“Don’t,” Hannah says again, and Lela pulls back her hand as if burned.
Derek holds up his hands in submission, then drops them to the keyboard once more. He does not look to Lela for approval but moves his fingers rapid-fire, enabling the VPN, calling up a TOR browser, and tapping into the network. There are no standard addresses on the Dark Net, everything hidden, known only by a seemingly random stream of characters that end with .onion. This makes searching difficult. So do the passwords protecting so many of them or the requirement that you belong to an approved friends list. He says he isn’t sure what they’re looking for, and Hannah says she is. An entity, Undertown, and a name, Cloven. They’ll start by searching the wikis and directories and link dumps, maybe get into some chatrooms, see what they can turn up.
Some sites fail to load; some sites are slow to load. They scroll through political websites, some libertarian, some anarchistic, all choked with conspiracy theories. Here are jihadists from ISIS requesting funds and volunteers, and here is an Idaho militia offering up a $100,000 reward for any who might assassinate the Antichrist president. Here are music and movies and TV dumps, where anything you’ve ever wanted to plug into your ears or eyes is available for free. Here is a supposed assassin who will kill anyone for a fee. Here is an NYC hooker who will fuck you for Namecoins or bitcoins. Here is a digital Silk Road offering up weed, crank, oxy, roids, H, E, iPhones, iPads, pistols, pythons, whatever, everything delivered to your doorstep.
All this time Hannah’s eyes remain open, twitching, tracking things unseen to Lela. Her lips move like a child’s when reading.
Then Derek clicks on a link with 666 in the address chain. It loads with a slow, shuttering blackness that overtakes the screen.
Derek shakes the mouse, smacks the keyboard with his index finger several times, before giving up. “What do you see, Hannah?”
No response. Her face marbleized.
Derek twists in his chair to examine her. His face sheened with sweat. “Hannah?”
“Hannah?” Lela says, and takes her by the shoulders, gives her a gentle shake.
It is then that the girl’s eyes roll back white and her mouth unhinges and she begins to scream.
“Hannah!” Lela says. “Hannah, can you hear me?”
Lela can’t hear her own voice over the screaming, which continues longer than it ought to, carried by more breath than a set of lungs could bottle. Lela gives up on shaking Hannah and covers her ears and turns in a hopeless circle and tells Derek they need to unplug her.
He leans back in his chair, so repelled by the screaming that it might as well have claws that scratch, fangs that bite. “She said not to! Not unless she said to.” The clarity of the monitors behind him fizzles in and out, and in a panic Derek turns his attention to the computer terminal. Something pops. Sputters. Flares. The fans pick up speed and expel the reek of smoke. “Oh no,” he says. “Oh shit.”
Hannah’s body begins to seize. Shivering and hitching. White flecks of spit fly from her mouth. One of the arms breaks off of her chair. Lela goes to her and gets knocked to the floor by a flailing arm.
Hemingway barks and Josh tries to settle him down. Juniper stands in the doorway to the bedroom, a hand pressed painfully to his side. No one is doing anything. No one knows what to do. Hannah—absurdly—was in charge until a moment ago.
Then the girl goes silent, out of breath, though her mouth remains wide open. She continues to convulse in the chair. Her skin brightens red—and then, just as suddenly, blackens. Smoke rises from her hair before it catches flame.
Lela throws herself at Hannah once more. She misses the cord the first time—then swipes again, grabbing for it, making a fist around it. It’s hot. So currented with electricity that her muscles harden, and for a moment she can’t move. Jolted. Electrocuted. Then Lela falls back and yanks the cord with her weight. And at last it gives, popping cleanly from the lightning port.
Juniper is beside her now, and he kicks the cord from her hand. She breathes hard from the floor, not wanting to get up but forcing herself to. Hannah’s skin has split, blackened with angry red lines running through it. Smoke curls off her. Lela doesn’t know what she expects. Maybe for Hannah to rub her eyes and clear her throat, to thank her or yell at her, to tell them all what to do next. Instead she slumps from the chair to the floor, her body so limp it appears deboned, the posture of the dead.
Chapter 27
THE ROADS AREN’T SAFE, but Juniper drives them anyway. He has no choice. This is their only chance. The Buick LeSabre he brought to Portland so many years ago has been replaced by a Dodge truck with a grille like a clenched fist. It has a brush guard and tires treaded so thickly, he could climb the side of a cliff. A 6.4-liter HEMI V8 engine with a growl you can feel a block away. If you hoist up the bench seat in the club cab, you’ll find weapons tucked into the smuggler’s space: a pump shotgun, two pistols, boxes of ammo that rattle on a rutted road. The gearshift—with a twist and a yank—becomes a knife spiked by a thin six-inch blade. The topper is windowless and lined with iron, and two heavy-duty bolts lock its door in place. The color, as if there were any question, is black.
The only vehicles on the road are crashed. An upside-down SUV. A bus on its side. A five-car pileup. A sedan with its hood crumpled like an accordion. A semi that appears to have plowed through oncoming traffic. At times the way is blocked altogether, a gridlocked section of road, all of the cars with their doors open as if the drivers will be back at any second. He turns back to try another route or slowly noses through the wreckage with a rocking screech or takes the truck into the grassy meridian or onto a muddy hillside shoulder. He keeps his eyes on the side mirrors as much as the road before him, and for some time and many miles there is only darkness and his headlights reflecting off shattered glass, rent metal, and the puddles rippled by wind. He doesn’t know if everybody is sleeping or hiding or simply dead.
Every now and then he checks in with Josh. The Motorola walkie-talkies have a fifty-mile range, and their voices come across with only a few hiccups of static. Juniper says, “How are you doing?” and Josh says, “Almost there.”
“Same. Keep me posted.”