Bad Glass (32 page)

She led me up the dark stairwell, across a new bridge on the other side of the building, and then back down to the street. There were no guards at this entrance. It was all the way up at the north end of the block, and the street here was silent and empty.

Taylor collapsed against the nearest wall, just outside the Homestead’s entrance. She pressed her hands flat against its surface and lowered her head, resting her cheek against the dirty brick.

“Taylor—” I said.

“No, Dean,” she whispered, shaking her head slightly. “Don’t say a fucking word. I can’t hear it.”

She put her back against the wall and slid down to the sidewalk. After a couple of moments just sitting there, frozen, she lifted her butt off the ground and reached back, struggling to pull something from the waistband of her pants. With a trembling hand, she produced one of Weasel’s notebooks. The ratty black-and-white notebook had been folded down the middle. The cover was creased and stained, painted brown with dirt and dried liquid. The upper right-hand corner had been torn back like a scraped tag of skin, still attached to the book by a precarious tongue of cardboard.

Taylor flipped back the cover and started to read.

She kept her head down. Her face was buried in the book for nearly ten minutes. Then her shoulders started to shake, and the notebook fell out of her suddenly limp hands.

There were tears trickling down her cheeks, but I only got to see them for a couple of seconds before she once again buried her face in her palms.

I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it once again, remembering her request:
Don’t say a fucking word. I can’t hear it
. Looking at her, I knew that that instruction still stood.

So I left her alone. I picked up Weasel’s notebook, flipped to the first page, and started to read his story.

The last page was gone. It had been torn from the book, the final entry cut short, severed midsentence. All that remained was a ragged strip of lined paper that still clung to the binding.

But I knew how the story ended. With fingers sticking out of smooth concrete.

As soon as I reached the end, Taylor pulled the book from my hands and got to her feet. “I did this,” she mumbled, her frantic eyes darting back and forth. “I did this to him.” And before I could stop her, she ran away, heading toward Riverfront Park.

Object. A skateboard:

I didn’t find Taylor in the park.

The park had changed in the last couple of days. Maybe it was just the snow and the ensuing melt, but it seemed much more desolate now, quiet and still. Like an animal holding its breath, or, maybe, like an animal that’s no longer got any breath left to hold. The trees had lost their last leaves. Lush branches had transformed into skeletal limbs, with sharp fingers reaching up to scratch a painfully blue sky, and the ground beneath was carpeted in a thick layer of decaying brown mulch. And where there weren’t any trees, there was dead grass, vast stretches of wild straw pressed flat against the ground. There was no longer even a hint of green, just sickly, jaundiced yellow.

I couldn’t tell if this was just the normal transition between fall and winter here, or something different. Something permanent.

In my search, I found an old man sitting cross-legged at the top of a hill near the base of the clock tower. If I hadn’t been looking for Taylor, my eyes would have skipped right over him, just a lonely old man growing like a lump out of the crest of a hill.
A goddamned Methuselah
, I thought as I drew near. He was stick-thin and had a scraggly white beard. His eyes looked haunted, sunk deep into the bony angles of his face.

He didn’t respond when I tried to talk to him, when I asked
after Taylor. He didn’t even look up. I’m not even sure he knew I was there. He just kept staring off into the distance—down the hill, across the river, out toward the heart of the city. I didn’t try very hard to get his attention. I just left him sitting there.

As I made my way through the park, I didn’t see any dogs. In fact, except for the old man, I didn’t see anything alive. No animals. No people.

I stayed away from Amanda and Mac’s tunnel.

After about an hour, I gave up the search and started home, hoping Taylor had beaten me there.

Charlie was in the kitchen, and Sabine was upstairs, locked in her room. The rest of the house was empty. There was no Floyd, no Devon, no Amanda, no Mac.

And no Taylor.

I stood in Taylor’s doorway for a while, staring at her empty bed. Her smell was thick in the air. It wasn’t a particularly clean scent—we were living rough here, after all—but there was a hint of sweet amber and rose beneath the smell of sweat and dirt. It smelled like flowers, I thought, sprouting from rich soil; this was a horribly romantic notion, and it left me feeling a bit disgusted at myself.

I was losing my focus, my drive—
I should be hunting down photographs, looking for images that will rock the world!
—but it seemed like there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t put Taylor out of my mind. No matter how many times she ran away, no matter how distant she remained.

I gave the room one last look, then shut the door.

Before heading back downstairs, I gulped down a Vicodin. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, I chased it with my last oxycodone.

I found Charlie sitting at the kitchen table. “It’s getting lonely here,” he said when I entered. He sounded wistful. “Sabine’s hiding upstairs. Floyd and Taylor are off doing their own things. Amanda and Mac … well, they’re just gone.” He shook his head
at the word
gone
. “And Devon—I haven’t seen Devon in days and days.”

“Yeah, Devon,” I repeated, remembering the conversation Taylor and I had had with Terry, right before we found Weasel’s disembodied fingers.

Devon. His tunnels. His radio. The subject was a welcome distraction. It was something I could grasp hold of, something relatively solid.

“Remember that networking hub I showed you? You said you could access it, get information. Can you still do that? Can you figure out what it is?”

“Now?”

“Yeah, now.”

“I can try. If it’s standard hardware, standard networking, I should be able to just plug right in.” Then he shrugged. “What that’ll tell us, however, I have no idea. Maybe nothing.”

“Then get your stuff,” I said. “It’s time to go.”

The house across the street was filled with a still and unnatural silence. There were muddy footprints leading back and forth from the front door to the basement stairs.
Did Floyd and I leave those behind the last time we were here?
No, I realized. Our tracks would have only been going one way, from the muddy tunnel out to the street. Someone else must have been here.

Charlie crossed the threshold behind me and then pulled to a stop. He looked around the empty house, perplexed. “There’s a networking hub in
here
? Right across the street? But why? And
who
?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, Charlie. Those are the million-dollar questions.”

I led Charlie to the room upstairs. The radio was still there, but the binoculars were gone. So somebody
had
been here. Devon, maybe? Come back to collect his property? They were nice binoculars; I probably would have come back for them myself if they were mine.

“Do you need the hub, or can you work with this?” I asked.

Charlie shrugged and headed straight for the radio. He sat down at its side and bent low over the matte-black console. “This should work,” he said, unhooking the cable with a soft
click
. There was a small box at the end of the line and a couple of different wires sprouting from its end. “I don’t even need to dig out a connector. This thing goes straight from coax to cat-5.”

He set his shoulder bag down at his side and started setting up his computer. “Did you listen to it?” he asked as he went to work. “It’s some type of networked radio, right?”

“There’s nothing but static.”

“Static?” he said, glancing up. There was a perplexed look on his face. “Like white noise? Hiss?” I nodded. “That doesn’t really make any sense. There’d be nothing like static on a network like this. Unless …” The lines on his face softened as a new thought erased his confusion. “Unless this network connects up with a broadcast node somewhere else, somewhere outside the range of interference.”

“So this could actually contact the outside world?”

“Maybe. If the cable …” He lifted it toward me briefly before plugging it into the side of his notebook. “If the network and the hubs lead all the way outside of Spokane—miles and miles away—if it’s hooked up to some type of broadcast antenna or a satellite somewhere. If that’s the case, this thing could be linked almost anywhere. Anywhere on the planet.” Charlie paused for a moment, and we both let that sink in. Then he continued. “The military’s using something like that for their data traffic, but according to Danny, it’s all aboveground, stretching straight down the middle of I-90. And they’ve got a fleet of engineers maintaining the lines.”

“So what is this shit?” I asked, but I didn’t really expect an answer. I was just giving voice to my confusion.

“It’s a darknet,” Charlie said.

“A what?”

“A
darknet
. A private, secret network—something not hooked
up to the world, isolated and secure, running on its own wires, using its own protocols.”

“Who would do that?”

“I have no idea,” he said, once again bending low over his computer. “But there’s a … fanciful notion out there—nothing real, you understand, nothing concrete, just whisperings—about a shadow Internet. A network running parallel to the Internet we know, but somehow different, and very, very secret. Controlled by financial giants, the people who’d have the resources and the power to do something like that. It’s all real illuminati stuff, you know, just paranoid speculation. But if it existed, I imagine it would be something like this—all hidden wires and clandestine hardware.” Charlie looked up from his notebook and smiled slyly. The computer had finished booting up, and a multiwindowed program now filled the screen. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Perhaps it’s just a couple of lines connected to an antenna outside of the city. Hell, maybe it’s just feeding someone’s addiction to NPR.”

I knew better. I’d been down in the tunnels. I’d seen the wires sprouting out in eight different directions.

Charlie was silent for several minutes as he scrolled past screen after screen of numbers and acronyms, arcane listings that looked like nothing but gibberish to me. “It looks big,” he finally said. “I don’t know how big. Depending on what type of router they’re using and how many they’ve got, I might only be seeing a small corner of the network here. But there’s traffic … a fair amount of traffic.” He opened a command window and typed in a string of letters, and a media player appeared in the center of his screen. After a couple of seconds, an error message popped up, accompanied by a soft
bing
. “It’s encrypted. I can’t get at it.”

Abruptly, he unplugged the network cable and slotted it back into the radio. “The radio’s just a very specialized computer, set up to isolate and decrypt an audio feed that’s been meshed inside the network traffic, and maybe broadcast back out. There’s got to be hardware decryption somewhere inside this thing.”

He turned the radio on and immediately jumped back, startled by an insistent voice that leaped from the speaker. Beneath the voice there was a whisper of static, a low ebb and flow, like water and gravel echoing down an empty pipe.