For his stash-the-cash hideaways he used an identity pieced together from fragments he’d appropriated by stealth attacks on fuzzily fenced targets, such as 3-D avatar gaming destinations, AdoptAFish and similar bioweepy charities, and Feel-iT-enabled porno installations in suburban malls. (“Haptic feedback gives you true, stimulating flesh-on-flesh sensations! Say goodbye to faked screams and groans, this is the real thing! Warning: Do Not Expose Your Electronic Device to Moisture. Do Not Place Terminals in Your Mouth or Other Mucous Membrane Regions. Severe Burns May Result.”)
No surprise, really, for Zeb to discover during one of his trolling expeditions that the Rev himself was a frequent visitor to the haptic wanksites, though he indulged himself at home — he couldn’t afford to be caught in a mall — and hid the feedback terminals in his golf club bag. He favoured those sites involving whips, penetration with bottles, and nipple-burning. He was also a big fan of the historical re-enactment beheading sites, which were relatively expensive, maybe because of the props and costumes — “Mary, Queen of Scots: Feel This Hot Red-Head Spurt,” “Anne Boleyn: Royal Slut! Did It with Her Brother, She’ll Do It with You, Then You Get to Slice Her Dirty Little Neck,” “Katherine Howard: Turn This Stone Cold Fox Stone Cold with One Whack of Your Powerful Blade,” “Lady Jane Grey: Make This Elite Virgin Pay the Price of Snootiness, Blindfold Optional.” These gave you the sensation, right in your own hands, of what it felt like to decapitate a woman with an axe. (“Fun! Historic! Educational!”)
For extra payment you could decapitate them without their clothes on, which was more exciting. Zeb took a few turns at it himself — courtesy of the Rev’s account, which he cooked accordingly — so he had grounds for the clothes versus naked comparison. A naked woman on her knees, about to lose her head — why was this riveting? Was he callous or a psychopath or something? No, psychopaths had a brain chip missing, according to Adam, who read up on these things. They couldn’t feel empathy; screaming and tears were just annoying noises as far as they were concerned. So they couldn’t feel shitty and/or pervy about what they were doing, not like Zeb.
He thought about hacking in and recoding the program so that when the axe came down you got the sensation not in your hands but in your own neck. What would it feel like to have your head chopped off? Would it hurt, or would the shock cancel that out? Or would you get a rush of empathy? But too much empathy could be dangerous. Your heart might stop.
Were those naked, kneeling, and shortly to be headless women real or not? He guessed not because reality online was different from the everyday kind of reality, where things hurt your body. And they wouldn’t be allowed to murder real women right onscreen: surely that was illegal. But the effects were so amazing and 3-D that you ducked the gush of blood.
Adam didn’t see the attraction of these activities once he found out about them, which he did because Zeb couldn’t resist the urge to share his knowledge about the Rev’s secret life. Which was now also, to some extent, his own.
“That is depraved,” was Adam’s comment.
“Right! That’s the point! What are you, gay?” Zeb said, but Adam only smiled.
The Rev’s frustrated kink urges must have been in need of an outlet: Zeb was now too large and surly to take a chance on as a sado-subject. He might hit back, and the Rev was at heart a coward, so the belting and piss-drinking and imprisonment were now in the past. Nor was Trudy an option for the warped bastard, since — despite her stand-by-your-mealticket subservience — she would never put up with leather halters and nipple piercing and flagellation with a cane, or eating her own excrement. Information is power, so Zeb thanked his lucky stars for the online haptic-feedback sites, and made a record of the number of times the Rev had used them, and took care to store away this Santa’s packsack of red velvet information for future use. Though the Rev might manage to electrocute himself via his own dick in the meantime — blow himself up like an overboiled hotdog — and Zeb would sure like to be an eye at the keyhole for that hilarious little fiasco. He briefly considered rewiring the haptic terminals to achieve this very effect, but was unsure of the voltage it would take. A Rev just badly scorched rather than no-refunds dead could mean big trouble: he’d figure out who did it, for sure.
By this time Zeb had magic fingers: he could play code the way Mozart played the piano, he could warble in cuneiform, he could waltz through firewalls like a tiger of old leaping through a flaming circus hoop without singeing a whisker. He could slip into the PetrOleum Church accounting — both sets of books, the official set and the actual one — in a few swift moves, and he did, on a regular basis. This went on for a couple of years, as the.09 per cents piled up, and Zeb grew taller and sprouted more body hair, and worked out in the gym at CapRock Prep, where he took care to keep in the middle of the bell curve gradeswise, especially in IT, so that his extraterrestrial hacking talents would not be suspected.
In six months he would graduate, and what then? He had some notions, but so did his parental overseers. The Rev had made it known that through his connections he could get Zeb a coveted job in the northern oil desert, driving one of the humungous machines that wrangled oil-rich bituminous gravel. It would make a man of Zeb, he said, leaving the possible definition of man floating in the air between them. (Child torturer? Religious fraudster? Online girl decapitator?) Also, the money was good. Then, when he’d done that for a while, Zeb could decide on what calling he wished to pursue.
There were three subtexts to this: 1) The Rev wanted Zeb to go very far away because he was beginning to be afraid of him, and rightly so. 2) With any luck, Zeb would get lung cancer, or a third eye, or scales like an armadillo: the air up there was so toxic you mutated in about a week.
And 3) Zeb was not brilliant. Not like Adam, who — in the hopes that he would carry on in the old man’s fraudchurch biz — had been sent to Spindletop U. and had majored in PetrTheology, Homiletics, and PetrBiology; this last, as far as Zeb could see, required you to learn biology in order to disprove it. That took a certain kind of intellectual adroitness, a kind — it was implied — that Zeb lacked. Galley slave would be more his level.
“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” said Trudy. “You should be so grateful to your father for taking all that trouble. Not every boy has a father like yours.”
Smile, Zeb ordered himself. “I know,” he said. The word smile meant “carving knife” in Greek. He’d found that on the web, when he wasn’t decapitating historical figures.
Zeb missed Adam when he wasn’t there, and he suspected it was mutual. Who else could they talk to about the improbable sublayers of their lives? Who else could do a hilarious word-for-word imitation of the Rev’s Prayer to Saint Lucic-Lucas, to whom God had revealed the Holy Oil?
When they were apart they avoided text messages, phone calls, or anything else with an electronic signaclass="underline" the internet, as was well known, leaked like a prostate cancer patient, and the Rev was most likely snooping, if not on Adam, at least on Zeb. But when Adam would come back for vacations it was old-home week. Zeb would welcome him with an amphibian in the shoe or an arthropod in the cufflink box or a burr or two artfully stuck onto the inside of his Y-fronts, though they were getting too old for this kind of japery, so it was more of a nostalgia thing.
Then they’d go out onto the tennis court and pretend to play a game, and murmur together in brief snatches across the net, comparing notes. Zeb would want to know if Adam had got laid yet, a question that was skilfully evaded. Adam would want to know how much money Zeb had skimmed off from the Church and sequestered in his secret stowaway accounts, since it was their firm plan to disappear from the Rev’s charmed circle once they had sufficient funds.