Runner (Sam Dryden Novel)

by Patrick Lee

  “Okay, it’s safe,” she called.

  Dryden pulled the handle that released the seatback from its hold and shoved it forward and down. Air and light from the passenger compartment flooded the trunk. He saw Rachel next to him, looking pale and almost sick.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She managed a nod. She was still shaking badly.

  “Come on,” Dryden said. He guided her forward onto the folded-down seats. Outside, the edges of Fresno were sliding by at seventy miles an hour.

  Dena looked back at the two of them. She was as badly rattled as Rachel.

  “I don’t get it,” Dena said. “I don’t know why he let me go. He just … did, all of a sudden.”

  Dryden’s mind went to bad explanations first—old habit. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe someone with a thermal camera had seen that there were warm bodies in the trunk. Maybe there’d been standing orders to let anyone like that go through, to be followed, and someone had given word to the cop at the last second.

  “Did the officer have an earpiece in?” Dryden asked. “Did he touch his ear like someone had told him something?”

  Dena shook her head. “Nothing like that. He was right in my face, I would’ve seen it.”

  “What about someone giving him a hand signal? Did he look away at another cop before he let you past?”

  “No. I was watching him the whole time. He was staring right at me and then … he just changed his mind. I still can’t believe it.”

  Dryden couldn’t believe it, either. Didn’t believe it. Not quite, anyway. He turned and stared through the back window. He could see the glow of flashers half a mile behind, pulsing against street signs and buildings near the interchange.

  Dena seemed to pick up on his tension.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Is there something I should know?”

  Dryden watched the road behind them a few seconds longer, then turned forward again.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  * * *

  They reached Modesto just after two in the morning. Dena stopped first at a Walmart on the edge of town.

  “There are things you’ll need,” she said, “and you’ll want to minimize the time you spend in public places like stores.”

  Dryden and Rachel stayed in the car while Dena went in. She came back out twenty minutes later with several bags full of nonperishable food, plus a flashlight, batteries, and fresh bandages and antibiotic gel for Rachel’s arm. She’d also bought a baseball cap and a pair of wrap-around Oakleys for Dryden. “Better than nothing,” she said.

  They were at the train station ten minutes later. Dena parked and left the engine running, and for a moment no one spoke.

  “When I wake up tomorrow morning,” Dena said, “I’m going to lie there for thirty seconds and wonder if I dreamed this.”

  Rachel leaned forward between the seats and hugged her. Dena held on for a long time, her eyes closed.

  “Thank you,” Dryden said. It was probably the fifth time he’d said it.

  Dena opened her eyes over Rachel’s shoulder and looked at him.

  “Protect her,” she said.

  Dryden nodded. “With my life.”

  He hoped like hell it would be enough.

  * * *

  A minute later he and Rachel were on the freeway, accelerating into the sparse middle-of-the-night traffic. In his mind Dryden went back over the route he’d eyeballed on Dena’s computer. For a few seconds he couldn’t recall the name of the town right at the end—the one at the U.S. 50 interchange, where the two-lane led south to Elias Dry Lake. Then he remembered: The town was called Cold Spring.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Cobb woke an hour before sunrise, took a long steam shower, and went out on the balcony off his bedroom suite to have a smoke. The bedroom overlooked the valley, its mountain walls thick with snow. Every bit of it glittered in the sharp air, and overhead the brightest stars stood out in the predawn twilight.

  He heard the patio door slide open right beneath him. The twins came out and crossed the pavers to the edge of the pool. While they waited for its thermal cover to retract, they peeled each other’s clothes off, taking their time with it, kissing, whispering to each other in whatever language it was they spoke. They weren’t really twins; Cobb had simply thought of them that way since the day he’d met them. They looked like each other, that was all—same skinny little bodies, same big dark eyes and pert little tits, same pouty expressions when the whiskey or the vodka or the pot ran out, though there was always someone by to restock it inside of an hour. Cobb didn’t even know the girls’ names. In his head he called them Callie and Iola, for shits.

  He watched as the steam from the uncovered pool filled the air around them—the girls insisted on keeping the damned thing at 100 degrees, and Cobb didn’t argue; he sure as hell wasn’t paying the energy bill for this place. Before the steam cloud obscured them, Callie slipped into the pool and Iola seated herself at its edge, her feet dangling in the water. Callie went under the surface and came up again right in front of Iola, her face between her thighs. The girls were only shapes in the steam now; Cobb watched as Callie’s face dipped forward and Iola leaned back on the pavers, her breathing turning into cute little moans. Cobb glanced over his shoulder at the nightstand clock in the bedroom. Thirty minutes until his shift started. Plenty of time to go down to the pool and join them.

  It was the damnedest thing, the turns life could take. A year and a half earlier he’d been a logistics specialist—which was to say a warehouse worker—stocking shelves at a supply depot in Ramadi. In addition to killing camel spiders the size of his Christ-loving hands, that life had consisted of squaring away pallets of toilet paper and potato chips and coffee for the private American army in Iraq—about the same size as the real army that’d withdrawn a few years before. Cobb had woken up every morning there in his shitty little particleboard housing unit, his twenty-third birthday just behind him, his framed diploma from Ohio State six thousand miles away at his folks’ place in Rochester, and he’d thought the same thing he so often thought now: How the hell did I end up here? Hadn’t that always been the million-dollar question, though? Yes indeedy. Seth Cobb, the directionless wonder. Where will the wind take him next?

  Where it had taken him about fifteen months ago was to a hiring office out at the edge of the company grounds, there in Ramadi, after someone had stuffed a bright green flyer under his door in the middle of the night. The flyer had been both vague and right to the point.

  GENEROUS PAY / EXCELLENT LIVING CONDITIONS (NON MIDDLE-EAST LOCATION) / MUST BE WILLING TO CUT OFF CONTACT WITH FAMILY, LOVED ONES FOR FIVE YEARS / EXTENSIVE PHYSICAL AND PSYCH TESTING REQUIRED

  Cobb had family and loved ones, but he was more than willing to miss out on their company for five years, and he was quite sure the feeling was mutual. So just like that, he’d found himself sitting at a little desk in the run-down building the flyer had directed him to. It was a disused hangar of some kind; he could see fuel stains on the concrete floor. There was a door to a back room, and every time someone opened it Cobb got a glimpse of bulky, high-end medical equipment inside. One of the machines was an MRI, he thought.

  Before he got any closer to that room, there were written tests to complete. These would turn out to be the strangest part of the whole process. None of the questions were difficult, exactly. There weren’t even right and wrong answers, only judgment calls, like Your house is on fire and your dog is trapped inside; do you risk your life to save him? Or Would you play a single round of Russian roulette to save a loved one from certain death? After two days’ worth of that stuff, the written tests had culminated in something that deeply puzzled Cobb—at the time, at least. He had been made to sit off in a corner of the big room, away from any other applicant, and a man in his thirties had sat down directly behind him, saying nothing. The man just sat there while Cobb paged through one final test packet. This last test, he saw, contained no questions. There were just instr
uctions, like For the next five minutes, think in detail about the worst things you’ve ever done and gotten away with or Have you ever deeply hurt someone you cared about? Think about it, in specifics, for the next five minutes.

  What the hell was the point of this, he wondered. He could sit here running Pink Floyd lyrics through his head and they wouldn’t know the difference. But for the hell of it, he went ahead and obeyed the instructions. He found it oddly stressful, after a while; it even seemed to give him a headache, or at least a funny chill at his temples.

  That test lasted an hour, and when it was over, the man behind him stood up and left, taking out a phone as he went. Twenty minutes later Cobb had been ushered into the back room at last, and he spent the next four hours getting poked and scanned and being buzzed into the claustrophobic tunnels of diagnostic equipment. That day had ended in a little office outside the hangar, with Cobb seated across from two men he’d never seen before. Both were fortyish and hard and leathery. He never learned their names.

  “If you accept this job offer, you’ll be working for a company called Western Dynamics. You know it?”

  Cobb nodded. “Big defense contractor.”

  “You’ll be required to take three doses of a drug, a simple pill, the first one tonight if you’re on board.”

  “Is this a drug trial?”

  “Not at all.”

  “What does the drug do?”

  “Nothing dangerous. You won’t know what it’s for until later. That’s part of the deal. And the flyer wasn’t bullshitting about losing contact with your kin. You won’t have a phone. You won’t have Internet access or mail service either.”

  “What’s the generous pay?”

  “Two hundred thousand a year, all of which you can bank, because room and board will be provided for you.”

  Cobb whistled and sat back in his chair. He asked if he’d have a stack of nondisclosure forms to sign if he took the job. No, the men told him. When it came to that, the situation was very simple: If he ever shared the details of this job with any outsider, he would be killed, and no one would ever be prosecuted for killing him. Cobb looked into their eyes and saw that it wasn’t a joke. Which made him believe the rest of it, too.

  “Let’s have the first pill,” he said.

  A funny thing had happened that same night, back at his housing unit on the other side of Ramadi. A messenger came by with a thick three-ring binder, and Cobb laughed, because here was the paperwork after all. Of course. Only it wasn’t paperwork. Inside the folder were detailed profiles of over one hundred women; no names for any of them, just reference codes. All of the women were between the ages of eighteen and twenty, and every last one was a heartbreaker. The profiles included high-res face photos as well as nude shots. Tucked inside the folder’s front flap was a handwritten note: Pick any two, and submit your choices to the hiring office tomorrow at 0800.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, Cobb had been in the air aboard a C-17 transport. He’d dozed en route, waking when the plane touched down here at the compound—the place he’d called home ever since. Even now he had no idea where it was located. Somewhere in northern Canada, he guessed. There were mountains, and it was cold as hell year-round, and there were no roads connecting the compound to anything else. Nothing surrounding the place but northern wilderness as far as you could see. The compound itself consisted of the airport, with its array of buildings and hangars, and then a single road looping out into the woods, skirting the rim of the valley and accessing the dozen houses that stood there overlooking the drop-off. Each house was a hundred yards from the next, every one of them screened from its neighbors by the intervening forest.

  The wind shifted and partly blew the steam cloud away from the patio. Cobb took in what it revealed, then smiled around his cigarette.

  Callie was still at it, her eyes closed, lost in the moment; Cobb couldn’t see her mouth, but he could tell she was smiling. All at once she opened her eyes and looked up at him. She raised one hand from Iola’s thigh and beckoned him with it. Cobb nodded and took another deep drag.

  The two girls had arrived here the day after he had. By then he’d all but forgotten having picked them from among the profiles; he’d mostly figured that was just another psych test. That first day here, on his own, he’d simply marveled at the house; he had it all to himself. It was brand-new—you could still smell the carpet and the paint—and it looked like something you’d see on MTV Cribs.

  EXCELLENT LIVING CONDITIONS.

  No shit. There was the heated pool, with a hot tub at one end; the patio itself was heated by electrical coils under the paver bricks. There was a home theater with 7.1 surround sound. There was a sauna. There was a Sub-Zero fridge in the giant kitchen, and on the granite counter there was a tablet computer dedicated solely to a list of foods and drinks. You could scroll down that list and tap two dozen items—or just one, if you had a craving for it—and the groceries would show up at the door thirty or forty minutes later, no charge. Cobb had been soaking it all up, wondering what in the name of hell he was supposed to do here, when the doorbell rang and he met Callie and Iola for the first time.

  Those first few weeks, it remained unclear what exactly the job would be. An older guy named Hager stopped by a few times, early on, to explain some of the ropes. There were two more scheduled dosages of the drug, he said, which would be brought to the house at the necessary times. It was fine if Cobb used the available alcohol and marijuana, within reason; those substances would not conflict with the drug, either now or later on when his work began.

  “What sort of work?” Cobb had asked.

  “That’ll come later. Another few weeks. For now, just settle in. Enjoy yourself. There are marked hiking trails that go up on some of the ridges close by. Take the girls out for a walk, if they feel like it. If you ever encounter any of your neighbors, it’s fine if you want to say hello, exchange pleasantries, but keep it to a minimum. They’ll all be doing the same work as you, but you’re not to discuss it. I’ve had this same talk with them, so it’ll be fine.” Hager had ended the conversation somewhat cryptically. “There’s a landline phone in the basement. I’m sure you saw it. It connects to my office here at the compound, and nowhere else—you just push the red button. In time there’ll be something you want to ask me about. When it happens, give me a ring.”

  That was all.

  In the weeks that followed—very, very nice weeks—Cobb did as Hager had said. He settled in. It was clear from the start that communication was never really going to happen between him and the girls; he didn’t know what language they spoke, but he thought it was something from Eastern Europe. Maybe they were Romanian—they reminded him of the cute little gymnasts from there that he’d always tuned in for when the Olympics were on. In any case, how much talking did you really need? You could share an emotional connection well enough without words. Some nights the three of them would get bombed out of their minds and load up a foreign film from the theater’s digital library, something in French or German so that none of them could understand it. They’d try to follow along and end up laughing so hard it actually hurt, and then the clothes would come off and for the next few hours Cobb’s whole world would just be smooth skin and moisture and heat, clenching little hands and sighs and screams, and before he finally passed out in a tangle of their limbs, he’d think, I feel sorry for every last person on earth right now, stuck living their lives and not this one.

  When it finally happened—the thing that would make him pick up the phone downstairs—he didn’t immediately recognize what was going on. This was a month or so after he’d taken the last of the three pills, and in fact he hadn’t thought about those pills in days. He was high when the effect started, and his first thought on the matter was that he was hallucinating. True, pot had never made him do that before, but there had to be a first time for everything. Anyway, this wasn’t a full-on hallucination. Not a visual one, at least. Just an auditory thing—Callie’s and Iola’s voices
in his head, chattering away in the same language they spoke. It was about six hours before he put it together, enough time for the high to be long gone and for his thinking to crystalize. It was early evening, and he was standing in the kitchen with Callie. By then he’d realized he was getting images in his mind alongside the girls’ voices. One of these images suddenly stood out vividly: a can of Pepsi being popped open. Not three seconds later, Callie turned and crossed to the fridge and took out a can of Pepsi. A minute after that, Cobb was in the basement pushing the red button.

  Hager walked him through it as if he were talking to a man on a ledge. Yes, he said, those were the girls’ thoughts he was getting in his head. Like stray radio stations. Yes, the pills had done that to him. Yes, the condition was permanent. There was more to it, though, than hearing thoughts. The pills had given Cobb other capabilities, but these were active skills that would have to be trained up. Hager would send a man over in the morning to begin said training.

  “What other capabilities?” Cobb asked.

  “Think of it as sending instead of just receiving. Ship to shore, shore to ship, that sort of thing.”

  “You mean putting thoughts in other people’s heads, not just hearing theirs.”

  “Thoughts, but more importantly feelings, deep emotional impulses, like guilt or disgust, or even elation. Forcing people to feel those things.”

  “What the hell for?” Cobb asked.

  “For lots of reasons. It’s useful in all kinds of ways.”

  Cobb had grasped the meaning of it then, like something sharp and jagged in his hands. A sculpture made of broken glass.

  “I’m a weapon,” he said into the phone. “You’re going to send me all over the world to fuck with people’s heads.”

  “You’re going to fuck with people’s heads,” Hager said, “but we won’t need to send you anywhere.”