But in combination the two of them were pretty effective. They were joined at the head: Zeb was the bad one who was good at bad things, Adam was the good one who was bad at good things. Or who used good things as a front for his bad things. Adam and Zebulon: bookends, as in the alphabet. That cute A — Z name symmetry was the Rev’s idea: he liked to theme-park everything.
Adam was always being held up as an example. Why couldn’t Zeb behave well, the way his brother did? Sit up straight, don’t squirm, eat properly, your hand is not a fork, don’t wipe your face on your shirt, do what your father says, say yes sir and no sir, and so on. That was how Trudy would talk, almost begging; all she wanted was peace and quiet, she didn’t really enjoy the consequences of Zeb’s pushbacks and sulkiness — the welts and bruises and scars. She wasn’t a sadist as such, not like the Rev. But she was the centre of her own universe, big-time. She wanted the perks, and the Rev was the ever-flowing source of the cash that paid for them.
After telling Zeb what a model kid Adam was, she would go on to say that Adam’s line-toeing was all the more special, all the more praiseworthy, considering … then she would trail off because Adam’s mother, Fenella, was never mentioned at length if Trudy and the Rev could help it. You’d think they’d have used her and her scandalous douchebag behaviour as a stick to beat Adam with — disparage his genetic inheritance — but they never did. He was too good at innocence, or the show of it, with his big blue eyes and his thin, saintly looking face.
Zeb got hold of some old photos of Fenella — they were on a thumbdrive, at the bottom of a storage box in the closet, the one he was frequently locked into. He’d hidden a mini-light in there so he could see in the dark. He found the drive, then nicked it and plugged it into the Rev’s computer to see what would happen. The thing still worked: there were about thirty pics of Fenella, some with tiny Adam, a few with the Rev, none of them smiling much. The thumbdrive must’ve been an oversight because there were no other pictures of Fenella in the house. She didn’t look in any way slutty; she had the same thin, truthful, big-eyed look that Adam had.
Zeb had quite a crush on her: if only he could talk to her and tell her what was going on she would be on his side, she’d despise the whole setup as much as he did. She must have done, because hadn’t she run away? Though she didn’t look like the running-away type, she didn’t look strong enough.
Sometimes he felt jealous of Adam, because he’d once had Fenella for his mother, and all Zeb had was Trudy. Then he’d let resentment of Adam’s failsafe punishment evasion system get the better of him, and he’d mess with Adam in private: turd in the bed, dead mouse in the sink, switch the hot and cold taps in their shower — he’d figured out plumbing by then — or just apple-pie his sheets. Boy meanies. The Rev had done well out of his oil stocks, in addition to the gushing wells of his parishioners’ savings, and they lived in a big house, with Trudy and the Rev at the opposite end to Adam and Zeb. So if Adam yelped they wouldn’t hear him. Though he never did yelp; he just beamed out the reproachful I-forgive-you gaze that was ten times more annoying.
Sometimes Zeb would tease Adam about Fenella. He’d say she must have tattoos all over, tits and all; he’d say she was a cokehead; he’d say she went off with a biker, no, a dozen bikers, did them all, one after the other; he’d say she was peddling it on the street in Vegas to deranged addicts and syphilitic pimps. Why was he saying those gross and repugnant things about the woman he considered his other self, his fairy-dust spirit helper, next door to a marble goddess? Who knows?
The strange thing was, Adam didn’t talk back. He’d just smile in an eerie way, as if he knew something Zeb didn’t.
Adam never ratted about Zeb’s juvenile pranks. Even then he was a secretive little bugger. Anyway, the two of them mostly worked as a team. At school — CapRock Prep, a private school funded by one of the OilCorps, boys only — they were known as the Holy PetrOleum Brats because of their dad’s position, but nobody picked on them openly, not once Zeb was big enough. Adam alone would have been a sitting duck, he was so stringy and transparent; but if anyone lifted a finger in his direction, Zeb would beat the crap out of them. He only had to do that twice. Word got around.
Schillizzi’s Hands
In face of the brainwashing team of Trudy and the Rev, Adam and Zeb took joint evasive action. What were they evading, apart from punishment? Anything that might lead in the direction of the path of righteousness, the Holy PetrOleum Path, the path the Rev and Trudy were forever urging them to tread.
In Adam’s case, this action took the form of blue-eyed lying — he could make just about anyone except Zeb think he was innocent as an egg unlaid — whereas Zeb had the instincts of a sneak thief. Time spent in the punishment closet had its upside, hairpins had their uses, and it was not long before he had the secret run of the house, tiptoeing through the bureau drawers and emails of his elders while they believed him securely imprisoned among the winter coats and outdated consumer electronics. Lockpicking became his hobby, and soon enough, with the aid of clandestine sessions on the school’s digital facilities and free time at the public library, hacking became his vocation. In his fantasy world no code could keep him out, no door could shut him in, and fantasy merged into reality the older and more practised he became.
At first he stuck to porno peepsites and pirated acid rock and freakshow music — all forbidden by the Church, needless to say: it went in for buttoned-up collars and public chastity vows, and its music sucked like a thousand Monster Leeches from Outer Space. So Zeb would earphone the Luminescent Corpses or the Pancreatic Cancers or the Bipolar Albino Hookworms while trolling onscreen for ever-new and cunningly deployed girl body parts. No harm in it really: they’d already made the videos, so what he was doing was just a form of time travel. He wasn’t causing anything.
Then, once he felt ready, he decided to up the ante and really test his powers.
The Church of PetrOleum was high-tech enabled, with a dozen sophisticated online social media and donation sites skimming the cash from the faithful 24/7. The security on those sites was supposed to be as foolproof as such things got, with two layers of coding knitware any potential klepto would have to penetrate before making off with the debit accounts. And the system did keep out such kleptos; but it had no defence against an insider job, such as the one Zeb managed to pull off so spectacularly when he was barely sixteen.
The Rev’s weak point was his belief in his own invulnerability, so he was careless; and as he had no head for number-letter combos, he wrote down passwords. Then he hid them in places so obvious even the Easter Bunny would scoff. The cufflink box? The toes of the Sunday shoes? Retro-cretin, sighed Zeb, extracting the wafers of paper, memorizing their cryptic scribblings, then replacing box or shoe in its exact previous location.
Once possessed of the keys to the kingdom, Zeb diverted the river of donations — not all of it, a mere.09 per cent, margin of error, he wasn’t lobotomized — into several accounts of his own devising, making sure that the donors got the standard grovelling thank-you and guilt-inducing pep-talk message from the church, plus a hate slogan or two directed at the Enemies of God’s Holy Oiclass="underline" “Solar Panels Are Satan’s Work,” “Eco Equals FreakO,” “The Devil Wants You to Freeze in the Dark,” “Serial Killers Believe in Global Warming.”