by Mark Lukens
“Still need a code to get into the gate,” Joel said.
“He could wait in the parking lot and follow someone inside after they go through the gate.” Stan frowned. “He wouldn’t be able to get back out until someone else left.”
“I don’t need to go there,” I told them.
They all stared at me.
“I think I already know what’s in the storage unit.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I locked eyes with Stan. “Remember the bags of fertilizer that were stolen from work a few weeks ago, the ammonium sulfate?”
Stan’s eyes widened with shock.
“You two work at a fertilizer company?” Adam asked.
“Not a fertilizer company,” I said. “We’re a pest control company, but we treat lawns and shrubs with nutrients and chemicals. A few weeks ago a spreader used for applying fertilizer and twelve bags of ammonium sulfate were taken, along with a few odds and ends: a few cans of organophosphates, a can of roach bait, a few other pest control things. But those other things don’t matter, not even the spreader. It’s the bags of ammonium sulfate that are important.”
“To make a bomb,” Stan said.
“We wondered how someone had stolen the stuff without someone seeing them,” I continued. “We thought someone had loaded the bags and extra spreader onto their truck and offloaded them somewhere on their route, but we couldn’t pin it on anyone.” I paused for just a moment. “Because it was me. I had to have come back one night under hypnosis and taken it. I’m one of only three people with a key to the offices and the loading bays, one of only three people who know the code to the security system.” I was starting to feel sick to my stomach again.
“Three weeks ago,” Stan said.
I nodded. I knew what he was saying—it was too much of a coincidence. “Michelle quit her job three weeks ago, but she never told me. Because she’s involved with this.” There, I’d finally said it out loud.
Adam and Joel exchanged glances.
“Michelle was the one programming me,” I whispered. I felt like the air had been knocked out of my lungs, like I’d been punched square in the chest and I couldn’t catch my breath. “She programmed me to go to my work and steal the bags of fertilizer. Then I stopped at the storage unit on the way home.”
“So they got him making a bomb?” Stan looked to Adam for the answer.
Adam shrugged again, exchanging another glance with Joel. I couldn’t be sure, but I think I was starting to pick up fear in their exchanged glances at each other, like they had stumbled onto something much bigger than they wanted to tackle.
“But a bomb for what?” Stan persisted.
“A terrorist attack,” Adam suggested. “There might be more than just bags of fertilizer in that unit. There might be other bomb-making supplies. There might be guns and other weapons.”
“And they want him to do it on April eleventh,” Stan whispered.
I could feel the puke wanting to come up.
“Could be a false flag attack,” Joel said.
“Something to push their agenda,” Adam added. “Something to make Americans afraid, something to convince Americans to hand over their guns, or get on board with the latest war.”
Joel stood up and looked at Adam. “I think it’s time you two left.”
Adam nodded. “Yeah, guys, I hate to cut this short, but we need to end this.”
“But what is he supposed to do?” Stan asked. He seemed unwilling to go, even though I was already standing up.
Adam shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“We can’t go to the police,” Stan said, his voice rising a little. “We can’t go to the government. Do we go to the newspapers?”
Adam just stared at Stan like he should already know the answer to that. “I doubt a story like that would ever get past any editor.”
“Come on, Stan,” I said. “We should go.”
“We need some help,” Stan said. “You guys said you could help.”
“I said we would try,” Adam said. His voice had a sudden edge to it.
“Come on, Stan,” I said again.
Finally, Stan grabbed his laptop and stood up.
I felt numb as I walked to the door of the RV, about to step out into a world I’d never known before, a world that was suddenly real now.
We got into my truck and I started it. I slipped the battery back into my phone and turned it on. I shifted into reverse and pulled out of the grassy area next to the RV, then drove back down the little street, following the signs that led back out of the RV park.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I drove. A patsy. I was the patsy. And Michelle was a part of it all—there was no denying that now. She’d been a part of this since the beginning. Was our whole life a lie? My whole life?
“You want me to drive, dude?” Stan asked.
I didn’t answer him as I pulled out of the RV park and onto the road. A terrible thought had just crossed my mind. “I met Michelle in college right after my parents died in a car crash.”
Stan seemed to sense where I was heading with my words. “You don’t know that the crash had anything to do with all of this.”
“But what if it did? What if this was set up when I was a teenager, set up from when I was a kid, whenever they got a hold of my DNA and knew I could be programmed? What if they killed my parents when I went to college to get me and Michelle together?”
Stan didn’t say anything. What could he say? I saw in his eyes that he believed what I was saying. And I suspected that he’d already thought of it before I had.
It was nearly night now as I drove down the road away from the RV park.
“I can’t believe those guys,” Stan said. “I thought they would help us.”
At first I’d been prepared not to believe the two men and their supposed affiliation with some government agency—one of the alphabet agencies, as Stan called them—but after spending almost an hour with them, I believed they knew what they were talking about. But I also believed that they felt they were in over their heads with this. Possibly things they’d heard rumors about, programs they’d only suspected had existed, were suddenly real to them and they didn’t know how to handle it. They didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t know what I was going to do. I just drove in a fog as the sun dipped down below the trees.
Just then my cell phone rang. I picked it up, glancing at a number I didn’t recognize, but it had a local area code. I thought about ignoring the call, waiting for it to go to voicemail, but for some reason I knew I had to answer it. At least it would be a distraction for a few seconds from the nightmare I’d found myself in.
But when I answered the phone, the world got a lot crazier.
“Hello?” I said into the phone.
“Zach.”
It was Michelle.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I needed to pull my pickup truck over to the side of the road. My world was spinning, and it wasn’t safe for me to be driving at that moment. The next few seconds seemed to drag out for hours. I had my cell phone clutched in my hand, tight up against my ear. I needed to hold on to this phone, I couldn’t let it go, I couldn’t lose Michelle again.
I veered over to the side of the road too quickly, running up onto the grassy shoulder, the truck bumping along the uneven ground, my truck creaking.
From the passenger seat, I heard Stan asking what was wrong and why I was pulling over. The fear in his voice was unmistakable. He was probably still spooked from being in Adam and Joel’s RV. I was, too.
“What’s wrong?” Stan asked. “Who is that?”
A car that had been following me too closely swerved around me as I got off the road, racing away and probably happy that I was out of his way.
I came to a stop, slamming on the brakes a little too hard, both of us pitching forward into our seatbelts. But through all the rocking and bouncing, I hadn’t lost the cell phone next to my ear.
“Who is that?” Sta
n asked again, his voice practically a shriek now.
I ignored Stan. “Michelle?” I said into the phone.
In that moment I was back to Square One, back to believing that Michelle had been taken, that she hadn’t left me, that she wasn’t involved with all of this. In those few seconds that fantasy came back to me. I was ready to forgive her. I just wanted things to go back to the way they were. I just wanted my old life back.
“Zach,” Michelle said. The first time she’d said my name it had been a question, like she was making sure I was who she was calling. This time my name came out sharply, like a teacher scolding a student.
“Michelle,” I breathed into the phone again, the motor of my pickup rumbling, the air conditioner down low, the windows rolled up and muting the sound of the cars and trucks roaring past us on the road only a few feet away.
Questions poured out of me, my words practically running together. “Where are you? Where did you go? Someone said you left with a man. Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“Zach,” That sharp command was back again. “Listen to me.”
I paused, my breath caught in my throat.
“You need to stop digging,” she said.
For a moment I didn’t understand what she was saying, the words not even making sense to me.
“Stop digging,” she said again. “Stop asking questions. Do you understand me?”
“Michelle . . .”
Click.
She’d hung up.
I stared at the phone like I couldn’t figure out what had happened. The phone went dark.
“That was Michelle?” Stan asked.
I didn’t answer; I just stared at the phone in my hand.
“Holy shit,” Stan whispered.
I checked the number Michelle had just called from and dialed it into my phone with trembling fingers. A second later I heard the now-familiar sound of a disconnected phone, a robotic female voice telling me the number I had just dialed was not in service. I tried the number three more times.
“What did she say?” Stan asked. He seemed hyper, ready to jump out of his seat.
Shaking my head and staring out the windshield, I laid the phone back down in the center console. “She told me to stop digging.”
For once Stan was speechless.
Stop digging—Michelle had said to stop digging. Stop asking questions.
A threat?
It sure had sounded like it. Michelle had left me, then she just called me and threatened me.
Suddenly all of the fantasies of Michelle not being involved with this were gone in an instant, the idea impossible now. I’d heard it in her voice, in her tone. She’d never loved me. I had been a job to her, something to program and watch over, waiting until I needed to be activated. I couldn’t help thinking about my parents again, an anger rising inside of me like a geyser. The car crash had always seemed suspicious to me. My dad had lost control of the car—that had always been the explanation for the accident. Witnesses said the car sped right off the road and into a tree, exploding instantly. They said my father never even slowed down, the brake lights never came on.
Since the fire had damaged my mom and dad’s bodies too badly, there hadn’t been much evidence from the autopsies. The doctor told me that most likely my dad had suffered a massive heart attack or stroke while driving, and my mother hadn’t been able to stop the car.
I had accepted the doctor’s explanations then, but I wasn’t so sure now. Everything seemed suspicious to me now, a plot to get me to Michelle.
Had the programming from Michelle and the cabal started as soon as she met me? Had she programmed me to go to work at Carlton’s Lawn and Pest Control? Programmed me to become a manager so I would have access to the fertilizer? I tried to remember why I had taken this job in the first place, and I couldn’t remember. I tried to think of why I had stayed there all these years. The money wasn’t the greatest, and I really kind of hated the job. But I had stayed.
“Zach,” Stan said,
I looked at him and saw the horror in his eyes.
“They know,” he whispered and glanced down at my cell phone in the console. “Your phone. They’ve probably been tracking you. You shouldn’t have put the battery back in.”
I wasn’t paying attention to Stan; I was concentrating on the road, whispering to myself, repeating Michelle’s words to me: Stop digging.
I wondered what digging Michelle was talking about. Talking to Kendra at her work? Harassing the waitress and manager at the restaurant where she’d left me? Going to Dr. Valentine’s office? No, she—they—would have expected me to do all of that. It was the other stuff, the computer searches, the cameras, bringing Stan and Alicia into this. Adam and Joel.
But it was even more than that—it was what we’d found out tonight about the storage unit and what was inside of it. It was the time and date we had figured out.
“We need to get out of here,” Stan said, looking behind him out the rear window of my pickup truck like he expected a car to pull up behind us at any second. “Cops might come. Wonder why you’re parked on the side of the road.”
Stan was right; I didn’t need to draw any attention to myself right now.
As I was about to shift into drive and pull back onto the road, Stan picked up my cell phone, about to take the battery back out, but the phone rang. I grabbed it out of his hand, expecting to see Michelle’s number on the screen again. It wasn’t her number—I didn’t know whose number it was.
“Hello?” I said, answering the phone.
“Zach?”
“Alicia?”
“Hi. Sorry, I got your number from Stan yesterday. I was trying to call him, but he’s not answering his phone.”
“He’s here with me. He doesn’t have his phone with him.” I didn’t want to go into a long and detailed reason why, and I felt the less I said on my phone the better. “You want to talk to him?”
“No,” she said, and I could practically hear the shudder in her voice. “Actually, I was trying to get a hold of you. I’m at your house.”
“My house? Why are you at my house?” I cringed at how rude that must have just sounded. “I mean—”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I called your home phone and tried to find Stan. I wanted to tell you what I found out about the pills.”
Not on the phone, I thought. I looked at Stan and saw the same expression on his face. He shook his head no.
“How about some ice cream?” I blurted out to Alicia before she could continue.
I checked the rearview and side mirrors before pulling back onto the road.
“Ice cream?” she asked.
“Or some coffee. I know a nice little place where all of us can go.”
“Okay,” she finally said. “Where?”
I gave her the directions and then hung up.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Alicia was there before we were, waiting in her car in the parking lot. The place wasn’t crowded, and we pulled up in the space right beside her. I had pulled the battery out of my phone and left it in the glove box. Stan left his phone and laptop in the truck, and I locked the doors after we got out. Stan had already written a few words on a small notepad we’d stopped at a dollar store to buy: LEAVE YOUR PHONE IN THE CAR.
I expected Alicia to question the note when Stan showed it to her, but she didn’t. She left her phone in the car and got out, pushing the button on her key fob to lock the doors. I could tell she was rattled by something. She told me on the phone she wanted to tell me something about the pills, and then I had remembered that she had taken a pill from both of my prescription bottles to get them tested by a chem major she knew. That had only been a few hours ago, but now it felt like it was days ago.
We went into the little diner and found the table farthest away from any other customers. I didn’t know if we would be any safer inside the building, especially after Adam told me about parabolic directional microphones, but this diner had to be better than my own house.
“What’s wrong?” Alicia asked after we sat down in a booth. She scooted all the way to the window. Stan sat down next to her. I sat across from them. “You guys look scared out of your wits.”
“We found some things out,” I told her.
“Yeah, me too.”
“Okay,” I said, keeping my voice low. “You go first.”
“Where did you get those prescriptions from?” she asked me.
“From Dr. Valentine.”
“I mean, which pharmacy filled them?”
“They came in the mail.”
“The mail?”
I shrugged. “Dr. Valentine would write out the prescriptions for me and then send them off. I’d get the prescriptions about a week later in the mail.”
“And you didn’t think that was unusual?”
“Not really. I figured that’s how things were done nowadays.”
“Do you know where the pills came from? What address? Do you still have the package they came in? Was there a packing slip with them or some kind of receipt?”
“I don’t know where they came from. Never really looked at the address. Out of state, I think, but I can’t remember where.”
“What about the package they came in?”
“I’m sure I threw it away. And that was at least a few weeks ago. Why?”
“I just wanted to see the name of the pharmacy the pills came from.”
“Is there something wrong with them?”
“No. I mean yes. They’re not the pills they’re supposed to be. Not what’s written on the label, at least.” She pulled out a piece of paper from her purse and unfolded it.
“What are they?”
She handed me the paper. I looked at it—some kind of computer printout that I didn’t understand with a bunch of long chemical names and percentages. “What does this mean?”
“Those pills are nothing but fillers.”
“Fillers?”
“Yeah, the fillers they put into pills: starch, sugars like lactose, calcium salts, binders.”
“Placebos?” Stan offered.