Weavers

by Aric Davis

  “We’re going to figure this out, Cynth,” said Mom. “We’re going to figure it out, and we’re going to show them all. Just wait.”

  Cynthia nodded and said, “OK.” It was all she had, but it was enough for Mom.

  Cynthia could see her nodding back to her in the front seat, and she wondered if this was how it had been for poor Jimmy Keebler last spring when he and his mom disappeared to Lake Tahoe.

  CHAPTER 3

  Darryl Livingston woke covered in cold sweat. He couldn’t remember where he was, and then his surroundings filled him in. He was in the apartment he shared with Terry, the crappy one in Austin, and he was sleeping off a pretty bad day drunk. I’m in Terry’s fucking bed to boot. What the hell?

  Darryl yawned, stood from the bed, then sighed into a balled-up fist. Terry kept the walls of their shitty little apartment covered in porno pictures, and that wallpaper alone should have been enough to immediately hammer home his location. I didn’t even have that much to drink, thought Darryl, but he knew damn well that wasn’t true.

  Darryl left the bedroom, took a piss in the yellow bowl in the bathroom, and then wandered into Terry’s unfortunate living room. The wallpaper here could be described as tame compared to the bedroom—just T & A, no penetration—but it was still unlikely to impress anyone with ten cents’ worth of brains. Darryl sat down heavily on the couch, then flicked the TV on with the remote from the coffee table. He gave a look to Terry, but if his friend had noticed him, he was keeping it a secret. He doesn’t notice shit. Terry had eyes for a keyboard, mouse, and screen but managed to avoid just about everything else.

  Terry sat just a few feet away, at the dining room table. His ears were covered in a pair of massive headphones, his hands were draped over a stained keyboard and mouse, and his monitor was filled with dancing numbers. Darryl knew what Terry was listening to—metal on his Walkman, always metal—but he didn’t even want to ask about the numbers. Terry liked his porno everywhere and his women stuffed like turkeys, but his computer shit was not to be trifled with. Terry was way too good at that for messing around, and he was usually good for a place to stay if Darryl was too drunk to walk.

  Darryl contented himself with the TV as Terry let his fingers tap keys and click buttons, but the sound of the work was just background noise. Darryl managed to sit in the apartment for all of one hour before getting a beer from the fridge, drinking it in a few savage pulls that had once really impressed girls behind the Austin Drive-In, and then leaving the can on the counter and grabbing another one. Darryl’s days of impressing girls with his beer-slamming abilities were long gone. In fact, his time spent attempting to impress girls or anyone else was long gone. Lately he’d come to consider effort itself overrated when things could be had so easily.

  After three more beers and another hour of TV, Terry finally peeled the headphones off and turned to Darryl. “I knew you were up,” he said, and Darryl just nodded in response. “I could hear you the whole time. I was just waiting for you to say something.”

  Darryl nodded again, saluted Terry with his beer, and then finished it in a single gulp.

  “You looked busy, so I let you be busy,” said Darryl. It was only partly true. The sooner Terry realized he was up, the sooner they would have to talk about work, and Darryl wasn’t in the mood. Work was how the bender had started and why he was drinking at such an unreasonable pace, but the subject was unavoidable at this point. He owed Terry, and they both knew it.

  “I was only busy because I was waiting for you to come to your senses,” said Terry, and Darryl nodded. “And don’t try and fucking read me, Darryl. I’m not in the mood, and you already know what I’m going to say.”

  “You want money,” said Darryl.

  He didn’t need to go rooting around in Terry’s topknot to know what his friend was thinking. They both had green on their minds. There was just no good way to score right now. Of course, that’s Terry’s job, thought Darryl, and they both knew that, too. While he slumbered off a drunk in the smut chamber, Terry was supposed to be hard at work on something. That was the deal, even if it was an unspoken one.

  “You need money just like I do,” said Terry. “You’d rather make this my fault, though, than try to work out a solution.”

  That made Darryl raise an eyebrow and cock his head. Terry couldn’t be in his head, not like that. Not like what I can do.

  “It’s true,” said Darryl. “I do sort of hold you responsible. You’re the one who wanted to talk last night, and I figured you’d have developed a solution to our little problem. Instead, you’re on your stupid computer with your fucking smut, and I’m sitting here dealing with the back end of a serious bender.” Darryl hoisted his beer, found it empty, and stood to walk to the fridge. “And I’m about to throw another drunk on while I’m waiting—see if you like that. I can hear that kid crying a couple of doors down again, and I can’t fucking stand it.”

  “I’m working on a solution,” said Terry, ignoring the comments about drinking, porn, and the kid down the hall.

  Let him change the subject, thought Darryl. They both knew, thanks to Darryl, that the kid would be dead soon if his dad couldn’t lay off the pipe and the beatings.

  Darryl took a beer from the fridge and walked back to the living room before opening it. The tab hissed foam, and Darryl smiled as he drank.

  “I like solutions,” said Darryl. “Tell me more.”

  “It’s this web shit,” said Terry. “I know I’ve explained it before, but in a nutshell it makes it so that I can talk to someone far away. Sort of like a telephone, but all anonymous, and almost always with strangers. Hell, for all I know it’s all people who live here in the building—it’s that out-there. You can talk to anyone, and it’s only going to get bigger. Just wait until the new millennium rolls around.”

  “Doesn’t do me any good,” said Darryl. “I need to see them in person. I need to be able to be in range. We’ve been over this. We’ve tried the phone, lots of different remote stuff. It just doesn’t work.”

  Darryl drank beer and turned to look reproachfully at his partner, but Terry just smiled.

  “I know it’s hard to believe, but just trust me. Take a few hours to get acquainted with it, and then tell me what you think.”

  “I’ll look,” said Darryl, though he knew it was pointless. He’d look at Terry’s bullshit solution, and then he’d walk away like he always did. Then a few petty jobs to get us by and that will be that, just like always. Until Terry gets another strike-it-rich plan. Darryl was tired of it.

  “One other thing,” said Terry as he stood, a grin plastered across his face. “You’ll know better than I do, but I’m pretty sure almost everyone in these virtual rooms is a kid.”

  Darryl stood, his beer forgotten, and crossed the room. “Show me,” said Darryl, and Terry grinned like a child on Christmas morning.

  All kids, Darryl thought. Holy shit.

  CHAPTER 4

  Jessica Hockstetter woke with one thought in her mind: Frank. She sat up slowly, letting the ugly memory of their session two days prior continue to burn off heat in her subconscious, and then gave the off button on the alarm a practiced snap, minutes before it was due to go off.

  Yesterday had been hell, today was going to be hell all over again, and tomorrow? It was a safe bet tomorrow would be a shitty day, too. Jessica sighed as she rolled off the bed. She walked to the bathroom and stripped her clothes off into the hamper before turning the shower on and then sitting on the toilet as the water warmed up. It hadn’t always been like this—crappy days and unsolvable problems—but now that felt like all it was ever going to be. A living nightmare.

  Jessica stood from the toilet, flushed, and then, against her better judgment, gave herself a look in the mirror. Aside from the lack of makeup, Jessica felt good. Yes, she was a year shy of forty-nine years old, but she ran every day, watched what she ate, had never smoked,
and rarely drank—all with a higher calling in mind, but for what? Just like her father, she had given her life to the Telekinetic Research Center—the TRC—and she had nothing to show for it.

  Jessica was what people in her field called a reverse-mute, meaning she was unaffected by telekinetics—TKs for short. Reverse-mutes were quite rare, possibly even rarer than full-grown TKs. A reverse-mute was far less likely to be discovered, to be sure, and finding a TK was like finding a specific pebble in the ocean. Being a reverse-mute had helped her career almost as much as being the only child of Jason Hockstetter, who had been a hero in World War II and won the greatest honors the OSS was able to bestow on a man at the time.

  Of course, even more importantly, Jason Hockstetter had been involved in some of the most dangerous battles of the war with a TK at his side. That the very same TK who had helped Jason in combat was the one giving Jessica so much grief was an irony that was not lost on her, but as she turned the shower off, she felt quite sure Frank delighted in it.

  Frank Rosenbauer was an anomaly even by the standards of most TKs. He had abilities that made theirs seem like parlor tricks. Lately, however, the combination of a government that always wanted more, the lack of TKs in the system, and Frank’s surliness had been making for less than happy times. It’s not his fault that he’s miserable, Jessica reasoned to herself as she toweled off, and at least part of that was true. Frank had been held in the TRC since the late 1940s, but after the escape attempt he’d been involved in back in the early 1980s, he’d been locked down as tightly as was humanly possible. Not that everything about Frank was bad—in fact, his bizarre skill set had forced precautions on them that might have taken decades to put together without the necessity of keeping Frank in a cage.

  Jessica dressed quickly in an outfit comfortable enough for a twelve-hour shift but also presentable enough if someone from Washington were to drop by. It was bad enough living with the fear of their funding being pulled by some suit who didn’t get the importance of their work, but it would be far worse for the man to do so because he didn’t feel that her dress befitted her supposed station.

  So many fucking games. Her job was supposed to be about research, but lately it was about making sure everyone was happy, and she knew that Howard Thompson, the director of the TRC, was as miserable over it as she was. They were in grave danger of losing everything, of being mothballed permanently, unless they could find a new way to wow Washington. Sure, they had Frank, and then another low-powered TK at the TRC, but neither Frank nor Gus was up for the sort of heavy lifting that was being hinted at. Between his rebelliousness and his age, Frank couldn’t be allowed near anything that really mattered, and there wasn’t a chance in hell he’d be allowed within a hundred miles of the president.

  Dressed now, Jessica hopped downstairs and walked to the kitchen. She’d prepped the coffeemaker the night before and hit the button to make the magic happen, before crossing the room and grabbing a to-go mug from the cupboard and walking back to watch the machine work.

  I could quit, thought Jessica, but the idea was unrealistic. People didn’t quit the TRC; they retired. It was the sort of government work where you did not pass go, did not collect two hundred dollars if you left. There was no one in the current or former administrations on any level who would acknowledge the TRC as being anything more than an unfunded joke north of Hartford, and there were no credentials to be had from working there. Sure, maybe she could turn her experience into a career spent ghost hunting or looking for cryptids in the Pacific Northwest, but neither of those fit the bill. As she poured the steaming coffee, Jessica reminded herself that she’d known all of this going in and she’d promised herself that it wouldn’t matter.

  “Fuck,” said Jessica quietly as she crossed the kitchen to get some cream from the fridge. She stirred it in with the spoon she’d left on the counter the day before. When she was young and following in Daddy’s footsteps, the TRC had been a dream come true. Now it was a place where dreams came to die, where old TKs paced their rooms, like rats in a trap.

  Jessica let the thought fade, like so many others she’d had in the eighteen months since the last of their leads on new blood had dried up, and then topped the coffee with its lid and grabbed her keys. She might not want to be there, but like it or not, the TRC was all she had.

  The TRC’s building looked nothing like a facility designed for the planning of the occasional multimillion-dollar black-ops operation. It looked more like a middle school that desperately needed refurbishment, but in this case looks were intentionally deceiving. The building had been designed to appear like the sort of underfunded crackpot enterprise it had been before the Second World War and the success of Jason Hockstetter. Despite its humble digs, the TRC was considered one of the crown jewels in US preparedness programs. Or at least it had been.

  Jessica left her car and crossed the cracked pavement of the parking lot, then opened the unsecured and unguarded front door and strolled inside. The interior of the main floor of the TRC mirrored the outside of the building. The walls were painted in the sort of colors that were all the rage for science classrooms in the 1970s, shades of yellow and green that would have been combined into a camouflage pattern called “Vomit.” Tess, the receptionist working the door to the public area of the TRC, gave her a wave as she walked through, and Jessica said, “No Howard yet?”

  “Nope, not yet,” said Tess, and Jessica frowned. It wasn’t like Howard to arrive at the office after her. Had he finally had enough? It was possible. He’d always struck her as being the sort of man who would have won his battles as a boy by taking his ball home rather than playing a game in which he couldn’t succeed.

  Jessica passed through the halls of the TRC, ignoring rooms that hadn’t been used for anything in years, before entering the Hall of Wonders. The name was a joke—the hall was far from great, but it was the largest room on the main floor of the building, and it housed the collection of dioramas that the founder of the place had put together back when the research done here consisted more of shoddy guesswork than science. The dioramas showed great TK moments in history, almost all of them culled from the Bible and urban legend. The one closest to the door showed Jesus walking across a blue plastic body of water, his hands aloft to the sky. Just a few feet away was a glass box filled with what was supposed to be Daniel in the lions’ den. The lions were falling apart, and Daniel’s paint was fading terribly, but it was still clear from his exaggerated pose that he was meant to be controlling the beasts with his mind.

  There were several other religious scenes, but Jessica’s favorite was located next to a plain-looking door across the hall. Inside the case were a pair of ships nearly identical in build and size. The first was the doomed RMS Titanic, the famously unsinkable ship that had proven exactly the opposite, and the other was the fictional ship the Titan. The Titan was an anomaly and the closest thing to actual TK activity Jessica could see in the room. The story of the Titan was written by Morgan Robertson in 1898 and was published as Futility. In the book, published fourteen years before its fictitious ship’s real-life sister was to sink, the Titan—also “unsinkable”—hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and eventually went down with few survivors, as there were not enough lifeboats.

  Jessica had no opinion on whether or not Robertson was actually a TK—after all, no TK she had ever met could see into the future—but it seemed to her the only logical solution to the mystery. Robertson had either gotten very lucky or channeled into something very special.

  Taking her eyes from the diorama, Jessica placed her thumb on a biometric scanner that was next to the boring-looking door. A few seconds later the door opened with a hiss, and Jessica walked through into her least favorite part of the journey, a sally port known internally as the Killing Hall.

  The Killing Hall would have been as boring as the door leading to it if she hadn’t helped design and test it. The walls and ceiling were all stainless steel, and
the men who controlled the defenses and access through the port were kept off-site at an address known only to Howard. TKs had limited range—a thing that was both good and bad—and by keeping off-site the men in control of who entered and exited, it was impossible for a TK to influence them.

  The hall itself was only necessary because of an escape in the 1980s. Frank had put together the plan himself and over time had earned the faith of two compatriots who desired to escape as badly as he did. Despite the planning and the timing of the endeavor, Frank himself never made it outside, Joseph Yee was shot dead, and Katarina Kaufman had never been seen again. Thanks to this escape, the hallway was as deadly as a medieval torture device, and far more advanced. With the push of a button, the man in control of the space could fill it with incapacitating or, if need be, deadly gas, or he could flood it with water, or trigger one of many other less- or fully lethal methods of preventing an escape. So far, none of the techniques had needed to be employed, but, as someone who had been on staff during the 1983 breakout, Jessica was all too aware of how necessary these precautions were.

  At the end of the sally port, Jessica leaned in to a retinal-scanning device and waited as the computer verified that she was in fact allowed access to the real TRC. Once in, Jessica walked through a small antechamber, hopped on an elevator, hit the button for the fourth floor, and then waited as it dropped. The elevator dinged as it arrived at the fourth, and Jessica stepped through the doors as they slid open. She waved at Pam, the receptionist on this main level of the TRC, and then passed a man wearing one of the Tesla Helmets that kept safe the workers here who were not lucky enough to be reverse-mutes.