Devoted(21)
He feels as strong as her dead boyfriend had looked. He scoops her off the blacktop as if she is weightless and carries her to the shoulder of the highway and drops her, kicks her, sends her rolling to the bottom of the slope.
In a fever of desire and triumph, he descends to the woman where she struggles to get up from the tall grass. He falls upon her, pins her beneath him. Recovering from the punch, she struggles under him. But this contest is settled before it’s begun, for she is the gazelle and he the lion, she the fly and he the spider.
The sound of a truck engine arises, approaching on the highway above. No one can see them here in the grass, at least twenty feet below the roadbed. Although it’s unlikely that anyone in the truck could hear Justine if she screamed, Shacket slams the heel of one hand under her chin and shoves hard, pushing her mouth shut, forcing her head back, her elegant neck arching, trapping her cry in her throat.
Maybe the two cars, one behind the other on the shoulder of this lonely road, will seem curious to the driver of the truck. But with no one in either car, no one flagging passing traffic for help, there isn’t any reason to stop and investigate. In fact, in this often lawless and dangerous age, a wise man would keep moving and avoid the risk of involvement.
Judging by the sound of its engine, the truck seems to slow, and Justine apparently has a moment of renewed hope. She bucks and twists under Shacket, tries to force a scream through clenched teeth as he jams the heel of his right hand harder against the underside of her chin. Her taut and supple body squirming under him, her utter helplessness, his absolute power: Although neither of them is naked, this is the most erotic moment of Shacket’s life, and he is rampant.
Justine’s hope is a false hope. The truck accelerates, and the sound recedes. She stops struggling, stops trying to scream. The quiet of the wilderness descends, deeper than before, without insect buzz or birdsong, as if every creature that lives here is aware that among them has come one unique unto the world, one who is changed and changing still, one who lives by no rules either of man or nature, who fears nothing, and who should be feared.
He removes his hand from Justine’s chin, hoping that she will scream for him, for him alone, now that there’s no one else to hear. She looks up into his face, her blue eyes wide, her nostrils flared, breathing hard, and says only, “Please.”
Shacket likes the sound of that: the word, the pitiable note of entreaty, the recognition that he is her absolute master.
“Say it again.”
“Please. Please don’t hurt me.”
He intends to rape her. Instead, to his surprise and hers, he bites. She screams. He bites again, and the biting is wonderful, exhilarating, the most fulfilling thing that he has ever done.
Her terror is his ecstasy.
18
Woody in his room. At his computer. Seeking justice.
They said Woody’s IQ was 186. His reading comprehension rate was 160 words per minute. Deduct 160 from 186, and you had the number of letters in the alphabet.
He was born at 4:00 a.m., July 26. July was the seventh month. Twenty-six multiplied by seven was 182. Add four, representing the hour he was born, and you had his IQ.
This was a Wednesday. Woody’s dad died on a Wednesday. Exactly 164 weeks had passed since his dad died. Woody began working on “The Son’s Revenge: Faithfully Compiled Evidence of Monstrous Evil” on the second anniversary of his father’s death, sixty weeks earlier, when his hacking skills were refined to the point at which no security system, no digital defense, could stand against him. Deduct sixty from 164, and you had the number of pages that were in the document that would convict his father’s killers.
None of these numbers—from his IQ and reading comprehension rate to the amount of pages in the report—meant anything useful. They were mathematical coincidences, or perhaps they were patterns indicating a series of algorithms underlying the operation of the universe; but even in the latter case, they were so deeply woven into the matrix of reality that they were beyond human understanding.
However, the way Woody’s mind worked, his recognition of such coincidences or mysterious patterns was constant.
This mental quirk, the recognition of obscure patterns, helped him pilot his way through all levels of the internet, from the World Wide Web that everyone used, to the remote archives in the deep web, to the ominous byways of the Dark Web.
To Woody, the internet was a planet of its own, every site a village or a city with its neighborhoods and streets, a planet across which he traveled as if by magic, typing a brief incantation and, with a click, teleporting from one continent to another.
He had opened back doors in numerous computer systems and had implanted rootkits, which made it possible for him to return often and search their archives on such a deep and subtle level that even the best IT-security types were unlikely to detect his presence.
Just in case someone scoped him out as he was cruising through their data, he never went directly from Pinehaven to any back door, but spoofed his way through numerous domestic telecom exchanges and used other tricks, so anyone backtracking him would be flummoxed.
In more than a year of intense effort, he had taken one known fact and Sherlocked his way to more than a hundred pages of evidence that a special counsel, appointed by the attorney general of the United States and given a platoon of investigators, might not have discovered in a decade. When you were a high-functioning autistic genius, your developmental disorder, coming with a singular ability to concentrate intensely for long periods of time on what might seem to be mundane facts, was an advantage of great value.