by R. L. King
And now she was scared, in some kind of trouble—and he had no idea what he was going to do when he got there.
One thing he did know, though, was that he was going to have to stop for a piss soon or things were going to get embarrassing. The old Harley, which looked like crap but ran great, thanks to his spending every spare moment wrenching on it, was nonetheless true to its species, and shook like a spastic Chihuahua. Frequent stops were pretty much required. That, and he was getting hungry.
The rest stop wasn’t the kind of place he’d normally choose to pull off, but at this point that wasn’t a consideration. It was already starting to get dark; at least the place still had lights—a lot of them didn’t nowadays.
He pulled in, parked the bike next to a picnic table, and headed off toward the bushes. There was a bathroom but he didn’t trust it: unlike the parking area, it didn’t have any lights. The illumination from the overheads revealed graffiti sprayed on its walls—the usual gang tags along with some odd symbols that Jason didn’t recognize. Just not worth taking the chance.
When he got back, intending to toss down a couple of energy bars and a bottle of water from his pack, he froze. Two dark shapes stood near the picnic table, between him and the bike. One was large, shapeless and imposing looking, while the other was smaller and oddly twisted. Jason slipped his hand into his pocket for his knife, wishing now that he’d brought his pistol. He wasn’t technically supposed to have it anymore, but if it saved his life he’d worry about the legal details later.
The two shadowy figures didn’t move as he slowly approached them, keeping the picnic table between them. “Can I help you guys with something?”
“Yeah,” said the big one. His voice was low, doleful, almost apologetic. He stepped forward, and the light revealed a large Hispanic-looking guy in a ski cap and a shabby overcoat that was, amazingly, too big for him. “You got anything to eat? We’re real hungry.”
“Real hungry,” echoed a quavery voice. The smaller figure moved up next to his friend: he was an old man, hunched and skinny, with bright, manic blue eyes that shone dazzlingly out of his wrinkled apple-doll face.
“Uh…” Jason paused, looking them up and down, gauging his ability to get to his bike before they could catch him. The old guy he could take easily, unless he had a gun hidden somewhere. The big guy he wasn’t so sure about. They both looked a little…not quite right, but not necessarily threatening. He glanced around for a vehicle, wondering how they’d gotten here in the first place, and saw none. Finally he decided to play along. “That’s all you want? Something to eat? You’re not gonna hassle me?”
“Naw, man,” said the big one in his ponderous tones. “We just hungry, y’know?”
Jason had thrown several granola energy bars in his duffel bag so he could make quick stops instead of having to waste time and money stopping at fast food places. Keeping a close eye on the two strangers to make sure they didn’t come any closer, he dug two bars out and tossed them on the table. “There. Now you gonna let me get on my way?”
The old guy darted forward and snatched the bars, flipping one to the big guy and immediately ripping the wrapper off his own and wolfing it down like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. The big guy nodded to Jason. “Thanks, man.”
Jason nodded back. He watched the old man finish his bar and nibble at the inside of the wrapper for crumbs, while the big one carefully unwrapped his and took slow, purposeful bites. After a moment, Jason opened the duffel again and put two more bars on the table. “Looks like you guys can use them more than me. How’d you get here, anyway?”
This time, the big guy picked them up and pocketed them with another nod of thanks. The old one looked hungrily at his friend’s pocket but seemed to understand—save them for later.
“Travelin’, travelin’,” the big guy said. He looked Jason in the eyes, though his wandered a bit. “Listen, you’re a good dude, so I’m gonna tell you something.”
Jason cocked his head, keeping his hand on his knife inside his pocket. In these times, too much trust could get you killed, even if things looked like they were mostly okay. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“You don’t wanna hang out too long here,” the big guy said, gesturing around. “This ain’t a good place.”
“And how do you know that?”
The old guy pointed toward the bathroom as if the action was self-evident, then shuffled back behind the big guy.
“You see that there on the side of the crapper?” The big guy waved in the same direction his friend had.
“What? The tags? This gang turf?”
The big guy shrugged. “Don’t know nothin’ about that. Don’t care. But you see that circle thing with the X through it and the squiggly line?”
Jason shot a quick glance in that direction without taking his eyes off the two bums for longer than a couple of seconds. Sure enough, one of the odd symbols he’d noticed before looked just as the big guy had described it:
“Yeah,” he said. “What’s it mean?”
“Means this ain’t a good place. Means you don’t wanna camp here.”
“You know that from just that symbol? Who put it there?”
“I dunno.” The big guy seemed to be losing interest, his attention wandering. “Hey, man, you got anything to drink? Beer, maybe? Little whiskey?”
“Or maybe a smoke?” the old guy asked hopefully, poking his wizened face out from behind the big guy’s sleeve.
Jason sighed. “Sorry, guys. Hey, listen, I gotta go. Thanks for the tip, and you guys take care, okay?” He began moving slowly in the direction of his bike, ready to leap to instant action if they tried anything. He hoped they wouldn’t—he still hurt quite a bit from last night’s bar fight.
They didn’t. They just stood aside and watched him as he strapped his duffel to the back, threw a leg over the seat, and fired up the bike.
He was a mile away before realizing he’d forgotten to eat anything himself.
CHAPTER TEN
Jason rode straight through the rest of the way, with only one stop for gas and a quick meal eaten in the parking lot of the station. He took the first exit labeled Mountain View, and pulled off into the parking lot of a grocery store to consult his map. He hadn’t been up here since he was a kid, and had no idea where he was going—he knew the whole area was one big urban sprawl, with one town running into the next one with barely a border. It wasn’t looking much better than Ventura, either, he noted, spotting things like an overflowing dumpster he could smell from here, and one of the grocery store’s windows covered with plywood and tattered, fading flyers for local concerts. Things were apparently tough all over.
Much as he would have liked to show up at New Horizon’s doorstep right now and maybe wipe what was undoubtedly a pasty smile off Ed Pretentious Delancie’s face, he decided that for once in his life he’d use a little discretion and make his appearance first thing in the morning. He doubted that being sweaty and covered with dead bugs would make any kind of positive impression. Intimidating, maybe—but he knew he didn’t have the only say about whether he could pull V out of that place. He’d at least make an attempt to placate ol’ Ed. If that didn’t work, punching him in the nose was definitely not off the table.
He cruised down El Camino Real, the main drag that tied most of these indistinguishable towns together. There weren’t that many cars on the road, fewer motorcycles, and quite a number of people huddling in small groups in shop entranceways. It looked like it might even be worse up here than it was back home. He knew this area used to be fairly prosperous—a lot of the new high technology companies were based around here, luring people in search of good jobs. But all that had gone sour, like everything else, a few years back. His eyes darted back and forth, taking in the billboards (“DRINK BUZZ!” proclaimed a barely-dressed chick, wide paper strips of her skin peeling necrotically away from the faded neon background) and haphazardly-placed posters (The End is Near! one screamed in thick black letters, while the toothy electric
grin of TV do-gooder Gordon Lucas shone out of another).
There were a lot of motels along El Camino, ranging from high-class chains he knew he couldn’t afford to ramshackle establishments that looked like they’d been around for fifty years, and might have changed the sheets on the beds a couple of times during that period. He had enough money to last a little while if he was frugal, but…yeah. Even he had standards.
The glow of a neon sign off to his left caught his attention. MOTEL – CHEAP ROOMS, it read in a style that had already gone out of style when his dad was a kid. “What the hell,” he muttered, and flipped a turn into the driveway.
The parking lot was full; he had to leave the bike down at the end of the row from the office and trudge back. Ignoring the stares of a couple of leather-jacketed teenagers lounging near the ice machine, he continued on his way.
He’d almost reached the office when a small, white symbol chalked on the curb near the office door caught his eye. At first his gaze just slid over it as part of the background scenery, but then something clicked in his mind, and he stared at it.
It was the same symbol he’d seen back at the rest stop—the one the two bums had told him meant “a bad place.”
No, that’s crazy. It’s got to be a coincidence. I’m just tired. I’m seeing things that don’t mean anything. But all the same, it spooked him a little. It was definitely the same symbol, a symbol he’d never seen in his life before today, and had now seen twice in the last several hours.
When Jason was a kid, his dad had told him, “Jase, don’t let anybody ever tell you not to listen to your gut. Sometimes it’s all you got, and it might save your life someday. Brains are great—you should never disengage your brain. But your gut’s gonna be what saves you.”
Right now, looking at that innocuous little symbol chalked there on the curb, he understood what Dad had met. He felt a little stupid doing it, but he took one last glance at the office door, then turned around and headed back for the bike.
The two teenagers who’d been next to the ice machine weren’t there anymore. Instead, they were standing near the Harley, silently inspecting it. Jason got a glimpse of some kind of red and black logo on the back of one of the jackets. “What do you two want?” he demanded.
They looked startled to see him back so soon, but shrugged. “Just lookin’,” said the older one, turning to face Jason. His head was shaved and covered with colorful tattoos that extended down to his forehead. “Ain’t illegal, is it?”
“Okay, you had your look. Now clear out.”
Shrugging again, the two of them sloped off back toward the ice machine without another word. Jason watched them go, glanced around to make sure they didn’t have any friends lurking in the shadows, then rumbled out of the parking lot, still pondering the weird symbol.
First thing the next morning he was on the road again. He’d found a symbol-free motel a couple miles farther up El Camino and settled in; a shower, a quick meal from the fast-food place next door and a good night’s sleep had done wonders for his outlook, and by the next day, as he spread his map out over the room’s tiny table and memorized the route to New Horizons, he’d pretty much forgotten about things like creepy bums and strange graffiti. All he was thinking about now, as he carefully noted street signs, was Verity.
New Horizons, when he finally found it, was a two-story, gray, Victorian-style home in a marginal residential neighborhood. All around, Jason could see signs that the people who lived here weren’t doing all that well: peeling paint, roofs missing shingles, broken-down toys, junker cars that looked like they barely ran. New Horizons itself was in decent repair, but had the threadbare look of a place that was being kept up haphazardly as the money became available. There was no sign or placard announcing its name, only the house number. Almost without thinking about it, Jason glanced around, looking for any chalked symbols, then felt embarrassed. Still, he was heartened by the fact that he didn’t see any.
Next to the large double front doors was a button with an intercom speaker. He stabbed the button. “Hello?”
The seconds stretched out in silence. Jason waited nearly a minute, then knocked insistently on the door before hitting the button again. “Anybody in there?”
Again several seconds passed, and then a female voice crackled out of the speaker: “Can I help you?”
“Yeah. I’m Jason Thayer. I’m here to see my sister. Verity.”
Pause. Jason was beginning to wonder if anybody in this place ever did anything quickly. “Verity’s not here,” the voice said at last.
Jason froze. “What the hell do you mean, she’s not here?”
“She’s not here,” the voice repeated. “She left a couple of days ago.”
Jason took a long, slow deep breath in lieu of kicking down the door. “Okay,” he said slowly, measuring every word. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but I want to see my sister, and I want some straight answers. Get Delancie out here. And open this damn door right now.”
“Hold on a minute.” The speaker went silent again.
Jason waited. A minute passed. Two. Three. He looked down at his watch: he would give them one more minute and then he was going to beat his way in. He had mad visions of them spiriting Verity out through the back door while he waited like a sucker on the front porch, but he knew if he gave in to those, he’d be moving into territory it was hard to get back out of. So he waited, following the second hand on his watch as it swept its way toward his deadline.
With fifteen seconds to spare, something rattled on the other side of the door, and then it swung open. Jason jerked himself back to attention.
“Mr. Thayer? I’m Dr. Edward Delancie. It’s good to meet you.” The man inside extended his hand. He looked almost exactly like Jason had expected him to: white, middle-aged, brown hair just beginning to go gray, wire-rimmed glasses, caring-professional sweater. His eyes crinkled with kindness, but his perfect white teeth reminded Jason more of a used car salesman. He stepped forward, and only then did Jason notice that he was flanked by two other men, identically dressed in jeans and New Horizons-logo light blue, button-down shirts. One was bald, black, and overweight; the other was short, white, and muscular. They both looked like they could handle themselves in a fight.
“You need your thugs with you to talk to me?” Jason demanded, cocking his head toward the two.
Delancie smiled, shrugged. “You sounded pretty belligerent, Mr. Thayer. You scared poor Melissa when she answered the intercom. These aren’t thugs; they’re members of my staff. But all the same, if you give me your word that you won’t do anything violent, I’ll be happy for just you and me to have our chat.”
“I want to know where my sister is,” Jason said. “When we talked yesterday, you said she was in some kind of time-out, but the chick on the intercom said she was gone. Which is it? I want to see her now, and then we can talk.”
“Erm.” For a moment, Delancie looked uncomfortable. “Mr. Thayer, come with me. Let’s talk in my office. Charles, Tony, I don’t think you’ll need to stick around. I’m sure we can discuss this like civilized folks.”
For a second, something in Jason’s brain pinged—something he thought he should remember—but then it was lost in the anger again. “Is she here, or isn’t she?”
“Well…no.” Delancie raised his hands in a gesture of surrender as if he expected Jason to hit him. “Come with me, Mr. Thayer, and I’ll explain everything. There’s been a terrible oversight, and I take full responsibility.” He indicated for Jason to follow him. Charles and Tony looked uncertain about whether they should come along as well, but Delancie waved them off.
It was all Jason could do not to start busting heads, but he knew that wouldn’t get him anywhere—at least not until he had all the information. He sighed and stalked off behind Delancie toward a door at the end of the hallway.
“You see, Mr. Thayer,” Delancie said as he settled himself behind a cluttered desk in an office that was surprisingly small and unimpressiv
e for somebody as obviously full of himself as he was, “I was given incorrect information, and I passed that information on to you without checking on it. I was out of town myself the last couple of days, you see, so when you called I was in the middle of getting caught up. By the time I’d discovered my error, I tried to reach you, but you had already left. I take it you didn’t get a call from our staff?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Jason demanded, planting his hands wide on the edge of the desk and leaning over it to tower over the seated Delancie. “I didn’t get a call from anybody but my sister.”
“Please, Mr. Thayer, sit down.” Delancie’s expression of calm concern didn’t change. “I’ll explain everything.”
Giving up for the moment, Jason threw himself into one of the high-backed wooden chairs in front of the desk. “Okay. This better be good. And it better be fast, because if Verity’s not here, I need to get out there and find her.”
“I assure you, we’re already looking. We’ve alerted the authorities, and we feel it’s only a matter of time before we locate her. But let me tell you what happened. As it turns out, I was given a report that said that Miss Thayer was in time-out, written by one of our part-time staff who fills in when I’m away from the home. I didn’t verify the report myself. Since Miss Thayer tends to remove herself to her room and stop interacting with the other residents when given time-out, I assumed she was doing the same this time. It wasn’t until this morning that I discovered that she had left the facility.”
“So you don’t—I don’t know—check to make sure your people are here every day? Don’t you have some kind of roll call? Don’t they have to go to school or something?”
Delancie sighed. “Mr. Thayer, we do what we can. We don’t have a lot of money here, and our staff is somewhat—shall we say—a skeleton crew lately. Because Miss Thayer is one of our older residents, and because she had been improving so dramatically over the past few months, we generally don’t keep as close a watch on her as we do some of the other younger or more—er—emotionally fragile residents. As I mentioned, Miss Thayer still has occasional episodes, but it’s been quite some time since she’s had one.”
