The Book (17 page)

Holden glanced once more at the scarred script of their motto and nodded. He was certain of it now. They were the answer and he needed to find them.

For hours, Holden worked in a daze as he planned the particulars of finding the group. But no matter what angle he came from, he kept returning to the same question: How could he succeed where the government had failed? Finding and joining their cause would be much more difficult than simply deciding to do so. Although they were apparently vast in number, Holden couldn’t simply contact them
.

What were the mechanics of joining an anarchist collective?
he thought, while tightening a patched coupling to the joint of an oversized pipe.

As he bounced from job to job, he imagined their purpose in choosing to brand the buildings with such violence and a far simpler reason began to present itself. Branding the buildings appeared on the surface as a way to defile the architecture, but what if they were really advertisements? It made sense, didn’t it? How else would a secret group recruit new members to their cause?

On his return to General Fire he stopped back at the building off Rush to inspect the brand. Something would be there - an address or a phone number entwining the details like vines across a trellis. From the road, he could see that the plastic police tape had been removed and that the granite had been ground back to reveal a stain of honed stone above the gleaming bronze standpipe. Although the brand had been erased, the corner was unguarded. Holden parked his van at the loading dock and jogged around the building to have a closer look.

It was raining again.

Or was it still?

He wasn’t sure if it had ever stopped.

Standing before the standpipe, he collected the water from his jacket and rubbed his hand along the smooth, open pores of the peppered gray granite. Like an ancient, architectural secret, the dry crest of
The Free Thinkers
gradually revealed itself in the swath of his dripping hand. He uncovered as much of it as he could before stopping to stare deeply at its details. Losing himself in its lines and folds. But it was a lost cause. After all that energy, nothing was there. At least nothing that his eyes or his limited intelligence could see.

Frustrated, Holden kicked the wall and limped away swearing. He thought he had found the answer but there was nothing he could do with it.
Now what?
The construction crews erased most of the imprint of their brand from the stone and he couldn’t rightly search the web for a detail of their seal.
So what else is there?
In the flash of sudden rainfall, he realized what he could do and returned swiftly to his soiled, sustainably-insolent, hybrid van.

He reached the Sears Tower before he had mentally walked through his exact reason for being there. From what he recalled of the article with Martin Trust,
The Free Thinkers
had branded their crest into the darkened steel of the building. Beyond lacquering the façade in some acid wash, there wasn’t much to be done in such a short time - which meant that the artistic work of
The Free Thinkers
should still be visible to John Q. Passerby. And it was.

“Hey Mister…twenty?”

Holden shielded his eyes from the rain to look down. A beached whale of a man was smoushed into the corner of the building holding out a warped, plastic cup from a fast food restaurant. He hadn’t been out of the van for more than a minute and already Holden was baited by a begging Unfortunate. The man (if you could call him a man), who was lounging directly under the wrinkled wounds of the brand that Holden came to study, held out his plastic cup and shook its contents loudly. “Can you spare a twenty?”

“What?” Holden couldn’t believe his ears. “No. What happened to asking for change, man?”

The Unfortunate adjusted his gargantuan frame and rolled from the corner, covering his shorn head with the shards of a broken umbrella. He inspected Holden with awkward intention before falling back and muttering, “A twenty is change for a fifty.”

“Leave me alone, please.”

“At least I got your attention, right?”

Holden shook his head, rose a hand to cover his eyes and leaned forward to study the brand, looking for some secret detail in the growing darkness of the cloud-coated sky. The slices and gashes that had been created in the stone of the other building looked like molten wax upon the tower’s black steel, hardened in its syrupy state. Holden lowered his hand and stepped back. Unless he could find another building where the text could be clearly visible, there was nothing he could safely do to find the group.

Failure. Again.

“I’m hungry, man,” the Unfortunate grumbled, shuffling in place. When Holden didn’t answer, the whale of a man grew more restless and soon splashes of wild mutterings began spouting from his blowhole. “What are you standing here for? Are you spying on me? Get out of here. Get away from me!”

Holden ducked as a plastic crate was launched powerfully at his head. Without bothering to respond (willfully engaging with an Unfortunate was like reasoning with an alley cat that wouldn’t cover its stool), Holden left the sidewalk and returned to his van, depressed and slighted by a barrage of judgment from a drifter that seemed oddly well-fed.

Holden wove into traffic, arguing with himself. What did he expect to find? Some secret passageway to a ruined corner of the city where writers lived in hiding behind a fortification of books that somehow avoided the churning machine of The Great Recycling? There was nothing special in the branded image and he needed to recognize that. Glancing down at his watch, he realized that he was supposed to be dropping in on Marion and Winston. But with the day he was having, and the fact that his every move was likely being monitored by Martin Trust and Agents of The Publishing House, going home to hit the hay seemed like a smarter move.

The next day Holden was in his element, or at least it appeared that way. He worked meticulously on each individual task he was called to accomplish. Removing leaking couplings, cutting and threading new pipe, adjusting fittings, spinning the main valves off and on like a gyroscopic top, replacing ancient sprinkler heads with the newest and shiniest models and, all the while, ignoring the self-righteous indignation from the upright society of Chicago’s gold coast about how his van was butchering and stealing the sacred virginity of the earth. He was focused more that day than he had been in years, because he wasn’t thinking about the Blackhawks or his daughter or the novel he was excited to get back to during lunch. Holden was
thinking again
. His irrepressible thoughts circumnavigated the illusive terrorism of
The Free Thinkers
.

Regardless of what his hands were doing or how unsuccessful he had been at tracking them down, his mind continued to imagine what the group would be like. He romanticized them living in an old, abandoned library in the deserted suburbs to the south. He heard them spouting quotes from Shakespeare before diving from the side of a building. He saw passionate chases on freight trains and helicopter crashes. Courage and love and retribution. The only reason Holden stopped thinking about them was because he found himself in the parking lot of General Fire Protection with the van idling. He was done for the day.

As he muscled the remnants of pipe from a renovated building into the shop and dumped them onto the recycling pile, Holden found himself faced with the fact that the work day was over and he still didn’t know how to make contact with
The Free Thinkers
. The only solution that seemed at all promising was to circle the city to study each of the brands and hope that something interesting would link them. Some clue that could tell him what to do next. The idea wasn’t a pearl, but it was something. Naturally, the brands would have all been removed or erased by the government – so, really, there was nothing to do but think about the arrangement of them and which buildings were chosen, hoping that a connection could be made.

On the way to the locker room, Holden recalled the locations he had heard of or seen throughout the last few years and was busy creating a mental map of the city when all thoughts of
The Free Thinkers
left him for the first time in thirty hours. Shane was standing motionless in the aisle of lockers, his skinny fist gripping the straps of Holden’s brown duffle bag.

It had been quite obvious that his best friend in the world, the only person he had ever really trusted, had been avoiding him. Shane had come in an hour early that morning and it was the first time in years that he hadn’t sent Holden a pointless text or called him with a filthy joke.
But it made sense, didn’t it?
Shane didn’t know, didn’t want to know, why Agents were asking questions. Terrorism was hitting too close to home and, just like Holden, Shane avoided trouble like fish to a sand box.

So he did what was right. Holden left the puck with Shane’s goalie. Rather than address the fact that his duffle bag was in the room, he walked to his locker and took his time with the padlock. The very moment it opened, Shane was beside him with the bag. He tossed it against the back of the locker and swung the door shut.

“I don’t know what you’re a part of, but I just want to tell you right now that I don’t want to be a part of it.” His voice was charged and his face showed a surprising degree of emotion that neither of them had ever seen in Shane before. “I know you, Holden. And I know the way you think. Do not include me in whatever is going on. Okay?”

“Bro, what are you talking about?”

“Don’t act stupid,” he spat, stepping close. He lowered his shoulders, readying himself to fight. “That stuff with Marion and those guys that came by…I can’t be involved in any of that, alright?”

Without reply, Shane stood straight and walked to the door of the locker room. Holden called after him, but the door swung closed and the silence of his friend’s absent response mingled with the noxious scent of perspiration to create an aura that was disheartening and deeply lonely.

What was that all about?

Shane’s reaction took Holden by surprise. It was completely unexpected. It had been years since his friend had come at him like that. And there was more behind his words than something as simple as fear. Shane didn’t like bad attention, but he was fearless in the eyes of battle. This was a side of Shane that Holden had never seen and it scared him. Everything normal in his world was changing so rapidly. Things were getting out of hand and he couldn’t regain his grip.

And then there was the bag.

Holden’s greed for its contents pushed thoughts of his only confidant in life aside. He unlatched the flimsy metal door and stared into the back of his locker. With a delicate hand, he reached into the dark void and thumbed the zipper head before pulling it back along the seam. His eyes rummaged through the contents until he saw the cover of the book Winston had imparted to him. The man made of paper was still on fire and the pages within carried the same rustled, well-read appearance. He released the breath he had been holding and drew the zipper closed. Although his friendship was in jeopardy, the book he had entrusted to Shane was safe.

To keep up appearances, Holden completed his regimen by scrubbing his hands vigorously in the sink before leaving with his leather-bound Book in hand. He wanted everyone around him to know that life for Holden Clifford, no matter how unhinged in reality, hadn’t changed in the slightest.

Amid the flurry of commuters hiding from the obnoxious and redundant downpour, he stepped onto the elevated train as he always had before the truth was exposed, sat in a quiet corner and found himself gripping his Book with eagerness. All around him passengers were swirling their pointed fingers in the green glow of bondage and Holden found himself longing to open his own. The warm leather felt so right in his hands. The hidden words invited him to partake and, before the next stop, Holden was searching its contents for the right story to alleviate his many disappointments.

The train completed a full circuit of the city and Holden stayed on, scanning names of authors and titles of books with a ravenous craving. But not one, not a single one, seemed to have enough flavor to slake the hunger within. That is, until The Book decided for him. Without his control, the screen darkened and bled back through the green pond scum to offer a suggestion.

Having trouble deciding? Why not try:

THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS by John Wyndham

Click here to download.

This story was chosen for you by the Publishing House,

based on your own, unique reading record.

The temptation to click the glowing line below the title was more than he could have imagined. He knew it was wrong when he decided to download the book. He knew it was wrong to start reading it; but it took him three full pages to realize why he wouldn’t stop. Holden felt he had reached the end of a paragraph to find that the next one was identical in every word. To fight against the Publishing House was pointless. What could someone like him really do to stop them? Returning to his simple life was easy. There was no thought in the option. All he had to do was read. He loved to read. And then he remembered Marion and how she was still at Winston’s home, waiting. Wondering why he hadn’t come back to check on her like he promised. With her face upon his mind once more, Holden closed the cover to The Book and shoved it into his duffle bag before looking out the window.

The sight that met his eyes changed everything.

Scrawled into the glass of the windowpane beside him, inches from his face that whole time, was the emblem of
The Free Thinkers
. His mind quickly retracted from where it had been and he suddenly felt so very stupid. The Book was a lie. The Book was filled with lies and he had gone back to it. Although his daydreaming about
The Free Thinkers
made the work day go faster and brought him no closer to discovering how to find them, it was still the truth.