by Sue Duff
He was in the backseat of an SUV sitting still in traffic. From the bright pink and coral stucco-looking buildings, he wasn’t in Northern California. The car lurched and took off when an opening presented itself.
“He’s going to wake up before we get him to the house.” A woman’s voice came from the front seat.
Acid burned Patrick’s throat as stomach contents pushed upward in a slow migration. He bent over and grabbed his stomach. “Sick,” he moaned.
A large bag was opened up at his knees as if they were anticipating it. He gagged and coughed, but nothing came out.
A stranger’s face appeared between the front bucket seats. “You’ll feel better once you purge it,” she said.
“What . . . happened?” Patrick groaned. The car took a corner fast. Thrown against the door, Patrick retched and spewed beyond his control. The proffered bag flailed about, trying to catch Patrick’s bile with each twist and turn of the wheel. He grabbed the seat belt across his chest and hung on.
“Fuck! It’s getting all over,” a man said from beside Patrick.
Having purged the last of it, Patrick leaned his head back against the headrest.
“Clean him up,” the woman said.
Someone wiped Patrick’s face with a towel, then swiped at his shirt.
“Get us to the house,” the disgruntled woman said. “Or we’ll all be sharing his pain.”
Sunlight flickered on and off as the car sped by a row of buildings. Patrick fought to keep conscious, but whatever they’d given him made him woozy.
Where was he? The salty air and squawk of birds could have been outside his bedroom window at home, but the simple town and décor was undeniably foreign, unless he was on an elaborate movie set.
The car soon left the simple town behind and green fields stretched as far as Patrick could see, at least out of the one eye that cooperated and stayed open. Trees dotted the landscape in neatly formed rows that rushed by like elongated stripes. Migrant workers with wide straw hats were harvesting what came from the trees, stuffing their bounty into cloth bags slung across their chests.
Every few minutes the car passed bent-backed wrinkled men in loose pants and shirts leading donkeys pulling carts filled with stacks of baskets down the dirt road. His surroundings didn’t slow down enough for Patrick to catch a glimpse of what they were harvesting.
Dogs ran alongside the SUV until the vehicle left them in the dust, only to pick up another one or two farther down the dirt road. The car slowed and Patrick’s vomit-coated chin slid back and forth across the window as the ruts in the road deepened and tested all four shocks at varying times. The man seated beside Patrick bumped into him thanks to a particularly violent bounce, and he released his seat belt to scoot over to the opposite side of the seat.
Patrick pushed to sit up. “Where are we?”
“Shit! You didn’t give him enough,” the man next to Patrick said. “He needs more.”
“I can’t or we could have a corpse on our hands,” the woman said from the front. Her face turned to the driver. “How much farther?”
“Barring no more delays, fifteen minutes,” he said. “Maybe twenty.”
“Damn it, that’s too long. At this rate he’ll be wide awake for sure.” The woman’s head disappeared below the seat. When she reappeared a minute later, she held a hypodermic. She thrust the needle into a small vial and filled the syringe with a clear liquid, then turned toward Patrick. “Give me his arm, and hold him down,” she said.
“No,” Patrick groaned and batted at the guy.
One of Patrick’s swings hit the driver on the back of the head. The SUV swerved, then corrected. The driver looked over his shoulder. “Take care of him or I’ll pull over and do it myself!”
There was a thunderous bang as the windshield shattered. The door Patrick had been resting against flew open and he took flight. In an instant the setting sun turned Patrick’s world to midnight.
{33}
Slurp. Something slimy scraped across his cheek. The rough tongue caused his head to rock back and forth with each lick. Patrick opened his eyes to a night’s sky, and it took a second for him to make out a mangy dog standing over him with its drool clinging to matted fur. The dog’s drool flicked with a plop on Patrick with every turn of the animal’s head.
“Ewww.” Patrick brought his arm up to shove the animal away, but pain shot through his forearm and he couldn’t offset the animal’s resuscitation efforts. “Go, get out of here.” Patrick rolled onto his side and propped himself up by an elbow. An odd sensation, like the onset of numb that never quite makes it to numbness, coursed through his body. He got as high as his knees. The smell of gasoline gagged him, and he held his breath until the nausea passed.
The car had rammed into a huge boulder at a curve in the road. The bumper lay a few feet away and the hood had folded up like an accordion halfway to the windshield wipers. Something dark, that Patrick surmised to be blood, smeared one half of the driver’s face, and from the angle that his head rested, it looked like he’d suffered a broken neck. Why hadn’t the airbags deployed?
Unable to see the woman in the front seat and the man who had been sitting next to him from where he knelt, Patrick waited for the spinning in his head to stop and for the jackhammer at the back of his skull to throttle down. He reached back and felt something wet and sticky. The dog whined and tugged at Patrick’s back.
“No, you can’t lick it and make it feel better,” Patrick said. “Shoo!”
A small hand connected with Patrick’s as he waved off the mutt from over his shoulder. When he turned, a child no more than four stared at him with dark brown eyes the size of ping-pong balls. His black hair glistened in the moonlight. It was cut short and hugged his skull. He gave Patrick the widest smile he’d ever seen with crooked teeth dotted in dark splotches as if already rotting from poor oral hygiene.
“Who are you?” Patrick said and got to his feet. “Where am I?”
The child didn’t respond and stared up at Patrick.
“Does that fur-ball belong to you?” Patrick said. He pointed between the dog and the child.
The boy smiled and said something, but Patrick didn’t recognize the language, much less understand. He shook his head and shrugged. “Sorry, kid, that’s all Greek to me.” The boy looked over his shoulder and gestured to the wreck.
Patrick leaned against the boulder until he could catch a deep breath and work past the throb in his head. The child giggled when the dog licked Patrick’s pant leg.
He left the two companions and peered inside the car. The woman was slumped over. The man from the backseat was pinned between the front bucket seats. Both lay unmoving. A walkie- talkie crackled. A man’s voice spoke in the strange language.
Patrick leaned through the open back door to check on the guy and to search for a cell phone, but the child squealed and tugged on his belt.
“What?” Patrick said.
The child pointed toward oncoming headlights. The boy climbed into the car and retrieved the walkie-talkie from under the seat, held it up, and shook his head. Whatever the man on the other end was saying, it frightened the child.
A moan came from the front of the car. The woman was alive. The child tugged on Patrick’s shirt. A spike in Patrick’s adrenaline ignited his limbs. He followed the child into a nearby grove of trees.
For having such short legs, the kid was fast. Still groggy, Patrick struggled to keep track of the boy in the dark grove. When he caught up with him, he grabbed the child to stop and leaned over to catch his breath. A foggy memory took shape at remembering a hypodermic needle.
He glanced about. The tightly packed orchard obliterated any surrounding landscape. If there was a farm house in the distance, the lights were off. Where had the boy come from? Was he part of the migrant-workers group Patrick had seen earlier, or was that imagined? His thoughts took their time to clear, like sludge draining while someone filled his brain with fresh water.
Shouts and angr
y voices came from behind. The child took Patrick’s hand and turned down a narrow path that cut between the trees. This section of the grove appeared more mature than where they had entered near the wreck. He had to give the child credit. The thicker branches would conceal them better.
Flashlights flickered in and out of the trees. The voices grew more distant. Whoever the child was afraid of, he was leading Patrick in the opposite direction.
“Hey, thanks, kid,” he said. Patrick rubbed the child’s head. The boy stopped and giggled, then smoothed down his hair with spit. Patrick wiped his hand on his shirt. He touched his chest. “Patrick,” he said.
The child slapped his own chest. “Epifanio.”
“Well, Epi, thanks for the save back there, or whatever it was.” Patrick patted his pockets. They were empty. “I need a phone,” he said to the child, and gestured as if talking with one held to his ear. “I don’t suppose you can point me in the direction of the nearest town?” The child imitated Patrick. He threw the kid a disgruntled look that was wasted in the dark. “You’re mocking me, aren’t you?”
A shout, followed by what sounded like a gunshot. Yelling. The child hugged Patrick’s legs. The dog dropped to the ground and covered its eyes with its paws.
“Shit!” Patrick grabbed the boy and crouched down. Once the echoing gunshot faded, only the shrill cry of the insects could be heard. He pulled the child away and grabbed him by his shoulders. “Where can we hide?”
The boy pulled out of Patrick’s grasp and took off at top speed down a nearby path. Patrick scrambled to his feet and followed. The child soon veered off the path and navigated in and out of the trees. It was everything Patrick could do to keep up with one eye on the child and another on the lowest limbs. Just when Patrick’s lungs threatened to explode, the child came to a halt at the edge of the orchard and held onto the trunk of a small sapling. He stared into the distance.
Patrick caught up and bent over to suck in air. When he righted, a smile touched his lips and he scooped the boy up into his arms. Dull dots of light were scattered at the horizon. The town didn’t look very dense, but surely someone there would have a phone.
There didn’t appear to be much cover between the orchard and the town. Unwilling to put the child in any more danger, Patrick set him back down and stuck his hand out.
“Thanks, Epi,” Patrick said and gave the child an exaggerated handshake. “Now scamper away and stay away from bad guys.” The child smiled and giggled, but his face fell when Patrick backed up, leaving him standing there alone. “Go, find your family.” Patrick gestured for him to leave, then started out across the field at a quick pace, putting some distance between him and the grove.
At a bark, Patrick glanced over his shoulder, then stopped. The child and dog were following a couple of yards behind him. “Go home,” Patrick hissed and waved.
Epi stopped and tossed him that infectious smile from behind a returned wave. The dog whined and rose on its back legs, hopping about like a circus performer. It landed on its front paws, kicking up dust from the field.
He couldn’t endanger the child. “You need to go home,” Patrick whispered.
The child didn’t budge. Lights in the trees. Patrick walked up and gathered the child in his arms. Epi patted Patrick’s face. “Come on, I’ll drop you off with the first people I find. Someone who speaks your language.” He took off for the distant town under the veil of darkness, thankful for there was nothing more than a crescent moon overhead.
What the hell had happened? Who was after him? Why?
{34}
Ian leaned forward between the seats and stared at the address Marcus’s geeks had found. “This one,” Xander said from the driver’s seat. “I bet you a year’s worth of Red Bull.”
“Game over!” Pacman said as his licorice stick swerved to the corner of his mouth. The boys slapped hands and rapped knuckles at their self-proclaimed victory.
“Are you sure this time?” Tara said.
“It fits. Look.” Pacman held up his tablet to show Ian and Tara a rental listing. The photo depicted a small bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac.
“Simple and nondescript, that’s something Rayne would have chosen,” Tara said.
Ian had Marcus’s geeks pull up Patrick’s GPS history in his car. They’d tracked his movements over the few days leading up to his kidnapping and found what they believed was Rayne’s new address.
Pacman turned around and gave Tara a conspirator’s grin. “How are you going to sneak away?”
“We haven’t gotten that far,” Tara said.
Pacman waved his tablet. “We could try and jam the jam.”
“I’m thinking of coming clean and telling Marcus,” Ian said.
“What, exactly?” Tara asked.
“That’s the part I’m still working on.” He leaned between the bucket seats. “Thanks, guys. I owe you one.”
“Anything for the Heir,” Pacman said.
“We’re at your beck and call, oh commandant!” Xander gave Ian a two-finger salute.
Ian stuck out his fists. The boys bumped and slapped their ritual hand gestures, then everyone exited Patrick’s car.
Marcus stood next to the driveway with crossed arms and a scowl that rammed his bushy eyebrows together. “What are you cooking up?”
“Let’s take a walk,” Ian said. The others scattered. He led Marcus down the north path. “I want to find Patrick.”
“So do I,” Marcus said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “For a multitude of reasons,” he said with an edge in his voice that put Ian on the alert.
“We have to assume he’s alive,” Ian said.
“Agreed.” Marcus stopped. “But what I want to know is, how could he have survived being electrocuted like that?”
“I don’t know. Joule was confident that her modifications to my boost were correct. If that’s true, Patrick had to have endured an astronomical amount of energy.” Ian rubbed his chest and gazed at the sun’s texture across the ocean’s surface. What would he uncover if he pursued this? He’d already lost Rayne. He wasn’t about to lose Patrick.
“What did you find in his GPS?” Marcus asked. When Ian looked surprised, the old general grunted. “Give me some credit.”
“There were his typical haunts, and he made a couple of stops at the auditorium.” Ian wondered why. For the past few months, Patrick had managed the auditorium from his laptop. “He also made more than one visit to Rayne’s new place.”
Marcus pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. It was Patrick’s. “I found this in his room. Dr. Mac said he left it behind when they shyfted to London to gather supplies.”
“It’s not shielded against the magnetic effects of shyfting, like ours,” Ian said.
“I’m going to have the boys get contact info and anything else they can off of it,” Marcus said. “They took Patrick for a reason, Ian, and I don’t think it’s because of his association with you.”
Ian nodded. If that were the case, Jaered would have interrogated Patrick the first time he kidnapped him. But Patrick swore that didn’t happen. Had his friend held something back from the first kidnapping? Ever since that incident, Patrick had been distant, evasive. The more Ian thought back to the past few weeks, so had Rayne. Why didn’t they want Ian to know Rayne’s new address?
“What is it?” Marcus said, staring at Ian. “Your gears are cranking out something.”
“I know where to start,” Ian said.
Ian shyfted Marcus and Tara to Rayne’s house. He’d chosen a spot behind a large bush that he’d seen in the real-estate listing that the boys had shown him. Tara led them through a side gate. They stepped up to the back screen door, then in unison, peered inside. It was the kitchen. An emptied cardboard box sat on the floor with crumpled newspaper scattered around it. Another one, its flaps still folded upon each other, rested on the small kitchenette table. A pizza box stuck out of the trash can.
Tara looked over her shoulder. “Tall, plentiful trees. N
o bodies in the few windows I can see.” Marcus shyfted inside and unlocked the door.
Tara opened it, but at Ian’s hesitation, she paused and lowered her voice. “Ian, if you want, Marcus and I can check things out. You don’t have to do this.”
Ian hadn’t prepared himself for the emotional upheaval that had swept over him, but he didn’t hesitate, and pushed the door wider. “This is about Patrick, not me.” He entered the kitchen.
Odors of bacon, sausage, and barbecued chicken came from the direction of the pizza box. That and the empty beer bottles confirmed that Patrick had made a recent visit. Tara opened the fridge and found a loaf of bread, an unopened carton of milk, and a small tub of butter with its shrink wrap still attached.
Ian wandered into the front room. Rayne had kept her mother’s couch, but not much else from her old apartment. Marcus was seated on the edge of the lone piece of furniture, flipping through sheets from one of the many stacks of papers.
Tara sat on the floor and grabbed a sheet from the top of another one. “What is all this?”
Ian stared at the QualSton logo on a cardboard box. It had been addressed to Patrick at the auditorium. Why the secrecy? He opened the carton and found a framed picture, a magnifying glass, and other miscellaneous papers.
Marcus held up a sheet. “This is a list of scientists at QualSton. What would she want with this?”
“Maybe she was curious about her background,” Tara said.
Ian looked at the framed news article and photo. Dr. Benjamin Harcourt was listed in the caption along with a few dozen other names. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she was researching her father,” he said.
“Or someone else.” Tara grabbed another sheet from her pile. “There’s a woman’s name that keeps coming up in my stack. Each entry is highlighted.”
Marcus gathered his pile in his arms and stood. “I want to take all of this back and have the boys analyze the info.”