Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  “That’s the thing, he’s pretty famous. Have you ever heard of T-Y-T-V?”

  Kurt’s blank expression said no, so Minter continued.

  “It’s an online show. Mainly tech reviews and commentary, but with way better production values than the rest. He had panel discussions every week, and because he had so many viewers, he could attract really big guests. Amos was on last year when the Lenses launched. I’m surprised you’ve never heard of it.”

  “Seriously, Minter, we don’t have time for you to drip-feed me a story about some show I’ve never heard of.”

  “Okay, okay. Here’s the gist. A week before the Seed launched, Amos started recruiting high-value internet celebrities for a big new project. None of this was my department, obviously, but I know what happened: 32 people were invited, and 31 people said yes. This guy, Tyler Kennedy, he was the only one who said no. I’ll tell you the whole story later, but Ernesto contacted him after that and persuaded him to join the resistance while he still could.”

  Kurt took a second to make sense of it all. “So if you knew the exact location where a high-value target was going to meet Ernesto, why didn’t Amos intercept him?”

  “We didn’t have access to any of these communications until a week later. He was long gone.”

  “Okay,” Kurt said. “But, to be clear, your plan is to drive to a location known to Amos as a meeting point for new members of the resistance?”

  “They’re not watching the place. Even when we first saw the communications, he didn’t send anyone. And trust me, I would know. Amos thought it wouldn’t be so bad if Tyler arrived and broadcast videos from their base because he thought we would be able to trace the uploads.”

  Again, this didn’t make sense to Kurt. “But if you couldn’t trace Ernesto’s log-in, which you must have tried, why would Amos think you could trace anything else they do?”

  “That’s exactly what I said,” Minter replied. “But everyone else was telling Amos that we would easily be able to trace a large uninterrupted upload. Which is fine in theory, you know, but we’re not dealing with idiots here. And Tyler hasn’t uploaded anything since then, anyway. I don’t know what he’s doing there with Ernesto, but it’s not making videos.”

  Kurt shrugged. He didn’t really care about Tyler or his videos. “Even if it’s safe, though, what do we do when we get there? How do we know someone will come?”

  “I think they also use the place for deliveries. They need to bring in fresh supplies every so often, I guess. I looked at pictures from some routine drone flights and one day two weeks ago there was a box outside the building. Three days later, when the SkySweeper next flew over, the box was gone. All we have to do is sit in the car at a safe distance until someone comes. Then we’ll decide our next move from there.”

  Kurt had more confidence in Minter’s plan now than he had two minutes earlier but still felt far less happy than when he had believed that Minter knew Ernesto’s actual location.

  “I’d feel a lot better about this if we knew they were still using this place for deliveries,” Kurt said. “Two weeks is a long time.”

  “Do you have a key for Stacy’s house?” Minter asked.

  “For emergencies,” Kurt said, too surprised by the question to do anything other than answer immediately.

  “Good. We’ll go there before we find a car,” Minter said. “Come on, I’ll explain on the way.” He headed for the door.

  With the obvious question of why Minter wanted to go to Stacy’s about to leave Kurt’s lips, he instinctively followed him to the door. After taking a single step, he stopped.

  “What’s wrong?” Minter asked.

  Now that he had finished packing and finally knew where they were going, if not why they were going there, Kurt’s mind turned squarely to the one problem that his attempts at linear thinking had succeeded in delaying. “What about us?” he said. “Amos has to think we’re dead.”

  Minter made no effort to hide his confusion. “Why?”

  “Because if he knows I’ve run, he’ll kill them.”

  A week earlier, Minter would have thought the suggestion that Amos would harm Kurt’s family was ridiculous. But since then Amos had killed two people, one of whom had been utterly innocent and as dear to Minter as he was to Kurt. After a few seconds, Minter shared an idea: “We’ll take them with us.”

  Kurt ruled it out instantly. He knew that Randy and the kids would be wearing their Lenses, which meant that Sycamore would see Kurt explaining everything to them and make almost certain that Amos would pursue.

  Simply put, it wasn’t enough for Kurt and Minter to get away from Amos; they had to convince him beyond reasonable doubt that they were both dead.

  Minter stood in thought again but found no quick response this time.

  This absolute lack of ideas, no matter how momentary, sent Kurt back into an all-too-familiar pattern of circular doubt. All of his earlier hope had depended on getting away safely, but his insistence on linear thinking had meant saving the hardest problem for last. Such linear thinking offered no comfort now that Kurt and Minter had reached the end of the line. Reality had caught up with them and they were struggling to think their way free.

  Kurt knew that a botched escape would risk everything at a time when the stakes couldn’t have been higher. And though he also knew that he had changed the rules by removing his Seed, a big part of him felt that Amos’s prior promise to leave his family out of it might still represent the best chance of securing their safety. An internal whisper that he should go through with what he had been about to do when Minter arrived was proving difficult to silence. With his mind presenting a blank space where alternatives should have been, he desperately needed Minter to come up with something good.

  Minter couldn’t miss the anguish on Kurt’s face. “There’s always a way out,” he said, as reassuringly as he could. “We just have to find it.”

  Another silence followed, this one longer and more painful than the last, as seemed to be the developing pattern. “What’s your best idea right now?” Kurt asked for the sake of his sanity.

  Minter hesitated. “Maybe a gas explosion?”

  Sorry to have asked, Kurt didn’t even know how to respond. Minter was as smart as anyone Kurt knew so if that was his best idea, they really were done for.

  “But I guess there would still be body parts after an explosion,” Minter continued, as if that was the only problem with the plan.

  Another silence fell, somehow even deeper than before. It seemed to drag on and on, until…

  “I guess we could always frame someone,” Minter said.

  The nonchalance in Minter’s tone softened Kurt’s reaction to what sounded on the face of it like another hollow idea. “Like who?”

  Minter thought again. “What about Fury River?”

  The Fury River Baptists, a fringe sect who used religion as a front for their scattergun intolerance, were among the only high-profile groups to openly oppose Sycamore. Minter had manipulated Fury River into picketing the Seed’s launch, and their followers had since grown ever more unholy in their proclamations of what was in store for those who promoted the Seed. And the real beauty of it was that militant Fury River cells often acted without approval from the central leadership, so no individual could authoritatively deny the group’s involvement.

  Kurt’s eyes widened. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. This could actually work, he thought to himself. Hope was sneaking back in.

  “So, what exactly would we do?” he asked.

  “We could a write a note,” Minter suggested, still formulating the plan as he spoke. “We could say that enough is enough and the time for talk is over. Write some of their slogans, put some of our blood on the page, say there will be more victims to come unless Amos stops pushing the Seed. Something like that. And then we could wipe some blood on the floor and the sofas so it looks like there was a struggle.”

  Kurt was nodding. There was certainly no shortage o
f blood on the washcloths and makeshift bandages they had needed after so inexpertly removing their Seeds. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s just do it.”

  Minter asked for some plain white paper, which Kurt quickly found inside the box his printer had been stored in since the move. But given that Minter was left-handed, the open Seed-wound on his palm precluded him from anything as dextrous as writing.

  Kurt was happy enough to pen the note. He had hardly written anything by hand since leaving high school, so he had no discernible style. Still, he opted for an exaggerated scrawl to eliminate any chance of it being cross-referenced against an old exam paper or something similar from his ancient past.

  He began to write: “No prisoners, no hostages, no negotiations. The time for talk is over. Down the River comes the Fury.” There were plenty of spare sheets of paper should Kurt have made a mistake, so he wasn’t too careful with the wording.

  Next he wrote “Kurt Jacobs” above “Terrance Minion” and drew a rough circle to the right of each name. He pricked his left thumb with the knife from earlier and dabbed a few drops of fresh blood in the circle next to his name. Minter did the same without arguing.

  “This is good,” Minter said. “This is good.”

  Kurt looked at the sheet. There was still a lot of empty space underneath Minter’s name. “I think we should write more names,” he said, “so it’s sort of like a hit-list. Maybe if Amos is the last name he’ll be too busy being worried about it to question the details. What do you think?”

  Minter nodded enthusiastically. “It can’t hurt,” he said. “Let’s see… put Colin De Vord as number three, Michael Richardson as number four, and Isaiah Amos as number five.”

  Kurt did so, more careful with his writing now that blood was invested in this draft of the note. He assumed that Colin De Vord was Communications Colin, and there would be plenty of time to ask who Michael Richardson was once they were safely in a car headed north.

  Minter suggested two final lines, and Kurt wrote them as neatly as possible: “One by one the shepherds will fall. May their blood be cleansed by the River of Fury.”

  When each had placed their Seed on top of their small spot of blood, the note was complete. But as Kurt positioned his Seed with his right hand, his left resting on the table, Minter noticed something disconcerting. “Uh, Kurt, your wrist is really pulsing.”

  Kurt looked down at his left hand and shrugged. “Maybe if you’d listened to me when I said I needed two pills…”

  “They’re just painkillers,” Minter said. “Strong as hell, but painkillers all the same. They don’t actually fix what’s wrong.”

  “And nothing’s wrong apart from the pain,” Kurt insisted. “So what if it’s pulsing? That’s what it’s supposed to do.”

  “Like that, though?” Minter asked. He lifted Kurt’s hand for a closer look.

  Kurt grimaced and shook him away. “I said I’m fine,” he snapped.

  “Maybe you should take that second pill after all,” Minter said.

  “Maybe you should shut up.”

  Minter shrugged. This was the Kurt Jacobs he remembered from before the world knew his name; this was the Kurt Jacobs who would rather not have what he wanted than follow someone else’s advice. Stubborn didn’t cover it.

  “Any-way,” Kurt said, elongating the word, “what do you think will happen next? Will he announce it tonight and have a big public funeral?”

  Minter knew that a public funeral was inevitable, but the timing was less clear. “If you want my best guess, I’d say he won’t send anyone in here for a few days and he’ll cover up the deaths for as long as he can.”

  “Why would he cover it up?”

  “Because you being kidnapped is better than you being dead. People don’t know how a kidnapping will end so it holds their attention for longer. And more public attention means more people watching the news, which means more ad income, which basically means that you’re worth more to him alive than dead. One day you’ll have huge value to him as a martyr, but not until he’s milked every drop of hope and suspense out of the viewers.”

  Kurt was satisfied with Minter’s answers; as long as Amos bought the story, it didn’t really matter how he sold it. For his part, Kurt’s best guess as to what would happen next was that he and Minter would spot a gaping hole in the murder story as soon as they were too far away to turn back and that a new, flawless option would present itself an hour too late.

  “Anyway, we need to get going,” Minter said. He quickly acted on his prior idea to dab blood on the floor and walls, then headed for the back door.

  Kurt warned him that the path beyond his fence was narrow and completely unlit until it joined the main street, but Minter saw darkness as an advantage and insisted that a narrow path was safer than an open street. On the other side of the path lay the quiet meadow that Kurt’s soulless bedroom spectacularly overlooked, so Minter was confident that they would reach the end without encountering any potential whistleblowers.

  The mansion meant nothing to Kurt so he felt no emotion in leaving it for what might well have been the last time. General doubts and focused fears grew with each step Kurt took across his spacious lawn until he reached the nose-high wooden fence at the edge of the property. He offered Minter a foot up, and Minter readily accepted. Kurt then handed his backpack and briefcase across to Minter and climbed over to join him on the narrow, lightless path.

  Whatever came next, there was no going back.

  2

  Rain fell lightly on the path as Kurt and Minter kept their heads down and scuttled along. The rain provided an excuse for their hoods and their haste, which would be important in a few minutes when they reached the end of the path and emerged onto a busy street.

  “So why are we going to Stacy’s?” Kurt asked, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to talk for much longer.

  Minter, who led the way, stopped without warning and motioned for Kurt to do the same.

  “What is it?” Kurt whispered.

  Over the silence of Minter’s non-reply and the gentle patter of raindrops, Kurt heard footsteps approaching. It wasn’t quite dark enough for Kurt to go unnoticed by whoever was coming so he nudged Minter in the back to keep walking.

  The footsteps grew louder and were now punctuated by laughter and gasps. Before he could see anyone, Kurt heard a man’s voice. “No way,” the man said to himself. “That is so awesome!”

  Minter turned to Kurt. Their eyes had adjusted to the cloud-obscured moonlight enough that they could comfortably make out each other’s faces. “He’s immersed,” Minter said as quietly as he could. “Stay right behind me and he won’t even know we’re here.”

  The man, who wore short sleeves despite the rain and looked to be in his 30s or 40s, cupped his hands and held them outstretched as he walked, as though trying to catch falling leaves. After a few seconds of this, the man laughed again and began to prod the air with his finger, popping bubbles that weren’t there. He then crouched down and punched upwards in a left-left-right, left-left-right pattern, walking sideways like a crab as he did so. Kurt couldn’t even guess what kind of game he was playing.

  “Cover your face,” Minter whispered. “If he looks up like that while he’s passing us, he’ll see.”

  “But he’s immersed. He won’t see anything,” Kurt said.

  “It doesn’t matter what he sees; his Lenses are still recording. If someone at HQ happened to be monitoring his feed for any reason…”

  “Okay, Okay,” Kurt said, urging Minter to keep his voice down. Since his right hand was occupied by the silver briefcase, Kurt brought his wounded left hand to his face, palm inwards, and spread his fingers to cover his features.

  The man was almost beside them now. Kurt fought the temptation to peek through the gaps between his fingers.

  “How the hell am I supposed to smash that?” the man complained. He rose to an upright stance and scanned his surroundings in exaggerated circles. “I’ll give it a shot, I guess.
But it ain’t exactly fair.”

  Minter ushered Kurt to the very edge of the path, holding him against the wall in the hope that this fully-immersed consumer would pass them by without incident. Minter then covered his own face and stood as still as he could.

  Kurt gave in after a few seconds and peeked through his fingers, just in time to see a closed fist careering towards his face. Instinctively — thoughtlessly — Kurt turned his hand around to deflect the blow.

  “Aaaaaahhh!” Kurt bellowed. The pain of the blow to his still-raw Seed-wound was surreal, like nothing he had ever felt. “Aaaaaahhh!”

  Minter spun himself around to face Kurt and pressed his hand firmly against Kurt’s mouth. Kurt struggled as Minter held him against the fence.

  “Watch where you’re going, asshole,” the man said, absentmindedly rubbing his fist. “People are trying to walk here.”

  Neither Kurt nor Minter were foolish enough to make eye contact, but it was obvious from the man’s movements that he was still fully immersed in whatever game he was playing.

  “It won’t happen again,” Minter said, lowering his voice to match the pitch of Kurt’s pained roar while still restraining him.

  The man walked away without turning back. His non-reaction to Minter’s words indicated that his ears as well as his eyes were fully occupied. After a few steps, he resumed punching the air like nothing had just happened.

  “I thought I told you to be quiet?” Minter said, letting Kurt free.

  Kurt looked at his palm, at the fresh blood collecting at all sides of his inadequate bandage. “Easy for you to say,” he said, with half a mind to punch Minter’s left hand so he would know the feeling.

  “Did you see his eyes?” Minter asked, ignoring Kurt’s complaints. “Because if you saw his, he saw yours.”

  “No,” Kurt said. “Thanks for your concern, by the way.”

  Minter started walking again. “It’s just an impact injury,” he said.

  “To a wound that’s probably already infected, thanks to your idiot knife-handling skills,” Kurt called after him.