Pursued

by Gary Urey

  The Pursuers had followed his trail directly to the beach.

  Chapter Ten

  DOCTOR STAIN

  An excited roar came from Pinchole and the other SWTs inside the Monitoring Room.

  The Doctor, who had been outside in the hallway, flung open the door. “What’s going on in here?” he asked.

  Pinchole was pumping his fists in the air like he had just scored the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. “They got him!”

  “Got whom?” the Doctor asked.

  “The boy!” Pinchole exclaimed. “The Pursuers captured Axel Jack!”

  The Doctor eyed Pinchole suspiciously. “You had better not be pulling my leg.”

  “Absolutely not, sir. Look at the monitor.”

  The Doctor stared intently at the large screen. Usually when he scanned the view, Axel and Daisha were distancing themselves from the Pursuers. Blue blips represented the kids; red blips represented his Pursuers. Now, there was no blue or red, but one large magenta-colored pulsing dot.

  “What does this mean?” the Doctor asked.

  “Red and blue mixed together make magenta,” Pinchole explained. “That means one of our men and the boy are on top of each other. Understand?”

  “No, I don’t understand. I want more proof than an elementary-school art lesson.”

  A loud buzzing sound came from a speaker on the satellite console.

  “A transmission is coming through,” announced one of the SWT assistants.

  “Quiet, everyone,” the Doctor ordered.

  Silence fell over the Monitoring Room. The only sounds were the equipment’s cooling fans and the crackle of radio static.

  “We have…captured…boy,” a man’s voice with a thick European accent said. “GeoPort…in our…possession. Return with prisoner…when Warp…resets…over.”

  An audible gasp escaped the Doctor’s lips. His pulse raced, and the hair on his arms stood on end. He quickly scanned his memory, making sure he had taken his blood pressure medication that morning.

  “What about the girl?” the Doctor asked.

  “Of course,” Pinchole said, changing the view on the screen. “I was so excited about the boy’s capture that I had momentarily forgotten about her.”

  The map quickly faded from New York City to central Ohio. To Pinchole’s astonishment, he did not see red or blue blips, but one large magenta dot just like with Axel.

  “Look!” Pinchole exclaimed. “They must have the girl too!”

  Another cheer went up from the SWTs, and in a rare moment of unrestrained emotion, the Doctor reached out and patted Pinchole on the back.

  “Are you absolutely sure our men have her?” the Doctor asked.

  “We haven’t heard a transmission from them yet,” Pinchole said. “But the meshing of the two colors into magenta is a direct hit. You saw it for yourself with the capture of the boy. Unless…”

  Pinchole’s voice trailed off, making the Doctor inquire deeper.

  “Unless what?” the Doctor asked, narrowing his eyebrows.

  “Our surveillance satellites are not actually tracking the people. They are following and gathering information from chips that professors Jack and Tandala placed inside the solar tracker and the GeoPort. So, unless the girl has somehow gotten hold of the solar tracker and—”

  “And that is highly unlikely,” the Doctor said, cutting him off.

  “Exactly. I have a better chance of sprouting fairy wings and flying to Ohio than that girl has of overpowering two of our men and stealing the tracker.”

  “Then let’s wait for their transmission. In the meantime, we have a lot to talk about.”

  Pinchole ran a hand through his thinning mousy-brown hair and let out a deep sigh. “Now the real fun begins.”

  “I want to review the plans down to the very last detail,” the Doctor said. “Follow me to my office.”

  Once inside the Doctor’s spacious, opulent office, Pinchole went over the strategy he had been fine-tuning for over a year. First, they were to secure the kids, make them comfortable, and then pick their brains about practical use of the GeoPort. After all, they had been the ones using the devices and were the experts. While all this was going on, Pinchole and his SWTs would carefully break down the parts of the GeoPort to begin mass production. The Doctor would hole up with a small army of lawyers and lobbyists—registering patents, wining and dining the heads of the US Federal Transit Administration and Security and Exchange Commission, bigwigs from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, even the president of the United States and other world leaders.

  After all the t’s were crossed and the i’s dotted, the Doctor Lennon Hatch Geographical Transportation Company would be up and running, and he would be the most celebrated and powerful man on Earth.

  “Can you believe this is about to become a reality?” Pinchole mused.

  “I won’t break open a bottle of Château Margaux until the first wealthy business traveler pays a small fortune to use the GeoPort for instant transport from Wall Street to the Tokyo Stock Exchange,” the Doctor said.

  “What do we do with the kids once we have gleaned all the information we can from them?” Pinchole asked.

  The Doctor stared at the sprawling Googleplex headquarters out his window. A superior smirk washed over his face. The Google founders had made themselves billionaires and many of their stockholders millionaires with a simple search engine company. They gave people the ability to look up information instantaneously. He would give the people the ability to travel anywhere instantaneously. The Doctor would be king, and everyone else in Silicon Valley his court jesters.

  “The boy we’ll have no use for,” the Doctor answered finally. “I haven’t decided what to do with the girl.”

  “Well, I’d very much like to hear a transmission signaling that our men have in fact captured her.”

  “They have her,” the Doctor said confidently. “You said it yourself—red and blue make magenta. The GeoPort and I make history.”

  “With the GeoPorts soon to be in our possession, we don’t have to find the mysterious Magnes Solace anymore,” Pinchole said. “But I’m still very curious about what he or she knows.”

  “Do what you need to do,” the Doctor said, and motioned for Pinchole to follow him. Together they hurried back to the Monitoring Room, eager to hear the latest updates.

  Chapter Eleven

  DAISHA

  Daisha’s refuge for the night was a small patch of woods separating two potato fields. A three-quarter moon shined in the night sky; the stars spilled like silver glitter across a never-ending sheet of black construction paper. Back in Palo Alto, before the running, she had always been afraid of the dark. Now, the nighttime world was her best friend.

  Using her satchel as a pillow, she rested on a bed of soft pine needles, paranoid about a bug possibly crawling inside her ear. That had happened once while lying in the grass of a Stanford University courtyard. The experience had turned her into a complete insectophobe.

  Her thoughts drifted to Axel. Where was he? What was he doing? Was he keeping a safe distance from the Pursuers? A smile came to her lips, remembering the time they had exploded through the Warp and landed in the tiny European country of Liechtenstein. The place was mountainous, quaint, and stunningly beautiful. It had made her feel like she was Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.

  “The hills are alive with the sound of reggae!” she had sung in a green meadow on the road to Vaduz Castle, which she later learned was the official home of the Prince of Liechtenstein.

  They had lost the Pursuers earlier that morning along a set of railroad tracks in the capital and had made their way up a mountain to check out the castle. The two still had money back then, and they’d stopped at a farm stand to buy picnic food—bread, cheese, strawberries, and two bottles of cold trink kakao, the Liechtenstein version of chocolate milk.

  As they ate, drank, and basked in the Alpine sunshine, Daisha stared at Axel. His curly brown hair had
grown long, draping to his shoulders, and his blue-gray eyes framed with long black eyelashes gleamed in the midmorning light.

  In that instant the thought came to her: he’s cute.

  Axel must have been thinking the same thing about her. As if guided by some invisible force, they looked into each other’s eyes, smiled, and held hands. Daisha remembered her heart pounding with both fear and excitement. She had never kissed a boy before, but the urge to peck Axel on the lips burned inside her. But the tender moment had quickly ended when their GeoPorts buzzed, and over the side of a hill trudged the Pursuers and their tenacious, unrelenting solar tracker.

  A series of loud crunching sounds snapped Daisha from her memory.

  She sat up on her knees and scanned the darkness. Her senses were on high alert, her muscles tensed to run. There was a long silence, and then more of what sounded like rustling leaves and twigs snapping.

  “It’s just a deer,” Daisha muttered, trying to calm her nerves. “Are there bears in this part of Ohio?”

  The thought of a big, stalking black bear sent shivers up her spine. But she knew that bears didn’t attack people—unless a mother was defending her cubs. It was June, prime foraging time for mama bears and their babies.

  Daisha stood up slowly and slipped the satchel over her shoulders. The line No rest for the wicked tumbled into her mind. She had heard the phrase from a head-banging death-metal song on Axel’s iPod. That style of music made her brain ache, but Axel loved to crank it up and thrash around like an insane chimpanzee.

  “But I’m not the wicked one,” she said aloud. “And I still can’t get a wink of sleep.”

  Just then, the GeoPort in her pocket buzzed to life. The vibrations startled her. She slapped at her thigh, thinking at first that a very large insect had crawled up her pant leg. The commotion in the woods grew louder, and she suddenly remembered that the GeoPort only buzzed when…

  A man’s sweaty, viselike hand reached out of the darkness and grabbed her around the neck. His other arm wrenched around her stomach. Daisha kicked, screamed, and flailed like a fish on the end of a hook. The man’s hand clamped tighter on her throat, his other arm squeezing every last bit of oxygen from her lungs.

  Her eyes bugged out. She was choking.

  “Make a move, and I snap your neck,” the man growled in the unmistakable broken English of a Pursuer.

  The other Pursuer emerged from the dark woods. He shined a flashlight directly in her face, temporarily blinding her.

  “Where’s the GeoPort?” he barked. “Tell me now, or we kill you!”

  One thought raced through Daisha’s mind: How did they track me at night?

  She didn’t have time to ponder for very long, because the Pursuer’s death grip squeezed even harder around her neck.

  “You have three seconds to give it up or else!” he shouted in her ear.

  Daisha nodded toward the satchel, which the Pursuer had torn from her back during the struggle. It was now lying in the weeds a few yards away.

  “In the bag,” the Pursuer holding her grunted to the other.

  The other Pursuer rummaged through the satchel before dumping its contents on the ground and searching through the items with his flashlight. “It’s not here,” he muttered.

  The hand around Daisha’s throat released its grip and checked her pockets.

  “Look what I found,” the Pursuer said, and wriggled his fingers inside Daisha’s pocket.

  Daisha leaned forward as far as she could and flung her head backward with all her might. She heard the Pursuer cry out in pain as the back of her skull collided with his nose. She heard the crunching sound of cartilage breaking, and warm blood sprayed out in all directions. Daisha wrestled free from his grip, turned, and kneed him hard in the groin. The Pursuer collapsed to the ground, writhing in agony.

  The other Pursuer lunged at her, only to fall flat on his face. A gnarled mass of protruding tree roots had tangled up his feet. Daisha kicked him hard in the head, instantly knocking him out cold.

  “I want the solar tracker!” Daisha yelled.

  “You mean this?” a voice asked from behind her.

  Daisha turned and saw the Pursuer whom she had just kicked in the private parts holding the Oreo cookie–shaped solar tracker.

  “Yes,” Daisha said. “Give it to me. Now!”

  The Pursuer struggled to his feet, blood dripping down his face. “I’ll trade you the solar tracker for the GeoPort,” he said and then charged at her.

  Daisha sidestepped his advance, grabbed his shoulders, and hurled him into the weeds.

  The solar tracker fell from his hand. She snatched it off the ground and then raced into the darkness.

  Chapter Twelve

  AXEL

  Axel leaped to his feet, attempting to flee, but he didn’t get more than two steps before a very large man pummeled him into the sand.

  “Don’t move,” a voice growled. “Or your life ends here!”

  A second Pursuer holding a flashlight approached him from the darkness. For the first time, Axel got an up-close look at two of the men who had been chasing him for the past six months. The Pursuer holding the flashlight was older than Axel had originally thought. Deep lines etched his forehead, and his receding blond hair was graying at the temples. The Pursuer holding him down was much younger, a big and burly man with light-green eyes and a day’s worth of unshaven stubble on his chin.

  The older Pursuer shined the flashlight directly in Axel’s face. “Where’s the GeoPort?” he asked harshly.

  Axel hacked up a wad of sand that had lodged in his throat. “I threw it in the ocean,” he spit out.

  “Liar!” barked the younger Pursuer. The man then drilled his knee hard into Axel’s chest.

  “Owww!” Axel cried out.

  “If you don’t want him to break ribs,” the older Pursuer said, “you will give us what we want.”

  “I told you,” Axel gasped. “I don’t have it.”

  The younger Pursuer slapped Axel hard upside the head. A Fourth of July fireworks show exploded in front of Axel’s eyeballs. A loud ringing sensation filled his ears. His stomach heaved like he was about to throw up.

  “Search him,” the older Pursuer ordered.

  “Nothing’s here,” the younger Pursuer said after searching Axel’s pockets.

  “It’s not in the backpack either,” added the other.

  Axel’s thoughts screamed: Don’t search my sock…don’t search my sock.

  But that was exactly what the younger Pursuer did. He worked his hands down Axel’s pant leg until he found the bulge protruding from his ankle.

  “Got it!” the Pursuer yelled, holding up the GeoPort for his partner to see.

  The older Pursuer tossed his partner a set of flex-cuff zip ties. “Secure him while I contact Doctor Stain. His rosy face will blush with happiness.”

  The two men laughed.

  The older Pursuer walked down the beach and disappeared onto the boardwalk. The other one grabbed Axel’s wrists and cuffed them tightly together. After a moment, his fingers tingled and his hands grew numb.

  “These are too tight,” Axel moaned. “They’re hurting me.”

  The Pursuer ignored Axel’s pleas. Instead, he reached into his shirt pocket and produced a silver flask. They sat under the pier for several minutes. Axel’s head ached with the slap, and his hands felt like they were going fall off from lack of blood flow. The Pursuer spent his time slurping from his flask and scratching at what looked like a fresh tattoo of a charging bull on his neck.

  Finally, they saw the older Pursuer trekking down the beach in their direction.

  “Did you tell him?” the tattooed Pursuer asked.

  The older Pursuer nodded. “Yes, and they are all extremely happy. I have a car. Let’s get a hotel room. I’m exhausted. The Warp won’t reset until tomorrow anyway.”

  The men lifted Axel from the sand and dragged him to an awaiting red Toyota Camry with a large dent in the front passenger’s
side door. After tossing him rudely into the backseat, the men sped away through the city streets and onto a four-lane highway. The men referred to themselves by name. Axel learned that the younger Pursuer’s name was Loosha, and the older Pursuer’s name was Kostia. A large highway sign that said Welcome to New Jersey, The Garden State soon came into view.

  Tears welled in Axel’s eyes. He wondered what they were going to do with him. Torture him, beat him senseless, and then dump his dead body on a desolate country road? Daisha’s big smile and pretty round face framed with natty dreadlocks flashed in his mind. They had been apart less than twelve hours, but it already seemed like a lifetime. He hoped that she was safe and not going through what he was.

  Loosha shined the flashlight into the backseat. “Don’t cry, little baby,” he said in a singsong voice. “We are not going to kill you. Doctor Stain wants to do that himself.”

  Loosha laughed, swallowed from his flask, and then passed it to his partner.

  “Give the boy his due respect,” said Kostia. “He was cunning prey that took us many months to capture.” He took a long swig of the flask and then shouted, “Salute!”

  They rode in silence. Finally, after many miles, Axel heard the click of a turn signal and felt the car come to a stop.

  “I’ll check in,” Kostia said. “You stay with boy.”

  Axel lifted his head and peeked out the window. A large neon sign illuminating the night sky flashed Edison Plaza Motor Inn—$69 per night. This was his chance to get away. He tugged and struggled to loosen the cuffs on his wrists and ankles, but they were too tight. The more he attempted to undo them, the deeper the sharp plastic gouged into his bare skin.