She didn’t know the details. When she tried asking, Mom used her fists. So she learned not to ask. Really a no-brainer, that one.
Mom did something wrong. Something stupid. Another place where she didn’t know all the details, she just knew that it was the sort of screwup the big boys didn’t approve of.
Now? Now the future wasn’t looking all that sunny and Mom did anything and everything for another fix.
Tina didn’t like to think about that. She liked to think about her mother at home and being, well, her mom.
Still, none of that changed the fact that she was sitting in a place that was completely unfamiliar to her, in near darkness. She could see some light coming from beyond the boards that covered the windows. Enough to let her know it was the daytime, at least. That was something.
Tina stood up and immediately let out a squeal. It wasn’t until she really moved that she realized she was naked. The sound of her outcry echoed off distant walls. It was the only sound she heard, except for the angry squeak of a rodent she’d startled. The rat didn’t bother her. Vermin had been a part of her world for years.
She looked around more carefully, awake now and frightened. She’d never been fast at waking up and never really thought about it as a disadvantage, but now she was feeling differently.
No one was around to look at her in the nude, so she decided to keep it that way. She scanned the oversized bags of trash around her and started sorting through them for something to wear.
Nothing! The first three bags were absolutely useless, revealing nothing but torn papers and leftover wreckage. Whatever they were doing to the building around her, it looked like most of it was destruction, not construction.
She found a duffel bag a little deeper in the debris and figured out that was where she’d apparently been sleeping. A look at the pattern on her leg told her it matched the texture of the military green material. Inside she found clothes. They were too big, but with a little work she managed to make them fit. There was a men’s shirt that looked like it was made for a giant and a pair of baggy painter’s-style jeans that worked if she held them in place.
The sticky stuff on her skin was irritating, but she could wait until later to get to that. Right now she had to figure out where she was and try to get home. Her mom would be worried- Yeah, if she’s even woken up yet -if she didn’t get back soon.
When she was done dressing, she pulled the duffel bag with her. It was heavier than she expected, but she hoped maybe she could find some shoes to go with the clothing.
She pushed and pulled at the duffel bag until she got outside and then, winded, she sat on the package for a few minutes to catch her breath.
The day was bright but hazy, with a lot of glare from up above but no sign of the actual sun. Her stomach rumbled at her and she did her best to ignore it. She’d lived her entire life in Camden, New Jersey, which was not a place known for having a lot of extra food lying around.
Camden was a slum, pure and simple. She knew people who went out of their way to avoid Camden, like it was a bathroom with a broken toilet or something. She couldn’t really blame them. Most of the people she knew who lived there wanted to get out as fast as they could, before the drug dealers or someone even worse got to them. She tried not to dwell on that part of her world, but it was there just the same. It was always there, like an anchor trying to drag her down. She hated the city almost as much as she hated having to live there.
No. Food wasn’t really that big a deal. She’d gone hungry before.
Tina looked down at her hands. Underneath the rusty gunk that covered them, they were thin and delicate. Most of her was that way. Not eating much had given her a body that looked like it belonged to a twelve-year-old, which wasn’t so bad, back when she was twelve. At fifteen, she figured she should have been developing bigger boobs by now.
She tried not to let it get to her. One more thing on a long list of complaints that she couldn’t do a thing about, not really.
She looked at the stuff on her hands and frowned. Whatever it was, it coated her like a thin layer of paint, but it was flaking away now. She tried wiping it off on the jeans, but the stuff liked to stick a bit.
She brought her fingers up and sniffed at them and immediately pulled them back. The odor wasn’t that bad, not really, but it was strong, and she recognized it.
“Blood. I’m covered in blood.” Her skin slipped into a thick wave of gooseflesh.
She was pretty sure it wasn’t hers, but that didn’t do too much to make her feel better. It wasn’t a little blood, not like from a busted nose-Mommy hits when she’s in a mood-or even from a big scrape like she got along her leg once when she was a kid and a car hit her.
No, this was a lot of blood, like enough to fill a person.
Tina’s skin crawled again at the thought. She bit her lip to stop herself from panicking. Panic too much and people think you’re easy prey. People think that way about you in Camden, and you don’t live long. That was a lesson she learned a long time ago and one she never intended to forget. You couldn’t be a coward if you wanted to survive in her hometown.
So, she was covered in blood. But at least it wasn’t hers. That was a bonus.
On the other hand, she could be in serious trouble if she didn’t figure out who the blood belonged to, and the last thing she could remember was partying with Tony Parmiatto after he offered to give her a lift.
Tony was the real deal, one of the guys who actually made money in Camden, dealing the sort of stuff no one ever wants to think about and smart enough not to get hooked on it. He was handsome, rich and fun to be around. He had a great smile, and his jokes always made her laugh, and okay, so he was a few years older than she was, but that wasn’t so bad.
He was also her ticket out of Camden. Maybe she could never be a Mafioso, not in the truest sense because, hello, female, but if she got in good with Tony, she could be connected to the Family in the right way. She could learn from her mom’s mistakes and do things differently. She could get work, could make enough scratch to get the hell out of Camden and never once look back.
That was the plan, right up until he tried to slip his hand up her shirt.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, because she did. It was that she wanted him to like her, and not in the way that meant he called her when he was horny. She wanted him to like her enough to introduce her to his friends, to his bosses. He’d have to work for it before he got anywhere beyond a little snuggling.
Tina shivered again. They’d been arguing about something, she remembered that much. She closed her eyes to try to focus on the last discussion they had and she could remember Tony laughing, a nasty, mean sound, and smiling, but it wasn’t a nasty smile, it was just, it was just Tony being Tony. She was angry about something, but she couldn’t make her mind get past the noise that came out of nowhere deep inside her head, a sound loud enough to make her want to scream WAKE UP!
– like an explosion going off, and that was all she could remember. After that there was waking up a few minutes ago.
“What if I did something to Tony?” She spoke the words softly, afraid that saying them out loud would make them a reality.
She had to bite her lip again to stop the panic. Tony was made. He was connected. Throw a hundred other Mafia cliches out there and he was those too. He was second or third in line for the local mob guys and that meant if she’d done something to Tony, his friends would be after her to do something back.
Now and then a body showed up in the Delaware River. At least twice she watched them get fished out by the cops.
She stood up from her makeshift seat and looked around. There was a big space of parking lot in front of her, but the entire shopping center she was in looked like it hadn’t seen a person in months. A weathered sign faced the highway a few yards off. It read PENNSAUKEN MART and over that, someone had placed several yellow signs that stated it was marked for demolition.
Pennsauken? That was miles from Camden! How
had she gotten here?
She shook her head and dug into the duffel bag, hoping for shoes a second time. It was going to be very, very hard to walk back home without a good pair of shoes.
There was a pair of sandals that looked almost new. They were three sizes too big, but she didn’t much care. Tina fished them out of the bag and dropped them on the ground ready to slide her feet into them. Then she froze and stared back into the bag.
She stared hard, barely even breathing, and then hastily closed the zipper. Then she opened it again. Closed it, looked around and finally inspected the contents a little better.
Money. A lot of money. Most of the bundles of bills she could see looked like hundreds and twenties. Her ears were ringing and her heart felt like it was about to break a few ribs.
She sat down hard on the warm concrete walkway to the interior of the abandoned shopping center.
“Oh, damn. What did I do?”
It was hard to swallow.
“What the hell did I do?”
No one answered her. No one. She was all alone.
Chapter Nine
Hunter Harrison
Hunter Harrison looked at the address on the folded envelope he’d pulled from his jeans pocket. It matched the one on his learner’s permit. He stared at the road where 138 Willoughby Way should have been. No houses, just a lot of torn-up buildings and construction vehicles. Oh, and the sign that said there were new houses going up in the Silver Hills Community!
His stomach did a nervous drop and he shook his head. It hadn’t been much of a chance anyway, had it?
There weren’t a lot of chances for things to go right around him. Nothing had been going his way in the last five months and before that, well, he couldn’t remember much of anything anyway.
Five months. That had been when he woke up in Baltimore, Maryland, in a sleazy hotel room with two suitcases full of clothes and very little else. He hadn’t expected to wake up there. He’d expected to wake up in his bedroom at 138 Willoughby Way, which should have been in front of him.
Five months to learn that nothing was what he’d expected it to be. Five months to try to understand why the face in his hotel mirror looked much older than the face he thought he remembered or even like the crappy photo on his learner’s permit.
Time had gone wacky around him, maybe, or he’d been out of his mind for more than five months because he didn’t for a second think he could have changed as much as he had in less than a couple of years, at least if the picture on the ID was right.
If he thought about his past a lot-and he did-he could get glimpses, flashes of memories, but none of them made much sense. There was a man he thought might be his father and a woman whose face made him feel happy. He was almost certain she had to be his mother, but he couldn’t come up with a name to go with her face to save his life. There was another boy, smaller, younger, with a bright smile. He thought his name was “Gabby.” He wanted to know all about them, all of them. He wanted to know about the others he saw now and then, kids in uniforms, sometimes just eating lunch together and other times studying. He knew he’d gone to school with them, but that was all. There were no names, not even the name of the academy they’d attended.
They might as well have all been images from a stranger’s scrapbook.
Even after he woke in the hotel in Baltimore, things hadn’t gotten any better. He’d spent most of the last five months as a slave to some punk whose name he didn’t even know.
Five months! The thought sent his blood pressure soaring.
He’d been trying to get back to Boston for a long time but never managed it until now. Sometimes he’d get close, like all the way into Rhode Island, but as soon as he closed his eyes, he found himself somewhere else. That unknown, unnamed bastard that gave him orders kept him enslaved so well that sometimes he almost gave up on trying to get away.
Blackouts. Or maybe the kid was drugging him. He couldn’t say for sure. All he knew was that the faceless voice from the recorded messages could steal his life away at a whim.
Worst of all, whenever it happened, days or weeks had gone by. The first few times it was days. This last time he woke up almost a month later.
“Not this time.” His voice was deeper than he remembered too. Another thing to mess with his head when he was trying to concentrate.
He walked back over to the motorcycle he’d borrowed to get up here this time. Borrowed, a lovely way of saying that he stole it but meant to return it. If he could remember where to send it back to because he’d been in a bit of a hurry when he hopped onto the bike.
There were no answers for him here, so maybe for a change of pace he could actually return the bike. Part of him was going to miss the feeling of riding. Had he ridden before his memories vanished? He must have, otherwise how could he ride so well now?
He hopped on and slid the key back into the ignition and the blackness swallowed him. He had just enough time to realize that the nameless monster had found him again before the drugs took over and dragged him into the darkness.
Hunter came out of his stupor in a different place. It was nighttime, and the darkness was cut by blue and red strobes. He heard the screech of tires even over the sound of wailing sirens and knew that it had happened again. His life, his world, snatched away from him.
His hands were cuffed behind his back and there were two cops in the front seat of the squad car. The one on the passenger’s side was looking at him and scowling. He had a fat lip and a bruise on his face that looked like it would be growing darker very soon. At a guess, the cop wouldn’t have minded pulling out a pistol and shooting him.
“Don’t know what got into him,” the cop was saying. “I’m just glad he’s unconscious.” The cop shook his head. “No, wait. Looks like bright boy’s waking up.”
“Is he restrained this time? I don’t want him getting loose again.” That came from the driver. All Hunter could see of his face was the eyes looking back at him in the rearview mirror.
His vision grew darker, the sun setting at high speed, and his heartbeat thundered in his ears. How the hell could the man have found him in the back of a moving cop car?
“Don’t-” He started to speak but had no idea what he was going to say. His head hurt so badly he thought maybe someone had broken his skull when he wasn’t looking.
“Don’t what?” The passenger cop was scowling even more and reaching for something. “How about don’t make me hit you with the Taser again, boy?”
Taser? He used a Taser on me?
“I-don’t-”
“Shut your face. We’ll have you in a cell soon enough.”
He closed his eyes and heard a distant roar, a sound like a giant waking up in a bad mood. When he opened them again – Everything was different. He was in the same car. But there was blood all over the place and the windshield was gone, shattered into a billion shining pieces on the dashboard and across the seats. Even across the hood. A billion shining pieces, all of them soaked in red and glistening.
At least the car wasn’t moving anymore.
He saw red marks across both of his wrists, deep and angry marks that didn’t look like they’d be healing anytime soon.
He tried to climb out of the car, but the doors were locked. No, wait, not locked. Blocked. There were trees crushing into the car from both sides. Hunter stared at them for a moment, unsettled, and then looked around them to the pasture up ahead.
There was no sign of the cops that had been yelling at him before, just the blood all over the place.
“What the hell is going on around here?” The policemen were gone and he found himself wondering if somehow his parents had found him. Maybe that was why the cops had shown up. Maybe that was why they’d been driving him in the car No. They’d hit him with a Taser. That was serious stuff, one step down from putting a bullet in his head. And they had been beaten, both of them.
He shook his head. None of it made sense and his skull still felt too small for his brain.
The radio in the front of the squad car was ruined, smashed into broken plastic and glass. There was a smell like gunpowder in the air, though he couldn’t remember when he’d have ever smelled the scent before.
Hunter climbed over the headrests between him and the front of the car and then slid out of the broken windshield and onto the hood of the car. The metal under his butt was still warm as he scooted across it. Too warm for the early morning sunlight to have heated it up. The engine beneath him had been running recently and running hard by the looks of the damage to the car. Broken glass and blood scraped at the paint. How the vehicle got wedged between two trees was another of those mysteries that kept trying to sink him.
His clothes were all wrong. They were torn apart, bloodied and not his. The fabric was fine and expensive, and he couldn’t remember a time in his life when he’d ever worn a three-piece suit. Then again, he couldn’t remember that much of his life, but even if he could, he wouldn’t have put on clothes that were the wrong size.
Hunter shook his head. He didn’t have time to worry about anything like clothes! He was standing next to a wrecked cop car. He didn’t think much of his chances of explaining why he shouldn’t be arrested if anyone else came around.
“Screw this.” His voice rumbled and he shook his head again. He didn’t remember sounding like that, and even after five months it was weird.
Hunter looked around. The cops would be back soon. Nobody left a wrecked car behind without plans to come back. He wanted to be long gone before they came back.
He stared at the sun and then at the watch sliding loosely on his wrist. Four in the afternoon. That meant the sun was already in the west. A quick look at the side of the squad car told him that he was in Pennsylvania.
He wanted to go north and he had a long ways to go if he wanted to get back to Boston.
He started walking, staying off the road itself and trying to keep in the cover of low-lying bushes whenever he could.
He never saw the bodies of the two policemen that had been shoved out of sight behind the bush closest to the car.
Subject Seven ss-1 Page 6