A surveillance photo, set slightly askew. Peering in through a window at a man frozen in action.
It is a second-story window, perched directly above a protected front door. The eaves above and below are coated in several inches of snow. On the other side of the glass, a young man is glancing back over his shoulder into the unseen depths of the room. He is wearing a black knit cap and a thick winter jacket. His mouth is open, and his arms are raised at his side, caught in midgesture. He is talking. Or arguing. The lines on his face convey a look of pure frustration.
It is a moment of candid emotion, caught and frozen in time.
There are no furnishings visible in the room behind him, nothing but a small swatch of wall. A blue light glows somewhere out of view, coloring the wall a vibrant shade and tinting the man’s pale complexion. It is a subtle light, but it stands out inside that frame within a frame—a touch of color inside an otherwise monochrome image. It makes it look like the man is trapped under tropical water or frozen inside a cube of polar-blue ice.
We can’t see who he’s talking to.
08.2
The snow was thick on the ground by the time I got out of bed. Almost five inches. Practically a blizzard by my sunny-California standards. The snow was still falling, but it was now just a tiny flurry, nothing but dust and smoke particles floating in the air.
It felt like my head had been stuffed full of foam and string sometime during the night. And my hand had resumed its loud complaints.
My jeans lay draped over the back of the folding chair, and as soon as I got out of bed, I dug through its pockets, coming up with the remaining oxycodone. There were three left and I considered taking them all, but I ended up just popping a single pill. The night before was a real blur—a slide show of motion snapping past inside my head—and I didn’t want to fall back into that haze. I wanted to stay sharp. I had work to do.
Besides, I told myself, my hand doesn’t feel that bad.
Unfortunately, this reassurance didn’t really help, as the thought of unwinding my bandages and checking on my damaged flesh still filled me with a sense of dread. It was something I didn’t want to think about, something I didn’t want to deal with. Not yet.
I got dressed, adding an extra flannel shirt to my layers of clothing. Then I stood at the window for a while, staring out at the snow-shrouded street. It was a still, pristine tableau. There were no cars or pedestrians, no hint of animal life. The entire world had been hidden beneath a thick alabaster blanket. I looked for tracks in the snow, but there was nothing there. Not a single footprint.
Not a single paw print, either, I thought, remembering the surge of wolves flowing down this very street.
On the way downstairs, I paused for a moment outside Floyd’s open door. He lay passed out atop his covers, fully clothed. His guitar case sat propped against the wall near his head, and his hands were smeared with dried blood. He was snoring.
The rest of the bedroom doors were all closed. The only sound in the upstairs hallway was the low, regular drone of Floyd’s breath.
Downstairs, I once again found Charlie sitting at the kitchen table, typing away at his notebook computer. When I entered, he glanced up briefly, and then nodded toward a French Press sitting on the kitchen counter. “I made coffee,” he said. “Help yourself.” Before I could thank him—before I could say a single word—he looked back down at his computer, once again losing himself in the glowing screen. I could practically hear the gears clicking away inside his head. In those brief moments, my presence had been noted, analyzed, and filed away. His thoughts had moved on. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at his side.
“When are you sending stuff out next?” I asked, idly rapping a knuckle against the back of his screen. “When does your thumb drive go back out into the world?”
“Taylor said tonight,” Charlie replied, not looking up. “She’s giving it to her friend tonight.”
“If I wanted to post something—to a forum, a message board—could I do that? Could you program something to do that?”
Charlie’s fingers fell silent on the keyboard, and he glanced up. I watched as his forehead scrunched up in lines of concentration, his unfixed stare drifting up toward the ceiling. I’d managed to capture his attention.
“Is it a public message board? What type of security are we talking about?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. You log into an account, then type stuff into a box.”
Charlie laughed and shook his head, then fell silent. His stare remained fixed on an imaginary spot above my shoulder. After a handful of seconds, his eyes refocused. “You have your computer here, right? Did you browse the site recently?”
I nodded. “Probably the last thing I read.”
He smiled. “Then bring it to me. I bet you ten bucks—if it’s still in the cache, I can do it. I can post whatever you want.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s incredible.” Charlie’s eyes flickered back toward his computer, and I could tell I was about to lose him again.
“Are you scared?” I asked, seizing the moment. “About what might come back? On the drive? In your email?”
He stopped, hands frozen over the keyboard. For a moment, I thought I’d pushed him too far. Then he smiled.
“No,” he said. “It’s them, my parents. I figured it out. They’re trying to get to me, trying to tell me something. And that’s what I want… to find them, to contact them.
“And when it’s time, it’ll all become clear. They’ll reach me, or I’ll reach them.” Charlie once again had that distant look in his eyes, like he was grappling with some technical problem, trying to figure out how to make something work. “It’s the message, you see, not the form it takes. I just have to figure out what they’re trying to say.”
He turned back toward his computer, dismissing me abruptly. I could see two windows open on his screen. One was filled with code, and the other showed his mother on the corner of Second Avenue and Sherman Street. Charlie had zoomed the picture in on her haunted expression.
I felt bad for him. The only message I could read there, in that close-up, was a message of fear: Charlie’s mother looking back over her shoulder with that frightened look on her face, like she wasn’t alone on that abandoned street, like there was something else there, chasing her. Something horrible.
Amanda and Mac were playing in the backyard when I finished up my coffee. They were having a snowball fight. Amanda was hiding behind a row of rosebushes while Mac lobbed projectiles high into the air, sending them raining down like artillery shots. After a round of sorties, Amanda popped up over the line of bushes and whipped a snowball directly at his head, sending him toppling over.
Their laughter was high and bright, a counterpoint to Charlie’s insistent tap-tap-tap.
Amanda stuck her head in through the back door. “Me against you three,” she panted. “Mac needs the help. He’s getting his ass kicked out here!” A snowball hit the window at her side, and she turned, laughing, to once again join the fray.
Charlie’s fingers didn’t even pause on the keyboard. After Amanda disappeared, he started sucking at his teeth absently, filling the room with a wet, slurping sound. I set my empty coffee cup in the kitchen sink, then headed upstairs to start work on my forum post.
Taylor’s door was right across from the stairwell, and I paused when I reached it. I listened for a moment, then knocked tentatively. There was no response. I pushed, and the door swung open. The room was empty, her bed neatly made. Early riser, I thought. Already out in the world, doing whatever it is she does in the morning.