Remote (18 page)

There was a single wireless keyboard sitting on the desk, in front of the rolling chair.  Jack glanced at it but didn’t pick it up. 

Beyond the exercise area was a short hall, with doorways on either side halfway down it and another at the end.  To the right was a storage room with a small fridge and microwave; as Jack had thought, Remote had enough supplies stocked to last at least a week. 

The room to the left was a bathroom, with mirrors behind more shatterproof glass on three of the walls.  There was a device that looked like a giant’s dental instrument hanging behind the door, a round mirror mounted on an adjustable swivel at the end of a four-foot handle. 

But it was the room at the end of the hall that was the most intriguing.

It wasn’t large, and the only furniture it held was a small cot and a bedside table.  This was obviously where Remote would sleep if the panic room were under siege.  What made the room remarkable was the shelves that lined the walls and what they held.

More automata wouldn’t have surprised Jack, but that wasn’t what he found.  At first glance it was just an assortment of random stuff: lunchboxes, framed photos, DVDs and toys and various knick-knacks.  But every single item had one thing in common.

They all featured the woman from the poster.

Her name, Jack gathered from the signed publicity photo in the expensive gold frame, was Eden.  The sight of her smiling face on the side of a wax cup brought back a vague memory of her in a fast-food commercial, some kind of tie-in to a movie. 

The movie was called
Shambles
, and Jack found it in a DVD case a little further down the shelf.  Eden’s last name was Fawnsley according to the back of the case, and the movie itself seemed to one of those horror/parody things that had recently become popular again. 

There was more, lots more.  DVDs labeled with television appearances, usually on talk shows or in commercials.  She guested on a European version of
Dancing with the Stars
and on a Japanese game show.  There was an action figure and even an unauthorized biography. 

Jack picked up the paperback bio.  It featured a slightly different version of the poster and was titled
I’m Not Ascared of ANYTHING! 
He scanned the back cover copy quickly, then looked at the front again.  He had a rough idea who Eden Fawnsley was now, but no idea why Remote seemed so fascinated with her. 

He padded back to Remote’s control center, taking the book with him.  Remote was still unconscious, but his breathing was steady. 

Jack eased himself onto the cool white leather of the rolling chair, opened the book and began to read.

***

Nikki understood desire. 

Not lust, but the basic human drive that more or less underlay just about everything men and women did.  People wanted things—some physical, some not—and the more they wanted them, the more they were willing to do in order to get them.  If you could convince someone they could get what they wanted by doing what you said, you could pretty much tell them what to do, and that held true for everyone from junkies to politicians—not that there was a lot of difference between those particular two examples.  Just different drugs. 

She knew what Goliath wanted, in both the short and long-term.  Food, drugs, sex and a warm soft place to sleep were on the short list—and maybe some medical attention for his ruined eye--but she knew he was willing to forgo all of those if he got what he really wanted.

Revenge. 

“You were traded,” Nikki said, the soft white flakes drifting down around her like the aftermath of a pillow slaughter.  “You were the asshole to be named later.  I didn’t take you down, but I sure as hell would like to take down the guy who did.  You want a piece of that?”

Goliath didn’t answer her at first, just stared at her from his metal cave.  “Who’d he get for me?  King Kong?”

“Doesn’t matter.  I don’t give a shit about
him
, I want the guy who has him.  You help me with that, things get a lot easier for both of us.”

“And if I don’t?”

She sighed.  “Then we’re stuck out here in the woods, freezing our asses off.  I brought some food for me, but you’re gonna have to do with roots and fucking berries.”

“So let’s say I help you.  What’s it get me?”

“Clothes.  Heat.  Food.  Some painkillers for your eye. I’ll even throw in some beer if you don’t jerk me around.”  She didn’t bother reinforcing the revenge aspect—it was better if Goliath thought of that as being his own angle.  Having an agenda would give him a sense of control, and that meant he’d be easier to deal with.  “So, you in?”

“Fuck
yeah
, I’m in.”

“Okay.  Here’s how this is going to work . . .”

***

Eden Fawnsley’s fifteen minutes of fame began on a reality show called
Horror House
. 

The premise was simple: contestants were screened to find the kind of people who shrieked at scary movies, and had very particular fears.  Twelve of these people were locked inside a specially-built, very creepy house that was wired to provide everything from blood-spewing faucets to monsters leaping from closets.  Whoever lasted longest got a million dollars--and the producers had plenty of surprises in store, tailored to the contestant’s specific phobias.  There were animatronic spiders the size of pit bulls, a refrigerator full of rats, snakes that slithered out of toilet bowls.  But it was more subtle than that—TV screens had horrific images inserted subliminally and constant low-level music provided a horror movie soundtrack, while an espresso machine and a never-ending supply of Red Bull kept the contestants hyper-alert and on edge.  Even their sense of smell was manipulated through the introduction of subtle hints of blood, decay, burning flesh. 

The show was a big hit.  People tuned in to see people pushed to the very edge, to seem grown men reduced to tears and women shriek.  Some of the contestants soiled themselves.  One woman had to be hospitalized and sedated, and another man bodily removed from the set when he became completely irrational and threatened another contestant with a broken bottle.

But there was more to the show than simply terrorizing people.  There was a mystery, clues, choices to be made and chances to be taken.  Competition fought with survival instincts, simple greed versus the basic human trait of banding together against the threat of the unknown.

Eden didn’t win the million dollars.  But she did generate one of those stand-alone moments that reality TV producers pray for, an unscripted moment of sheer human emotion as raw and real as seeing a mother run into a burning building.  It made her, if not a star, then at least a comet that blazed across the media sky for a season or two.

Reality TV shows liked archetypal characters, the more basic the better, and Eden was chosen to represent the soft-spoken, mostly pure of heart Southern Gal, east of white trash and north of racist, a little bit slutty and a little bit virginal; Britney before the breakdown, with just a touch of Daisy Duke.  If she’d been a character in a slasher flick, she would have stood a good chance of making it almost all the way to the end credits. 

Not all the way, though.  She wasn’t quite smart enough to play the plucky lead who survived—more like the lead’s best friend who was the final, heart-rending victim.  Likable, but just not hard-assed enough to come out on top. 

One of the prime laws of reality TV was Thou Shalt Not Get Along, which meant personality types were always chosen to maximize conflict.  Producers couldn’t always predict who would wind up bitter enemies and who would wind up friends—people had a stubborn habit of defying expectations—but there were certain combinations guaranteed to generate animosity and suspicion.  Nobody was surprised when Eden and a contestant named Estrellita Juarez took an instant dislike to each other; Estrellita was a scientist, a hard-headed geneticist from a wealthy family; Eden was a dirt-poor high-school dropout and devout Christian.  Eden stridently denied being a bigot, but there was obviously a deeply-ingrained class bias in her attitude toward Latinos, made even more evident by the fact that Estrellita was better educated and better off than she was.  They argued on the very first day, almost came to blows on day three, and then—despite themselves, and their circumstances—came to a gradual, grudging respect of each other’s abilities over the course of the next week. 

Specific tasks had to be performed to earn clues, which would lead to more tasks.  The only reward the contestants ever got was downtime, an hour or more in the Safe Room, the one place they could be guaranteed not to be attacked, frightened, or terrorized.  Contestants could even be “killed”, marked with fake blood by a realistic-looking weapon, meaning that any attacker had to be either fought or run away from; three “deaths” would remove you from the game for good.

Only four contestants were left when Estrellita and Eden were paired up for a trip to the basement.  Both of them had already been “killed” twice. 

Estrellita’s specific fear was lizards, and for a very good reason: She was from Florida, and when she was six years old she’d seen her eight-year old brother dragged into a canal and killed by an alligator.  She’d never been comfortable around water, and even a picture of Godzilla was enough to make her hyperventilate. 

The monster that attacked them seemed to have leapt directly out of her nightmares, a hulking, scaly brute with a snout full of gaping, razor-sharp teeth.  Estrellita had screamed, dropped her flashlight and tried to run; she hadn’t taken more than a step before it grabbed her from behind.

But this monster had been designed with more than Estrellita in mind.  Eden’s phobia was more specific; she was terrified of butchers.  The sight of any large, sharp knife made her nervous, and an actual meat cleaver provoked a panic attack.  A life-long vegetarian, she would cross the street to avoid a deli and had once fainted when she wandered into the meat section of a supermarket. 

The reptillian monster, with his bloodstained apron and cleaver, was designed to terrify both of them.  Whoever it got first, the producers were sure the other one would run away screaming—but they were in for a surprise.

 After eight days of psychological torment, sleep deprivation and fear, Eden Fawnsley physically attacked a monster three times her size while defending one of her competitors.   Her cry of “I’M NOT ASCARED OF YOU!” was an instant catchphrase that echoed through the mediasphere, a meme that resonated with anyone who’d ever wished they could face down their worst nightmare.  It became a rallying cry for a culture tired of terrorist alerts, fearmongering, and sensationalism; and Eden, after her third “death”, found herself reborn at the center of a marketing whirlwind. 

Jack closed the book.  He hadn’t read the whole thing, just skimmed it, but he had the salient facts.  The question was, what was it about Eden’s story that fascinated Remote so much--was it her courage in the face of intense pressure?  Her capitalization on her moment in the spotlight?  Something as simple as physical attraction, or more subtle?  What was lurking in Remote’s head that drove this particular obsession?

***

Goliath wasn’t fooled.

Things had settled down in his head, but they hadn’t gone back to normal.  He could still hear the angry screaming of overamped guitars in the back of his head, the prayers of the Mantises to their new master, and he knew his trials weren’t over.  This was another test, to see whether or not he was willing to embrace his new reality or retreat to the safe, sane world he’d been born into. 

The division in his head had grown, both sides gaining strength from battling the other, like two wily boxers each learning their opponent’s moves.  Goliath sensed that on some deep level something had finally broken inside him, some kind of boundary that he’d been raging against his whole life without ever knowing it was there.  On the other side of that barrier was either total freedom or complete destruction, and he wasn’t sure which one he wanted more.

It was funny though, funny enough to make him laugh out loud; part of him knew that he still had a choice, that all he had to do was say to himself
this is crazy
and it would all fade away; not all at once, not right away, but a few days from now he’d be shaking his head and wondering how he could have believed anything so fucked up.

But another part of his brain was telling him it didn’t have to be that way.  That he could choose to believe, choose this new reality, and then it wouldn’t be crazy at all—it would be real.  He would be the Godfucker, and all reality would be his to kick the shit out of whenever he wanted.

Right now, one point of view seemed just as valid as the other—in fact, to Goliath they didn’t even seem to contradict each other.  Just two guys arguing in a bar over which had the longer dick, that was all. 

For now, he was going with the one that promised unlimited power. 
What the fuck—why not?
  But that didn’t mean he was done with his sanity, not yet—not when he needed it to convince his captor he could be dealt with in a rational manner.  He didn’t need food or clothing or even beer—though some painkillers for his eye would be good, it hurt like a bitch--but he did need her to think those things were important to him.  It would give her a lever to move him in whatever direction she wanted . . . until that lever snapped in her hand.

Because the Mantises would never accept a God that would allow himself to be caged.  But once Goliath was free, he would be free forever.

So he had growled
yes
and
no
and
C’mon, I’m freezing my fucking nuts off
, even though his body seemed like something far, far away that he was operating like a video game.  Even his damaged eye was only a nagging irritation, something that didn’t really seem to matter. 

The woman with the gun had relocked the trailer door and gotten back in the truck and driven for another two hours.  Now they were in some pissant little tourist town in the foothills, at the very last unit in a strip motel that seemed to have no other customers but them.  Goliath was sleeping shackled to the U-shaped pipe under the bathroom sink, on a nest of bedspreads pulled off the two doubles.  The woman with the gun slept on one, and some other guy slept on the other.  She disconnected the phone from the wall and stashed it in a drawer before cuffing the guy to the bed-frame, which Goliath found very interesting; apparently he wasn’t the only prisoner in her collection.