Stephen King - End of Watch

As a senior, Brady wrote his only A paper, for a half-assed sociology class called American Life. The paper was called ‘American Deathways: A Brief Study of Suicide in the US’. In it he cited the statistics for 1999, then the most recent year for which they were available. More than forty thousand people had killed themselves during that year, usually with guns (the most reliable go-to method), but with pills running a close second. They also hung themselves, drowned themselves, bled out, stuck their heads in gas ovens, set themselves on fire, and rammed their cars into bridge abutments. One inventive fellow (this Brady did not put into his report; even then he was careful not to be branded an oddity) stuck a 220-volt line up his rectum and electrocuted himself. In 1999, suicide was the tenth leading cause of death in America, and if you added in the ones that were reported as accidents or ‘natural causes,’ it would undoubtedly be right up there with heart disease, cancer, and car crashes. Most likely still behind them, but not far behind.

Brady quoted Albert Camus, who said, ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.’

He also quoted a famous psychiatrist named Raymond Katz, who stated flatly, ‘Every human being is born with the suicide gene.’ Brady did not bother to add the second part of Katz’s statement, because he felt it took some of the drama out of it: ‘In most of us, it remains dormant.’

In the ten years between his graduation from high school and that disabling moment in the Mingo Auditorium, Brady’s fascination with suicide – including his own, always seen as part of some grand and historic gesture – continued.

This seed has now, against all the odds, fully blossomed.

He will be the Jim Jones of the twenty-first century.

Forty miles north of the city, he can wait no longer. Brady pulls into a rest area on 1-47, kills the laboring engine of Z-Boy’s Malibu, and powers up Babineau’s laptop. There’s no WiFi here, as there is at some rest areas, but thanks to Big Momma Verizon, there’s a cell tower not four miles away, standing tall against the thickening clouds. Using Babineau’s MacBook Air, he can go anywhere he wants and never have to leave this nearly deserted parking lot. He thinks (and not for the first time) that a touch of telekinesis is nothing compared to the power of the Internet. He’s sure thousands of suicides have incubated in the potent soup of its social media sites, where the trolls run free and the bullying goes on endlessly. That’s real mind over matter.

He’s not able to type as fast as he’d like to – the damp air pushing in with the coming storm has worsened the arthritis in Babineau’s fingers – but eventually the laptop is mated to the high-powered gear back in Freddi Linklatter’s computer room. He won’t have to stay mated to it for long. He clicks on a hidden file he placed on the laptop during one of his previous visits inside Babineau’s head.

He centers the cursor on Y, hits the return key, then waits. The worry-circle goes around and around and around. Just as he’s begun to wonder if something has gone wrong, the laptop flashes the message he’s been waiting for:

Good. Zeetheend is just a little icing on the cake. He has been able to disseminate only a limited number of Zappits – and a significant portion of his shipment was defective, for Christ’s sake – but teenagers are herd creatures, and herd creatures are in mental and emotional lockstep. It’s why fish school and bees swarm. It’s why the swallows come back each year to Capistrano. In human behavior, it’s why ‘the wave’ goes around at football and baseball stadiums, and why individuals will lose themselves in a crowd simply because the crowd is there.

Teenage boys have a tendency to wear the same baggy shorts and grow the same scruff on their faces, lest they be excluded from the herd. Teenage girls adopt the same styles of dress and go crazy for the same musical groups. It’s We R Your Bruthas this year; not so long ago it was ’Round Here and One Direction. Back in the day it was New Kids on the Block. Fads sweep through teenagers like a measles epidemic, and from time to time, one of those fads is suicide. In southern Wales, dozens of teens hung themselves between 2007 and 2009, with messages on social networking sites stoking the craze. Even the goodbyes they left were couched in Netspeak: Me2 and CU L8er.

Wildfires vast enough to burn millions of acres can be started by a single match thrown into dry brush. The Zappits Brady has distributed through his human drones are hundreds of matches. Not all of them will light, and some of those that do won’t stay lit. Brady knows this, but he has zeetheend.com to serve as both backstop and accelerant. Will it work? He’s far from sure, but time is too short for extensive tests.

And if it does?

Teen suicides all over the state, maybe all over the Midwest. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. How would you like that, ex-Detective Hodges? Would that improve your retirement, you meddlesome old fuck?

He swaps Babineau’s laptop for Z-Boy’s game console. It’s fitting to use this one. He thinks of it as Zappit Zero, because it’s the first one he ever saw, on the day Al Brooks brought it into his room, thinking Brady might like it. Which he did. Oh yes, very much.

The extra program, with the number-fish and the subliminal messages, hasn’t been added to this one, because Brady doesn’t need it. Those things are strictly for the targets. He watches the fish swim back and forth, using them to settle and focus, then closes his eyes. At first there’s only darkness, but after a few moments red lights begin to appear – more than fifty now. They are like dots on a computer map, except they don’t remain stationary. They swim back and forth, left to right, up and down, crisscrossing. He settles on one at random, his eyes rolling beneath his closed lids as he follows its progress. It begins to slow, and slow, and slow. It stills, then starts growing bigger. It opens like a flower.

He’s in a bedroom. There’s a girl, staring fixedly down at the fish on her own Zappit, which she received free from badconcert.com. She’s in her bed because she didn’t go to school today. Maybe she said she was sick.

‘What’s your name?’ Brady asks.

Sometimes they just hear a voice coming from the game console, but the ones who are most susceptible actually see him, like some kind of avatar in a video game. This girl is one of the latter, an auspicious beginning. But they always respond better to their names, so he’ll keep saying it. She looks without surprise at the young man sitting beside her on the bed. Her face is pale. Her eyes are dazed.

‘I’m Ellen,’ she says. ‘I’m looking for the right numbers.’

Of course you are, he thinks, and slips into her. She’s forty miles south of him, but once the demo screen has opened them, distance doesn’t matter. He could control her, turn her into one of his drones, but he doesn’t want to do that any more than he wanted to slip into Mrs Trelawney’s house some dark night and cut her throat. Murder isn’t control; murder is just murder.

Suicide is control.

‘Are you happy, Ellen?’

‘I used to be,’ she says. ‘I could be again, if I find the right numbers.’

Brady gives her a smile that’s both sad and charming. ‘Yes, but the numbers are like life,’ he says. ‘Nothing adds up, Ellen. Isn’t that true?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Tell me something, Ellen – what are you worried about?’ He could find it himself, but it will be better if she tells him. He knows there’s something, because everyone worries, and teenagers worry most of all.