Part 2: Next Level / Chapter 20

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By the time we pulled up in front of Darla’s house, it was very clear that nothing in the attic was going to be saved.

Firemen were swarming the place, but it was a raging inferno. Apparently, old-fashioned computer components are super combustible and the tiny flames that had sprouted from the wrecked equipment during my tussle with Merrick had spread with impossible speed through the upper level of the mostly-wooden structure.

“No, no, no, no, no!” Darla cried out, as we leaped out of the car. We ran toward the house but a fireman waved us off and we were forced to just stand by and watch as the wreckage of the top floor was drenched in hose water and slowly extinguished.

A half an hour later, as we wandered through the ashy wasteland of the first level, the cops showed up. One officer approached us and introduced himself as Detective Derrick Branch. Apparently, a neighbor had heard something that sounded like gun shots, so the situation had raised some questions. Branch asked those questions, prompting Darla to walk him through everything that had happened.

Shell-shocked as she was, I was impressed that she managed to make some careful omissions where RIP and I were concerned. But even without that, the story was pretty hard to believe and after dutifully tapping the details of her account into a rubberized tablet, Branch paused for a beat and asked incredulously, “We’re talking about Dean Merrick?”

“Yes,” Darla answered.

“Head of Goliath Enterprises?”

“Yes.”

Branch rolled his eyes.

“Look, I was there too,” I said, jumping in. “Everything she said is true.”

“Dean Merrick broke into the house, rifled through her undies, and burned the place down?”

“That’s right.”

Granted, Merrick wasn’t entirely to blame for the fire. I’d done my part by knocking him into the offending equipment. But I didn’t feel compelled to bring that up. After all, he’d incited the whole thing. And maybe I was still annoyed that Darla had said he was good-looking. Also he’d shot me over and over.

“Look, Darla jumped back in. “I know it sounds—”

“Crazy?” Branch cut her off.

“Don’t call me crazy!”

“I didn’t call you crazy, I called your story crazy.”

“It’s not a story, it’s what happened!”

“Okay, I called your ‘what happened’ crazy. Look, do you have any hard proof to back all this up?”

“Well . . . ”

She dawdled too long and he skipped to the end.

“So it’s gonna be your word against his?”

He brought up a different window on his tablet and restated the question, as he apparently perused her record.

“Fortune 500 CEO, versus . . .”

His eyes lit up with revelation.

“. . . lady involved in a hit-and-run with a cheeseburger.”

He read on.

“Who was institutionalized?”

Darla grimaced.

“Are you calling me crazy again?”

“No,” Branch answered. “I didn’t call you crazy before.”

“But you are calling me crazy now!”

“Lady, the evidence is calling you crazy.”

“Well, then the evidence better shut its face!”

“Whoa!” I called out. “Let’s be reasonable here. She’s not just some rando. Her great uncle was Merrick’s dad’s business partner. There’s a clear connection between them.”

Branch sighed, processed what I’d said, then put up a “wait here” finger as he turned and walked over to another officer. After a brief confab, he returned.

“Well, we found Merrick’s car where you said it was. He wasn’t there, so maybe he fled the scene or . . . ” he trailed off in a way that suggested he thought there was more than a 50/50 chance we’d stolen the car and crashed it ourselves.

He put his tablet to sleep indicating he was done and gave us an official police goodbye: “We’ll look into it and get back to you.” Then he walked away again.

We just stood there in the street, staring from him to the still-blazing house fire. I looked over at Darla and saw a quiet demoralization had settled on her. I hadn’t fully registered that she was watching her fortune go up in flames.

“This isn’t your fault,” I said. “I mean the terms of your uncle’s will can’t apply.”

“They were very clear,” she said simply. “But it’s not about that. I didn’t earn that money. It never even really felt like it was mine. But I . . . wanted to fulfill my uncle’s final wishes. And I felt like . . . I was finally doing what I was supposed to, you know?”

I nodded.

“And more than that, whatever secrets were left in that computer are gone.”

I nodded again in grim agreement, but tried to summon some lackluster optimism.

“You still have the printout,” I said. “Are you sure you’ve—”

“I scanned the whole thing,” she cut me off. “None of the stuff that’s been translated explains what’s going on. It’s just business deals and earthquakes and stuff that’s already happened or didn’t happen that was maybe supposed to.”

“Like what?”

“Like all the stuff I told you. And . . . ”

“And what?”

“And . . . nothing.”

The “and” didn’t feel like an “and nothing.” But I thought I might be imagining things under the circumstances.

“So, what now?” she asked.

I took stock of my faculties and concluded that the exhaustion had finally well and truly caught up with me.

“I need to sleep,” I confessed. “But the drive to my place is too far. I’ll nod off and we’ll both die in a fiery crash.”

“Well, I will,” she corrected. “You’ll probably heal right up.”

“Probably. But I feel like either of us dying in a fiery crash is a deal breaker.”

“That’s sweet,” she said.

“Maybe you can drive?”

She scrunched up her face and I remembered she didn’t have a license. But she’d avoided running over kamikaze cyclists while a madman was shooting at her, and I was pretty sure that beat whatever the DMV test was throwing at people these days. However, her lack of a license wasn’t the issue.

“I’m pretty spent too,” she responded. “Should we get a hotel room?”

“What kind of hotel room?” I asked.

“With two beds.”

“Well, obviously. For sure. I wasn’t . . . I didn’t think . . . I meant what kind of hotel not what kind of room?”

“Oh. Yeah. That’s . . . there’s a Courtyard Marriott just off the freeway.”

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The awkward miscommunication hung in the air for a moment and then we were off.

###

After checking in to the hotel, we trudged up to our third-floor double, and each flopped down on a bed, staring up at the ceiling. I noticed the overhead lighting was recessed into some decorative molding. That struck me as luxurious. In fact, the whole room was luxurious by my standards. The wallpaper was an exquisitely adapted Japanese print of a flotilla of ships adrift in a frothy, turbulent sea. The deep blues were contrasted by a series of four black and white paintings mounted side-by-side on the wall behind me—each depicting a portion of a mountain range that was continued from one painting to the next.

Set against the wall beyond the foot of the bed was a full-sized desk and adjustable office chair to make traveling executives feel at home. There was even an inspirational placard on the desk that read “Plunge boldly into the thick of life!” attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

All very luxurious. But Darla had paid for it with a shrug, remarking, “We might as well live it up. Estate lawyers will probably freeze my accounts tomorrow.” I was amazed at how little she seemed to care about the financial ramifications of what had happened. Lots of people think money won’t change them. They’re usually wrong—once they have it, it becomes who they are. But I thought Darla was genuinely different. And there was that feeling again: an overwhelming sense of belonging. I’d been fighting it, but I thought I might be losing.

My phone rang and I looked down at it, then rolled my eyes.

“It’s my office.”

She nodded and said, “I’m gonna freshen up.” Then she headed for the restroom. I noticed she’d left the printout sitting face-down on the desk. I quelled an impulse to flip it over and have a look. It didn’t take much effort. I found I was less tempted to break her trust than ever.

“Hello,” I answered the phone.

“Henry?”

“Hey, Lela.”

“Mr. Delaney wants to know where you are.”

“Listen, Robbie’s in the hospital again. I’m not going to make it in today.”

“Oh, no,” she said.

Robbie’s condition had disrupted my employment often enough that I’d had to share a little about the situation with my coworkers. I knew Lela would instantly assume that I was indisposed, sitting at his bedside. I didn’t mind the misrepresentation, because that was exactly where I would have been if I weren’t out headbutting cyclists to save him.

“Robbie’s in the hospital,” Lela called across the office to someone, presumably Frank.

I waited for it.

“He . . . wants to know if the Malomar contract is signed yet.”

“I’m working on it.”

“He’s working on it,” she called across the office again.

“Okay, I gotta go,” I told Lela.

“Give Robbie a hug for me,” she said.

“Will do.”

As I hung up, the phone rang again immediately. This time the call was coming from the hospital. An irrational panic spread through me—a dread that using Robbie as my get-out-of-work-free card had triggered some karmic backlash, no matter how noble my intentions.

“Hello?” I answered anxiously.

“What’s new?” Robbie’s voice came back.

I sighed. It didn’t seem like the emergency I’d feared.

“Well,” I answered. “A maniac burned down Darla’s attic and all her computer stuff. And a couple of cyclists tried to get me to run them over and then tried to run me over before exploding into a mist of Gatorade.”

“Cool,” he said.

“Yup.”

“You get a lot of XP from the cyclists?”

“A hundred and twenty each.”

“A hundred and twenty? That’s a raw deal.”

Maybe the report seemed par for the course, after everything else the game had thrown at me, but for whatever reason, he didn’t ask any more follow-up questions. He just fell silent. It was out of character, considering his earlier excitement about being anointed my mentor. I wondered if I’d misjudged the situation at his end.

“What about you?” I replied. “Where’s your mom?”

“Bathroom,” he answered. “She’s using the one down the hall so I won’t hear her crying.”

“What?”

“Oh. Yeah,” he said, shrugging with his voice. “They did some more blood work.”

“And?”

“Nothing new. They were just confirming the prognosis. But I think mom was hoping . . . ”

“That they’d find a mistake,” I finished his thought.

“Yeah.”

I sighed again.

“Oh,” he said. “I was thinking. Those shorts you got—they might boost your stats if you equip them, or at least their item description might show up. Have you tried putting them on?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I think they’re probably some rando’s underwear, and you know . . . cooties.”

“Well, I don’t think you have to put ‘em on for real. Just put ‘em on over your pants, dude. It won’t matter. Equipped is equipped.”

I shrugged and said, “Gimme a sec.”

I pulled the briefs from my pocket and slipped them on.

“K,” I said.

“Anything?”

“Nope.”

He sighed.

“Oh well. Worth a try.”

“Yeah.”

“I think mom’s coming back,” he said. “I’m supposed to be sleeping. Call me if you fight an Owlbear or something.”

He hung up.

“So . . . what do we have here?” Darla asked as she emerged from the bathroom and noted my new “underwear over the pants” look.

“Just talked to Robbie and he had . . . ”

“Fashion advice?” she finished. “He nailed it.”

I rolled my eyes and removed the briefs.

“Is he okay?” she asked.

“Same as he was,” I answered. “So, no.”

She frowned sympathetically, then seemed to ponder Robbie’s misfortunes.

“Is your sister on her own?” she asked. “I mean is Robbie’s dad . . . ”

“He’s gone,” I answered.

Her face went a little pale.

“Not dead,” I clarified. “Just gone.”

From her expression, I could tell she thought that was better, but not by much. She nodded and fell silent.

But a moment later, her eyes went wide.

“His dad!” she exclaimed.

“Huh?”

“I’ve been trying to figure out how Merrick could know about the feed,” she explained. “Especially how he could have any idea of what was in it. But he said his father came to visit my uncle after they fell out.”

“You think your uncle told his father about the predictions?”

She pulled out her phone and started Googling something.

“Not intentionally. We all thought he was just lost to dementia. And he was. But also I think maybe . . . maybe he could read bits and pieces of the code, before the translation started.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he did have a key. But the point is, sometimes when he was babbling, I think some of the babble could have been . . . ”

“Predictions?” I finished. “And you think Merrick’s dad figured that out?”

“Maybe he got lucky. Heard the right babble about some company that—”

She dropped off, staring at her phone. Then she tossed the phone aside and jumped up, grabbing her printout off the desk. She rifled through the pages, stopping on a highlighted spot, mouth agape.

“What?” I asked her, barely restraining myself from shifting my position to read the highlighted section.

“Starling Software stock will triple on IPO,” she read aloud. “That showed up in the feed twenty-nine years ago, just a few months after . . . ”

She grabbed her phone back up off the bed and read from the article she’d apparently found: “Goliath Enterprises grew ten-fold following Cyril Cunningham’s exit and institutionalization—starting with the stunningly lucrative acquisition of Starling Software six months before its IPO!”

I started to get it.

“Flying Dutchman’s operating system will . . . ” I said, struggling to recall the whole prediction from the printout she shared earlier.

“. . . become the new standard for smart phones,” she finished.

The seeming coincidence overlapping with Dean Merrick’s recent acquisition was too much.

“So, what, you think his dad built some kind of playbook based on your uncle’s rambling?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I think,” she answered, now pacing back and forth. “But it’s coming up short now, because a bunch of the predictions about recent events are missing the mark.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea, but now we know why Dean showed up all crazy-eyed looking for answers.”

“His business is flailing,” I filled in. “And he’s looking for a quick fix.”

She nodded.

“But he’s not going to get it,” she said, the wind going out of her sails.

At first, I couldn’t make sense of why her mood had dropped off a cliff. But as she continued, I understood she wasn’t lamenting Dean Merrick’s bad luck.

“Nobody’s going to get anything from the feed ever again,” she went on. “Because it’s gone.”

“Couldn’t you access the feed through some other computer?” I asked.

“I have no idea how my uncle accessed it in the first place—never mind how to translate it. I don’t think anybody knows. He wrote the code for it in some kind of a fugue state on an Indian reservation just before he was locked up.”

She flopped down dejectedly beside me.

“We can’t access the feed,” she said hopelessly. “We can’t translate the rest of the printout. We can’t figure out what’s happening with me, you, or anything. And I’m still going to end up—”

She broke off, but I knew where she was headed. She didn’t care about all the money. But the feed was different. Among other things, she believed it could help her understand the strange sense of separation she felt from the world—and maybe evade the looming specter of whatever had plagued her uncle.

I placed a hand lightly on her shoulder and said, “You don’t know you’re going to end up like him.”

Given my issues, the tenderness was dangerous territory. It was the comfort and familiarity I’d side-stepped with Kimberly and plenty of other people. But I ignored the alarm bells going off in my head.

Darla looked me in the eyes. Then, without another word, she leaned her head against my chest, propelling me onto my back as she burrowed in. We laid there like that for a long while. Then, eventually, our mutual exhaustion took its toll and we nodded off.

###

I slept like a dead man. That was weird because I definitely had plenty of ammo for nightmares. But maybe I had too much ammo. Maybe my subconscious couldn’t pick a problem to focus on. Who had created this dumb game? How had they created it? Why had they picked me to play? And how could I hope to win and save Robbie, considering how busted the game dynamics were?

Never mind all that, what about Darla? What was her deal? Her recent snuggling offensive had put me off balance, but even before that, she’d been an enigma. I could tell she was holding something back. Maybe several somethings. But I hadn’t pressed her. I guess I was too busy processing the messes I knew about to go digging for more. Sure, I’d thought there was a chance that getting to the bottom of her situation would shed some light on my own—but that hope had literally gone up in smoke when the equipment in her attic melted to slag.

All in all, things were really, really great. But they were about to get even better.