Weavers (7 page)

CHAPTER 13

Darryl laid his hands on the keyboard and took a deep breath.
He felt alive, connected, and he hadn’t even begun to reach out yet. Going without booze for a few days sucked, but this moment was always the same—he felt pure and alive—and though he knew the feeling would die, it made him wonder why he covered this with booze. This was his gift, what he was meant to do, and he willingly buried it under alcohol.

“Do you want me to help you get started?” Terry asked from across the room, but the words may as well have come from across Texas.

“No,” said Darryl as he began to type. Terry had showed him how to enter live chat rooms, and Darryl found himself entering one that was supposed to offer conversation about a game called
Resident Evil
. Not that it mattered. Darryl couldn’t have cared less about the game or what other users had to say about it.

It only took a few moments for Darryl to connect. There was a user in the chat room named JVTINE911, and Darryl let his mind wander until he could make a connection. He was used to seeing the threads and working amongst them, but this was different. He was with JVTINE911, but stuck inside of the teenage boy’s head inside of his room. Darryl knew nothing about the boy and then everything in an instant. His name was Bryce Rucker, he was in tenth grade, and he loved his PlayStation. Bryce had never kissed a girl, was smoking the occasional cigarette, and had masturbated twice in the boys’ locker room at school. Bryce’s dad was a lawyer with the Crawford and Crawford firm in Phoenix, where their family lived, and Bryce’s mother was a homemaker. Dad worked too much, Mom tried too hard, and Bryce was spoiled and lonely.

As disconnected as he felt from them, Bryce still knew a great deal about his mother and father. As he began to type on his keyboard, blood started to pour from his left nostril, but Bryce made no effort to wipe it away. Threads of pure amber spilled from his head and his fingertips, all of them brushing over the keyboard and screen of his computer, but the only things Bryce was moving were his fingertips. He was a zombie, a sight that would have made his mother scream and dial 911, but Bryce was hard at work. Despite the fact Bryce felt like he didn’t know his parents very well, his father’s online banking security information collapsed at his fingertips.

Darryl knew he was shitstomping the kid, but he didn’t care; he couldn’t care. Bryce was a victim of circumstance, nothing more and nothing less. He had no aura, no ability to protect himself from someone, like Darryl, who could bend him. It was perfect and couldn’t have been any easier if Darryl had held a gun to his head. The kid knew everything that Darryl needed, and in just forty-five minutes the work was done.

Darryl gave Bryce one last push, a hard one, before leaving, and though he didn’t hear the gunshot, he knew what he would see if he looked at a Phoenix newspaper the next day. Bryce Rucker had never fired a gun, but he knew where Dad kept his .357, always loaded, and as soon as Darryl was out of his head, Bryce was going to retrieve that gun, put it in his mouth, and pull the trigger.

“Shit, are you all right?” Terry asked when Darryl came back, the walls in the apartment swirling as his mind realized that he was no longer attached to Bryce.

“I’m fine,” said Darryl, knowing that it was the farthest thing from the truth. He felt sick, dirty, and diseased, but he had only done what he had to. Darryl had no idea if there were other people like him who had kept their ability to bend past adolescence, but if there were, he had to imagine they would be doing the same things he was. “I need coffee,” he said, knowing even as Terry scrambled to get him a cup of the black that it wouldn’t be good enough.

Terry returned with the coffee. It was ice-cold and double brewed, and Darryl slammed it like the sludge was a cold beer at the end of a hard and hot day. The caffeine went to work immediately, making him feel alive again, as if there were springs under him.

“Again,” said Darryl, and he handed the cup to Terry, who once again made the trek to the kitchen. Darryl slammed the second cup, set the mug down next to the keyboard, and sighed.

“Do you want me to get you a bump?” Terry asked, and Darryl shook his head as he looked for a new person to chat with.

“Not yet,” said Darryl. “We need to save it, anyways. I’ll be ripping through the stuff soon enough.”

“Did you get anything?”

“Twenty-four grand,” said Darryl. “It would have been more, but his dad just bought a boat. It had a big down payment, bigger than what he told his wife by almost triple, so he was a little lighter than I was hoping. The next one will be better.”

“Twenty-four thousand dollars is a lot for one,” said Terry. “That’s a record.”

Darryl nodded as he punched keys and entered another web-based chat, this one for lovers of the
Final Fantasy
games. “It won’t be the record for long,” he said. “This is going to be a hard night.”

Terry said something else, but Darryl didn’t hear him. He was racing through the wires and static into CAiT$iTH, known to her friends as Ericka Hurley. Ericka was seventeen, a big fan of
Final Fantasy VII
, and the daughter of two veterinarians. As Darryl took her, Ericka’s cat, Thumper, leapt from her lap and began to hiss at her best friend and the yellow strings running from her scalp. No one else in the house heard anything, not until the tub ran over with pink water and began to flow down the stairs.

“That’s two,” said Darryl as he snapped back, and Terry came running from the kitchen with another cup of room-temperature coffee. Darryl took the coffee, drank, and then belched loudly. The caffeine was cutting through the fog, but he could already feel the shadows racing in. Darryl had made two teenagers kill themselves to cover his footsteps, but he harbored no guilt. They were casualties of war, a necessary mess while making an omelet. There was no guilt, but he could feel his aura fading and couldn’t even imagine what a mirror might tell him about his current state.
Black and purple, black and purple—like your liver, like your guts, like everything inside of you, just waiting to die.

“Cut me a line,” said Darryl. “A big one. Cut me a fucking worm.”

Terry nodded, then ran to the bathroom and grabbed the small mirror they kept for just such an occasion. Darryl watched his friend—no longer a fatboy but instead a man with a very unfortunate attitude toward women—and then took the offered mirror with its requested line. Darryl grabbed the glass straw that was next to the line of coke, which was fat enough to be a leech instead of a worm, and then hunkered down and got his Hoover on. He shut his eyes as he snuffled up the coke—the last thing he needed to see was his topknot when he was doing blow—and then he felt reborn.

“Take the mirror,” said Darryl, and dutiful Terry did as he was told while Darryl dove back into the machine.

Darryl stole, committing acts of rape far worse than he ever could have with his dick and a gun, and then he was really steamrolling. He’d pop out, sniff coke and chug coffee, and then dive back in. Looking at the clock made him sick, so he stopped looking, and then, what turned out to be two days later, he wandered into a chat room based around the
Legend of Zelda
games and started a conversation with a boy named Vincent Taggio. Darryl sunk his teeth in like a vampire, but it wasn’t until he was all in that Darryl realized his victim was himself a vampire.

Vincent wasn’t like the rest. He was playing his own game, using his own skills. Vincent was a bender, too, and he’d already figured out the trick that Darryl was using, but he wasn’t ready to be struck back. Darryl was on him like a hungry dog after a sack of Ol’ Roy. Vincent asked him, “What the fuck are you?” and the voice was accompanied by a sizable jolt. The boy thought he was invincible. He fought back, and they never fought back—not in person, and so far, not over the wire, either. Vincent’s defenses crumbled, of course—he was just a boy, after all—but a part of Darryl still wanted to get the hell out of him.

Darryl dove into Vincent’s mind and took all the important things. It was quite a load. Mom and Dad were rich, Dad was connected with the Chicago Outfit, and he was a player, not a kickstand. Vincent knew all that, but even better, Vincent knew his dad’s friends—goombahs with names like Ricky and Sal and Tony—and Vincent had done his own exploring into them. Instead of one bank account, Darryl had been given the keys to the vault, Cayman Islands keys, and he got to cleaning house while Vincent pissed himself and shuddered at his desktop.

When Darryl was done, he slid free from Vincent with a snail trail of shit dripping behind him. Darryl had never been inside another bender—he’d never even thought about it—but he’d cleared almost half a million dollars in under an hour. Vincent had been easy to shove, and Darryl hated that he couldn’t use the boy again and was leaving him to a slow death at the end of a rope, but he came clean of Vincent with a sheen of sweat and a new knowledge.

“You’ll never fucking believe this,” said Darryl as Terry ran to him with a coffee and the mirror. Darryl could see light outside and didn’t even want to think about what day it was.

“What?” Terry set the goods down in front of his friend, but Darryl shook his head at both the coke and the coffee.

“I need booze,” said Darryl as Terry cocked an eyebrow, no doubt wondering how his friend could already be done. “I’m serious, Terry. I need a drink.”

“All right,” said Terry, a wounded tone in his voice. He’d only been trying to help.

“This last kid was like me, he was doing the same thing we are, and I was able to make him do things, everything. Half a million, Terry. Half a million because this kid was a bender like me. Can you believe it?”

“Holy shit.” Terry could believe it as it turned out.

“If there’s one, there’s a million,” said Darryl. “They’re all kids—remember me telling you that? For whatever reason, there’s just me and then all these kids that can do this, and the ones that can do it all have access to their whole worlds.”

“Let’s get a drink and talk about it,” said Terry.

Darryl ran a hand through his hair. He could see that Terry thought he was crazy, and not for the first time.

“Yeah, let’s get a drink. I can explain better, I think,” said Darryl, but he didn’t really care either way. Terry didn’t need to understand for it to be true.
I’ve been wasting my time.

Terry drove them back from the liquor store in the shitty car. Being in it now was just a reminder that they would have a better one soon, that soon Austin and the car and the porno apartment would all be in the rearview mirror. Freedom from all of that would carry its own weight, of course. The need to always be moving was rough, and some of Terry’s tastes could be tough to deal with as well, but they’d finally have money to grease the wheels. Darryl didn’t talk as his friend drove, didn’t even want to think yet. There were three cases of beer in the trunk, along with a couple of handles of Johnnie Walker Black, and he didn’t want to think about any of it until he could get a drink in his hand.

Darryl had only been bending over the computer for two days—an eternity in his mind, but nothing compared to the marathon sessions of his youth. Of course, with the computer they weren’t just tricking guys into emptying bank accounts from strip club ATM machines. This new way was better, cleaner, though the kid—fucking Vincent with his gangster dad—had shown Darryl that he was still operating penny-ante scams when he could have been fishing for whales all along.

Terry finally parked at the apartment, and the two of them humped the booze up the stairs. The neighborhood was quiet, almost as if the psychic energy coming from his topknot was enough to warn the rest of the apartment dwellers to stay inside. Not that he cared, of course. Darryl wanted a drink in each hand. He wanted to shut it off. He wanted to walk past a mirror without squeezing his eyes shut.

They piled booze on the kitchen table, and then Darryl went to work on getting a scotch. By the time he got to the couch, Terry was already there with a beer and a lit cigarette, waiting to hear why Darryl had bowed out so quickly. Darryl sat down beside him and slammed the scotch, loving the burn as it curled through his chest and down into his belly.

“OK,” said Darryl at last. “Like I said, the last kid was doing the same thing that I was, Terry. He wasn’t stealing, but he was thinking about it. His dad is some mobbed-up guy, and the kid was making a list of his father’s connections in his head.”

“He couldn’t just kick you out?”

Darryl shook his head, letting Terry keep rapid-firing questions.

“What made this kid so special but made him unable to eighty-six you from his head?”

“I don’t know, not exactly,” said Darryl. “I do have some guesses.”

“Spill.”

“I think he could have kicked me out—that is, if we’d been face-to-face,” explained Darryl. “The thing is, he had no idea that someone could do what he was doing. This isn’t exactly well-documented shit, you know? Point is, I pulled close to a half a million out of that kid, and all I had to do was let him do what he already knew. There was no discovery process, no rooting around in his head for maiden names or old addresses so that I could try and figure out a likely password. He’d already done all of the work. Do you know what this means?”

“That we got lucky?”

“All I need to do is find kids like Vincent, maybe even ones more powerful, both mentally and in terms of family. Can you imagine if the Clintons’ kid was a bender and we could get to her? Or maybe the son of a stockbroker, or head of the FBI? As far as we know, I’m the only adult who can do this, but how many of these scammy little kids are out running the same kind of racket, but without the stones or smarts to set up offshore accounts and actually take? I mean, when I was a kid, just knowing I could do something was usually good enough, but that’s what makes them so ripe.”

“What if you didn’t make them off themselves?”

“We’ve been over that, Terry,” said Darryl. “I don’t like that part any better than you do, but if they didn’t die, the kids might be able to remember what happened. And without the deaths, the empty bank accounts are going to be noticed a lot faster. These kids might not deserve to die, but I don’t deserve to be broke, not after what we’ve been through.”