by James Renner
“The holy fuck are you doing here?” said a gruff voice from the doorway.
It was an FBI agent past his prime, a scruffy-looking gentleman with a white handlebar mustache. He gave me a passing glance, then stepped over to David. I learned later that this was retired agent Dan Larkey.
“What’s wrong?” asked Casey.
“What’s wrong? This man is charged with murder. I want to know what the fuck he’s doing here. What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t kill my wife,” David said. I could tell he was one insult away from assaulting the man.
“He was asking questions about Erin,” said Jo.
Jumping to conclusions, Casey leapt up and grabbed David by his shirt. He knocked him into the wall. “Where were you yesterday?”
“Mr. McNight,” said Larkey, pulling the father off David, but slowly. “Neff was in lockup when your daughter was taken. The only thing he’s here for is publicity. That’s all. He’s just a snake, slithering out from under his rock to make some money off your daughter’s tragedy. Another book, right, Mr. Neff?”
“I’m not writing a book about their daughter,” David said, adjusting his shirt.
“Then why are you here?” asked Larkey.
“I think she was abducted by the same man who took Elaine O’Donnell.”
“Based on what?”
“The girls look a hell of a lot alike. Both abducted by a man in a van at a park by their home.”
“Phhhhht,” Larkey said, waving his hand. “Go play private dick somewhere else.”
“Wait,” said Jo. “He helped us remember something important. There was a handyman here a couple weeks ago. A guy named Harold Schulte. Mr. Neff said he was a suspect in Elaine’s abduction.”
Larkey stopped short, as if slapped. He turned back to David. “Is that true? Was Schulte here?” he asked. His voice had changed. There was no longer even a hint of sarcasm.
“Yes.”
“Well.” Larkey cast his eyes to the living room carpet, thinking. “Well, let me make some calls, all right? If it checks out, it’s a home-run lead.” He looked at David in an odd way.
“Are you going to talk to this guy Schulte?” asked Casey.
“I have to check it out first,” said Larkey. “I have to verify the information. I have to talk to the SAC. Maybe a judge.”
“Jesus. What if she’s there right now?”
“It’s not that simple, Mr. McNight.”
“For you,” I said. I nodded at David and he started for the door. Larkey made brief eye contact with me then. It was hard to say for sure, but I think I detected the slightest nod from him. A simple nod of permission. Larkey understood that he was mired in red tape and that we were free to do as we pleased.
I followed David outside and a minute later we were headed west toward Rocky River.
* * *
David’s cell phone chimed a mile from Harold Schulte’s house, which we were able to locate quickly online. It was Katy.
“Can we talk?” she asked.
“Yes,” said David. “I’m sorry. I should have called. Have you been watching the news?”
“Just saw you on TV. My dad is fucking pissed about me being mixed up in all this. Thinks you’re robbing the cradle and breaking up my marriage. For a couple days he thought you had some private investigator tailing him. He’s paranoid. But, you know, you are charged with murder.”
“I didn’t kill anyone and you’re not married.”
“Duh. But things got sort of complicated. I’ve got Ralph over here leaving necklaces and shit in my mailbox. Sobbing voice mails. I don’t know if I should get a restraining order or take him back.”
“Kate, I can’t talk now. But I’d like you to come meet me later tonight. Can you do that?”
“I guess. Just talking, though?”
“Do you have a pen?”
“Uh, okay. Go ahead. We’re not meeting at your house?”
“Nope. Here’s the address.” I listened, stunned, as David gave her the address of my secret hideaway.
He hung up and gave me a crooked smile.
“Planning a reunion?” I asked.
“It’s time she learned what you did for her,” he said. “Life is too fucking short for games. And you could use a little gratitude.”
I laughed. “But it was never about saving Katy,” I said. “I was obsessed about an answer, not a solution.”
“If that was the case, you could just as easily have decided to confront her killer when he dumped her body. You would have had him red-handed.”
I sighed. I hated myself. “The only reason I came back far enough to see the abduction was because it gave me two chances to see who did it, or so I thought. The first chance was the abduction, the second was the dump site. That’s all I was thinking.”
“If all that drives us is some pigheaded need to learn who committed these crimes, then why did the Man from Primrose Lane save Elizabeth’s life on the cruise? Why did he care anymore?”
“Her life became his obsession,” I said. “As much as her death was the obsession of her would-be murderer. It’s a perversion, David. It’s about control. Don’t you see? We stalk these girls, too.”
EPISODE FIFTEEN
THE UNIKS
They caught up with me a mile from the western edge of the Cleveland quarantine. I heard their banshee screams from above as they honed in on the unique biometrics of my body. It sounded like a dozen modems suddenly beginning to communicate with their Internet provider: disorganized electrical conversations suddenly merging into one common language, a binary patois with only one paragraph and purpose: Find David Neff. Stop David Neff.
We call them uniks. But they’re really UNICs. As in, Universal Nanobots for Identification and Capture. Built by Lockheed. Programmed by attorneys general. They are about the size and shape of a hockey puck, able to fly through use of graviton fields. Before they are launched from the warehouse of the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation in London, Ohio, the biometrics of the target are uploaded into the machines. They have no reasoning ability, no negotiating parameters. They find targets and stop targets. They do this by crashing into the fugitive and sticking to his body. Once contact is made, a barbed hook shoots from the machine into the fugitive’s flesh. Then the nanobot’s graviton field turns in on itself and, to the fugitive, it feels as though the machine suddenly weighs seventy-five pounds. They travel in packs of twelve.
A unik’s purpose is to immobilize a public enemy long enough for the nearest understaffed police precinct to catch up. But sometimes there are unforeseen problems. I once wrote about an escaped con who had attempted to evade capture by swimming across a lake when the uniks caught up with him. The machines attached themselves to him over the middle of the lake. His body is still at the bottom, somewhere. Severely thin fugitives have been crushed to death. My death would not be so quick. No police officer would venture into the quarantined zone to place me under arrest. If the uniks got me inside the boundaries of the quarantine, I would be pinned to the ground, or to the seat of the tow truck’s cab, and I would eventually die of starvation. There was no hiding. If I tried to duck into some fortified building, they would hover outside the exits until I ran out of food and water. Time meant nothing to them. They would wait through eternity for me, and I didn’t have that long.
On rare occasions, fugitives have “beaten” the uniks. There are, actually, several ways in which this can be accomplished, but each method is fraught with such risk that many criminals simply stop running as soon as they hear the machines approaching. One such way to avoid detection is to “alleviate” your biometrics. Sane people call this death, as it requires a temporary end to your thought patterns and heartbeat. If you have someone in the medical profession you can trust to revive you after three minutes, you will awake to find the uniks have given up the chase. Some have successfully altered their biometric patterns by performing amateur lobotomies. A third method is electrocution. If you w
ait until all twelve uniks are attached, you can electrocute yourself. An electrical impulse of sufficient strength can short-circuit the nanobots’ graviton field and, if you survive, all you have to do is pull their barbs out of your body and go on your merry way. I had planned to use the stunner to achieve this. Events in Cleveland had waylaid those plans.
I slammed on the brakes.
The uniks screamed and whirled past me in a dark swarm.
I clicked the lever for the truck’s hood, then reached behind the driver’s seat and grabbed the jumper cables. I hopped out of the cab.
The machines course-corrected and came for me.
I was opening the hood, a semblance of one last idea playing in my mind, when the first one hit me in the small of the back. THUNK. The barb shot into my skin, missing my spine by a fraction of an inch.
“David Joseph Neff, you are under arrest,” the nanobot said in a loud prerecorded voice. “Please arrange yourself into a safe and comfortable position. Your mass will greatly increase and it may be some time before an officer of the law will arrive to take you into custody. Five, four…”
I attached one end of the jumper cables to the truck’s hydrogen battery.
“… three, two…”
I clamped the black cable to the fingers on my left hand, gripping the red pincers by the protective handle, daring myself, trying to find the nerve to do it.
“… one.”
The sudden weight of seventy-five pounds knocked me to the ground. The red cable fell from my grip and dangled a foot off the broken pavement, a few inches in front of my head. I reached out for the metal teeth with my right hand but it was suddenly hit by another unik. The barb pierced through my hand like a wooden nail, crucifying me to the pavement. The machine’s graviton kicked on, the weight crushing my palm nearly flat. I screamed.
Then a series of uniks pounced on my outstretched legs, my other arm at the elbow, and my buttocks. A dozen uniks were upon me, holding me completely still with 900 pounds of pressure distributed across my 160-pound body.
I stared straight ahead at the dangling cable for some time, getting up the nerve.
You know how when you step into a swimming pool that first day of summer, how pushing yourself into that freezing water feels like torture? How it feels to make yourself sit in the doctor’s chair for a root canal? Multiply that by a hundred million and you’ll come close to understanding the apprehension I felt at that moment.
I blew at the cable.
It jostled in the air a little.
I blew harder, as much as I could manage with such weight upon my chest.
The cable began to swing.
Every time it arced to me, I blew again, and, slowly, it came nearer to my head. Forty, fifty times. I began to feel light-headed.
I blew again. This time the cable’s metal claw collided with the aluminum bumper of the truck as it arced back, shooting hissing sparks into the air. It came at me but missed my forehead by a quarter inch. I blew as hard as I could.
Again it collided. The sparks were brilliant fireworks.
I wondered if I would ever wake up.
The cable connected with my face at the bridge of my nose. The circuit completed. I don’t remember pain. Just the taste of copper filling up my mouth and coursing down my throat. And then all was blackness.
* * *
I awoke in the darkness and I was not alone.
Ten feet away, a mangy dog with matted hair bared its teeth and approached with a pensive growl. I saw its eyes and its vague shape reflecting the cancerous pink glow of the city behind us. It meant to eat me. But it had thought I was dead.
“Get out of here!” I screamed.
The dog tucked its tail between its legs and danced away into the night to feast upon mutant rabbits and blind rats.
I tugged the black cable off my bruised left hand. I bled from a dozen superficial wounds where the uniks had cut into me but the machines were lifeless, fried. One by one I plucked them off, too, pulling bits of skin away as I did. My right hand got the worst of it. I had lost a lot of blood from the wound there while I was unconscious. A pint, maybe more. If I hadn’t woken up as soon as I did, it’s possible I could have bled out. I wrapped it in a piece of fabric I tore from my shirt. Still, I barely felt the sting of the cuts for the constant throbbing of my brain. It felt swollen and molested inside my skull, worse than a migraine. My nose felt like it was broken.
I was more concerned about the truck at the moment. It was no longer idling. If it had run out of gas while I lay unconscious, I was in a load of trouble; it was a long walk to Tanmay’s home in Vermilion and I would have to leave the black egg behind.
A bit of luck: it had stalled. When I turned the key, it kicked to life again. Soon I was, once again, headed west.
* * *
Tanmay was waiting.
His large cabin sat on a cliff overlooking a Lake Erie no longer inhabited by edible fish. Nothing but retarded walleyes in there now. When it rained or snowed, you weren’t even supposed to be outside.
“I was becoming afraid, my old friend,” he said, as I pulled the tow truck and the Cushman into his large unattached garage and work space. “Your name is all over the news. The Slipstreams are reporting that you surely met your demise inside Cleveland.”
“Almost,” I said.
“Oh, my, look at you.”
I looked at my reflection in the truck’s side mirror. The light of the garage showed the damage done by the jumper cables. That jolt to the bridge of my nose had given me two black eyes.
“You should see the other guy,” I said. Then I thought of the truck driver burning on the bridge and felt bad. Of course, I hadn’t forced him to rob me. “You think you’ll be able to figure this thing out?”
Tanmay looked at the black egg. He stepped to it and ran his hand along its sleek exterior. His middle finger found an indentation near the top that, when pressed a certain way, caused the egg to produce an audible POP! The top shuddered open and back on hydraulic hinges, revealing an interior lined with soft white velvet. Appropriate. It would be my coffin for decades. “Yes, I think we’ll get ’er going just fine,” he said.
Less than an hour later, we sat at his kitchen table. I picked at some naan his wife had set out before going to bed.
“I transferred the fee to your account this morning,” I said.
Tanmay nodded. “It is too much, David.”
“What do I need it for? I’m not coming back. You’re putting yourself at great risk. And it would end up being split among my ex-wives otherwise. Believe me, no probate court is equipped to deal with that mess.”
“It is appreciated. I do hope you find what you’re looking for.”
“Me, too.”
He handed me a leather case containing a single syringe. “The egg is quite simple in design. Army-issue, I think. A switch and a trigger to turn it on. Another to turn it off. From what I can tell, there’s enough juice in the lithium battery inside for one run. Enough to activate the field that causes it to travel back through time and to deactivate it. One trip. A shot of this,” he said, pointing to the syringe, “will put you to sleep. I have patched in a digital timer on the arm of the chair into which you will strap your arm. It is essentially a very expensive egg timer. It’s set to go off in thirty-six years, fourteen days, and some-odd minutes. When you reach that point, it will deliver the antidote into your bloodstream, waking you up from your hibernation. You will have to deactivate the egg manually before you get out. I’m frightened to imagine what may happen if you climb out of a machine as it is traveling backward in time.”
“And how do I get out once it’s sealed from the inside? It looks hermetic.”
“It is. To keep out contaminants, I suppose. Tesla was quite crafty.” Tanmay stepped to the counter and picked up what I first assumed to be a partially disassembled flashlight. He clicked a switch on its side and suddenly the nose of the tool erupted in a shower of sparks. I shielded my eyes from the
light it emitted but there was still a bright orange glow in the background of my vision for the better part of twenty minutes. The air around it smelled of alfalfa. “It’s a cutting tool. A crude laser welder.”
“It’s a light saber!”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. You must know that there is no data to completely predict the effect such a long hibernation will have on your system. You will surely be disoriented when you awake. Your mind will be mushy. Your brain will attempt to rediscover its old connections and neural pathways, but some may have deteriorated beyond repair. It may take a while before you feel like yourself again. Your muscles will have atrophied. Walking will be difficult and painful, if not impossible, for several days. You will be covered head to toe in your own waste. The body does not stop entirely while hibernating. Your body continues to ingest nutrients—from your stored fat—to the tune of about a pound a year. During this time, it also excretes a black, thick dung—have you ever seen a baby’s first bowel movement?”
“No.”
“It is this same black gunk, this tarlike shit. It will, over the course of decades, envelop your body. You will find it very difficult to scrub off.”
“That’s a hell of a side effect.”
“And there is one very dangerous probability to consider. The digital timer, and the fail-safe I designed for you, may become damaged. I know not the impact time travel has on my equipment. I tell you this so you can know the risks involved.”
“What happens if the timer fails?”
“You will remain in hibernation forever,” he said. “And eventually your body will consume itself.”
* * *
It’s more difficult than you might think to find a decent location to turn on a time machine. I was planning to return to 1999. I had to consider what might have existed at that location thirty-seven years ago. For example, I couldn’t park the egg in an abandoned building because I might open it in 1999 to find myself in the middle of a busy Walmart. Cleveland would have been a safe place, relatively speaking, if not for the fact that Cleveland had still been a living city until 2019.
