End Time (48 page)

Satisfied with his work at Police Plaza, Kid paused. The desire for a rainbow tab overwhelming his brain. For a moment, he said nothing, breath shaky, his face turning pale. He felt completely washed out, and he avoided the girls' eyes for fear they'd notice. He nodded to the chaos on the iPad screen.

“A couple of days of this and just you wait.”

*   *   *

Later that night the children settled into their beds, but the lad had trouble sleeping. He tried playing soft music, he tried letting the television on his dresser whisper to him, but nothing worked. Kid glanced at the candy dish full of Dalekto tabs next to the TV. The dish called to him.
C'mere, Boy. C'mon, just one or two won't hurt. What you waiting for, Boy?
The need for them rose up through his bones, from the tips of his toes to the top of his head, a burning craving, the urge irresistible. He tried to think of something else, anything else. Nothing worked. Kid tore his eyes away and gripped the bedsheets for dear life. The Craze owned him body and soul.

And he didn't feel smart at all, only weak and shaky.

With all the control at his command, he got up and poured the dish of Dalekto into the toilet. The tabs fizzed, the water swirled to a flickering rainbow; then all the colors combined making the toilet water look like blood. He hit the flush handle, and the tabs were sucked away. The act took all his effort, and he sagged on the sink, his breath coming in gasps. An ashen face stared back at him from the bathroom mirror.

Mr. P. had left Dalekto all over the house. What would he do about those? Throw them out? Yes, throw them out.

For a split second he thought of Lila's magic finger and the flowing warmth making him want to call through the open bathroom door. Would she do it again? Just the girls' presence seemed to help—a kind of antidote. The Kid left the sink and went into their room. Orange light spilled in from the streetlamps below; he stood for a moment, staring longingly at the bunny rabbits and smart mousies in the Beatrix Potter mural—if only he could go to a place like that.

Lila looked up from her pillow. “What is it?” Kid's face took on a pained expression. “Don't you want to talk about it?” she asked.

Kid struggled for the words. “Bad things. Dalekto is doing bad things to me. I don't like my room. Can I stay in here?” He seemed so pathetic and scared.

“That's why we're here,” Lila told him. “To keep the bad things away.”

The bunk bed creaked as the little girl woke up too. “Come in with me,” Maria told him, “or take the top bunk.”

He seemed smitten that he'd actually been invited somewhere. “You sure?”

“Yes, I'm sure.”

“I think I'll go up,” Kid said at last.

He climbed up to the top bunk and dug his way under the covers. “I've always wanted to sleep on the top bunk.”

The effect of the girls' room and their auras lasted through the night, killing the Craze so Kid could sleep. But it didn't last forever. When morning light came, his mood had grown cold and calculating again, and the wholesome effect of the Beatrix Potter mural by Lila's larger bed had vanished. No longer needy, no longer afraid of being alone in the dark. With a good night's rest, Kid's mischievous urges overcame everything—the need to be good, the desire for company, and temporarily even the Craze.

Daybreak found him deep into executing Piper's lists and commands, creating chaos one finger tap at a time. And the girls watched in silent alarm as his iPad spread mayhem over a thousand streets and neighborhoods. Under Mr. P.'s direction, Kid reached out using his skycap dispatchers, his private army of drug traffickers:
Chicago, LA, San Diego, Boston, Austin—they'll go everywhere, man. Wear the pavement down, man.
Calling out to his Dalekto distributors, his skycap couriers in every burg of any size, the young master set his social network of pushers to other tasks, redirecting their efforts in fantastically destructive ways.

Explaining to the girls, “My skycaps have been delivering Big D into every corner of the city. In New York alone my ‘Little Men' will commit ten thousand crimes in a matter of hours and yuk it up on YouTube.”

Kid clicked on a flash mob of skycaps swarming the Prada flagship store in SoHo; roughly dancing undressed mannequins through the aisles, their Google Glass headsets showed the swarming mob from every conceivable angle. The gag ended with a mess of ignited lighter fluid and the sprinkler system going off like a thunderstorm.

The police never showed.

Reports of wildings came in from Topeka, Memphis, and Austin. In New England, flash mobs looted Boston's Faneuil Hall, picking it clean. In downtown Pittsburgh, one of Kid's skycaps dumped a truckload of manure into the water feature fountain outside the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Industries complex. Before leaving the wreck, he spray-painted DayGlo graffiti on the stonework:
Superfund Cleanup Site.

With the help of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, monkey-see-monkey-do madness rose up from the pavement, the wilding taking on a life of its own. Across the greater metropolitan area, nimble hands sabotaged backhoes in storage areas and construction sites.

With no backhoes, no digging.

With no digging, no graves, and the unburied dead overwhelmed the system. Bodies began showing up in abandoned lots and alleys. Food for rats.

The craving for Dalekto spurred Kid on; the girls helpless to stop him. The more the Craze ate into him, the more he crushed everything and everyone under his thumb, grinning into his touch screen as his fingers did the dirty work. Mr. P. had forwarded access to innumerable municipal accounts to his young apprentice's iPad. The young man moved a decimal point here, erased a number there. Multiplying a debt, liquidating a pension fund, hitting the
B
for billion instead of the
M
for million. He could do it with his eyes closed. Cities large and small operated on billions of dollars of Monopoly money; now, the time had finally arrived to call in their IOUs. Crash the system.

Even as the children slept, automated overnight flash trades devoured bank balances in milliseconds. As dawn broke, city workers and the mass of civil servants realized in a single blow that payrolls were not going to be met. The money stream had gone flat, run dry like a fire hose at an empty hydrant. Nurses, cops, teachers, firemen, transit workers, not to mention faceless throngs of bureaucrats, turned into paupers at the click of a mouse.

Things began to grind to a halt. Trains and buses came once every two hours; the lights flickered and garbage started to pile up in blissfully warm late-September days. At toll points around the city, Port Authority toll attendants demanded cash and rifled luxury cars while the cops passively stood by like the London Metropolitan Police during the London Riots of 2011.

On the cable news shows, the newscasters, all second-stringers or third-stringers, blabbered on as if nothing was out of the ordinary, offering the usual menu of foreign crises, international debt, and cheating celebrities. But they seemed very pale and tired, as though some announcers were working both sides of the camera or hadn't left the studio in days. And their faces … Almost yellow, you might say.

It seemed the Days of Reckoning had suddenly arrived. And Lila wondered if she picked up the phone whether the Food Emporium would actually answer.

Early one morning, the two girls caught Kid sitting on the bathroom floor staring at the closed toilet seat. One hand held an open Altoids breath mint tin with a dozen or so Dalekto tabs—Kid's secret emergency stash. He pondered the open tin, a single finger moving the tablets around inside the shiny box, his mind caught in a desperate struggle. The girls barely breathed; afraid that if they spoke Kid would stick a tab in his mouth. But after long moments of sliding the things around, Kid lifted the toilet seat, tipped the last of his Dalekto tabs into the water, and leaned heavily on the flush handle. Sagging over the roaring toilet, he retched.

Splashing cold water on his face from the sink, he drank from the tap and fumbled over his toothbrush; then noticed the girls staring at him from the connecting bathroom door.

“What are you looking at?” he demanded.

But neither Lila nor Maria knew what to say.

*   *   *

Elsewhere in the San Remo apartment building, things were getting ugly. Apartment doors slammed above or below; incoherent shouts echoed off walls. Tenants hit the elevator buttons over and over, repeatedly cursing. Lost souls moaned or cried softly. Whatever the problem happened to be, it was beginning to sink in that no one was coming. No EMT, no rescue, even though the city canyons echoed with sirens. The children could feel it all around them, things getting out of hand.

When a terrifyingly piercing human shriek reached the sixth floor, Lila and Maria rushed to the living room window and leaned out. Down below, the body of a man in a bathrobe lay sprawled on the pavement—a jumper. Lila seemed to recall his name was Skinson. Beside him, a woman wailed and cradled his head.

Lila and Little Maria dialed 911, but got a recording. The body would lie on the pavement below the San Remo for days, until urban scavengers stripped it of its bathrobe and slippers. Then at last it would disappear.

Under the Beatrix Potter mural, Kid worked the iPad.

He liked the girls' room better than his. Especially at night, its cozy warmth and pretty mural picture safe and comforting, even as he did ugly things before crawling into the top bunk. Lila found herself drawn to his shoulder, wondering silently what kind of meanness she'd find. This time Lila saw the ugliness emanated from a much closer source: a desperate video call from that place Kid once called home, that ratty apartment on the Lower East Side.

Dimples and Mama had crawled their way back to the dingy apartment on Avenue A. Lila watched as Dimples Skyped in a final plea from the bathroom. Mama in the tub, dead from an overdose of bad dust. While Dimples rasped, “Up for Room Time—?” Kid disconnected, blocking the Caller ID.

Without taking his eyes off the screen, his voice betrayed nothing.

“Mr. P. taught me a lot of useful tricks. How to rearrange TV, how to influence people … The man can get inside your head and rearrange your thoughts; he can get inside a toaster oven and bake a Hot Pocket. But he still keeps the good stuff to himself—molecular metamorphosis, the mental manipulation of matter.”

The Piper could collapse a bridge, but he couldn't stop an earthquake. He could cause a thunderstorm, but he couldn't water the desert. A creature of finite powers. With limits, like any entity—and Lila began to understand that the gaunt man “paid the piper,” so to speak, every time he performed a miracle. Afterward, he wore out, got tired, had to recharge.

“But his greatest talent is getting people to think what he wants,” Kid told her. “Nudging them, scaring them to death. All we do is fuel the engine of fear, and lust and greed. That's how human interaction works. The lust for power masked as benevolence. The trick is to present it as a collective awakening. That way people think they're doing good as they're doing bad.”

A quote from Nietzsche floated to the top of Kid's mind. “Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” Not long ago, in a moment of candor, Mr. P. mentioned how he had ‘befriended' Nietzsche, tormenting him with syphilitic symptoms just to see a brilliant mind crumble under the weight of physical and moral rot. So much for geniuses.

Kid returned to the present. “See, I'll show you.”

He opened up a new message window called Billboard West-Southwest; the cursor blinked waiting for him to type.

“I'm putting new sayings on digital billboards around the country—subliminal advertising. Y'know those signs that flash at you on the interstate and cloverleaf interchange? Nashville, San Diego, Denver—Bible Country, all those End-of-the-Worlders. If they think the Rapture is at hand, they'll volunteer to disappear. So when they get sick, which they inevitably will, masses of them will go nice and quiet. This should get their attention in Dubuque.” The digital message on the highway billboard now read
GOD IS WAITING
. “You watch; there'll be people walking off cliffs just to meet him.”

Lila and Maria looked at him aghast, too stunned to speak.

He swished the iPad icons and paused a moment, considering the problem of billboard manipulation closer to home. Thinking out loud, “The new ‘future proof' Yankee Stadium has over a thousand HD video monitors and a giant scoreboard. The Times Square billboard is primo too. Elevator TVs; taxi, bus, and airport digital signs. Problem is, hardly anybody believes squat in this city except maybe the newsstand Dot Heads and the Camel Drivers. And they all hate each other's guts on a good day. Let's play it safe; let's focus their energy. How about—”

The Kid tapped out a new line:
The Jews Did It.

“Wait. Wait. Wait!” Lila grabbed his hands. “Stop!”

“What?” he asked, annoyed. But her warmth flowing into him actually made him want to stop. “You want it more precise? So everyone can understand?
Blame the Jews
?”

“Stop, Kid,” Lila repeated. Her fingers reached for the iPad screen. She tapped and slid and scrambled his work, making it disappear. “Don't do this. This is not you.” Maria joined them on the bed, and the two girls pressed him on either side, shoulder to hip. He snatched the iPad close. “It's mine! You can't have it! Mine!”

Kid began to pant, mouth open with labored breathing. The urge for a tab of Dalekto engulfed him in a slow burn. But when Lila touched him, the warmth flowed over him like a summer breeze and the gritty desire for the Devil D eased off.

“That pad's not yours,” Lila told him very seriously. “It's his.” She looked around their safe room. “Everything is his—the apartment, the clothes, the toys, the city. The only thing you own is yourself. Yourself and us. Just the three of us.”