by Jem Fox
“Donde esta la key?,” I asked them, miming opening the door. Foreign languages are not my strong suit.
One little kid with big chocolate eyes pointed silently to the porch light, where, once I looked, I could see the outline of Ramón’s key where it leaned against the glass. Again, we’re not talking Mensa material here.
I was fully prepared to tell his landlord that I was his girlfriend. If she argued with me and said Ramón had some other girlfriend, I was fully prepared to pitch a fit about him cheating on me. But, as it turned out, she wasn’t interested enough to trudge downstairs and ask.
The inside of his place was dark and dank. I snapped on a light and tried to be quick. This place didn’t have a back door.
His computer was still sitting there. No one had come to collect it yet. I powered it up and confirmed that he wasn’t smart enough to keep it password protected, then fired up his web browser.
I had an idea that his history might feature his boss’s website, and I was right. There was a public portion that was sickening enough — especially if you knew the story behind it — but there was a private portion, too. It required a password, thoughtfully scrawled on a sticky note and stuck to the side of the computer by Ramón.
I sat perched on the old kitchen chair Ramón had used as a desk chair, trying not to sit but unable to hover that long. It was deadly quiet in the basement. With the heavy wooden door shut, the earth pressing in on all sides muffled the shrieks of the kids playing outside. There was a loud ticking clock and a hum in the walls and I could feel the moisture seeping through the cement all around me. I clicked through to the back room of the geek’s website and tried to prepare myself for degradation.
After a few minutes I knew that they’d lied about hiding the girls’ faces. A few minutes after that I saw Melody and stopped looking.
I fingered the plastic flash drive in my pocket. Melody’s “insurance” was no good to her if her worst nightmare was already on the internet.
I went through Ramón’s desk. I could hear my internal time clock clicking down. How many minutes was it safe to linger here? I found a stack of DVDs in plastic cases, no labels, just numbers written with a marker.
I put in disc #1 and found a collection of files dedicated to unwilling encounters. Melody’s handsome campus boy and Celia were on there.
Disc #2 was pictures of kids. I stopped after the fourth one, too sick at my stomach to go on. I’d never get this garbage out of my head. It was in there for good now.
I didn’t want to look at disc #3. I figured household pets were the only thing left and I didn’t want to know. I stuck all the DVDs inside my backpack and walked out.
The fat man took a long time opening his door, balancing a grocery bag and a pizza box, a six-pack hanging from his finger, jangling a key ring and swearing under his breath.
He shut the door and shot home three deadbolts, dropped the keys on a table, and turned around to take his load of foodstuffs to the kitchen.
That’s when he saw me sitting in his chair in front of his computer set-up. It was a pretty intense set-up, almost as good as the geek’s. A big table with a lot of computer screens and it floated a few feet from the wall. There was no regular living room furniture. Why buy a couch if you don’t have friends, right? He probably watched some form of TV there on his computer. This chair I was sitting in, a fake-leather throne made for a extra-big man, was comfortable enough to spend 18 hours a day in, which is about what I estimated for his routine.
I sat there with my legs crossed, my fingers laced together in my lap. There was one little lamp by the door and another on the desk behind me.
The shock could have killed him. He looks like a man courting his first heart attack. He dropped the bag and hugged the pizza box with both arms like it was a baby.
“Hello, Marcus.”
“Wh—who are you?”
I unfolded myself from the chair. It was so big I almost had to hop down to the floor from it. He was clear across the room and still he shrank back a little. I’m a girl, small of stature, slight of build. I guess I was giving off a foreboding aura. His fingers were digging into that cardboard box and I imagine his legs were shaking inside those XXXL jeans.
“Sit down, Marcus. I need to talk to you.”
He walked over obediently and sat in his chair, still holding the pizza box against his chest like a schoolbook. He licked his lips. “Who sent you?”
I dragged over one of his kitchen chairs and sat it down a few feet away. I really didn’t want to get that close.
“I have some questions for you about the geek.”
Unlike the thugs I’d been dealing with, Marcus had a fully functioning brain. He got on the same page quick. He didn’t pretend he didn’t know who I was talking about.
“How’d you find me?”
“Well, Marcus, that was fairly easy. I called the pizza places on campus and asked them if they had a customer who was a really fat guy on the young side. There were two of you, and the other guy didn’t have seven computers.”
He sputtered.
“It’s hard to go underground when you weigh 400 pounds, Marcus. That’s why they’ll have to bury you in a piano case.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I want you to tell me about the geek’s business.”
He looked at me warily. “Can I eat while we talk?”
“Sure.”
He set his pizza down on his lap and opened the lid, peeked inside and sighed. “Man…”
“Focus, Marcus.”
“Okay, shoot.” And he scraped up some cheese, dropped it on a triangle of crust and stuffed it in his mouth.
“I know what he’s doing out there. I want to know how the computer side works.”
“All right.” He talked around a mouthful of pizza. “He created a darknet — a private place online where certain trusted individuals can upload and download stuff anonymously. Share their hobbies.”
“Like kiddie porn.”
He choked. “No! Hey, no way — no kids. It’s not the material that’s hush-hush. It’s the customer. They want to be untraceable, see? They want to keep their proclivities to themselves.”
“Proclivities like they enjoy watching college girls get raped?”
He shoved the pizza box onto his desk with one hand and waved the other at me dismissively. “No, no, look — it’s all surface. Just look and feel. It’s not for real.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“Well, you heard wrong. I mean, that’s the flavor of what he’s selling, sure, but it’s just a show they’re putting on. It’s what the customer wants.”
“Really. ’Cause I heard the girls weren’t willing and the geek blackmails them into putting on that show.”
“No. Absolutely not. Trust me, nobody around here wants to go to prison.”
I sat there, taking his measure, wondering if he was for real.
“I want to know how to pull the plug on the geek’s operation.”
He shook his head. “You can’t pull the plug. I mean, you can take out his local stuff but it’s all out there." He gestured wide, indicating the whole world. “It’s like a spiderweb — something flies in and breaks one part of the web, the rest still holds. The spider just fixes the part that’s broken. You can’t get to all of it. That’s the beauty of it. You just replace the equipment, set up somewhere else, and plug back in.”
“So I can’t kill it then.”
“Nope. It’s not a single thing that can die. It’s a network. It’s a system. It’s a whole group of people trading data. If one part goes dark, the rest will just keep going. Then a new part can start up somewhere else.”
I exhaled in frustration, ran my fingers through my hair. “What’s the point of it, then? His darknet? How does it make him money?”
He leaned back. “Well, these things don’t just happen. Somebody makes them happen. He makes it happen, and people pay him to be a part of it. They want a safe place to
— you know. They don’t want it to get back to their wives or their bosses or whatever.”
I gave him a black look. “The internet is forever.”
He smiled. “Exactly. If you don’t want to leave a trail, you need something like this.”
“So I can’t kill it.”
“No. Even if his office shuts down, there’s no way to get the data back. It’s out there and circulating. They’ll all just move to a new network if this one stops functioning. He’ll just set it up again somewhere else.”
The knowledge that there was nothing I could do to fix it felt like a burning in my stomach and my chest. There wasn’t a gun or a knife or a rock that could reverse the damage the geek had done. There wasn’t anything you could blow up that would get those girls back their innocence.
I stood up from my chair, and Marcus flinched. He was jittery for a big man.
“What are your proclivities, Marcus?”
He blushed.
“Do you avail yourself of the geek’s porn offerings?”
He cleared his throat. “That’s not my kind of thing.”
“Never?” I packed a lot of disbelief into that one word.
He pointed limply to one of his computer screens. “I’m a gamer. That’s how I spend my free time, when I’m not coding. I’m a level 90 elite—”
“Uh huh.” I unzipped my backpack and pulled out the three DVDs I took from Ramón’s.
“No offense, Marcus, but you really need to get out more.”
I handed him the first DVD. He just looked at it, then at me. I pointed to his computer.
He opened the case very slowly, hesitated, and turned to ask me a question. My expression made him hurry up and put the damn thing in.
A list of files came up. I leaned over and pointed to the one I wanted him to open.
“Please don’t touch the—”
“Marcus, so help me God I will break this monitor over your head if you don’t hurry the fuck up.”
He swallowed hard and double-clicked on the file.
I leaned over him and floated my head over his left shoulder and rested my hand lightly on his right shoulder. “See that little girl? She isn’t putting on a show, Marcus. She’s getting raped by that happy boy there who’s been told that she is just acting a part. He doesn’t know he’s raping her. He didn’t find out until after.”
Marcus turned green. It really was a high-quality picture on that screen. He fumbled for the keyboard to stop the video, grabbed his trash can, and puked into it.
I went back to my chair.
“I don’t think you’re an evil person, Marcus. I don’t think you meant to help make this. But you deserve to be punished.”
He kept a hold of the garbage can like he might have another go. His hands were shaking. He choked out his question. “What are you going to do to me?”
“I could turn you in to the cops and you could spend some time in county jail. You’d probably come out with a lifetime of empathy for what those girls went through.”
He turned from green to gray. “Please … no.”
“No. I thought of something easier. You’re going to look at every single image on this DVD." And I held up the disc marked #2.
I pulled my chair to where I could see his face but wouldn’t have to see the screen. I wanted to make sure he didn’t turn away or shut his eyes, but I didn’t need to see anymore of those hellish images myself. I wished I could burn away what I’d already seen.
He looked at four pictures before he started crying. He only made it through a dozen more files before I let him stop. His big shoulders were shaking and his face was swollen. I was pretty sure he couldn’t really see anymore anyway.
It seemed like an appropriate punishment. He didn’t look close enough at what the geek was doing with his business. He took the money and looked the other way.
So I made him look.
I ended up sleeping in Melody’s bed that night. She was relieved when I showed up alone. She said she could bunk with her sister. I wasn’t in any active danger, and neither was she. The geek and his crew weren’t looking for me — they wanted me out here doing their job for them. So I wedged a chair under the door handle, climbed into Melody’s grimy sheets, and fell into a hard sleep.
I woke up six hours later just before dawn. I had the beginnings of a plan in mind the night before, and my brain had worked it out while I was sleeping. I lay there and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling and ticked down the list of things I needed to do.
Melody wasn’t keen on lending me money, but I told her the guys at the building had taken everything I had, and she sighed and gave me forty bucks. It wasn’t even close to enough, but I accepted it because I knew she didn’t have more.
I took a shower in her grungy bathroom, making sure not to touch the curtain. God only knew what diseases were lurking there. And I say this as a person who has stayed in a lot of no-star establishments.
I spent some of Melody’s money buying breakfast, then went to the drugstore and bought black hair dye. I walked to the student union and went to the ladies room in the basement. That early in the morning, I had the place to myself. I dyed my hair in the sink. It made a huge stinking mess.
I didn’t have time to get across town to the thrift store, so I had to waste too much cash on a shirt I’d never want to wear again, way tighter and pinker than I’d usually wear. Then I stopped in the hardware store.
I have a pretty good internal clock, so I didn’t bother asking anyone what time it was. I wasn’t sweating. I had till four and I didn’t need nearly that long.
My new black hair and my new pink shirt made me feel like I was wearing a Halloween costume. I had to walk all the way across campus feeling like a fool with a neon sign over my head saying “Look at me.” I tried to use the time to get more used to looking like that. It didn’t work.
I arrived outside the Dramatic Arts building and saw exactly what I was looking for: a bunch of theatre types standing around looking arty and pretentious. One of them was wearing a Shakespeare get-up and holding a fake sword. Another had on obvious stage make-up.
I walked up to them. “One of you guys have a car?”
The one who had a car was thankfully not the one in costume. “Uh, yeah. I do.” He was skinny and blonde and wearing a t-shirt with the comedy and drama masks on it. Guess which it’s going to be today, theatre boy.
I crooked my finger at him and led him away from the crowd. “Some friends and I are filming a little movie and the guy who was supposed to drive this afternoon bailed on us. You interested?”
Was he interested? Yeah, he was interested. He immediately looked back at his friends, then leaned toward me and pitched his voice low. He didn’t want to share. “What’s the film? Where’s the set?”
“Industrial park on the edge of town. It’s a thriller. How well do you drive?”
He had stars in his eyes. “I drive great. Industrial park? Cool. Will I have lines?”
I shook my head. “Not this afternoon. We just need you to drive. But if you do a good job…”
“Sure, sure. When?”
“What time is it now?”
He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and looked at it. “Eleven-thirty.”
“If you’re free, we can shoot it now.”
“Well…” He hesitated.
“But if you’re busy, I can find someone else.” I looked back over at his friends.
“No! No, now’s fine. I can go now.”
“Okay, then. Where’s your car?”
His car was reasonable — a dark sedan that looked like a million other cars. When we got out to the edge of town I had him pull over and take the license plates off. I handed him the dollar screwdriver I’d picked up earlier. While he was doing that, I sat in the back and got ready.
I wrapped clear packing tape around and around my ankles, holding them carefully apart the distance I wanted them to be. Then I used my new pocketknife to saw through the tape. I experime
nted a little with another small piece of tape until I got it where it looked solid but I could rip it right open just by kicking my foot.
By that time, my driver was done taking the plates off and was admiring my work.
I had him help me with my wrists. The first layer by my skin was doubled so the tape wouldn’t pull my arm hair off. I had him wrap my wrists and then use my knife to cut me loose again. He concentrated so hard, his tongue was poking out the side of his mouth. I had him cut the tape on the underside of my hands, where it wouldn’t show.
We experimented some more until we got it to where it looked real but came right off. Then I told him I needed to borrow his phone.
I walked a few feet down the road. I dialed a random number, let it ring a couple times, then killed the call. I talked into the dead phone, being quick and hoping it wouldn’t ring in my ear and give me away.
“Hey, I found a guy—”
He interrupted me, calling over from the car: “Lance!”
“—Lance to drive the car. Yeah, he seems great. He’s in the theatre department, too.” I gave Lance a thumbs-up and he gave me two in return, beaming. “We’re ready to shoot it. We’ll be there in the next ten minutes. Yeah. Okay. No problem.”
I turned around and tossed him his phone. “Let’s go over this one more time. We only have enough tape to shoot it once.”
Lance looked a little confused. “Are you using tape? Aren’t you—?”
“Yeah, the producer’s old school. We can only do it once. Don’t come back, or you’re going to spoil the shoot and they won’t ask you back again. Understand?”
“Yes. Totally.” He nodded.
“Tell me what you’re supposed to do.”
He recited obediently. “I pull up to the door and slow way down but don’t stop. You roll out of the backseat onto the ground. When you’re clear, I punch it and drive away fast. I take off down the road.”
“And don’t come back.”
“And I don’t come back.”
We got back in the car and taped my ankles and my wrists up again. I directed him to the industrial park.
He was excited. “Will you be able to see me? On screen?”
“Not in this scene. Next time, though.”
