Transcription (24 page)

“What are they doing? Tell me.”

She didn’t want to meet his eyes. In the low light that was seeping around the curtains of the sliding door, it was difficult to tell exactly what she was focused on.

“They’re torturing people, just like I wrote,” she said. Danielle took a breath. Her voice started shaky, but she sped up as she talked. “In my version of your dad’s story, I decided that it needed more suspense and more gore. I had the same motivation. The character hates people who exercise because they’re wasting their energy instead of using it to help humanity. The character believes that it’s completely narcissistic to work out for your health, because you’re only prolonging a self-centered life. People need to expend their energy making the world a better place. He goes out to the bike path with a baseball bat and attacks anyone who’s exercising.”

“I remember,” James said.

“In
my
version, the guy inflicts compound fractures so he can immobilize the victims. He drags them off into the bushes and leaves them there to cry for help. When people pass, if they help, then he lets them all go. If they try to pass without helping—more selfishness—then he tortures them even more than the original victim. He winds up with a whole group of people as bait. They’re all groaning in the bushes.”

“Could be worse,” James said, nodding.

She stared at him for a second before she continued. “It’s
horrible
. The guy keeps going until he’s hunted down by an angry mob. That was his intent all along—to spur people into altruistic action. And people are doing it! It’s so terrible.”

Danielle collapse to a stool and hugged her arms around herself. James reached for a box of tissues and pushed them in her direction.

“How many people?” he asked.

“I don’t know—that’s the thing. It seems to be happening more each night, like it’s going viral. I searched for my story online, and I found one place where a reader had mirrored it. Apparently, my site is slow when I come out with a new piece, so people copy it to other sites to make it easier to read. I didn’t even know. I don’t have any control over it. They’re calling it ‘Torture-cise’.”

“Danielle,” he said. Her name felt strange in his mouth, like it was a transgression for him to use it. He reached towards her, to comfort her, and then pulled his hand back. “It could be much worse. Some people got hurt. People get hurt every day. You can’t stop that.”

“But it’s gaining momentum,” she said. “The more they report about it, the more people are going to seek out the story. If the story is causing this, then who knows how many people will be involved in a week, or two weeks? What happens then?”

“Like you said—you don’t have any control over it. Unless you can make all these other people delete it, then what’s the sense in getting upset about it?”

Danielle threw up her hands and paced back and forth. Her range was limited by the stacks of boxes.

“How did this happen?” she asked. “You have to explain this to me.”

James sighed. “I don’t think I can explain it.”

“You must know,” she said. “You predicted it. You warned me about it. You made me write the story, and then you made me delete it so nobody else would read it. You must have known what the story was capable of. What makes that story so infectious?”

James shook his head.

“You’re lying,” she said.
 

“No. I’m not,” he said. “There’s nothing special about that story.”

“Bullshit!” she said. “If I hadn’t rewritten that story, I would have been out there bashing people myself. But at least it would have ended with me, right? You made me spread the thing. You turned me into the Typhoid Mary of Torture-cising.”

She stormed around him and banged through the door.

James shrugged and shook his head.

#
 
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James returned to his room, checked his alarm, and then tried to go back to sleep. Rest eluded him for a while, and then when he finally did get to sleep, his dreams were terrible. In all of them, he was eating. The fruit he ate was too sweet, and buzzing with tiny flies. He ate shrimp that was warm, and tasted like it had been sitting out in the sun. In his dreams, James picked the bones of rotting animals, trying to finish the flesh before it turned.

He woke with a stomach ache and acid burning at the back of his throat.

After brushing his teeth and eating a handful of antacids, he sat on his balcony with a bowl of cereal. He couldn’t force himself to eat it. His stomach remained a knotted mess, and the idea of food didn’t settle it.

James stared off into the leaves and watched as the sunlight waned. It was going to be a long night.

He didn’t even see Bo until his head appeared over the railing.

Bo climbed over and sat down before he said anything. Bo leaned to the side, pulled a newspaper from his back pocket, and held it towards James.

“I brought you this,” Bo said.

“I thought you weren’t talking to me.”

“You should read this,” Bo said. “It’s an afternoon edition. I didn’t even know they did that. Did you?”

James shrugged. He didn’t take the paper. Bo flopped it down in James’s lap. The corner of the paper landed in his cereal bowl and started to wick the milk. James still didn’t move to stop it.

“A lot of old people are afraid to turn on the news or go online, so they printed a special edition of the newspaper to keep everyone informed. I can’t believe it,” Bo said. “Do you even know about the curfew?”

James shook his head.

“Jesus, man. This is a giant barrel of shit you’ve unleashed on the world.”

“I didn’t do anything,” James said. “I never asked her to read that story. In fact, if you hadn’t meddled with me the other day, I might have died in peace and Danielle wouldn’t have been involved in this at all.”

“This is your mess,” Bo said. He turned his face upwards and spoke to the sky. “Don’t try to deny it. You knew what that story would do, and you probably know how to stop it.”

“No,” James said. “If I thought there was a way to stop it, I would. Whatever is happening will end on its own.”

“Whatever is happening? Society is collapsing—that’s what’s happening. Don’t you even realize the impact of what you set in motion?”

Bo looked at James. He didn’t reply or meet his gaze. James just sat there, letting the newspaper soak up the milk from his uneaten cereal, and staring off into the leaves.

“Reports are still rolling in of all the people attacked last night, James. There’s a curfew tonight. Nobody is allowed outside after dark, but a number of the attacks were committed by police officers last night, so they’re afraid that there won’t be enough people to enforce the curfew. In this neighborhood alone, there were two reported cases. Just in this little area. And
tons
of people read the story today. Danielle said that she thinks that anyone who read the story might try to attack tonight.”

“She’s right,” James said. “Once you read it, you’re infected.”

“Well that’s a big problem then, because the story has been reposted everywhere. Somewhere around noon today, some journalist in Denver figured out that two of the attackers had read Danielle’s story. He reposted a link to it, and now the site has a million hits. What do you think is going to happen when there are a million people out with bats, and clubs, and pipes, and they’re all trying to break bones?”

“Danielle said the story was about attacking exercisers,” James said.

“I guess. I haven’t read it. Fortunately, she told me to stay away from it. But not everyone who was attacked was exercising. One guy broke into his neighbor’s house and began beating people who were just asleep in their beds. They weren’t exactly exercising.”

“Maybe it was unconnected?”

“What are the odds of that?” Bo asked.

James shrugged.

“I’ve got to go. I’m out of time,” James said. He still had another twenty minutes before sundown, but he was weary of Bo’s accusations.

“No,” Bo said. “There has to be a way to fix this. Was the story cursed or something? I don’t even believe in that bullshit, but tell me—how can reading a story make people want to hurt strangers?”

James turned to him and looked him in the eye for the first time that day. He sat up straight and the bowl and newspaper fell to the deck.

“I have thousands of stories in there, Bo.
Thousands
. Every single one of them is about something terrible that a person did to friends, family, and strangers. And every single one of them is just as infectious as the one Danielle published. I’m not happy about it, and if there were anything in the world I could do to stop it, I would. But, for now, this the world we live in, and if I don’t go write, then something even worse is going to happen tonight.”

Bo didn’t respond. James stood and unlocked his door. He let himself in and Bo heard the lock click into place.

CHAPTER 19: NIGHT

H
IS
FINGERS
GRIPPED
HIS
pen so tight that they turned white. All the blood was pressed away from the skin. His hand cramped and threatened to give out. James kept his left hand limber, and ready to take over if his right hand stopped working.

The story was terrible. It was about a hospital worker who harvested organs from the living and sewed them into the dead.
 

He thought he was accustomed to gore, but he dragged the little trashcan out from under his desk and vomited hot, stringy, bile as he wrote. James felt his stomach flip and twist.

Sometime during the night, he heard three bangs on his metal door.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

He kept his hand moving while he glanced up and looked at the door, waiting for the person to bang again.

The next set of bangs was muffled—the person was banging on his neighbor’s door. James didn’t know their names.

James returned his focus to the story. The hospital worker was feeding human brains to feral cats who lived behind the hospital. They seemed to enjoy a break from the dumpster rats and snacked on the brains with joy.
 

After a few more bangs, he heard an answer shouted by his neighbor.

“Go away! We’re not opening.”

Instead of banging again, whomever was at the door began swinging hammering blows on the door. James looked over and thought he could see his own wall shaking as the person assaulted the neighbor’s door. His neighbor was shouting—begging the intruder to go away. The nature of the sound changed. James imagined that if he were to get up and look out his peephole, he would see the neighbor’s door beginning to buckle under the blows.

Through the walls, he heard his neighbor scream.

James kept writing.

Crashing and banging met his ears, but he kept writing. He had to keep his pace constant, or he would lose his story. The hours marched on towards dawn and the sounds faded. With only an hour left to go, his right hand failed. A cramp tightened his grip around the pen and he could only move the hand in big, jerking motions. James tried to pull the pen from his grip and quickly gave up. He moved his right arm away and picked up a fresh pen with his left hand. His writing was slow and awkward at first, but he found his rhythm again. He finished the night as his fresh muscles were just starting to twitch and warm up.

James was exhausted. His hunger had flared during the night and then evaporated once he was free to eat. In one of his cupboards, he found a nutritional supplement drink that offered to “Support Digestive Health,” and “Maintain Muscle Mass.” He shook it as he headed for the balcony.

When he slid the door to the side and slipped by his drapes, the world looked different. It looked unkempt. It seemed like the neighborhood had stayed awake on a bender, and forgotten to change its clothes. In the parking lot, several cars were parked askew. Windshields and driver’s windows had been beaten out. Tires had been slashed.

In the lawn, a bicycle sat in the center of a burned out circle of grass. The ground was charred black and accented with white and gray ashes.

As he stepped outside, James heard a light knock on his front door. He ignored it and slid the door closed behind himself. He used his key to lock the door from the outside. James leaned over his railing and sipped at the milky drink. It tasted too sweet, but it coated his stomach and quelled some of the burning. He tried a larger gulp.
 

Movement caught his eye, and he turned to see a shape appear at the entrance of the building. The person bolted, running in a low hunch for the parking lot. It was an older man—someone James didn’t recognize. The man didn’t stop at any of the cars. He weaved through the parking lot and disappeared through the bushes on the opposite side of the lot.

James tried a bigger sip of the drink. He wondered if there were any more inside. He’d only seen one in the cupboard, but he hadn’t really delved into the darkness there. He couldn’t remember buying them, but he sometimes ordered random things with his groceries. James checked the date on his watch. It was about time to order more groceries.

He heard a voice call out in a hoarse whisper from below. “Hey!”

James leaned over the side to see who was talking. In the distance, he heard a hollow popping sound.

“Hey!”
 

He saw him. Bo was looking out from the entrance of the building.

“Open your damn door,” Bo said.

“Just climb up.”

“Fuck that,” Bo said. “Open your damn door. It’s not safe.”

James finished his nutritional drink and turned back towards the sliding door. As he slid the door shut behind him, he heard more popping sounds. There was a light, insistent knocking at his front door.

He wound between the stacks of boxes and opened the door. Bo slipped in and shut it behind himself. He locked it, too.

“Mr. Martin didn’t make it,” Bo said.

“Who?”

“Your neighbor,” Bo said, pointing. “Someone broke into his place last night and bashed his brains in.”