A Tap on the Wall

“Where’s Mom?” Charlotte asked her father. “Is she ever coming back?"

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” Oliver lied to his young daughter. “But we have to keep moving. Grab your brother’s hand, let’s go!”

Oliver, Charlotte, and Carter Young-Baker ran through the streets of downtown Seattle hand-in-hand one week after the Arbiter ended the world.

After one day of a cyberterrorist attack that shuts down the entire internet, phones and banks are the first to go. Revenue streams get confused, communication becomes next to impossible, people stop getting paid and start getting angry. But after a week, people start getting hungry. They start hoarding and stop trusting their neighbors as the systems they’ve always trusted to keep them going begin failing one by one. Electricity and water can’t be monitored, hospitals become overwhelmed and underequipped, and people start throwing bricks through windows five feet away from ten-year-old blonde twins and their 37-year-old balding, shabby-looking fathers.

“WATCH IT!” Oliver yells at a group of young twenty-somethings as they run past.

“Dad, I’m hungry.”

“I know, Carter.” Oliver stopped and looked around. He spotted a Safeway grocery store with the windows already broken across the street. “Wait here. There’s too much broken glass.” He ran through the street, narrowly avoiding a cyclist, and carefully stepped into the Safeway. He turned around and gave them a big thumbs-up, and they returned it. He smiled for their benefit before turning around.

How the hell did it come to this? How did things get this bad? How did it get this far?

No, stop.

He couldn’t let himself go there. Not right now. He needed to be strong, for them.

The shelves usually stocked with essentials were clean. He got what he could: a few snacks, frozen meals, and bottles of some health drink. He ran to a checkout aisle, snatched a bag, and walked to the same broken window he came in through.

SWACK.

Oliver Young-Baker had never once wondered what it felt like to get smacked in the back of the head by a large blunt object, and yet the universe had decided it was time for him to find out. He felt himself get carried slowly to the ground, the bag being pulled from his grip before the blood rushed to his head and the world went dark.

* * *

Five years before the end of the world, Oliver and his wife Natalie came into the most money they had ever seen in their lives. A couple of passionate activists in a world ridden with corruption and unfairness, they never thought they would be heard. For years, rallies and marches protesting politicians and global issues had become regularly scheduled events in their Google Calendars. Writing and calling representatives acted as a second day job. Oliver’s I.T. job at Serpent Tech Solutions, a local Seattle startup, allotted him a lot of time at work to write up emails and organize meetups. Natalie’s job as a painter was its own form of activism. She put a ton of effort into making sure her artwork got in front of those who needed to see it. From street art to local galleries showcasing works against war and climate change, her work had ended up gaining a fair amount of momentum.

The money came in when Natalie got her work into a huge exhibition downtown. Apparently, some big-name celebrity Oliver had never heard of was willing to pay a very generous sum of money for Natalie’s most famous painting, titled “Deathwatch.” Deathwatch was simple and more minimalistic than her other works, but still preserved her typical cautionary themes. The painting was simple: a bright white background, a blue circle in the center, and a black beetle in the middle of the circle. The painting’s namesake, the deathwatch beetle, was an omen of death. Once it crossed your path, or if you ever heard it tapping on your wall, you were doomed. The rest of the symbolic dots weren’t hard to connect, and it was apparently the exact sort of thing that multimillionaire celebrity environmentalists ate up.

As proud as Oliver was of his wife’s success and the newfound financial security it would bring, he was happy to be rid of the painting. He wasn’t the type of man who needed to be reminded that the world was going to end. The two of them had spent so much time doing everything in their power to prevent exactly that, and it felt like this money wasn’t a step in the right direction.

It felt like a sedative.

“Calm down, take this,” it whispered to him. “Take this and shut up.”

He hated it.

* * *

“Where are my kids?” was the first thing Oliver asked upon regaining consciousness, his head pounding. He was sure he had fallen onto the ground, but now he was… sitting? He blinked, but he couldn’t fully focus on the figure in front of him.

“They’re fine. Safe.” Something shimmered in the figure’s hands. “Are they good kids, Mr. Young-Baker?”

“What?”

“They look like good kids. A gift?”

Oliver squinted harder and immediately recognized what the stranger was holding: the heart-shaped locket Natalie had given him for his first Father’s Day, pictures of Charlotte and Carter inside. He went to reach for his neck, but the cuffs around his wrists restrained his movement. “You… you already got my food. I don’t have any money. Just let me go.”

“We both know that isn’t true, Oliver.”

His eyes finally adjusted to the dark room, and he realized where he was: an interrogation room. The man who sat in front of him set the locket down on the table and looked up at Oliver. He had short, buzzed hair, was in great shape, and wore a tailored black suit.

“Oliver, every single agency has eyes everywhere right now. We’ve got intelligence that tell us radicals are looking for every opportunity now that the grid’s down. The global economy’s plummeting us back to the damn Dark Ages.”

Oliver sat in silence, his singular thought being Charlotte and Carter. His eyes were locked onto the little golden heart.

“Any chance of getting the world back on track is being tackled from every angle, and it’s the world’s worst kept secret that the Arbiter is the one who shut it all down.”

His eyes didn’t waver from the locket. The well-dressed suit sighed.

“Look. Every step we’ve taken toward preventing the Arbiter dealing a final blow to society as we know it has taken us one hundred times longer than it should.”

Oliver’s eyes broke away from the locket and met the man’s dark eyes.

“Oliver, my name is Agent Flores. I can’t tell you which organization I’m with, but I can tell you every one of them knows about you. We need Deathwatch on our side.”

* * *

“We’re not extremists, Oliver!”

“I know, that’s my point!”

“No, it’s not your point.” Natalie said in a hushed whisper after putting the kids to bed one year before the end of the world. “Your point is you feel like we’re not doing enough.”

“Not as much as we could be.”

“Your point is that you think hacking your friends’ Facebook pages as a kid is the same as—” She lowered her voice as she glanced at the staircase toward the kids’ rooms. “—hacking the goddamn banks?”

“No, I understand the difference. I understand—”

“Oh, you understand—?”

“I understand, Natalie, that as nice as it is to get paid for a painting that tells people we know the world is doomed, it’s not the same as doing something about the world being doomed.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. Natalie sighed and took a sip of wine. After a moment, Oliver continued. “Our kids are lucky. They’ve got their education paid for, and they’ll never have to know what it’s like to starve.”

“And that’s bad?”

“No. It’s incredible! But there are so many kids out there, just like Carter and Charlotte, who will never know what it’s like to get something for Christmas. There are people in the world, billionaires, with offshore bank accounts that are filled to the brim with possibilities for those children. Children like ours, Nat.”

Natalie sat down on the couch, drank the rest of her glass of wine, and put her head in her hands. “Jesus, Oliver. We’re parents now.”

He sat next to her. “So we stop fighting?”

“We have to play by the rules.”

“Their rules, not ours. I swear to god Natalie, after you sold that stupid painting, you lost your backbone.”

“Get out,” she snapped. “I want you out. Take a walk, go to your parents’ house, do whatever the hell you need to do, but you’re not staying here tonight.”

“You can’t be—”

“Do I look like I’m not serious, Oliver?” Her blue eyes pierced through him and strangled his heart. “Get. Out.”

So that’s what he did. But he didn’t sleep at his parents’ house. He didn’t call up a friend. He didn’t try to cool his head. He went to his office at Serpent Tech Solutions and got to work.

If everyone else was going to tell him what to believe, what needed to be done, what rules to play by… he would make his own. He would decide what needed to be done.

He could do that.

He could be the arbiter.

* * *

“I’m not a part of Deathwatch.”

“We traced a ping right before the shutdown and were fortunate enough to be able to track it down before our systems got wiped. It came from this city… your street. The only person with the knowhow and financial resources to help us get everything back on track lives in your house. We know you didn't start Deathwatch, Mr. Young-Baker. We’re looking for your wife.”

* * *

“I can’t believe this!” Oliver yelled at Natalie, two months before the end of the world. “You went behind my back and did exactly the sort of thing I’m fighting against!”

“You stole thousands of dollars from the man who bought my painting!”

“To be redistributed! And you called the cops?”

“You… you don’t see how you ruined everything, do you?” Natalie begged him with tears in her eyes. “You don’t see how you’ve destroyed our lives, our kids’ lives, everything we’ve worked to build?”

“So, you betray me? Use our money to fight against me, with this Deathwatch vigilante group? The level of self-aggrandizing… I’m not the problem, Nat!”

“The sooner you see that you are, the better.”

“Deathwatch is a mistake. Shut it down.”

“No, Oliver. Marrying you was the mistake.”

* * *

“Do you regret what you did?” Agent Flores asked. “Any remorse at all? It’ll be a while before the reinforcements get here to drag your ass to prison for two hundred lifetimes, so I figured we have some time to chat about it.”

“I did what I did for them.” Oliver looked at the locket. “The world was falling apart.”

“Well, let me be the first to congratulate you, genius,” Flores said with a slow clap. “Real nice world you built for you and yours. Tell me, what was the last thing your kids said to you? Was it ‘thank you,’ or ‘good job?’” Which came first?”

Dad, I’m hungry.

“I was… fixing it. I would’ve put it back eventually. We would have rebuilt. It would have… taken time, but it would have been worth it.”

Flores laughed. “The end of the world. Not a bang, not a whimper… but some schmuck with a silly nickname who thinks an anti-criminal organization established by his philanthropist wife built to stop corruption just… wasn’t movin’ fast enough for him. Shame.”

A knock at the door.

A tap on the wall.

Flores slid the locket to Oliver. “Gold star, Ollie.” It landed in his lap as the beetle crossed his path one last time.