The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  “Fill it?” the attendant asks, and the driver says, “Yeah, with super.” Smoke and beer in his breath. He fumbles with his wallet, hands over a black AmEx.

  The attendant doesn’t see many of these, and he taps it in his palm a moment before running the card, twisting off the cap, nosing the nozzle into the tank. The line shudders with fuel, and the numbers start to twirl.

  Then the stereo starts up again, blasting so loudly, it hurts. His marrow shudders. His ears feel ready to burst and bleed. There are two other cars getting fueled up, and a few people walking in and out of the store. All of them are staring with annoyance at the white Jeep.

  “You mind turning that down?” the attendant says, and the skeleton says, “Actually, I do.” He blows a cloud of smoke and cranks the knob higher. The attendant shakes his head and walks away to check on another vehicle, and the driver and his friends laugh, give each other knuckles, nod along to the thumping bass.

  “Check out this guy,” one of the skeletons says, nodding at the figure lurching down the sidewalk, toward the station. About a block away, he appears in the pool of a streetlamp, then disappears in shadow, then flashes into existence again, getting closer, closer. He has a tromping gait, stooping forward, his arms dangling at his sides. He’s a heavy guy, his big body crushed into a rabbit costume splashed with what looks like blood. “What do you think? Psycho Killer Easter Bunny?”

  The man seems intent on his destination, staring straight ahead and driving his floppy feet down forcefully—until the driver leans out the window and calls out to him. “Hey, fattie—I’m pretty sure I know where you hid all the chocolate eggs!”

  The man in the rabbit costume stops and slowly swivels his head toward them. The ears make his shadow appear horned. He starts toward them, and the skeletons in the Jeep giggle nervously. “Oh shit, this guy is messed up,” they say. “Roll up the windows, Todd.”

  Todd, the driver, fumbles with the keys, and they clatter to the floor. He doesn’t bother going after them, because the man in the rabbit costume is already here, only a few feet away from his open window, studying him with a dead expression. His eyes appear red-laced. What must be fake blood mats his costume and speckles his blank face.

  “What the hell happened to you, bro? Get off on the wrong holiday?” Todd smiles, sucks hard on his cigarette, flicks the ash, blows some smoke that swirls around the man in the rabbit costume before ghosting away. “You kill Santa Claus or what?”

  More giggles from the backseat. The music thumps like an angry heartbeat between them.

  At that moment the gas tank fills and the pump chunks off and the man in the rabbit costume’s attention turns away from Todd. He walks to the rear of the Jeep, reaching for the nozzle.

  “Put up the windows, Todd—put up the windows!”

  Todd ducks down for the keys, fumbling around, hooking the ring with his finger. He tries mashing them into the ignition, but it’s too late. The man in the rabbit costume rips the nozzle from the tank and clicks the trigger and restarts the pump. Gas splatters the ground, then the rear of the vehicle. He holds out his arm as if firing a pistol, splashing their faces. They shield their eyes with their hands and sputter, “Oh shit, shit, shit!”

  Then the man in the rabbit costume trains the hose on the front seat, at Todd’s face, at the red tip of his cigarette. The gas ignites with the thump of a dropped crate, of misplaced air. It goes blue first, like pooling water, and then brightens to a blinding orange. The boys are screaming, their skin melting off them.

  Their screams and the music give way to an earsplitting boom as the Jeep explodes, leaping up and forward to crunch its grille into the pavement. And then the pumps explode, one after the other, hurling sheets of metal. And then the underground tanks erupt, the pavement buckling and crackling to make room for the volcanic spurt of flame that will shatter windows and melt the Texaco star from its sign.

  The man in the rabbit costume has been knocked twenty yards by the blast, his skin scorched and his fur smoldering, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He sits up, and then stands unsteadily, before marching away.

  All throughout Portland, the wind blows and the trees seethe, their leaves torched with color. Pumpkins shudder with candlelight. And screens glow with streaming red code. People look at their phones and then tear off their masks to reveal something scarier beneath. People checking scores, stocks, the weather, email, text messages, social media. Who to hook up with, who to meet up with, where to go for drinks, how to get there. Everyone minutes away from watching something, checking something, their devices like a part of their mind that needs constant access, a prosthetic cerebrum. “Hold on a sec,” they say, “let me take a photo of this.” “Hold on a sec,” they say, “I want to show you this funny video.” “Hold on a sec,” they say, “I gotta send this text.” And when they look up again, their eyes burn as if pocketed with embers.

  A club surges with bodies until someone opens Tinder and swipes right and five minutes later people are shoving their way out the exits, screaming and painted with blood. Trick-or-treaters roam the streets hungry for more than suckers and candy bars. A window shatters, a body flung from it. A car smashes through a fence and into a backyard party lit with strings of jack-o’-lantern lights. The digital veins of the city course with the contagion.

  Around midnight a private jet drops from the sky and circles the city as if to survey it before landing at the Portland airport. It does not hail control. No ground crew comes to meet it. A fire burns in the terminal, and the flames shimmer across the fuselage. The tarmac is empty when its wheels screech and it rolls slowly to a stop. The door opens and a man appears in it. A man named Cloven, who takes a deep breath of the smoke-scented air as if it were purifying.

  The fall climax is a time of reaping harvest, of accounting. The sun and the night end their tug of war as the long death of winter emerges the victor. Tonight, darkness wins.

  Chapter 23

  HANNAH IS USED TO the dark, so she manages this labyrinth of tunnels better than most. Blindness feels familiar, even comforting, since she knows it is all-encompassing, shielding her from sight. One hand traces the wall; the other carries the obsidian blade. It is as long as her forearm, scalloped from the antler that punched the stone, shaped and sharpened it. The handle is wrapped in an ancient leather binding. She takes tall steps so as not to trip on anything. She is not afraid of what is ahead of her, only behind.

  Maybe an hour, maybe a half hour ago, soon after she ran from the chamber, an explosion sounded. The ground shook. Her ears popped. Several bricks untoothed from the ceiling and walls. This was followed by a wall of wind that knocked her forward a step and carried grit in it.

  She doesn’t know which way to go or how far. She doesn’t know how long she has been walking or how far. Down here time seems to pass more slowly and distances to stretch twice as long. Down here every noise is exaggerated. The scuttling of something underfoot, the fluttering of something overhead, all pronounced by the same acoustics that make her every breath and skidded heel sound thunderous. She takes care to slink along as quickly and quietly as she can and not cry out when cobwebs net her face or when a centipede scuttles across her probing hand or when bats swoop and make kissing sounds overhead.

  For a few years, she played in a beep baseball league. It was a version of the game adapted for sight-impaired players. Some could see only a few feet, some couldn’t see at all, so they wore eye masks to make things fair. The ball was oversize and housed a speaker that beeped. The batter swung for the sound. There were only two bases, foam pillars that emitted a screeching alarm the runner hustled toward with arms wide open. If the runner touched the base before the fielders touched the ball, they were safe. She was always fast. She was always unafraid of hurrying perilously through the dark. She was almost always safe. That’s what the umpire would cry—“Safe!”—and she hopes for the same now. To be safe.

  She crosses a short steel bridge over a canal. Pipes—as big around as a m
an—drop from the ceiling and jut from the walls. Whenever she walks past them, she hurries, as if something might reach out and drag her in. She stops every now and then, saying, “What was that?” and “Did you hear that?” her voice echoing away. No one answers. She is alone.

  Until she isn’t. The sound is unmistakable. A sound with gravity to it, a weighted presence: the scrape and thud of footsteps. And panting. A clicking. A hound. She stands at the junction of two tunnels and for one bewildering moment cannot distinguish the sound’s direction. It seems to come from one way, then the other, behind her, before her, then all ways at once, as if she is surrounded. She spins in circles, losing track now of which way she came. The panting is louder, coming in gusts.

  She’s not fast enough to run. So she tightens her grip around the obsidian dagger, holding it two-handed, as if it were a bat and the hound the beep ball hurtling toward her. She tries not to cry, tries not to scream, tries not to think. Her senses narrow. Just like beep baseball, she imagines her ears growing larger, like big pouches to catch noise, every nerve in her body rooted there. She cocks her head, and the hound’s approach and the tunnel system take shape in her mind. She hears air currents huffing and whistling. She hears water dripping. She hears a sniff and claws click-clicking against stone. She faces the tunnel from which the noise comes. Now she’s certain. The hound is no more than twenty feet away, rounding a corner.

  There. The deep-chested growl that signals its approach. She can feel it as well as hear it, as if her bones are being scraped over. It is a sound and she is a smell. They are both blind. She is used to being blind. She knows how to survive being blind. The hound does not creep hesitantly forward, but springs toward her, excited by her nearness. She tries to gauge its size—almost as tall as her on all fours—and crouches down with the dagger angled upward in defense.

  The full weight of the hound slams into the point. There is an almost human scream in response. She falls back with the animal on top of her. She does not know where it is wounded—its breast or neck—but the dagger has buried itself deeply. She holds tight to it. Blood warms her hands. Jaws snap, nicking the air near her face. Claws scrape at her sides. But still she holds fast, arching her back and forcing all her strength upward. With a damp pop and a surge of blood, something gives. And the hound goes still a moment later.

  She rolls away and scoots to the edge of the tunnel and vomits. Then she hugs her legs to her chest and shivers her way through the next few minutes. Her whole body seems to pulse along with her overworked heart. She spits away the stringency lingering in her mouth. She hears a seething, like sand run through fingers, and when she reaches out, discovers the hound gone, only ashes in its place.

  Her relief doesn’t last. Slowly she turns her head to the left. More footsteps sound. The clomping of shoes, hurrying in this direction. Not a hound, but a man. She feels like she can’t endure any more, not one more thing. “I can’t even,” she says, but she can. She does. She stands, wobbling in place. She considers searching for the dagger but decides against it. “I can’t do that again. Don’t make me do that again.” Hide. That’s what she needs to do. Hide right now or she’s going to die. Hannah crumples her face as though to cry, but a scuffing sound startles her back to reality and she swallows down the feeling. She edges away, hurrying along the wall until her hand fumbles into something, the metal lip of one of the giant pipes. Inside it there is room enough to crawl, huddle in a ball.

  A long minute passes. The footsteps draw near. She can see the air outside barely brightening, like the breath before dawn. What must be a flashlight.

  Finally she sees the source—bobbing into view—the hand and then the body and then the face of a man. The man in the black torn clothes. The man with the cauliflower skin. He peers into the pipe. A crow roosts on his shoulders. It squawks a greeting. “There you are,” he says. “Let’s get you out of this terrible dark place.” He holds out a lumped hand. “And into the light.”

  She only hesitates a second. Then takes his hand and lets him help her scoot from the pipe. He smiles at her and she smiles back. “You’re safe,” he says, “for the moment.” And she feels it. She stands a little straighter than before. She has run and she has fought and she has hidden, every test survived. She is used to feeling weak, and that’s fading. Maybe strong isn’t the right word, but she feels different. Resilient, ready for the next affliction.

  “Sarin?” she says.

  The man shakes his head no. “But there’s you. You’re here.”

  She’s alive, he means, but more than that. She’s like Sarin. That means she has a role in the story still unscrolling. Not as a victim. No longer blind and maybe no longer a child. There’s something she can do. Fight back. Fight the dark. “What now?” she asks.

  He smiles in response. He likes the question. She does too. The agency of it. He puts a hand to her shoulder and leads her down the tunnel, and it isn’t long before she hears a distant car horn, and they follow the sound and soon feel a puff of wind and the air lightens. A ladder reaches up to a vent. “This way,” he says, as her fingers curl around the rungs and she begins to climb.

  Chapter 24

  IT’S AFTER MIDNIGHT when Lela and Hannah sit in the dining room of The Weary Traveler. Below the table, curled in a horseshoe shape, lies Hemingway. The coffee doesn’t taste good but Lela drinks it anyway. Hannah picks at a package of M&M’s. Outside, sirens cry, car alarms blare, voices shout. But they hardly notice. They might be done crying—for Cheryl, for now anyway—but their minds remain deaf with grief.

  Maybe fifteen minutes have gone by without either of them saying a word, when Lela speaks. “We’re going to have to take care of each other.”

  It’s a startling thing to admit, but it feels right. Lela often claimed that she never truly understood something until she wrote about it. Saying out loud that she will watch over Hannah feels similarly clarifying. It is true that Lela can barely get her clothes folded and her dishes put away. She might not take good care of herself, but she will take care of this girl. She will. She has to.

  She isn’t sure if the threat has passed, just as she isn’t sure if this place is safer than any other. Earlier, from his bed, Juniper told her to lock every door and window and to collect every tablet and computer and phone and smash it to the floor and crunch the plastic guts beneath her heel. “Don’t check your email. Don’t answer the phone. Don’t answer the door,” he said. “Paranoia is a requirement if you want to survive this.”

  Not just this, she thought, but the world they live in. Despite legal and medical advances that make this seem like the safest time in history, there are so many more ways to get hurt, so many of them online. She did as she was told. Almost. She couldn’t bring herself to destroy her own laptop. She held it over her head. But then her arms trembled. It belonged to The Oregonian and she hadn’t backed up her work in what felt like a century, and damaging the device was a little like sledgehammering her skull. It was her, an extension of her. That was the sad truth. So she let her arms drop. And slipped the computer back into the oversize purse that rests beside her now.

  At this Cheryl would have shaken her head. Typical Lela. Chronically unable to sever herself from work, to think of others first. Her sister is gone and yet still here, in Lela’s head and across the table, as Hannah looks like a tinier version of her. The same brown hair. The pursed mouth. The doofy homemade sweater and secondhand jeans. But there’s always been something different about the girl. She’s stronger and more poised than her mother ever could be. Even now, despite everything that has happened, Hannah does not come across as afraid or broken. Just the opposite. Possessed by a straight-backed, firm-jawed resolve.

  Hannah has always acted older than her years, but now she seems older even than Lela. The Mirage is scratched across one lens. Her hair is matted and tangled. Her clothes are smeared with dirt and blood. She’s a survivor. A fighter. Lela remembers what Juniper said—the girl was special—and what Sarin said—the gir
l was like her. She knows they’re right without fully understanding what they mean.

  “We need a plan,” Hannah says. “We can’t just sit here like a couple of morons, wait and see what happens.”

  That sounds like something Lela would say. Hannah’s right. She’s absolutely right. But this is one of the few times in her life Lela doesn’t know what to say or do. She folds a napkin in half and in half again. Wipes away some crumbs. Then reaches across the table. “Hold still a sec. You’ve got something.” Lela uses her fingers as a comb, picking some dead flies and dirt clumps from Hannah’s hair. “That’s better.” Then picks up her coffee but doesn’t drink from it. “You’re sure he’s dead?” Lela says. “The red priest? Tusk?”

  Hannah plucks two M&M’s from the package and crunches them down to a wet rainbow. “That wasn’t his name.”

  “Cheston.”

  “That wasn’t his name either,” Hannah says. “Lump said he called himself Alastor.”

  “Whoever he is, he’s dead? That means we stopped them? It’s over?”

  “I guess before Alastor died, he said it was too late. He said it had already begun.”

  “What’s it? What’s already begun?”

  Hannah hoists her shoulders in a shrug. “Something bad. Something they’ve been planning for a long time. Something called Zero Day.”

  “Zero Day? When is—” Her voice drops away when another siren wails past the shelter and a kaleidoscope of red-and-blue color momentarily lights up the room. Lela cocks her head and listens for a moment. Then slips her computer out of her purse and splits it open to check the police and fire scanner. A few weeks ago, she had someone set up her laptop so she could tune in live to the dispatch system. The screen slowly brightens to show her inbox. There is a tall pile of new messages, all from different senders, all with attachments.