Evasion

by Mark Leslie

Ever.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Today

  Scott slammed his laptop closed, wondering if the air supply on the GO train could have been infected with the same airborne contaminant that had affected the Digi-Life building.

  No, he figured, taking a quick look around at everybody else on the train, including the other by-law officers. That couldn’t be it. Nobody else on the train that he could see was behaving out of the ordinary.

  Well, no more than the way people tend to behave in that fidgety “I’m not guilty” manner when a bylaw enforcement officer was checking for tickets, or the way that people tend to sit up a bit straighter and put both hands on the wheel when their vehicle comes into proximity with a police cruiser on the road.

  So the good news was that this hadn’t become a train filled with a mob of zombies out to get Scott.

  No, it was just the single officer, and she was striding purposefully toward him.

  Scott slipped his laptop into his bag, hopped out of the seat and proceeded to head to the back of the train, slid the heavy door opened and stepped out into the enclosed section where the trains connected. Despite being fully enclosed it was louder and breezier in that small three foot by three foot space. Looking through the window into the next car, he couldn’t see any bylaw officers there, and so he pulled that door open and stepped into the car.

  Then he quickly walked across the mid-level section and down the flight of five stairs to the lower section. He could hear the door separating the cars slide open behind him, and he rushed a little more quickly down the center aisle across the train.

  As he reached the bottom of the stairs at the other side, he glanced back and saw the bylaw officer heading down the aisle. She was gaining on him. He hoofed it up the stairs and down the mid-level aisle toward the next set of connecting doors.

  This time he moved through them quickly, not pausing to see if there was anybody on the other side before opening the doors to the next car.

  He rushed inside, then down the stairs and along the lower-level aisle again, picking up speed.

  As he raced up the stairs, he could tell that he had gained a few feet on his pursuit from the officer, as she was just rushing down the stairs on the opposite side as he was rushing up on his side.

  He moved more quickly through the mid-level area, through the passageway connected to the next train, and through the next car. This time, he was already at the next set of doors when he could see, looking along the upper section, that she was just coming through the doors on the far side.

  Good. He was still gaining.

  He went through the next set of doors to the following car, and then the one after that.

  It was feeling good. He was evading her. He only hoped that he would be able to stay ahead of her long enough for the train to stop at Union Station and he could rush off.

  Except, he figured his luck wasn’t going to hold up.

  Because as he rushed up the last set of stairs, instead of an entranceway connecting to another car, it was a car with a conductor booth on it; one of those cars in which there was a conductor to operate the train when it was heading in the opposite direction of where the engine was.

  “Oh shit!” Scott said, stopping in his tracks.

  He turned, spotted the officer across the opposite side coming in through the opposite doorway and heading purposefully toward him.

  “So much for my great lead,” he gulped, standing there and feeling a cold sweat trickle down his face.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Twenty Years Earlier

  Scott’s father only spoke to him once about girls.

  And, by the time he had, it had been far too late.

  Scott had, of course, already done the damage, already not only pushed Jessica away in a maximum overdrive sort of way, but had, most likely frightened the poor girl into thinking that he was going to end up stalking her for the rest of her life.

  The ill-timed chat about girls had come on the same day Lionel Desmond had woken Scott with that alarming prick, the accidental poppy stabbing. Scott still wondered at just how the poppy could sink in so deep and cause such a painful stab.

  He remembered rubbing his shoulder that afternoon when he and his father had been in the boat.

  Lionel Desmond, normally quiet and pensive and not a man of many words when they were out on the boat, could sense that something was wrong in his son, and so asked.

  Scott told him the whole story. Okay, not everything; he kept some of the heavier petting details about the party, the groping and feeling up and, especially, the orgasm out of the tale. He relayed the tale as if Jessica had been a girl he had danced a lot with that night, that they had kissed, and that he later found out had liked him.

  Then, feeling proud of himself and the manner by which he had interpreted the Billy Joel wisdom from that song, he’d explained to his father how he had laid it all out on the line with Jessica.

  He would never forget the look of horror on his father’s face when he went on to explain the repeated voice mail messages and the things he had said to her in his emails. And the worse part about it was that Scott didn’t tell his father about all of it, he held back most of the details, making it sound like he’d just left a handful of voice mails and a couple of emails.

  But still, his father had been horrified.

  And he gently explained to Scott how coming on strong was one of the worst things that a guy could do.

  “But I’ve seen the shows and hear it in songs,” Scott said in frustration. “Women want men to talk to them, to be honest, to share their feelings,”

  “They do,” Lionel said. “But that’s only after they’re already a couple, already together, already committed.”

  Lionel explained how women seemed to be more attracted to men who kept to themselves, who held back, played their cards close to their chest.

  “I don’t know,” Lionel explained. “Maybe they see men as projects, as a challenge, as something to work at.”

  Lionel went on to explain to his son how he and Lionel’s mother had gotten together. How Lionel had been infatuated with Janelle, but how she barely noticed him no matter what he’d done. How she hadn’t started paying attention to him until he had started dating her cousin. “That was when I knew,” Lionel had said. “That’s when I figured out that she must really like me. So I kept dating her cousin, because I wanted to make sure she was really falling for me.”

  Scott was initially confused, but then, when he started to put the pieces together at the complexity of the relationships between men and women, when he started to map out the counter-intuitive push/pull behavior, thinking about it like the way that magnets repelled one another when you pushed both north ends together, but how they came together when you flipped the north and south ends, it all started to make sense.

  Relationships could follow set patterns, they could be mapped and planned and figured out.

  So Scott figured, were he ever interested in pursuing a relationship again, he would be able to, like his father, manipulate the situation to create the optimal setting for a girl to fall for him.

  But he didn’t want just any girl.

  He wanted Jessica.

  And he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he had blown it big time; he had messed it up in such a complete shit-bomb way, that there would never be any going back.

  And that hurt tremendously.

  It dug deep to the bone.

  It was devastating to even think about her. So he couldn’t imagine ever falling for anyone again.

  It simply hurt too much.

  So he tucked away the information that his father had shared, the wonderfully deceptive manner by which you could manipulate someone into doing things, into falling for you. The way you could trick someone into falling in love with you.

  Scott not only learned the folly of his ways with Jessica, but was startled to learn just how deceptive and manipulative his father could be.

  Chapter Tw
enty-Seven

  Today

  Scott watched the top of the officer’s head on the opposite side of the train as she moved forward through the doorway connecting the two trains. He stood rooted in his spot, at a dead end, having run out of trains to escape through.

  When her head bobbed out of view as she ducked off to her left to take the short flight of stairs to the lower section and head in his direction, Scott shot forward and raced up the stairs to the upper section.

  He only hoped that his footfalls weren’t so loud that she could hear him crossing over-top of her. He figured the ambient noise of the train and the low rumble of conversation of the commuters might be enough to keep her from hearing him.

  He made it to the other side and raced down the stairs and toward the door to go back into the car they had both just run through. When he looked back he could see her on the mid-level on the opposite side, standing in front of the engineer’s booth. She hadn’t yet turned around, but would likely figure out which way he had gone. There was, after all, only a single possible path he could have taken.

  Scott rushed through the doors connecting the trains and then proceeded to race back through in the opposite direction.

  As he rushed he glanced out the window trying to determine, based on the scenery, just how far the train was from Union Station. He spotted the base of the CN Tower and knew they were pretty close. Just a few minutes. He could even feel the train beginning to slow down in its approach to its final stop on the morning’s commute.

  He figured, with the number of cars he had, he might just make it, so long as he didn’t bump into the other by-law enforcement officers.

  He had wondered if they might also be turned; but he figured they couldn’t have been – otherwise they would have, in tune with the female officer pursuing him, have joined in the chase, knowing exactly where she was, and, via her understanding, where he was.

  If they had been turned, the three officers could have easily cornered him.

  He felt pretty lucky, and, as he raced, speculated about how she could have been infected if it hadn’t been an airborne agent in the train’s ventilation system. She must have been infected earlier. How, Scott couldn’t figure out.

  He had to get away, get off this train, to a secure location, so that he could figure things out.

  He just needed more than a few minutes to compose the elements that he knew and try to make heads or tails of the situation; why these people – both the people that he knew as well as perfect strangers, had been consumed with the desire to stop him, to kill him. And, more importantly, who or what was behind all of this?

  And, as he ran through another car, continuing to be pleased that he hadn’t yet bumped into the other bylaw officers, and seeing that the train was now entering the tunnel at Union Station, he was thinking he would get that chance. It was likely less than a minute or a minute and a half before the train would stop, the doors would open, and Scott could rush out.

  But his luck ran out.

  As he was just about to open the doors that would take him onto the next train, he could see, through the glass of the two door windows, one of the other by-law enforcement officers standing in the next car on the mid-level and writing up a ticket for a commuter on that level.

  “Shit!” Scott said, turning to look back. On the opposite side of the car, the female officer was coming through the doors.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Four Days Ago

  Scott finally managed to track down Nottoff, and had gone as far as driving up to Sudbury to meet up with him.

  He had located the man’s phone number, finally, after several hours of digging and searching. The number was unlisted and not in any of the crack-able lists he had access to.

  It was even blocked in the hospital record system, in a scramble-code encryption that Scott had never seen before, and never would have expected in simple internal hospital emergency contact information that was already behind a tight firewall.

  So when he finally deciphered the scramble-code encryption – a task that took almost a full week of tinkering – he was startled to get a “this phone number is not in service” message.

  “Damn!” he’d said, slamming the phone down after the third attempt to call the number.

  He knew, then, that he would need to head north and meeting Nottoff face to face.

  He’d managed to swing getting the Friday off from work, despite being under a tight deadline at Digi-Life, so he could make the trek up north to meet Nottoff. He’d done so by spending most of the evening the Thursday night working late on the project. Not that he didn’t already work late most evenings during this challenge – with looming deadlines, it was easy to still be in the Digi-Life offices until eight or nine at night.

  But this time, he stayed there until eleven-thirty, taking care of some of the tasks that he normally would have put off until Friday.

  It was a four hour drive north to Sudbury from Toronto; a trip that Scott had become proficient at. He planned on making the best use of the extra work he’d had to put in at Digi-Life and buffering that with the best time of day for making such a trip with a guaranteed time for the lightest possible traffic.

  He figured if he went to sleep for a few hours, slept from midnight until three in the morning he could drive north up Highway 400 to Sudbury and be there by seven Friday morning when Nottoff would be getting off shift, according to the schedule.

  The highway would be virtually dead that time of night, so Scott would be able to make good time heading north.

  And he’d arrive in time to intercept Nottoff after his shift.

  It would all work out well.

  And it had been working out well.

  Until he got about forty minutes north of Barrie, on a lonely and quiet stretch of Highway 400.

  That’s when his front passenger tire blew.

  It happened suddenly.

  First, the tire gauge on his dashboard lit up, informing him that he had low tire pressure. He’d seen that before and knew, based on the sensitivity of this alarm, he could drive for several days before having to actually check the tires.

  But not this time.

  The low tire gauge went on, and then, within seconds, there was a loud thrump-thrump sound coming from under his car, and the vehicle rocked up and down as if it had one of those hydraulic shocks you’d sometimes see on muscle cars. The car lurched forward and began to slow.

  “Holy shit!” Scott muttered, navigating the car over to the side of the road.

  He didn’t even need to apply the brakes. Taking his foot off the gas petal combined with the additional friction of riding right on his right front rim slowed him down quiet enough.

  After fiddling with the spare tire from the trunk for about five minutes, Scott knew he wasn’t going to be able to fix the flat himself.

  So he called the Automobile Association emergency number, told them of his situation and explained where he was, approximately, on the highway.

  The dispatcher informed him that the closest contractor was about forty minutes away, but that they’d be there as quickly as possible, and retrieved his cell phone number so the driver could contact him in case there were any issues with locating him. Then she gave him her name (Jeanette) and a confirmation of his request number. 3Q547

  The highway was pretty desolate and only ran north and south. Scott wondered how it would be possible for anybody driving on this highway not to see him. But he kept that observation and those thoughts to himself.

  He needed the service guy to come, fix his flat tire for him, and then get going.

  This was going to set back his plans big time.

  Fifty minutes later, ten minutes after the time quoted to him, when he tried calling the Automobile Association again, he got stuck in a “we are experiencing a significant volume of calls right now” message reminding him his call was important and he was in a queue, to stay on the line for the next available operator. The repeated message included the
fact that if this were an actual emergency, requiring medical assistance, to hang up and call 9-1-1.

  He stayed on hold like that for another half hour, before he thought of pulling out his laptop and seeing if he could locate the contractor vehicle’s location himself.

  He used the hotspot option from his mobile device to connect to the internet, and within minutes was inside the Automobile Association’s internal servers, browsing through the calls made within Ontario.

  There was nothing in the system indicating that he had called at all. His Automobile Association customer number showed that the last time Scott had made any sort of service call had been three years earlier, when he needed a battery boost on a cold February morning. There were no other calls registered since then.

  A search of the first name (Jeanette) or the confirmation number for his call 3Q547, revealed nothing either.

  It was as if Scott had never called.

  Ten minutes later, a trucker pulled over about twenty yards ahead of where Scott was parked. In the time he’d been sitting there, a little over half a dozen vehicles and two large transport trucks had all shot past him on the highway. None of them had even slowed down when they passed him, but several had moved over to the far left lane either in order to leave additional space, or perhaps because they were worried about “catching” whatever had caused this poor sucker to have to pull over.

  The trucker lurched out of his truck and walked over to see Scott.

  “Car trouble?” he asked in a southern drawl that Scott seemed to think might be Louisianan.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Flat tire.”

  “You got a spare?”

  “Yeah. I’m just, ah, not all that good at it.”

  “It’ll be my pleasure to help you,” the trucker said. “The name’s Pete.”

  “I’m Scott.”

  Pete stuck out his hand, shook Scott’s. “Pleased to meet you, Scott. Now let’s see what we can do to help you out here.”

  Scott was back on the road and drove no more than twenty minutes before the “hill assist” light flashed on his dashboard. The tire pressure gauge went off again, and so did the low fluid indicator. The dashboard lit up like one of those musically synced Clark Griswold styled houses in those YouTube videos, lights blinking on and off, flashing at different speeds, with beeps and boops and buzzes popping into the night air.