by Zara Zenia
“I don’t know.”
“This man knocked you up and you don’t even know his last name? I thought I raised you better than this.”
My eyes welled up with tears. I wasn’t exactly happy with this development either.
“Find his file,” my dad demanded. “I want to see who this guy is.”
“There isn’t one,” I sighed. “He’s a temp worker. You told me not to mess around with paperwork for those guys. There’s nothing on him.”
His face turned a deep shade of red. He marched toward the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going down to the site to have a word with him.”
“You can’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
“He’s not there.”
I started to cry. My dad looked uncomfortable.
“I went looking for him this morning,” I said between sobs. “The guys said he didn’t show today. I tried his apartment the last few days. He never answered.”
“What now?” he asked.
I had thought about what I would do if I were ever in this position. I had a few choices. I could end the pregnancy, give the baby up for adoption, or keep it and raise it alone. I really wanted to have a child someday, I just didn’t think it would be so soon. I can’t explain the reasoning behind my decision, but something in my gut told me what I needed to do.
“I’m going to keep it,” I said.
“I want no part of this, Dana,” he said. “If this is the choice you’re going to make, I want you out of my house.”
“Today?” I asked. I wanted to leave the house and this job, but not immediately.
“I’ll give you two months to leave this business and my home. I can’t have my pregnant daughter being seen in public. I will not stand by while everyone can see what a whore my daughter has become.”
I felt like I had been slapped in the face. My parents and I weren’t close, but they weren’t ever this cruel.
I needed some support. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I needed my parents’ support. I didn’t think I could have a baby on my own.
I needed Elijah, now more than ever. Even if he told me to leave him alone forever, I needed to hear it from him.
Chapter 11
Elijah
On Friday, Dana briefly stopped by the site to arrange plans with me. We had hooked up so many times that we developed our own little secret code. “Any weekend plans?” she asked me casually.
“Yeah, I have a friend coming to town on Saturday night. Maybe around 8:00?”
“Sounds fun. There are some new movies at the theater this weekend. I think there’s a guest DJ at the club, too. Are you doing anything special?”
“Nah, just hanging out at my place.”
With that, our plans were set.
That night, I was bored, and couldn’t stop thinking about how things were getting weird between us. I felt like I was leading her on, and she wanted more from this arrangement. I wanted to clear the air before our night together on Saturday.
I couldn’t call her, and I certainly couldn’t ring her doorbell and talk, so I wrote her a letter.
Dana,
I couldn’t help but sense that things have changed between us. What started out as meaningless sex feels like something more. I’ve had an amazing time with you and I want to keep spending time with you. I have to be honest with you, though. I can’t be in a relationship right now, and I want to make sure you understand that. I hope I’m not making things too weird, because I’m excited to see you tomorrow.
E
It was nearly midnight, and the town was silent. I didn’t like to wander around, but I was fairly confident that no one would see me. I knew that Dana lived close to the office, in the biggest house on the block. It was a cool summer night, so I made my way over there to deliver my message.
I made it a few blocks when I noticed my grumbling stomach. Ever sense I left The Organization, I’d been terrible about feeding myself. I was so used to being fed at regular intervals, that when left to my own devices, I just forgot. I knew of a convenience store nearby, so I diverted my route ever so slightly.
I grabbed a bag of chips from the display and handed a wad of cash to the cashier. As he counted it, I couldn’t help but notice the man at the adjacent register. He was wearing a plain, black suit and placed a single bottle of water on the counter. The man had tinted glasses on, so I couldn’t see where his eyes were looking. I just had a bad feeling they were starting directly at me.
I grabbed my snack and walked out the door. The man followed a few steps behind me.
“Sir,” the cashier called. “You forgot your water.”
The man ignored her and continued walking. I picked up the pace to see if he would follow. He did, keeping the same amount of space between us.
I sprinted off. Behind me, I could see headlights flip on and heard the slam of a car door. They were in pursuit.
I ran ahead of the black, heavily tinted car, like I had the night of my escape. I cut through yards and alleys, but they managed to find me each time I hit a main road. This town was too small. There weren’t enough places to hide.
I managed to lose them for a minute when I ran through the park. The bike trail was too narrow for cars, so I buried myself as far as I could under the shelter of massive oak trees. There was a highway on the other side. I was trapped like a rat.
At the most, I only had a few minutes to get away before the agents found me. I picked a tall tree with lots of branches and leaf cover and scaled it in a matter of seconds.
I got to my perch in the tree just in time. I heard footsteps and hushed voices not too far from my hiding place.
During one of my procedures at the hospital, I was coming to after being under anesthesia and I heard a strange conversation. I always chalked it up to being delirious from the medication, but as I sat in the tree, something clicked.
I heard the doctors talking about tracking devices, and one seemed really annoyed that his research kept falling through. I knew that tracking devices were sometimes used in our line of work. We used them to find our vehicles, or our meeting points. Sometimes, we even used location trackers on missiles or other weapons. This was something different. The doctors were talking about tracking humans.
I felt like I was in that tree for hours. I didn’t see any sign of them, so I waited another hour or so, just to be safe, and cautiously climbed down.
By now, they were certainly at my apartment. I counted the cash in my wallet. One hundred and thirteen dollars. I wanted to grab the rest of my cash that I worked so hard for, but it was completely out of the question. I had to leave now.
I figured that they would have agents at the bus stop, so I cut through backyards all the way to the edge of town.
Dana told me about a country road she liked to go to at night to look at the stars. She was right; the small pinpricks of light in the black sky were dazzling from here. I stepped into the ditch, where I could duck down if necessary, and ran on the soft earth.
It was completely dark and silent out here. I found it both eerie and oddly comforting. If anyone approached, I would see or hear them from miles away.
Before the sun came up, I passed through a couple small towns. I was afraid that The Organization would expect me there, so I constantly changed directions.
Once the sun came up, there was no point in running any more. Without the cover of night, a man running in the middle of the country in street clothes was suspicious. I entered the next small town and found a lone gas station by the side of the highway.
“Excuse me,” I said to a man filling up his old, beat up pickup. “Where is the closest bus stop?”
“You don’t look like you’re from here,” he drawled.
“No, I’m not.” I scrambled my brain for a new lie. “I’m a little embarrassed to say, but I had a fight with my girlfriend while we were driving back from the city, and she dumped me out here.”
T
he man laughed. “Son, I’ve been there before. Where are you headed?”
“Uh, back to the city?” I didn’t know where I was or what the nearest city was. All small towns have a nearby “big city” though.
“Hop in, I was just going that way myself.”
I had no choice but to get in his truck and see where he was taking me.
This guy wasn’t a big talker, and that was perfectly fine with me. I was pretty tired, and wanted to get my mind straight.
He kept spitting his tobacco spit into an empty beer bottle, and the smell was making my stomach turn. I couldn’t remember the last meal I had.
It was time to regroup and develop a new game plan. I had to be more careful this time. I could not create any sort of relationship with anyone. No matter how good they looked in a tiny thong and lace bra.
There were more job opportunities in big cities and bigger crowds to get lost in. I could work a job for a few weeks, and then go somewhere new. I could be more anonymous until things cooled down.
At what point would The Organization stop looking for me? What makes me so special that they can’t just let me go? I didn’t know much about what they were doing, so I really had no secrets to spill. They were running low on test subjects, but soldiers suffered serious injuries all the time. Certainly there would never be a shortage of test subjects in this world.
I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew, I was at a public bus stop in downtown Avalon. When I got out of the truck, I was almost lost in the crowd pushing to get on the bus. I felt like I made the right decision.
I reached into my pocket for bus fare, and pulled out my note to Dana. I didn’t need this now. I ripped it into four even pieces and dropped them in the trash.
Chapter 12
Dana
To say that I was having a hard time piecing things together would be an understatement. I felt completely lost and alone.
My dad convinced me to tell him where Elijah was living. He knew all of the property managers in town, and I thought that maybe someone knew where he was. The owner of his apartment building didn’t have any information on him either, because he was subletting the apartment from another tenant. He did manage to get inside the apartment, which didn’t yield any good information.
“I see he didn’t clean up before he left,” the landlord said. “It looks like he packed up, but left some clothing on the floor and food in the fridge.”
To me, it didn’t look like he packed up at all. He had few belongings, and I was certain that he left without much planning.
“At least he left the remainder of his rent,” my dad said, pointing to the stack of cash on the nightstand.
“More than that,” the landlord said, counting the money. “I suppose he thought this would cover the cost of cleaning this place up.”
I leafed through his remaining belongings and peeked into drawers. Not even a note.
“What a low-life,” my dad muttered.
I couldn’t stand being around my dad any longer, so I left the apartment and went to the diner.
“Are you here for your daily gallon of coffee?” the diner owner asked me.
“Not today, Frank,” I responded. “Just some pie, and maybe a glass of milk.”
I ate my snack and made a mental list of all of the places Elijah could have gone.
I knew exactly how much money he made doing construction and how much rent in a place like that cost. I did some quick math and figured that he couldn’t have more than a few hundred dollars with him. Not enough to buy a plane ticket, so he couldn’t have gone too far.
When we talked about jobs we wanted, he always brought up the idea of working at a music venue. He said that he always went to clubs and dive bars between deployments. I figured that would be a good place to start looking for him.
I did a quick search on my phone and found there were hundreds of venues and bars within a hundred-mile radius of here. By the time I had a lead, he could already be gone again.
Frank dropped off a piece of pie. Just what I needed.
“Is everything all right with your friend?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” I nearly choked on my food.
“Two men came in here the other day and asked if I’d seen that big guy that sometimes meets you for lunch here. They showed me a picture of him.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I just said that I had seen him around, but I didn’t know much about him, except for the fact that he was one of your dad’s workers.”
“Did you mention me?” I asked casually.
“No,” he replied. “I got the feeling that you were trying to keep your friendship under wraps. I didn’t want to get you in trouble.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, handing him money for my food. I had somewhere to be.
My next stop was the construction site. The temp laborers were working away as if nothing had happened. I was envious that everyone’s lives could continue while mine was in a downward spiral.
“Has anyone visited the site recently? Like, someone who doesn’t work for the company?” I asked the foreman.
“No, but two guys came into the office on Friday evening. It was after business hours, but I stopped back there because I forgot my phone in the conference room. They were standing by the front door. Strange looking guys.”
“How so?”
“They were dressed pretty formally. More formal than anyone in Springfield ever dresses. They clearly weren’t from here.”
“What did they want?”
“They just asked me if I knew that Elijah guy. I told them that he was my best worker. An absolute machine, that guy is. Does the work of three men.”
“Did they ask anything else?”
“Just asked what I knew about the guy. I couldn’t tell them much; he never really talked. I knew that he lived in one of the apartment buildings not too far from here.”
“Why were they looking for him?”
“Oh, who knows? He was probably late on his child support or missed a meeting with his probation officer.”
“How would you know that?”
“I don’t,” he sighed. “But I’ve worked with enough of these guys to know that it’s a major possibility. Some of these guys are nice enough and are good workers. You get guys that don’t have a lot of other skills, or need some money to send home to their families in other countries. Other times, we get real shady characters, guys who committed felonies and can’t get work elsewhere. You never know who you’re going to get.”
Did I know anything about Elijah? He certainly didn’t have a family to send money to, and he must have acquired some skills if he was in the army for so long. Was there something I was missing?
“Are you sure that’s all you got from these guys?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much it. They had these weird glasses on, so I couldn’t see their eyes very well. Said they were government workers. I asked them which branch they were a part of, because we don’t want any trouble with immigration, ya know? But they wouldn’t tell me, exactly. Some kind of secret branch, I suppose. Maybe military.”
Suddenly, something clicked. I went back home and started a list of music venues, starting with the ones is the larger surrounding cities. I needed to find him.
Someone else was looking for him. Someone with a lot of power, by the sound of it. I knew that Elijah was a good guy, no matter how bad things sounded. Our experiences together were only thing I had to go off of, but I just knew it was true.
My instincts told me that he was in some kind of trouble. Perhaps that was the reason that he didn’t like to talk about his past. He clearly had secrets, but I never pushed him to tell me.
It was suspicious, after all, that a man in his twenties would choose a middle-of-nowhere small town to live. He had no connections here; it was like he threw a dart at a map of the country, and it happened to hit somewhere in the middle of the United States. It would be a good place to go if you didn’t
want anyone to find you.
He also didn’t have a phone. I thought he was just quirky and old school, but maybe it was because he didn’t want to contact anyone, and didn’t want anyone to contact him.
The only logical explanation I could come up with was that something happened during his military service that he didn’t want anyone to know about. Something happened that caused him to hide out in our sleepy little town. I had suspected that he wasn’t discharged for an injury, because I saw just about every inch of his body, and I never saw any scars. In fact, I never saw a single blemish. Just perfectly smooth skin.
I didn’t know a lot about the military, but I knew that you couldn’t just leave. I’m pretty sure that doing so is a crime. He’d been in the army for a long time and probably had a high security clearance. Maybe he knew something that was top secret.
Maybe it wasn’t my fault after all. It was so silly to think that my interest in a guy would cause him to move out of town.
I didn’t care what kind of trouble he was in. I just wanted to find him to make sure he was okay. That, and I needed him. Our unborn child needed him, too.
Chapter 13
Dana
The day Elijah left, my life became exponentially more complicated. I realized that I started hooking up with Elijah just so I could have more excitement in my life, and I got more than I bargained for. If I would have known that meeting Elijah that morning would lead to me partaking on a manhunt while our child swam around in my belly, I would have just taken a cold shower and gotten on with my life. Alas, there was no going back now.
With all of the work that had to be done before I was officially kicked out of the house, there was little time left in my day to look for Elijah. As a punishment for being impregnated by one of his construction workers, my dad had somehow found more work for me to do. He demanded that I keep my condition a secret from the rest of the company, and I had no problem with that.