S'wanee: A Paranoid Thriller (26 page)

“Soup’s on, Cody!” Pearl called from downstairs. “Just a handful of us tonight!”

The “Present” included an illustrated report on a current program called HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program), developed for the US military by several universities (Stanford, MIT, Clemson, Cornell), with the prototype built in Alaska. The pictures looked like a football-field-sized sea of antennae.

Ross’s report was dense and jargony—ELF waves, GWEN networks, a magnetically sensitive material called magnetite found in mammalian brains—but the gist of the program, as far as Cody could tell, was high-powered radio transmissions that could “insert almost anything into the target brain mind systems, with such insertions processed by the biosystems as internally generated data/effects.”

According to Ross, “Words, phrases, images, sensations, and emotions could be directly input and experienced in the biological targets as internal states, codes, emotions, thoughts, and ideas.”

Ross used phrases like “prerecorded drugs” and “brain bombs.”

Ross claimed the technology could easily transmit through any existing antenna or “digital broadcasting spectrum,” including “cell towers.” Ross claimed such “devices” could be tapped into and “piggybacked” on without the “owner’s knowledge.”

“Cody, I’ve saved dessert for you!” Pearl called up. “I made chocolate molten cake!”

The “Future”—Ross had just started this section, which consisted mostly of unorganized thoughts and notes. He used the phrases “double-blind study” and “terminal experiment,” which Cody had heard before. He’d written “Project terminus: January 15,” which was ten days away.

At the bottom of the document was a link that opened Cody’s browser. The page required a password, which his software hacked easily. It was a grid of QuickTime video screens, all black, numbered one though twelve. He clicked a play button, and the screen said “Under Construction.” He clicked the others; same thing.

“If you get hungry, I’ve left dinner in the oven.” Pearl gave up. “Don’t study too hard!”

The Troller, Cody had just noticed, was waving yellow from a strong wireless signal. He moved his laptop around the room, and the wave adjusted stronger and weaker. The wave was strongest at the window overlooking the Quad.

Towering above the Quad, Shapard Tower shone its nightly beacon.

Shapard Tower, which Ross had warned everyone to keep away from. “Save the Tower,” he had said, and the Wellington Kilts had joined in the chant that very first week. The tallest spot on campus, aiming its spotlight squarely on Rebel’s Rest every night.

Shapard Tower, which turned the yellow wave red and frantic as Cody walked across the Quad with his laptop.

All Saints was unlocked but dimly lit, and Cody moved down the aisle through the empty silence, past the pews and arches and the “S’wanee Massacre” stained-glass window that had caught his attention that first week, which had caught Ross’s attention, as Cody recalled.

At the front of the chapel, to the right of the altar, was a door marked “Tower.” It was unlocked, and Cody climbed the spiral staircase. At the top was another door marked “Carillon,” behind which, Cody knew, sat some contraption, some transmitting device, a mini-version of the massive antennae in Ross’s document.

It was a small room, almost like an office, the only light trickling from a hole in the ceiling. There was a clock on the wall and framed diploma-looking certificates. There was a sign that said “Earphones Required.” Along the wall, taking up most of the room, was a monster piano thing with big wooden levers instead of keys and stacks of sheet music on the side with several pages spread out across the front. Dozens of wires strung upward from the machine through the ceiling. There was a clump of professional-looking earphones on the bench. On a desk next to the machine sat a telephone and a small laptop computer.

A sturdy, fixed ladder led up through the hole in the ceiling where the light shone down. Cody climbed into the room with its giant wheels coiling thick wires attached to dozens of bells of various sizes dangling from thick steel beams. A massive bell hung directly in the center. The spotlight, huge and blinding, aimed through the arched tower window, connected to a closed circuit box labeled “Quad Light.”

Cody looked around. There was no antenna, no transmitting device, just bells and coils and wheels and a light. The Troller had dropped back to a yellow wave. Peering through the tower window, Cody saw the spotlight focused, not on Rebel’s Rest, but over the whole Quad, just like it said.

There was nothing here. Just the Phantom’s office, where he played his Top 40 on the mutant piano machine. Where he did his job.

The largest wheel in the tower started to turn, pulling its wire, and a cluster of bells tipped a deafening, earsplitting toll. Cody’s eyes shook and his eardrums maxed out as he scurried down the ladder to flee the torturous, brain-smashing noise. He stumbled on the last rung, dropping his laptop, and fell and scrambled to his feet by the protective earphones and, clutching his laptop, fled down the spiral staircase before the chimes could lead to the massive hourly toll that would blow his head apart.

Cody burst onto the Quad just as the bell struck ten and then went silent. The Quad was well lit and empty in the cold. Cody stood shivering and ringing.
Way to go, Tiger
.

He opened his laptop, which,
Thank God
, still worked. The browser responded, a document opened, the network still connected.
Good ol’ Apple
.

The Troller was red. The wave was so violent and tightly packed, it was practically a solid block.

Cody took a few steps, and the wave, still red, loosened up a bit. He reversed his steps, and the wave tightened again. He took a few more steps, and the Troller went haywire and sounded a beeping alarm. Cody looked up.

He was standing under the towering evergreen, still roped off. He backed away, and the red wave eased. He held the laptop close to a branch, and the wave alarmed and flashed. Cody got nearer to the branch, and even with the ringing in his head, he could feel a pulsing vibration in his eardrum. He stood still.

The tree made a quiet hum. From its hundreds of branches came a slight, steady buzz.

The tree wasn’t a tree at all.

•   •   •

“Human trials,” Ross had said to the white coats. “The same technology as any mobile device,” he’d told the eager crowd.

Cody was running in the cold night, to clear his head. Down Tennessee Avenue, where wildlife used to roam and roamed no more.

“We can override fundamental instincts, including self-preservation and survival,” Mad Scientist Ross had declared over his clip mike, demonstrating “the degree of control this new technology can achieve.”

“Puck is the culmination of lots of trial and error,” Ross had said. “It hasn’t been easy.”

Fletcher would certainly attest to that, if his throat hadn’t been torn out through his neck. Didn’t he get Nesta from the school? One of the many strays the school took in and “rehabilitated”? Didn’t Ross experiment on Nesta as part of his “trial and error” before the poor dog went violently insane? Now Nesta’s sick, hijacked brain was pressed between glass in Spencer Hall, after Ross sliced and picked it apart.
Trial and error
.

Ross had controlled Puck through an antenna that looked like a tree. Cody’s Troller had zigged wild near the tree that wasn’t just a tree. Hadn’t Cody dreamed, or had he actually seen, Ross replacing branches on the same tree? Digging, burying electrical cables? Weren’t Ross’s fingers dirty that first week?

Cody caught his breath at Morgan’s Steep, the treacherous dead-drop cliff, now bright in the moon. Caleb had done this run at night, too, before he disappeared. He’d even invited Cody to join. Weren’t workers cleaning up below around the same time Caleb vanished? Wasn’t the same white delivery van that took Nesta away speeding from Morgan’s Steep on the morning that Ross claimed Caleb had “transferred”? Why were the men in blue scrubs at Morgan’s Steep so early in the morning? What were they “delivering”—or “picking up”—in their van?

“‘The S’wanee Call,’” Ross the Rogue had written in his thesis, “can insert almost anything into the target brain.” Ross the Suck-Up had praised S’wanee as a “new technology incubator.”

Ross had tracked Cody down just as he was researching the “S’wanee Massacre,” right when he was finding the truth. Ross had spy cameras on his iPad and could track anybody anywhere. Ross had seen to it that the door to the archives was now locked. Ross had called the Order of the Gownsmen “a very big deal.” “Every junior is obsessed with it,” he had said. “You’re my project,” he confessed to Cody on the ride that first day. They were all his project.

Eight of Cody’s friends had mysteriously, almost magically, disappeared.

Ross called his wireless, mind-controlling science project “a bit of magic.”

At full sprint heading back down Tennessee Avenue, Cody thought, “Ross is hijacking people’s brains.” He thought, “Ross is killing off Rebel’s Rest to get his gown.”

And then he thought: “Cody, you’ve lost it.”

“D
ude, that’s heavy stuff,” Banjo said. “That’s real heavy stuff.”

Blowing off a study cram session, Cody had told him about Ross’s 3D-Brain Atlas-Puck presentation to the white coats, his thesis proposal, the history of the “S’wanee Massacre,” the non-tree tree. Cody linked them up and laid it all out.

“You sound crazy; you know that?” Banjo said, and Cody said, “Yeah, I know.”

Banjo thought and said, “I never really liked Ross. I think he’s creepy.”

“He’s watching us all the time,” Cody said. “On his iPad.”

“He’s a creepy motherflyer. But experimenting on us? Like microwave mind control shit? Dude, you really think that?”

“Dude, it’s not science fiction,” Cody insisted. “It’s real. I saw it myself.”

“The technology’s
there
, man. I’ve read up on it,” Cody continued. “I mean, military dudes at a desk in Florida can make drones drop bombs all over the world. You can scan somebody’s credit card through their pocket. You can send signals to robots and make them do anything. It’s just magnetic stuff; it’s in the brain,
our
brain. You can hijack it and control it. It’s all in Ross’s paper. I can show you.”

“I don’t need to see it,” Banjo said. “But, dude, the fact he wrote a paper doesn’t mean he’s doing it. I mean, we got econ problem sets where we’re selling magic rings in Middle Earth and shit like that, but it’s not real. It’s just homework.”

“Eight of us are gone, Banjo,” Cody said. “
Eight
.”

“But why would he want to make people kill themselves?” Banjo asked.

“To prove he can,” Cody said. “If you can make people kill themselves, you can make them do anything.
That’s
his experiment. That’s the selling point.”

“Fuck. Me,” Banjo said, shaking his head. “You know, the government experimented on my people before. With Tuscaneegee syphilis shit; you know that?”

“Dude, they did it all the time,” Cody said. “LSD, mushrooms, all kinds of shit that drove people crazy. They got caught, and that’s why they made it illegal.”

“You think the school’s in on it?” Banjo asked.

Cody shook his head. “Just Ross. He’s fucking sick. Brilliant maybe, but sick.”

“Yeah, you sound crazy,” Banjo repeated. “You sound Cocoa Puffs, but I’m not saying you’re not onto something. It’s just a
crazy
something, like
Twilight Zone
shit.”

“Did you see Elliott before Christmas? Did you see him leave?”

“Nope.”

“Have you talked to him since? Do you even have his number?”

“Nope.”

“You think Skit really quit school because of an abortion?
Skit
?”

Banjo inhaled and rocked back and forth.

“You think Vail, happy-go-lucky Vail just up and jumped to her death? Or Caleb—
Legacy
Caleb—left school in the second week?

“The school knows something’s fucked up,” Cody went on. “But mass suicides aren’t the best recruitment tool, you know? They’re covering it up, like they did last time.”

“I don’t know, man,” Banjo resisted. “I don’t know.”

“Do you really think Sin drove everybody into a tree? On that road? In a car nobody can track down?”

Banjo exhaled. “Fuck. Me.”

•   •   •

Dean Apperson looked like he needed a cigarette. He was dapper/dandy as always, but he didn’t offer Cody a drink, and he spoke directly in plain words.

“Cody, do you think Ross is killing your classmates?

“I…I don’t know,” Cody said, and thought,
Fuck you, Banjo
.

“Do you think he’s experimenting on you? Like a science project?” Dean Apperson wasn’t angry, just curious, and behind him the fire crackled and popped, like on the DVD.

“
Yes
,” Cody said, the cat out of the bag. “Yes,” and told him why and told him everything. The taps were open, and it felt good.

“I see,” Dean Apperson said pleasantly, inspecting him. “And you think he tampered with the tree on the Quad? To make it a radar sort of thing? Is that what you think, Cody?”

“Yes, sir,” Cody said. “He changed some of the branches. He ran wires, too. I saw him.”

“Actually, you saw both of us.” Dean Apperson nodded. “I think I understand now. Cody, that’s not a tree at all. It’s a cell tower.

“I picked it out myself,” Apperson continued. “I didn’t want an ugly eyesore marring the Domain. Would you? Cell towers that look like trees, especially evergreens, are quite common these days. Did you know that, Cody?”

Cody thought,
I did know that.
He’d just forgotten.

“And it’s brand-new to us.” Apperson went on slowly. “With the inevitable kinks and whatnot, but I think we’ve mostly sorted it out. Now we have a strong, up-to-date, cutting-edge network. It’s very much an improvement.”

“Did you tell your mother this?” Apperson asked. “Because she called me, you know. Over the break.”

“This is my fault,” Apperson said. “I should have alerted the parents immediately. Just as I ask you to be up-front with me, I owe the same courtesy and honesty. We’ve been shell-shocked a bit, as devastated as you’ve been, but that’s no excuse, and I will do better in the future.”