“Do you want me to stop, Ms. Knoll?”
“IF YOU STOP I WILL KILL YOU.”
And so he did not stop, until her orgasmic cries filled the lonely halls of her modest home. John thrusted his staff into the moist—
Me
“John,” I said into my phone, “it is really, really important that you give me the actual story and not a bunch of bullshit. The truth is enough, you don’t need to sex it up. So, please, back up and just boil it down to the parts that, you know, actually happened. The thing with the drawings of the church, that was real, right?”
“Yeah, a little traditional country style church, like you’d see on a postcard. White, steeple, probably some stained glass.”
“Like the one at Mine’s Eye?” That’s a little wooded area with a pond around what had been a coal mine back in the olden days.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, meet me there. The creepy kid drawing thing is a little cliché but it’s literally the only lead we’ve got.”
John said, “There’s something else, though I don’t know what to make of this, either. Ted’s car got stolen. Old restored Impala. I found out just before I called you, it was missing from his garage when he got back from the ice factory.”
“Huh. Maybe this whole thing was one big ploy to steal his car? Oh, I was able to get into the phone, the one we recovered from the ice factory.”
John paused for a confused moment. “What phone? The pink toy one?”
“I don’t … I mean, is that what it looked like to you the whole time?”
“Yeah, it had a Disney princess or something on it. When you asked about hacking it, I thought you were joking. Were you able to make it work, somehow?”
“Yeah. Maybe?”
“And?”
“It had photos and a video on it. Fake ones. There were pics of the little girl looking mangled and bloody, but I don’t think it means she’s actually been hurt.”
“How do you know they were fake?”
“There were pics of us on there. We were dead in those, too.”
“Hmm.”
“Yeah. I have a question, John. Who’s paying us for this?”
“What?”
“Amy doesn’t get enough hours at the call center and I don’t get any hours at the anything. Who’s paying us?”
“It was never discussed. I don’t think Ted has much money.”
“The cops called us in, shouldn’t they have like a consultant’s fund in the budget?”
“I think that would require us having some kind of license or expertise or something. We’ve had this discussion before. Did you find anything on Joy Park?”
“Well, it’s a porn star. Otherwise no.”
“Yeah I saw that,” said John. “You think those boobs are real?”
I consulted my notes. “I did some digging. If she got a boob job she got it early. She’s about twenty-seven I think, her earliest shoots are from five or six years ago, and she had big boobs then. Looks pretty natural when she’s on her back.”
“You see that set where she’s coming out of the pool? Jesus.”
It felt like we’d gotten off the subject somewhat. Then I suddenly remembered what I should have done when the call started. “Hey, what’s the code word?”
“The what?”
“The, uh, password Ted set up, to make sure you’re you and I’m me.”
John said, “Oh, right. It was … wait, why do I have to say it? If you’re an imposter maybe this call is just a way to find out about the password.”
“How would I have known we have a password at all?”
John considered for a moment. “It was ‘bushmaster.’”
“Yeah.”
“I remember because that was my nickname in high school.”
“Though, if you—”
“Because I got so much bush.”
“Though, if you were an imposter, I think I’d know within seconds. You think one of ‘Them’ could mimic the stupid shit that comes out of your mouth?”
There was a moment of silence before John said, “That’s … actually a good question.”
“What is?”
“If it tried to be one of us, would it know how to say everything we just said? About the boobs and such?”
“I wish we didn’t know how to say it.”
“Serious question.”
“No. I mean … I don’t think so. How could it?”
5. AMY’S BREAKFAST WITH EVIL
Amy
Amy Sullivan’s cubicle neighbor, Shawn, was taking her home from work in his new Mustang. She was in the passenger seat eating a single-serving box of Cocoa Pebbles by shaking them into her mouth, then washing it down with a bottle of Orange Crush (the selection in the break room vending machine at the office actually matched her preferred diet really well).
Shawn asked, “Are you sure you don’t want anything else to eat? You’re just downing handfuls of sugar there.”
“I’m fine.”
“I don’t know how you stay that size on your diet. I wouldn’t be able to fit behind this steering wheel.”
“I have a painting of myself in my closet, it gets fatter every time I eat.”
“You have a what?”
She wondered if he was really just afraid she would spill something in his car, despite having told her it was fine every time she asked. Amy was trying to balance her meal with her one remaining hand and she knew it probably looked precarious. She had briefly experimented with a prosthetic left hand, to replace the one that had gotten lopped off in the car crash years ago. She and David had picked it out together from a catalog her doctor had given her—a metallic, Terminator-esque model that they both thought was hilarious. It kind of looked like she had gotten some of her fake human skin ripped off, revealing the robot underneath that had been there all along. Which, Amy had said, would actually make sense: if someone was going to create a cyborg intended to pass for human, it was more logical to disguise it as a hundred pounds of freckles and glasses than a muscular Austrian.
The hand had only lasted about a month, though, before she stopped strapping it on every morning. The reason, she told everyone, was that it just wasn’t convenient to use—it looked like a robot hand from the future, but in reality was just operated by a cable that ran around her other shoulder, and she had to open and close it by shrugging. It didn’t have little motors in it or anything, like Luke’s hand in Star Wars—those were for people with Cadillac health insurance. It didn’t have much in the way of grip strength, either, and she found herself just doing everything with her right hand anyway. It was just habit, she’d now lived without the other hand almost as long as she’d lived with it.
But the real problem was that, with the robot hand, it was like she suddenly had a PLEASE HIT ON ME sign draped over her neck written in a language that only the creepiest of guys could read. Those guys loved the robot hand, each and every one of them broaching the subject as if they were the first. She didn’t know if it was a fetish thing or if they just thought they could get her cheaper because she was a damaged floor model. All she knew was that whenever she entered the one remaining video game store in town, all four male employees would follow her from shelf to shelf, desperately trying to make conversation (“Hey, do you have a DotA account?”).
But the convention had been the final straw.
A group of former college friends had invited her to a gaming convention in Indianapolis and offered to pay her way (David would never have come within a five-mile radius of a gaming convention, even if he was bleeding profusely and just needed to pass it on the way to the emergency room). Everyone was going in costume, and Amy only needed a cheap pink wig and an afternoon modifying a white skirt and top to go as Ulala from Space Channel 5—a costume she had picked specifically because that character wore white elbow-length gloves. But she had accidentally left the gloves at home and everybody had thought the mecha hand was part of her costume, since to people unfamiliar with the game, the getup just registered as Generic Space Girl. Amy wondered if they thought she was so dedicated to the role that she had hacked off one of her limbs just to complete the ensemble.