“Hello?”
“Yes, hello Peter,” the voice says. It’s a woman’s voice, but I know it’s really Carlos on the phone. Peter is the name on all of my identification. Peter Brookhiser, of Cleveland. I’ve tried to memorize all of the pertinents on my new ID, but it’s hard, and, like the phone, I’d hate to have to burn it. Then I’d have to learn a whole new set of facts.
“This is Peter,” I say. I know that my voice is being changed too. Carlos put a chip in these burner phones so that I can’t be located using the NSA’s voice recognition and tracking programs.
“Don’t get back in the car, man,” Carlos says. “Somehow they’ve tracked you down.”
“On the ground?” I ask.
“Not yet. Doesn’t look like they have anyone moving in, but there’s chatter on a military band, and they’re looking for an Excursion fitting the description of your vehicle.”
“Dammit. What else?”
“That’s all I know.”
“Then, what next?” I ask.
“Get moving. Right now. You need to go overland for a bit, head east and south, and get to Strasburg. It shouldn’t be too far. You’ve been to the warehouse there. That’s your next stop.”
“Okay. Shit.”
“And burn the phone.”
There is silence after that, and I know that Carlos has broken the connection. He doesn’t like to talk on the phone, even when he has his voice scrambled.
We’re back alongside the restaurant, with Frank still counting—he’s at three hundred and eighty-five steps—and I look up ahead and see two truly shady characters stepping out from the landscaping. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they had both been hiding in the bushes. The first is tall, maybe six-foot-five, and wiry. He looks a little strung out. His short, fatter friend, who’s keeping his head down, seems to be angling to get behind us.
“Hey, friends,” Lanky says.
Frank just walks on by the two men. He’s still counting, and they look at him with flummoxed glances before turning their attention to me.
That’s when I realize that these must be the two men from the red Buick. Probably running from the cops for something a little more mundane than having a killer robot. I look around, but the cops are long gone.
“Hey,” I say. I put my hand in my coat pocket so it looks like I might have a weapon in there. I don’t know if it’ll work, but I’ve seen it in the movies.
“Easy, friend,” Lanky says. “Was wondering which way you boys were heading. Maybe we can catch a ride.” He gestures with his thumb at his fat friend, who still hasn’t looked up at us. No one in their right mind would give these two clowns a lift.
“Which way you headed?” I ask.
“South, man,” Lanky says. “But we’ll go whatever direction you’re heading.”
“Interesting,” I say. Frank must have reached four hundred and twenty-two, because I see him standing on the curb near the front of the restaurant, staring into the parking lot.
There is silence for a moment, and then Lanky seems to get anxious. He takes a step toward me, but stops when I act like I’m going to draw something out of my pocket.
He puts his hands up in a gesture of peace. “So what do you say, friend?” he says.
A plan hits me all at once. I don’t take time to think about it. After all, I’m not a very good person.
“I tell you what, friend,” I say with heavy emphasis on the last word. “I’ll do you one better. Here.” I throw him the keys. “Take it.”
Lanky catches the keys and looks at me through bloodshot eyes. “Whut?”
“Take it,” I say again. “I was going to get rid of it anyway.”
Lanky turns and looks around the parking lot. “Which... uh...”
“It’s the black Excursion up there. Up by the road.”
“It stolen?”
“What do you care?”
“Is it?” Lanky asks. His eyes cut at me like I’m trying to rip him off.
“No,” I say. “It’s not stolen. It just reminds me of my ex-wife. Expensive and a pain in the ass to try to maintain. I owe more on it than it’s worth.”
“You givin’ it to me?”
“Not really,” I say. “I’ll report it stolen eventually. But probably not for a few days. Papers are in the glove box.”
I want to say, You were about to steal it anyway, dummy. I’m just making it easy for you! But I don’t. I have a plan now, and I don’t want to mess it up. I need to come across as a financially burdened dad, trying to put one over on either his ex-wife or the insurance company.
I should feel bad about setting these jerks up, but I don’t. I don’t feel bad one bit. I walk over and take Frank by the arm, and we walk past Fatty and head back toward the rear of the restaurant. Fatty is now staring at his friend in confusion.
“You must think I’m dumb!” Lanky shouts at my back.
I look over my shoulder and smile. “Yes, I kinda think you are.”
CHAPTER 6
From a hilltop behind the diner we stop so I can situate Frank’s shoes. He’s wearing slip-on sneakers, and they tend to fall off his feet if he does much hard walking. This is going to be a chore, I think as I stuff his foot back into his shoe.
I look down and I see the two ne’er-do-wells climb into the Excursion. The vehicle rocks back and forth a bit as they search through it. Probably rifling the paperwork in the glove box and seeing if there’s anything else to steal. I have a bad opinion of human nature, but to be fair, it’s usually borne out by facts on the ground.
I know. I probably shouldn’t have set these two boys up like this. Maybe they’re just like Frank and me. Maybe they’re on the run from their circumstances and they just need some help. Maybe they’re innocent victims of a society and an economy gone to hell. But, in my defense, in all my years on this planet I’ve become something of an expert on scumbaggery. Hell, I probably aced a bunch of it on my own. I know these boys are up to no good, and they wouldn’t have hesitated to rob us if they could have.
They’re not smart, but they’re bad men, I think to myself. I think it, but I know the human mind is capable of rationalizing any behavior, and that bad and good can be relative when you’re applying these labels to yourself. I know this because I’m human. Just like everyone else, only more so.
And I need something good to happen for once. I’m traveling with an autistic boy in a man’s body with the whole federal government on my tail. When do I catch a break? Well maybe I just did, and these two saps are just on the wrong end of the deal.
I really need a drink.
The Excursion starts up and I see the brake lights come on. Why would he back up? It’s a straight shot up to the highway. No need to back up—that’s why I parked there. Then I realize he’s trying to find the right gear. Not the brightest light in the sky, this lanky fella. The brake lights go off, and the Excursion jerks forward before he hits the brakes again. Finally he pulls forward and turns right onto the on-ramp of the highway.
From up here I can watch him head south. I wonder if the cops will be on him soon, or if perhaps a military convoy is up the road a spell.
I don’t have to wonder long. A few hundred yards down the highway it happens. I see the explosion before anything else has time to register. The Excursion rockets skyward in a brilliant fireball that blasts into a thousand- thousand pieces of shrapnel. I’m vaguely aware of the missile trail, the roar of jets flying overhead—and then the blast wave hits us and we both fall backward onto the ground. More from shock than from the force of the blast wave, but we still fall down.
Damn.
“Transport jet,” Frank says, lying on his back, looking up at the sky.
I push myself up with my hands and look over at Frank. “No. Not a transport jet. It was some kind of fighter aircraft.”
“Transport Agency,” Frank says. He speaks the words very distinctly, like he’s trying to teach something to a younger brother.
I’m up now, and
I’m pulling Frank up with me. His eyes don’t seem to register fear, and now he’s reaching down again for his shoe, but his hands are full with his bolts. Again with the shoe. I help him pull it on and then I drag him with me as we disappear into the woods.
“There is no Transport Agency,” I tell him.
“Transport Agency jet,” Frank repeats.
You never know what’s going through his eleven-year-old Amish mind. How does he even know what a jet is? He’s Amish.
* * *
Once we’re a hundred yards into the woods, I stop and pull out my cell phone—the one I’d been using to talk to Carlos. I remove the battery and smash the phone on a rock. I bash it a few times with another stone, then I pick up the pieces and push them under some pine needles and leaves.
The other burner phone, the one still in my pocket, I just remove the battery from it. It wasn’t powered on when the... whatever that was... went down, and I don’t know if pulling the battery is enough to render it untraceable, but I don’t want them scanning the data from the nearest tower and looking for other phones in the area that were logged in. I’ll need to power it up again once we get a few miles away, but for now I’m taking no chances.
I need a drink. Bad.
Frank seems to be okay though. In fact, he’s completely unaffected. Being surrounded by nature seems to have a calming effect on him. To him, we’re just out on a stroll, and I see that he notices when a cardinal zips by us and alights on a pine branch. You never know with him. You can’t guess when he’ll have a problem, when something will strike him as wrong, or when you might somehow do or say the wrong thing and set him off. But then something truly bizarre can happen and he’s wholly unfazed.
Turning off a cartoon almost sends him off the chart; seeing the vehicle we’d been traveling in destroyed by a missile doesn’t even register.
I don’t know how much progress he’s making with the CAINing, either. I really just need to get us out of this area and into Strasburg so we can pick up another vehicle and get back on the road.
Of course, the number one question on my mind is: How did they find us? There can be no doubt that the missile back there was meant for Frank. None whatsoever. The government just spent over a million dollars to try to remove a threat. And I know they’ll do it again. I can only hope that for now, they think we’re dead. They’ll figure out the truth soon enough, but that might give us a window to get to Strasburg.
I’m glad for the tree cover, too. We turn south and find a cow or deer path that makes the walking relatively easy. Sometimes we even make it a few hundred yards before Frank walks out of his shoe again and I have to help him put it back on. Occasionally we have to scale a barbed wire fence, but we do our best to stay in the trees, avoiding contact with farmers or anyone else.
“I wonder how far it is to Strasburg,” I say aloud. Mostly to myself, but maybe a little to Frank, who isn’t stimming or engaged in any overtly autistic behavior. Maybe he’ll talk.
“Two point four miles to Strasburg,” Frank says.
“What?”
“Two point four miles to Strasburg, Ohio, USA,” Frank says.
How can he know that?
It’s true that many autistic people are also savants. Of course, in no way is every autistic child a savant, but many of them are. I’ve studied a little about it and I know the basic bullet points. And I know that Frank’s parents and other caregivers saw no indication that he had any savant characteristics.
But maybe Frank does have savant syndrome. There are many levels of it, and not only is not every autistic a savant (that’s a myth perpetuated by the movie Rain Man), but neither is every autistic savant a prodigious savant—that is to say, someone with truly extraordinary abilities, well outside of the realm of “normal.” Whatever that means. But savant abilities do occur among autistic children at a higher statistical rate than they do in the rest of the population.
So maybe Frank has some savant tendencies. Could be.
“Hey Frank,” I say. “How far are we from Strasburg?”
“Strasburg, Ohio, USA is... two point three miles.”
There was a map in the diner, with a pin in it. Maybe while I was paying the bill, Frank looked at the map? But... that doesn’t explain how he knows our current distance from Strasburg. He has no way of knowing our position or trajectory. Unless he’s been counting steps.
Strange. Maybe Frank’s savant gift is mapping, and he can continue to locate himself on the map in his mind as he moves. And then there’s the fact that he has one of the most powerful and robust computers in the world linked to his brain. Surely he has access to high-quality maps in the databases that Carlos uploaded into his computer.
But—and this is the thing—an autistic child needs to have context for what they know. Even an autistic savant doesn’t just know things he or she has never had access to. This is an Amish boy. He can’t just start spitting out the schematics of a nuclear plant even if that information is in his computer memory (which it probably is). He would first need some context to apply the information.
I mean, walk into any library, and you’ll have access to more information than you’ll ever be able to use—but that doesn’t mean you know any of it. That’s what I mean when I say Frank has access to all of this data. Access doesn’t equal knowledge.
Come to think of it, I’m not even sure Frank knows what a “mile” is. He’s only eleven, and I keep having to remind myself of that.
Unless the CAINing has proceeded farther than I’d suspected. Unless he’s actually accessing his computer memory, and the mind is amalgamating that information on the fly.
If he’s learning on the go...
Hard to tell.
We walk about another half mile and then I check with Frank again.
“Frank, how far to Strasburg?”
“Are we going to get my Amish clothes in Strasburg?” Frank asks.
“We are.”
“One point seven miles to Strasburg, Ohio, USA.”
I look at Frank and smile. I’ll have to access his memory and do some searching around when we get to a place where we can rest. I have some programs on my burner smartphone that will help me to parse some of what’s going on with the boy. It will be fascinating to study.
I reach over and pat Frank on the back. “Very good, Frank. Thank you! That is very helpful.” He flinches when I touch him, pulls away. He couldn’t care less if I thank him.
We skirt a large hill and a pond, and for a moment we’re out in the open. I don’t like the feeling, so I hurry us along. After a bit, we’re back in the woods again. Well, more like a few small copses of trees separated by clearings. We hear the jets again, and Frank says “Transport jets” as if he knows what that means.
I don’t.
We’re starting to get tired, and around a mile out of Strasburg we happen upon an old barn that looks abandoned. The structure is solid—oaken beams harvested from old-growth forests, from the looks of it—but the siding is mostly gone, and a third of the roof is missing.
We enter the barn, and through the opening in the roof I see the afternoon sky, blue and mottled with puffy clouds.
“What time is it, Frank?” I ask. I don’t think he can tell time, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. Maybe with occasional questions I can find out what else the boy can do.
“I need my Amish clothes,” Frank says.
“I know you do, Frank.”
“Because I need them.”
“I know.”
I sit Frank down on a bundle that looks like old horse blankets wrapped in rotted rope, and then I reach over and power him down. For the first time, I feel a twinge of guilt in doing it. He’s a human being. But it’s naptime for Frank. His mind needs it, and let’s face it: I need it too. Not the nap; I need Frank to be down for a bit. I need to access his computer, and I want to do some investigation into how the CAINing is proceeding.
But first I need a drink.
We’re a mile out of Str
asburg and I need a drink very hard. That’s what I used to say in the days after Marilyn—Cruella—left me, and right before I would go on a bender that would last for days on end. I need a drink so hard. Maybe it’s not the wisest thing to do when I’m on the run, but if I’m going to manage to keep it together through all of this, I need a little something to keep me going.
I’ll just have one.
There’s bound to be a quiet, rundown bar somewhere in Strasburg. I’ll pop in, have a double scotch, and be on my way. That’ll even me out. Then I can come back and interrogate Frank’s computer with the smartphone. See what I can learn.
Just one drink. That’s all.
CHAPTER 7
I’m getting drunk.
The scotch is silky and doesn’t burn at all, because I don’t buy cheap scotch even when I’m just in it to get drunk. The third one slides down even smoother than the first two.
The Pharaoh Tavern is a gettin’ drunk kind of place.
Neon from a dozen beer signs gives the smoky air a red-gold hue, and Linda Ronstadt croons forth from an honest-to-goodness jukebox the likes of which I haven’t seen in a dozen years. Her voice is as smooth as the scotch, and though they’ve had this album on repeat since I first walked in, I don’t mind it one bit. The bartender polishes the bar and turns his head to me every few minutes with a gleam in his eye, but the bar top never gets any cleaner no matter how hard he tries. I think he knows that I’m his meal ticket for tonight, so he’s hanging close in case I need a top-up.
There are other people in the bar, but even with my low latent inhibition (that’s a scientific term that basically means I’m a noticer; my brain treats even mundane details as if they’re worth paying attention to—think Sherlock Holmes), I’m able to tune them all out like they aren’t even there. Like we’re not sharing this moment in Earth’s history. Like they are only bit players or bots in this scene.
Brother, Frank Page 5