In the morning, Jon went down to get donuts, juice, and coffee from the lobby while Megan slept. When he got back, she was up and dressed, wearing the same white tank top and jeans from the day before, but freshly showered. She was busy flossing her teeth and turned when he entered, her dark, wet hair falling across her face. As soon as she saw him, she gave him a winning, toothy smile. Jon felt that warm, melting feeling again. He felt his heart skip a beat—and saw a flash of recognition from Megan the moment it happened. She felt it too, he thought. Then, she dropped her floss and clapped her hands together.
“Donuts!” she exclaimed gleefully. She practically skipped over to the small table by the window and grabbed one. “I’m starving,” she said, and shoved it into her mouth, chewing it loudly. “Mam, es is goo,” she mumbled through a mouthful of donut. She grabbed another as she swallowed the first with an audible gulp. “Did you get any for you?” she asked, and then took the plate.
“Um,” Jon murmured. “Uh, I was going to go back.”
She slapped him on the back. “Good man. Get me some more while you’re down there.”
When he returned with another plate of donuts, Megan had her denim shirt on and was brushing her hair with a large gold plastic comb, the TV tuned to The Today Show. The entire first plate of donuts was now just a few crumbs.
“Finally,” she said, grabbing a chocolate donut off the fresh plate. “I’m hungry.” She gestured towards the television, where Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumble were saying something to each other about President Reagan. “Nothing about us yet. I’m sure something’ll drop soon. So, you want to go do something?”
Jon nodded. “Actually, I saw a Radio Shack in that strip mall when we walked up to the Baskin & Robbins last night. I’ve got a list of stuff to get, so I can try and put some stuff together from the book. I thought we might go there first.”
“Oh, good Lord. Do I have to?”
He blinked. “Uh, well, no. I guess not. You don’t like Radio Shack?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s really hot,” she replied. “No, I like shopping for shoes. For clothes. For records. Too bad we didn’t see any shoe stores. And I don’t have a record player, now, anyway. But, no, I’m a girl. And I’m not, like, a geek girl, or a tomboy or whatever. I don’t want to go to the Radio Shack.”
“It’s not that far, just around the other size of the bowling alley—”
Megan grinned. “Yeah, cool, we can go bowling later. That I’d like.”
“So I’ll just walk.”
Megan nodded. “You could use the exercise.”
Jon sighed. And so did Megan, simultaneously. “Stop that,” she said. “The whole sighing thing is irritating enough without dragging me along.”
Girls were so strange. What was wrong with going to Radio Shack for a few minutes? But he didn’t mind walking, and some fresh air wouldn’t hurt. Still, even though already dressed and ready to go, he didn’t move. Something didn’t seem right. But he couldn’t put his finger on it.
After a minute, Megan turned from the TV and looked up at him. “What’s the hold up? Are you going or staying?”
“Going, going,” he said. “In one second. First, I’ve got to get my list. I left it in the briefcase.”
He knelt down next to the empty space where the briefcase was, and reached out and until he touched its invisible surface. With a ripple as if his finger was breaking the surface of still water, it reappeared. He opened it up and pulled out his list, and then rustled around inside it for a while, sticking a few items in his pocket—the small silver tube of spray, the capsule labeled SMOKE SCREEN and OIL SLICK and DEVIL’S STENCH. One of the silver cigarette cases—that could come in handy, in a pinch. He picked up one of the small brass boxes that looked a little like square belt buckles. It wasn’t labeled, but he knew from the black notebook that it was supposed to be the “invisibility” belt. He really needed to try that, sometime. It was supposed to turn the wearer invisible, by—and this was why he hadn’t tried it yet—essentially coating the wearer almost instantaneously with trillions of tiny microscopic machines that dynamically refracted light, channeling it around the wearer and "creatively" filling in the gaps. Wearing an intangible liquid mirror that was a hundred times thinner than a human hair, that could nanoscopically channel visible light while simultaneously allowing for normal touch, sight, hearing and breathing didn’t bother him. Something about the idea about being coated with trillions of tiny microscopic machines didn’t sit well, which was why he didn’t try it out the minute he first read about it. Though, in truth, he guessed that was probably what he had done, at least in part, when spraying himself with the NANOCOAT AEROSOL or using the Dragon Soap. It had to be doing something—leaving something on his clothes, an on his skin, to work. And what were the contact lenses, if not a very busy collection of microscopic machines? And he had stuck those in his eyes.
Although, he thought, perhaps some caution was merited. It wasn’t a coincidence that both Megan and he were breathing in tandem, that their heartbeats were perfectly synchronized. Something was connecting them together, in a way he didn’t understand, but there had to be a mechanism for it. There had to be a process. It wasn’t just happening. And that process had to have something to do with the book, or the spray, or the Dragon Soap. Something that was, maybe, distributing tiny, molecule-sized machines not just over his body but in it, not just on his skin but under it. Into his heart? Into his brain? Had the book, or something that Dr. Bernhard had concocted, done the equivalent of installing microscopic radio transmitters in their brain, connecting their heartbeats and breathing and dreams and maybe more?
Yikes. Well, he had always wanted to be closer to Megan. And now he was. He sighed—and Megan, across the room, did too.
“Stop that, I’m trying to watch the news,” she said. “I thought you wanted to go to the dweeb store.”
“I am. I’m looking for something.”
He pulled out another square brass belt buckle to give Megan. In case of emergency, he figured being able to turn “invisible” would be an awfully useful thing. He slipped a HOLOGRAPHIC DECOY into one pocket and then paused, pulling up the small silver box that, in neat block letters, read BIONIC EARS.
That could be handy. He had read some more about the contents of the briefcase on the ride up, and thought these could come in handy, now they were on the run. He opened it up, and inside was a dozen small pink pellets. He carefully picked up one and placed it in his right ear. There was a squeal in his ear, and then green type flashed in front of the briefcase. BIONIC HEARING INSERTED the blinking type alerted him. After a moment, the type faded, and as he stood up to walk over to the bed to give one to Megan, new green type appeared before the bed. PLEASE INSERT BIONIC EAR IN RIGHT EAR.
Jon blinked, and the type cleared. Not only were the magic hearing aids connected to the magic contact lenses, they could tell he had only put it in one ear. In his minds eye, he could see wires shooting out of the little pink pellet, through his ear canal, then latching onto his optic nerve, as the contact lenses stabbed microscopic glass needles back through his eyeballs and into his brain. Jon shook his head. Don’t be such a pussy, he thought, and popped the pellet he had gotten out to give Megan into his right ear. There was another squeal, and then more giant green type floating out in space.
BIONIC HEARING ACTIVATED, it said. PLEASE SELECT OPTIONS. LOOK UP TO SCROLL UP, LOOK DOWN TO SCROLL DOWN. BLINK THREE TIMES RAPIDLY TO TOGGLE OPTIONS. BLINK TWICE AND ROLL EYES WHEN COMPLETE.
Jon scrolled through the options, but didn’t adjust anything. All the settings were already where he thought they sounded best, if he had any idea what they were. INTERCOM was set to SMART-ACTIVATE, CONFERENCE was set to SMART-ACTIVATE, AMPLIFY AUDIO was set to SMART-ACTIVATE. OFF and ON were they other settings for CONFERENCE and AMPLIFY AUDIO, but INTERCOM included the option of NAME-ACTIVATION, which he had read about some in the black notebook, but did not remember, at the moment, how he was actually supposed to teach it to know who you wanted to talk to. CB, FM, AM and POLICE BAND signal monitoring was turned off. There was more, but all he wanted to do was to make sure he could communicate with Megan, anywhere, any time, and according to the little black notebook, these pink pellets would fit the bill.
“What are you doing, you weirdo?” Megan asked after a minute. “I thought you were all hot to go shopping for wires.”
“I’ve got something here I want us to use—sort of the ear version of the contact lenses.”
Megan giggled. “X-ray hearing? I hope it doesn’t make me feel like falling over and barfing they way that X-ray vision shit does.”
“Well, it’s supposed to be smart about letting you hear stuff far away—I don’t know. Everything sounds really clear to me, but nothing’s too loud. But I wanted to see if we could use the intercom. We should be able to stay in constant contact with each other.”
“No shit,” Megan said, putting her hand out. She arched an eyebrow. “It’s not enough we’re, like, synchronized breathers. You want us to be—what? Synchronized listeners?”
Jon put two pink pellets down in her hand. “I want us to be able to stay in touch. In case we get separated.”
She leaned forward, giving him a sloppy, donut-sticky kiss. “You’re too cute. You worry too much, but you’re too cute. This is, like, day two and we’re already in Kentucky. It’s going to be all right.” With that, she popped a pink pellet in each ear.
“I know, I know,” Jon said. “Just, I think it’s good to be prepared.”
“Yowch!” Megan yelped. “I hope it doesn’t do that again. That was loud. Okay, now what—hey, the big green letters. What am I supposed to do now?”
“I think you should be fine. Just blink twice and roll your eyes—that should get rid of the words.”
Megan did. “That worked. Now what?”
“Hold on,” Jon said, stood up and ran to the bathroom. He closed the door.
“You gotta piss?” Megan said clearly, from all around him. It almost sounded like she was speaking with his throat, her voice was so close. “Need some Pepto?”
“No,” Jon said quietly. “I’m fine. Do you hear me?”
“Holy crap!” she said. “You sound like a radio DJ. So we can talk to each other, from anywhere? Now, that’s cool. How do you turn it off? I don’t want you to hear me when I’m, like, going to the bathroom. Uh, you’re not going to the bathroom, are you?”
“No, I’m not going to the bathroom. You’ve got activate the instructions again by putting both fingers in your ears—twice, I think. In-out, in-out.” Jon did it himself. “Yup, that worked.” Then he blinked and rolled his eyes, making the big green letters go away. “Then, you should see the instructions for turning off or on or changing settings there. But they are supposed to be ‘smart’, so if you’re clearly talking to somebody else or going to the bathroom, it’s not supposed to be transmitting. And there is a way to program them so you have to say the person’s name before it let’s you talk to them. I’ll look into that.”
“That would be good. So you want to describe for me the many joys of Radio Shack?”
“Maybe a few,” he said, opening the bathroom door and walking over to the bed. “Just to test it.”
“All right, all right. Go already, I want to watch some TV. This right here is heaven already. Carla always controlled the TV. Even if she didn’t want to watch it, she just turned it to PBS or something she knew I couldn’t stand. Just to be a bitch. Now, I’ve got the TV all to myself! And there’s, like, HBO, like at Johnny Two’s house. I’m set. You could get me some more ice for my beer, though.”
“Okay. Just one more thing,” Jon said. “Where’s your belt?”
“On the bottom of the closet somewhere. Why?”
“I want to put this on it,” he said, going to the closet and finding her belt. He placed the brass box over her actual belt buckle, and it latched onto it with a click, as if it had been designed specifically to fit over her belt buckle. “Cool,” he murmured. He walked over to Megan, tapping out shave-and-a-haircut on the front of the brass buckle.
“Now touch this,” he said, holding her belt out to her.
“Oh, that’s stylish.” She touched the brass buckle in it’s center, and, for a moment, a lingering green fingerprint glowed brightly, then vanished.
“Now,” Jon said, putting the belt buckle down on the bed. “Touch it once to turn invisible—I think you have to have the belt on to make it work, and we can test it later, but—you know—”
“I know, just in case,” Megan agreed. She grabbed the belt and put it down in front of her.
“Invisible, huh?” She pressed her finger against the belt buckle and, with a ripple, her belt vanished.
“Cool! Perfect, any time I need to turn my belt invisible.” She chuckled.
“The notebook said it had a limited range. That it can only cover so much distance, so if the area it’s against is above a certain size, it stops there. So that if you turn it on and you are holding an apple, the apple turns invisible, too. But if you turn it on and you’re holding onto the handrail of a staircase, it doesn’t turn the rail or the stairs or the building invisible.”
“I’ve got to try it,” she said, poking around on the bed to try and turn it back. “Shit, where is it? There!”
The belt rippled back into existence. She stood up and wrapped the belt around her waist, not bothering to loop it through her jeans.
“Uh, you might want to hang on—” Jon started, and with a shimmer like the air over a hot grill, expanding outwards from the center of her torso, Megan vanished.
“Holy shit!” he heard Megan say. “Holy fucking shit! I’m invisible! I could have had so much fun with this before we left. Why didn’t you show this to me before we left?”
In truth, Jon hadn’t thought to, things had been moving so fast. But he answered, “Because you would have had so much fun with it before we left.”
“I can’t see my hand! I can’t see my fingers. I see—I see something, when I move. Like—”
“Distortion,” Jon said. “I see it, too. It’s supposed to be like a suit, made out of trillions of microscopic mirrors, and it looks like maybe there is a slight delay—I can barely see the shape you, when you move, for a second. That’s bizarre. Can you see all right? I don’t see your eyes, your hair—does your hair feel—you know—normal?”
“Hmm. Just ran my fingers through it, it feels fine. I’m opening my mouth, do you see anything? Ahhhhhhh!”
“Nothing,” Jon reached out to where Megan’s voice was coming from, and felt his hand touch her arm.
“Hey, watch it, bub, hands off the merchandise.”
“I feel you, but you aren’t there. That’s something else.”
Jon felt her arm pull away from his hand, and then the covers sprang off the bed. They shook crazily, and then settled down, taking on the distinct shape of Megan. Then suddenly, they vanished.
“Holy crap!” Jon said. “You made the covers disappear!”
“That was me? What the hell?” Suddenly, the covers, fell out of nowhere, on to the floor.
“And now they’re back,” Jon said. “Must be—must have decided you with covers on wasn’t too big to make invisible. I guess—I mean, what if you were trying to hide and somebody threw dirt or paint on you, right? I mean, I guess—”
There was a springing sound and the bed rocked up and down, a Megan-shaped impression appearing on the sheets. After a moment, Megan announced that the bed hadn’t disappeared. “Still here,” she said cheerily.
The bed rocked again, and the impression vanished. After a moment, a white tank top floated down onto the floor. “So, if I take it off, it don’t stay invisible,” she said. “Wild, wild, wild. I had to pull it out from under the belt, though—I wanted to see what happened if I took the belt off, and it won’t let me. It’s, like, buckled for life.”
“What if you turn it off?”
“Hang on,” she said, and the tank top suddenly jumped from the floor, jerkily flying up and then downwards, taking on the provocative shape of Megan’s torso. Then, almost as soon as the tank top was on, it vanished. Then, with a ripple, Megan reappeared. “Wow, that’s cool,” she said. “I have to reach for everything ten times, because I can’t see my own frickin’ hands, but still, that’s cool.”
“Does the belt come off, now?”
She pulled at the belt buckle, and the thin black leather belt fell easily away from her waist. “There ya go. Guess it wants to make sure it doesn’t come off, if you’re invisible. Be kind of inconvenient, if you were running naked through the city and it got caught on something and pulled off. I would think.” She put the belt down on the nightstand.
“We’ve got to try and turn invisible and make out tonight. Come on. We gotta do that.” She grinned maniacally. “I wonder if we can take these things in the shower? Wouldn’t that be cool? Like, washing each other naked and invisible?”
Jon just nodded. Yes, it would be, but then, where did that stop? Would they have to go through last night again?
Still, the idea was plenty tempting.
Megan lay back down on the bed. “Okay, times a wasting. Go do your geek shopping and get back here so we can go bowling. Or go to the pool. Hey! Do you think we could walk across the pool water? That would be cool!”
“Okay, I’m going, just be careful.”
“Wait!” Megan said, jumping off the bed, going over to the sink, and grabbing the ice bucket. “Get me some more ice.”
Jon nodded, and took the ice bucket. “Be right back,” he said, and went down to the ice machine.
He was down at the ice machine when heard the cars pull up. First one, then another, pulling in fast and stopping sharp, tires grinding against gravel. He knew the chance of it having anything at all to do with him and Megan was extremely remote, but it caught his attention, so many cars pulling in so suddenly. Like Megan had said, it was only day two and they were already in Kentucky. The only evidence she had left behind was pointing to Mexico. His note to his mother had been apologetic and ambiguous, but left no real clues as to where he was going. Nobody in Shelbyville, Kentucky would know Megan and him from Adam and Eve, and even if the hypno-thingy had worn off the hotel clerk, or if the arguing couple behind him or someone else at the hotel had noticed he was too young to be staying at a hotel alone, that would hardly set off alarm bells with the CIA and the FBI and the U.S. Military, would it?
But there was another car, and then another. Jon peaked casually over the ice machine in time to see a black, unmarked car swerve down the driveway and across the parking lot, and then another, this one white.
Jon stopped shoveling ice out of the icemaker. He peered around the edge of the hall, where he could barely see a man in a dark suit talking to the desk clerk, showing her something, and she was nodding. And he had just been down there, getting donuts. He had said good morning to her. He had looked right at her. Against all logic, he found himself straining to listen—and then realized he could hear the conversation, almost as if he were in the room with them. “Do you know which room they’re staying in?” the man was asking.
“No, sir, I don’t, but if you can give me a name, I can look them up—”
Jon suddenly felt cold. His mouth tasted like tin, and it was becoming hard to breathe. He could feel his heart beating in his chest. It was becoming hard to think.
He strained to hear, white noise filling his ears. If he focused on a particular sound, it seemed to grow clear. He heard footsteps everywhere, rustling clothes, clicks and clacks that could be keys turning or, maybe, weapons loading.
Everywhere he heard whispered voices. “So what are they doing here?” one voice was asking.
“No idea,” said another. “Swan didn’t say anything about SS.”
“This way,” one voice was saying. “Second floor. Check the doors—”
Oh, God. The curtain in their room had been parted. Someone walking by could easily see Megan sitting on the bed, flipping the channels, couldn’t they? Shit! How could they have been so stupid?
“Jon,” he heard Megan say inside his head. “Jon? I don’t feel so good. I can—hardly breathe. Are you—?”
“Get out,” Jon said. “Guys, in cars, and suits, out in the parking lot, in the lobby—you’ve got to get out—”
“You can’t be serious,” Megan said. “We’re in Kentucky—”
“Megan, run!”
“Shit!” he heard Megan say loudly between his ears. Then, nothing but voices and footsteps drumming on the landing above him, as two men in brown pants and sports coats sprang from the parking lot onto the stairs. He shrank back behind the ice machine, adrenaline shooting through his blood stream, cold sweat beading on his face. His legs and hands were trembling.
“Megan?” he whispered. “Can you—”
“Run, Jon,” he heard her whisper back jerkily. “I’m toast.”
Jon felt himself sliding down against the dirty wall as the ice machine clattered loudly, dropping a fresh load into the ice bin. “Megan,” he said softly. “I—”
“Get out of here,” she whispered urgently. Then, quite clearly: “Get your hands off those, you fuckin’ pervert! You’re, like, old enough to be my grandfather.”
There was a rumbling on the landing, and he heard footsteps clicking against the concrete on the first level. He heard the lobby door crash open, and somebody was yelling something in Spanish. Shit, shit, shit, what the Hell had they been thinking?
“Who?” Megan said. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
He heard footsteps coming down the walkway towards the ice machine, and knew it was time to move. He grabbed his bucket of ice and starting walking, as casually as he could, away from the clicking footfalls.
“Hey, you!” a voice said. “Stop!”
Jon felt his heart jump into his throat. He dropped all pretense of casualness, throwing the ice backwards and sprinting out into the parking lot.
“Stop!” the voice yelled, then: “Down here! I’ve got him down here!”
The back parking lot was surrounded by a tall fence, and the hill behind the fence was steep and dense with trees. He was either going to have to go all the way around the hotel, one direction or the other, or cut through the breezeway that ran through the middle and opened up to a short walkway that stopped, on this side of the hotel, at the pool. If he tried to go around the hotel in the direction away from the breezeway, towards the lobby, he’d have nowhere to go if they cornered him. Towards the breezeway, if he could get past them, the parking lot at least opened up to a small street that lead past the strip mall and a convenience store, and then the main thoroughfare, where he’d have a better chance to hide or lose himself.
Heart hammering in his chest, Jon ran toward the breezeway. If he could cut through the breezeway, maybe he could get to the car or the hotel room. Not that either would do him any good now—he couldn’t help Megan by getting caught. But if he could get into the car—he could hide there until the excitement passed. Could he drive it? He still had the magic key in his pocket--Megan had given it back to them whe nthey arrived. But where would he drive? And what if the government men figured out that that was the car they had come in? He had put down a different car when they registered, but if they had already found them at the EconoLodge, how hard would it be for them to figure out which car they had really driven in?
Three men, two in black suits and one in a sports coat were coming down the stairs at the breezeway, one with a gun pulled. A gun! Holy shit! They were going to shoot him! He turned around, and the guy who had spotted him by the ice machine had been joined by another man, and they were both bearing down on him, cutting off any exit to the rear—it was the hills and the fence or nothing. He leapt off the walkway, then into the parking lot, where two dark brown sedans were pulling around the back corner of the hotel at the lobby, towards him. He saw they were going to cut him off if he tried to run towards the back fence, so he instead ran for the swimming pool, jumping over short gate and onto the concrete.
“Don’t make another move,” said a man in a brown coat, the one holding his gun out, as he approached the actual entrance to the pool. “There’s nowhere for you to go.”
The sedans pulled in at the end of the pool, between Jon and the fence, and a younger man was coming up behind the man with the gun and then past him, jumping over the short gate easily. “We don’t want anybody to get hurt,” he said, although Jon noticed that the men in both cars had gotten out, and were crouched behind their car doors, guns drawn and pointed at him.
Although there were other agents coming around the end of the hotel facing the street, they weren’t coming through the parking lot, and no cars had pulled through there, yet. So the route to the main road was still relatively open, if he could move fast enough. As the man in the brown slacks and sports coat that had jumped the gate slowly approached, hands out, saying, “It’s all right, we just want to ask you some questions,” Jon headed for the street. Barely thinking about it, but knowing he couldn’t go around the other way at the back of the pool, the with the agents and their sedans just a few feet away, he stepped out onto the pool.
The water stilled, flattening like polished glass as his foot came down on the surface, in a circle that spread out for almost six feet where the sole of his shoe touched the water. He brought his other foot down. The man that had been approaching him with his hands out froze, and Jon saw the other agents coming up behind the man with his gun out stop. One took off his dark glasses. Somewhere in the white, frozen terror that seemed to be consuming him, putting him almost on auto pilot, Jon wondered: do they even know what they’re after us for? Do they have any idea?
For the first time since he had heard the cars pulling into the parking lot, had heard the rumble of footsteps on the walkway above the ice machine, his brain reminded him that he had more than a magic car key in his pocket and magic shoes on his feet. He had stuff in his pockets.
He stopped just standing there, and sprinted across the water of the pool. His sudden movement apparently triggered some sort of instinct in the guy who had gotten closest to him, because the man jumped after him, and fell with a muffled splash into the water, bobbing up and then grasping frantically at Jon’s feet, trying to catch him. But Jon was too fast—he had as much traction running across the water as he had had running across the parking lot—and was at the other side of the pool and jumping the gate.
There were two pops then, like little fire crackers, and Jon felt himself jolted forward as he landed on the pavement. I’ve been shot! he thought. The motherfuckers actually shot me! He turned, a part of him expecting to fall down, a part of him expecting to see blood, but he saw nothing except the man with gun, holding it out in front of him absurdly, almost comically, smoke wafting from the muzzle. Jon felt something slide out of his shirt, and then heard it clink on the ground. He looked down at the flattened .38 caliber slug. Dragon Soap, Jon thought. Damn!
Two men were coming up behind the man who had fired, and one of them was yelling at him: “Stand down, stand down!”
Not listening, and apparently tired of waiting for Jon to fall, the man fired again. There was a tiny flash of white and a fresh puff of blue smoke coming from the muzzle, and again Jon felt as if he had been pushed, almost as if the ground had bucked beneath his feet. But he was otherwise unharmed, and this time he saw the bullet, the tip of the slug flattened to about the size of a quarter, fall to the ground.
The two men who had come up behind the trigger-happy fellow in the brown sport coat had forced his arms down and relieved him of his weapon. The one who had been telling him to stand down was stepping in front of him, speaking loudly. “Jon,” he said. “Listen to me. Nobody wants to hurt you. That was a mistake. We just want to talk.”
There was a pause as the man looked at Jon, waiting expectantly. Nobody else was approaching him—yet—so he was trying to decide the best way to escape. Running for the street still seemed to be the best option—he could get great traction, he was certainly running faster than he ever remembered having run before, and if he could find somewhere to hide, even for a moment he could—he could—
He could do something, but his ears were ringing and his head was buzzing. His legs were trembling. He couldn’t remember.
“Jon, we just need to talk. About Dr. Donald Bernhard. That’s all. Nobody wants to hurt you. Nobody wants to put you in jail. Your friend, Megan—she’s talking to us right now. Nobody is getting hurt.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Something clicked in his head, and he realized he hadn’t heard Megan say anything, even though he was sure, if she were conscious—oh, God, if she was alive, did she use the Dragon Soap like she said?—they would still be connected. That he could hear her. That she would have said something else by now.
“Megan,” he said quietly. “You there?” Nothing. “Megan?” Still, nothing.
Jon yelled back to the man. “What did you do with Megan?”
“She’s just answering some questions, that’s all,” the man said. “Now, come on, let’s just—”
He had never been so scared in his life. Never. He was so scared he couldn’t think. But he knew he couldn’t get caught. He knew he couldn’t let them catch him. Instinctively, with complete certainty, he knew any chance he had—and any chance Megan had—depended on him getting away. So he had to get away. It was no more or less complicated than that.
Jon jumped onto the hood of the parked Mercury Marquis in front of him, and sailed up almost ten feet into the air. He shouted in surprise as he flipped, head over heels, and landed with a sound like someone hitting a metal drum with a sledgehammer on the front of the blue Toyota parked behind the Marquis, breaking the windshield and buckling the hood. He pushed himself up, shaken but unhurt. His ears clearly, even loudly, heard the rustle of footsteps moving quickly in his direction. Voices talking into microphones—“Target is down,” one man was saying. “Stand down, stand down, do not shoot,” another was saying urgently. “We’ve secured the second floor,” another voice from somewhere said. Jon tried to focus on each voice in the static of noise that was filling his ears.
“Subject is subdued,” another voice was saying. “She’s out.”
And there was another voice he heard, a woman’s voice, crackling from the tinny speaker of a radio receiver: “But did you find it? Did you find anything? An object, a statue, something that looked like a pyramid or—”
Jon pushed himself up, getting to his knees. He had wondered if anybody had any idea what they were looking for, and he had his answer. Obviously, somebody did.
“—is he hit or not? Who fired?” a deep, male voice was asking.
“Get them both,” the woman’s voice was saying. “Get everything they have. Bring them back to White Sands. Don’t say too much around the fibs. Keep ‘em back, if you can—”
“—how the hell did he do that?”
“—go around the back, and stay unless you see him—”
“—call Horton and get him down here—”
Then he heard the woman, crackling across some sort of speaker. “—don’t kill them unless you know you’ve got it—”
Jon stood up, then, as if bouncing on a trampoline, jumped up about a foot—then brought his feet down, at as steep an angle as he could, as hard as he could, on the dented hood of the blue Toyota. He went flying, this time no higher—perhaps about ten feet—but much further. He easily cleared three cars before landing feet first, and shooting skywards, straight up, at least twenty feet. “Holy shit!” he screamed into the air, on one level understanding that he wasn’t going to get hurt but on another feeling like he was dangerously close to losing control of his bladder. Good thing he had used the Dragon Soap before trying this particular trick, because he wasn’t going to be able to land on his feet, at least, not when he needed to stop.
The next time he hit the ground, he tried to hit so that the angle would at least propel him towards the street, which it did. He twisted in midair and managed to land on his butt in the grassy median between the hotel and the 7/11 convenience store that sat between the hotel parking lot and the main road, sinking almost a foot into the ground.
“—he’s over there, over there—”
A small army of men in black suits and brown sports coats and three guys dressed like they were going to go golfing, in light pants and short-sleeve knit shirts, were running across the parking lot. The three sedans, two white and one brown, were screeching across the asphalt towards the exit that curved around to the convenience store. Jon stood, pulling himself out of the butt-shaped hole he had left in the ground. He absently brushed off his backside, but found there wasn’t any dirt, mud or grass clinging to his jeans. But he did feel some large, bulging lumps in his pockets.
He groped around in his pants, remembering that he had brought things with him, stuff he could use, but suddenly finding it impossible to remember everything he had tucked in his pants before leaving the room. He pulled out a hand full of stuff from his right pocket—loose change, and bottle cap, and several of the little capsules. The capsules! Oil slicks and smoke screens and “Devil’s Stench”—one of those things ought to help him out. He held one up. Which one was this? He thought he saw the word SLICK on it. Good enough for him, and no more time to waste—he twisted it between his fingers—he was pretty sure those were the instructions—and threw it into the air in the direction of the approaching cars. The capsule, rapidly flashing red, started beeping, the tempo increasing until it reached a crescendo, and, with a flash and a muffled, liquid sound, it expanded into a large black globe.
“—get down! What the hell is that?”
“—what’s happening? Did they do something? Did they use something?”
“—go around the other way, around the other side of the hotel—”
The front two cars that had been driving up the winding road up to the 7/11 slammed on their brakes, the brown car behind them crashing into their rear bumpers, as the black globe oozed rapidly onto the asphalt and spread. It spread under the cars and down into the parking lot, a shallow and purposeful flood of dark, glassy liquid. Once it had oozed beneath them, the cars, on a slight hill, began sliding backwards. The first car tried to drive forward, attempting to move against the slick, and instead slammed backwards against the car behind it. That car went spinning backwards in a slow arc, down into the parking lot, until it hit one of the parked cars, and both cars slid slowly and then stopped.
Several of the men that had been running towards Jon had stopped when he’d thrown the pellet, but a few of them had kept on going. They had reached the end of the parking lot when the black stuff oozed down around the road leading up towards the convenience store and under their feet. Immediately, they fell, not so much slipping as flipping over as if someone had pulled a rug out from under them. Jon saw them struggling to get up, but every time they got to their hands and knees, legs and arms flew out from under them, as if they had been pulled. As if the men had been kicked back down. At some tiny sub-molecular level, Jon guessed they probably had been.
Three cars peeled around from the opposite direction, and several men were running around from the front of the motel, avoiding the oil slick. It did seem to Jon that, as the men and cars not blocked by the black ooze came from around the front of the hotel, the slick seemed to start flowing in that direction.
“Hands up in the air, where we can see them!” one man shouted as he got closer to Jon. “Get your hands out of your pockets, lay down on the ground—”
Jon twisted another pellet and it started to flash red, the intermittent beeping getting rapidly faster as he threw it, until it became a single, high-pitched squeal. He thought he heard a gun fire twice, but Jon didn’t feel anything hit him. There was a sudden burst of inky black smoke that spread rapidly, moving towards both the men stuck in the parking lot and the men coming around from the front of the hotel. It moved away from Jon, against the wind, and towards the government agents. Though they scattered quickly and some moved back, the smoke seemed to expand and move with them, not letting them get a clear sight of him. Jon jumped up, sprinting the short distance up to the 7/11 and then running behind it, into the small cinderblock alley that concealed the trash dumpster, hands searching his pockets for something else.
“—can’t see, where’d did he go—”
“—what the hell is this, I can’t—”
“—he went behind the store—the 7/11, he went behind it, get somebody up there—”
“—have a clear line of sight, copy, does anybody have a clear line of sight—”
Jon heard cars pulling around, off the main thoroughfare into the motel parking lot. A crash and a tinkle of glass followed, but it wouldn’t be long until they got somebody around the smoke and oil, up to the 7/11. In fact, he could hear the clear sound of two cars pulling in a little too quickly at the 7/11 right then. Not from the hotel, he thought, but from the street. More were coming.
He fumbled through his pockets, and his hand landed on the small brass box. The belt buckle. Shit! The belt buckle, of course! Not that he would have wanted to turn invisible in front of God and everybody, but, still. He couldn’t think of anything better for getting away from a whole bunch of people, and more coming all the time, than turning invisible. Apparently some of them, at least, knew what they were looking for. But would any of them know what Dr. Bernhard had done? The sorts of things the book was capable of? Would they be looking for him to turn invisible? And even if they were, what could they really do?
The tinny voice of a woman—the same one he had heard earlier—crackled in his ears. “—just make sure they don’t get away—”
“They aren’t going anywhere. There must be fifty people here. Why didn’t you tell me the FBI was going to show up—”
“Because I didn’t know the FBI was going to show up, the FBI wasn’t supposed to show up—”
“If there’s anything else I should know, you’d better tell me now—”
“Crawford, the only thing you need to know is—”
Jon heard car doors opening and footsteps running quickly towards the 7/11 as he jerked the brass box out of his pocket and looked down with dismay—he didn’t have a belt on! He looked around for a moment, as if a belt might just appear out of nowhere, his free hand searching his pocket for some sort of solution, when three faces rounded the corner. “Freeze!” the first man yelled. “On the ground!”
Jon bounced up lightly on his feet, then brought them down firmly. He sailed upwards and, flailing and flipping forward, crested the top of the 7/11. With a scream of surprise, he landed head first on the large rooftop compressor for the 7/11’s air conditioning. His head punched easily through the grating and into the whirling blades of the fan, and Jon screamed again. He could feel the fan blade chopping at his face and head as it squealed and made a wretched grinding noise. The smell of burning plastic and ozone was immediate as the fan blade stopped. Jon put his hands on either side of his head and carefully extracted it from the hole he had made in the rooftop compressor, which was now venting black smoke out the sides. As he pulled back, he blinked—the fan blade was torn up, each blade split at the end and nicked and torn at the sides, as if it had been chewed on, and bent and beaten as if someone had gone after it with a sledgehammer. He felt a small sting on his cheek, as if cut, but otherwise appeared unhurt. He touched his cheek, and brought his fingers to his face, seeing a small drop of blood, but no more. Maybe he should have lathered his face with the Dragon Soap twice.
He looked to the side as he heard someone clambering up on top the garbage dumpster and then saw the man clumsily leap from the top of the dumpster to the rooftop, pulling himself up with obvious effort. Jon looked at his hand with the small brass box, and then down at his beltless pants. Well, did he really have to have a belt, he wondered? It wouldn’t do him any good just to make the belt buckle disappear, and even if it did make him invisible just holding it in his hand, what if he dropped it? Or was there another way to use it?
Giving it no further thought, he held the belt buckle against the snap of his jeans. He felt and heard a distinct click as the brass box fit over it exactly, as if it had always belonged there. He let it go, realizing this might not be the best course as the one man finally made his way onto the roof and another man—no, no man, he realized, it was a woman—peered over the edge of the 7/11’s rooftop, coming up over the dumpster.
“Come on, Jon, stop,” the man was saying. “We don’t want to hurt you. But some of these goons do. And they will if they get their hands on you. Come with us, and we can put you in protective custody—”
“No, thanks,” Jon said, and start running towards the man. The man blanched, and then was reaching into his coat.
“Stop—” The man began, and Jon leapt over him, sailing in an arc over ten feet of rooftop and then over the head of the female agent perched at the edge of the dumpster. He landed with a crash that sent trash flying up in the air and knocked the female agent to the ground, and pressed the button on the brass belt buckle. He held his hands out in front of him, and except for the vaguest hint of a ripple, he could no longer see them. He stood and grabbed at the side of the dumpster opposite the convenience store, and—with some effort, but with greater ease than he would have imagined—lifted himself up the side.
Carefully, though not exactly silently, he jumped from the dumpster to the top of the enclosing cinderblock wall. The 7/11 backed up against a half-a-cul-de-sac of motel parking—more parking, really, than the EconoLodge needed—that ended with the steep hill of trees and brush at the rear and then opened up to an empty field that led out to the main street on the side. Nobody waiting over there, at least not yet, but he was hesitant to go wading through an open field of tall grass where his invisibility wouldn’t keep the grass from displacing around him—at least, he seriously doubted it would.
Looking back at the motel, he thought about trying to get back to the room first to retrieve the book—but there was too much going on. It would be too dangerous, he thought. Better to wait until later, when things cooled off. After they had given up looking for him. Although he wasn’t sure how quickly that could happen—as he looked down into the parking lot, the oil slick was continuing to spread, and the hotel and the road leading up towards the 7/11 was enveloped in black, inky smoke. Each time a hand or head escaped the dark cloud, it stretched out to consume them again. That was some scary shit.
The female agent was up, and pulling trash out of the dumpster, while the other man was looking around the side of the dumpster Jon had just climbed up and out of. “Don’t move,” the woman was saying. “You may be hurt. Just stay still—we’ll make sure nothing happens to you.”
“He’s not hurt.”
“She needs to get back.”
“I don’t think he’s in the dumpster.”
“Get back, get back from there.”
“You guys need to see this. He—the air conditioner—he landed right on it and—”
Jon decided the best route was back over the 7/11, through the parking lot and out across the street. Although he guessed they could see the same telltale ripple that he did when he moved, they wouldn’t be looking for him to have vanished into thin air. So he jumped from the edge of the cinderblock wall onto the roof, this time landing much more gracefully, though nothing muffled the noise. The male agent at the top of the roof turned to look at him, but, apparently seeing nothing, did a full 360 degree turn, looking for the source the sound.
“What was that?” he heard the woman’s voice ask.
“Don’t know,” the man answered. “I don’t see anything.”
“Check around the back. Did he go around the back?”
“He couldn’t have gotten around the back. I’m right here.”
“Have you looked down at the hotel back there? I saw him throw something—and then that started. Don’t tell me he couldn’t’ve done anything.”
“I saw him head right for the dumpster—he has to be in there or he got over the wall and headed for that field, or those trees—”
“I don’t see anything back there.”
“He’s not in the dumpster.”
“I heard something up here, on the roof, over there,” the man on the roof of the 7/11 said, and started walking in the general direction of Jon. As lightly as he could, Jon stepped off the roof and landed on his knees and his hands in the parking lot. He tried to make the landing as soft as he could, but there was distinct smacking sound when he hit the concrete and, even though the impact didn’t hurt, it was jarring and he exhaled sharply when he landed.
“There was something,” the man was calling from the room. “He was behind the compressor, or he was hanging off the edge—”
“He wasn’t hanging off the edge,” a new man said, running towards the spot where Jon had just landed as Jon gently stepped backwards, barely getting out of the way as two men in brown sports coats ran by, small black wires dangling from their ears. “There was a noise right around the side—someone jumped.”
Both men went around the side of the 7/11, and after a moment reappeared. Jon stepped back further, taking a position out of the way next to the first gas pump. The first one shrugged. “Nothing,” he said.
“I know I heard something. Somebody jumped,” the man was saying.
As he looked inside the 7/11, at least two men in black suits and sunglasses walking up and down the aisles, other voices, further away, filled his ears.
“—Johnson, go back up to the main road and make sure he hasn’t made it up there—”
“—the smoke is not breaking up. Get somebody down there to see if we can get those men out of there—”
“—still can’t get past the slick, and we can’t get to them or—Ed tried, and he got caught in it—”
“—go check the field, see if he’s in there—he might have gotten to the field and is planning on waiting us out—”
“—he couldn’t have gotten to the field—”
“—and check back in the trees over that fence—get around to the other side. What’s over there, a strip mall? Office buildings? Check them and make sure he didn’t get around—”
And then he heard the tinny voice again, the voice of that woman, coming across a radio or maybe a telephone. Who was that? Who was talking to her? “—make sure you have everything, strip the beds, vacuum the floor, take the carpet, take the shower curtain, drain the water out of the toilet—”
“We don’t have that kind of forensic equipment,” this voice was deep; warm, but stern. “We’ll secure everything important.”
“I don’t want everything you think is important, I want what I just told you to secure. I want everything. The bed sheets, the towels, the hotel soap, the little bottles of shampoo.”
“We’ll make sure to bring you back some shampoo.”
“Agent Crawford, I was ensured that I could expect your full cooperation on this matter.”
“The FBI is here. They’ll do forensics. If necessary.”
“I don’t care what the FBI is going to do, I care what you are going to do for me, Agent Crawford—”
“Ms. McNaney, it’s under control. If you want to strap on your six shooter and come down here and clean up Dodge, your more than welcome to.”
“Crawford, the situation you described to me does not sound like a situation under control—”
“Smoke grenades and motor oil. Very clever but I don’t need E.T. to come down and explain it. We’ve got it under control. If you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.”
“Crawford—”
Jon shook his head, trying to shift the focus of what he was hearing, listening for any mention of a girl. Any reference to Megan. But there was nothing. “Megan,” he whispered under his breath. “Megan, can you hear me?” Still, nothing. Shit, shit, shit. He strained, turning his head, able to pick and focus on a conversation at will but hearing nothing about Megan.
“—then fan out. You guys hit that strip mall over there. We’re going to cross over to the shopping center. Krazitz and Howards are over checking out that lot—”
“—and what about the suits? I saw two of them—”
“—county sheriff has five cars in route right now—”
“—he’s not over here—”
“—then where the hell did he go? I saw him land in the dumpster. I haven’t stopped looking at the dumpster—”
“—that’s not natural, I’ve never seen smoke do that, never, it’s working against the wind—”
He kept listening, switching his focus from conversation to conversation, but still nothing about Megan. He looked around from car to car, but there was no sign of her. He stepped back away from the gas pump to a clear area away from where the men in brown and black coats were talking, some disappearing behind the 7/11 and others getting back into their cars and pulling out, and jumped up. He tried to land lightly on the canopy above the gas pumps, but there was a solid thunk, and he could hear at least one man whispering urgently.
“Over here. I heard something—is there anything up there?”
“I don’t see anything.”
Jon looked back at the hotel, blinking the sequence to turn on the X-ray vision. Brilliant chrome-and-blue filled his vision, making him now wish he had left it set to something more practical, but there wasn’t time to try and change the settings now. He looked at the cars stuck in the oil slick at the hotel. He thought his best hope was that Megan was in one of the cars still struggling to get free of the slick, black substance that coated the parking lot. He stared intently at one car and then the next, but there was no sign of Megan anywhere. He looked to the motel, searching out his room. After a few moments, when he focused on a room with what had to be a dozen people milling around, he was sure he had found his room. In fact, he could see the warm glow of the book, suspended from the ceiling but hidden from their eyes. As his vision focused on and then through one person and then another, he could see holsters with guns and billfolds with badges. He had found the right room, but only two of the dozen people were female, and it was immediately obvious that neither woman was Megan. Shit! Shit, shit, shit!
He scanned the hotel parking lot one last time, hoping against hope that Megan was either being held in some government agent’s car or had gotten out and was hiding in the parking lot or around the hotel. Perhaps she had had more presence of mind than Jonathan and had turned invisible immediately; he had left her belt, with brass buckle attached, right next to the bed. Why she would be silent now, he didn’t know, but he hoped there was a good reason, and he would find her, escaped and close by so that they could meet up and sneak away to safety.
Though he searched the hotel grounds and the parked cars in the lot, staring intently, focusing on everything, there was no sign of her.
But he did see their car: the Dodge Aries they had “borrowed”. Nobody was around the car, so either they didn’t know Megan and he had used it to get here, or they thought they had bigger fish to fry. He focused on it, scrutinizing it as carefully as he could, and saw that in addition of a half-full bottle of Diet Pepsi and some discarded candy wrappers, Megan had left her purse on the floorboard of the back seat. And the night before they left, they had gone through the briefcase and put a bunch of stuff in her purse. There was money, the ATM card, the little silver aerosol bottle, the rest of the contact lenses and more that he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t hope to get back to the hotel room now, and though the book were safely hidden, he wouldn’t be able to actually get to it until the government men were long gone. But he still had a few tricks in his pockets, and Megan’s purse had even more. If he could retrieve that before clearing out, he just might have a better chance of finding and rescuing Megan. And of getting the book back. Jon blinked the sequence, and the blue-chrome of the X-ray vision evaporated, leaving him the bright morning sunlight and a big empty sky.
There was a thump as two hands grabbed the opposite edge of the fuel pump canopy and a sweaty head with a receding hairline peered over the edge. “Nothing,” the man said, and then dropped back down.
In the distance—in the far distance—his ears heard sirens. He knew he needed to clear out, before more men came. Before something tripped him up, or he made another mistake, and ended up caught, like Megan. He jumped down from the fuel canopy onto the asphalt below. A few of the men close by turned and looked, then looked away, talking into their shirt sleeves. Jon was tempted to try another pellet on them. There was one that was supposed to stink, he remembered. But except for the slightest shimmer, he couldn’t see his own arms or hands and, in any case, he might end up giving them a better idea of how he had escaped. Or end up having it backfire on him. Better just to go grab Megan’s purse, and then go.
He walked back down to the EconoLodge parking lot. He was hesitant, at first, to step on the area still coated by the slick. He recalled reading something about how the aerosol nanocoat—the stuff in the silver tube he had sprayed on his shoes—was supposed to let him walk across any surface, no matter how slippery or slick. Certainly, that would apply to the oil slick, too, right?
But he was hesitant, wondering how much he really needed the stuff in Megan’s purse. The consequences of not being able to walk on the oil slick seemed pretty severe. Everyone who had gotten stuck originally was still stuck, and there were more besides. The men sprawled on the black, glassy stuff that covered the asphalt, and the cars piled up against each other, had all stopped fighting, stopped trying to get up or get out, trapped until—well, Jon didn’t really know what happened with the oil slick. If he was supposed to deactivate it somehow, he didn’t know how to do it. Or had Bernhard built in a time limit, after which it would stop working?
Jon didn’t remember, and wasn’t even sure that had been covered in the black notebook, but he decided to take his chances and stepped onto the oil slick. If there was a time limit, time was running out. He didn’t remember what all was in Megan’s purse but didn’t want them getting around to going through the cars in the parking lot and finding it.
Gingerly, he put one foot down, into the slick and found that it was no different that stepping onto the bare asphalt. More confidently, he started walking forward, finding that it wasn’t slippery for him at all and, although the surface of the slick stuff looked like deep black water, it didn’t ripple or deform where his feet touched at all. He skipped quickly over to the car, going to the side opposite the convenience store and most of the visible agents, except for the several still wandering free on the second floor landing and outside their room. He fumbled around in his pockets until he found what felt most like a key that wasn’t his house key—a smooth key with a wide square head that felt almost like glass. Quietly, he touched it to the door lock and it slid in easily, and turned effortlessly. He opened the door a crack and reached in, using the power locks to unlock the rest of the car. Then, he crept back to the rear door and opened it up just enough to reach in and grab Megan’s large macramé purse. He held it for a moment, feeling a stab of fear as the purse appeared to float in midair in front of him, suddenly afraid that, unlike the items in the hotel room, it was going to stay perfectly visible and impossible to escape with. After a few moments, just as he was seriously considering just putting it back, Megan’s fat rope macramé purse vanished, straps and all.
Jon sighed, and threw the purse straps around his shoulder. Then he headed across the parking lot, towards the street, wondering what the hell he was going to do now.
And that was the problem. What was he going to do now? He waited at the street corner past the 7/11 for the light to change and, when it did, he crossed, almost getting clipped by a large red Cadillac making a left turn. He made his way safely to the other side, and then decided to find some place out of the way in the strip mall to think about what he was going to do next. Because they hadn’t planned on this. Getting cornered so soon. Getting separated, one caught, one not. They hadn’t planned on one having to rescue the other, or, hell—they hadn’t planned on anything, except how to get to Canada. And it had been Megan that had planned most of that.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. He didn’t know what Dr. Bernhard had been smoking, but he had obviously been on some kind of drugs, to think Jon was supposed to be trusted to tie his own fucking shoe laces, much less anything more complicated, or more important, than that. Stupid senile old motherfucker. Now Megan was gone and they were after him and the book was stuck in a hotel and there was nobody to help him and everything was ruined and they had only been gone for a day. One day! And everything was fucked to hell. Godammit, what had he been thinking? Why hadn’t he been thinking? Shit, fuck, shit!
His heart was pounding and he felt like he was about to throw up, pass out, or do both at the same time. Calm down, he told himself. It’s not going to do Megan any good if you have a heart attack. Deep breath, come on, now.
Jon took a deep breath, eyes flitting from store to store in the strip mall, then to the small, alley-like areas that ran between the buildings at intervals of about every four or five stores, and then up to the roof area. Getting on the roof seemed a good place to stay out of the way, until he could come up with some sort of plan. Some sort of something.
Just before he was about to jump up, though, he saw a young woman with big glasses and stringy brown hair flipping a placard from CLOSED to OPEN at the Lemstone books at the very end of the strip mall. That was a religious bookstore, Jon thought. Certainly, it wouldn’t be too crowded on a Wednesday morning. And the woman with the stringy hair looked like she was alone in the store. And he was going to need somebody to help him. Right?
He started walking towards the Lemstone Books, trying to decide what to do. He might get somebody to drive him somewhere—but who? The woman in the book store? Then where? Back to Oak Ridge? Maybe Dr. Bernhard’s house, even though he had said there was nothing for Jon there? Back to Doreen to see if they had gotten her, too—well, hell, they would had to have gotten her, wouldn’t they have? If they had been looking for him and Megan, if they had found them in Kentucky, then they had to have gotten to Doreen, probably while he and Megan had been cruising down the Interstate. Shit!
He had to get back to Oak Ridge, he decided. Unless he could find Megan, and there had been no sign of her at the hotel and there was still no sign of her, he had to go back to Oak Ridge. Maybe they had let his mom go, or maybe there were just a few government types waiting for him and he could ambush them and—and what? What the hell was he thinking? He was going to use his silver hypno-thingy on any government guys he happened to run across, and they would guide him to Megan? Oh, yeah, that sounded real likely. Shit!
Still, he had to do something, and staying in Kentucky wasn’t going to do him any good. Maybe he could find Doreen. Maybe he could find the reporter guy. Richard Mathers. He was an adult. He was bound to have some idea of what he could do, Jon thought, putting his hand in his pocket and feeling around for the little silver cigarette case. He might could help. Even if he needed to be persuaded.
Jon pushed open the door to the Lemstone Books and stepped in, the little bell—a real, metal bell—tinkling pleasantly as he walked through the door. The mousy woman was standing on a stepstool behind the counter, tacking up an advertisement for a 10% off “Summer Vacation” sale. Jon paused, as the woman looked over her shoulder, focused on the words “Summer Vacation”. It seemed so long ago that he had sat behind his desk waiting patiently for the school bell to ring. It could have been a year or more since he had with Mrs. Matthews a good summer. Playing Pitfall on his Atari. Worried about learning how to program his TRS-80 Color Computer in assembly language. It seemed more than years ago; it seemed a lifetime ago. It seemed almost as if was somebody else’s life he had been living then, and now he was finally living the life that was actually his. He had actually started living. And living sucked. Big time.
If he could do it all over again, he would have taken the book, taken the video cassette, and thrown them both in the garbage. Somebody else’s garbage. And then his biggest risk that summer would have been asking Megan out on a date. But that wasn’t what happened. That wasn’t what he had done.
He had fucked everything up. If only he hadn’t kept the book. If only he hadn’t listened to Megan. If only he hadn’t ever talked to that weird old man at the Super Bee. If only.
Jon shook his head. He had to get control of himself. There was no if only. There was only: what now?
“Hello?” the woman asked. She was young, and not unattractive under her stringy hair and Coke-bottle glasses, although she had fairly bad acne. As she stepped down off the stool, craning her neck around, looking for whoever it was who had just stepped in, he noticed her ears were pierced, at least six times, from the lobe to the very tip of her ear. There was some sort of earring—mostly gold and Cubic Zirconia, it looked like to him—in every hole, though most didn’t seem to match. “Is anybody there?”
Jon looked up at the corner of the ceiling, noting the video camera, and back the woman, who was still look intently at the door, staying behind the counter. Where there might be a silent alarm, Jon thought. Or a not-so-silent alarm. “Hello?”
Jon veered off to the left, going back behind a side row of books. He knocked one book off the shelf and then, a few feet later, another. “Hello? Who’s there? Do you need some help?”
Jon stepped quickly past the counter and opened the door at the back, stepping inside the small office. Then he slammed the door. There was a tiny room with a modest desk and a filing cabinet directly in front of him, and the half opened door to a small closet of a bathroom to the side. Jon pushed the bathroom door a little further open, and turned on the light.
“Hello?” the woman was calling, and the office door knob turned. “Hello? Chris, if that’s you, I swear, you are so dead.”
Jon stepped in the bathroom, flushing the toilet, and then stepped back out the way.
“Okay, now I know it’s you,” the girl said, walking into the office, peaking around into the bathroom and then walking towards the desk. “Chris, this isn’t funny, I’ve got to work. If Tina showed up and thought I was messing around with you again . . .”
Jon pressed the button on the front of his belt buckle, and saw his other hand, the one holding the magic silver cigarette case, ripple into view. “I’m not Chris,” he said flatly, and the woman turned around with a jerk, a strangled squeak escaping her throat. Her small chest was pumping up and down as she looked at Jon, her expression behind those big, thick glasses a mixture of bewilderment and anger. “Jeeze—I—kid—what the hell are—you about scared the pee out of me, who—did Chris put you up to this?”
Jon held the little silver cigarette case up to her face, and there was a high squealing sound and a bright blue-white flash. “I need you to drive me to Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” he said. “It’s right outside Knoxville.”
“Okay,” she said blankly. She looked around her. “But the store. Someone—”
“Chris is coming,” Jon said. “He’ll handle it. Let’s go.”
“Chris can’t run the store,” she said quietly, turning in a circle. “Tina hates Chris.”
“Look at me,” Jon commanded, and she turned around. There was another blue-white flash and high-pitched squeal. “Tina loves Chris. He’ll do a great job. Tina said you had to drive me to Oak Ridge right now, or you’re fired.”
“Oh, shit!” she swore, then, eyes wide and frightened behind her large glasses, lunged for Jonathan.
He stepped back, his hand reaching for his belt buckle, but she grabbed him by the wrist and with surprising strength and pulled him towards the door. She jerked the office door open and ran through. “We’ve gotta go now!” she said. “Or Tina’s going to fire me for sure.” She looked back over her shoulder to the empty desk. “Chris is here. He does a great job. The store’ll be fine. Come on.”
Jon did his best to keep up with her as she grabbed her worn black leather purse off the counter and ran for the door. “Come on, come on, we’re going to be late,” she said, the little silver bell ringing loudly as they went out the door. “Go, go, go!”
She almost skipped across the parking lot, towards the back where a yellow Volkswagen bug and a dirty purple Dodge Pinto were parked. As luck would have it, the woman’s car was the Pinto.
“Great,” Jon mumbled. Those things were supposed to be deathtraps, weren’t they? There had been some sort of show on PM Magazine or 20/20 or 60 Minutes. But before he could remember exactly what the problem was supposed to be, she was unlocking the passenger side door and pushing him in. “Come on, come on, let’s go.”
Jon sat down on the worn vinyl, several strips of gray duct tape apparently barely containing the springs, with uncomfortable lumps and a few hard points that Jon guessed were springs soon to break through poking him. Keys tinkling and who-knew-what clattering in her large black purse as she threw it in between them, she entered on the driver’s side and started her car.
Jon jerked as the girl again lunged for him, this time reaching around his waist and pulling up a loop of seat belt that appeared to have been cut and then tied back together, then buckling him in. “Safety first,” she said brightly. Then, after fastening her own patchwork seatbelt, she stuck the key in the ignition and started the car. It coughed and sputtered the first few times, but finally caught and, with grinding noise, she threw it in reverse, and stepped heavily on the gas.
The car lurched backwards. With a bang and a tinkle of glass it took the bumper and tail light off the yellow VW Bug. Jon instinctively jerked his head around, trying to see who might have heard, if the government men were already over there, but he didn’t see anything. “Whoops,” the woman said, giggling, and then with a screech of rubber she raced her little Pinto out of the parking lot, taking the speed bumps on the way out at twenty then thirty miles and hour. Across the last one, Jon thought he heard something fall out from under the car.
“Uh, maybe you should slow down,” Jon suggested, putting his hand back in his pocket to find the little silver cigarette case. “Maybe—”
“No, no, no. Tina will fire me, if we’re late. I’ve really got to keep this job. I really do. You like music?” she asked, and turned on the radio. The volume was already turned all the way up, and the music—nobody Jon recognized—was very fast and very loud, mostly distortion, screaming, and pounding drums.
“Could you please turn that down!” it sounded terrible, and he couldn’t help but think everybody within a fifty-mile radius would be able to hear it, too.
“What?”
“Could you please turn the music down?”
She shook her head, barely avoiding a small copper-colored Plymouth Arrow that was taking the speed bumps at a reasonable speed, in the correct lane. “It doesn’t go any louder than this,” she screamed back. “Jammin’, huh?”
She hit the slight hill of the stripmall exit at nearly fifty miles an hour, forcing the small Pinto into the air. Jon felt a little bit like he had just been sucked into an episode of the Dukes of Hazzard, and he had just hitched a ride with a punk-metal-listening, flat-chested, acne-ridden, Coke-bottle-glasses-wearing version of Daisy Duke. As the car hit the street with the sound of grinding metal, and perhaps a piece or two falling off, Jon took the moment of distraction to turn the radio down.
“Hoo!” she exhaled, gripping the steering wheel tightly with her thin—and, Jon noticed, badly scratched—fingers. Her knuckles were white, she was holding the steering wheel so hard, and her left leg was pumping up and down nervously. But she showed no signs of slowing down as she turned left out of the strip mall, and away from the entrance ramp to the Interstate.
“No!” Jon shouted. “The other way—the Interstate is the other way! We’re going to Oak Ridge! Knoxville, you know where Knoxville is?”
“Oh,” she said and then, to Jon’s horror, did a U-turn into oncoming traffic. A baby blue Lincoln Towncar slammed on its breaks and honked. Another car jerked over in the next lane to avoid a head-on collision with the crazy woman Jon had picked to drive him back to Oak Ridge. He thought another car rear-ended that one, but couldn’t be sure, as he lost sight of the cars quickly. The woman stepped on the accelerator and passed—very closely, almost clipping it—a white van in front of them. A white, unmarked, windowless van, Jon noticed, ducking down slightly, but it was not going in the direction of the hotel, or the strip mall, he saw. They cruised past the road that led down into the EconoLodge a little too fast for comfort. Coming from the opposite direction, turning onto the street from the Interstate, Jon saw flashing lights to accompany the sirens he had kept hearing in the distance, heading for the EconoLodge.
As the drove past, he peeked over the edge, only able to see the few agents and cars parked in the 7/11 parking lot, and those milling around on the second floor landing of the motel. As he looked, Jon heard snippets of conversations.
“—someone has been in that field, recently. There are tracks—”
“—the fence was broken over here. The break looks old, but there’s an open path that cuts through—I think it leads right to the hotel next door—”
“—stay back. We don’t know what it is, but it’s—”
He heard what was becoming a more unpleasantly familiar female voice: “—if it isn’t there then the boy must have it, or he knows where it is, find the boy—”
He strained to keep hearing her, but her voice faded.
“—tell your men to keep their cars back—”
“—smoke is dissipating, but all of them are—”
“—move the dumpster, they will want to know—”
“—it’s on its way to White Sands now. When we get a sample of the oil, or wherever it is—”
“—did you call your insurance agent? We told you yesterday—”
“—we’re going to be late to the meeting, Did you call—”
“—mom, yesterday Missy said my dress was old—”
Jon shook his head, trying to let the voices recede, and they did. He wasn’t going to hear anything else useful, not right now. Then, Jon groaned, as he watched the car cruising down the ramp going North, away from Tennessee. He sighed, shaking his head.
“Don’t worry, we’re going to get there,” she said. “Tina won’t fire me. I’m sure.” She stepped on the accelerator, and the Pinto jumped forward in traffic, rattling.
“Um,” Jon said. “What’s your name?”
The woman laughed. “Veronica, silly, you know that.” She smiled, nodding earnestly at him. “You always call me Ronnie.”
Jon blinked. “Ronnie?”
“Yes, Nathan?”
Jon paused. “Nathan?” he asked.
“I know you are but what am I?” Ronnie said, then laughed loudly.
Jon put his face in his hands. His head was hurting. “Okay, Ronnie,” he started
“I know I am, but who are you,” she said in sing-song, quickly, and then cackled.
“Ronnie. You need to get off at the next exit and then take the entrance ramp going south. We’re going to Tennessee. Oak Ridge. Remember?”
Veronica blinked, craning her head as if to look over the traffic in front of them, and then eyeing the concrete median that ran between the lanes.
“I said, you have to get off at the next exit and turn around,” Jon said.
“I am, I am. Plenty of time. We won’t be late.” She jerked across three lanes, to the tune of a lot of excited car honking, and exited, turning up on the bridge and then quickly, finally heading in the correct direction, south on I-64 towards Frankfort. “Hey, I love this song! Have you heard this one? It sounds kinda like your guys’s band.”
“My band?” Jon asked blankly.
She nodded vigorously. “Yeah, it rocks!” She turned up the volume on the radio, and started bobbing her head up and down to the noise.
Jon slouched down in the seat as they drove past the main Shelbyville exit, noticing there were both police cruisers and what were probably unmarked vehicles—several plain white or black Ford Tauruses, he saw—both exiting and entering.
“Yeah, hoo!” the girl yelled as she turned the radio volume up some more, and started pounding on the flimsy and torn ceiling of her Pinto with her free hand. “Got it going. Yeah!”
Jon looked back at the exit as they passed, looking at the tall EconoLodge motel sign, still clearly visible from the Interstate. Now, it seemed like a million years ago that he had first seen it. That he and Megan had pulled up in the parking lot and gotten a room. Their first—and only—night together in a motel. How had the government men found them so fast? Where would they have taken Megan? He hoped against hope that she would get taken back to Oak Ridge, maybe taken to juvenile court. But somehow he doubted it. He turned all the way around in his seat, looking back as he left them all: book, the briefcase, the last place he had seen Megan, and the stupid idea that they could ever have run away to Canada together. Now there was just—just what? Nothing. There was nothing. He was fourteen, had spent most of his life reading books or playing video games, and he had no idea what to do, no idea how to make this right. No idea how to fix it.
“So how’s Mark?” Ronnie screamed over the music as Jon turned back around and slumped deep into his seat. “Aw, jeeze, I’ve gotta have a cigarette. You don’t mind, do you?”
Jon shook his head no as she fumbled a pack of Virginia Slims out of her purse and pushed the cars cigarette lighter in. “Last time I saw Mark, he told me he was going to get a mohawk. Did he? I didn’t think so. He doesn’t have the nads, if you know what I mean. What about Rhonda? Didn’t you tell me she was seeing a shrink?”
Jon leaned his head against the passenger-side window, partly disturbed but mostly relieved that he did not have to participate in this conversation. What was he going to do?
Jon shook his head. The truth was, he didn’t know.
Well, actually, he guessed he did know. He just didn’t know how. But he knew exactly what he was going to do.
He was going to go get Megan.
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