by Ryan Horvath
It was Brian, this time, who broke the silence. “This looks awesome,” he said as he looked down at his plate.
“From the three of us, I’d expect no less,” Jack said and he winked at Brian.
“May I have some of the chicken? Um… Please?” River mewed and licked her chops.
“Of course!” the men replied in unison. Each of them cut some of their chicken and shredded it. They put it in a saucer Ian got from the cabinet and set the chicken on the edge of the table. River put her forepaws on the edge of the table, smelled the chicken up close and quickly dug into it. With that, the men also began to eat. The only sounds were the happy clanking of silverware, the chewing, drinking, the requests to pass something, and the groans of pleasure from satisfying and delicious food.
When they were finished eating, around 7:30 PM, they cleaned up their dishes and retired to the den for whisky sours and a couple movies. Ian sat in the easy chair and Jack and Brian took the sofa with River stretching out in the small crevice between the two men’s thighs. Ian selected a comedy.
As they watched, Jack tried to stay in the moment, to hang on to this normalcy that surrounded this evening with his friends. He tried not to think about the next few days and whatever hardships may lie ahead for them. He stole glances toward Brian and Ian throughout the movie, wondering what was really going through their minds.
Ian selected a second movie when the first had finished; an action movie this time. And the alcohol continued to flow. By 11:30, Jack had had enough and said, “All right guys. As much as I’ve loved tonight, we should turn in. We’ve got a busy day ahead of us.”
37
KAREN AND BLAZE
Early Wednesday morning, Karen found herself and her canine companion parked outside the security fence at an electric junction station off of Highway 422 just outside of Delightful, Ohio which is on the way to Cleveland from Warren.
The air this far north and this close to Lake Erie was autumn crisp and there was a light and consistent breeze that made it feel several degrees cooler. Karen bundled the windbreaker she kept in the trunk of her car around her to steel herself against the chill that was trying to invade her body. Her breath steamed from her mouth and nostrils in thin clouds. She had had no idea that she and Blaze would be travelling this far. They had been on the road for nearly eleven hours and traveled only a mere three hundred and twenty miles. Blaze had lost the bad smelling green eyed man’s scent on numerous occasions and it had taken a stop, and in some cases, several stops, for him to make an attempt to reacquire the trail. They were on one of these stops now.
To Karen’s astonishment, Blaze was always eventually able to catch scent of the kidnapper and he seemed to be getting better at it. Their last two stops, it had taken Blaze only one stop and less than fifteen minutes to find his bad smelling man’s scent. This gave her a glimmer of hope in the pit of her stomach that Amanda might still be alive.
But why had the bad smelling green eyed man taken her sister so far? What kind of kidnapper would risk crossing all those jurisdictions with an unwilling captive in his possession? Karen didn’t want to think about the monster’s motivations behind his madness.
“How’s it coming? Anything?” Karen asked Blaze. He was seated about six feet in front of the car while Karen leaned, hugging herself, against the hood. Her hair was blowing back from her face in the breeze, exposing her ears to the cool night air.
Blaze cocked his head to his left, stood, and turned to Karen. He woofed, “Yes, let’s keep going down this highway. He didn’t come this way but I think it’s like we are downwind of them or something.”
“Okay,” Karen said. “We’re coming up on Cleveland soon which is a big city like Pittsburgh, from a while back. Do you want me to do the same thing with Cleveland that we did with Pittsburgh?”
“Yes, that would be good, Master Karen,” Blaze barked. They had skirted Pittsburgh as far away from the city as they could so as not to distract Blaze with scents not belonging to the bad smelling man or Amanda. As soon as they were past the glow of the city, they stopped for Blaze to catch hold of him and he did on their second checked route.
“Sounds good, Blaze. I’m tired. Are you tired?” Karen asked the Dalmatian.
Blaze thought about this a moment then chuffed, “Yes, I think I am.”
“Do you think you could still track the bad smelling man if we took some time to sleep?” Karen asked apprehensively.
“My sense of smell is still getting better. Did you notice it took less than five minutes for me to find him this time? The smell is stronger to me too. I think we could spare some time,” he replied with an almost human look of pride on his face.
Karen smiled at him. “C’mon then,” she said and walked back to the driver’s door. She opened the car and motioned for Blaze to enter. He jumped in and stepped over to the passenger seat. He circled three times on the seat and lay down in a coil, his snout resting by his hind quarters. Karen pulled the trunk lever and walked back to the rear of the car. When she returned, Blaze watched as Karen entered the car and closed and locked the doors. Karen started the car and cranked the heater. Within a few minutes, the interior of the vehicle was comfortably warm. Karen tossed the items she had retrieved from the trunk, a pillow and blanket, into the back seat. Blaze lifted his head and looked at her hopefully, his blue eye shining like a sapphire and his green eye glinting akin to an emerald.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” she said to him. “Those, this flimsy jacket, and some batteries and a flashlight are about as prepared as I am for this. I wish I’d have known we’d be coming so far. I would have packed better. I guess I’ve got plenty of money at least,” she continued, not knowing that her money would be meaningless in a matter of days.
Karen took out her smart phone from her jacket pocket and plugged it into the charger she always kept in the car. She fiddled with some buttons and said to Blaze, “I’m setting an alarm to wake us up in two hours. If you hear it before me, help wake me up, okay? I don’t want to lose any more time than that for fear we may lose the trail altogether.”
“I will do that, Master Karen,” Blaze woofed softly. He then returned his head to the resting position and closed his eyes.
Karen turned off the car’s engine, placed the alarmed phone on the arm rest between the seats, and crawled into the back seat. She propped the pillow up against the passenger’s side door and stretched out as much as the space would allow for. She spread the blanket over herself and rested her head on the pillow.
Not the most comfortable or best position to sleep in but it’ll do for two hours she thought. She closed her eyes and almost immediately, sleep overtook her.
Two hours later, Karen felt a cool wet thing brushing her in the face. She opened her eyes in the darkness to find Blaze licking her cheeks and her smart phone beeping and buzzing.
“I’m awake, I’m awake,” she told Blaze. The dog bounced back into the passenger seat and Karen reached for the phone and silenced it. She sat up fully and blinked the sleep from her eyes. Blaze was looking at her expectantly. Karen wiggled back into the driver’s seat and turned the engine back over. The car had gotten fairly chilly in the two hours they had been asleep. She waited a few minutes until she was warm again and then shut the car off. She unlocked the doors and stepped back into the even cooler pre-dawn air. Blaze followed her and padded quickly over to the fence where he began to relieve himself. Karen had her sights set on a small foreman’s building, more of a shack really, that was attached to the fence. With any luck, she’d have enough privacy to take care of her own bodily functions behind it without being seen from the road. When she got to the building, she found, to her luck, there was a Port-a-John on the side she hadn’t been able to see before. She quickly moved to its door and opened it.
The portable restroom had not seen much use, for which Karen was thankful. She conducted her business and when finished, used the hand sanitizer pump. She exited the Port-a-John and headed back to her ca
r. She spied Blaze sitting next to the passenger side door, his breath pluming from his nostrils. But then her sight wavered and moved to something else. She was having another vision.
This was one of her young Jack again but it wasn’t as calming as her last vision of him.
He had a shot gun raised to his shoulder which made no sense to Karen because her Jack was very much anti-gun, and had served on many committees to reform gun control laws. Again, her young Jack wasn’t alone. This time, he was with two men, both around his age and both also armed, that she did not recognize; and a third man was with them who looked to be no more than twenty years old. Young Jack’s tortoiseshell feline friend was also at his feet. As she turned her head to her left she saw Amanda, the bruised and half naked Amanda from their previous visions, with what could only be Karen’s arms around her, helping her shield her breasts. Amanda was shaking her head, crying, and shouting while she pointed at something behind them. When Karen turned to look behind her in the real world, a gesture that Blaze, who sat watching, thought peculiar, she saw in her vision a black sedan roaring toward them.
Then the vision was gone and only the foreman’s building and the junction box were before her in the wee hours of morning.
She turned back toward Blaze and her car, composed herself as best she could and started to walk back.
When she neared him Blaze woofed, “What was that? Did you see something?”
“Yeah, another vision,” she answered.
“I see. Should I do anything?” he barked in question.
“No, I don’t think either one of us can do anything. Anything but hurry that is. We’ve got to get to Amanda,” Karen said anxiously.
“Then let’s get going. I’ve already got the scent,” Blaze chuffed.
Karen opened the passenger door for him and hurried to the driver’s side and jumped into the car. She started it and took off with a spray of gravel leaving Delightful, Ohio in their wake.
38
SIMON
At 4:50 AM on Thursday, right about the time his originally scheduled flight was landing, Simon was completing check-in at the Carlton Hotel in downtown Minneapolis. He signed in under a false name and paid the hotel clerk with his cash. When the clerk asked for his credit card for incidentals, Simon removed two more hundred dollar bills from his bag and slid them over to the clerk.
“These two Benjamins can be yours if we could just skip that part. I’m only going to be here the one day after all. What kind of damage could I do in that time?” he said this to the clerk trying to look as innocent as possible.
The clerk looked at the offered money. He then looked around the room which, at this hour, was occupied only by the two of them.
Satisfied that there was no one to observe this transaction, the clerk said, “I think we can arrange that,” and he placed his palm on the money, bent his fingers, folded the money in half, and slid it into the pocket of his vest. “Here’s your room key, sir.” The clerk handed Simon a keycard and thanked him for choosing the Carlton Hotel as his place to stay.
Simon took the keycard and headed across the lobby to an elevator lobby. He pushed the button to go up. When the car arrived, he stepped in and pushed the button for his floor, the third. As the car proceeded up, Simon looked at his hazy reflection on the elevator doors. He wasn’t sure but he thought his reflection looked taller. He figured this was just a distortion, or perhaps his eyes playing a trick on him since he’d been awake for some time and rather paranoid as well. He held his hands out before him and marveled at how taut his skin was and how ageless they looked.
When the elevator reached his floor and he debarked, he was greeted in the hallway with a mirror showing him his reflection. He was taller! And now, he looked like he did just after his senior prom. He stepped to be inches from the mirror. His small crow’s feet were gone. The skin around his neck and jaw was firm and in place and when he furrowed his brow there were fewer creases. And, even though he was only twenty-eight, he’d already started to go gray around the sideburns. That gray was gone now, replaced by the chestnut brown hair that was on the rest of his head.
He smiled but that smile was quickly stamped out. He still wondered if the CIA was looking for him. He felt confident he hadn’t been followed up to this point. He felt that if he had been tailed, that he would have been taken by now. He suddenly realized he was alone for the first time since the costume change in the men’s room at LAX. Alone and here he was gawking at himself in a mirror like some prissy little twit. An assassin could be coming up in an elevator right now.
The thought really spooked him and he whirled around and looked above the elevator doors but these elevators were not the type that showed where the elevator was and which way it was going. He decided not to stick around in the deserted hallway anymore and hurried to his left. He quickly found his room, inserted the keycard in the slot and entered quickly. Once inside, he quietly closed the door and slid the deadbolt and security latch into place.
The room was small, containing only a king size bed, two nightstands, a small ornate wooden table and chair, and a bureau with a flat screen television on top of it. There was an open closet which led to the tiny bathroom. The size of the room made it easy for Simon to search and inside of a minute he was certain he was alone. He sat down on the bed, placed his bag on the duvet cover, and examined the phone, looking for listening devices. He found nothing. He checked the room’s two air vents and found no hidden fiber optic cameras.
Did I really get away from the CIA? he thought. Are they even looking for me?
The day’s traveling and all of Simon’s tensions were starting to take their toll on him and his eyelids began to feel heavy.
“What the hell? I certainly can’t go see that man now anyway,” Simon said to the empty room.
He stripped off his clothes and laid them on the foot of the bed. Simon moved his bag to be on the side of his clothes. He padded into the bathroom and turned the shower on as hot as he could stand. In the fogging mirror he noticed that his muscles had toned up. They hadn’t grown by any means. He’d spent most of his life reading books and using computers and the muscles he did have were never all that hard, like some of the football and soccer players were in his high school. His thighs and biceps were solid now and that small spare tire around his midsection that he had been working on was replaced by a flat and tight abdomen. Simon smiled at himself and stepped into the shower. Ten minutes later, he turned the water off, dried himself and swished some of the complementary mouth wash. He left the bathroom and walked over to the bed; its immense size and plushy linens beckoned to him. He pulled back the sheets and slid into the bed. His head hit the pillow and, in spite of all of his anxieties throughout the day, he fell asleep fast.
Simon awoke several hours later, around ten in the morning feeling nicely refreshed. The light was bright in his room and it stung his eyes. He swung his feet out of the bed onto the carpeted floor. He stood and stretched and walked over to the bathroom. He completed his morning rituals and returned to the main room where he looked over to his clothes. He remembered seeing a sign in the hotel lobby when he checked in and there was a men’s clothing store on the skyway level of the hotel. He threw his pants, shirt, and sandals on and grabbed some cash and his keycard. He left the room for the clothier and once there, he purchased two pairs of jeans, two button-down striped shirts, two sweaters, clean socks and underwear, a sleek leather jacket, and a pair of jogging shoes.
Simon paid the salesman for his purchases and returned to his hotel room, laden with bags. He busied himself with removal of the tags from the clothing and then changed into a fresh pair of boxer briefs, socks, a pair of the jeans and one of the shirts. The rest of the new clothes, as well as the old, he carefully packed in his computer bag to the point of making it bulge at every seam.
He didn’t want to haul the bag around with him so he removed his tablet and slid it into the pocket of the jacket. The tablet had everything he needed on it as he
had transferred the files and programs from his notebook while en route from Honolulu. By now it was a quarter of noon. Simon decided that now was a good time to try to meet the young extraordinary man whose blood had destroyed the pathogen that had invaded it. He left his room for the second time this morning and went down to the street level. He exited the hotel and waited his turn for a cab to pull up from the cab stand. Once in the cab, he gave the driver the address he wanted to go to and the driver informed Simon that was just across the Mississippi River and they’d be there in a jiff.
As the driver had promised, they arrived at the destination in less than ten minutes. It was just past noon. Simon paid the driver and got out of the car. He stood looking at the townhouse before him. There was a light on in the front window. Simon walked up the sidewalk and stopped on the front stoop. He looked a little to his right and was about to press the doorbell when the door was opened before he could. The quick action startled him.
The man who opened the door saw how his visitor had reacted.
“I’m sorry,” Jack Voight said, looking at Simon with curiosity. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I heard your footsteps coming up the walk. Can I help you with something?”
39
ART
After the cab returned Art from the airport back to his apartment building, he immediately went to a breakfast diner he liked that was three blocks down the street. The sun was bright and it promised to be another unseasonably warm day for the last day of September. Once at the restaurant, he did his typical gorge, and feasted on eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns and stacks of pancakes. He washed this binge down with milk, orange juice and steamy coffee. While he ate, he looked out the window to his right and thought.