But now? He was no longer using toll roads. He hadn’t used his credit or bank access cards since Erie, Pennsylvania. He had no GPS, and even the all-powerful They couldn’t have tracked him to the café by his email and shown up within minutes. So how had the little old lady found him in a parking lot in Peru, Indiana?
Then he realized he was making an assumption. He didn’t know that the microchip in Baxter’s collar had been put there by her. It could have been there for days or even weeks for all he knew. He’d only checked because he’d become suspicious. The fact that he’d found it right after talking to her wasn’t proof that she was the one who put it there.
Maybe she’d been exactly what she’d appeared to be. An old lady who liked dogs.
Still, the encounter had set alarms ringing in his head. In his memory, she had the feeling of an optical illusion. She seemed real, seemed to be authentic, but he was certain she wasn’t. She was part of the conspiracy, like the boy in the tollbooth, like the Men in Black in Erie, Pennsylvania. Like the NYSEG workers who blew up his house.
So how did she find him?
It would be easy to put a tracer on his car. Stick something inside the wheel well or underneath the bumper, and no one would be able to find it. But he couldn’t get rid of his car.
He could, however, get rid of anything else They could use to track him. Like his cell phone.
Cell phones sent and received signals from satellites, although he didn’t know much about it beyond that. He was beginning to regret his general anti-technology bent, in fact. In any case, there had to be something in a cell phone that tracked where the user was. He’d seen posts on Facebook tagged as having been posted from mobile phone in Philadelphia, PA.
If the phone kept track of where he was, why couldn’t someone use that to monitor his whereabouts?
He reached in his pocket and pulled out his cell, looked at it as it sat in his open palm. It was one of the old-fashioned flip phones. He’d intended to upgrade to an iPhone, but never gotten around to it. iPhones were equipped with a GPS. Were older cellphones like his?
Maybe.
And “maybe” was enough. He had to shake Them loose from his trail, vanish from the map. Any way they could track him was one too many.
Just west of Watseka, Illinois, Chris rolled down his window, and with a swing of his wrist, sent his trusty old flip phone flying into a cornfield.
No calling the police now if he was in trouble—not that there was any guarantee whose side the police would be on. Nor could he contact Elisa if there was an emergency. But he had to get ahead of Them. If he could lose Them once, completely, then maybe after that he could stay safe... if he kept moving, that is.
He stopped for lunch at a McDonald’s east of Peoria. His food was handed to him by a bored-looking girl who recited his order in a nasal monotone— a regular cheeseburger with the works, a kid’s hamburger with no ketchup or pickles for Baxter, large fries, a bottle of water. He thanked her, and then paused, waiting, he realized afterwards, for her to say something cryptic, to reveal herself as one of Them.
She didn’t. As he drove away, he started to laugh, quietly at first, and finally in paroxysms so helpless that he had to pull over.
“Oh, God.” The storm finally passed, and reached up to wipe his streaming eyes. “I’m cracking up, I really and truly am.”
He reached into the bag to pull out Baxter’s burger, unwrapped it and set it on the seat. It was gone in under a minute. Chris ate his more slowly as he drove. The heat was already oppressive, and he considered turning on the AC, but instead opted to open the windows and take off his shirt. The wind felt good on his bare skin. Baxter put his paws on the windowsill, face out in the slipstream, tongue flapping.
Under other circumstances, all of this would have been fun. No connections, nowhere to be, free to go when he wanted to and stop when he wanted to. Just him and his dog, like that song from the 1970s, “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo,” about not being beholden to The Man, having no restrictions, having no responsibilities.
They’d tried more than once to end him, and yet he was still alive. Damned if he was going to waste that.
—
He crossed the Mississippi River into Missouri at a little after four in the afternoon. The Bayview Bridge, its steel girders and fanlike array of cables looking almost white in the westering sun, leaped across the expanse of flowing water, of impressive breadth even this far north. Hadn’t Mark Twain grown up somewhere near here? He couldn’t recall the name of the town. But this was definitely Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn country, and even now, with metropolitan St. Louis to the south and Kansas City straight ahead, there was an old-fashioned feeling to the place, as if the entire Midwest still had one foot in the nineteenth century.
Missouri went by in a string of small towns that all looked alike, with quaint names and even quainter slogans, along a stretch of highway that could have been drawn with a ruler. Shelbina, “Queen City of the Prairie.” Macon, “City of Maples.” Brookfield, “Home of the Great Pershing Balloon Derby.” Chillicothe, “Home of Sliced Bread.” In between were miles of flat farmland. He drove at a steady sixty-five miles per hour, moving with the flow, only slowing when the speed limit changed as he passed the “Welcome To” sign for the next village along the way. The traffic picked up as he approached the city of St. Joseph, on the western edge of the state. The weather had been beautiful all day—sunny, hot, humid, white puffy cumulus clouds—but by six o’clock the sun was descending into a line of ominous thunderheads forming on the horizon, and he began to think that he had covered enough ground for one day.
He passed up a Hampton Inn, a Ramada, and a Holiday Inn, knowing that he would have to give identification there. He wandered aimlessly for a while, wondering if he would have to cross into Kansas before finding something suitable. He finally pulled off Highway 36 into the parking lot of a place that looked like a possibility, a disreputable-looking low building with a sign proclaiming it to be the State Line Motel, and, below it, Vacancy in equally garish neon. His was the only car in the lot. Apparently no one else that evening was desperate enough to opt for lodging this questionable.
He turned his engine off, pulled his shirt back on and buttoned it, and got out. Huge, widely-spaced raindrops spattered the pavement, carried on a wind that ruffled his hair in angry gusts. The sky had turned a nasty color, greenish-gray, like algae-coated slate. The clouds were roiling, their undersides twisting and bubbling into bizarre shapes.
A homeless man sat slumped in the entry to the motel. Despite the heat, he was wearing an oil-stained red plaid flannel shirt, tattered jeans, and a dark stocking cap. A paper bag with the neck of a bottle sticking out sat next to him on the stoop. He looked up at Chris as he came in under the awning, and said, his voice slurred, “Help for a guy down on his luck?”
Chris looked at him, wanting to say, I’m very down on my luck at the moment, too, bub. Instead he took out his wallet and dropped a five-dollar bill into the man’s grimy hand. “God bless,” the man said, and then added, “weather’s gettin’ bad, sir. Tornadoes. Seen my share of ‘em. Hope never to see one again. But this is the way it looks when they come. Can’t outrun ’em.”
“I guess you can’t.” He didn’t know what else to say.
“Certain things you can outrun. Certain other things as you can’t. Tornadoes is one o’ them you can’t. Best to know which is which.”
“Yes.” Chris’s mind went reeling. What did that mean? Was he one of Them? Was that a warning? Or a threat?
“You can’t outrun God. I found that out, sir. Yes I did.”
Chris took a deep breath, let it out slowly. No. He was only an old wino. An ordinary person. Not one of Them. “That’s… good.”
“Yes, sir, it is. Gonna meet God soon, I am. Leave this place behind.”
The wind was roaring now, and the sound of the rain behind him on the pavement sounded like bacon sizzling in a pan.
“I have to go.”
The man waved one hand vaguely in his direction. “You go, then, and God bless you.”
“Same to you.”
Chris pulled open the door and entered a dingy lobby. This was a step down even from the Belmont Inn. The check-in desk was topped with stained and torn contact paper, and the only places to sit were two dented folding chairs. A grimy oil painting of a landscape, hanging crooked on the faded wallpaper, was the only concession to décor.
Behind the desk was an old man, his face grizzled with two days’ growth of beard.
“I’d like to rent a room for the night.”
“Yeah.” The man pushed a clipboard across at him. “Nightly rates are forty dollars. Fill this out.”
Chris filled the paper out with his pseudonym and fake address, and pushed it back toward the man along with two twenties.
The man looked it over. “You’re in room four. Out the door, left down the sidewalk, third on the left.” There came a tremendous thunderclap, and the man shook his head. “Helluva storm. They say we got a tornado warning, all o’ Buchanan County and out across the river into Kansas. Best get inside while you can.”
That seemed like good advice, and Chris went back out through the front door. The homeless man was still sitting with his back to the wall, but seemed to have fallen asleep despite the noise of the storm.
Maybe he wasn’t asleep. Maybe he was dead. Maybe he finally went back to God, like he said he would.
He stood, looking out into the downpour for a few moments, and finally decided to go for it. The rain was showing no sign of slackening, and he didn’t want to stand there in the entryway with only a sleeping—or perhaps dead?—wino for company. Besides, he figured he could dry off as soon as he got to his room.
Hunching his shoulders and squinting his eyes against the storm, he walked out into the parking lot. Cold rainwater soaked him to the skin almost immediately, poured down his neck, plastering his shirt to his back.
He went up to his car and opened the door, and called for Baxter. The dog looked terrified. He was a complete wuss about thunderstorms, which fortunately had been infrequent back in upstate New York. He was sitting in the passenger seat, shivering, and looked at Chris with wide eyes that seemed to say, You’re not really going to make me go out in that, are you?
He rolled his eyes. “I’m not going to stand here in the rain all night waiting for you, Man up, dude.”
He reached in and picked the dog up. Baxter weighed a little under fifty pounds, and it was a struggle to lift him over the driver’s seat and out onto the rain-soaked pavement.
There was another lightning flash and thunderclap, and Baxter whined and huddled against Chris’s leg.
“Just come on, and we’ll get inside where it’s nice and dry.” He shut the car door and stopped, gaping.
His front driver’s side tire had been slashed. It was completely flat, a gaping hole sliced in the side.
Dear God!
It was the car. They were tracking him by tracing the car.
He looked frantically around the parking lot, searching for who could have done this, but there was no one there. The parking lot was empty. The lights from the traffic on Highway 36 flashed by, tires hissing on wet pavement.
With the suddenness of a snake, a hand grabbed his upper arm in a viselike grip. Chris twisted around, lost his balance, and almost fell. Baxter growled, hackles rising, and backed up against the car. It was the homeless drunk, who had roused himself and now stood very close, rain pouring down his lined face like tears, his fingers still clamped on Chris’s bicep.
The drunk’s eyes were wide, showing bloodshot whites. His pupils were huge in the dim light. He pulled Chris to him, until their faces almost touched. “Run.”
Chris yanked his arm free, gasping for breath, and his butt pressed up against the closed car door. He felt frozen in place, as if his body had been turned into stone, as if he were a statue left out in the rain in this desolate parking lot. Then there was a loud crack from somewhere near the motel, and one of his car’s windows shattered in a cascade of shards.
“Run!” The drunk’s creaking voice rose to a shout. “Run!”
There was another sharp report and the man lurched forward. Chris’s chest and face were spattered with blood. The drunk spun around, arms flailing, and landed with a splat on his back on the wet pavement. His eyes rolled back to show nothing but whites, and a dark stain spread across the grubby red plaid of his shirt.
The paralysis broke like a dam bursting. Chris turned and sprinted toward the highway. Another gunshot followed him. Afterwards, he was certain that he’d felt the wind of the bullet’s passing ruffling his hair. Baxter, whining with fear, was right at his heels. Heedless, he ran across the eastbound lanes, the grassy median, and launched himself into the westbound lanes.
The reflexes of the driver who almost hit him were amazing. Compression brakes roared and groaned. Even so, the truck’s front wheel barely missed Baxter’s tail as the two of them cleared the lane and stumbled onto the shoulder of the highway. Panting, Chris crouching down into the high grass, hoping desperately that the distance and dim light would defeat whoever it was that was trying to shoot him. But the eighteen-wheeler continued to slow, and to pull onto the shoulder, finally coming to a complete stop about fifty feet further along the road.
He stood and ran toward it, the soles of his sneakers making splatting noises on the wet asphalt. By the time he reached the front end of the truck, the driver had already slid over and opened the door, and was shouting, “What the hell was you thinking, running in front of me like that? You coulda got yourself killed!”
But then he looked at Chris’s face, and his own expression changed from anger to concern.
“Buddy, you okay?”
“Help,” was all that Chris could get out. “Help me.”
“Climb on in.” He reached out a sinewy arm, hand open toward him. Chris took it, and once he was seated reached down and grabbed Baxter by the front legs and hauled him bodily into the cab. A minute later, they were pulling back out into traffic, and he saw a sign that said MISSOURI RIVER, followed by one moments afterward that said Welcome to Kansas!
—
“I’m Thomas T. Champion, from California, P-A,” The truck driver gestured with one hand. “Gotta add the P-A part, ’cause people always think it’s California state. That’s a place I never been, not yet, at least. I been all through the Midwest, and far west as Montana, but that’s about it.”
Thomas T. Champion turned out to be loquacious and friendly, once he was convinced that Chris wasn’t on the run from the law.
“Police ain’t after you, are they?” he asked, as the truck rolled on through the rainy Kansas night. “’Cause I don’t mind helping a guy who needs help, but I don’t want to get mixed up in nothin’ illegal.”
Chris assured him that he hadn’t broken any law.
“Kinda figured not. Dumb of me, but I looked at that dog of yours, and I knew somehow that you weren’t no jailbird. I guess there’s nothin’ stoppin’ a criminal from gettin’ a friendly old dog like that, though, right?”
“Guess not.”
“What was you runnin’ from, though? I swear to Jesus, you almost got turned into road pizza out there.”
Chris thought for a moment, and then decided that there was nothing for it but the truth. He was too tired to make up a plausible lie in any case.
“There’s some people who are trying to kill me. The FBI tried to warn me about it. I have no idea why. I think it might be something that happened in my past, that for some reason I’ve forgotten about.”
Champion’s grin flashed out in the dark. “Really? Like in that movie, what the hell was it? The one with Matt Damon.”
“The Bourne Identity.”
“Yeah! That’s the one! So you think you might be some kind of international spy or somethin’, and you got, whatchacall, amnesia?”
“No, nothing like that. I really don’t know what’s going on, or
why they want me dead, but I’m pretty sure it’s not that.”
“Hey, that Bourne guy didn’t know, either,” Champion said. “It could be.”
“Yeah, I guess it could.”
“Where you from, Mr. International Spy?”
“I grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, but I’ve lived in upstate New York for about twenty-five years. Little town named Guildford. South of Syracuse.”
“Huh. What brought you out there?”
“A job. I’m a high school science teacher.”
“Mild-mannered high school teacher by day, top-secret international spy by night.” Champion laughed at his own joke. “Betcher popular with the kids on account of that.”
“Oh, yeah, they’d like that.”
“So how’d you end up in St. Joe?”
“I was stopping there for the night. Traveling west. Trying to stay one step ahead of the guys who are after me and keep from getting killed. But I think they had some kind of tracking device on my car. If you hadn’t picked me up, I’d probably be dead by now.”
Champion’s smile faded. “So, you’re really serious? All that stuff is true, you being hunted and all?”
“Yes. All true.” He looked out of the window again. “I think a guy who tried to help me got killed because of it, too. Shot in the back.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“How’re you not freakin’ out?”
Chris shook his head. “I don’t know. It hasn’t sunk in yet. People are dying because of me, and I still don’t know why.”
Kill Switch Page 10
