Brood XIX (11 page)

Jason hung the phone up again, waited a
moment, and then dialed *69 to make sure that everything had really
just happened.

* * *

He logged his computer onto the internet.

Google.com
, he typed at the search
option and then hit enter.

Google came up as the number one match, and
he clicked the link to it.

At the home screen he typed in the phone
number he had lifted from the last call return service, including
the area code, and poised the cursor over the "Google Search" box,
instead opting for the button directly to the right, labeled "I'm
Feeling Lucky."

By the time his finger recoiled from pressing
the mouse button, the search yielded its results.

It was a little trick he had learned back in
high school. Given any given phone number, Google would provide the
name and address of the person to whom the number belonged. It
would even offer links to Yahoo!Maps and MapQuest.

Jared printed out the page, tapping his foot
anxiously and tugging gently at the paper as it rolled far too
slowly out of the printer.

"Room two-sixteen, Kenward Hall," he said,
whirling to grab his jacket and shoes. "Scott Nelson or Andrew
Cosgrove."

* * *

Jared stood ankle deep in the accumulated
snow in the field to the west of Kenward Hall. He had no idea what
time it was or how long he had been standing there staring up at
the side of the dorm. There had only been a half dozen windows with
their lights still on when he had arrived, and from where he stood,
he could still see three of them.

The falling snow alighted atop his head,
forming a layer of frost over his ruffled hair. His body heat
melted the snow ambitious enough to make it all the way to his
scalp into thin, frigid rivulets.

Droplets of freezing water quivered from his
jaw line, threatening to snap free, but holding tightly to the
week's worth of stubble that thickened on his skin.

"Scott Nelson or Andrew Cosgrove," he said,
studying those lighted windows for even the remote hint of a shadow
to move across them.

* * *

"Can I help you?" the resident advisor
working the front desk called across the lobby.

Jared just shook his head and looked off in a
different direction, feigning indifference.

He had found a seat in the back rear corner,
partially concealed by one of the tall potted ferns. His damp hair
clung limply to his head, and his flesh prickled beneath his
drenched clothes.

"I can't just let you sit there all
night."

"I'm waiting for a friend," Jared called
back, turning his attention to the television bracketed to the
wall, staring at the vacant gray screen.

"I could ring his room if you would
like."

"I'm early," he called back. "I'm sure he'll
be down soon enough."

"Who are you waiting for?"

"Scott Nelson or Andrew Cosgrove from room
two-sixteen."

Jared forced a smile.

"I think Scott goes home just about every
weekend, but Andrew's generally here."

Was it the weekend? Had he really missed
nearly the entire week of class?

"Perfect," Jared said. He smiled to the RA,
and went back to waiting for the breakfast crowd to begin rolling
through the lobby.

* * *

The doors to either side of the front desk
were access-controlled by a button beneath the reception desk,
though one could easily walk right through if someone were to open
it for him and he were to merge into the crowd...

Jared had slowly worked his way across the
lobby until he was standing on the far side of a Pepsi machine from
the front counter, leaning against the wall.

His eyes were so irritated and red that they
hurt to blink.

So he didn't.

Through the window in the middle of the
wooden door---the glass crisscrossed with diamonds of wire---he could
see a group of girls approaching, flipping their hair, swinging
their heads, completely absorbed in whatever conversation held them
in such a state of enthrallment.

As soon as the door opened, Jared darted
directly for it, pulling it wide and stepping behind it as if to do
the gentlemanly thing for them and hold it.

The girls thanked him in chorus, and he
slipped past them and into the hallway.

"Two-sixteen," he whispered, heading for the
stairs.

* * *

From where he crouched behind the door to the
stairwell, he could clearly see the golden numbers affixed to the
center of the door. One of the guys in room two-eighteen to the
right had come and gone several times, as had the people across the
hall in two-fifteen, but the knob hadn't even budged to room
two-sixteen.

He had discretely walked down the hall and
pressed his ear to the door---maybe an hour ago now---to ensure that he
could hear noise within, and then rushed back down to take his spot
in the doorway. There had been the sound of typing, of frantically
hammered keys.

Jared had dumped the contents of his
pockets---loose change, his keys, candy wrappers---onto the ground in
front of him. Whenever he heard someone coming up or down the
stairs, he pretended as though he was merely gathering his
belongings to shove back into his pocket.

He knew there was someone in the room, and at
some point that person would have to come out. There was a communal
bathroom for each wing on each floor, which was down the hall and
around the bend to the left. Eventually, whoever was inside was
going to have to make a trip to it.

He was counting on that person leaving the
door unlocked when he did, as he was only going to be heading down
the hall for a few minutes tops.

* * *

Jared saw the glint on the round knob the
moment it moved.

The door opened inward and a guy strode
purposefully out into the hall, allowing the door to swing shut
behind him. He had dark hair that was cropped on the top, but other
than the fact that he had bare feet a wore a pair of jeans, that
was all Jared could determine before he turned away down the
hallway.

Jared threw back the door to the stairwell
and sprinted toward room two-sixteen, twisting the knob and
shouldering his way through.

The room looked just like every other on
campus: same painted cinder block walls, same wood-railed beds,
same damn pipes running along the rust-stained ceiling.

He needed to find a journal, a diary,
something that would offer insight into the voice's psyche. Or
failing at that admitted miracle, he needed to find a bottle of
prescription painkillers, an overabundance of over-the-counter
drugs, or maybe even a gun. Something.

Throwing the drawer of the nightstand open,
he riffled through the contents, but there was nothing but a packet
of Tylenol and an opened box of condoms. He hurriedly lifted the
mattress, but there was nothing stashed beneath but the
box-spring.

He similarly scoured the matching setup on
the opposite side of the room, yielding nearly identical
results.

Both roommates were sexually active. There
was no sign of drug or alcohol abuse. Both walls were thick with
framed photographs of friends and girlfriends. There was even a
little Nerf basketball hoop mounted to the wall.

It didn't fit the profile he had created.
There were no moody posters of melancholy musicians. No black
fingernail polish or the matching clothes heaped in the corner. The
room was in a precise state of order. Everything had its place. It
reminded Jared more of his own room than that of someone preparing
to end his life.

Surely someone about to die wouldn't give a
rat's ass about whether or not the bed was neatly made!

At the back of the room there was a desk
beneath the lone window with a computer atop it. The screen was
still on...the cursor flashing.

Beside the keyboard was a stack of
handwritten notes on yellow legal paper. Atop them rested an
old-fashioned looking tape recorder that appeared to have a phone
jack that entered to the left side, and connected it with the
hand-held unit resting on the cradle to the right. A handful of
tapes were scattered across the desk without their cases.

Subject 16, Night 4
, the first one
read.

Subject 16, Night 1
.

Subject 16, Night 5
.

Jared snatched the phone from the cradle and
the tape recorder immediately began to whir, recording the dial
tone.

He slammed the phone down and ripped the
cords from the sides, stabbing the "Play" button with his index
finger.

"Hello," his own voice spoke back to him.

"I didn't think you'd answer," that same
voice responded.

"I was starting to think you wouldn't---"

Jared pounded the machine with his fist,
popping the cassette hatch open and jarring the tape loose.

What the hell was going on here?

He leaned forward toward the monitor and
dragged the scroll bar on the side all the way up to the top.

Senior Thesis

The Myth of Compassion: The Generosity of
Strangers

* * *

Jared heard the door to the room open inward
with a slight squeal. Through the small gap he had left the closet
door ajar, he watched the person pass on their way back across the
room to the computer.

He slipped a tie down from the rack beside
him, rolling it tightly in each fist. With a snap, he jerked it
taut.

"What the---?" that voice he knew nearly as
well as his own gasped.

When Jared emerged from the closet, the guy
had his back to him. To either side he held out one of the severed
phone cords.

"I was a test subject!" Jared snapped.

"Holy Christ!" he spat, whirling around and
grabbing hold of his shirt above his heart. "You scared the living
hell out of me, man!"

Jared recognized him immediately. He didn't
know the guy's name, but he had seen him before. They had shared
the same General Psychology class freshman year, Behavioral
Evaluation lab only last year.

"All of these nights...talking to you..."

"I'm a psych major. I was just working on my
thesis!"

"I was your thesis!"

"Calm down, man," he said, backing away and
throwing his hands up in front of him.

"What about my thesis!" Jared railed.

His eyes flashed red and his arms rocketed
from his side.

* * *

Before he left, Jared gathered the audio
tapes and the equipment, and erased the entirety of the paper from
the hard drive of the computer. When Andrew's roommate came back
after the weekend---finding him hanging from the pipes along the
ceiling by one of his own neck ties with his face blue and
swollen---he was able to tell the police all about how he had heard
Andrew on the phone several nights in a row, talking to someone
about wanting to kill himself.

He had thought Andrew was working on his
thesis.

Professor Witt had confirmed that Andrew was
indeed working on a project where he pretended to want to kill
himself, trying to solicit compassion from the person on the other
end of the randomly dialed phone. He supposed in his lauded
professional opinion that the entire design of the thesis should
have been a clue into the inner workings of Andrew's mind, a
heavily-veiled cry for help.

* * *

Jared received a B minus on his paper,
as---after everything Professor Witt had been through in dealing with
the tragic suicide of a beloved student---he was of the opinion that
Jared's paper didn't capture the essence of the anguish and
despair.

"It was too clinical," he had said. "Too
clean."

Jared had stared at his feet.

"As a phychologist, Mr.Danner, you can't be
afraid to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty."

* * *

"I'm going to kill myself," the man sitting
in the couch across from him said, averting his eyes.

Jared looked up from the yellow notepad
sitting in his lap, and offered the man the hollow, placating smile
he had groomed to perfection in medical school.

BURIAL GROUND

Andes Mountains

Northern Peru

October 11
^th

9:26 p.m. PET

The screams were more than he could bear,
but they didn't last long. Panicked cries cut short by wet, tearing
sounds, and then finally silence, save the patter of raindrops on
the muddy ground. From where he crouched in the dark recess of the
stone fortification, hidden from the world by a screen of tangled
lianas and the sheeting rain, he had listened to them die.

All of them.

The signs had been there, but he and his
companions had misinterpreted them, and now it was too late. It was
only a matter of time before they found him, and slaughtered him as
well.

Hunter Gearhardt donned his rucksack
backward, and wrapped his arms around its contents. He'd managed to
grab a few items of importance once he'd recognized what was about
to happen, and he needed to get them out of the jungle. More
bloodshed would follow if he didn't reach civilization. With their
inability to access a signal on the satellite phone, there was no
other way to deliver the warning. It was all up to him now, and his
window of opportunity was closing fast.

His breathing was ragged, too loud in his
own ears, his heartbeat a thudding counterpoint. He couldn't hear
them out there, but they had attacked so quietly in the first place
that the silence was of little comfort. They were still out there,
stalking him. There was no time to waste. He needed to put as much
distance between himself and his pursuit as possible if he were to
stay alive long enough to get down off the mountain. And even then,
they knew this region of the cloud forest far better than he
did.