I'M STARTING TO WORRY ABOUT THIS BLACK BOX OF DOOM

 

EXCERPT

Day 1

“But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.”

—Charles Darwin, in a letter to a friend, 1861

Abbott

Abbott Coburn had spent much of his twenty-six years dreading the wrong things, in the wrong amounts, for the wrong reasons. So it was appropriate that in his final hours before achieving international infamy, he was dreading a routine trip he’d accepted as a driver for the rideshare service Lyft. The passenger had ordered an early-morning ride from Victorville, California, to Los Angeles International Airport, a facility Abbott believed had been designed to make every traveler feel like they were doing it wrong.

He rolled up to the pickup spot—the parking lot of a Circle K convenience store—to find a woman sitting on a black box, one large enough that she probably could’ve mailed herself to her destination with the addition of some breathing holes and a piss drain. It had wheels and she was rolling herself back and forth a few inches in each direction with her feet, working out nervous energy. The millions of strangers who would become obsessed with that box in the coming days would usually describe it incorrectly, calling it everything from a “footlocker” to an “armored munitions crate.” What the woman was actually sitting on was a road case, the type musicians use to transport concert gear. This one was covered in band stickers, a detail that would have been inconsequential in a rational society but would turn out to be extremely consequential in ours.

Abbott rolled down the window and braced himself, doing his usual scan for reassuring signs that the passenger is Normal (he’d developed a sixth sense for the weirdos who, for example, wanted to sit in the front). The woman on the box wore green cargo pants and a dazzling orange hoodie that looked to Abbott like high-visibility work gear. Though, if she was on the job, the bosses weren’t strict about the dress code: She wore a faded trucker cap that said, “Welcome to the Shitshow.” Below that was a pair of oversize sunglasses with lime-green plastic frames and, below that, smeared lipstick that looked like it had been hurriedly applied in the dark. Her hair was short enough that it appeared to have been buzzed without a mirror while driving down a bumpy road. It did not occur to Abbott that all of this would be an excellent way to thwart security cameras and facial recognition software.

Abbott, his nervous system already hovering a finger over its big red Fight-or-Flight button, asked, “You got the Lyft to LAX?”

He was hopeful she’d say no, but there was no one else in the vicinity aside from a rail-thin man by the tire air machine having a tense argument via either Bluetooth or psychosis.

“Oh my god,” said the woman on the box, “I have a huge favor to ask you. HUGE. I am in so much trouble with my employer.”

She removed her green sunglasses, as if the situation had become much too serious for such eyewear. Her eyes were bloodshot and Abbott thought she’d either been recently smoking weed or recently crying, though he knew from personal experience that it was possible to do both simultaneously. He was now absolutely certain that the favor she was about to ask was going to be illegal, impossible, or just a string of nonsense words. He wasn’t sure how to respond without accidentally agreeing, so he just stared.

“Okay,” she said, after realizing it was still her turn to talk. “Yes, I ordered a trip to LAX, but in the time I’ve been waiting, I found out that’s not going to work. This is a big problem. BIG problem.”

Her voice was shaky and Abbott decided that she had, in fact, been crying. He instantly sensed two opposing instincts in his brain quietly begin to go to war with one other.

“This box I’m sitting on?” she continued. “The guy who hired me has to have it by Monday, the Fourth of July. I can’t ship it, because I can’t let it out of my sight—I have to stay with it, wherever it goes. And I can’t fly, for reasons that would take all day to explain. Now, I’m going to ask you a question. It’s going to sound like a hypothetical or a joke, but it’s an actual question. Okay? Okay. So, how much would you charge to drive me to Washington, DC?”

Abbott took a moment to make sure he’d heard her right before replying, “Oh, that’s not something you can do in a Lyft, the maximum trip is only—”

“No, no. You’d clock out of your app or however you do it. I’m asking you, personally, as a citizen with a beautiful working car—what is this, an Escalade?”

“A, uh, Lincoln Navigator. It actually belongs to—”

“I’m asking what you would charge to take me all the way across the country. And your reflex is going to be to say no amount of money because I’m talking about totally putting your life on hold for more than a week, without notice. Restaurants, hotels, lost business, canceled Fourth of July plans, additional stress—it’s a lot to ask. But I’m willing to pay a lot. Or rather, my employer is willing to pay a lot. Look.”

She twisted around and dug into a tattered duffel bag that Abbott hadn’t previously noticed. When she came back around, she was holding two thick folds of cash, each bound with rubber bands. He physically recoiled at the sight of it, mainly because not a single reasonable person has ever carried money that way.

“This is one hundred thousand dollars,” she said, waving the cash around like a mind control amulet. “The guy who hired me has this kind of money to throw around and no, he’s not a criminal, he’s a legitimate rich guy, if such a thing exists. No, I can’t tell you who he is. All I can tell you is that he needs this box by the Fourth at the latest and it has to be kept quiet. Today is Thursday. We can make it easily, we don’t even have to travel overnight. Four days of leisurely driving and we’ll get there Sunday evening, no problem. One hundred K is my starting offer for you to make this drive. Make me a counteroffer.”

At this stage, Abbott was considering this request in the exact same way he’d have considered a request to be transported to Venus in exchange for a baggie of rat turds: he just wanted out of the crazy conversation as quickly and safely as possible.

He said, “I’m sure there are plenty of people within a few miles of here, probably a million of them, who’d love to take you up on this. But I really can’t. I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “No. No, you’re perfect for this, I can tell already. And I can’t keep asking people, I have to get on the road and I have to do it now. The more drivers I have to ask, the more people know about this, and that’s bad. Secrecy is part of what I’m paying for. And I’m not crazy, I know how I look. Though I will have to tell you about the worms at some point. But no, I’m dressed like this for a reason. How about one fifty?”

A third fold of cash was added and Abbott had to force himself to look away from it. He prided himself on not being enslaved to mindless greed, but way back at the rear of his noisy brain was a tiny voice pointing out that this amount of money would let him move out on his own and tell his father to fuck off (though it would definitely have to be done in that order). It would be freedom, for literally the first time in his life. Abbott imagined a factory farm pig escaping into a sunny green pasture and seeing the clear blue sky for the first time. Though he was having trouble imagining the pig looking up. Could pigs do that? He’d have to google it later. Wait, what did she say about worms?

The woman grinned and sat up straighter, the posture of an angler who’s just seen the bobber plop under the surface. It kind of made Abbott want to refuse just to spite her.

“But there are rules,” she said, a finger in the air. “You can’t look in the box. You can’t ask me what’s in the box. And you can’t tell anyone where we’re going until it’s over. After that, you can tell anyone anything you like. But no one can come looking for us.”

“Well, there’s certainly nothing weird or suspicious about that. So, why don’t you just rent a car and drive yourself?”

“No driver’s license. I used to have one, but the government took it away. They said, ‘You’re too good of a driver, it’s making the other drivers look bad, you’re hurting their self-esteem.’”

“I just . . . I really can’t, sorry. You say I’m perfect for this, but I assure you I’m the absolute perfect person to not do it. That’s, what, like, fifty hours of driving? I don’t even like to drive for one hour.”

“You drive for a living!”

“Oh, I just started doing this a couple months ago to—”

“I’m just teasing you, I know you probably didn’t grow up dressing as a Lyft driver for Halloween. But no, you’re my guy. You’re not married, right? I don’t see a ring. No kids, I can see it on your face. If you have another job, it’s one you can walk away from, it’s not a 401K and health insurance situation. You probably live with a parent, so even if you have pets, there’s somebody to feed them while you’re away. You’re old enough that nobody’s going to assume you were abducted. You’re, what, twenty-four? Around there?”

“Twenty-six. Did you just deduce all that on the fly?”

She smiled again and made a show of leaning forward, narrowing her eyes as if to examine him. “Ah, see, there’s something you need to know about me: I can read minds. I can tell you’re skeptical, so let me give it a shot. Ready?”

She narrowed her eyes further, comically exaggerating her concentration. At this point, Abbott was 99 percent of the way to driving off and marking the ride as canceled.

“You have trouble getting to sleep at night,” she began, “because you can’t turn off your brain. Usually it’s replaying something stressful that happened in the past or rehearsing something stressful that could possibly happen in the future. You then have to down constant caffeine just to function through the day—I bet you’ve got one of those big energy drinks in the center console right now. You sometimes get really good ideas in the shower. You can’t navigate even your own city without software that gives you turn-by-turn directions. You get an actual, physical sense of panic if you can’t find your phone, even if you know it’s still somewhere in your home.”

She was rocking in her seat, rolling the trunk’s tiny wheels back and forth, back and forth.

“You don’t have a girlfriend or a boyfriend,” she continued, before Abbott could interrupt. “You’ve never had a long-term relationship and, at least once in your life, you thought you were dating someone while the whole time they thought you were just friends. You actually don’t have any close friends. Maybe you did when you were in school, but you don’t keep in touch. You’ve replaced them with a whole bunch of internet acquaintances—maybe you’re all members of the same fandom or a guild in a video game—but you’d be traumatized if any of them suddenly showed up at your front door unannounced. Sometimes, out of the blue, you’ll physically cringe at something you said or did when you were a teenager. When you use porn, you may have to sort through two hundred pics or videos before you find one that will get you off. You’re sure that humanity is doomed and feel like you were cursed to be born when you were. Am I close?”

Abbott had to take a moment to gather himself. Forcing a dismissive tone with all his might, he said, “Congratulations, you’ve just described everyone I know.”

“Exactly. It describes everyone you know.”

“I really do have to get back to work, I don’t—”

“Don’t get offended, please, none of that was intended as an insult. I’m only saying that I know you’re an outsider, just like me! I think the universe brought us together. But I’m not done, because this is the big one: The reason you’re hesitating to make this trip, even for a life-changing amount of money, isn’t because you’re worried that I’m a scammer or that my employer is a drug lord and this box is full of heroin. No, what you fear above all is humiliation at the hands of the unfamiliar. What if you get a flat tire on a highway in Tennessee, do you even know how to change it? What if we wind up in the wrong lane at a toll road and the lady in the booth yells at you? What if you get a speeding ticket in Ohio, how do you even pay it? What if you get into a fender bender and the other driver is a big, scary guy who doesn’t speak English? Then there’s the absolutely terrifying prospect of spending dozens of hours in an enclosed space with some weird woman. What if you embarrass yourself? Or, worse, what if I say something that makes you embarrassed on my behalf? You’ll have no mute or block button, just unfettered raw-dog, face-to-face contact, with no escape, for days on end. What if I’m so unhinged that we literally have nothing to talk about, no shared jokes, no way to break the tension? What if, what if, what if—all of these scenarios that humanity deals with a billion times a day but that you find so terrifying that you wouldn’t even risk them for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. So the question is: Would you do it for two hundred?”

She fished out a fourth hunk of bills. The escalating amounts actually didn’t make an impression on Abbott; at this point, the dollar figures all registered as equally impossible sums of money. But the hand that held the cash was trembling and he sensed the thrum of desperation inside the woman, the vibe of one who has exhausted every reasonable option and is now trying the stupid ones.

“A hundred now,” she said, “and a hundred after we arrive in DC. If you think it’s a trick, that we’ll get there and I’ll steal back the money at knifepoint, we can swing by somewhere and you can drop off the first payment. You can even take it to your bank, let the teller do the counterfeit test on the bills. If we hurry.”

“How do you know I wouldn’t do that and then just refuse to drive you?”

“Because I can see into your soul. You would never do that. Not just because it’s wrong, but because you’d be torn apart by the awkwardness of that conversation, of having to see the look on my face when I found out you’d double-crossed me. Also, you’d soon realize that you wouldn’t just be screwing me, but my employer. And even if he’s not a criminal, you can guess that’s probably a pretty bad idea. He could send guys in suits to your house to demand the money back and just think how awkward that would be.”

Abbott heard himself say “Can I have time to think about it?” and knew that his automated avoidance mechanism had kicked in. He’d been developing this apparatus since his first day in kindergarten when the Smelly Girl had asked him to play with her and, in a panic, he’d had to come up with a plausible excuse not to (he told her his family’s religion forbade touching plastic dinosaurs). These days, it was pure reflex: if an acquaintance invited him to trivia night at the bar, a ready-made, ironclad excuse would fly from his lips before he’d even given it a thought. Sure, sometimes he’d find himself wondering if maybe he should be filtering these invitations before they were routed directly into the trash. Here, for example: on some level he knew this offer deserved more consideration. But his request for time wasn’t about that, it was just one of the stock phrases he deployed to get to a safe distance where plans could be easily canceled via text or, even better, by simply avoiding that person for the rest of his life. Sure, this woman was in some kind of distress, but that would be no burden to him once she was out of sight—

“No, you can’t have time to think about it,” said the woman on the box. “I meant it when I said we have to leave right now. Maybe we can swing by your place to pack up some clothes and whatever medications you’re on—you’re on a few, right?—and to tell the parent or grandparent you live with that you’ll be back late next week. But it has to be real quick, in and out.”

“I can’t even tell my dad where I’m going?”

“You’ll tell him that a friend needs you to help with a job that pays a bundle, that it’s being done on behalf of a celebrity and has to be kept quiet so the press doesn’t sniff it out. And that it’s nothing illegal. That’s, like, ninety percent true. Or eighty percent. It’s mostly true.”

“Is your employer a celebrity?”

“He’s not a movie star or anything, if you’re trying to guess who he is. But your dad shouldn’t question it.” She waved a hand in the vague direction of Los Angeles. “Out there, you’ve probably got a hundred professional fixer types doing jobs like this as we speak.”

“Then go find one of them. If you think I’m such a loser, what makes you think I can even get us there?”

“All right, enough of that.” She stood and put on her lime-green sunglasses. “You don’t even have your heart in it anymore. Come on, help me load the box, it’s really heavy. We’ve been sitting out here too long and people are starting to stare.”

In the coming days, many words would be spent speculating as to why Abbott had agreed to the trip. Was it the money? Or did he genuinely want to help this woman he’d never met? The truth was, not even Abbott himself knew. Maybe it was just that by the time she was lugging the box toward the rear of the Navigator, it’d have simply been too awkward to stop her.

Malort

Considering he was two hundred and seventy-five pounds, bald, covered in tattoos, and wearing mirrored sunglasses, Malort could have wound up with many nicknames. But, a drunken bet in a Milwaukee dive bar decades earlier had resulted in a bicep tattoo of a Jeppson’s Malört bottle, the Chicago-area liquor so infamously bitter that the label featured a lengthy paragraph apologizing for the taste. His friends had all agreed the tattoo and nickname fit him, but never dared to explain their rationale in his presence. He did have to drop the little dots above the “O” in recent years as nobody knew how to add those in text messages.

The man they called Malort rolled up to find that the Apple Valley fire department had apparently arrived just in time to turn the shack in the desert from a smoldering ruin into a wet smoldering ruin. Only two and a half walls of the flimsy structure were still upright, exposing the charred interior like a diorama. It told a fairly simple story of a loner hiding from and/or rooting for the Apocalypse. From where he sat, there was no sign of the black box and he had a sinking feeling it was long gone.

He stepped out of his metallic red Buick Grand National and approached a young man whose build and face made him look like a kid who’d dressed up in his dad’s helmet and turnout coat. He was hosing down the aftermath to cool the embers and looked like he would have a stroke if two thoughts appeared in his brain simultaneously. He noticed Malort and a beam of curiosity pierced his haze.

“This your property?” asked the kid.

It was a dumb question, thought Malort. The type of guy who sets up in a wilderness survival shack probably doesn’t get around in a sparkly Buick that surely lists at least one pimp in its Carfax report. He took the dumbness of the question as a good sign. Instead of answering, Malort pulled out his phone and pointed the camera at the scene, acting like he had an important job to do. Generally, if you can project enough confidence and purpose, all the uncertain nerds of the world will just part like the Red Sea.

He stepped toward the smoldering structure with his phone and, without looking at the kid, grumbled, “Is there propane?”

“There was, it already popped, that’s what blew out the sides here. The ruptured tank is on the floor, there’s some kind of apparatus attached. Maybe a booby trap, or maybe they were trying to deep-fry a turkey? You ever seen one of those go wrong? Nightmare. So, uh, are you a friend? One of the neighbors?”

Malort peered into the half-standing structure from afar, trying to stay out of the hose splatter. The other firefighters hadn’t seemed to register his presence, most of them distracted by the task of spraying down the landscape to keep stray sparks from triggering a brushfire.

“The strangest thing just happened,” rumbled Malort. “You know the big house over the hill there, behind the fence with all the barbed wire? The crazy bastard who lived there owns all this, it’s all his property. So, I was chasing an intruder through that house, then they went ’round a corner and vanished into thin air. I looked all around, saw neither hide nor hair of ’em. A few minutes later, I looked out the window and noticed the smoke over here.”

“Oh, really?” said the kid, who didn’t seem to understand what that had to do with this.

“Nobody dead in there, I take it?”

“No, sir. Looks to me like they either left the propane to blow on purpose or left it unattended on accident.”

“So there’s no corpse in there, but if you go over the hill and look in that house behind the barbed wire, you’ll see the owner is dead on the floor of a workshop where he was making Lord-knows-what. Though I wouldn’t advise poking your head in unless you’ve got a strong stomach. They’ll have to identify him by his teeth and prints, considering the condition his face is in.”

Malort studied the smoking remains of a bed, now just a blackened frame and springs. The morning sunlight and the spray of the hose was decorating the scene with a festive little rainbow.

“Is that true?” asked the kid, trying to piece together the implications. “Did you call it in?”

“I’m not much for callin’ things in. Though you should tell your people to wear protective gear when they go over there. I don’t know what the guy had in his shop, but there were homemade radiation warning signs on the door. You can decide for yourself whether a homemade radiation sign is scarier than an official one.” Malort studied the shack’s exposed ashy guts and asked, “Have you seen any sign of a road case? One of them black boxes with aluminum trim, about the size of a footlocker?”

“No, sir. I mean, we haven’t dug around inside there, but I haven’t seen anything like that. Hey, uh, Bomb and Arson are on their way, you should tell them about the dead body.”

“Nobody has come to take anything from the scene?”

“Not since I been here. I didn’t catch your name?”

“And nobody saw the occupant leave? Or what vehicle they were driving? Might have been a blue pickup.”

“No, sir.” The kid was glancing around now, presumably for someone senior to come to his rescue.

Malort zoomed in with his camera, focusing on the bit of intact wall at the foot of the bed. There was a schizoid scatter of pictures and drawings pinned to the wall, blackened and curled. The residue of a mind gone to batshit. He snapped a photo. He then studied the floor around the bed . . .

“Point your hose away,” growled Malort. “I’m gonna check somethin’.”

He stomped toward the shack, kicked over the burned-out bed fame, and yanked away a waterlogged rug underneath. There it was: a hatch that opened with a metal ring.

“Huh,” said the kid as Malort yanked the hatch open. “They got a basement?”

“They’ve got a tunnel and a bomb shelter. Follow it back a hundred yards or so and you’ll wind up under that house behind the fence. It turned out my intruder didn’t vanish, they slipped into a bedroom closet, climbed down a ladder, ran over, popped out here.”

Then, thought Malort, they’d rigged it so he’d get a face full of propane tank shrapnel if he tried to follow.

The kid looked amazed. “Damn. Is this like a cartel operation? I have a buddy who said they busted a place that had tunnels running all through the neighborhood—”

“Sir!” shouted a new voice from behind the kid. “What’s your business here?”

It was the older guy, coming to assert his authority. Malort tensed up. The dude was in his fifties or sixties but that only put him in the same range as himself. And you generally didn’t want to tangle with a firefighter; they had muscles from hauling gear and bad attitudes from breathing toxic chemicals and remembering the screams of burning children.

“He’s looking for a big box,” said the kid. “He says the old guy who owns this land is dead over in that house behind the fence. And now he’s found a secret tunnel under the Unabomber hut. And the house is radioactive, maybe.”

“Who are you?” asked the older man, ignoring the kid completely.

Malort put his phone away. “I was just leaving.”

“No, you’re not. I’m gonna need to see ID. Hey!”

Malort ignored him and made his way back to the Buick. The senior fireman was talking into a radio now, hurrying to get himself between Malort and his car.

“You just wait right here.”

He put a hand on Malort’s chest. Malort stopped, looked slowly down at the gloved hand, then back up to meet the old dude’s eyes. There he detected the same apprehension he’d seen on the faces of authority figures since his growth spurt in middle school. He decided that, if things continued to progress in this fashion, he would open with forearm blows to the head and then delegate the closing argument to his boots. No doubt the other firemen would try to jump in, but you can’t waste your life worrying about stuff that’s not gonna happen until thirty seconds from now.

“Everybody,” announced Malort, “get out your phones and start recording, because if this old fuck doesn’t get out of my way, what happens next should really be something to see.”

He balled his fists and his heart revved into another gear. As stimulants go, an early-morning ass-kicking was only a notch below speed. The old man gave him a perfunctory hard look and then backed down, allowing Malort to get behind the wheel of the Grand National unimpeded. The old man made a big show of photographing the license plate to save face.

As Malort backed up, he leaned out his window and said, “Never challenge a man in a Buick. He’s got nothin’ to lose.”

As he headed back to the main road, he pulled up the pic of the shack’s interior and zoomed in on the charred paranoia collage. Written on a handmade banner above the darkened scraps were three words:

THE FORBIDDEN NUMBERS