Dead Man's Switch

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “Going to get all sentimental here, like you want wings?” Johnson asked. “Become a beautiful butterfly?”

  “I think this is a good example of why guys rarely share feelings,” King said.

  “My point too. See how I managed to end the conversation? Now we don’t have to share feelings.”

  “So let me tell you why I was thinking about airplanes,” King told him. He was talking a lot and knew why. They were waiting for the iPhone to ping. The one on the table between them. Blake’s iPhone. King didn’t like the silence.

  “Not because you feel like singing a ballad about finding your true self someday?”

  “Sky Mall magazine. You heard of it? It’s on airplanes. People can shop while they’re flying.”

  “When I was little,” Johnson said in a dreamy voice, “I wanted to be a ballerina...”

  “You made your point already with the butterfly thing.”

  “…until I found out you had to be a girl to be a ballerina.”

  King snorted. “Go ahead and tell people I haven’t been on an airplane. It will be worth the trade. Because I’m going to love telling them about ballerinas.”

  “Dreams are fragile,” Johnson answered.

  King was impressed that he couldn’t tell if Johnson was serious or not.

  “So I’m thinking,” King said. “Blake got his ideas from a Sky Mall magazine.”

  This snapped Johnson into full attention. He glanced at the iPhone and then back to King.

  “So when I was googling invisible ink and a special flashlight, it took me to the Sky Mall website. Guess what. That’s where I had seen Measles before. Sky Mall sells stuffed dogs with a voice recorder and remote. You can record anything you want.”

  “Like ‘Where’s the nearest fire hydrant?’ and ‘Don’t eat yellow snow’?”

  Blake had recorded those lines for Measles.

  “So maybe when Blake was flying here from Nebraska,” Johnson said, “or any other time, he sees this stuff in a Sky Mall magazine and thinks it’s a great way to send messages from the dead? Like he was planning to be dead even before he got here?”

  “I bet if we could find out when he was on an airplane last, that might mean something. I mean, he didn’t stay on the island the whole time. He was gone with his parents once in a while. So maybe he discovered something that might be happening on the island before the flight, and while he was thinking about how to send us messages, he read the magazine.”

  “I’ve seen the magazines,” Johnson said, “And don’t freak out that I’ve been on an airplane and you haven’t.”

  King resisted the temptation to make a smart remark about ballerinas.

  “You can browse the magazine as you fly,” Johnson continued. “You can place an order, but the stuff needs to be shipped to you.”

  King shrugged. “He gets stuff sent to him here. No big deal.”

  “Yet he gives us $2000 to smuggle an iPhone to him?”

  “But once he had the iPhone, he could buy stuff through eBay or Sky Mall.”

  King gave another glance at the iPhone. Did he really want it to ping with a message? Because then he’d have to go one step further in betraying his father.

  “Send blank email to my name backward at dmsgames.com,” Blake’s voice had spoken through the stuffed dog’s collar. “Where’s the nearest fire hydrant? Don’t eat yellow snow. Where’s the nearest fire hydrant? Don’t eat yellow snow. Send blank email to my name backward at dmsgames.com. Throw a ball and I’ll chase it. Wait for a reply. Name backward and get it right the first time. Where’s the nearest fire hydrant?”

  King and Johnson had argued. Had Blake meant drawkcabemanym@dmsgames.com? Or had he meant ttawekalb@dmsgames.com? Or selsaem@dmsgames.com?

  Johnson had suggested sending all three emails. But King had reminded him that Blake’s voice from Measles had also told them to get it right the first time. In the end, they’d agreed that Blake must have meant for them to use Measles’ name as one last piece of protection. Sam had promised not to tell anyone but King the name. Only he would know what name to put in backward.

  So they had sent the blank email, and now they were following the next instruction—“Wait for a reply.”

  That had led to wondering why Blake was putting them through all these steps before giving them any more information about his accusations about King’s dad, which had led to another exhausting half hour with Johnson because all conversations with him eventually got exhausting. Johnson was unique, there was no doubt. After all, King was still trying to tell whether Johnson had been serious about a ballerina dream.

  Johnson had said that if Blake really was trying to give them information, he could have just put it in the iPhone right away so they would find it right after finding the password with the flashlight and invisible ink. Johnson thought this was just Blake’s way of messing with them.

  King wanted to believe Johnson. Really wanted to believe him. King had already lost his mother to a coma. If Mack was doing something criminal, it was like he’d lost Mack too—to something that arguably was worse than a coma. At least with Ella, King would always have great memories and never stop adoring her. If Mack truly wasn’t the person he appeared to be, King would always have tainted memories about him.

  King had argued that Blake was just setting up a few provisions to make sure that only he and Johnson got the real thing that Blake was waiting to give them. That he’d made sure that nobody but King or Johnson would know they had to use Blake’s iPhone to send a blank message to selsaem@dmsgames.com.

  And apparently, they would learn more only if they’d used the correct name backward and if the email triggered a return email. And apparently, there was no guarantee of when a return email would show up.

  King couldn’t get something else out of his mind. “Were you dreaming about a pink outfit too?”

  “Huh?” Johnson said.

  “Ballerina.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Ballerina. It wasn’t that I wanted to dance like a ballerina. I wanted to look like one. That was before I learned that boys were supposed to like cowboy outfits. Society can be so cruel to those of us who dream different dreams, you know.”

  King had to admire Johnson. King still couldn’t tell if the guy was serious or trying to mess with him.

  Then the iPhone pinged.

  King nearly dropped it as he fumbled to open up the new email.

  The email didn’t have a message. Instead, just one line, underlined, blue.

  http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=w8IfHXAClUo&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dw8IfHXAClUo

  There was only one thing to do. Touch the link.

  No surprise. It opened to a YouTube video.

  CHAPTER 19

  The iPhone didn’t have a wi-fi connection, so it loaded on the 4G network. Not LTE. As the video loaded, the spinning circle at the top of the screen seemed to hang forever.

  “Just to be clear,” King said to Johnson, “you’re not expecting your parents home for a while, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Johnson said, eyes on the screen. “Not for a while.”

  Then, finally, the YouTube video had loaded.

  King had been expecting it, but it was still a shock of sorts to see Blake Watt appear on the iPhone screen. Blake was wearing a white T-shirt. His light blond hair was tousled like always. He was wearing his round thin-framed glasses. Hard to believe Blake was gone.

  But in a way, he was still alive in assembled data bits. This was, King thought, the new immortality for humans. Scattered across cyberspace, waiting for instant resurrection by those who were still flesh and blood.

  “King. Johnson.” Blake was holding the phone at arm’s length as he spoke into it. “Hope you’re doing better than I am. Weird to be talking to you knowing that you’re only going to be seeing this if I’m…not around.”

  With no warning, the screen went black. It took King a second to realize that Blake had pulled the phone in to his body and hidden it.

  Then
Blake was back.

  “Sorry, guys, I thought I heard something.”

  Blake took an obvious breath. The video was shaking a little as if his hand wasn’t steady.

  “You know, I rehearsed this so I wouldn’t ramble,” Blake said. “But still, it seems like there’s so much to say and I hardly know where to begin.”

  King didn’t realize he was leaning in to watch the iPhone until Johnson tapped his shoulder and moved him back so they could both see the screen.

  “First, I guess, apologies for what it took to get you guys to this video. It’s a private video on a secret YouTube account I set up so nobody will find it by accident. I had to run you through all those hoops to make sure that only you two see this. If someone found the phone taped to a tree by accident, or maybe if you guys had given the phone to the warden when you found it, there’s no way anyone else but you would get here.

  “Second, I guess, is why. You’ll find out soon. But even then, you might not believe it. So let me tell you how I got to the island. Then maybe things will make better sense. I stole a bunch of money.”

  Blake paused. Grinned. “That got your attention, didn’t it. Actually, I didn’t steal it for me. I’m a white hat—someone who hacks into systems to test them and help out the people who own them. Black hats are malicious. They put in bad software, steal passwords, stuff like that. Anyway, my mom was the president of her bank. I found a way into the bank’s system. I moved some money to prove it could be done, and then I moved it back again. I sent the bank an email to let their IT guys know about it so they could fix it.”

  On the screen, Blake shook his head. “Some moron there leaked it to the press. All they needed to do was fix the problem, but no, suddenly everybody’s screaming about it, and now my mom is under heat even though I was doing it to make sure it got fixed before the bank got in trouble. It was stressing her out so bad because nobody could find out who broke into the system or how.

  “She was so freaked out, I told her I’d done it, expecting that she would at least keep that secret. But no, she went all ethical about it, and just like that, I’m on probation with a court order not to be around any kind of computers. Mom resigned and Dad quit his university job so they could move me onto an island and work here and make sure I didn’t have Internet access.”

  Blake grinned into the camera. “So thanks, guys, for helping me get back on the Internet with my first iPhone. I had a bunch of PayPal money stashed away, and once I got back online with the iPhone, I was able to order a bunch of other stuff. And I could use the 4G to get online in secret. Slow, but it’s better than nothing.

  “The thing is, I live to be a hacker. It’s like asking a bird not to fly, telling me to keep away from coding software and jumping into systems and hanging out in forums with other white hats.”

  Blake lost his smile. “I just didn’t expect that breaking into the prison software would show me what I learned there. And now you need to keep helping me with this. But there’s no way you’re going to believe what I found if I just tell you. I’ve got my computer set up so that once you get to it, you can go through the steps I did, and then you’ll believe.”

  The smile returned. But it was grim.

  “Thing is,” Blake said, “you’re going to have to go into the abandoned prison. Nighttime will be best. Next video link will show you how to get to my stash.”

  The video went black again. Because it had ended. And a new video began to load. With instructions on what to do next.

  It was like the shock of falling into the deadly cold water of Puget Sound that had kept prisoners from escaping for over a century. The water that had drowned Blake. With a shock like that, for a split second, you can’t react. And then, all you can do is sputter and gasp.

  Johnson broke the silence first. “No way, man. Not. Going. Into. Abandoned. Prison. Ever.”

  King squared his shoulders. He was thinking about whatever crime Mack had committed that was the reason for all that Blake had done to set this up. No way did he want Johnson to learn what it was.

  “Good,” King answered. “Because I want to go alone.”

  CHAPTER 20

  McNeil Island Corrections Center opened in 1875 as a territorial facility. Washington had not yet become a state. Later, the Federal Bureau of Prisons had taken over, and finally, the state of Washington began to lease it from the federal government more than a century later. In 1984, the island was deeded to the state. That was the beginning of the end of the largest parts of the facility. Budget cuts led to the closing of the main buildings, a cluster of concrete structures on the southeast corner of the island, near the ferry dock.

  This was King’s destination.

  It hadn’t been difficult to leave the house unnoticed by Mack, who, as usual, had hidden himself in the wood shop almost immediately after returning home at the end of his day shift.

  King’s biggest problem had been containing his impatience. He’d needed to wait until dark, so he hadn’t slipped away until 9:30.

  He was okay with solitude in the night air, even passing the cemetery. It was empty. Before the island had become a prison, pioneers had lived and farmed here. When the residents were forced to leave in 1936, all the remains in the cemetery had been exhumed and reburied on the mainland.

  Not that King believed in ghosts in the first place. At this point, he figured he had enough trouble with everything else in his life that was haunting him. His mother hovered between death and life, and he wasn’t even allowed to see her. His father was keeping secrets and living what looked like a Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde kind of life—posing as a wonderful father who believed in honor and courage and yet was somehow involved in the drowning of one of King’s friends.

  Nope. The nighttime and the ghosts were not what worried King. Not even the abandoned prison.

  It was the threat of what might be hidden inside and what it might tell him about his father.

  King came in from the west because the east side of the complex held the occupied buildings, called the McNeil Island Special Commitment Center. In other words, a holding tank for deranged loonies. It was where his father worked. King had often looked at the island with Google maps. The buildings were giant triangles. Five of them in a row connected by an external corridor and surrounded by the electric barbed-wire fence.

  At the northwest corner of the complex, near the helicopter landing pad, the remainder of the buildings had been shut down and abandoned. This was his destination.

  King was armed with a small flashlight and a small canister of pepper spray that he’d stolen from his father’s room and hidden against his ankle in his sock.

  He was also armed with a door number. In the video, Blake had promised that entrance 15A had a lock that only looked secure. All it would take, Blake had promised, was a simple tug on the lock, and it would pop open.

  King moved slowly among the buildings, stopping frequently to listen for footsteps. Prison guards were not likely to be here, but no sense taking risks. At least, unnecessary risks. What he was doing was definitely risky, but King didn’t feel as if he had much choice.

  He reached the first building in the abandoned cluster. The exterior was rough concrete, more than a century old. The steel doors had peeling gray paint and barely visible numbers that had been sprayed on with a stencil. It didn’t take him long to find 15A.

  It was bolted shut on the exterior with a huge padlock that prevented the bolt from sliding open. King gave it a gentle tug, and it popped open as if it had been oiled. He slid the bolt back, and it, too, was smooth and soundless.

  This, he thought, did not bode well. So far, every single thing that Blake had promised from beyond the grave had been accurate. That made it all the more likely that whatever was ahead would be equally accurate.

  King stood at the door for an entire minute, wrestling with his decision.

  It felt no different from when he’d been at the base of the tree in the forbidden zone, knowing that the next step would
betray his trust in his father.

  He realized he was only kidding himself at this point. Grabbing the lowest branch of that tree had been the point of betrayal. Everything after that was simply a journey down a slippery slope with no chance of stopping himself. King pushed open 15A and shone his flashlight into the empty hallway.

  It smelled faintly of urine. Decades ago, the prisoners had been forced to use wood buckets to hold their body wastes. No amount of bleach and paint had been able to remove the stench.

  King stepped inside and closed the door. It occurred to him that if someone bolted it shut on the outside, he would be trapped in this building as surely as the long-dead murderers and thieves had once been held captive. But on this slippery slope, the best he could do was to try to control the direction of his fall.

  He plunged forward into the darkness.

  Five doors down on the right, Blake had said. Push open the cell door and look beneath the bunk bed on the left wall.

  And that’s where King found it as promised.

  A Macbook Air laptop. Beautiful, lightweight, and sleek.

  And without a doubt, filled with something nuclear and ready to explode with fallout as poisonous as radiation.

  CHAPTER 21

  King popped open the laptop computer lid. Difficult not to love a Macbook Air. Gleaming silver keypad. High-resolution screen.

  The screen showed a prompt for a password, and King clicked MEASLES onto the keyboard.

  The screen was black for a couple seconds, and then Blake Watt’s voice broke the silence that had pressed in on King in the small room.

  “Don’t touch anything on the computer,” Blake said. “Wait for it…”

  Blake’s face appeared in a small square in the upper right-hand quarter of the screen. It was obviously video. Below that square was another one of similar size, with an arrow button for play. The second video was frozen with a view of a hallway and prison cells.

  “Here I am,” Blake said. “Your tour guide. But really, don’t touch anything without my instructions. Wish I could stand in front of you in 3-D, like Princess Leia in Star Wars, but this was the best I could do.”