Gwendy’s Final Task

But Gwendy also remembered what Richard Farris had told her that nightmarish evening on the screened-in back porch—the box’s last seven proprietors all dead, many of their families in the ground right alongside them—and it occurred to her that perhaps what the button box wanted most of all was a voluntary act of madness and mass destruction from its most faithful guardian. Talk about a win—the win of all wins—for the bad guys. And exactly who were the bad guys?

Around that time, the plague that Farris had warned her about—the media was calling it the Corona Virus or COVID-19, depending on which channel you watched; Gwendy couldn’t help but think of it as the Button Box Virus because she knew it had been responsible—finally made landfall in the United States. Only a handful of people had died so far, but many others had fallen sick and were being admitted to hospitals. Schools and colleges all across the country were sending students home to learn online. Concerts and sporting events were being cancelled. Half the country was wearing masks and practicing safe social distancing; the other half—led by a frozen-like-adeer-in-the-headlights President Trump—believed it was all a big hoax designed to steal their constitutional rights. So far, there was no sign of the stacked up body bags that Farris had told her about, but Gwendy had no doubt they were coming. And soon.

Some late nights, when she was feeling particularly small and alone, curled up like an orphaned child on her side of the spacious king size bed or lying awake in a hotel room after a campaign stop, unable to find sleep despite a warm bath and several glasses of wine, Gwendy was certain that the button box was responsible for taking Ryan away from her. A life for a life, she thought. It saved my mother and took my lover. The goddam box had always been like that—it preferred to keep things square.

In March of 2020, she got a phone call on her personal cell, a number known to only a handful of people. Perhaps a dozen in total. UNKNOWN CALLER showed in the window. Because spammers were now required to display an actual callback number (legislation she had enthusiastically voted for), Gwendy took the call.

“Hello?”

Breathing on the other end.

“Say something, or I’m hanging up.”

“It was a Cadillac that hit your husband.” The voice was male, and although he wasn’t using one of those voice-distorting gadgets, he was clearly trying to disguise his voice. “Old. Fifty, maybe sixty years, but in beautiful shape. Purple. Or could have been red. Fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview.”

“Who is this? How did you get this number?”

Click.

Gone.

Gwendy closed her eyes and ran a review of all the people who had her private cell number (in those days she was still capable of such a mental task). She came up empty. It was only later that she realized she had also given her number to Ward Mitchell of the Derry PD. She doubted it had been him, with his chilly eyes and Magowan campaign button, but it would have been entered into the department’s computer system, and she had an intuition that it had been a cop who called her … but she never found out who.

Or why.

18

BERN STAPLETON HANDS THE iPad back to Jafari Bankole. The astronomer looks at the screen and shakes his head in disbelief. “I swear I tried that. Twice.”

“Probably you did,” Stapleton says. “These gadgets are fancy as hell, but they’re not perfect.” He glances over at Senator Peterson, who’s strapped in her flight chair, busy tapping away at her own mini computer. “Let me know if you need anything else, Jaff.”

“Thank you,” Bankole says, already engrossed in the seemingly endless rows of shifting numbers.

This is Stapleton’s third trip to the up-above, which is why he’s currently making his rounds on level three of Eagle Heavy. All four crew members on the lower deck are first-timers, what the veterans call Greenies. Stapleton knows from experience that four weeks of training, no matter how rigidly organized, just isn’t enough time.

“How’re tricks, Senator?”

Gwendy looks up from her iPad screen. “Just finished performing my assigned duties as Weather Girl, and now I’m checking my emails. Pretty typical afternoon. What are you up to?” Despite her sassy tone, she’s genuinely curious. She’d noticed Stapleton speaking quietly with Adesh Patel a few minutes earlier, their heads mere inches apart, and it worried her. Were they discussing her little episode from earlier? Sneaking glances at her when she wasn’t looking? She doesn’t think that’s the case, but even the possibility makes her uneasy.

“Thought I’d make sure the rookies were pulling their weight,” Bern says. “Speaking of that …” He looks around. “Where’s Winston?”

Gwendy hooks a thumb toward level four. “Either in the bathroom again or hiding in his cabin. I think he’s already grown bored with the view from his precious porthole.”

“How about you?” Stapleton asks. “You bored yet?”