Dead Man's Switch

by Sigmund Brouwer

  King told Johnson about the GPS coordinates and finding the iPhone duct taped to the trunk of a tree, about 20 feet up.

  “So someone is messing with you big time. Dead people don’t send emails,” Johnson said.

  “Did you send it?” King asked Johnson.

  “Right. And I hacked into the prison computer system to shut down the scanners.”

  “Then it was Blake. The email outlined in detail how we had purchased the iPhone and smuggled it onto the island. It mentioned the nick in the bevel. Only three people knew. You. Me. And Blake.”

  “And the email was dated yesterday? Not before he drowned? Maybe you missed seeing it before.”

  “Yesterday. Think I didn’t look at the date and time on it 15 times to make sure?”

  “Dead people don’t send emails,” Johnson said.

  “Yes they do,” King said. “It’s called a dead man’s switch.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Before continuing with his explanation, King glanced at his watch. In 20 minutes, they needed to be back at their own houses for the six p.m. head count. It wasn’t exactly a curfew, but close enough. Since Blake had drowned, all family members of prison employees needed to be accounted for three times a day.

  “Dead man’s switch,” King repeated. “It’s a fail-safe thing. Like with a forklift. If the driver goes unconscious for any reason and his foot leaves the gas or the brake, it automatically shuts off.”

  “Blake spent a lot of time on forklifts.”

  “Shut up,” King said. He never spoke like that. It got Johnson’s attention, and the smirk on Johnson’s face died. “The switch is usually wired to break a circuit. It protects locomotives, tractors, chainsaws, a bunch of things like that.”

  Johnson nodded, but King could tell he had hurt Johnson’s feelings. He would get around to fixing that later. This was too important.

  “Sometimes,” King said, “the dead man’s switch is not meant to protect, but to threaten. Like for hand grenades. Once the pin is pulled, when someone lets go of the handle to throw it, the switch activates a circuit and the countdown begins to the explosion. A bank robber goes into a bank holding a live grenade, and if somebody takes him down, the grenade goes off. But as long as he’s holding the handle against the side of the grenade, nothing goes wrong.”

  “If I say anything or ask anything, are you going to yell at me again?”

  King shook his head. “You just need to take me seriously. I’m scared.”

  “Scared? I’ve never seen you scared.” Now Johnson looked worried.

  “No, you’ve seen me scared plenty. I just hate showing it. So look at me. I’m scared.”

  “Still look the same,” Johnson said, trying a grin. “And I don’t want you scared. Because then I’ll get scared.”

  “You’ll get over it. You’re scared all the time.”

  “I know. Now tell me the rest. This isn’t about locomotives or chainsaws or hand grenades.”

  “You get the concept, right? The switch is in place to set something off if the person in control of the switch loses control.”

  “Loses control. As in—”

  King didn’t let Johnson finish. He didn’t like the word “dead.” He didn’t even like saying it to explain a dead man’s switch. His mother suddenly was in a coma and might die at any time. Nothing had changed King or his father more than that. Kids around him didn’t really understand. To them, dead was what happened to SpongeBob SquarePants or to Wile E. Coyote when he chased the roadrunner in Bugs Bunny cartoons. Horrible, violent things happened to SpongeBob or to the coyote, but a second later, they were put back together and doing cartoon things again.

  To King, dead was imagining what it might be like to touch his mother’s face in a casket, expecting her skin to be soft and warm and waiting for her to open her eyes and smile. To King, dead was watching his father stand in the open front door of their house every night, looking out into the darkness in utter silence as if King didn’t exist in the kitchen behind him, just as lonely.

  “There are websites,” King said. “One of them is even named Dead Man’s Switch. What happens is you put stuff into an email or a bunch of emails. And if you don’t go to the website once a day—or whatever frequency you set up—and put in a password, the emails start going out automatically.”

  “Obviously then, Blake set this up before...” Johnson didn’t finish the sentence. He was beginning to believe in the reality of this situation. Slowly. The same way King had. “How do you know about all this?”

  “Didn’t take much,” King answered. “Just a few Google searches. I checked it out after the first email from Blake. Wiki told me about switches in general, and then I googled for more specifics. That’s when I took the instructions in the email seriously.”

  Johnson let out a big sigh. “There. You’ve done it. Given me just enough to drag me into whatever you’re doing. Now I have no choice but to ask.”

  King waited.

  “What did the email say?” Johnson asked.

  King reached into his pocket. He had been waiting for this moment. To not be alone. He took out a piece of paper and unfolded it.

  “I’ll read it to you as we’re walking,” King said. “Otherwise we miss head count.”

  “Yeah,” Johnson said. “Like we need that reminder about Blake at this point.”

  King held the paper and read aloud.

  King, if you get this, it means I’m probably dead. SOMETHING CRAZY AND INSANE BAD IS HAPPENING AT NIGHT. TRUST NO AUTHORITIES. THEY WILL HUNT YOU TOO. Print this out and then immediately trash this email and empty the trash on your computer. It might not make a difference because if they find out about this, they can get on the servers and find a copy. So this will be the last email you get from me this way. Everything else will be untraceable. To get the next messages, you’re going to need the iPhone. The coordinates are 47° 12’ 4” N, 122° 41’ 20” W. The tree will have a long wide gash on the north side, about head high. The tree is in the forbidden zone. Once you click on the link in this email, there will be three short windows of time when the infrared scanners will be blocked by a program that I slipped into the prison mainframe: 9 to 11 the morning after you click the link and 9 to 11 each of the two mornings after that. After you get the iPhone, go to Johnson. MJ knows the password. Just ask him about The Room. I’ve rigged the phone. Four wrong tries and all data is gone. You will get further instructions from the iPhone after you unlock it.

  As King folded it, he was too aware that the bottom of the page was torn. He’d done it, not daring to leave the remainder of the email anywhere in existence.

  A more cautious person would have burned the paper after finding the iPhone in the tree. But King wanted to be able to show it to his dad if he was caught in the forbidden zone. He didn’t care about anyone else on the island being mad at him. Just his dad.

  But King couldn’t leave the remainder of the email on the piece of paper for his dad to read. The next part detailed how King and Johnson had smuggled an iPhone to Blake for $2000. That part of the email would have disappointed his dad, and King hated disappointing his dad.

  And King didn’t want his dad to see the part that really scared him, now that everything else in the email had been correct. It was the part that said if King didn’t retrieve the iPhone from the tree and unlock it within 72 hours, another set of emails would begin reaching the websites of every local radio and television station and newspaper with information about a serious crime that involved King’s father—the crazy and insane bad thing happening at night on the island.

  Johnson asked King to read the email aloud twice more. They were now less than five minutes from the cluster of picture-perfect farmhouses on the picture-perfect island. The last of the sunlight was glowing warm, and fingers of shadows seemed to caress them as they walked down the road.

  “What I don’t get,” Johnson said, “is why you’d take the chance that the email was right about the infrared scanners being bloc
ked? Yeah, you can believe it came from Blake after you learned about a dead man’s switch. But why believe the rest of it? Like that the infrared scanners had been blocked? I mean, really, you think Blake could have arranged something like that?”

  “I had my reasons.” Like, King thought, the threat to expose whatever crime his father had committed.

  Johnson stopped and put a hand on King’s shoulder. “Sorry, Kinger. I’m not going any further on this. You asked me to listen to what the email said, and if I did, you said you’d get rid of the phone. I listened. Get rid of it.”

  “I didn’t tell you everything about the email,” King said. “There’s a part I tore off the page. And it’s the reason I went into the forbidden zone. It said if we didn’t continue, the media would find out that my dad was part of the crazy and insane bad thing happening at night on the island.”

  “It’s a bluff,” Johnson said. “Your dad? Ha. Everyone knows he’s rock-solid honest.”

  King wasn’t prepared to test their friendship. He wasn’t prepared to ask Johnson to help him prove whether it was a bluff. He didn’t want to know if their friendship was strong enough for Johnson to risk all the danger that might be ahead of them just for King and his father. So King prepared himself to look squarely into Johnson’s face and lie. He would tell Johnson the truth after they figured out the password.

  “Mike,” King said, knowing that he was about to betray his friend by lying, just as he had betrayed his father by believing the email and looking for the iPhone in the tree. “The email also said your father was part of the stuff happening on the island. If we don’t get to the next set of instructions before the deadline, the world would learn about his involvement too.”

  CHAPTER 8

  King’s dad was Mackenzie William King—Mack to everybody, including King, who’d been calling his dad Mack ever since King could swing a small baseball bat at the lobs that Mack had loved tossing in the backyard of their small home.

  Some 20 years earlier, at a friend’s wedding, Mack had met a Canadian girl named Ella Hutchison, a cross-border cousin of the bride. Mack had a reputation then for fighting hard and driving hard, and most people thought it was only a matter of time until his way of living took him into prison. The chance meeting at the wedding had changed things. The instant, utter, crazy, hopeless love at first sight had become family legend. Mack told that to everyone. And after a pause, he added, “She chased me and chased me until I also fell in love with her.”

  Everyone laughed at that. Ella, with her long blonde hair, had a beauty that shone with the faintest curve of a smile. Everyone knew that Mack was the one who fell deep into the pool of love and thrashed like crazy to hold his head above the water until Ella rescued him.

  That was part of family history. How Ella had tamed Mackenzie, replacing his wildness with something much more satisfying, a union of souls.

  King’s birth had, as each of his parents told him constantly, completed their world. All they’d needed was a small house on an island where the three of them could form a perfect nest of contentment as King grew from toddler to small boy to the man he was becoming.

  At King’s birth, Ella had suggested they name their son William Mackenzie, a reversal of Mack’s name, Mackenzie William. Naturally, Mack liked the thought of someone in his image but not his clone. Then Ella had pulled a small trick on her adoring and doting husband by suggesting the addition of a second and unique middle name, Lyon. Mack often said the infant’s full name of William Lyon Mackenzie King was almost longer than the baby himself.

  With Ella’s customary sly sense of humor, she didn’t ever reveal the reason for suggesting Lyon. No, she waited and fully enjoyed the moment when, years later, someone pointed out a strange coincidence. Just shy of King’s ninth birthday, King and Mack finally learned that there had been another William Lyon Mackenzie King. A Canadian, just like his mother Ella. But unlike her, this Canadian was a long-dead prime minister. Ella had found a way to make their family uniquely Canadian while living on the American side of the border.

  King, who had looked up photos of the other William Lyon Mackenzie King, had been okay with the Canadian part because he, like everybody, loved Ella. It was the part about sharing the name of an old man with no hair who looked like a bulldog that had no appeal to him.

  On the other hand, what was really cool was seeing a movie about King Mufasa and Queen Sarabi and their son Simba. Yes, The Lion King. Or The Lyon King, the movie in his mind, in which he naturally played a center role.

  So about the time he learned he’d been saddled with a name to honor a fusty old politician long put into a grave, King rejected his link to a prime minister by pronouncing himself the Lyon King, and he did it with such consistency that others on the island had given up fighting it.

  Life as the Lyon King had been wonderful. He and Mack made no secret that they were the two biggest members of the Ella King fan club, and they kept her on a pedestal, where her bright light filled their home.

  Then ten days earlier, while Mack and Ella were in Seattle, Ella collapsed without warning on a sidewalk outside a Starbucks. Physicians still couldn’t explain why. All they knew was that nothing could seem to bring her out of a coma. And no one could guess when she might recover. Or if she would.

  With her in a coma, the light in King’s home had been extinguished. The nest destroyed. No metaphor could come close to describing the misery and dejection Mack and King were enduring while Ella hovered between life and death. And both Mack and the Lyon King were helpless to do anything about it.

  In a small workshop behind King’s house, Ella had a pottery wheel and paints and a kiln. She made coffee cups and bowls and vases and jugs and earned a living selling most of them online. She was proud of her independence, but she insisted on handling all kitchen duty as well because she took joy in taking care of her two men.

  But as King walked into the house at supper time, Blake’s iPhone in his back pocket, there was no smell of sizzling sausage to greet him. No singing in the kitchen.

  The kitchen felt dusty now. King and Mack just made sandwiches whenever they were hungry. Since the coma, they had not sat down once for a meal together. The house was silent because the only thing that mattered, the only thing that was worth discussing, was too painful to mention. The silence was an unbearable reminder that the family had been reduced to the two of them.

  Ella also had a thing for cuckoo clocks. Her collection was scattered throughout the house. Little clocks. Big clocks. When the house finally began to sound like a ticking time bomb, Mack had begged Ella to keep only three clocks wound.

  But now even the clocks were silent. When Ella entered the coma, King and Mack let the clocks go quiet. They didn’t need cheerful reminders on the hour that Ella was not around to enjoy the carved wooden creatures that sprang out.

  King needed food. He threw a slice of bread on a plate, slapped some presliced cheese and luncheon meats on it, squirted it with mayo, and covered it with another slice of bread. And yes, he drank milk straight from the carton. He’d always done that when Ella was around, mainly because of her indignant squeal whenever she caught him. Now he drank from the carton because it took less effort than getting a cup from the dirty dishes in the sink and rinsing it.

  When Mack walked into the house, King was standing at the sink, staring out the window and thinking about Ella and wondering what criminal act Mack had committed and letting the depression slowly sink down on him as the night slowly fell on the view outside.

  “Hey,” Mack said to King. “Good to see you back in time for curfew.”

  Curfew. This echoed in King’s mind. “Trust no authorities. They will hunt you too.” Was that the reason for curfew? Something that Blake had found? That involved Mack?

  “Hey,” King said in reply without moving. King didn’t know if he could keep his face neutral if he turned. He worried that Mack would see that King had betrayed him, that King no longer thought Mack was nearly perfect, that King
could no longer trust the father he had once worshipped and adored just as they both worshipped and adored Ella.

  King waited for Mack to ask about why King had been kicked out of the homeschool writing class. When nothing came, King wondered if Raimer had decided not to report anything to the warden. That made sense. King had been defiant, but making it an issue would raise a lot of other issues that Raimer might not like.

  “Hungry?” Mack said.

  “Already ate,” King answered. With Ella at the hospital, scheduling decent meals didn’t matter much in the King household.

  “Good,” Mack said.

  Just down the road, at their neighbors’ house, a dog named Patches began to bark. Patches didn’t need a reason to bark. Or if Patches needed a reason, it was beyond any human ability to comprehend. Before Ella had gone into a coma, hearing Patches would prompt King or Mack to make up something, the stupider the better.

  “A butterfly must have drifted into Patches’ airspace.”

  “Patches just released some gas and doesn’t know it was his.”

  But now, King and Mack just let the dog bark without comment. None of the old rituals mattered anymore.

  Ella was ALONE. Mack wouldn’t let King visit.

  King smelled wood dust on Mack, even across the space that separated them. It was only the space of the small kitchen, but it felt like opposite sides of the universe. Wood dust. That was Mack’s escape. Mack worked the day shift at the prison, and at night, he liked working with wood, making delicate pieces of furniture. His wood shop shared a common wall with Ella’s clay room.

  King heard the sound of the fridge opening. He knew what Mack would do. Throw bread on a plate, slap presliced cheese and luncheon meat with mayo on the first slice, and add a second slice to hold it in place. The only difference in their routine was that Mack drank his milk from a cup. That’s because Mack couldn’t take the entire carton back to the wood shop. Which explained the dirty dishes in the sink.