Part 22 (1/2)

He didn't respond when I tried to talk to him, when I asked after Taylor. He didn't even look up. I'm not even sure he knew I was there. He just kept staring off into the distance-down the hill, across the river, out toward the heart of the city. I didn't try very hard to get his attention. I just left him sitting there.

As I made my way through the park, I didn't see any dogs. In fact, except for the old man, I didn't see anything alive. No animals. No people.

I stayed away from Amanda and Mac's tunnel.

After about an hour, I gave up the search and started home, hoping Taylor had beaten me there.

Charlie was in the kitchen, and Sabine was upstairs, locked in her room. The rest of the house was empty. There was no Floyd, no Devon, no Amanda, no Mac.

And no Taylor.

I stood in Taylor's doorway for a while, staring at her empty bed. Her smell was thick in the air. It wasn't a particularly clean scent-we were living rough here, after all-but there was a hint of sweet amber and rose beneath the smell of sweat and dirt. It smelled like flowers, I thought, sprouting from rich soil; this was a horribly romantic notion, and it left me feeling a bit disgusted at myself.

I was losing my focus, my drive-I should be hunting down photographs, looking for images that will rock the world!-but it seemed like there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I couldn't put Taylor out of my mind. No matter how many times she ran away, no matter how distant she remained.

I gave the room one last look, then shut the door.

Before heading back downstairs, I gulped down a Vicodin. Then, after a moment's hesitation, I chased it with my last oxycodone.

I found Charlie sitting at the kitchen table. ”It's getting lonely here,” he said when I entered. He sounded wistful. ”Sabine's hiding upstairs. Floyd and Taylor are off doing their own things. Amanda and Mac ... well, they're just gone.” He shook his head at the word gone. ”And Devon-I haven't seen Devon in days and days.”

”Yeah, Devon,” I repeated, remembering the conversation Taylor and I had had with Terry, right before we found Weasel's disembodied fingers.

Devon. His tunnels. His radio. The subject was a welcome distraction. It was something I could grasp hold of, something relatively solid.

”Remember that networking hub I showed you? You said you could access it, get information. Can you still do that? Can you figure out what it is?”

”Now?”

”Yeah, now.”

”I can try. If it's standard hardware, standard networking, I should be able to just plug right in.” Then he shrugged. ”What that'll tell us, however, I have no idea. Maybe nothing.”

”Then get your stuff,” I said. ”It's time to go.”

The house across the street was filled with a still and unnatural silence. There were muddy footprints leading back and forth from the front door to the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs. Did Floyd and I leave those behind the last time we were here? No, I realized. Our tracks would have only been going one way, from the muddy tunnel out to the street. Someone else must have been here.

Charlie crossed the threshold behind me and then pulled to a stop. He looked around the empty house, perplexed. ”There's a networking hub in here? Right across the street? But why? And who?”

I shrugged. ”I don't know, Charlie. Those are the million-dollar questions.”

I led Charlie to the room upstairs. The radio was still there, but the binoculars were gone. So somebody had been here. Devon, maybe? Come back to collect his property? They were nice binoculars; I probably would have come back for them myself if they were mine.

”Do you need the hub, or can you work with this?” I asked.

Charlie shrugged and headed straight for the radio. He sat down at its side and bent low over the matte-black console. ”This should work,” he said, unhooking the cable with a soft click. There was a small box at the end of the line and a couple of different wires sprouting from its end. ”I don't even need to dig out a connector. This thing goes straight from coax to cat-5.”

He set his shoulder bag down at his side and started setting up his computer. ”Did you listen to it?” he asked as he went to work. ”It's some type of networked radio, right?”

”There's nothing but static.”

”Static?” he said, glancing up. There was a perplexed look on his face. ”Like white noise? Hiss?” I nodded. ”That doesn't really make any sense. There'd be nothing like static on a network like this. Unless ...” The lines on his face softened as a new thought erased his confusion. ”Unless this network connects up with a broadcast node somewhere else, somewhere outside the range of interference.”

”So this could actually contact the outside world?”

”Maybe. If the cable ...” He lifted it toward me briefly before plugging it into the side of his notebook. ”If the network and the hubs lead all the way outside of Spokane-miles and miles away-if it's hooked up to some type of broadcast antenna or a satellite somewhere. If that's the case, this thing could be linked almost anywhere. Anywhere on the planet.” Charlie paused for a moment, and we both let that sink in. Then he continued. ”The military's using something like that for their data traffic, but according to Danny, it's all aboveground, stretching straight down the middle of I-90. And they've got a fleet of engineers maintaining the lines.”

”So what is this s.h.i.+t?” I asked, but I didn't really expect an answer. I was just giving voice to my confusion.

”It's a darknet,” Charlie said.

”A what?”

”A darknet. A private, secret network-something not hooked up to the world, isolated and secure, running on its own wires, using its own protocols.”

”Who would do that?”

”I have no idea,” he said, once again bending low over his computer. ”But there's a ... fanciful notion out there-nothing real, you understand, nothing concrete, just whisperings-about a shadow Internet. A network running parallel to the Internet we know, but somehow different, and very, very secret. Controlled by financial giants, the people who'd have the resources and the power to do something like that. It's all real illuminati stuff, you know, just paranoid speculation. But if it existed, I imagine it would be something like this-all hidden wires and clandestine hardware.” Charlie looked up from his notebook and smiled slyly. The computer had finished booting up, and a multiwindowed program now filled the screen. ”But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Perhaps it's just a couple of lines connected to an antenna outside of the city. h.e.l.l, maybe it's just feeding someone's addiction to NPR.”

I knew better. I'd been down in the tunnels. I'd seen the wires sprouting out in eight different directions.

Charlie was silent for several minutes as he scrolled past screen after screen of numbers and acronyms, arcane listings that looked like nothing but gibberish to me. ”It looks big,” he finally said. ”I don't know how big. Depending on what type of router they're using and how many they've got, I might only be seeing a small corner of the network here. But there's traffic ... a fair amount of traffic.” He opened a command window and typed in a string of letters, and a media player appeared in the center of his screen. After a couple of seconds, an error message popped up, accompanied by a soft bing. ”It's encrypted. I can't get at it.”

Abruptly, he unplugged the network cable and slotted it back into the radio. ”The radio's just a very specialized computer, set up to isolate and decrypt an audio feed that's been meshed inside the network traffic, and maybe broadcast back out. There's got to be hardware decryption somewhere inside this thing.”

He turned the radio on and immediately jumped back, startled by an insistent voice that leaped from the speaker. Beneath the voice there was a whisper of static, a low ebb and flow, like water and gravel echoing down an empty pipe.

”-three things we need to look out for: an expanding border, changes at a cellular level, and communication. If it breaks through to the populace, we need to know immediately. It's getting worse-that much is certain-but we're not quite sure how it's getting worse, we're not quite sure in what manner, and we have no idea what that might bode for the future.”

Charlie shot me a startled glance. ”That's Devon,” he hissed. ”That voice, I'm sure of it ... but what he's saying, that doesn't sound like him, not at all.” I nodded in agreement. I'd only spent a matter of hours with Devon, but I recognized his voice. And this clear, quick delivery couldn't have been further from the stoned, incoherent ramblings he'd subjected us to at the house.

After a pause, Devon continued, his disembodied voice filling the room. ”Containment is another matter. One we can actually do something about.”

”Don't worry about Charles.” This was a new voice-a man's voice-barely rising above the hiss of static. It sounded faint and distant, a trickle of words beamed from the other side of the world. At the sound of the new voice, Charlie blanched, literally blanched, his face turning a sickly shade of gray. The voice continued, ”If it comes down to it, we'll deal with Charles.”

”I'm sure you will, but just in case, I've got my own contingencies moving into place,” Devon said. ”No offense intended. I'm sure you can do your job, but I did not get to the place I'm at by taking other people at their word. We've got to plug these leaks, no matter what your familial concerns may be.”

”I understand,” the man replied, his voice still a muted whisper. Static and distance had stripped away all hint of emotion.

Devon's first words had knocked Charlie back on his heels, but this second voice hit him even harder, leaving him perched motionless on his folded knees, his mouth hanging open in a lowercase ”o.” Now he broke his paralysis and scrambled forward, his hands darting across the front of the radio. Finally, he managed to find the big red ”transmit” b.u.t.ton.

”Dad,” he called, his voice catching on the final note, the raised lilt that would have transformed the word into a question. ”Dad, it's Charlie. Is that you?”

The static continued for a couple of seconds-tense seconds-as we both waited for the voice to respond. Then the static stopped, and there was only silence. Devon and the mysterious voice-Charlie's father, I thought. Is that even possible?-were gone, leaving behind the sound of mute wires.

Charlie sat still for a couple of seconds, and then he turned his ashen face toward me. His eyes were wide, and he looked stricken, shocked absolutely senseless.

”How could you be sure?” I asked. ”It was a whisper. I could barely hear him. It could have been anyone.”

Charlie shook his head. ”No, I know that voice. It was him.”