Мэтт Рихтел - Dead on Arrival

He got out of the vehicle, sensing Alex and Jerry were watching his every move. He guessed that Jerry would be furious he’d had this intimate exchange with Eleanor, face-to-face.

“You gotta see something,” Jerry said. “Get a load of this.”

He was standing in the doorway of the house, gesturing to Lyle. Every part of Lyle wanted to ignore him.

“What are you afraid of, Lover Boy?” Jerry said.

Lyle saw that Jerry was trying to play off his lover boy comment as no big thing. He was clearly pissed while Alex’s face was implacable.

“What are you afraid of?” Jerry repeated and gestured Lyle over with his gun. Lyle couldn’t figure a way around it. He walked up the slick stairs onto the porch. He stared down at the body and then peeked inside the house and found himself fascinated. What was it about this place and this man that left him unharmed—well, until he was gunned down? The first thing Lyle saw was the image of the serpent. Along the far wall on the first floor, a banner hung with a picture of a snake. Lyle took a step inside. It smelled of cooking, boiled meat, Lyle guessed, coming from an open-style kitchen separated from the room where Lyle stood by a yellow linoleum countertop. The place was lit by a camping lamp. It showed a couch with a blanket folded neatly across it and a recliner. Along the wall to the right, a startling sight: stacks of canned goods—corn was the first thing that struck Lyle’s eye, and peas and chili—and cases of bottled water. Someone was ready for the apocalypse. To the left, there was a trophy case made of thick glass. It was filled not with trophies but with guns, big, powerful guns, stacked horizontally.

In the middle of the room, though, were the two things that most caught Lyle’s attention: a camping light that lit the cabin and a small black radio.

“What is that?” Lyle asked Jerry.

“Narrowband radio.”

“Who uses it?”

“Public safety folks, hobbyists. You know what kills me?”

“What?”

“I took out one of the good guys.”

“What do you mean?”

“Prepper.”

Lyle took his meaning and knew it was right. This dead guy was one of those militarized citizens who was “prepping,” preparing for the collapse of the government or society. Not just planning for it but hoping for it, probably. When the whole thing collapsed, the spoils would go to the ones who had stocked up on guns and food and the tools of survival.

Lyle started walking through the house taking everything in. The place was orderly to the point of being pristine. A room behind the kitchen was too dark to make out but seemed to be an office. A doorway to the right of the kitchen was padlocked. Back in the living room, he looked at the banner of the serpent: Don’t Tread on Me.

Jerry was no longer in the room. Alex fiddled with her phone.

“I’m getting a signal,” she said. “I think the network is back.”

Lyle couldn’t pinpoint what was so extraordinary about this place.

“Something’s changed,” Alex said. “Things are making sense to you.”

He stared at her. Was she turning insane?

“I don’t know you that well but you seem to be in a kind of thrall,” she said.

“He doesn’t have electricity,” Lyle answered. “That’s it. He’s off the grid.” He looked again at Alex. “Tell me how you’re feeling? Does your head hurt?

“Have you stopped limping?”

He stared at her leg. It no longer had that nuanced rectitude in it. He shook his head, wondering what to make of this new puzzle piece. Something about her immune system? No, it meant something else.

“You don’t really care about her,” Alex said, ignoring his question.

“I think you need to lie down.”

“Eleanor, the captain. That was an act, wasn’t it?”

Outside, the car honked. It honked again.

Alex smirked. “I’ve been watching you.”

He stopped now and stared at her as if she were lying on the autopsy bed. Outside, the honking was going nonstop.

“Please, lie down,” Lyle said. He started walking to the door. He felt his phone buzz. Then he felt Alex’s hand on his arm. He turned and saw an odd look on her face, like she had grand plans.

The horn outside the cabin continued to blare. “They’re in trouble,” Lyle said to Alex. It wasn’t the sort of stupid obvious thing he usually said, but this woman was well more than unnerving him. What the hell was she talking about?

“It’s only the beginning.”

“What?”

“This is alpha, not even beta, not quite the way it should go. Give me a month to work the kinks out. You helped find them, the kinks. Of course you did, I knew you would. We needed a genius, the world did, and there you were.” She paused. “I had no idea it wouldn’t work on kids. I’m glad, of course. They need it so much less.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Better days ahead.”

“What did you say you do at Google?”

He looked at the door, wondering how he was going to just get past this person.

“You won’t feel a thing, Dr. Martin.”

Then, for some reason, he found himself staring at her hat. There was something odd about it; hadn’t he thought so all along? It looked like wool, sort of, but it had these metallic strands built into it. Gold colored. Gold, right? Like that rectangle he’d found on the flight deck door.

He felt his phone buzz again. Did she say she’d gotten a signal? He pulled out his phone and thought about Melanie. She was out there, and her son. He reached the door and caught a glimpse of what was out there. Jerry lay on his back in the snow; in the pickup, Eleanor’s face was buried in the steering wheel, where she must have been—

Lyle’s phone buzzed. He swiped at it and saw the image of the cover of an album that he’d been listening to when he fell asleep on the plane.

Everything went black.

During that first trip to the Nevada desert to see Lantern, Jackie spent two mornings watching study subjects interact on the computer through the thick, soundproof two-way mirror. She and Denny would be on one side and the subject on the other, using a phone or tablet, sitting at a table or a recliner, whatever felt comfortable. The instructions to the participants were open-ended and simple: visit any sites you like, however you’d spend your time on the Internet—Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, the New York Times .

“Porn?” asked the first morning’s subject, a lanky woman who commuted a hundred miles to work at Walmart. “I’m kidding!”

Jackie felt kinship with her. Something sad in the corners of her mouth, a telltale sign of bleached short hairs over her lip. The woman loved Twitter. Her first stop that morning had been to see what was trending. A monitor in front of Jackie mirrored what the subject was doing. A second monitor showed Jackie a handful of changing external variables, including the speed of the Internet connection being fed to the study subject, frame rate of the images, the pixelation. Denny sat behind her reading a hard copy of the local newspaper. It was an uneventful ninety minutes. Nothing particularly stood out. On the memory test, the woman fared little better than a control. They broke for lunch.

Upstairs in the warehouse-like setting of Google’s Lantern offices, Denny excused himself to the restroom and Jackie looked out over the office setting. It struck her as odd. The pair of Alexes was gone. Maybe it was because it was lunch. Still, the Ping-Pong table looked unused. She counted six cubicles in two pods. Only a single computer monitor gleamed with electricity. Most of the cubicles looked empty. One included a stack of manila folders. Jackie had taken a step in its direction when she heard Denny’s footsteps.