Jacked (12 page)

“Ned Ludler,” said Jahn, his eyes still closed. “That’s who you seen. Ludler’s a bad one, maybe the worst. He’s been with Father Eli since near the beginning. He’s mean, vicious, and believes everything tech is bad.”

“He had a beard…” Tar stopped and he felt his mouth drop open. All the Black Shirts standing behind Father Eli had beards in that show, including the man three spots down from Ludler, the man he thought he recognized and now knew for certain who had stood there. He just could not make his mouth work to say the name.

“You know a lot about the Black Shirts, Mr. Ferguson. How’s come?” Toby asked.

“Because…because he was one of them,” stammered Tar. “You were there, too, standing just down from the man who killed Shovel.”

Jahn’s eyes flew open and he sat up quickly. His jawed moved back and forth but no words came out of his mouth.

“You had a beard then, just like all the rest of them. You were a Black Shirt, weren’t you, Uncle Jahn.” The way Tar spoke, what he said was more an accusation than a question.

“Yes,” Jahn finally answered. “I followed Father Eli.”

The boys looked at each other. Tar wondered if the fear he saw in Toby’s eyes was mimicked by his own.

“What happened? Why’d you quit?” asked Toby. “You quit, right?”

“Of course I quit! I couldn’t stay with them, not after Martha.” Jahn’s voice cracked and he closed his eyes again. “I joined up with Father Eli not long after I lost my job to a shiny machine. I worked at that factory for almost fourteen years and then one day,
poof
, my job was gone to some piece of metal that ran around the clock with no breaks and no pay. Father Eli gave me purpose again, showed me that machines were sucking the life out of people.

“So Martha and I joined the cause. She helped run the rallies and the kitchens for the other out-of-work folks, while I went with Father Eli when he was making the rounds, talking to masses of people. By then he was becoming a pretty big name, going to Washington and all over the country to spread the word about the evil of tech. We were afraid that someone in the government or at one of the MentConn companies might try to hurt him so that was our job, to protect him. Ned Ludler was in charge of making sure Father Eli was kept safe.”

“What made you quit?” Toby asked.

“Martha,” Jahn said. “Or at least what happened to her…made me do what I did.” He stared into the shadows. “She got sick. Cancer in her brain. The doc said it was all in one spot and they could go in and get it out. But by then the doctors were all using machines to do the operations. Martha and me, we both told them no and the doc should do the surgery on his own. He wouldn’t do it. She kept getting sicker and sicker—must have dropped fifty pounds, and she wasn’t very big to begin with—then the pain came. She’d sit in the dark and cry all day.

“So I went to Father Eli and asked him if maybe in that type of situation if tech was a good thing. He told me that if she died because of the cancer it was because God wanted her to.” Jahn wiped tears from his eyes. “She went in the spring before The Crash. Ned and some of the others carried her coffin and Father Eli spoke at the funeral. Everyone told me how sorry they were. But she didn’t have to die and we all knew it.”

Jahn looked at the boys and smiled.

“I knew then what I had to do. So, on the day of The Crash, I came and got Tar to keep him safe.”

#

Toby snored softly on two benches pressed together along a wall. Sunlight filtered between plywood sheets nailed over the store windows, letting in just enough light to see by. Tar lay on his own benches, trying to sleep but unable to quiet his mind after everything Jahn had said. Although they had decided to start moving as soon as the sun came up his uncle looked even worse in the dim morning light so the boys decided to let him sleep. They would wait and bug out later.

“Tar,” Jahn said, his voice not much more than a breathy whisper. “Are you awake?”

The boy rolled over and looked at his uncle.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I always meant to, when you got older, but the time never seemed right.”

Silence sat heavy and awkward between them for a few moments.

“But you still haven’t told me everything, have you?”

“No, I haven’t.” Jahn tried to sit up in the recliner but, after a few seconds, stopped. His breathing was erratic and sweat ringed the top portion of his shirt, making it dark. “Give me my backpack.”

Tar stood up and walked over to Jahn, picking up the pack on the way. He sat it gently on the old man’s lap. His uncle smiled and waved at him to sit down on the box beside him.

“I was waiting for a chance to be alone.” His smile wavered but he kept it going, forced and rigid. “I’m sorry, Tar. Sorry I couldn’t do what I wanted to and keep you safe. But I wouldn’t change anything I did.”

The boy never took his eyes off the old man.

“You’re not really my uncle, are you?”

The smile dropped. Jahn’s breathing grew in strength for a moment, then dropped back to a ragged rhythm.

“No, I’m not.”

“Then who am I?”

Jahn sighed.

“Your real name is Taro Hutchins. Your parents, Martin and Hisa Hutchins, worked at the same place where they kept the Mind. They were tech programmers.”

The ground felt like it was suddenly moving underneath him. He wanted to make it stop but thought if he stood up he would either fall down or puke. He wiped sweat off his forehead.

“Then who are you? A neighbor? A friend of my parents?”

“I never met them, your parents. And I never laid eyes on you until the day I carried you out of your apartment. You see, what I knew, what I believed, was that Father Eli and Ned and all the rest had killed my Martha, just as sure as if they had walked up and stuck a knife in her. So I decided then and there that I would do everything I could to make sure they never got what they really wanted: to shut down the Mind forever.

“But I didn’t know what they were planning. So I stayed quiet and kept doing my job, kept my eyes open and my mouth shut. Finally, I overheard Eli and Ned talking and Father Eli said he had sent Polly riding inside her horse. But that didn’t make sense because none of the women in the inner group were named Polly and how in God’s name could a woman ride
inside
a horse?

“But then Father Eli told Ned it would all happen soon. On October 29th Polly was going to destroy the Mind. So I spent every minute of every day looking for this Polly. I never saw her. But, just like he said, on that day, The Crash happened and people all over the world started dying…or
worse
.

“But while I was looking for Polly I found out through Ned that a group of kids, some of them little more than babies, had been part of some sort of test project at the university where the Mind was. They were the kids of people who worked there. So I tried to find out more about them while I looked for Polly.

“October 29th came and I still hadn’t found her. That day after lunch Ned called a few of us together and told us that we would be going to the university later that night, and we would be looking for some information in an office.

“I didn’t have any time left to keep looking so I skipped out and went to that office while everyone else was still eating supper. Inside was this young woman, just a student, and I told her what I was looking for, told her what I had to have. She didn’t want to tell me, wouldn’t say…so I hit her. I punched her and pushed her and…oh, God…”

Jahn stopped. His chest heaved up and down, tears flowed in rivers from his eyes. Tar could barely breathe, his chest pushed on by the weight of the old man’s confession.

“She finally gave me this,” Jahn said once his breathing was under control. He reached into his backpack and pulled out an app. It was a small machine, about four inches tall and an inch wide. Tar had never seen anything like it. As he watched, Jahn flicked his wrist and the machine folded out from itself, unwrapping and snapping into place until a six-inch screen was attached to the black plastic end.

“She gave it to me and ran away,” Jahn continued. “By then it was almost 10:30. I was scared. I hadn’t found Polly and I knew I couldn’t stop Father Eli’s plan against the Mind. I didn’t know how to work the machine, so I read the first name and address off the list on the tech and yanked out the battery to save it from whatever this Polly was doing to the Mind.

“It was your name, Tar. That’s how I found you. That’s how I made it to your parent’s apartment three days later. And that’s how I found your father, dead at his desk, and your mother gone zom, still staring at the buzzing white screen on the TV. And I found you, dirty and hungry and crying. So I picked you up and carried you away from all of it.

“No, Tar. I don’t regret anything, even hitting that girl. I’d do it all again because it kept you alive.”

Tar opened his mouth three times before he finally managed to croak out, “Why?”

Jahn tried to smile but it looked more like a grimace.

“Why? I wanted you to know about the other kids and your parents and everything that happened. Before I left to find you I set fire to the building and destroyed all the records. I ran away as Ned and the other Black Shirts stood on the other side of the fire and screamed at me to stop.

“I did it because I wanted you to know you weren’t alone. I wanted you to know you were important. I wanted you to have a chance for a life.”

Tar couldn’t take any more. He gave up. He lurched off the box and half-ran, half-crawled until he leaned against the far wall and retched up the contents of his stomach. He did not stop, continued bringing up bile, heaving until his muscles quivered and his gut ached. At some point Toby helped him to the benches. Tar cried himself to sleep and the man he had known as Uncle Jahn never said another word.

Chapter 15

Jahn died about sunset.

He never spoke again, almost as if he had used up the last of his words to get out what he had wanted to say for so many years. As the day wore on Jahn’s breathing stopped and started, each break longer and longer. Finally, as the last fingers of light slipped between the cracks of boards on the store window, the man Tar had called Uncle Jahn took a final, shallow breath, exhaled slowly, and did not move again.

After it was over the boys slumped down by the far wall and Tar told Toby everything Jahn had said. He cried a little more but it did not last long and soon they were quietly sitting on the benches, leaning against the wall as the black settled deep into the building. When it got too dark Toby turned on the dim flashlight and navigated across the room to take the app from Jahn’s hands.

He handed it to Tar.

“Do you suppose it’s brick?”

Tar shrugged.

“I don’t know. Maybe not, if he got the battery out in time but I don’t know what kind of juice makes it work.”

“This was in Jahn’s other hand.” Toby held up a piece of paper, folded over against itself several times, with a piece of tape over the end. “I think it might’ve been sticking to the app.”

Tar took the little package and opened it in his lap. Inside was a small round battery. He looked up at Toby.

“It looks like Uncle Jah…it looks like
he
thought of everything.”

“Only if it still has juice,” Toby said with a shrug. “Give it a try.”

Tar put the battery down beside him and used the flashlight to examine the little machine. One side of the plastic was flattened with three inset buttons on the smooth face. The unfolded screen was like nothing he had ever seen before and he marveled at its thin design. After a few minutes he turned his attention to looking for the battery holder and found it on one end after pushing in a small rectangle that sprang out with an empty slot.

Tar slipped the battery in and pushed the button with the circle and straight line, something he had long ago recognized as the On/Off switch on this kind of app. The screen glowed for half a second, then went blank, its silver surface reflecting his face in the low light.

“Is it fragged?” asked Toby.

Tar turned the app over in his hand, looking at it from several angles.

“I thought it was going to turn on but…” He glanced up at Toby. “The battery might have just gone dry. I’ll try to fix it, though.”

Tar placed the small machine on his lap. He pushed in the power button and grabbed the plastic part with his hand.

It wasn’t like the locks or everyday stuff he normally fixed. He could run a lock through his mind in a couple of seconds. Music machines and math apps took him a few minutes to fix, and the show box he had grepped for Mr. Keisler had taken most of a half an hour before he made his way through the maze in his mind—going forward what felt like several miles, turning here, backtracking there, sometimes even reversing his path—before he connected all the tunnels and made the light shine all the way through.

But those had been like little puzzles on paper, the ones parents gave to their kids in the common room to keep them busy. This was different. Not only did the maze go forward and back, side to side, it also went up and down. Layers stacked on layers, rising as far he could see in his mind, Tar felt small and lost in the twists and turns.

Despite the overwhelming number of paths his mind flew faster and faster down the app’s hallways. He had found large sections like this in Mr. Keisler’s machine, parts of it that felt whole and complete with every trail linking to the next. Now as Tar moved as fast as his thoughts could take him he wondered what actually needed fixed.

He rounded a corner in his thoughts and there it was: the blockage. Tangles of paths and dead ends twisted around each other like a poorly wound ball of string. He attacked the darkened paths, lighting each one as it connected to the next section.

Turn, push. Bring an end up. Drag a section back. Turn again. Connect four paths into one street crossing.

The tangle began to smooth out as Tar moved faster, sensing the end of the maze just out of sight. One last link and he moved on, flying down perfect boulevards not snarled and tangled streets. Up ahead was the end, the entire board lighting behind him…