"...in Kerrin, upstate! I know this sounds crazy, but you need to believe me, you can still stop it from..."
Jeremy Plevin hung up the video chat midsentence. He'd met lots of crazies on the internet but that guy took the cake. In the kitchen Craig was making Tuesday night hamburgers.
Jeremy, you need to listen to me!
JP is typing
The dude was already yapping away again in the chat box. Jeremy blocked the wierdo before he could say more and closed his laptop.
"Jer, burgers are up. Let's do this." Craig Plevin called into the den.
Jeremy took one last look at the laptop and then ran to the kitchen table, hungry for fried beef. Craig hid beside the door frame leading from the den and pounced when Jeremy came racing through, lifting Jeremy, laughing, over his head and toward the kitchen table.
Jeremy was walking back to his dorm when he found out Craig was in the hospital. It took nearly two hours to get from the Long Island campus to Mount Sinai. By the time he arrived it was already dark.
"I'm looking for Craig Plevin." Standing in the hospital lobby, Jeremy felt that strange out of body sensation that sometimes comes hand and hand with emergencies. As a kid, he'd grown familiar with it, though it had been years since it reared its head.
"5th floor. Are you family?"
Jeremy was inexplicably moved by the question. He almost said the only family we have left.
"Yes."
Craig lay in shadow inside the hospital room looking like a hard candy shell of his former self. The dry pallor of his skin sent a frise shooting up Jeremy's spine. Death felt close by.
Craig's waxy eyes were closed and on his exposed arms Jeremy could see the scars of Craig's life consuming habit. Craig's right arm was littered with angey red blotches. His left arm ended abruptly in yellowed gause at the bicep.
"Jesus, Craig."
Jeremy's voice must have triggered something because Craig stirred in the bed. His right eye opened slightly, just one thin slit, and he mumbled a mostly incoherent string of words. All Jeremy could make out was 'sorry' and 'brother.' Then Craig passed out again.
Jeremy sat down in the chair next to the cot and tried to cry. He'd cried only twice before. Once when his father died. Once when his mother left them and didn't come back.
He failed to cry today.
Jeremy was 20. Craig, Jeremy's older brother, was 34. He would not survive the week.
Water was out again. That made it four days in a row. Jeremy felt a hint of panic in his gut. He went over to the closet and counted the stacked jugs. Out of 9 gallons, only 4 remained.
His cell phone rang - an antiquated tablet style device. They went for a dime a dozen at the junkyards, and the plan was subsidized once you got the device.
He answered the phone but had no service inside the trailer. A choppy voice was on the other end of the line.
"Hold on. One sec."
Jeremy shut the flimsy closet door and took the brief walk from his tiny bedroom, through the kitchen/dinette, out the the front door. The front door opened to face the mottlef white of another trailer not three feet away. Three short steps headed down into foot churned mud.
Jeremy swung around to the small exterior ladder and climbed the rungs up until he was on the trailer's flat roof. From there he had a view of the whole park, FEMA trailers as far as the eye could see in any direction.
Jeremy put the phone back to his ear. "Can you hear me?" They could, but what they had to say was impossible. Jeremy told them to fuck off, but the man on the other end persisted.
"Fine. Where?"
It took Jeremy several hours to get to the morgue. The walk to the edge of the camp took a dangerous hour, followed by public transit into the city proper. The whole way Jeremy felt the familiar out of body sensation.
When he arrived he gave his name and was told to wait for the detectives to arrive. An hour later one did, a harried looking woman with a badge that read Joplin.
"Mr. Plevin?"
"Yeah."
Jeremy sat through what she had to say. The woman's body had been found in the basement of a deceased homeowner, some random guy named Lynus Flanger. She was only recently dead, likely from starvation, along with several other male and female bodies, all of an advanced age. Flanger had kept them alive, alive and chained, for years, possibly decades.
Her identity was already confirmed by DNA analysis, but could Jeremy try and identify her?
Jeremy struggled to form words. "It's been forty years. I haven't..." the sensation of watching someone else speak was overwhelming, "...I haven't seen her since I was 8 years old."
Of course, detective Joplin understood, but it would be a great help to the investigation if Jeremy could just try.
"Right. I guess."
Jeremy's mother - the woman the NYPD said had been Jeremy's mother - was pulled out of a refridgerator on a metal slab. Just an old, shriveled person, arms curled from a lifetime's worth of chains - face a frozen grimace of wrinkles.
Jeremy turned away. "I don't know this person."
The detective nodded and frowned and spoke thoughtlessly. "Terrible. And right under everyone's noses, can you believe it? Some suburban McMansion upstate. In Kerrin of all places! I take my kids there to hike every summer."
The name of the town seemed familiar somehow, but Jeremy couldn't place it. Not that it mattered now. Life had dealt him his hand, and it was shit.
"Yeah," he said, "we done?"
The detective pushed the slab back in and closed the door. "Yeah. Sorry to waste your time."
Jeremy just nodded and left the morgue. Waiting to catch the bus back to the camp, he tried to cry again. Nothing.
Jeremy was old. He was not an advanced age, but his bones hurt. His skin was dry and sour. He still lived in the trailer given to him by the feds. The one year emergency camp had turned to a five year camp, had turned into a twenty year solution. Meanwhile, on the ground, nothing had changed.
Longing for a time when things were good - at least OK - when he was not alone, one evening Jeremy finds himself scouring the old dives of his internet hangouts. He finds his way to the archaic remnants of legacy Facebook and tries to log in under his old username. He tries several passwords. None work.
Instead he logs back into his current profile, "JC", and from there he scans what's publically available of his older self.
Photos of him at school, of Craig, healthy and happy, his indefatiguable caretaker. Going back far enough, even a single cell phone pick of a really old family photo. There he was, tiny and 5 - there Craig wearing teenage angst like a golden crown - and there his parents. Jeremy's father smiled broadly and looked with love at Jeremy's mother, her face young and untroubled. Each of them blithely unaware of the string of terribles about to befall their family.
Jeremy got to the last public picture and cursed his fallible memory. Before leaving the profile, he sent a useless message to the profile.
"knock knock. Let me in"
He was about to log off when he saw, unbelievably, a response being formed.
@jeremyP is typing
Jeremy was frustrated. Some asshole had hacked his fifty year old facebook account?
Huh?
Jeremy responded feverishly.
This used to be my account. @Jeremyp
i don't think so, I got it in January.
"Bullshit." Jeremy sat up straighter and kept typing.
They're not letting people create legacy accounts anymore. Don't BS me.
my brother set this up for me.
Jeremy found that unnerving somehow. But then he kicked himself for being such a rube.
Come on man, you're wasting you time hacking weak shit lile this? Just give me the password.
My brother said not to give strangers the password.
are you for real? Quit the innocent kid act.
huh?
Jeremy was getting pissed. Fuck this guy, Jeremy just wanted some photos of his dead family. Without thinking Jeremy pressed the video chat button and initiated the call. "You got the balls to answer asshole?"
The chat rang a couple of times and then the video screen maximized and a child's face took up the screen, no more than 10 years old. Behind the boy was a setting so familiar to Jeremy that it called out to him across time.
And that's when it came back to him. The strange encounter a half century ago. A message sent from a terrible future to a past where things could still be fixed.
Jeremy panicked at the sudden realization, the impossible opportunity.
"You. You're me! You're Jeremy Plevin! You need to listen. Your mother didn't run off, she didn't abandon you! She's being held in a house in Kerrin, upstate! I know this sounds crazy, but you need to believe me, you can still stop it from..."
The kid - Jeremy - didn't even say a word, just watched, wide eyed and scared, before cutting off the video mid sentence. Jeremy kept typing.
Jeremy, you need to listen to me!
YOUR MOTHER IS BEING HELD IN A HOUSE IN KERRIN
But then he was blocked, the final written message left unsent. The chat went silent.
Jeremy sat for the longest time, alone in his trailer. He sat and wondered, and then railed and screamed. He tore the antique computer from the outlet and flung it across the room, into the wall.
Then, broken and spent, for the first time in decades, he wept.
[Photo Source]By AnonMoos [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
