My hearty started pounding when I read the words that resulted from my attempt to use our old code.
.
Buy a burner call 8786450677 wilson.
Chapter 15
My mother had watched me curiously as I had circled the different letters, then as I was writing them down on the bottom of the last page.
“What are you doing?” Ma asked.
“Just trying to work through the numbers,” I replied. “I think following the instructions on this letter would just be a waste of money.”
“Oh,” Ma said looking disappointed.
I didn’t want her to see what I had really done, as much for her safety as mine, I didn’t want her to know that the letter was from Wilson. If the military sent anyone out to ask questions, the less she knew, the better.
I folded the letter and slipped it in my pocket.
“Do you need anything from the store?” I asked as I stood up and took a few steps towards the door. “I’m going out to get a pack of smokes and I would be happy to pick up a few things for you.”
“I thought you had quit smoking?” my mother asked. “You know those things are not good for you.”
“I know Ma,” I replied. “I’ve almost quit. I’m down to just one pack every other day. I’m trying.”
“You need to try harder,” she said. “Now what did you ask me?”
“I asked if you needed anything from the store?” I asked and smiled sadly.
“No thanks,” she replied. “Just don’t stay out too long, I’m making perogies for dinner tonight, so don’t be late.”
“I won’t Ma,” I replied. “Perogies, what’s the occasion?”
“I know they are your favorite, I just wanted to do something nice for you,” she smiled.
“I would never be late for perogies,” I smiled, then headed for the door.
Ma smiled, sat back on the couch and pulled out one of her crossword puzzles and was soon engrossed in her own little world.
I closed the door quietly behind me.
I walked down the street until I reached the local Speedy Mart. I went inside and walked down the aisles until I found the display for Tracfone. Tracfone’s were cell phones that didn’t require you to register the phone or sign up for a yearly contract. You bought a phone and a card for a varying amount of minutes, entered information into the phone from the card and then you had a working cell phone that wasn’t traceable back to you.
I’m sure that a determined investigator would be able to trace the cell phone number back to the Speedy Mart that sold it, and then he would ask to see the stores security cameras to try and identify who had bought this particular phone, but that would be a rare occurrence. However, just in case, I wore a baggy shirt, a large brimmed hat, paid cash and kept my head down. If anyone went through all the trouble to check the store’s security cameras, I hoped that my efforts and outfit would result in the camera’s recording not offering much to the investigator that would identify me.
I bought three cheap flip phones for ten dollars each, kept my head down and left the store. When I left, I walked in the opposite direction from my house, in the event the salesperson was watching. If he reported that the person that bought the phone in question had left the store and walked towards Route 51, it would keep the investigator from adding two and two and looking in my direction.
I walked three blocks down Brownsville road and was about to go down to the next street to double back towards my house, but then I remembered from Law and Order and Criminal Minds that investigators could trace the origin of a phone call by what cell tower the phone connected through. So in order to try to keep the phone from pinging any cell towers around my house, I knew I needed to get further away from my house instead of going back home to make the call.
The problem was that I didn’t have a clue where all the cell towers were located or how large of an area one cell tower could cover. I could end up walking for ten more blocks and end up connecting to the same cell tower that I would from home, which wouldn’t help what I was trying to accomplish.
As I stood thinking about what to do, I saw a bus coming down Brownsville road, the LED sign on the front of the bus that showed its destination was Century III Mall.
The mall was a good five miles from my house, so I felt that location would definitely not use the cell tower closest to my house.
I reached into my pocket, pulled out another two dollars and flagged down the bus. The driver wasn’t too happy that I hadn’t walked to the corner and the regular bus stop, but he stopped and let me get on the bus with just a disgusted look on his face. The bus stopped twenty feet later and let another four people board the bus. I was slightly embarrassed when I saw how close I had been to the bus stop, but I had more important things on my mind to dwell on it for long.
The bus pulled in front of JC Penney at the mall twenty minutes later. Century III Mall had been a beautiful mall at one time, one of the first big new malls in the Pittsburgh area. But the area around the mall had gone down hill fast after the mall had been built, slums developed around the mall and now all that remained of the mall were JC Penny on one end, Dicks Sporting Goods on the other end, and a hundred empty, boarded up stores in between. It was a shame what had happened to the mall, but it was also a shame how a lot of other Pittsburgh neighborhoods had declined. I know that change is inevitable, but unfortunately the change that had taken place in my area had not been for the better. Many of the people that could afford it, had moved away from the area, compounding the negative effects on the remaining population. But again, I had come here for a reason, and that reason wasn’t for a trip down memory lane.
I walked off the bus and looked around, finally setting my sights on a statue standing in the middle of a dry, nonfunctioning fountain. I walked over to the fountain and sat down on the side of the dry pool around the statue and pulled out one of my new phones. I read the directions on the box, then powered up the phone. After hitting a few keys to log onto the Tracfone network, I pulled out one of the minute cards I had also purchased with the phones. After flipping through the screens on the phone, I found the add minutes screen and entered the number off the card. I now had thirty minutes of cell time showing on my phone and thirty days to use those minutes.
Satisfied with myself, I pulled the letter out of my pocket, turned to the last page of the letter and entered the phone number into the phone. I held the phone to my ear and listened as the phone rang on the other end.
I hoped that the information I had deciphered from the chain letter wasn’t just a coincidence and the number I had dialed would end up connecting me with the National Weather Service. But our code was complicated and the chances of it resulting in an intelligible message other than the one intended had to be a million to one. I guess it was just that I wanted it to be Wilson on the other end of the phone so bad that my mind kept searching for ways not to be disappointed.
Finally, I heard the call connect.
“Don’t say my name or your name. Just leave a brief message and I will call you back.”
After the beep, I left a short message. The voice in the recording was definitely Wilson’s voice. But the question I had was how long ago did he record that message? Was it before or after my ordeal in the hospital? Would I be leaving a message that would never be returned? Was Wilson even still alive?
“I got your chain letter. I’m waiting,” I said, then closed the phone, ending the call. I knew my cell phone number would show up on his phone, now all I had to do was wait.
“Wilson, it was nice hearing your voice again,” I said to myself, but the question was would I be hearing his voice again. I sat and waited, hoping that I would get a call right back, but I gave up on that idea after twenty minutes had passed.
I looked around, trying to decide what to do to kill some time. I thought of going into the mall and walking around to see how the mall had changed since I had been here last, but I knew there would be very few people walking aro
und inside. If anyone would see me, it would be possible that they could give a description of me, something that I was trying to avoid. As I looked around for another idea, I saw Burger King across the road. The drive-up window had ten cars lined up and the parking lot looked full, I also heard my stomach growl, so I decided to walk across Route 51, get a Whooper and blend in with the crowd.
I walked into Burger King and got in line, there were five people in front of me, and waited for my turn to order.
I kept looking at my watch as the line slowly moved. It had been an hour since I had made the call, I was starting to lose hope that I would actually get a return call.
I finally made it to the front of the line and ordered a Whooper, fries and a drink. I saw a small table for two that was empty in the corner of the room, so I slowly made my way to the table and sat down. I was halfway through my lunch when my phone rang.
I quickly looked around to see if anyone had noticed that my phone rang and to see if anyone was looking my way, but everyone else was too busy looking at their own phones to pay much attention to me.
I held the phone to my ear, hit the call button and said, “Hello.”
“Meet me at our favorite spot in three days,” Wilson’s voice said. “Destroy your phone as soon as you hang up. See you then.” The line went dead.
I just looked at the phone, frustrated that I hadn’t been able to ask Wilson where he was, what had happened since we were at the bunker, and what did he know.
I also remembered from the TV shows that I had watched, that a phone call could be traced in about twenty-five seconds. I’m sure that Wilson also knew that information, but I was wondering if all this cloak and dagger stuff was really necessary. But after everything I had been through, I decided it was better to be safe. I turned off my phone, took out the battery and the sim card. I used my napkin to wipe my prints off the phone, then dropped it in my Burger King bag. After I finished my lunch, I walked towards the door and dropped the bag with the phone and my trash into the garbage can. For good measure, I dropped the battery in the trash can in the men’s room and flushed the sim card down the toilet.
I then left Burger King, walked across the road, sat on the fountain again and waited for the bus. As I got on the bus, I looked across the road at Burger King. A police car pulled into the parking lot and two officers got out of the car and started looking around. They finally went into the restaurant and seemed to stand at the entrance way for a long minute, just looking over the crowd inside.
“It couldn’t be?” I asked myself as the bus pulled away and started back towards Overbrook. “Could it?”
Chapter 16
I was dropped off at the bus stop on Brownsville Road where I had boarded the bus earlier today.
My heart continued to pound in my chest as I though about the fact that I was going to have the opportunity to talk with Wilson in person and find out what had happened to him since we were at the bunker. To hopefully find out where he has been since that last night at Roswell. To talk to someone that would not be trying to convince me that I was crazy. If anything, I would be the one talking to a crazy person, but that was OK with me.
As I walked, another possibility came to me. What if this was a trick? What if that hadn’t been Wilson’s voice, but a computer-generated voice to lure me into revealing that my acting ability wasn’t as effective as I had thought. If I showed up at the meeting spot, it would be an admission that I had remembered more than I was letting on.
But unless they had captured Wilson and somehow managed to get certain information out of him, how would they know where our favorite spot was?
Wilson was good at being evasive, I’m sure he would have given them a fake favorite spot. In fact, I wasn’t sure which spot he was referring to, we had a few favorite spots. We had our favorite drinking spot, our favorite parking spot where we would take girls, our favorite fishing spot, a favorite hunting spot and a favorite camping spot. I would have to think about which spot he meant.
I considered activating another one of my cell phones, but I was sure that Wilson had already destroyed his phone and the number I had wouldn’t be working any longer. I also didn’t think it was wise to take another bus ride to make the call from somewhere away from my house. I’m almost sure that the police showing up at Burger King after my call to Wilson was just a coincidence, but I didn’t want to press my luck. Too much strange shit had already happened.
But I had three days to think things over and decide what to do.
I arrived home and found my mother sound asleep on the couch, her crossword puzzle had fallen to the floor by her feet.
I quietly picked up her puzzle and set it on the couch next to her. When she didn’t stir, I just quietly walked to my room and closed the door.
I pulled the chain letter I had received from Wilson out of my pocket and began to look for clues to what favorite spot he meant on the phone. I tried using the code key on the first page to see if there was a hidden message on that page. The first page seemed to have been written fairly well, not the rambling meaningless dribble that was in the rest of the letter that always resulted when you were trying to insert the words you needed so the words would have the letters you needed for the secret message. The resulting letters, olpheyio, were meaningless.
I laid back on my bed and let my mind drift as I looked around my room. My mother hadn’t changed a thing in the room after I left for the army. Most parents that I knew wouldn’t have passed up the opportunity to make a sewing room or a TV room out of my room the day after I left. Most parents would have been moving out my furniture before I had reached the end of the sidewalk in front of the house. But my mother was the sentimental sort and left the room and the pictures and posters I had taped to the walls just as I had left it. I was sure, if nothing else, my mother would have torn down my poster of Katie Perry. She never liked that poster, she said it was too revealing for a boy my age, but it still hung over my dresser. The picture of me on the baseball diamond in my baseball uniform was still on the wall in the corner of the room. The picture of Joe and I with our prom dates was still on my door. The blanket, with the Steeler emblem in the center, was still on my bed. My autographed picture of Gerome Bettis, number 36, was on the wall next to the window.
I next looked over at my desk and laughed. The picture of Wilson and I whitewater rafting was still taped to the wall above my desk. Wilson loved to go whitewater rafting. He wasn’t very good at it and ended up doing more swimming than rafting, but the little guy just wouldn’t give up.
The picture on the wall was taken by Joe from the other raft, just before Wilson fell into the water, again. In the picture you could see Wilson, frozen in an unnatural position, right before he totally lost his balance and fell in the water.
I stared at the picture for a minute as a thought crossed my mind, then I got up and walked over to my desk and looked down at the collection of senseless letters I had written at the bottom of the first page of the chain letter.
I sat down and began to rearrange the letters.
I smiled when I had the letters where I wanted them.
The letters now spelled “ohiopyle.”
Ohiopyle State Park was where we had always gone whitewater rafting. The park was seventy miles from Pittsburgh. They had a small rustic campground where we camped in the tent Wilson had, which had five holes in it that made us get soaked when it rained. There was a little bar in the neighboring town of Confluence that never checked your ID, where we spent our evening after rafting.
I realized that I shouldn’t have had such a hard time deciding what favorite spot Wilson had meant.
“Damn Wilson,” I laughed. “Talk about sending cryptic messages. You give me more credit than I deserve. You’re lucky that I didn’t decide to go to our fishing hole off the West End to meet up with you. I was never that good with these coded messages when we were kids. I can’t believe that you expected me to figure all of this out by myself.”
Ohiopyl
e State Park was certainly an isolated location, I assumed that Wilson would meet me by the campground or the launch area, both were close together, so I didn’t have to worry about where to go once I made it to the park.
After having such as stressful day, I walked back over to my bed and laid down. I decided that I would try to get a few hours sleep before dinner. I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep, but my mind wouldn’t shut down. All I could think about was what information I would find out from Wilson.
I knew flying saucers and little green men would be a part of what Wilson would want to talk about, but for once, I didn’t have a problem with that.
As I laid on my bed, another sharp pain shot through my head. A white light flashed across the inside of my tightly closed eyelids.
For a brief second I forgot all about Wilson and Ohiopyle as I worried what the pain could mean.
Chapter 17
Thursday morning finally rolled around.
It had now been three days since I received the message from Wilson instructing me to meet him at our favorite spot. I wondered why he had me wait three days to meet with him, the only thing I could think of was that he wanted to give me enough time to think about where we were going to meet. He wanted to give me time to find the location he had hidden so well in the letter. Maybe he remembered how much trouble I had as a kid unencrypting our secret letters, but he knew I would keep at it until I finally found the meeting spot in his letter.
Apocalypse- the Plan Page 12