“It’s not,” Josh says. “This is real. Stop being a d-bag.”
Lela puts out an arm, silencing Josh. “It’s okay.” Her hair is damp now, and she combs the sodden mess of it back from her face. “I’ll be the first to admit, I am normally a vulture who acts in complete self-interest and will do anything for a story. But this is not one of those times.” Her voice thickens with emotion she isn’t used to managing. “My sister is dead.” She looks down at Hannah. Her face is inscrutable behind the Mirage. “Her mother is dead. People are dying all around us. And we’re going to join them if you don’t help us. Please help us.”
Derek dodges his eyes back and forth among them, settling now on Hannah. He appears to be chewing gum though he is not. “She’s the one, huh? The little girl in the weird sunglasses who says she can bring down the Dark Net and yet needs our humble help to get inside.”
“Little?” Hannah says. “We’re the same height.”
Derek defensively straightens his posture. He appears ready to fire off a response, but instead juts his chin at Juniper. “What about the big guy? Why so quiet?”
Juniper leans against the doorway, his face mooshed against the frame. Sweat drips from him though the night is cold. “Right now I just want to lie down, but I will say that I have some experience in these matters.”
“These matters?”
He holds up his pistol and then slowly tucks it back in its holster. “I’m not going to demand, and I’m not going to beg, but I will say please. Maybe we can help each other.”
“Please,” Hannah says.
“Please,” Lela says. “Okay? We’re all saying it. Fucking please.”
“Words,” Derek says. “Words are just words. They don’t reassure me.”
“Then what do you want?”
He’s the kind of person who can’t smile without smirking. “Social security numbers. Credit card PINs. And all account usernames and passwords. You write them down, I’ll authenticate. Then we’re in business.”
“So you can ruin me if I write about you? At a time like this, that’s your main concern?”
“Yep.” Derek pops his lips with the p.“How do I know you won’t ruin me anyway?”
“You don’t. But I won’t. I promise. I’ll keep the intel in a safe. Little insurance policy.”
Lela looks up and down the street, a shadowy corridor blurred by the now steady rain. Getting inside seems more important than ever, but she won’t let him walk all over her. “How do I know I can trust you?”
“Because we’re the good guys.”
She wants to grab Juniper’s pistol, shove Derek aside, push her way into the store, demand whatever help he can offer. But she’s had her share of difficult interviews and knows the only way to get what she wants. Listen and play off ego. “Fine,” she says. “You’re in charge. You can have whatever you want. Just let us in.”
Derek considers them another minute, then steps aside, holds open the door.
?
Past the display cases, past the neatly stocked aisles, through the cluttered storeroom, there is a doorway. It opens to a staircase that drops into the basement. Two dehumidifiers groan. Fans whir. The air is warm and smells faintly of burned sugar from all the computer terminals set up here, their screens glowing and hard drives humming. The walls are red-bricked and carry a framed poster of Orwell’s 1984, another of The Matrix. A Guy Fawkes mask hangs from a hook.
There’s not enough space for them all, but Juniper pushes his way into the adjacent bedroom. Onto the bed he promptly collapses. Joined a moment later by a tired Hemingway, who curls up on the floor with a humph.
Josh and Hannah sit on an IKEA futon. They watch as Lela writes down all the requested information on a notepad. Derek plops into an ergonomic swivel chair with a netted back. “Thank you,” he says, and takes the notepad and pushes off with his feet and rolls across the floor to face a thirty-inch monitor. His keyboard is split down the middle and angled in such a way that it appears almost winged. His fingers strike the keys with a strange aggression, as if he were at war with the machine. He calls up a browser called Opera and works through several websites, plugging in her information at each. Her bank account reveals several overdraft charges and a savings of $904. “Wow, you’re broke.”
“Writer,” she says with a shrug.
Derek logs out, tears away the sheet, tucks it in his pocket. Then he swivels around to face them. “Okay. Now what?”
“You say you’re the good guys.” Lela tries to make her voice as encouraging as possible. “Tell me about how good you are.”
A half-full bottle of Mountain Dew sits on the desk. He reaches for it, wrenches off the cap, takes a swallow. “Do you remember, last year, when the Wells Fargo website crashed for twenty-four hours?”
“Sounds familiar.”
He taps his chest. “That was us. Took five minutes to bring it down.”
“You’d think breaking into a bank’s website would be as hard as breaking into a bank.”
“You’d think, right? But no. You put up a fence in your yard, somebody can climb over it and dig under it. You put locks on your doors, but if somebody wants to get inside, they only need to put a rock through the window. Security is an illusion. We’re all willfully blind to the threats that surround us. Nowhere is safe. No one is safe.” She can tell this is a speech he’s given before. He holds out his arms, as if gesturing the world around. “As tonight has proven. I’ve spent the last four hours trying to crack this thing—whatever it is—but so far I’m getting nowhere. The virus isn’t like anything I’ve seen before.”
“Why aren’t you infected?”
“Are you kidding me? I’ve got so many security filters on this thing, I could run radioactive waste through it and it would come out purer than spring water.”
“Why’d you break into the bank’s website?”
Another swig. His words are hopped up on caffeine, spilling out of him: “The same reason we posted the names and addresses of those seventeen-year-old football players who raped that cheerleader. The same reason we hacked the computer of the archbishop and leaked his kiddie porn to the cops. The same reason we took over the Tacoma PD’s website and posted pictures of killer clowns after they shot that unarmed black kid. Because we’re the good guys.”
“You keep saying we. You’re part of a collective.”
He tucks the bottle into his groin and swivels back and forth in his chair. “Actually it’s just me. But I represent a greater good. That’s what I mean by we.”
“Do you have, like, a name?”
The smirk again. “You mean besides Derek?”
“Yes, I mean besides Derek.”
“Still working on that. I’ve got a few avatars. What do you think about The God Virus? That’s kind of awesome, right?”