The Phone Company

by David Jacob Knight

  Bill recognized every single member of this Pitchfork Mafia—there was Chad, Bonnie, and behind them, Clive—but their faces had changed now, swollen with rage and bloodshot eyes.

  He fought the urge to shrink back, knowing that law enforcement had to throw a bigger shadow than the crowd. He couldn’t step back anyway. He’d fall into an early grave.

  Bill looked over his shoulder at the body way down there at the bottom of the rectangular hole behind him, its skeleton half-exposed, its eyes still packed with dirt. The bone man stared up at him, his jaw open in a gravelly laugh.

  The crowd pushed forward.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Bill said into his megaphone, holding up his other hand, flat. “Easy now.” God, he felt like he was calming a horse. “I’m just trying to keep you all safe, all right? Work with me here!”

  “Move, or we’ll march on the sheriff’s office next!” one of the mill workers said. “We’ll recall his ass!”

  “Yeah!”

  Bill was afraid they would, too. Ever since the shooting at HMS, Sheriff Perkins had been rallied and petitioned against. No one knew how he’d gotten re-elected.

  “What’re they going to do with the bodies?” Kelli Anderson asked, point-blank. She stood at the head of the group and had become their de facto voice, as per usual when she saw fit to involve herself.

  She hated Bill, and he knew it. He was always arresting her boys for shoplifting, vandalizing, trespassing, or whatever the little cretins were up to next. Bill never told Kelli this, but it wasn’t his fault she got so involved in everything but the lives of her own two kids. He didn’t understand why she wasn’t a more active parent, especially after losing her daughter at HMS.

  “Well,” Bill said, dialing down the bullhorn’s volume, “the researchers tell me the first thing they’ll do is study the remains. They want to see what settlers’ diets were like back then, and what kind of diseases were around at the time. They say it could take months—”

  “Months?”

  “—but it’s all for historical value. The PCo’s got a great team of archeologists and forensic anthropologists here, and it looks like it’s all being done right.”

  “I can’t believe the county’s allowing them to do this,” John Cowan said. “They didn’t even run this past us.”

  “Oh,” Kelli Anderson replied, “the PCo paid off some of the living relatives, I’m sure. And the county commissioners have always had greasy palms. Isn’t that right, Deputy Biggs?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Bill replied, even though he knew that Kelli knew he was full of crap. “I do know that the county had some tests done, and they’ve deemed this place a health hazard. Apparently, the old graves are leaching arsenic into the groundwater.”

  “Arsenic?” someone else asked.

  “Sounds like bullshit to me,” Cowan said.

  “Chemtrails!” Marvin cried. “Death from the sky!”

  “No, it’s not from chemtrails.” Bill dialed up the megaphone again to shout over the Martian. “They used it in embalming fluids way back when. It never really breaks down, so it just leaches into the water table.”

  The truth was, Bill hadn’t seen the results from any soil or water tests done in or around the graveyard, and he hadn’t believed it when Sheriff Perkins fed him the line about the arsenic, either.

  Bill knew the real reason they wanted the cemetery gone, and he hated reciting information he hadn’t personally verified, especially when the legal justification felt so thin. But here he was, upholding Perkins’s Law.

  Murphy’s Law, more like it.

  “Anyway,” Bill said, “instead of standing out here in arsenic, breathing in the dust, why don’t we take your signs and move this party back to the, uh, free speech zone—”

  Somebody screamed.

  Uphill above the graveyard, the backhoe had started digging a trench (to bring in utilities, Bill had been told). The digger must have struck a pipe, because now sewage did what it did and rolled downhill, down the road.

  Toward the open graves.

  The protestors scrambled off the road, and the excavation team clambered out of the pits just as wastewater poured into the holes.

  “Crap,” Bill said. He grimaced at the smell and hoped it was something he could get used to real quick.

  Activating the handset clipped to his lapel, he said, “Aaron, you read me?”

  “Yeah, go ahead, Bill.”

  “We got a sewage spill up here at Harcum.”

  “Middle school?”

  “Graveyard. Get Public Health, Public Works and, hell, anyone else who’s supposed to give a shit about shit on the line, will you? We’re going to need a cleanup.”

  “I’m already consulting the ready book,” Aaron told him.

  “Smart girl.”

  The protestors were now stumbling around the open graves on the western side of the road. Though the sewage couldn’t reach them there, someone was bound to end up sleeping with a corpse.

  “All right, people!” Bill said into his megaphone. “I’m glad you’re protecting the town’s heritage, but I think we’ll have to cut this protest short!”

  “We have every right!” one of the protestors screamed.

  “They’re destroying our town! Don’t you even give a shit?”

  “Company man!” Marvin cried out.

  It’s what the Martian always called police or politicians, or any alleged puppet of the elite: a company man.

  Bill lowered his megaphone an inch. He did give a shit. The earthmovers had turned the graveyard into a field of open septic tanks, and they’d reduced the dirt road to a latrine. He was also pretty sure the backhoe was digging around up where a few of the natives had been buried.

  Meanwhile, the excavation team just stood around, watching the foul wastewater flush into the graves, desecrating town founders and pioneers, sullying the very people who’d logged and mined and milled and laid the grid of roads on which the whole town was based.

  Sometimes Bill hated his job, hated when laws he was sworn to uphold actually pitted him against the people he was sworn to protect. But that was politics.

  “Sorry, people!” he said, raising the bullhorn again. “Unless you all have a permit to be here, you’ll have to disperse. Pretty steep fine if you don’t.”

  Bill spent the next fifteen minutes breaking down the crowd’s objections, and finally he was able to usher them back toward the hole they’d made in the fence. He corralled them slowly, in single file between the deep graves, trying not to look down at all the skull shards and curled-up spines below.

  Near the end of the line, Marvin’s tie-dyed shirt resurfaced from all the fall jackets and winter coats. The Martian kept an eye on Bill from between his low-sitting hat and the brambles of his red and gray beard, slowing down and forcing people around him, disrupting the strict procession.

  “Keep it moving, Mar—” Bill began.

  The Martian lunged at him, grabbing the bullhorn out of Bill’s hands.

  “Marv!”

  The Martian cackled and leapt over one of the gaping graves, bullhorn in one hand, picket sign in the other. He landed on the edge, on loose clods, and his right Birkenstock skidded out from beneath him.

  Dirt rained down on the resident skeleton, what was left of it, and Marvin almost fell in. But then he scrambled up and pranced away as Bill came around the hole after him, kicking up dust.

  “Marvin—stop!”

  Cackling again, the Martian jumped over another hole, then another, darting away from Bill.

  “Sheeple!” Marvin yelled into the megaphone. “All of you, doing the bidding of the company man! Look here!” He took a few wild steps toward the excavation team on the other side of the spill, jabbing his picket in their direction. “They’re doing this—all of this—on purpose!”

  “Marvin!” Bill warned, making his way around the holes. He hadn’t been so acutely aware of the cameramen until that moment.

  Threading hi
s way between life and death, Bill could see in his periphery just a face with a huge camera for an eye, filming everything.

  “Get back in line, Marv,” Bill snapped. Sheriff Perkins had told him to handle this politically sensitive task sensitively. He hadn’t told Bill to make headlines.

  The Martian kept grave-hopping, though, this way and that, nimble as a deer but growing more and more breathless in his amplified rants. “Know . . . what they plan to do . . . with the bodies?”

  The crowd had stopped and was listening to him now, glancing between the Martian and Bill like they were watching a tennis match.

  “Out!” Bill shouted at them. They didn’t move from their cluster around the burial plots.

  “All this shit?” Marvin said. “They meant to dump it! They meant to take a shit all over our town!”

  “Yeah?” Bill said. He couldn’t control his sarcasm, despite the news coverage; he never could. “I heard they dumped the shit to get rid of the protestors is what I heard. Now like I said . . .”

  Bill had edged close enough to the Martian. He cut a quick corner, taking a big step over the grave ahead of him, reaching out. His hand brushed Marvin’s sleeve.

  But then Bill’s footing gave way behind him, disintegrating, just a bunch of tumbling rocks and crumbled dirt beneath his boot. He barely made it across and took two stumbling steps forward, lashing out, but Marvin had already danced away, making Bill’s move look desperate in front of the news.

  “You don’t get it, man.” The Martian’s thumb worked surreptitiously at the volume dial, which had maxed out, yet he kept trying to crank it up. “It’s got nothing to do with the protest. They needed to mix shit and death. It’s what companies do, man! There’s a reason they’re building it here, over the Seal!”

  The Martian was pointing with the picket again, and Bill happened to glance, only because he hadn’t told anyone what The Phone Company actually planned to do with the cemetery, once they’d cleaned up the site.

  He hadn’t even told Steve. He’d just dodged his friend’s questions, because it was supposed to be some big secret. Yet behold Marvin Jones, spouting the truth for once.

  Bill had found out about the plans for the PCo’s data center that morning, when the sheriff himself had called. It seemed Perkins only contacted Bill directly when there was something political involved. Or sometimes he called to invite Bill to a barbecue. Which, of course, was also political.

  Bill didn’t know how Marvin had found out about the plans, and he didn’t care. The Martian wasn’t pointing at a “seal,” anyway. It was Harcum’s First Step, now a granite island amid an ocean of townspeople’s shit. A few anthropologists were stranded on the pad, having climbed onto it to escape the spill.

  “This place is full of cracks!” Marv cried, backpedaling along a narrow ridge between burial holes as Bill rounded the grave between them. “Ley lines, cracks! Gold!”

  “Watch it!” Bill said, but Marvin never listened, taking another step back. His foot disappeared into the pit behind him, toward a skeleton without a head or a pelvis—and then Bill was catching him by the bullhorn.

  He yanked the Martian up and reclaimed his megaphone, then went to slap some cuffs on Marvin. He was planning to make a huge display of it for the news, too. But the Martian leapt again, over the hole, Birkenstocks flapping.

  “Marvin, stop!” Bill shouted into the megaphone.

  But Marvin didn’t stop.

  He raced up to the edge of the road and used his picket sign like a shovel to scoop up sewage and mud, which he catapulted at the anthropologists stuck on the Step. Brown crud spattered one of them, getting all over the poor man’s blue shirt and khaki shorts, and a bit in his gray beard.

  “Hey!”

  Marvin kept flinging filth at the marooned scientists, who fled to the edge of the pad, yelling curses at him. One of the anthropologists stepped on a slick spot on the edge. He slipped right off the plaque, disappearing into one of the graves below with a cry that ended in a gurgling splash. Then the man was shrieking and clawing at the muddy sides to get out.

  “Help!”

  The Martian dug his sign in again, preparing to scoop up more sludge, but then Bill was there, stomping on the wooden pole and driving it into the ground.

  “Felony if you fling it at me,” Bill said.

  But Marvin was no longer looking at him. He was gawking at the monument, his mouth just a black spot in his beard as he stared. Bill followed his line of sight.

  “I can hear it,” Marvin whispered.

  Bill realized he could hear it, too, under the screaming and yelling of just about everyone else on the site. A sucking sound. Something draining.

  At the western edge of the Step, a little whirlpool had formed in the filth. The granite pad was sucking the water under, into some deeper crevice.

  “Full of cracks, man,” Marvin breathed.

  And Bill could have sworn for a second there, when the water waned, just for a second, he saw it pouring into some bony, eyeless socket of some skull.

  Using the obvious curse word, Bill pulled Marvin up by his tie-dyed shirt to cuff him for the cameraman. But even in victory all he could think about was his own joke yesterday, about the trembling infirmity in his hand.

  * * *

  “Not to mention disorderly conduct,” Bill said.

  Marvin wasn’t listening. He was staring out the backseat window of the cruiser at the passing brick buildings.

  “This is twice in one week, Marv. First the thing at the courthouse, now this?”

  The Martian didn’t even blink.

  The thing at the courthouse had been frustrating. Bill had gotten a call that Marvin had smashed some lady’s phone, but when he arrived on the scene it quickly became clear that Marvin had staged the whole complaint; he’d made the call himself, as some sort of Yes Men attempt to draw attention to his cause.

  Bill had threatened him with counts of false alarm, misuse of a telephone, and making a false statement to a public official. Of course, he never booked or charged Marvin. They’d booked him before, and it never did any good.

  For starters, you couldn’t fine someone who didn’t have any money. And since Marvin’s property was useless—a cleanup would cost more than the land was worth—the only recourse was to lock him in jail, where the number of prisoner beds shrank with every failed levy.

  Once when they attempted to try him, the Martian had gotten off on a psychiatric defense. He ended up at the ward for rehabilitation, and after they proved he could be controlled with medication, they released him.

  “You’re all working for the company,” Marvin muttered to the window.

  “Yeah, I meant to ask you about that,” Bill said, “what company, PCo?”

  “Yeah, man. They have different brands, but it’s all the same thing.”

  Bill stared at him for a while in the rearview before returning his eyes to the road. Marvin believed everyone was part alien. Descendants of ancient astronauts and stars. Marvin really did look like a Gray Boy, too: pale skin, wider forehead, narrower chin; huge yet slanted eyes.

  “You know,” Bill said, “I’m not that thrilled about the PCo either. They ought to be strung up a tree for what they did to those people at the factory, but come on, Marv. Flinging feces? The only way it could be worse is if it was your own.”

  “Man, what happened at that factory is just business as usual. But here, man, there’s a reason they’re building it here.”

  “Yeah, about that. How is it you know about that?”

  “They’re going to build it over the Seal.”

  “Yeah, Marvin, but how’d you know?”

  “I told you, this whole place is full of cracks.”

  Bill sighed. He could see the Martian’s eyes ticking back and forth as they always did when his mind went off the rails and started plowing new tracks through crazy town.

  Cracks, Bill thought, trying to make sense of the Martian’s rant. Empty Mine: that was one big underground
crack. Was Marvin going off about the mine?

  “It’s a special place. The man on the phone wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  “What man on the phone?” Bill said.

  “He was there today, didn’t you see him? He was right there, man.”

  “In the crowd?”

  “No, the tall dude. The stiff in a suit. A real company man, like yourself. He’s the one who tried to buy me off.”

  “Ah,” Bill said.

  It was the first thing out of Marvin’s mouth that made sense. There had been more than one Jones on a tombstone at Harcum.

  “That’s how you know about the data center,” Bill said, but the Martian wasn’t listening, too busy doing the cat-clock thing with his eyes.

  Too bad, too, Bill thought. If Marvin had taken the bribe, he would’ve had money to pay fines.

  “I mean, it’s no coincidence the feds are trying to take our guns,” the Martian went on. “It’s no coincidence they can now detain or kill American citizens without due process. Have you heard about the FEMA camps? Or the drones? It’s all the company, man. It controls everything. First the seeds, and now they want to engineer their own honeybees. They already control our lives enough. Planned obsolescence, right in our food. A soft kill from the skies. It’s why they want us concentrated into cities, so they can test stuff on us. Chemtrails, viruses in the water supply. HAARP. Bigfoot armies.”

  Bill nearly laughed. The Martian had exhausted all of his half-baked connections to the PCo and was just rattling off conspiracy theories now.

  “I thought HAARP shut down,” Bill said.

  “That’s just what they want you to think, man. You’re walking right into their trap!”

  “Right.”

  Bill had been driving toward the sheriff’s office, with the plan of booking the Martian and maybe putting him in the holding tank till the crazy wore off. But they’d done this before. Today had been Marvin’s worst offense, for sure—that poor anthropologist—but jailing Marv always seemed to backfire.

  Last time they put him in a cell, he’d started a riot with the other inmates, screaming, “Poison in the food! Meat’s our murderer!” or the famous battle cry, “They took our beds!”