by Darrell Pitt
Chapter Nine
Ten minutes later we’re walking down the middle of the sidewalk back to the car. There is only one word the kid seems capable of saying and now he’s saying it a lot.
“Amazing,” he shakes his head. “Just amazing.”
“You’ll get used to it,” I say. “She’s like Bruce Lee. Only better. And faster. And prettier. And –”
“Amazing,” he repeats.
“All in a day’s work.” Brodie flashes a smile. “Now, we’d better start with introductions. What’s your name?”
He looks down. “I wish I could tell you, but –”
“Amnesia?” I ask.
“How’d you know?”
“It’s going around,” I say. “But there’s a cure.”
“There is?”
I check the back of his jeans. It turns out his name is Dan.
“I christen you Dan,” I say. “A last name costs extra. Now, tell us what you remember.”
He does. It’s more similar to Brodie’s story than my own. He woke up the previous day in an abandoned store on the West side of Manhattan with no memory of his previous life. He wandered around aimlessly for a while before realizing he had a piece of paper in his pocket. Nothing was written on the paper, but it had a letterhead.
Cygnus Industries.
He would have gone to the police, but there was something that stopped him. Dan produces a folding knife from his pocket and shows it to us. It has blood on it.
“You don’t think –” I begin.
Dan shrugs. “I didn’t know what to think. This isn’t my blood so whose is it? Did I stab someone? Did I kill them?” He stops. “I decided to lay low until I had some answers.”
“I know you don’t remember anything much,” Brodie says. “But you can obviously speak English. Can you speak any other languages?”
He frowns. “I’m not sure.”
“Say ‘my name is Dan’ in Japanese,” Brodie instructs.
“I can’t.”
“Vietnamese.”
“No.”
“Chinese?”
He lets out a string of words.
“Holy hell,” he says softly. “I can speak Chinese.”
It’s not so much his Chinese that impresses me, but his English. His English is good. Very good. He speaks with a very slight singsong inflection. Otherwise there’s no doubt he has spoken the language for a good many years.
“You know,” he muses. “I can remember streets too. Streets that are not from around here.”
“Are they in China?” I ask.
“I think so,” he says thoughtfully.
Now that he mentions remembering places other than here, my own mind begins to drift. An image comes to me as clear as day. A golden brown field of wheat. Blue sky. A farm house.
The image fades.
It’s the first time something has come back to me from my past life, from the time pre-now. I try to recover more of the thoughts – places, names and people – but nothing comes.
Dan continues. “I might have –”
That’s when the shot rings out. It pings off a street light next to my head. We swing around. Damn. The two guys that Brodie took out of the equation back at Cygnus Industries are charging down the street after us.
We run.
Another bullet whistles past us. I spy a set of steps leading down into a subway. Pointing to them, we take the stairs two at a time. There are turnstiles at the bottom. We push through these and hurry down another flight of stairs.
These lead to the station. A train has just pulled in. It lies about fifty feet in front of us. We race down the platform. The doors begin to close. I hold them open as Dan and Brodie squeeze in between them. The train starts to ease out of the station.
Yes!
I punch the air.
“We made it,” Brodie beams. “Now if –”
The sound of gunfire is explosive and all consuming. I shove Brodie and Dan to the floor as I catch a glimpse of three men on the platform. The two men from the Cygnus office have been joined by a third man. He is holding a machine gun and raking the carriage with fire.
Glass explodes everywhere. People dive to the floor. The front cabin where the driver sits implodes inwards with shrapnel. Then the train picks up speed and disappears into the tunnel.
The carriage is relatively empty. The few people inside were scattered around the interior. Now they slowly pick themselves up off the floor. As far as I can see, through some miracle, no one has been injured. Then I turn my attention to the driver. The door behind the driver contains a small glass panel through which I can see the interior.
The driver is slumped backward over his seat.
Hell.
“What is it?” Dan asks.
“The driver’s dead,” I tell him.
The train continues to pick up speed as one of the passengers appears.
“What’s happening, son?”
“It looks like the driver’s dead.”
“Holy hell.”
“And we seem to be picking up speed.”
“Surely there’s a failsafe switch.”
That would make sense. “Maybe it was damaged in the gunfire.”
“It’s not going to be possible to open that door to get in,” Brodie says. “We should move everyone to the back of the train.”
The man nods and starts directing passengers to the next carriage. It strikes me that people are amazingly supportive of each other in a crisis. The train picks up even more speed. It begins to rock from side to side.
“We’d better get to the back of the train,” Brodie says. “We can’t do anything here.”
We start to move back, but Dan remains at the tiny square of glass, his eyes fixed on the driver. I grab his arm.
“We can’t do anything for the driver,” I tell him gently.
“I know.” Dan glances up at me. “Although I think I might be able to help.”
The train comes out of the tunnel and barrels along an elevated rail line. Apartment buildings fly past on both sides. I feel a real sense of fear. With the speed increasing, even with the people taking refuge in the rear, it’s going to be an almighty accident when it happens. A disaster. My heart is beating like a drum. We are not just simply going to slide sedately off the rails. We’re going to fly off this elevated line at high speed.
“What do you mean?” Brodie asks.
Dan stands back from the door and holds out his hands. He looks like a magician doing a magic trick. For a moment I wonder if he’s completely lost his marbles. Then I notice the door shuddering. It’s not just caused by the movement of the train. It’s more than that.
It’s Dan.
He’s doing it with his mind.