by Mark Lukens
I stopped Alicia before we began walking to the hotel. “You don’t have to go with me. You don’t have to do this. It’s too dangerous. I can just go.”
“I’m going with you,” she said. It didn’t look like she was willing to negotiate about it.
I wanted to tell her to get back in the car and leave; I wanted to command her to do it. But I knew she wasn’t going to listen to me. I wanted to explain that we might not be able to find the bomb in time, or even if we did, I might not be able to diffuse it. I wanted to tell her about the danger we were in, that we could be facing our deaths in the next few hours.
But she knew that already—I could see it in her eyes.
We had discussed calling the police anonymously as we’d driven to the beachside, telling them that there was a bomb threat at the hotel. But would they take it seriously? And even if they did, would the bomb go off while they were investigating? And the worst part was that the cabal would get away with it; they would just go on to the next target. No, we needed not only to stop it, but we needed proof. We promised ourselves that if we couldn’t find the bomb by three-thirty, then we would call the police and the hotel to warn them.
That didn’t give us much time, but we had to try. That’s what we had agreed to do.
It took a few minutes of brisk walking to get to the festival going on around the hotels next to each other. We passed people on the streets and sidewalks, many of them college kids dressed in swimwear and summer shorts, sleeveless shirts. We saw sunburned faces and shoulders, sunglasses and flip flops, Many were already drunk, laughing and stumbling. I’m sure Alicia and I fit in with the crowd because of the way we were dressed, but I didn’t feel like I fit in.
For the next thirty minutes we drifted in and out of the hotel lobbies and pool areas, trying to find something that triggered my buried memories. The music thrummed in the background among the cheers and noise. Nobody stopped us or talked to us, and I tried to keep an eye out for any sign of the cabal. Of course they wouldn’t be dressed in dark suits and sunglasses, but maybe they would still stand out from the college kids.
Time seemed to be passing by quickly. I swore I could hear the seconds ticking away in my mind.
“You don’t see anything that’s familiar to you?” Alicia asked when we were back on the street, heading north past the hotel.
I knew she was trying to sound patient with me, but I could hear the stress in her voice, the panic in her eyes.
I looked around, trying desperately to spot something, to recognize anything from my dreams and visions. I shook my head no.
It felt like we were running around in circles, moving from one place to the next, and then back to that same place. The bomb could be anywhere. But the bomb would have to be pretty big if they were going to use the bags of fertilizer I had stolen from work. I wondered if they would try to hide it in a lawn truck, but a truck like that would be too obvious.
But it might be in a vehicle. And then I remembered something I’d seen a few minutes earlier.
“Come on,” I told Alicia.
“What? Did you think of something?”
“Maybe.”
We went back down to the other side of the hotel, the south side. There were cars and trucks parked up and down the street, and many other vehicles were parked in the three-story parking garage across the street. But the bomb wouldn’t be in the parking garage—there wouldn’t be enough people there, not enough loss of life, not enough terror. No, it had to be around the hotel somewhere.
The bomb could be in one of the cars and trucks parked along A1A, but none of the vehicles seemed to be big enough to house all the bags of fertilizer. It would need to be a truck or van, like a rental truck maybe.
Alicia was right beside me as I entered an alleyway between the two hotels where deliveries were dropped off.
Parked at the other end was a box truck, backed in so that the front of it was facing us.
We ran down the alley, the walls of the hotel hiding us from the street. I stopped when we were right beside the truck. I stared at the name on the side of it: Golden Eagle Food Delivery.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
We had to hurry. There could be people watching us, or even snipers tracking us with their scopes. But then again, maybe not. Maybe the cabal was banking on me not remembering the clues in my dreams and visions; maybe they were banking that the instructions for this terror plot were buried too deep in my mind for me to recover; maybe they were banking that Alicia, a mere student, wouldn’t know how to tap into my subconscious. Or maybe they were banking that we would run, that what had happened to Stan, Adam, and Joel had scared us too badly. And maybe they were banking that they would eventually find us, banking that we couldn’t hide from them forever.
I felt jittery as I hurried around to the back of the delivery truck, my skin crawling. I swore I could feel a red dot on my skin from a laser scope on a rifle.
There was a combination lock on the doorhandle of the sliding door.
“I don’t . . .” I began.
“You know the code,” Alicia said. “You’ve written it down before in one of those series of numbers. Just let it come to you.”
I saw the lines of numbers I’d written whipping by in my mind, but none of them made any sense to me. It seemed like an endless combination of numbers.
“I can’t . . . can’t . . .” Panic welled inside of me.
Alicia’s voice was calm, her touch gentle as she laid a hand on my shoulder. “Just reach out and touch the lock. Don’t think about it.”
I did what she said. It felt like my hands weren’t my own, like I was watching a video of someone else doing this. I watched as my fingers seemed to move on their own, the numbers just seeming to come to me, swimming out of the ash and fog in my mind. Then the lock was open. Deep down inside I knew what the combination was, just like I’m sure I knew the combination to the storage unit—maybe it was the same combination, maybe even the same lock with my fingerprints all over it.
After rolling up the metal door, I saw the bags of fertilizer packed down into some kind of wooden box that took up the entire back of the van with some kind of metal contraption and wires connected to it. There was a digital display counting the seconds down—less than twenty minutes now.
“You can do this,” Alicia said from behind me.
I didn’t turn around and look at her, didn’t even respond. I took a deep breath and let my hands go to work, trusting my subconscious. I knew that I had rigged part of this up, that I had been trained to do so. I could almost see the memories of myself setting the wires and blasting caps in place inside the storage unit, getting it ready to be transported by this truck. But I hadn’t loaded it up into this truck.
What if I couldn’t remember all of it? What if I could only remember part of it?
I couldn’t think about that right now. I saw myself floating in my friend’s pool, the sky clear and blue above me, not the gray fog of ash drifting down everywhere. The water was calm and cool, not the churning waters from the aftermath of a cataclysm. I wasn’t all the way there in my vision, but halfway there, relaxed enough to still see that my hands seemed to be working on their own, disconnecting wires and caps, punching in a code on the computer display.
The numbers stopped counting down, the display went blank.
I pulled the wires out and balled them up in one hand, stuffing them down into the pockets of my shorts. I let out a long breath and looked at Alicia.
She smiled with relief.
We’d done it, but the danger wasn’t completely over. There was another part of the terror plot—I was sure of it, but I didn’t know exactly what it was.
“There’s something else,” I told Alicia.
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“Another bomb?”
“No, I don’t think so. But there’s something else I was supposed to do.” It was nagging at me, pulling at me. It seemed to be there somewhere in the fog of
my mind, almost materializing like the ram in my visions had.
“Come on,” Alicia said. “We need to go.”
As soon as I slid the rolling door of the delivery truck down, closing it, I heard a man shouting at us from a doorway to the hotel. The party was still going on somewhere beyond those walls, on the pool decks, the music loud from where we stood.
“What are you two doing?” the man asked. He was dressed in some kind of uniform, maybe security.
I fumbled with the padlock on the doorhandle, snapping it back in place. I was sure a gunshot was going to sound at any moment, but I probably wouldn’t even hear it—I would just feel the impact of a bullet and then the world would go black for me.
“Hey!” the man called at us again.
We ran. We were back out on the sidewalk in seconds, blending in with the crowd, trying to hurry, but trying not to be too conspicuous.
“This isn’t over,” I told Alicia as we walked.
She nodded. “We’ll find it.”
Again, I saw the clock in my mind, counting down the seconds until doomsday. We were running out of time.
We hurried down the sidewalk, but I didn’t see anything that was triggering my memories. I crossed the street.
“Where are you going?” Alicia asked, hurrying to keep up with me.
A car had to practically screech to a halt as we ran to the other side of the street. It was just a hunch, but we’d been up and down that sidewalk in front of the hotels several times now. It had to be somewhere else, somewhere less obvious.
The parking garage? It seemed to be calling to me, so I headed for it.
“In there?” Alicia asked.
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I don’t think so. But maybe somewhere near it.”
We went past the parking garage, down to the next block, heading towards Grand Avenue. Businesses gave way to houses and apartment buildings.
Then I froze.
Alicia stopped right beside me. “What is it?”
“I think that’s it,” I told her.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
It looked like an abandoned house: two stories, wood siding, peeling paint, cracked and dark windows, an attached carport.
“The house?” Alicia said.
“Yeah. There’s something in there. Something under that carport.”
She didn’t bother asking questions. We hurried across the front lawn of the home and under the carport. The area was large enough to fit two vehicles inside of it, but there was only one vehicle parked there—a black pickup truck with a cap on the back. The truck was older with big tires. A Dodge Ram.
A black ram.
Like the black ram I’d seen in my visions and dreams.
It could have just been a coincidence, but I could feel that it was right, like I’d seen this vehicle somewhere before.
“That’s it?” Alicia said. “The truck?”
“The things I saw in my dreams, the things from my subconscious. The clues. One of them was a golden eagle, like the name on that delivery truck. Another one was a black ram coming out of the mist.”
Her eyes lit up. She remembered now.
I peeked in through the truck’s window, then gently tested the doorhandle. Locked. The topper on back was solid with only a window in the back. I went around to the back and cupped my hands to the sides of my face, peering in through the tinted window. In the back there were canvas bags with a few long metal barrels poking out.
“What is it?” Alicia asked from the side of the truck. “What’s in there?”
“Looks like weapons,” I told her. “Rifles. Guns.”
I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I break the glass and take the weapons? Load them into our Ford Taurus and get away as fast as we could?
“Zach,” Alicia hissed from closer to the front of the truck.
I hurried from behind the truck to the side where she stood.
A man approached us, walking swiftly and purposely. He wore camouflage shorts that came down to his knees, white socks, black combat boots, and a yellow T-shirt with some kind of writing on it. He had an American flag bandana on his head and a pair of aviator sunglasses over his eyes.
It was him, the other patsy.
We stood near the driver’s door of the truck as the man walked toward the carport.
“Stop,” I told the man, startling him.
He stopped right at the front of the truck, only a few feet away from us. It was like he hadn’t even seen us until I spoke. He stared at me. Even with the dark sunglasses, I could tell he was confused. Plans had been laid out a certain way in his mind and we were suddenly disturbing those plans.
“You can’t do this,” I told him.
The man didn’t say anything, his body was still tense.
Was that what I was supposed to be, a monster, a puppet carrying along the cabal’s orders?
“Listen to me,” Alicia said.
The man turned his attention to Alicia. He frowned and started reaching under his shirt at the waistband of his shorts.
Alicia had her Taser in her hand—she aimed it at the man, the electrodes shooting out at him, sticking to his shirt, electrocuting him.
The man’s sunglasses fell off as he fell down to the ground, convulsing for a moment.
Alicia kept the Taser in her hand, ready to give another jolt if she needed to.
The man sat up and looked around like he was confused. He looked down at himself like he didn’t recognize himself, like he didn’t understand why he was wearing camouflage and combat boots. “What am I doing here?” he asked, his voice cracking. “Who are you?”
“You’ve been programmed,” I told him. “Hypnotized.”
“No,” he said, trying to smile like this was all some big joke, but his smile was a quivering thing on his lips.
“I was one, too,” I told him before he could argue. “They programmed me. Did it over a series of years, preparing me for this moment. But Alicia pulled me out of it. She helped me. She can help you too. We can all go to the police together.”
The man looked unsure about that, unsure about everything.
“What’s your name?” I asked. “I’m Zach Hughes. And this is Alicia.”
“Randy,” he said. “I don’t . . . I don’t know about . . .”
“You have the keys to this truck,” I said. It wasn’t a question. “You have the keys, but you don’t remember ever seeing this truck before.”
Randy’s right hand went to his front pants pocket. He could feel the bulge of the keys there.
“You have a gun in the waistband of your pants,” Alicia said.
Randy’s other hand went to his side, and then he flinched.
“There are weapons in this truck,” I told Randy. “A lot of them. Assault rifles and handguns. They programmed you to use these weapons to shoot and kill as many people at the festival in the hotels on the beachside a few blocks away.”
Randy shook his head. “No. That’s not true.”
“After the bomb goes off,” I said. “You’ve already set up a bomb in a delivery truck.” I wasn’t sure if Randy had actually set the bomb or somebody else had, not even sure if that information had been planted into him during his brief programming.
“No,” he said again, his voice losing strength, now almost a whisper.
“Golden Eagle Food Delivery,” I said.
The words seemed to ring a bell with Randy.
“A black ram,” I said, gesturing at the pickup right beside me.
He stared at the big black truck. “I . . . I would never shoot people. Hurt people.”
“I know,” Alicia said. “But some people can be hypnotized to do things they would normally never do. I just brought you out of hypnosis. I can help you. We can help you. But we need you to help us first.”
Randy seemed to relax just a little as he waited for Alicia to continue.
“We can all help each other,” Alicia went on in her soft, soothing voice. She was getting to Randy bette
r than I was. “The people doing this, they’re very bad people. We need to get away from here right now. They’re setting all of us up to look like killers. We can explain everything. We can show you proof that we’ve got. But first you need to trust us.”
Randy still looked a little uncertain.
“You can keep your gun,” Alicia said. “And the keys to this truck.”
Randy looked horrified by the idea of that.
“We’re not cops,” Alicia said quickly. “But we can go to the cops together.”
I knew we couldn’t go to the cops, but Alicia was saying anything to get Randy to trust us. Once we explained what was going on, proved to him what was going on, let him watch the videos of my hypnotic sessions, even let Alicia put him under, then he would see. I wasn’t sure who we could go to with our proof, but we would find someone to listen to our story, find some politicians who weren’t corrupt, or maybe a journalist brave enough to tell this story, or maybe find help in another country. And with Randy’s testimony, it would only make our story that much more believable.
“Randy, please,” Alicia said. “We need your help.”
Randy seemed to come to a decision. He got back up to his feet, pulling the electrodes off of his shirt and letting them fall to the ground. He nodded at us, still six feet away and just beyond the front of the truck, nearly silhouetted in the opening of the carport. And then the side of his head exploded as a bullet tunneled through. He dropped to the ground, already dead.
CHAPTER FIFTY
I hadn’t even heard the gunshot, but Randy was definitely dead. His eyes were glassy; the sunglasses he’d been holding in one hand had fallen from his limp fingers and skittered away. His mouth hung open. There seemed to be the ghost of an expression on his face, one of surprise.
“Don’t move.”
It was Michelle’s voice.
I looked at Randy again. He had a gun in the waistband of his shorts and the keys to the Dodge Ram in his front pants pocket. Could I get to them in time?
Michelle hurried up to the opening of the carport, aiming a gun with a suppressor at us.