Hannah was typing on his computer when they got home. “Why does your computer always replace the word “bacteria” with the word “forestswarm?”
He looked at the green light and rummaged in drawers. He really should have unpacked.
“I thought you were planning to write things by hand, first.” He pulled a piece of masking tape off of one of the boxes and stuck it over the lens of the webcam. An image of a woman frosting a cake appeared on the screen, and he tried to close it quickly before Hannah noticed.
“And what’s with those weird tree photos that keep popping up? Do you have a tree fetish? Is that the real issue with you and Mom?”
“You shouldn’t use the computer,” he said. “It has a virus.”
“It’s haunted, you mean.”
“Haunted, sick,” he said. “Different words for the same thing. Let’s go for a walk.” He saved Hannah’s document and turned off the computer, which immediately restarted.
“They’re not,” Hannah said. “I’m doing a report, you know.”
They let Celia lead, and she took them past the forest, down the hill to the crooked row houses where the yards were filled with rusting car parts. Pit bulls snarled and pawed at flimsy fences. A man roped a tire to the front of his van and used it to push another car up a driveway. Two small girls flapped their arms in man-sized muscle shirts and shouted something. The forest continued, he saw now, crept down the hill, where the tall trees tilted among the abandoned toys and twisted plastic.
“What kind of house is that?” Celia held his hand, and they considered a dome-shaped structure cobbled from tarp, twisted poles, and duct tape.
“It’s a bunker,” Hannah said.
They both stood close to him, their bodies brushing his sides. He felt the warmth of them and held his breath, tried to stand perfectly still. He hadn’t lost them. They were safe. Thank you, he thought, sending a burst of gratitude out at the first thing that caught his eye, a turtle sandbox standing on its side. A tree rustled, just outside of his vision, but he didn’t turn his head to look at it.
“Why are you thanking us?” Hannah asked.
Sara had arrived with chafing dishes full of leftover salmon and mashed potatoes. “I did some research,” she said. “I think you might be someone’s RAT slave.”
“Rat slave?” Celia was lining up panthers around her plate.
“Remote Access Trojan,” Sara said. She didn’t believe in separate children’s and adult’s topics. “You downloaded something, and now someone, somewhere has access to your computer.” She ripped off a hunk of bread. “You’re probably being sold for bitcoins.” She looked at Celia. “You need me to cut that for you?”
William tried to imagine some person watching him through his webcam, filling out his A15 forms. Didn’t people have things to do? He didn’t even want to fill out his own A15 forms.
The doorbell rang. It was the mattress people. “You bought sheets, too, right?” Sara asked.