Seeds of Foreverland: A Science Fiction Thriller

by Tony Bertauski

  Harold’s jaw clenched and unclenched. Most teachers or school administrators would’ve thrown Harold out of the office with detention or called his parents. Not Mr. Tanner. He was a ninja counsellor.

  “Am I getting warm, Harold?”

  “He’s a waste.”

  “John?”

  “He’s an idiot taking up space, breathing our air and ruining lives. And he’ll have stupid kids just like him that will breathe our air, and they’ll have kids and they’ll have kids and they’ll all live pointless lives.”

  “So why should he live, is that what you’re saying?”

  “You mean kill him?” Harold aimed his phone like it was recording. “Did you say I should kill him, Mr. Tanner?”

  Mr. Tanner took the phone and laid it on the desk. He scratched his beard, speckles of premature gray whiskers peppered in a thicket of black.

  “I like you,” he said with his wire-framed counsellor-glasses twirling between his fingers. “You’re a chubby kid that’s too smart for his own good. And all this is a cry for attention, and yeah, that’s straight from a psychology 101 textbook, but it’s the truth. I don’t know what’s cooking at home, but I know your parents have a lot on their plate, probably not giving you a whole lot of attention.”

  Harold fidgeted, the creaky chair giving away his agitation. His family history wasn’t exactly a secret. But Mr. Tanner and the rest of the world didn’t know half of it. Neither do I.

  “You’re too smart to go toe to toe with John. He’d stomp you like one of your pet flies, Harold.”

  He nodded at Harold’s arm still throbbing with the promise of a gnarly bruise. Harold tried not to rub it, but the attention was making it hurt worse.

  “Here’s what worries me,” Mr. Tanner said. “All this bully stuff in middle school is small fry compared to what adults do. You get older and take all those smarts with you and get some real vengeance. Next time it won’t be fly guts in someone’s drink.”

  “You saying I’ll be a serial killer?” Harold laughed. “For a second, I thought you were kind of pulling some slick counsellor move on me. A serial killer, really? Okay.”

  “You watch movies?”

  “No.”

  “Sure you do. You ever see the dystopian ones, the ones where people do unthinkably dark things?”

  “Those are movies, Mr. Tanner.”

  “Sometimes, Harold, a good seed grows into a weed. A weed that smothers all the plants around it, poisons the soil with thickets of thorns and strangles the world. Is that you, Harold?”

  “Are you talking about pot?”

  Mr. Tanner didn’t smile, but he didn’t throw Harold out, either. Didn’t even sigh. Just leaned back in an office full of creaky chairs and bookcases of old books and studied Harold like an enigma.

  Harold was beginning to feel the first pinch of claustrophobia.

  “What do you want, Harold?”

  “I’m twelve, Mr. Tanner. What do you think?”

  “I can see it in your eyes. There’s more to you than this petty stuff. All these jokes are just a diversion. The fly dissections weren’t torture. It was curiosity, wasn’t it?”

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “Are you?”

  Harold exaggerated confusion. “Is that like a Zen koan?”

  This broke Mr. Tanner’s serious front with a burst of laughter. Here he was dealing with a precocious sixth grader that just threw out the term koan—a Buddhist term for an unanswerable question—like they were in some dharma battle.

  Harold had only heard the word in social studies the other day when they were studying religion. If anything, the joke broke the unperturbable Mr. Tanner to the point that tears welled up from laughter.

  Precocious indeed.

  “Can I go?” Harold asked. “I’m late for class.”

  “How’s your parents, Harold?”

  “Is this the counselling part?”

  “Just a question.”

  “They’re great. We’re going fishing after school and having a picnic. I’d invite you, but my mom doesn’t like to mix business with pleasure, so…”

  “They still at home?” He had resumed the counsellor pose with fingers scratching chin.

  There was no escape.

  “As far as I know.”

  “Your mom all right?”

  “Super.”

  “She was diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s. Was that it?”

  “It was that or Ebola. I can’t remember.”

  “Those other treatments? How’d they go?”

  Harold began to wilt. There wasn’t a single light bulb in the office, but he could hear his insides spattering like frying bacon.

  The other treatments.

  His mom had gone away for a couple of days after she was diagnosed, said she was getting help. A few weeks later, the neighbors asked how she was holding up. Seemed like everyone knew she was getting alternative treatments. Harold was the last to know.

  Electroshock therapy was back in fashion.

  She thought there would be benefits to stimulating or suppressing parts of the brain. It was her research; she was just volunteering herself for testing. They did it in her lab. She seemed a little off when she got back, but Harold just thought he was imagining that.

  It’s a sad, sad world, she once said.

  “How old are you, Harold?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “You should be homeschooled. You’re too smart for this place.”

  “And miss all the fun?”

  “It gets better in high school.”

  “If I leave, John gets away with everything. Who’s going to spike his drinks?”

  “A superhero, is that how you see yourself?”

  “Oooh, you were so close. I mean, you sort of went textbook earlier, but now you’re just reading the script. I feel so bad for you.”

  “You going to protect the helpless?”

  “No. Just Harold.”

  “You sure you’re twelve?”

  “You sure you’re a counsellor?”

  “The degree says I am.” He pointed at a framed certificate at the top of the bookshelf. It said Harvard.

  “You print that off the Internet?”

  “How else was I going to get work?”

  Mr. Tanner threw the Coke bottle with all the bug parts in the trash. It thudded like an apple. He tossed the heavy-stock fly museum on top of it and walked to the door.

  “Be careful.”

  Harold hiked the book bag on his shoulder and marched out of the office, his head spinning. He had been counselled against his will. And didn’t even see it coming.

  “Harold.”

  He turned toward the lanky middle-school counsellor leaning in his open doorway.

  “There’s no such thing as superheros.”

  “What about Santa?”

  He slid the wire-framed glasses up his nose. “Well, I don’t want to ruin all the surprises.”

  6.

  The kitchen sink was cluttered with dirty dishes from Harold’s room. There was a note on the table. Harold stood between two volcanic baskets of dirty clothes, one from Harold’s room and the other filled with Mom’s kerchiefs. The handwriting was blocky and hard, the lines crisp and forced, like the author was punishing the paper.

  Get the dishes done and the laundry. We’ll be working late. Text us when you read this. Your grandparents will pick you up when you’re finished with chores. And stop being a pig.

  At least Mom would’ve left money for snacks and emergencies.

  Harold slipped off his shoes and slid his stocking feet across the floor to avoid creaking floorboards. He wrapped his fingers around the brassy doorknob of the basement and turned in slow motion. When the latch pressed against the lock, he returned it without making a sound.

  Yeah, they were down there. For the long haul.

  That was why the grandparents were coming. His parents would be busy for a few days, maybe more. Every time they went on these marat
hon missions of research, it was a little bit longer. And Mom came out of it a little bit thinner.

  A bit sadder.

  With the clothes basket on his hip, he looked around the first floor. The office was in the back corner of the house, just off the dining room. It was an entertainment room when they first moved. Harold threw a fit when they moved the billiards table to the garage. The day after that, the oak desk was moved in.

  Harold hooked his finger in the brass loop of the sliding door, tugging it open just enough to slip inside. The greased rails wobbled but hardly made a sound. The cold thrill tickled his insides, like he’d walked through an invisible barrier of gamma rays that melted his intestines into sugary puddles.

  He set the clothes basket down and slid across the hardwood to the oak desk. The heavy curtains were drawn, a sliver of light bisecting the darkness. Harold rolled the chair back without a sound.

  The desk was massive with three drawers on both sides, each with a little keyhole. The lock could probably be picked with a little help from a YouTube tutorial, but any sort of damage and the jig was up. Harold didn’t want to test the extent of his father’s anger and this was without a doubt a horrible idea.

  But he couldn’t stop himself.

  It seemed the more he shouldn’t do something, the more he couldn’t stop. Mr. Tanner saw right to the heart of that.

  The desktop was orderly and clean; family photos that Mom framed were propped around the edge. There were pictures of his father standing with prominent figures at a neuroscience convention where his father, of course, was the keynote speaker talking about marriage between technology and the brain. It was titled The Organic Network.

  Harold tapped a keyboard. The computer monitor splashed electric light across the room. The picture of his mom smiling in the park. That photo had been locking the computer since Harold could remember, a photo when she was young and smart. And happy. That was the only common ground Harold and his father seemed to share.

  A love for her.

  The work space was covered with a calendar. His father, a techno-geek at heart, liked to duplicate his appointments with pen and paper. Redundancy, he would say, made the brain a magnificent tool.

  Harold lifted the bottom corner. In the darkness, the dull outline of a copper key bled into the rich grain of the oak desktop.

  He’d discovered this jewel on one of his many exploratory missions. These he took whenever his parents left the house or, nowadays, went to the basement. There was no book or drawer undefiled by Harold’s curiosity, no item his grubby fingers hadn’t turned over or, when the occasion made sense, went into his pocket.

  They were usually small tokens, things no one would know were missing, or something he couldn’t resist, like shiny black stones he’d found in a box beneath their bed or a deck of Vegas poker cards at the bottom of his father’s sock drawer.

  Little things.

  But the bigger things, like jump drives of data or external hard drives, were off-limits for sure. Not that Harold didn’t try to peek inside the computers. There had to be something good inside, something secret, something he just had to see. He just couldn’t find the password.

  The desk, however, yielded a veritable gold mine.

  Harold slid the toothy key into the bottom right drawer. The lock tumbled with a satisfying click. The drawer released its grip on the desk, exhaling its classified air for Harold to inhale. It smelled like fresh ink.

  Harold carefully unloaded the stacks of paper, the folders and notes, remembering exactly where everything was. He could do that quite easily, remember what he had seen. This benefited his habit of exploration. Every last item was in its place when he was done.

  He would’ve made a great Boy Scout. He wasn’t so honest or trustworthy, but he could clean a campsite.

  When he reached the bottom of the drawer, he pried away the false bottom to reveal a metal box. Discovering this was a bit of luck, how he noticed the depth of the drawer didn’t match the others, even if it was only by a few inches. Further investigation revealed the snug fit of quarter-inch plywood. Below that was the gold mine. Not gold, but the closest thing to it.

  Money.

  They were in stacks of hundreds. Harold wasn’t foolish enough to pocket a hundred-dollar bill. It would only be a matter of time before someone questioned what a twelve-year-old was doing with a pocket full of hundreds. But there was a stack of tens and twenties.

  Those he could skim.

  He wasn’t greedy. And he was smart. Only one twenty-dollar bill and one ten. He counted the stack and made a mental note of how much was there. Was he worried his meticulous father would notice the stacks were light? Sure. But so far there was no mention. Harold’s only guess was that Mom had no idea about the money.

  Thus the false bottom.

  Harold didn’t really need the money. He took it because it was fun. He would add it to the cache that was accumulating in a plastic container buried behind the garage. It used to go into a slice he put in the mattress, like a cushy piggy bank. Then he taped it beneath his desk, then hid it inside a dead computer tower. All of those were horrible locations.

  No one would look behind the garage. No one would dig in his special spot if they did.

  That savings account was his special fund for the day he would run away. That was how it started, at least. He had threatened to go it alone at least three times. Each time he would get hungry or cold. Once he even slept in the garage. But he always returned to his father’s cold stare. Had enough?

  If they lived down South where it was warm enough to sleep outside, he would be long gone. No one would hire a sixth grader. That was what the money was for.

  Each item went back into place, the folders in the same order, the papers cocked at the proper angle. The lock snapped tight. Harold’s heart rate still pounded in his throat as he pushed the key beneath the calendar at precisely the same spot.

  Just before the screensaver went dark, a glimmer of light reflected off the desk.

  Something was lying just above the calendar. It was a glass vial. Harold brought the screensaver back on and, just before picking up the vial, mentally noted the exact angle. He held it to the crack between the curtains, the sunlight illuminating the clear gelatin inside. Some sort of nutrient agar used to grow bacteria.

  The rubber lid was greasy, a smear of gel on his fingertip. It seemed out of place, nothing computer related. And nothing Harold had ever seen lying around the house. He had the urge to pocket this, but he knew where the line of stupidity was drawn. Steal money from a secret stash, sure, but nothing off the desk.

  He took a picture of it with his phone, instead.

  He replaced the vial exactly where it had lain, careful not to smudge the calendar or desktop with a trace of gel. He snuck out of the office with the clothes basket under his arm. The crash of endorphins left him empty and tired, a thrill junky coming off the edge of a deadly cliff.

  Luck, as it turned out, was on Harold’s side.

  He had started a load of laundry, and on his way to his room, he noticed the office door wasn’t completely closed. It was only a tiny gap, but enough that he would have to explain why he was in the office.

  When he went to quietly close the door, he noticed the pink kerchief on the floor. It must’ve fallen out of the basket. He shoved it in his book bag, cursing himself for being so careless. It was the flawless execution of dirty deeds that made them so delicious.

  This was an utter fail.

  But just as one domino can bring a million others down, this was the first in a series of devastating events.

  And the pink kerchief would be the lead domino.

  7.

  A week passed at the fart factory.

  Harold was sentenced to the grandparents’ extra bedroom—a storage room with a fold-out sofa bed and a mattress as thick as gauze. He woke after a night of being beaten in the back with an iron rod.

  The coffee machine went off at five a.m. like an old truck missing a
cylinder. His grandparents shuffled across the floor to fill their cups and pass gas like a couple of dueling trumpeters. Then the old-fashioned radio knob clicked on to report NPR in soft, soothing tones. The paneled walls were so thin that it all played out like the kitchen were in bed with him.

  The only television in the house was in the front room. They had basic cable, so there was nothing to watch. Harold spent the nights on his laptop until the grandparents said it was time for bed, after which he’d surf on his phone under the covers.

  He’d only packed clothes for three days. Grandma told him she’d pick up more clothes since his parents were still busy. He stopped by the house after school. The basement was still locked and the clothes still in the dryer—the ones he washed before leaving. He sneaked a few bills from the office.

  The tube of gel was gone.

  That night at the grandparents, he lay in bed with the pink kerchief, the one that had fallen out of the laundry basket. It smelled like his mom, soft and perfumy. There was a dark spot on it. When he rubbed it between his finger and thumb, it felt oily, reminding him of the clear gel.

  A wave of panic passed through him.

  Did he get it on his fingers? If he contaminated the kerchief, then it must’ve gotten other places, too. Was there a dab on the desk calendar, a smudgy fingerprint where the key was hidden? He didn’t notice it, but the office lair was bathed in its usual darkness.

  He’d have to beat it home after school again.

  They’d be locked in the dungeon. He could scour the place, buy a new desk calendar if he had to. Whatever it took, he could make things right.

  He took a deep breath and smiled.

  Finding a way out of trouble, walking as close to the edge as he could without falling, that was where the juice was at.

  \\\\\\\\\\////////////////////

  School crawled to an end.

  The yellow buses lined the roundabout, exhaling black clouds like rolling factories. Harold shuffled toward number twenty-two. He was nervous. If his father was waiting on the porch with the calendar, that dark look possessing his brows, well then he’d keep on trucking. Later that night he’d sneak behind the garage and grab his loot to hit the road. Somewhere a restaurant needed a dishwasher.