by Jason Segel
I’ve read that feral hogs are a serious problem here in Texas, and I’ve come across some crazy-ass pictures online. But I always figured that those Internet Hogzillas were at least eighty percent Photoshop. I guess I didn’t expect the real animals to be so goddamn big. Judging by the size of the thing I saw, it’s only a matter of time before the hogs take over. And to think it probably started with a couple of little pink porkers that escaped from a farm. In the wild, they must have returned to their natural state. Tusks sprouted, snouts lengthened and fur grew. And there weren’t any humans around telling them when to breed. Soon all of Texas was filled with monsters like the one I just saw. The feral hogs are what the Clay Man called unintended consequences. They’re proof that Otherworld isn’t the only world that’s spun out of control.
* * *
—
Kat’s napping in the back while Busara sits in the passenger’s seat, quietly tinkering with two small machines. One’s a metal sphere the size of a softball. The other is a banged-up, partially flattened version of an otherwise identical device. I’m watching out of the corner of my eye when Busara hits a spot on the intact sphere. Suddenly there’s a guy wearing workout gear crouching on top of her lap. I yelp and the car swerves as my head jerks around in his direction.
“Yes!” Busara exclaims.
“What the hell?” I recognize the guy. It’s Marlow Holm, who’s probably dead by now. My nerves are already on edge. He’s not who I need to see.
Thankfully, there’s not much to hit on the side of the road. The guy in Busara’s lap vanishes and she’s cackling hysterically. I don’t think I’ve seen her bust a gut like this. It’s definitely the first time she’s laughed since we left New Jersey. Or maybe ever.
“Oh my God,” she gasps when she finally stops. She marvels at the device in her hands, turning it over and over. “Wasn’t that amazing? Its sensors must tell it how much empty air is surrounding it. The hologram contorts to fit the available space.”
I’d probably take a lot more pleasure in Busara’s holographic experiments if I didn’t know what happened to Marlow in real life. I told Busara and Kat where he is—the Company has him. I didn’t tell them what he looked like the last time I saw him. His entire body was a purple, swollen bruise.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Kat murmurs sleepily from the backseat. My eyes flick up to the rearview mirror. Kat’s sitting up and rubbing her eyes. When her hands fall from her face, my heart skips a beat.
“I just figured out how to turn the projector on,” Busara says.
“That’s awesome,” Kat says. “Now can you figure out how to hack an ATM so we can get some food? I’d kill for a pack of Funyuns.”
They both laugh. I’m not sure what they find so funny. We had to throw away all our credit cards. Busara’s smartphone is at the bottom of a trash can, too. Everything good about the twenty-first century leaves a trail, and when you’re on the run from a tech corporation, you can’t afford to be tracked. So we’re back in the Dark Ages, with fifty-four dollars in cash, which we’ll use to fill up our car with dead-dinosaur juice. Meanwhile, we’re smuggling some of the most advanced technology on earth. The projectors on Busara’s lap are the first to generate opaque, three-dimensional holograms. Tucked away in the glove compartment are a pair of visors and two flesh-colored disks. Slap a disk on the back of your skull and place a visor over your eyes, and you’ll be transported to Otherworld—a virtual world you can experience with all five of your senses. In Otherworld, anything you desire can be yours, but the disks are flawed. They’ll kill you if you make a wrong move. Dozens of people have already died while the Company tries to work out the bugs.
Still, flawed or not, humankind has never produced technology like these disks. The ones we have are probably worth billions. The Company won’t let a pair of them just disappear. If they catch the three of us, there’s no doubt we’ll be the next to die.
Marlow Holm’s hologram reappears on Busara’s lap, and this time I lose it.
“Can you stop screwing around with those projectors until we get to Elvis’s house?” I bark at her. I sound far more hostile than I’d like. The rage spills out so easily these days. I try to adopt a more civilized tone. “Please. We can’t be more than six hours away now.”
The image disappears. Fortunately, Busara isn’t easily cowed. Most people find my size and fluctuating levels of insanity intimidating. But Busara doesn’t seem to care. “You want me to stop?” she replies. “You think we have an extra six hours to spare? You think the Company is sitting around twiddling its thumbs and waiting for us to get settled in New Mexico?”
She’s right, and she knows it. I sit back and wait for her to finish. Unfortunately, she’s on a roll.
“We haven’t seen a news report in over twenty-four hours. We don’t have a clue what’s going on. Who knows how the Company explained Milo Yolkin’s death to the world? They could have pinned the murder on you, Simon. You could be the most famous person in the United States right now and we’d never even know it. So you want me to stop trying to figure out how to use this projector? ’Cause last I checked, it’s our life insurance policy.”
It’s true. The Company used one of the projectors to murder four kids back in New Jersey. If we can prove it, we’ll have something we can take to the authorities. But that’s never going to happen unless we know how the things actually work.
“Okay, okay,” I groan. “Do whatever you want. Just shut the hell up.”
“I’m sorry, what did you just—” Busara starts.
“Ignore him,” Kat advises from the backseat. “Simon hasn’t eaten more than a Snickers bar in the past twelve hours, and that giant body of his needs regular fuel or it gets hangry.”
“Hey—whose side are you on?” I ask the girl in the backseat.
“Hers,” Kat says bluntly. I check her out in the rearview mirror. She winks at me and I lose the will to fight. I’ve been in love with Kat since I was eight years old. I almost lost her once. Now that I have her back, I’m going to do my best not to screw things up.
“Besides, Simon,” Busara adds. Apparently there’s a last word that she needs to have. “You promised me we’d find my father. And for all we know, six hours could make all the difference.”
Once again, Busara is right.
I’ve been staring at the gas gauge for over an hour. The needle is now below empty and the red light on the dashboard has burned itself onto my retinas. For the last thirty minutes, the three of us have been sitting in silence, focusing all of our energy on keeping the car on the road.
Kat crawls up between the two front seats. “You sure there’s no way to reactivate this?” she asks Busara, tracing a finger across a blue OnStar button on the rearview mirror. “They could send help if we run out of gas.”
“If the Company didn’t get to us first,” I point out.
Kat huffs with annoyance. “Simon, this is a desert. If we end up stranded out here, the Company will be the least of our worries. We have no food and our water is almost gone.”
“Then maybe we should have stolen a few bottles at the last place like I suggested,” I say.
“And maybe you should have filled up the gas tank.”
“I thought we should keep some money on hand just in case!”
“This argument is pointless,” Busara says. “Even if we wanted to reactivate the OnStar, we couldn’t do it without a phone. And besides, there’s a gas station ahead of us.”
I squint in the bright sunlight that’s pouring in through the windshield. Sure enough, there’s a sign in the distance. I lean back against the headrest as my whole body relaxes. I feel Kat kiss my ear. “Sorry,” she whispers. “I think I’m getting hangry too.”
I pull into the station. “You pump, I’ll pay,” I tell Busara as I roll to a stop. She hands me our last two twenty-dollar bills.
; “I’ll come in too,” Kat says.
“No,” I tell her. “You stay. We need to make this fast.” She won’t approve of what I’m going to do. I’m not thrilled that I’ll soon be adding theft to my long list of crimes. But there’s no way in hell I’m going to let us starve to death before we reach New Mexico.
* * *
—
I step into the little store and realize it’s my lucky day. There’s no one behind the counter. I grab a plastic bag and rush down the first of three aisles, filling my bag with anything edible I can see. When I reach the final aisle, I discover I’ve had company the entire time.
“Get enough for the girls, too?” There’s an old man standing by the Cheetos. He’s gotta be at least eighty-five, but he’s still a dapper dresser. His sunglasses have amber lenses and thick tortoiseshell frames. They go well with his Brooklyn accent, which is like something out of a Scorsese film.
“Huh?” I reply.
An eyebrow rises above the frames of his sunglasses. “You know, I thought you’d be smarter,” he says. I guess I should be offended, but I’m too busy taking him in. There are hipsters who’d kill for the straw hat and guayabera he’s rocking. But I doubt they’d try, thanks to the giant gun the guy’s got propped against his shoulder. Thinking back to my Call of Duty days, I’d say it’s a WWII-era sniper’s rifle.
“Are you from the Company?” I ask. It seems odd that they’d hire a geriatric assassin with an antique firearm, but you never know.
“What?” One corner of his mouth rises in a sneer. “Fuck no. Irene Diamond sent me.” It’s so weird to hear a guy his age cursing that I almost miss the name.
“You mean my mother?” That is literally the very last thing I expected him to say.
“The fact that Irene Diamond is your mother makes very little difference to me. The fact that she’s the Kishka’s daughter—that’s what’s relevant here. You can thank him for saving your ass.”
My grandfather has been dead for forty years. A small-time Brooklyn gangster nicknamed the Kishka on account of his giant nose, he’s been at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal since the 1970s. But that doesn’t keep him from popping up every once in a while. I wasn’t aware that my ass needed saving at this particular juncture. I wonder what the Kishka knows that I don’t.
“Wait—how did you just…”
“Find you?” the old man shakes his head at my stupidity. “You got the nose, but you didn’t get the brains, did ya? You ever heard of OnStar? It’s a goddamn surveillance system. Your friend’s car has been spying on you the whole time you’ve been gone.”
I glance out the front window at the car. It seems perfectly harmless. “That’s not possible,” I argue pointlessly. “The service is disabled.”
“So the hell what? You really think that means they stopped tracking the car? God, you’re an idiot. You’ve been leaving a trail of digital bread crumbs behind you. Lucky for you, your mother has a few friends in the law enforcement community. They told her what direction you were heading, and she called me.”
“Why you?” I ask, hoping the question doesn’t sound too rude.
“I’m familiar with the terrain. Been down here for years. Nobody knows the border like I do.” I think he’s telling me he hasn’t retired. I wonder what he’s been bringing across the border. Drugs? People? Huaraches? Who’d have guessed that my prim, proper mother was buddies with an octogenarian smuggler? Maybe I owe Irene Diamond a bit more respect.
“So does that mean the Company knows where we are too?”
“Oh, there’s no doubt that they do,” says the old guy.
My heart picks up speed. “Then why haven’t they stopped us?”
“ ’Cause they wanted to find out where you’re going!” He’s clearly exasperated with my ignorance. “Why bother killing a few measly rats when there’s a chance to set the whole nest on fire?”
I feel a bit wobbly. I’ve been leading them straight to Elvis.
“What should we do?” I ask.
“Get your friends in here,” the man orders. “If there’s anything essential in the car, tell them to bring it.” I hesitate. “You got a better idea?” he snaps.
I don’t, so I lean out the door. Busara’s just putting the cap back on the gas tank. “Kat, Busara. Come here, please. Grab the disks and the projectors, too.”
“Simon?” Kat asks. There’s a worried look on her face. She knows something’s up. The please definitely tipped her off. I’ve never been known for my manners.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “But please hurry up.”
A few seconds later, the two of them barge through the door. Kat’s limping, with one of her arms slung around Busara’s shoulder.
“What’s going on?” Busara asks warily.
“Oh my God.” Kat’s eyes have landed on the old man’s gun.
“It’s okay,” I assure her. “Really.” I hope to hell I’m right.
The man offers the two girls the kind of smile you’d see on the Wikipedia entry for dirty old bastard. “So which one of these beauties is the girlfriend?” he asks.
I point to Kat and he nods appreciatively. “You may be a bit slow on the uptake, but you’re related to the Kishka, no doubt. You got the same taste in ladies.” He reaches out a hand. “Name’s Leonard D’Ignoto, sweetheart,” he says.
“Lenny D’Ignoto? You’re the Phantom?” I don’t know why I’m asking. I know it’s true. There was an entire chapter on him in Gangsters of Carroll Gardens. He was a sharpshooter for the Gallo crime family in Brooklyn, which explains the gun. They say he got his nickname by killing over three dozen made men. He shot them all from a distance, so no one ever saw his face. I gotta admit, I’m a bit dazzled. It’s a little like meeting a movie star.
“Wow,” Kat says. She remembers too.
“So you really did know my grandfather.”
“Yep,” he says. “He introduced me to my wife. She just happened to be his girlfriend at the time. Never got a chance to make it up to him.” Lenny digs into his pocket and retrieves a large wad of hundred-dollar bills. “This means me and the Kishka are even. Now if you’ll excuse me.” He walks over to the open window near the register and positions his gun on the ledge. With his sunglasses pushed up on his forehead, he puts his right eye up to the sight. I have no idea what he’s trying to hit. The gun seems to be aimed at the sky.
“What is he doing?” Busara whispers. “Who the hell is this guy? How do you guys know him?”
A shot rings out. Before Leonard has time to stand up, an object has fallen from the heavens. Shards of metal and plastic go flying when it hits the ground.
“Holy shit, it’s a drone!” Kat gasps, putting words to my fears.
“That’s how they’ve been watching you,” Lenny says. “There’s a van a few miles back, and I’m pretty sure they just stepped on the gas. So what do you say we swap keys?”
I’m not going to second-guess him at this point. I toss Lenny the keys to Busara’s car and he throws his over to me.
“I’m parked behind the station,” he tells me. “Hold back and let ’em chase me. Wait until we’re long gone before you take off. But whatever happens, don’t get on the road again.”
“I don’t understand. What are we supposed to do?” Busara asks.
“Drive through the desert,” Leonard tells us. “Nobody who lives around here uses the roads.”
After a quick tip of his hat to the ladies, Leonard jogs out to Busara’s car, tosses his gun onto the passenger seat and climbs in behind the wheel. Then he’s off. Less than a minute after Lenny peels out of the parking lot, a white van races by. It’s got to be going at least 130, but if I were betting, I’d put my money on the Phantom winning the race.
We find the vehicle he left parked behind the gas station covered in a beige tarp. I pull it off, revealing a Land Rov
er painted in desert camo, with a tent tied down to the roof. Busara cups her hands and peeks in through one of the windows. When she turns back to us, she’s practically bubbly.
“It’s got GPS. And satellite radio.” Lenny’s border business must be booming if he’s giving vehicles like this away.
“Is it safe to use stuff like that?” Kat asks me. “Won’t the Company be able to track us again?”
“Why would they try?” I reply. “They think they’re already chasing us.”
“But what if they run Lenny off the road?” she asks. “What if they find out we’re not in the car?”
“I’m going to go out on a limb and say your friend Lenny is the kind of guy who doesn’t leave home without a plan that covers all contingencies,” Busara says. She looks up at me. “How do you know him again?”
“Long story,” I say.
“Great. It’s gonna be a long drive,” Busara replies as she climbs into the passenger’s seat.
Once we’re on the move, Busara uses the GPS to chart a course through the desert; then she switches the satellite radio on and searches for a news channel. She finds one and we listen patiently to reports on the latest scandal to paralyze the government and the riots that have been taking place in Rust Belt cities across the American heartland. It’s all big news, of course, but none of it’s new. I would have thought the shocking death of Milo Yolkin, the brilliant CEO of the Company, the world’s most powerful corporation, would have been the top story of the day. But it isn’t until the daily business report that we first hear Milo’s name.
The Company announced today that CEO Milo Yolkin will be taking an unforeseen leave of absence from the business he founded over a decade ago. With Yolkin gone, the wide release of his latest project will be shelved indefinitely. A major leap forward in virtual reality, Otherworld was on its way to becoming the most highly anticipated video game of the last forty years. Now it seems that only a small group of people will be able to claim that they’ve played it.
