The Phone Company

by David Jacob Knight

  “You never did understand measuring things in parts, did you, Marv?! You still managed to open it up, boy howdy! You ripped her good and wide, you and Lil’ Chuck!”

  Steve couldn’t stand for all the smoke, and all the pain it caused him. He dragged himself toward one of the crumbling walls, avoiding Graham’s silhouette.

  It moved, though, Graham’s silhouette. It tracked him through the flaming miasma. Steve never saw it happen, but every inch he crawled away from it, every grave marker he cleared, was an inch and a grave closer that Graham seemed to get.

  Gripping the edges of the stones, finding handholds and footholds even in the engravings themselves, Steve crawled faster, clawed harder, trying to outrun Graham through the smoke.

  There.

  An influx of fresh breath.

  Almost there, he thought.

  The way out.

  Steve could see now that the bomb had blown open only the back of the brick shell. The back quarter, really. The rest of the damage was all fallout, the crack opening up and swallowing another quarter of the whole shell.

  Steve reached the edge where the abyss gaped, growing with every stone and gravestone and chunk of cemetery dirt that fell away and fed it below.

  Huge fat cables, suckered to the bottom of the data center, snapped loose. They whipped through the darkness, strumming against the extant cables as they fell. The extant cables, still rooted to the data center’s foundation, stretched all the way into the endless stink of the dark.

  Most of them had been plugged in under the First Step. The old phone, the switchboard, had been connected to them. It was all connected.

  The First Step, as it came loose, had left a socket like a tooth. The hole was clogged, and had been that way for more than a hundred years, with clods of ancient Indian remains. Ribcages. Spines. Skulls packed with dirt. The last few mineralized deposits of teeth, vertebrae, and scattered metacarpals were just now crumbling like chunks of some old cork out of the hole that had always been at the heart of Cracked Rock.

  Steve glanced back to the last spot he’d seen Graham, then to the spot he thought Graham would be sitting now.

  “Hello,” Graham said directly ahead of him.

  “Shit!”

  With the one good eye he had left, Graham grinned at Steve. He lay on his side, and his other eye had popped into a crisped, bubbling jelly on his cheek.

  Before Graham could say anything else, Steve lunged. His blackened hands clamped down on Graham’s throat once more.

  But Graham kept talking.

  Except not from his own throat.

  Graham’s Tether said. His voice began to morph disjointedly into a woman’s voice. Robotic. The same voice of all PCo phone trees Steve had ever heard.

 

 

 

 

  Steve’s grip loosened around Graham’s throat.

  Dead.

 

  Already dead.

  The blast had killed him. It hadn’t been Graham talking at all. It’d been his phone, throwing its voice.

  Steve shook the useless corpse, cursing in its face, spitting in its face. “Where the hell are my kids?” He really didn’t want an answer. He feared one. He just wanted to bang Graham’s head against the stones, scraping away what was left of his stringy hair, along with pieces of his scalp.

  “Where the hell are my ki—”

  Graham’s phone said in its polite fembot drone. This time Steve recognized who the voice really belonged to. Not Graham, not anymore. Not even to the phone. It was like JJ had been using some kind of voice modulator app this whole time. He was Graham. He was the woman.

  “Son?”

  JJ said in his natural voice.

  “JJ, please, I stopped them! You can stop doing this now, they’re dead!”

 

  “Fuuuuuuuuhhhgggh!”

  With one great heave and a giant sob, Steve rolled and kicked and otherwise kneed Graham’s body into the hole, knocking loose rocks and dirt from the ledge. The corpse bounced off one of the extant cables that had connected to the old switchboard, but then hovered in thin air, as if too light to sink, now fully evanescent.

  Like a cloud, Graham dispersed and stretched out. For one wavering second before he disappeared, he became the mirror-house man, the man in the gaunt suit. He listened for a second to the phone at his ear . . .

 

 

  <¡Hasta la vista!>

  . . . then pulled it away and hung up at the same time as JJ ended the call.

  On the floor near Steve, Graham’s Tether went dark. Roaring, Steve kicked it into the abyss after him.

  * * *

  “Sarah!” Steve cried. His voice echoed in Hayworth’s mansion. He went outside and screamed again for her there. Screamed until his voice broke. She was gone. No trace, save for the backpack where he’d left her.

  He had almost convinced himself, after climbing out of the data center and away from that yawning crack, that Graham had lied about holding Sarah and JJ near the bomb.

  Graham certainly seemed to be lying about all the other bombs supposedly planted around Cracked Rock. Steve didn’t see any other fireballs in the night, no fires.

  All of it, all lies. A whole web of them. Little Chucky whispering secrets to Marv; Aaron 2 throwing false clues into the Dragnet for Bill.

  Blow up the data center . . .

  . . . Graham, too.

  That’s what the web was all about. Not about snaring the truth, but setting the trap. Steve, Marvin, Bill—the whole town had walked right into it.

  Before Steve panicked, before he shook apart, he thought of something and pulled out his phone.

  Still worked.

  Which meant JJ was right. The bomb had done nothing except for the one thing PCo had wanted it to do: yet another covenant broken wide open, the very promise that had founded the town in the first place shattered and swallowed whole.

  Harcum no longer lies by his wife.

  And now, he thought, PCo is free to do whatever it is they came for.

  Steve pressed 2 and held it, then put the clamshell to his ear. “Sarah?”

  “Dad?” she said, picking up the home phone.

  “Sarah, oh my God—”

  “Dad, I’m so sorry.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I saw JJ.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I followed him, I saw him go up to the mine. I know how to stop him, Dad, I know how to stop her. I’m getting another Tether—”

  “What? No! Sarah, goddamn it—”

  “Dad, listen.”

  “No! Where are you?”

  “They’re handing them out at the church, I heard Aaron—”

  “If you do that, if you connect again, you might as well come hunt me down with them, Sarah, they’re tricking you! They’ve done it to me this entire time, it’s all one big trick!”

  “He’s going to the tower, Dad, I know how to stop him. I need to go.”

  “Sarah!”

 

  Steve roared, almost threw his phone. It certainly would have helped curb the pain, if only for a second. He called Sarah back. No answer.

  He peered into the darkness for the light of the tower.

  There.

  There it was.

  The sky looked strange around it. Some sort of bulging cloud had formed, a thunderhead, purple-veined. From here, Steve couldn�
��t tell whether the coloring was from the light of the tower catching in the convolutions of the cloud, or some kind of weird atmospheric static, or perhaps part of the cloud itself.

  Whimpering, bleeding, and barely catching a breath through all the brushfires in his chest, Steve ran down to the road. If Sarah wasn’t at Mountain View, at the church, or at the camp, he’d go back up to the logging roads. He’d head to the mine, head to the tower. Didn’t matter how badly it hurt, how badly concussed his body was from the blast, or how much his lungs burned.

  JJ had been right about one thing: Steve had screwed up. In grappling with something much grander than he was, he’d ruined everything. He’d done it his entire life. But now he thought he could fix at least one mistake. His worst.

  Steve thought he had one last chance to save his son.

  CHAPTER 58

  “Here,” said the maternity nurse. She handed Steve what looked like an empty blanket.

  He had always been uncomfortable holding newborns. That is, until the birth of his daughter, Sarah. She’d been a full-term baby. Her neck had felt strong enough.

  This thing, though? This terminally small thing in the blanket? Its neck felt like a dry twig under too big a fruit. It wasn’t even big enough to nestle comfortably in the crook of Steve’s arm; the blanket seemed like it’d slip right through.

  But Steve held it, Steve fed it, Steve rocked the nearly empty blanket while it wormed and squealed, and he never smoked. As much as he wanted to—for all the late nights and nasty diapers, through all the jaundice and infections, as much as the nicotine would have helped—Steve didn’t smoke. He knew what had caused the premature birth in the first place. He didn’t want the slightest puff in his shirt. Not even Janice’s. She couldn’t be around at all if she’d smoked.

  Because in those sweet moments when the thing in the blanket finally found peace, JJ Gregory’s tiny finger would curl around Steve’s giant one, and there’d be soft cooing, maybe sleep.

  * * *

  Empty Mine gaped ahead of Steve. A stone disc lay off to one side where the storm had shoved it. The entire mouth of the mine looked raw, all the dirt and trees washed down to the toothy rock. Steve shined his light in. Its beam reflected off the puddles and pools all the way down the stone throat.

  He shivered. He never had liked the mountain’s cold, stinky breath. Although cool, the draft burned his skin.

  Steve had taken pain pills, he’d thought too many, but after his hike up the mountain, the only thing he couldn’t feel was where the bruised ribs stopped and the fever aches began.

  Focus, Steve thought. Focus on your son.

  The tower loomed up the mountain, surrounded by a cyclone fence and razor wire. Sarah had said JJ went to the mine, but that he was headed for the tower. So maybe the mine somehow led to the tower.

  Steve didn’t have much choice.

  He entered the mine.

  The tunnel, completely man-made for the first hundred feet, opened into a natural crack extending so high that not even a good flashlight could reach the top.

  Miners had wedged walkways, old now, but coated in creosote, into the crevice. Some of the ladders looked like chicken ladders, short two-by-fours nailed as treads onto long planks.

  One time in high school, Steve and his friends had thrown a party in the mine. They’d broken open glow sticks and had splashed neon yellow, purple, and green all over the walls, leaving glowing handprints, fluorescent cave paintings, and Bill’s red handprint on the ass of Janice’s jeans.

  Since then, The Phone Company had blasted new tunnels, exposing more cracks in the rock. Cracks in everything.

  Steve stumbled over fat black cables on the floor. They ran everywhere throughout the mine. The same kind of cables Steve had seen suckered to the bottom of the First Step.

  Sometimes the cables were bracketed to the wall. Other times they vanished into bottomless cracks.

  Steve didn’t like the cracks, their cold creepers of air. He didn’t like how they conspired with the pain pills so that he could no longer tell the difference between the breeze on his burns and the fever chills.

  Nothing was okay.

  Everything hurt.

  The main braid of cables would lead Steve to the tower, he was sure of it. From data center to tower, just follow the cables.

  Then what? Steve thought.

  He didn’t know. He just knew this was his fault, and he could fix it.

  A mile in, Steve reached the final chamber, originally formed when the miners carved out their mother lode. Now, in the back, PCo had chiseled open a staircase. Steve climbed over the cables they’d left coiled on the floor.

  At the top, the thick black lines threaded into one, sending a single black anaconda up the staircase. Steve followed it up and found a brand-new rope bridge. It ran through a giant crack. No catwalks in this part. The miners had never built here, likely had never seen it. The crack had no end to it. Not above, nor below, save for the sound of running water echoing up. Steve couldn’t even see the end of the bridge.

  He pulled on the ropes.

  Pretty sturdy.

  Knotted densely.

  Nodding, he kicked at the planks.

  New wood, braided tightly into the ropes; not partially sawn to set a trap, at least Steve didn’t think.

  On the first few boards, his light picked out footprints. Converse. His son’s. Steve didn’t know whether it was the pain pills or the pure shock, but he went across the bridge, numb to any kind of fear.

  In a banner along the crevice walls, someone had left cave drawings, a mixture of etching and old paint, severely chipped and faded. Huge chunks of the narrative had fallen away when whole sheaves of rock had broken loose into the underground river below.

  The art looked like a composite of hieroglyphics and cave paintings, like the ones in Lascaux, except instead of Egyptians, bison, and sun gods, the art depicted the Ebumnanyth and their entities. Spirits and skeletons danced among them, spreading locusts, plowing through battlefields of men, and vomiting up disease. In some, the deities watched while Ebumnanyth priests performed ritual sacrifice on the mountaintop.

  Above the bleeding piglet, kid, or lamb, the Ebumnanyth could be seen worshipping weird spiraling holes in and above Cracked Rock, Burnt Valley. Some of the spirals had maintained their paint, an electromagnetic purple opening unto a blue and yellow heart.

  Strange symbols annotated the art, similar to the programming language Steve’s students had used to code apps for the Tether.

  He reached the end of the bridge. A concrete archway opened into a tube with a metal ladder. Steve peered up with his flashlight, bouncing the beam off the walls of thick glass. He saw an opening at the top, half eclipsed by a hastily placed manhole cover.

  Steve looked at his hands, the skinned and blistered palms. He sized up the ladder.

  This.

  This service access.

  This was his entrée to the tower.

  Find JJ, and then what?

  “Take away his phone, I guess.”

  It was a bad sign that Steve was talking to himself. He only did that when he was really tired, or really drunk. It sounded pathetic, too, coming out of his mouth. A terrible plan, but it was all he could think of.

  Maybe disable the tower somehow? If he had an axe, he would’ve tried cutting through the cables. No, he was done saving the world. He had failed, and now it was someone else’s turn to pull the sword from the rock. Steve only had enough left in him to accomplish one goal. This tube? Climbing up it? It was about to sap most of his will to accomplish it.

  As Steve climbed, he got a closer look at the glass. Behind it, packed tightly around the entire tube, was something like mud and ash. In some strata Steve saw teeth, skulls too, bits of bone in the rocks and finer powders. He saw personal effects. A wedding ring. A gold watch in the mud. He saw old, moldering wood and corroded pulls.

  Up higher, packed into the muddy ash, Steve found something he thought he’d never see ag
ain. Stacked, standing on each other, their knees and elbows knocking glass, were the corpses from Mountain View.

  At first, they were old and crumbling, but the higher Steve climbed, the fresher they got, still in dresses and suits. As if they had been buried here in the order they died, suspended in the soiled remains of pilgrims and town founders. Because that’s what the muddy ash was: the dirt the town was built on mixed with the people who’d built it, soiled, now, with the shit of the people who eventually destroyed it.

  Throughout all of them, the big fat cable wormed its way up toward the tower, weaving its way around spinal columns, in and out of ribcages. Here and there, one of its bends flexed against the glass like a boa constrictor.

  Whatever they were doing here, this was all part of it. The corpses, the cables—like some giant spell riddling the mountain. The tower, Steve now understood, was the wand that cast the spell.

  In the tube, he saw a band of smaller bodies all in a row. Their skulls cried out for him as he passed. Eyeless sockets filled with clods. Brainpans blown wide open.

  Amongst the schoolchildren floated a scrap of white dress, a bright yellow strawberry flower embroidered on the hem.

  Steve stopped and closed his eyes, breathing deeply, swallowing thick spit. Luckily, he couldn’t smell the bodies, or the shit. The glass was sealing in the stench.

  He took a deep breath and hurried past, trying not to hear them, their silent pleas for help, trying not to see Janice’s skeleton standing tall amongst the kids.

  At the very top, the corpse of Gary Pervier screamed at him with its open throat, because its mouth was packed with shitty dirt. Buried beside Perv-o were the cooked bodies of the lunch lady, the janitor Red Beard, and all the other school personnel lost to the plane crash at HMS.

  Steve had had enough.

  He pushed the hatch open at the top. He was behind the fence now, in the compound of brick buildings, utility boxes, and cables that serviced the tower. Despite the deep space of night pressing in on all sides, the complex was well lit. Generators and fans hummed all around.

  Steve lifted himself out of the manhole and gazed at the skeletal tower. He was dizzied by the sheer height and repeating triangles of it. Receivers and domed dishes bristled and bubbled up each and every side.