Origin - Season One

by James, Nathaniel Dean

  “No, probably not,” Amanda said. “Should we go?”

  “Want to head down to Lake Morey?” Jesse asked.

  “That’s the best idea I’ve heard all week.”

  They pulled back onto the interstate and headed south. Mandy appeared unaffected by the four glasses of beer she’d had. Jesse, who’d only had three, looked almost stoned.

  “You gonna be okay?” Amanda said.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “You going back?” he asked after a moment.

  She looked out the window, her eyes distant, as if the question hadn’t really occurred to her until now.

  “My dad would kill me if I didn’t,” she said at last.

  Jesse was about to ask her what she wanted when he saw the car. It had pulled off the southbound interstate, moved across the central divide and stopped only a few feet from the road. Someone was standing at the back looking into the trunk. Jesse pulled over onto the side of the road and stopped.

  “That was a woman, right?” Amanda said.

  “Yeah, it was. Stay here, I’ll go see if she’s okay.”

  He got out and crossed the road. The woman saw him and moved to the side of the car.

  “Ma’am. Are you all right?” Jesse asked.

  “What do you want?”

  “My name is Jesse Corbin, ma’am. I live just down the road. Do you need a hand changing that tire?”

  The woman took a step toward him. She had a tire iron clenched in one fist. In the dim glow of the car’s interior he could only see her face. She looked haggard, exhausted. Mascara had run from her eyes in two black lines that made her look a bit like a sad clown. There was something mad in those eyes. The look of someone whose gears have started to slip.

  “You should leave,” Cynthia Ross said.

  “You sure you don’t want me to give you a hand with that?” Jesse asked, pointing at the tire.

  “You should leave,” she said again, her voice taking on an edge of hysteria.

  “Would you like me to call someone?”

  “No, don’t call anyone!”

  “Okay,” Jesse said holding up his hands, “I’ll go.”

  He decided they would call the police as soon as he got back to the car. The woman was clearly on something and he didn’t think pleading with her would do any good.

  “Wait!” Cynthia said.

  She opened the back door of the car and leaned inside. When she stood back up she was holding a small black bag. Jesse saw she was limping slightly.

  “Ma’am, are you sure you don’t want me to call an ambulance?” he said.

  She ignored the question and held out the bag. “Take this.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, just take it. Please.”

  Jesse did and saw she had started crying again. If there had been any doubt in his mind that the woman was nuts, that dispelled it.

  “Go!” Cynthia said. “You need to get out of here.”

  Jesse left. When he got back to the car, Amanda was standing by the side of the road. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s crazier than a shithouse rat.”

  “What’s that?” Amanda pointed to the bag.

  “No idea.”

  “Shouldn’t we help her?”

  “You can try. But I think we would be better off calling the cops. I don’t have a cell; do you?”

  Amanda took her phone from her pocket. “No signal.”

  “Come on,” Jesse said, “there’s a phone outside Seven-Eleven.”

  When they were back on the road Amanda turned to look at the bag in the backseat. “What the hell is that?”

  “No idea,” Jesse said. “But I plan on handing to the Sheriff as soon as I see him. She seemed to think it was dangerous.”

  “I think we should take a look first,” Amanda said.

  She reached back and prodded it with her finger, then picked it up and pulled back the zipper before Jesse could protest. “Oh my god!”

  “What?” Jesse said.

  Amanda pulled the bag open and tilted it toward him.

  “Holy fuck!” Jesse said.

  “Why would she give you this?” Amanda said.

  “I told you, she was nuts.”

  She pulled one of the bundles out of the bag and fanned the bills with her thumb. “They’re all hundreds. This must a hundred thousand dollars at least.”

  Amanda put the bundle on the seat beside her and reached into the bag again. This time she pulled out a small rectangular box made of some light gray metal.

  “Should I open it?” she said.

  Jesse didn’t answer, just looked at her and shrugged.

  She unhinged the small clasp on the box’s side, lifted the lid, and cautiously held up the thing inside, as if it might explode if shaken. “What is it?”

  “A hard drive,” Jesse said.

  “A what?”

  “A disk drive for a computer. Looks ancient.”

  He took it from her and inspected it briefly. It was a lot heavier than he’d expected.

  They reached the Seven-Eleven a few minutes later and Jesse got out to use the payphone. He dialed the number to the sheriff’s office printed on a large red sticker above the number pad.

  “Sheriff’s Department, Deputy Mills speaking.”

  “Good evening, Deputy. It’s Jesse Corbin.”

  “Who?”

  “The photographer from the Herald?”

  “What can I do for you, son?”

  “My friend and I passed a car on the interstate about ten minutes ago. It had a blowout. I tried to give the lady a hand, but she started acting real weird. Thought she was being followed or something. And she didn’t look too good either.”

  “Bit of a nut job, was she?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Well, you did the right thing. You get some pretty crazy folks on the roads these days. I’ll get Heck out there to check it out. North or south?”

  “North. She also –”

  The line went dead. Jesse turned to see Amanda standing next to him with her index finger on the switchhook.

  “What did you do that for?” Jesse said.

  “Jesse, we should think about this.”

  “Think about what?”

  “I’m just saying, that’s a lot of money. What if she doesn’t tell anyone? Hell, what if she doesn’t even know? You said she was nuts, right?”

  Jesse looked at her, astonished. “Doesn’t tell anyone? For all we know, she’ll say we robbed her.”

  They heard a car coming up the interstate and turned to see two black sedans fly past, heading back in the direction of Fryer’s. They both had blue bubble lights flashing on the dashboard and must have been doing at least a hundred miles an hour.

  “That was quick,” Amanda said.

  “That wasn’t the sheriff’s department,” Jesse said.

  “How do you know?” Amanda said.

  “They don’t have any unmarked cars. Come on, we need to hand that in.”

  When they were back in the car, Amanda took the bag and put it in her lap. “Let’s run away, Jesse. We’ll go to California and rent a house on the beach. Live like bums. It’ll be great, I promise.”

  “Very funny.”

  Amanda pouted her lips and looked away. “Jesse, you’re no fun.”

  “Trust me,” he said. “You’ll thank me. When that woman turns out to be some drug dealer’s wife running away with his money, you’ll be glad one of us kept our heads.”

  “Fine. But not right away,” she said. “Pleeeasse, Jess. Let’s go down to the lake first. At least let me count it so I’ll always know how rich we could have been.”

  He considered this for a moment. “Fine. But I’m not leaving your house without that bag.”

  They got back from the lake at half-past-eleven. When Amanda finally fell asleep on the couch just after midnight, Jesse got up and gently pulled the bundle of hundred dollar bills from her hand. He put it back i
n the bag, zipped it up and stood watching her for a while, then turned off the TV and let himself out.

  It wasn’t until he got back in the car that he remembered how much he’d had to drink. Turning up at the sheriff’s office smelling of beer and carrying a bag full of money didn’t seem like such a shit-hot idea. He decided it was best to leave it until morning. Just turning the money in by itself would probably get him off the hook for leaving it a little longer than necessary.

  He drove away at a cautious 25 miles per hour. When he was out of the town proper, he pushed the Volvo up to 30. He no longer felt drunk, but still found his vision blurring if he kept his eyes open for too long without blinking. As he came out of the final bend in the road and onto the straight that led out of town he saw something that made him slow down. Thinking he was still a little more intoxicated than he had suspected, Jesse rubbed his eyes and opened them again. The scene didn’t change. There was a car half-buried beneath one of the tractors on the forecourt of Farmland.

  Jesse pulled to the side of the road, got out and took a few steps toward the tractor. The car beneath it was peppered with tiny holes, like the ones you see on road signs someone has fired a shotgun at for fun. Just as he thought the evening had reached its pinnacle of unlikelihood, it got even stranger.

  When he turned around, the sight that greeted him was so bizarre something in his subconscious dismissed it as a figment of his imagination. A man was standing about ten feet in front of him dressed in jeans and a biker’s jacket. In each hand he was holding some kind of large rifle. To Jesse they looked a bit like the weapons used by imperial storm troopers in the original Star Wars films. When the man spoke, what he said rounded the evening off with frightening finality.

  “Son, you wouldn’t have a hard drive on you by any chance, would you?”

  Chapter 19

  Interstate 91, Vermont

  Tuesday 18 July 2006

  0030 EDT

  Francis cursed when he saw the blue lights. Two black sedans had pulled off the road onto the central divide between the south and northbound lanes. He put the bike in neutral, killed the engine and the lights and let the momentum take him forward. Ross’s black convertible was on the other side of the road, parked a few feet behind a white and brown police cruiser, its own strobes blinking red and blue.

  He coasted another thirty yards and pulled off the road. Leaning the bike against a tree he pulled the pistol from his jacket and ran back toward the cars.

  A gunshot rang out. Someone shouted and Francis turned to see four men running across the northbound interstate. They got back into their cars, crossed the divide and sped off in the direction he had come from. Francis watched them go, then ran to Cynthia’s car.

  It was empty.

  The decal on the door of the police cruiser said Orleans County Sheriff. The man who had been driving it was lying facedown on the grass by the passenger door. A few yards down the slope lay a single white sneaker. Francis began walking in that direction and almost tripped over Cynthia before he saw her.

  She had been shot. A line of blood ran from the small hole in her forehead into one open, staring eye. Her face was a ruin of running make-up and blood. Her bottom lip was badly swollen and her left cheek had been split open. He searched the body quickly, then ran back to her car.

  The hard drive wasn’t there.

  Francis returned to his bike and almost lost it as the back wheel spun out on the grass.

  He caught up to them just in time. When they passed a sign that said Morisson – Population: Just Right, one of the unmarked cars turned off its blue lights and left the interstate.

  Francis followed it.

  When it reached the intersection in the middle of town, the car turned left and parked outside a single-story brick building with a red tiled roof.

  Francis pulled into the gap between a red Ford Bronco pickup and an old Buick Regal that looked like it was being held together with body filler.

  From where he sat he could see the building through the cab of the Bronco. He was about to stand up when a man walked out the front door of the sheriff’s office holding a phone to his ear. He was wearing jeans and a pair of cowboy boots. When he turned away, Francis saw the navy blue windbreaker he wore had the words US Marshal printed on the back in big yellow letters. The caller was joined by a second man wearing an identical jacket. They talked for a moment, then the one who had been on the phone went back inside.

  No more than five minutes had passed when the other unmarked car appeared. Two men dressed in the same jackets got out and walked inside. They came back out a minute later, got back into their car and headed toward the other end of town.

  Francis left his lights off and kept his speed down to 30. The road wound through thick forest on both sides. Twice he almost missed a turn and drove straight off. He passed a tractor dealership; the illuminated sign above the barn-like structure said Farmland. Half a mile up the road he passed a sign saying Hope you enjoyed your time in Morisson – Come back soon! Beyond the town line the road began to wind again. At one point he thought he caught a glimpse of the car’s taillights disappearing around a bend. A minute later he did see them as they passed a small barn and turned off the road.

  There were three mailboxes on the corner with no names on them, only numbers. The car had stopped around a bend somewhere up ahead. Francis couldn’t see the taillights but he could hear the idling engine. He pushed the bike off the road, set it down on the soft grass to hide it from view and followed on foot. When he was only a few feet behind the car he raised his head and looked inside. There was no one in it.

  The road was little more than two ruts in the grass that sloped down to an open gravel yard in front of a single-story brick house. In the dim glow of the porch light, he could just make out two men descending the slope on opposite sides of the track. There was a pickup truck parked by the porch steps with a bicycle in the back. When they reached the yard, the man on the left ducked across the tracks and knelt beside his partner. They conferred briefly, then one of them stood up and walked back up the track. Francis ducked, moved around to the other side of the car and lowered himself onto his stomach. When the man reached the road he was talking to someone on his phone.

  “Volvo’s not here,” he said.

  There was a pause as he listened.

  “Okay, we’ll be there in five.”

  Francis timed his move carefully. He had picked up a rock about the size of a golf ball and the moment the call ended he threw it over the road into the trees. The man instantly dropped to one knee, his silenced pistol drawn and pointed in the direction of the sound. After a moment he stood up and began to walk forward slowly. Francis was hunched down in a squat with both heels pressed against the front tire. When the man stopped, Francis leaped forward, using the tire as a springboard. His feet only touched the ground once as he closed the distance and raised an arm. He brought the first two knuckles of his right fist down on the man’s neck just above the final vertebra and swung his left arm around in a chokehold. He kept squeezing until the man dropped his gun. Francis picked it up, pushed the silencer into the soft tissue beneath the man’s chin and whispered, “Who are you looking for?”

  When the man didn’t respond, Francis pushed the silencer deeper until he could feel it pressing the man’s tongue into the roof of his mouth.

  “A boy,” the man croaked.

  “Name?”

  “Jesse Corbin.”

  “Does he have the hard drive?”

  The man nodded.

  “Are there more than four of you?” Francis asked, raising his head to look back over his shoulder. He felt the man try to shake his head. Francis dropped the gun and grabbed his left elbow with his right hand. He squeezed until the veins in his own neck bulged and felt something give behind the man’s Adam’s apple. The body twitched several times, then stilled. Francis checked the jugular for a pulse. When he found one he stood up and brought his right boot down on the windpipe. There was
a crack followed by a squelching sound, like someone kneading an egg into raw hamburger. He didn’t bother checking again.

  The other man was still crouched at the bottom of the track. Francis considered waiting for him to come back up and shooting him, then had a better idea. In his mind he kept seeing Cynthia, one eye filling up with blood, the other staring sightlessly at him, as if accusing him of getting her killed.

  He stood up and motioned the man to come back up, hoping he would fall for it, ready to shoot him if he didn’t.

  Francis got in behind the wheel of the car and waited. When the man reached the road Francis turned on the lights and drove forward slowly, veering left just enough to give the impression he was going to pull alongside and let him get in. Then he floored the accelerator and straightened the wheel.

  The impact pushed the man to the ground and beneath the car. Francis stopped and reversed a few yards. The scene in the headlights was gruesome.

  The man was lying on his side, his legs twisted back at impossible angles. One side of his face had been literally scraped off. The white of his exposed cheekbone was brilliant against the maroon mask that covered the rest of his face. He was moving, but that was about all he had going for him. Whatever consciousness he had left would be wandering in a fog of unbearable pain.

  Francis got out. “Hey there, you piece of shit. Didn’t see that one coming, did you?”

  The man didn’t appear to hear him. His one good eye was moving around in little jerking motions. It made him look like one of those cheap horror movie zombies that were as likely to make you laugh as cringe. Francis knelt beside him and pointed the silencer of the pistol at the side of his head.

  “When I find out who you people are I’m going to kill every last fucking one of you,” he said and pulled the trigger.

  He checked the trunk of the car and wasn’t surprised to find it contained a small arsenal. What did surprise him were the two Pancor Jackhammer fully automatic shotguns sitting on top of the pile. The Jackhammer was an experimental weapon that had never been put into production as far as Francis knew.

  There was also a Special Forces-issue Colt M4A1 carbine, a silenced MP5 compact submachine gun, and an M40A3 Marine Corps sniper rifle, as well as two bulletproof vests and several handguns.