He could hear the Other, screaming, fighting to get free. The thought filled him with anger. He was back in Philadelphia again, not because he wanted to be, but because the Other had snuck out while he wasn’t looking. He had lost his vigilance. He had let himself forget. Big mistake.
It had taken him a while, but now he was back in control of the situation. He liked Philadelphia well enough. It stank of pollution, but it was alive and the people were always interesting.
Also, there were the cheesesteaks. A boy had to eat, right? And Seven liked to eat. He loved to eat. He had a passion for food that unsettled people. He knew that other kids his age did not eat as much, but the ones he met also were not as strong or as fast. They didn’t heal as quickly and they didn’t have the Other to contend with. All that he did required calories and meat and salt. And coffee. He liked coffee. And Red Bull. And other energy drinks. The list of foods he liked was very long. Years without had made him greedy. If he’d led a more stationary life, he’d have probably been fat by now, but he walked almost everywhere he went. Not only did he not have any ID, but he also had trouble seeing over the steering wheel of most cars. At eleven years of age, he was hardly grown up. His life in public was a constant series of camouflaged maneuvers. He couldn’t afford to be questioned about why he wasn’t in school or where his parents were because—Killed Daddy! Broke Mommy!—he didn’t have any. He couldn’t tell people where he lived because that changed every night.
He’d spent months living on the streets, making connections and finding ways to circumvent the police and the people who always wanted to take him home. He’d run from the complex, from the city where the complex lay hidden, fleeing as fast and as far as he could from the Other’s home and everything that reminded him of it.
What Seven could not carry he did not keep for long.
He started for the closest place that sold cheesesteaks and felt his stomach grumble. The people on the street around him were too numerous to count and that was good. It helped him stay anonymous. Seven needed meat. Some sugar and caffeine wouldn’t hurt either. The Other came around most often when he was tired. When he was weak. He couldn’t afford to be weak, but he also couldn’t go without sleep.
How many times had the Other tried to call his mother? He couldn’t even begin to guess.
Just thinking about the Other was enough to make his blood boil. The Other had to be stopped.
Seven’s eyes drooped as he felt the Other struggling to be free. “Get down. Get back down, you bastard . . . .” He growled the words, closing his eyes and fighting harder than before. “You hear me? I’m done with this, and I’m done with you.”
No answer. He didn’t really expect one, so that was just as well.
The world was growing darker, a sure sign that the Other was starting to win the fight.
Seven’s eyes were closed when he stepped off the curb. Unprepared for the sudden drop, he staggered forward and fell to his knees. He opened his eyes just as the car horn honked.
He was looking directly at the bumper of a car, right about to slam into him.
But he never felt the impact. The Other had come to take him away.
Chapter Two
Present day
Hunter Harrison
EYES CLOSED, THE AIR was brisk, cool and just at the edge of pleasant. Two degrees lower and everything would have sucked, but for the moment he kept his eyes closed. It was nice to just drift instead of waking all the way up.
His body felt numb. The air smelled like air freshener and cheap soap and a hint of cologne. He knew the stuff but couldn’t think of the name.
Outside, not too far away, he heard the sound of cars rumbling down an expressway. It was too many cars to be any smaller road.
That was the thing that startled him out of his reverie. The noise was wrong. The road outside his bedroom was a two- lane job in a small neighborhood. There was too much noise for him to ignore.
He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling above his bed. The stucco he was expecting was missing, replaced by water-stained acoustic tiles. He sat up and blinked, not quite panicked but feeling an edge of cold fear gnawing at his stomach.
“Where am I?” His voice was wrong, deeper than it should have been. He rolled out of bed on legs that felt uncertain under him and stared around the room. Not a bit of it looked familiar. The walls were the wrong color, his posters were gone and the bed was a king-sized monster, not the one he was used to. The carpet was a tacky orange and green affair that looked like it belonged in a bad movie from the seventies.
Cheap hotel. He’d never actually been in one, but he knew the scheme from a dozen different movies. There was a mirror, one window, a desk, a couple of ugly but functional lamps and a phone that had a little red light on it. Crammed into the corner was a recliner that looked to be made of green leather.
None of it made sense. Not a bit of it.
The pj’s he normally went to bed in were missing. Instead he was wearing boxer shorts, which made even less sense because he’d always worn jockeys and he wasn’t exactly into wearing other people’s underwear.
“Just . . . just calm down. Work it out. Nothing we can’t work out going on here, right?” The words weren’t his, they were his dad’s. That was what the man always said when things were spinning out of control, and right at the moment, he couldn’t imagine how things could get more out of control than they already were.
His eyes were trying to look everywhere at once, and he let them finally settle on the mirror across from the bed. He looked at his reflection and stopped dead in his tracks.
Because the last thing he’d expected, the one thing he had never believed was possible was simply this: he didn’t recognize the face looking back at him.
“What the hell?” He stepped back, his head shaking, his knees weak and watery.
He fell back against the bed and lost his balance as the room grew cold and gray.
“Oh no. No. No. What the hell? Seriously, what the hell is all of this?”
There were no answers. There was no one but him in the room, and that meant there was no one to help him figure it all out.
He stood up again, slowly, carefully, just in case his legs got away from him a second time. He could feel his pulse speeding up, and his breaths were coming too fast.
“Okay, okay . . . Just . . . I dunno, just try to relax. Call home, get hold of Mom and Dad and then we can see what’s happening.”
He reached for the phone and his finger took careful aim at the buttons, ready to dial home, but there was a small problem: he couldn’t remember his number.
He blinked back tears and bit back a laugh that felt completely wrong. “Oh, come on. This is getting stupid now.” His fingers searched the keypad for the right sequence—hell, even the right first digit would have been nice—but nothing came to him.
He clenched his hands together and made himself take a deep, slow breath.
“Okay, come on, numbers . . . numbers. There’s got to be a way to remember this. It’s my damned home phone number.”
He closed his eyes. His mom, she’d always drilled it into him. If he was lost, he was supposed to tell people his name, his phone number and his address, in that order. She’d gone over it so many times.
“So, what do we tell people when we’re lost? My name is . . .” And there he stopped. One more obstacle, a little thing really, but there it was. And this time when the tears threatened, he couldn’t stop them.
“What’s my stupid name?” His voice wheezed out of his chest, squeezing past a constriction that felt like a brick wall. “Come on, damn it all, who the hell am I?”
Three hours later, he was only a little closer to finding the answer to that question. A look around the room revealed a suitcase full of clothes, fifty-seven dollars and eighty-seven cents in cash and a wallet that held nothing but a learner’s permit for Boston, Massachusetts, in the name of Hunter Harrison. The picture on the ID looked a little like the face he saw in th
e mirror, but only vaguely. The face was too young, and he guessed he was at least a few inches taller than the five feet, seven inches that Hunter Harrison was supposed to stand in height.
There was an address, and that was a starting point. He figured he could find out where the address was in Boston and go there. Maybe it was his home and he’d get lucky and something about the place would help him remember who he was and what was missing from his life.
There was another problem, of course, and this one was a doozy. The address on the license said Boston, but as he discovered by checking out the local news, he was in Baltimore, Maryland. He couldn’t remember his name without help, or much of the past, but his geography was just fine. A few hundred miles stood between him and his destination.
He paced the room like a caged tiger for a while, doing his best to solve the puzzle of his existence, but it wasn’t going well.
He stood in front of the mirror, studying himself. The body was muscular, with broad shoulders, a solid chest and the sort of build that only came from years of hard workouts. Brown hair, tan skin, blue eyes. The face was a puzzle. He didn’t know why, but he somehow knew that his face was . . . older than it should have been. There was a small scar over his left eyebrow, like he’d run into something once upon a time. There were no other distinguishing marks.
How could he remember anything if he couldn’t remember his own face?
His stomach growled, and Hunter stood up, stretched and gave thought to eating something.
“Whatever. I need to get out of here. I don’t even know if the room is paid for.”
He reached for the jeans draped over the back of the cheap chair that went with the cheap desk in the cheap room and—
The car horn startled him out of his thoughts, and Hunter stepped back from the noise just in time to avoid getting creamed by the milk truck rumbling down the street. The air was hotter than he expected, and his skin was stippled with a thin sheen of sweat.
Not two feet away from him, the road was baking in the bright sunlight and a bum was sprawled on the ground, either sleeping off a bender or knocked unconscious.
The bum turned over and groaned. Hunter looked toward the man and took in the bruises and bloodied nose, the busted lips and the eyes swollen almost completely shut. His clothes were clean but wrinkled. Not a bum after all. Somebody’d just beat the crap out of him.
Hunter turned to get a closer look, but then—
It was dark and he was lying in a new bed.
He heard a noise and looked to his left. The shape next to him muttered and snored lightly. There was a girl in his bed with long red hair and a tattoo of a unicorn across her shoulder. She looked a few years older and she had one arm stretched toward him. Neither of them was wearing clothes. Hunter sat up in the bed and looked around, his heart hammering hard.
There was a girl in his bed. A naked girl. What the hell had he been—
Daylight again and a different hotel.
For a moment he tried to suppress the panic blooming in his chest and then he changed his mind. He shoved the fear aside and went straight for the anger that made his body twitch.
“Enough!” He came out of bed furious, hating this. “What the hell is this?” He couldn’t get a decent breath no matter how hard he tried. He didn’t know if hours had passed or days or even months, and the confusion hit him like a hurricane. His chest felt like someone was crushing him in arms as thick as a gorilla’s.
None of it made sense! He swung at the air, just in case there might be someone behind him, but struck nothing.
“What’s happening to me?” His voice cracked and his eyes stung with the need to cry.
And then he noticed the note on the window, taped in place. It said: PLAY ME, and an arrow was drawn pointing toward the pressboard desk below the sign.
Below the sign was a cheap tape recorder.
His head ached and his eyes burned a bit, but he nodded and took a deep breath. If there was a song on the thing, he’d throw it out the window. If it was someone talking, maybe he’d finally learn something.
Hunter pulled out the desk chair and sat down. A moment after that he hit the play button.
The voice that came out was tinny and distorted, and not one he recognized.
“Bet you want answers, don’t you? Bet you’re tired of blacking out again and again, aren’t you?” The voice sounded almost amused, but there was an undercurrent of anger, of hatred, that he couldn’t ignore.
“Tough. Your life is officially shit. I own you. Get used to it.”
“What?” The voice was recorded, but if he could have, he’d have strangled it into silence.
“You’re having troubles, loser. You’re in deeper than you know and the only way you’re going to get any answers is to listen to me. The only reason you’re alive is because I need you. If I didn’t, you’d be dead and buried where no one would ever find you.”
There were a few seconds of silence and then the voice started again. “You don’t know where your family is. You don’t know where you are. You might not even remember anything about yourself, and that’s okay. It’s all stuff we can fix if you work with me. But if you piss me off, if you cross me, I can ruin you.”
Hunter reached for the recorder, ready to shut it off.
“This is a first-time run. You want to answer me, you turn the tape over and you go ahead and say what’s on your mind. We’ll have a nice little talk. In the meantime, don’t get too stupid.”
That was all the tape said. He listened for several minutes to the static and silence of the blank tape before he turned it off.
Then he flipped the tape over and started talking.
Chapter Three
Subject Seven
“HUNTER HARRISON’S” VOICE GRATED on his nerves. The Other was a whiny little piss pot, and that much hadn’t changed at all. He thought he’d been freed of him forever. But now? Now the Other was back.
But things were different. The Other seemed . . . confused. He was lacking. He was missing most of his memories. He knew he had a brother, a father, a mother, but he couldn’t remember them clearly. He might have recovered from the car crash, but it seemed to have had an amnesia-like effect on his brain. Seven couldn’t clearly see into the Other’s mind, he never had been able to, but the bleed over let him see some of what was going through his enemy’s mind. Luckily it hadn’t done the same to him. That brought a small smile to Seven’s face, but it didn’t last long. The world was no longer his own and he hated that.
He lay on the hotel bed and listened, eyes closed. He didn’t want to see yet. He wanted to take in every nuance of Hunter’s voice, to understand everything about the Other. It was best to understand your enemy completely. Best to know him better than he knew himself. In this case, he certainly did. Seven smiled again at the thought. The name Hunter Harrison was a lie. A fabricated identity he’d created when he was learning how to make forgeries. The address was real enough, mostly because he would never be able to forget that damned location, but everything else was a lie and the Other fell for it.
He had believed the Other was dead and gone. He began to build a proper life for himself, to make connections and get himself set up, despite his age. He’d had the reins and full control and it had been amazing—liberating! But now the Other was back, stealing his world from him.
Again. The thought made him want to scream, but he’d learned a lot about self-control over the last few years. A lot.
He willed himself to focus on the tape. After the idiot had completed a long list of whining complaints about how horrible his life was, he finally got to the point. “Who are you? What the hell do you want from me? What did you do to my family? I need to know that they’re safe. And who . . . who am I?”
The anger disappeared for a moment and he roared with laughter, pounding the bed with his hands and his feet alike. “Who am I?” He repeated the phrase several times. Oh, this was rich. This almost made up for the changes in his plans.
He’d done all he could without help, all he could without backup. Now he needed to handle the next level of the game. And really, it was a game. It was best if he thought of it that way because games were different from life. Games could be won definitively.
He intended to win. It was what he did.
A moment later he left the room. He was hungry, but that could wait. There was a man waiting to meet with him who had information that could be bought.
Once outside the hotel room, he picked up the pistol he’d stowed under a decorative rock at the edge of the parking lot and fished the bundle of hundred-dollar bills from where he’d taped them to the underside of the closest manhole cover and stuffed them in a duffel bag. Not the best bank in the world, but no one asked questions. If no one asked stupid questions, he didn’t have to kill anyone else. Hiding the bodies was inconvenient on such short notice.
Loaded with cash and weapons, he headed for the meeting place.
Clarkson was late. Seven wasn’t happy about it, but there was nothing he could do. He flipped open his cell phone again to double-check, but there were no messages.
He dialed the number his contact had given him, but Clarkson didn’t answer.
No. Wait. Just before the damned phone kicked over to voice mail, something changed.
He looked around the bowling alley and studied the people around him. The Kingpin Bowl was a dive, the sort that reputable people didn’t go to. The only people around him were losers, slinking around in the bar area looking to score other losers, and a few teens who were playing in the arcade or actually trying to bowl a few games on the miserable alleys that needed more than a layer of polish to make them halfway decent. It was much too late at night for family fun.
Subject Seven Page 3
