The Eighth Day

by Joseph John

  The stairs creaked, and his footsteps clomped down them. Her pulse beat like a death metal drummer on speed. She piled two plates with pancakes and syrup and turned to face him.

  Showtime.

  But Echo-7 awoke with memories of New York, and all of their training and preparations had been for nothing.

  Presently, the comms control panel on the multi-touch interface lit up, and Chad Dodd’s voice echoed through the tiny room.

  “Tyler, are you there?”

  Emma Tyler tapped at the screen. “I’m here.”

  “We lost contact with Jackson and Garcia. Satellite imagery confirms a car crash.” A pause, then, “It’s bad. I don’t think they made it.”

  “What about Echo-7?” she asked.

  “GPS tracker has him still on the move.”

  “He had memories of New York.”

  “I was listening.”

  “How is that even possible?”

  “I don’t know, but we’re gonna find out,” Dodd said. “In the meantime, I’m sending a car to pick you up and take you to the crash. There’s a cleanup crew en route. I want you on site as lead.”

  Emma went back to the house and changed out of her tank top and blue jeans and into a white blouse, black blazer, and slacks. She was lacing up her oxfords when a Suburban crunched down the gravel drive, and she hurried out the door and hopped in the backseat. The vehicle pulled away, she its lone occupant, and drove her to the scene of the accident.

  Dodd was right. Jackson and Garcia hadn’t made it. It looked like something had chewed up their car and spit out its mangled carcass on the side of the road. Parts and pieces of both it and them lay scattered everywhere.

  The cleanup crew arrived in a caravan of vehicles: three SUVs, a semi trailer, a tow truck, and a water tanker. She directed two SUVs into position, angled nose-to-nose across the road, and positioned another two farther down the blacktop, on the opposite side of the accident. Then she set them to work.

  Men in gray jumpsuits swept the debris into piles with wide push brooms. Others removed the larger pieces by hand, carrying them up a ramp into the back of the semi trailer. A pair of black body bags lay open on the asphalt, and a jumpsuited man dropped tattered and glistening chunks of Jackson and Garcia into them. Several other jumpsuited men had pulled loose thick hoses attached to the water tanker’s side and were spraying down the area they’d cleared of debris and the fleshy chunks of Jackson and Garcia.

  A shimmer in the road near the horizon caught Emma’s eye. It might have been a car or a truck, but a heat haze cast a lustrous sheen upon the blacktop, and she couldn’t tell if the pointillistic vehicle was real or part of the mirage. But as it drew closer, it began to take shape. It was an old pickup. At first she thought it was Echo-7’s but soon realized it was the wrong make and color.

  It screeched to a stop in front of her, and she glided forward to meet it.

  “What happened?” the driver climbed out of its cab. He was an elderly man with sun-worn skin and graying hair, and he tucked his belt under his ample belly as he sauntered forward. “What’s going on?”

  “Sir,” Emma increased her pace as he approached. “Sir, please get back in your vehicle. There’s been an accident. The road’s closed.”

  “Hey, you ain’t the police. You FBI?” The driver tried to walk around her, but she stepped sideways to block his path.

  “Sir, please get back in your vehicle. Everything’s under control here.”

  The driver frowned. “Who the hell are you people? Where’s the police? The fire department? Where’s the EMTs?”

  “I assure you, sir,” Emma said, her tone calm and pleasant, “everything’s under control.” She took him by the arm and tried to guide him back toward his pickup.

  “Get your damn hands off me, girl!” he roared and yanked his arm out of her grasp. “I dunno what the hell you people are up to, but it’s time to let the law know about it.” He wrenched his smartphone out of his pocket, opened the video app, and pressed the red record button.

  Emma struck like a rattlesnake, lashing out and wrenching the phone from the driver’s grasp.

  “Hey!” he shouted.

  She dropped the phone on the ground and stomped her heel on it with a crunch of shattering glass, plastic, and electronics.

  “You stupid bitch!” the driver cried. He bunched his hands into fists and his face clenched in fury as he stepped forward.

  Emma brushed her blazer back to reveal a pistol holstered to her hip. The driver froze in mid-stride. She said, “Sir, I’d really like you to get back in your vehicle now.”

  Eyes wide and round, the driver took several steps backward before turning and hurrying to his pickup.

  Emma stood motionless in the road, feet planted shoulder-width apart and jacket drawn back from her pistol. The wind and the dust whipped around her like she was some kind of gunslinger.

  The driver threw himself into the pickup and started the engine. He leaned out the window. “I’ll be back with the police, you whore!” he hollered.

  Emma said nothing and watched him go.

  He stomped on the gas, squealed a U-turn, and raced back the way he’d come.

  She let him go. It didn’t matter. By the time he returned with Amarillo’s finest, Emma and the cleanup crew would be long gone.

  Shawn Jaffe fled north across Texas and into Oklahoma. As the hours passed, his white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel relaxed, his compulsion to stare into the rearview mirror faded, and the steel rod of his spine relaxed into the curve of his seat.

  The world rolled by like an old-fashioned movie reel, and he contemplated his life, growing up in Moore City, attending Ohio State, losing his parents. Those memories remained whole and real. It wasn’t until Victoria that his memories tore apart and led him down two paths of madness ending in Amarillo and New York.

  “Abort,” she’d said. “You hear me? Abort!” Someone had been listening.

  Another memory of a stranger and a warning stirred like a restless omen. They’re watching you.

  She’d called him Ryan Marshall. The ID on his smartphone said Ryan Marshall. He knew he was Ryan Marshall, yet he also knew he was Shawn Jaffe.

  Had Victoria conspired against him all along? Had their relationship been nothing but a fabricated truth? Memories of her were superimposed over those of New York, obscuring but not blotting them out, as if someone had manipulated his consciousness in an elaborate sleight of hand, cards appearing out of the sleeve while others vanished under the table.

  The answers waited in Ohio. Although the last time he’d visited Moore City was for his parents’ funeral, small towns had big memories. At least he’d figure out whether his Christian name was Shawn or Ryan, after which he’d continue to Ohio State, where the unreality had begun.

  A light glowed on the Ford’s dashboard, a red power-plug icon, and a dialogue box warned him the battery was at 5 percent of its charge. Shawn sighed. What can go wrong, will. He took the next exit and passed the long row of name-brand truck stops and fast-food chains with their crowds of vehicles and bodies. A couple of miles farther, a weary charging station slumped on the side of the road, time heavy on its shoulders. Not a soul in sight. Perfect.

  Shawn pulled in and stopped alongside one of the terminals, got out, and pressed his smartphone against its screen. It made a mechanical error tone.

  “Funds declined.”

  Brow furrowed, he examined his smartphone, wiped it on his jeans, and started to press it against the terminal’s screen again but jerked it away at the last second.

  Could they trace his smartphone payment? Were they tracking him even now through its geo-location services? Shawn scanned the road. Did they have the resources to do that? He didn’t know, but at this point, he didn’t have a choice. He wasn’t going anywhere if he didn’t get his truck charged.

  He pressed his smartphone against the screen again.

  “Funds declined.”

  “Come on,” Shawn said
.

  “Funds declined.”

  He glanced up and down the road again before hurrying toward the charging station’s storefront. Perspiration fell from his brow, and he wiped at it with one hand as his boots scraped across the crumbling asphalt. He pushed his way through the glass doors, a bell chimed, and the heat slid from his shoulders like a discarded shroud.

  The clerk leaned over a counter to his left and regarded him with a bland expression through lidded eyes. She must’ve outweighed him by close to a hundred pounds.

  “The terminal isn’t reading my phone,” he said as he stepped up to the counter.

  “Terminal is working fine,” she said.

  “You mind if I try it here?”

  “Nothing wrong with the terminal.” She shrugged. “How much you want?”

  Shawn cast a furtive glance outside. “Fifty bucks.”

  The woman tapped at the digital counter’s display, the flesh of her upper arms two plump pendulums of fat. “Go ’head.”

  Shawn swiped his phone across the counter and got the same mechanical error tone.

  “Declined,” the clerk said. “Told you. Terminal is working fine.”

  Shawn frowned. Victoria and whoever the hell she was conspiring with must have canceled his card. “I need a charge,” he said. “I’m almost out of battery.”

  The clerk put her hands on her hips. “This ain’t no charity.”

  “I know. I just—”

  The bell over the front door chimed. The clerk’s gaze flicked past him, and her eyes grew wide. Shawn turned.

  Two men in black suits stood at the open door, one pushing his way into the store, the second on his heels. The man in the lead held a pistol in one gloved hand. He raised it at Shawn.

  Shawn had no time to think. He lowered his head and charged, arms pumping. He tucked one leg under his body and fell into a slide as the gun bucked, and the noise was horrible, deafening. The man pulled the trigger again, but Shawn slid beneath both shots on his hip with one leg extended like a runner stealing second. His foot connected with the gunman’s knee with a wet crunch like someone biting down on a mouthful of ice cubes. The leg bent backward at an impossible angle, and the gunman screamed in agony and flailed his arms as he toppled sideways. The gun slipped from his hand and tumbled end over end.

  It fell, and Shawn stared into the barrel, at the handgrip, into the barrel again. He extended his arm, reaching for it, and it fell into his hand with perfect timing. He caught it, wrapped his fingers around the handgrip, and squeezed the trigger. The gun’s roar cut short the screams of the man with the broken leg. A crimson stain blossomed on his chest as he collapsed, and the impossible bend in his leg gave him the likeness of a life-size marionette with severed strings.

  The second man stumbled backward, pistol rising. Shawn jerked the trigger again and again. One of the bullets caught the gunman in the midsection and shoved him out of the store, where he collapsed in an unceremonious heap on the concrete. The door swung closed between them with an anticlimactic click.

  Shawn lay on the floor, pistol raised, breathing hard. A ringing filled his ears as if he’d spent last night in front of an oversized speaker at a rock concert. His two would-be assailants remained motionless, and the viscous pools of red spreading beneath them assuaged any fear they were anything less than dead.

  He pushed himself to his feet and turned toward the heavyset clerk, but she’d dropped out of sight behind the counter. “Are you okay?” he asked as he approached and peered over its edge.

  She sprawled on her back and stared at something just over his shoulder, eyes wide and unblinking. She wasn’t okay. She was dead. Two bullet holes leered from between her massive, sagging breasts. The gunman had hit her when Shawn slid beneath the shots. Collateral damage.

  He squeezed his eyes shut to blot out the image and turned away, face scrunched and upper lip curled as if he’d bitten into rotten fruit. Jamming the pistol into his waistband at the small of his back, he stepped around the bodies of the gunmen and pushed his way through the glass doors into the sadistic heat. He leaned over with his hands on his knees and drew in one deep lungful of air after another.

  An empty Tesla, black as an obsidian dawn, waited at the curb. The gunmen’s vehicle. There was no way they’d found him just because he’d tried to charge the truck. Their reaction time was too fast. They’d shown up within minutes of his attempted transaction. They must have been using his smartphone’s geo-location services to track him all along.

  He took it out of his pocket and hefted it in his palm. It weighed next to nothing, yet it gave him access to his ID, contacts, banking information, real-time biometrics and health data—his entire life stored in the cloud.

  He drew back his arm and heaved the smartphone skyward. It arced through the air and glinted in the sun like a jewel before disappearing over the roof of the store, where it landed with a clatter.

  So far, the road and landscape beyond the charging station remained empty, but who knew how long that scenario would last. If anyone pulled in for a battery recharge or pit stop, he’d be screwed. If he wanted answers, he needed to hustle.

  He turned and hurried toward the dead gunman lying outside. A quick search of his pockets found a smartphone, and Shawn tapped the wake button to reveal a retinal scan interface. The dead man stared heavenward with dull, clouding eyes. A fly landed on his lower lip and crawled into his mouth. Shawn held the smartphone over the man’s unblinking gaze, and it vibrated and emitted a click. But instead of unlocking, the screen showed input boxes for a six-digit PIN.

  He tossed it aside and pushed his way back inside the store for a second chance, but the other gunman’s smartphone was locked with the same retinal scan and PIN combination. Shawn dropped it onto the floor. He was running out of time, but unless he got some cash and a charge for his truck’s battery, it wouldn’t matter.

  He strode around to the business side of the front counter and found a locked drawer. He stepped over the fallen clerk and studied the digital countertop, figuring there must be some way to open it, but the shorthand and rows of icons were like a foreign language. He tapped one shaped like a dollar sign.

  An error message appeared. “Invalid print. User not recognized.”

  He pictured himself trying to lift the massive clerk’s lifeless body, prop it over the counter, and use her stiffening fingers to type. Instead, he stepped back, drew the pistol from his waistband, and aimed it at the lock on the drawer.

  He pulled the trigger, and the concussive boom battered his eardrums with a high-pitched wail. The lock disintegrated in a twist of metal and spray of splintered wood. A ding chimed, and the drawer flew open. Green bills fluttered out like confetti. He gathered them up and emptied the drawer into a paper bag without counting the take.

  No time to charge his pickup. He went outside and peered into the Tesla. Its power button required a fingerprint to activate.

  Back inside the store, he found a box cutter in a drawer behind the front counter and knelt over the gunman with the broken leg. He thought about Victoria as he went to work. He thought about his plan and what to do next. He thought about the pancakes he ate that morning. He thought about anything but leaning his weight onto the blade and sawing through flesh and bone, the wound leaking a thin stream of crimson, and the sound of rending gristle. After he finished, he wrapped the severed thumb in a paper towel from the bathroom, scrubbed his hands clean, and returned to the Tesla.

  He glanced around one last time before he slid into the driver’s seat and pressed the severed thumb against the power button. The car came to life, and the air conditioner spat out a cool breath of air. His skin broke out in gooseflesh. On the dashboard, the battery’s charge read 47 percent. Good enough to get him gone, and now he had cash to top off when he needed it.

  But the Tesla also had an in-dash navigation system. His number one priority was to switch vehicles, because once they realized he’d taken the car, they’d track him down and close in lik
e a frenzy of sharks.

  He threw the car into gear and sped away from the charging station, which faded from his rearview like a memory.

  Chad Dodd’s footsteps echoed along a sterile concrete hallway beneath a ceiling that glowed with the same soft white light as his office. Ahead, the corridor opened into an oblong chamber trisected by rows of unfinished pillars. At the far side, the director’s receptionist sat behind a semicircular desk covered in videos and electronic files.

  She glanced at Chad as he approached, and he flashed a weak smile. “Hey, Regina. Is he in?”

  Her gaze flickered sideways toward the gray door on her left. She dragged a digital calendar across her desk and studied it. “He has some time available later this afternoon.”

  “This is urgent.”

  With a sigh, she shook her head. “Always is.” She placed a finger against her earpiece. “Sir, Mr. Dodd is here to see you. Yes, sir. He says it’s urgent.” She winced and glared at Chad. “Yes, sir. I will.” She lowered her hand and flashed a sardonic smile. “The director will see you now.”

  The door whisked open, sliding into a recess in the wall. Chad stepped inside.

  The director’s office was similar to his own but larger, with several additional multi-touch interfaces mounted on the walls and a much longer conference table surrounded by extravagant leather chairs. The director sat behind a dark oak desk that contrasted with the bleak decor, a man of indeterminable age with rough, tanned skin lined from years of hard experience. His shaved head gleamed beneath the ceiling’s glow.

  Chad strode forward and stopped in front of the desk. The director buried himself in a document displayed on its surface, some sort of report or memorandum, swiping from one page to the next as he read through its contents.

  A trickle of sweat ran down Chad’s brow. He resisted the urge to brush it away. Instead, he remained motionless, a stone, his hands clasped behind his back.

  Finally, the director tilted his head to one side and fixed Chad with a cold, blue-eyed stare. “This better be good.”