Weavers

by Aric Davis

  “I didn’t even know what I was doing,” admitted Cynthia. “It was just like at the store, but worse, and I didn’t know what to do there either.”

  Mrs. Martin smiled at Cynthia, then made a cigarette appear in her hands and lit it. “You learned quickly,” she said. “I gave you a little push, but you already knew what to do. I can’t even imagine how many things you’ve accidentally influenced around your house without even knowing it.”

  “I never even knew about this stuff until a few days ago,” said Cynthia. “There’s no way I was doing anything like that before then.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Mrs. Martin. “I was blind when I was in my camp, remember? Yet everyone loved little Ora Rabban, because I was in their heads without even knowing that I was doing anything at all. God and the world work in mysterious ways, my dear. Do you remember what I was telling you about the Moirai?” Cynthia nodded, and Mrs. Martin smiled. “You’re a good listener.” Mrs. Martin took a long drag from her cigarette and said, “Do you know what a fable is?”

  “I think so,” said Cynthia. “Like an old story?”

  “Sort of,” said Mrs. Martin. “There are certainly a lot of old fables, and many of them have stories of even older origin, but the idea of a lot of fables was that they were meant to teach a lesson. I think the lesson of the fable of Moirai was one to help us understand that they are real. Not real in the way that the stories portray—three lonely sisters on a mountaintop measuring the life-strings of every man, woman, and child—but real in another way. I think the Moirai were people just like you and me, people with powers that most do not possess and who deal with these life-strings that fables tell of. Do you understand what any of this has to do with you?”

  Cynthia shook her head.

  “I am telling you this because you have been given a gift, an ancient gift,” said Mrs. Martin. “What you choose to do with it is up to you, but that is a decision for much later in life. Now, you are going to do what you are on this earth to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “To help me keep the North Harbor Apartments safe, my dear,” said Mrs. Martin. “It was no coincidence that you fell in my lap the way that you did. I will not leave you untrained. Today was just the first of the real lessons, but there will be many more. Keeping North Harbor balanced can be a full-time job.”

  “Are we going to help anyone else today?”

  “No, dear,” said Mrs. Martin. “You brought your crayons, so we’ll go over the colors using them, and later I’ll make us some sandwiches.”

  Cynthia nodded, her stomach rumbling at the mention of food.

  “I have questions,” said Cynthia, “lots of them. Like, why did we go so high above the apartments? Why were some of them marked? Have you helped Patrick before?”

  “All in good time, Cynthia,” said Mrs. Martin. “I’ll get some paper, and you can get your crayons. The coloring first, and if we have time before your mother comes back, maybe we can get to some of the other questions.”

  Cynthia nodded, her curiosity nowhere near sated, but her childlike need to please overriding her burning desire for answers. She took her crayons from the bag by the door and walked back to the table. She could hear Mrs. Martin singing in the kitchen, and she smiled as she sat down and set the crayons before her. Mrs. Martin was her friend, and there had to be a reason that she couldn’t tell her everything all at once, but what Cynthia most wanted was to be there the next time her parents fought.

  They won’t argue for long.

  CHAPTER 32

  “Oh fuck,” said Pat, and around him was the noise of headphones hitting tables and seats being left. Pat was back at work now after a night busy at home exploring leads on the possibility of a TK using a modem. He knew he’d need a federal warrant to take it any further and that he couldn’t exactly ask Jessica or Brinn for help with one. This new development squashed that frustration in an instant.

  “Brinn,” said Pat, “get on the phone with the FBI. We need all information pertaining to the gas station killings outside of Des Moines from last night. Geoff, call Jessica down here and tell her we need her to get on the horn with whoever suppresses leaks about this stuff and tell them to get to work.”

  Brinn being the lead no longer mattered. Both she and Geoff were on their headsets in an instant and then walking to opposite sides of the room so that they wouldn’t be too loud for one another.

  “Tell me what I can do,” said Rick as he walked to Pat, and Pat shook his head.

  “Nothing. We’re landlocked until we can confirm via video that it was even them. Suppression matters more than apprehension right now.”

  “Bullshit. Jessica never even mentioned suppression, she said that—”

  “They killed a cop, Rick. A state cop with a family is dead, and that’s not even mentioning the woman who was raped and murdered.” Pat stopped, took a deep breath, then drank deeply from the twenty-ounce of Mountain Dew on his desk, wishing as he did so that the plastic bottle were full of something much stronger.

  “We need it suppressed,” he went on, “because every cop and his mother is going to want to see that tape, and every news outlet is going to want to break it. I don’t know how they suppress something like this, but I know the people we’re working for don’t fuck around. Remember our NDAs? They’ll come up with something—or they’d better. Remember that video from Mexico? Now picture a cop being thrown to the ground by a harder version of what those assholes did to that girl at the ticket counter and then shooting him in the fucking heart.”

  “Jesus,” said Rick. “Some pretty fucked-up questions would be asked. We’d probably be out of a job, and this is the only time I’ve ever been paid to do something I liked that was actually legal.”

  Pat wasn’t sure how to respond to that, and then Jessica burst into the room.

  “Are you sure?” she shouted. A cellular phone was pressed against her head, but she was shouting at Pat. “I mean absolutely, positively sure?”

  “Yes. I mean, not until I see the video, but yes,” Pat said. “I’m doing the best I can, Jessica. I just can’t say with absolute certainty, and—”

  “Yes, get the tape and fix things over there,” said Jessica into the phone, turning away from Pat and making the younger man throw his hands to the sky in exasperation. “No, I don’t know how. You figure it out.” Jessica paused from her phone conversation as Brinn crossed the room to her.

  “FBI will have a hard copy of the video to us by morning,” said Brinn, “but we can set up for a videoconference with them to watch it in fifteen if you want.”

  Jessica gave her a thumbs-up, then walked out of the computer lab with the phone pressed to her ear. Brinn bolted from the room to get the videoconference set up.

  From the hallway the remaining researchers could hear Jessica screaming expletives into the phone, and then there was silence.

  “Yes, thank you,” said Jessica from what felt like a world away, and then she was back in the room, tucking the cell phone into its place on her belt and grinning from ear to ear now.

  “So this was your find, Pat?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good boy,” said Jessica, rubbing the top of his head as if he were a prized dog. “Now, should we go watch a video? If we hurry, we might get there in time so I can introduce you to what should be some very tired Fibbies.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Pat with a smile, and then Jessica waved them from the room.

  The video was done, the FBI office in Des Moines had been thanked for their help, but no one was talking, not even Jessica or Brinn. The five of them just sat in silence, as though they were waiting for something else to happen, some sign that things were going to be OK. It wasn’t coming.

  Finally, Jessica stood, clapped her hands together, and said, “Pat, that’s some great work, and I really appreciate how you handled the situa
tion after discovery.”

  “It was just dumb luck,” said Pat. “I’ve been following a watchdog newsgroup that updates police scanner information as it comes in. I don’t watch it all the time, though, so I could have missed it.” He shrugged. “It just worked out, I guess.”

  “Don’t be so quick to discount yourself,” said Jessica, and Pat saw the rest of the group nodding in agreement. He blushed, the red flush vivid against his pale skin. “You saw it. That’s all that matters.” Jessica clapped her hands together, a sign that praising the team was done, then said, “Now that we know they’re still out there in the wild, what are we going to need to do to get closer?”

  “Keep doing what we’re doing,” said Brinn. “Watch everything, but move our search east. We know they were headed that way.”

  “We have no way of knowing they’re headed east,” said Geoff. “I mean, other than them driving off that way in the video, and that’s no proof. They turn north a block away, we have nothing.”

  “So what do you suggest?” Jessica asked, and Geoff shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Wish I did, but I have no idea how we could be possibly know which way they’re heading. Not to mention they killed a cop, so there are going to be police everywhere. This could get really bad.”

  “It will get really bad,” said Jessica, her voice hard and flat. “What we need to do is figure out how to track them.”

  There was silence, no one offering anything, and then Pat slowly raised his hand as if he were still in primary school. All eyes turned to him and he spoke.

  “What if they use the web?”

  “How do you mean?” Jessica asked.

  “Well, it’s possible that one or both of them use the Internet as much as we do. Given the sexual violence that went on in Mexico and again at the gas station, I think it’s a lock that at least one of them is an extreme porn junkie. And if they are, they’ll be like gamers and every other heavy net user. They’ll end up going to the same set of sites every time. Right?”

  The rest of the research nerds nodded and voiced their assent. All of them visited the same places on a daily basis. The sites they’d added since launching the hunt for Darryl and Terry marked the only significant changes in their routines in recent memory.

  “So what does that mean for us?” Jessica asked, though she had an inkling. For one of the first times in her career, she was genuinely without any answers for the problem before her, and she had to admit this had some promise. But she was way out of her depth. Wrangling TKs or brokering deals with three-letter agencies? No problem. But the Internet was a whole new jungle, as she was rapidly learning. “Is it likely that one of you can just randomly come across one of them on one of those sites?”

  “Not possible,” said Brinn. “Maybe five or six years ago, but right now being online is like Indian country back in the Wild West. Even narrowed down to extreme porn sites, there’s just too much turf.”

  “Well,” said Pat, “except that right now these guys are in rural Iowa, theoretically heading east, right? Well, this isn’t exactly New York City out there. It should be pretty sparse as far as net users go. All we need to do is find an IP address that is consistently visiting the sort of site that these two might like.” Pat paused. “Assuming they continue on their path east, what is the next big city that they’re going to be near?”

  “Cedar Rapids and then Chicago,” said Rick.

  “All right, so we have until Cedar Rapids to find them, and then when they leave, we have until Chicago. After that they could head anywhere.”

  “What if they stay in one of the big cities?” Jessica asked. “What if they stay there as a way of hiding this IP address thingy from us?”

  “Not going to happen,” said Brinn. “First off, they don’t know that we’re going to try and track their IP address. Remember what I was saying about the Wild West? This would be like going to space back when guys were still jousting. It’s highly unlikely these guys are web experts. It’s just a tool to them. Secondly, they’re going to try and avoid big cities as much as possible because that’s where they’re most likely to be spotted.”

  “All right,” said Jessica. “Just so I can wrap my head around this, let me go over a few things. They’re going to need to keep moving east, they’re going to need to use the web frequently, and we’re going to need to be lucky to find them. Does that about cover it?”

  “Yes,” said Brinn, and Jessica grimaced as the rest of them nodded in agreement.

  Pat bobbled his head like the rest of them, but he had a secret, something he’d left out. He still wanted to find out if there was a connection between those deaths that didn’t make sense—the day care shooters in Santa Cruz, and poor Vinnie at the end of his rope. It would have been hard to find out what, if any, websites those kids were visiting, but if there was any common ground between them, he would have a leg up. This could have been just as hard as finding the two runaway TKs, but thanks to the federal warrants they had access to, checking out what the boys were up to online before they died would be a snap. Not to mention, I’ll have been right all along about them being able to do things to people over a modem.

  Pat had never played sports, had been bullied most of his life, so had never realized he had a competitive streak that was a mile wide. Now it was coming to life, and in the search for Darryl and Terry, he was playing in his first big game.

  CHAPTER 33

  The first tornado touched down an hour so east of Des Moines, less than fifty miles from where Darryl and Terry were sleeping, with subsequent ones getting closer by the second. Darryl wanted to wait as long as possible to leave, and Terry just wanted to hide in the room, but when the air raid siren could be heard over the whipping wind, Darryl decided that it was time to be done with Iowa. He gave Terry a nudge with his foot at the same time that he did with his mind, and minutes later the pair of them walked to the door.

  Outside, they could hear the wind rattling everything that wasn’t nailed down. When Terry turned the doorknob, the door slammed into him as though someone enormous had heaved his shoulder into it from the other side.

  The truck was bouncing on its suspension in its parking spot just outside the door as the wind buffeted it up and down, and when Darryl started running to it without thinking, as he cleared the building’s edge the wind threw him into the air and dropped him onto the hood of the truck. Darryl could feel the wind grabbing him like it full intended to toss him again, and then heavy hands were yanking his shirt and pulling him to the ground. Darryl rolled over to see Terry screaming something into his face, and though it was impossible to hear the words, Darryl knew what he was saying: if they were really going to do this, it was time to leave.

  Darryl stood, and the two of them fought with the door of the truck, before both piling into the passenger side. Darryl sneezed a mixture of blood and dirt, spattering the windshield, and then stuck the key in the ignition and gave it a twist.

  “Where are we going?” Terry asked as Darryl threw the truck into reverse and stomped the gas pedal.

  “East,” said Darryl. He had no destination in mind, but their first inclination when leaving Des Moines had been to go east, and he liked the idea of sticking with that.

  “How do we know the storm isn’t worse there?”

  “We don’t,” said Darryl. “Besides, as best I can tell, the storm has been with us ever since we got to Mexico.”

  Terry grunted in agreement as Darryl pulled onto the road and gunned the gas. The storm was all around them now, pulling and twisting the truck.

  After maybe half a dozen blocks, Terry pointed out the passenger window and screamed, “Dude! Over there!”

  Darryl knew what he’d see. He didn’t want to look, but he did anyway. Sure enough, there was a black funnel cloud tearing its way north through a field. Cows dotted the ground, and the wind was throwing them about like a
spoiled child that had grown tired of “Old MacDonald.” Darryl shuddered as he turned his attention back to the road, knowing nothing could be done to avoid something like that.

  “We’re just going to get some miles under us, and we’re going to leave this fucking state in the dust,” said Darryl. “We’ll hit Chicago or somewhere over east, somewhere big and quiet. We’ll lie low for a while, and then we’ll leave the country.”

  Terry nodded, his eyes wide. The purple that had made up the majority of Terry’s topknot had been used up on that woman at the gas station, and that wasn’t a bad thing.

  “I think when we get to wherever it is we’re going, I might get some help,” said Terry.

  Darryl grunted his assent, but thought, You don’t need a doctor, Terry. You need a friend who doesn’t fill your head with poison until it all but bursts.

  “We’ll figure it out, Terry,” said Darryl, feeling like the world’s biggest piece of shit. Not only did Darryl have no intention of helping Terry figure out his problem, he had every intention of continuing to use him as a walking wastebin. Only for a little bit longer. Only until we get somewhere we can hole up, thought Darryl, but he didn’t give himself the luxury of believing the lie.

  “I’m serious, Darryl,” said Terry. “I’m going to figure this out, even if that means turning myself in.”

  Darryl just nodded, but his mind whirled in a panic. Terry would break under questioning in an instant. The poor guy had been scrambled for years, and without Darryl to keep his shit together, he’d be about as tough as wet Kleenex.

  The sky was dark over the deserted road before them as the storm raged, but the scenery was nowhere near as bleak as Darryl felt in the cab of the truck. Then the wind somehow picked up even more, rocking the truck briefly up onto two wheels, and his knuckles went white on the steering wheel. Something flew across the road, an object both big and black, and when Terry began to scream, Darryl gave him a push. It was more of a twist than a bend, and as Terry began to snore, the only sounds were the wind and his sleep.