard time getting them to agree on another match once they were inside the needle.
Danny pushed his tray away and checked out of the conversation. He looked around for Reed. He had to come back to eat but maybe he did it at night when everyone was sleeping.
Danny pulled a sheet of paper from his back pocket. He had continued the doodling he started in economics class and fleshed out the details of the girl’s hair, added plump lips and eyebrows. He hoped to see her again once he was inside. Danny didn’t know what he was supposed to do and craved some direction. Craved some answers.
“What’s that?” Zin plucked the paper out of his hand. “Ooo, you’re a Michelangelo and a war hero, huh? Who would’ve guessed?”
Danny snatched it back. Zin didn’t seem alarmed by the overreaction.
“That your girlfriend?” Zin asked.
“Yeah,” Danny said. “I meet her every night in my dreams.”
Zin opened a box of juice and sipped, absently. When no one seemed interested in what they were doing, Danny unfolded the paper and smoothed out the wrinkles.
“You ever see her, Zin?”
He glanced. “No. Why, you?”
“No, no. I was just wondering, you know, for the next time we’re…” Danny stumbled over his directionless conversation. Again, Zin took no notice.
“Where do they come from?” Danny asked.
“The girls?”
“Yeah. I mean, are they real or just part of Foreverland?”
“No, they’re real all right.”
“How do you know?”
He shrugged. “Sandy describes a camp kind of like ours. They do the same things we do, only they don’t call it the Haystack. I think they call it the Vase, or something girly.”
“How do you know it’s real?”
He shrugged, again. “I don’t, but it makes sense. We’re a boys’ camp and they’re a girls’ camp. Why not?”
Danny looked at the face in the doodle. She was different than the rest. Maybe she wasn’t real.
“But how do you know?” he said. “Who says that this, right here, isn’t real? Maybe this is the dream.”
Zin shook his head, took another sip and grimaced.
“I mean, what proof do I have that any of this is real? Maybe this is just another Foreverland that we think we woke up in and we’re really still in a dark room somewhere freezing our asses off while we wander around another Foreverland—”
“Look! This is real!” Zin slammed his juice down. “It just is, so get that through your little punctured skull, all right? This is real, Foreverland is real, it’s all real.” He grabbed the paper and held it up to Danny’s face. “She’s real, too, Danny Boy. You know why?”
Danny backed off.
“Because we got nothing else. It’s just this, and that’s all. My girl is real, you got it? Stop pissing all over my party, why don’t you?”
He finished the drink in one long sip and crushed the carton on the table. His leg was shaking. Then he got up and left.
Sid didn’t see any of it, just figured Zin was making an early exit for the game room. In seconds, all of them followed Zin out. Everyone on the island had a nerve, Zin once told him.
Danny just stepped on Zin’s.
15
Danny woke early for the second round.
Mr. Jones walked him to the Haystack. They walked inside without introductions from another clipboard carrier as the last bell faded.
Danny wasn’t nervous until the air inside hit him and the steel fan loomed overhead and the smell of dank misery crawled up his nose. By the time he reached his cell, his insides had turned to jelly. Mr. Jones had sensed his hesitancy and placed a firm comforting hand on his shoulder. Danny turned quickly into his cell to get away. He waited until everyone was inside their cells before getting undressed, doing it quickly and folding everything neatly so that Mr. Jones would leave.
“Hey, Danny Boy,” Sid shouted. “I want you fully lucid this time and get to the sundial, my man. You hear? Once you’re inside the needle, none of this exploring crap like a new poke, you stay in the Yard and meet us at the sundial. We need to clock some real kills in the game, son. We only need to stay in first place another week!”
Someone whooped and shouted, “FIRST PLACE!”
And then everyone joined the seemingly random celebration.
“Zin, you, too!” Sid shouted above the melee. “You be at the sundial, boy, or I’ll dot both your eyes. You’re screwing with my time if you get lost inside the needle.”
And the chant continued. FIRST PLACE! FIRST PLACE!
“What’s the obsession with the game?” Danny said.
Zin was already sitting on the floor with his back straight. “There’s a reward for any team that captures first place for three straight weeks. They drop the needle as soon as we get here. No getting naked and no suffering.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” Danny grabbed the bars. He wanted to pull them apart and throttle Zin sitting so composed and unmoved. No suffering? I’d be in that game room every waking second!
“Bad luck to tell you,” Zin said. “It’s a jinx.”
Danny wanted to argue, but he was right. They were in first.
“Don’t fight it, Danny Boy.” Zin took a deep breath. “Suffering is part of life. Either way, we go inside the needle.”
“You mean you like this?”
“Hell, no. But it doesn’t matter how I feel.” Another deep breath. “Be here, no matter what.”
“Fine.” Danny crossed his arms and began pacing. “If you want to freeze your ass off, be my guest. I want out.”
Reed was standing in his cell with his back to Danny. He was as motionless as Zin was sitting. The skylights began to turn, followed by another round of cheers. Light faded. Darkness settled like thick soup. Forms disappeared. Voices became bodiless chatter.
The second round had begun.
______
“Danny Boy?”
Zin’s voice was soft, blending in with the docile conversations that were beginning to trail off into the silence of impending pain.
“The game, it’s a waste of time,” he said. “We’re going to explore once we’re inside the needle. I’m going to give you the tour, show you Foreverland.”
Danny resumed breathing like Zin had taught him. He finished his count to ten. “Sid’s going to be pissed.”
“Good thing he’s not running the show.”
“Then who is?”
“You are, Danny Boy.”
“Me?” He cringed, hoping Sid didn’t hear him. “Dude, I’m a poke, I’m not running anything.”
“Don’t be a clown, you’re the whole reason this place was cheering about a half hour ago. They’re all watching you, Danny Boy. Not Sid. He’s just a cheerleader.”
>
“You’re cracked, man,” Danny hissed. “Sid will put a black mark under my eyes after he’s done with you.”
“You think the old men are going to let him do anything to you or me or any kid in this place? Nothing’s going to happen, Danny Boy. This place is locked down tight.”
Danny imagined a mob of old men charging through the Yard wielding stun guns. It wouldn’t matter if they were carrying nuclear weapons, they’d throw a hip before they got anything under control.
“What about when they threw you in a trash can?”
“It was a trash can, who cares. It was funny. Even I laughed.”
“So how’s a bunch of crypt keepers going to keep us from getting pummeled?”
“Right here.” Zin’s dim figure tapped the tracker on the back of his neck. “They got some sort of remote in their pocket. They put their hand in there and they can kick a volt or two into your spine and you’re sleeping, my friend. And Sid knows it. The geezers load you on a cart and it’s over.”
“What’re you saying over there?” Sid’s voice carried from across the dark aisle. “You got something to say about me?”
“Nothing, Cap-i-tan,” Zin said. “Just girl talk over here, that’s all.”
Sid grunted. His teeth ground together. He said, “You just make sure—”
Click. Hmmmmmmmm.
The fan engaged. The blades began to crawl.
Conversation died.
“Let’s get on with the suffering,” Zin said.
Danny was already counting his breath. He glanced at Reed, still standing, still facing the other direction. It would be long and hard for him. Maybe if they held first place, he’d get a reprieve.
But he wouldn’t take the needle, so then what?
Danny thought about doing the same. He could talk to Reed when everyone was out. He could tell Danny more about the underlying secrets of the island, the red-headed girl, and why he resisted. Maybe they could talk long enough to sort through each other’s memories, figure out which ones were their own without having to go inside the needle.
But then the sprinklers began to hiss.
The Annihilation of Foreverland (A Science Fiction Thriller) Page 7
