Kinder Garten nodded. He tried to raise his arms and bring his hands together beseechingly, but they were trembling too much. Besides, there was still the matter of having a mattock stuck in him.
“Please,” Kinder Garten said. “I know I’ve done you wrong, but please don’t kill me.” He panted before he could speak again. “I have a daughter of my own. And she just lost her mother.”
Emma placed a foot on his collarbone and pressed hard as he spat and choked and howled, while she wrenched the mattock free again. Blood seeped out of this wound.
Apollo touched her arm. “I didn’t know you were going to do that.”
“I didn’t know either,” she said.
Apollo reached for the mattock, but she wouldn’t let it go. He didn’t fight for it, he just stooped closer to Kinder Garten. “Your father is dead,” he said. He meant to hurt him.
“I know,” Kinder Garten said. “I saw him.”
“And you just left him there?” Apollo asked.
Kinder Garten brought one hand to his sweatshirt, pressing against the second wound, the larger one.
“He’s been suicidal for months. I came upstairs to get something to eat, and then he’s just there on the kitchen floor. I figured he’d finally gone through with it all the way.” He blew out a breath. “It was kind of a relief, honestly.”
Apollo almost fell over.
Even Emma seemed shocked. “Damn,” she said.
“I mean, I was going to call the cops eventually, but I was in the middle of something down here. So I came back to it. It’s not like he was going anywhere, right?”
“But why’d you leave the front door open?” Emma asked.
Now Kinder Garten shifted, trying to raise himself. “I came in through the back. Was the front door open? But he would only do that if…he was trying to warn me you were here,” Kinder Garten said softly. “Did you two kill my dad?”
Apollo looked up at Emma then back to Kinder Garten. “We did,” he said.
Kinder Garten nodded. “Well…thanks.”
Apollo, to his own surprise, jabbed a finger directly into the hole in Kinder Garten’s chest. This made the man pop upright. The pain would’ve made him jump right to his feet if Emma hadn’t stepped on one of his ankles.
“He tried to protect you,” Apollo said.
Kinder Garten sighed. “You know what’s worse than being abandoned? Being raised by a man like him.”
“He did what any good father would do.”
“You sound like him!” Kinder Garten shouted. “A good father protects his children. If that moron had put some money aside, if he’d planned for the future in any way instead of taking his fortunes for granted, then I wouldn’t have had to do what was necessary.” He lost his breath for a moment. “I wouldn’t have had to make such a big sacrifice.”
Behind them, on the computer table, the iPad scrolled through photos, all of them of the same small child, various moments from the first six months of her life.
“Why didn’t any of you ever kill it?” Emma said. “That’s what I don’t understand.”
“You can’t kill it,” Kinder Garten said. “Come on.”
“Why?” Emma snapped.
Kinder Garten shook his head. “You don’t understand. I don’t blame you. I mean you weren’t raised…like us. You can’t change history. All you can do is make the best of what you’ve inherited. So that’s what I did.”
“By taking my son?” Emma asked. She pressed her weight onto his ankle.
Kinder Garten raised a hand, pleading. “He’s alive,” he said. “You understand he’s alive, right?”
“How do you know?” Apollo asked.
He gestured with his chin. “Bring me to the computer, and I’ll show you.”
Emma took her foot off his ankle, and Apollo grabbed Kinder Garten by the arm to lift him. If it hurt to be raised so quickly, neither Apollo nor Emma seemed concerned.
“Why’s it so hot?” Kinder Garten asked, looking up. The beams above his head were starting to spit smoke.
“We set your house on fire,” Emma told him.
Kinder Garten adjusted his chair, though this was difficult. It seemed like his right arm was losing movement. The whole thing hung loosely from the shoulder. The wound to the chest had brought up more blood. He touched at his ribs—the large patch of dried blood, an older wound lay there.
When Kinder Garten returned to the computer, the family on the middle screen were at their kitchen table, eating breakfast, basic morning business down in Charleston. They were completely unaware of the vulture in the room.
Kinder Garten shut off the remote camera feed from the family in South Carolina. Meanwhile the men on the other screens, the ones who’d also been watching the remote feed from their locations, now gawped openly at the scene in Jorgen Knudsen’s basement. Eight men leaned forward, every mouth hanging open. They could see Kinder Garten had company, that he’d been injured. Were they concerned for their friend, or had they decided this might be an even better show?
“I’m going to activate subject zero,” Kinder Garten said, as if addressing the men on the screen instead of the couple in the basement. Maybe it was easier to do all this if he continued to think of the child by his designation rather than his name.
“Brian,” Apollo said.
Kinder Garten nodded faintly. The middle screen went black, but a small numerical counter appeared at the bottom right of the screen.
“There’s nothing there,” Emma said.
“Let me move the camera,” Kinder Garten said.
He tapped at two keys on the keyboard, and the image on the screen swiveled side to side. Now Apollo understood they were looking at an underground scene, packed earth and stone.
“It’s the cave,” Apollo said. “You put a camera in that cave.”
“I told you,” Kinder Garten said. “All you can do is make the best of what you’ve inherited.”
“So what did you do?” Emma asked, leaning forward, squinting at the hazy screen.
“I monetized it,” Kinder Garten said, clearly proud. “My father did his service for free, but that was never how it was supposed to work. The pact was that we, the Knudsen men, would make the ultimate sacrifice. But in return, we would prosper. My father failed to make the proper sacrifice and received no blessing. He kept the troll from rampaging, but that didn’t pay my goddamn mortgage, let me tell you.
“So I spread the word on certain specialized boards. For a monthly subscription, you log on to the camera anytime you want and watch the proceedings. These men are watching all of you all the time. No act is unknown to them. If people put a little electrical tape over the cameras on their laptops, we could never see. A little thing like that is all it would take, but most of you don’t think that far ahead. In Apple we trust. For guys like this you need to offer a special treat, a mystery, something they’ve never seen. That’s worth more. The only thing worth anything. I don’t have a big pool yet, but I think word will spread. Subject zero has been our beta test. I’m hoping to set things up so I can take payment in bitcoins. Harder to trace.”