Public Enemy Zero

55

Mitchell was sound asleep in the passenger seat of the Land Cruiser when a commotion not of his design shook him awake. He felt his body lurch forward and then opened his eyes to see sunlight momentarily flicker from outside the carrier and then suddenly get blacked out. Something pressed up against his face and he could smell a sharp pungent smell like battery acid. All around he heard the sound of twisting metal and explosions as the entire world seemed to be shaken apart.

He felt a moment of weightlessness and then was thrown to the right as the world shifted around him. His brain tried to make sense of what was happening. Parts of a half-remembered dream still threaded through his consciousness. The smell. The pressure on his face and the explosion he just felt to his side. Airbags.

He was in a car. The car was in a train. The train had crashed. Mitchell could feel the rumble of metal sliding across gravel and hear the impact as cars hit each other. The train was still crashing.

The airbags began to deflate. The windshield was cracked from when the impact sent the cars in the carrier into the air, bouncing into the ceiling. His car and the carrier were now on their side. For a fleeting moment, he thought he was back in the tractor-trailer truck he’d stolen what seemed like ages ago.

Mitchell could hear the sound of the railroad cars in back of him shudder and fly off the tracks as the impact that hit him rolled from the front of the train to the back like a giant wave. Twenty million pounds of steel cried out as the train was brought to a stop.

Mitchell regained his senses. He did a quick pat-down to see if anything was broken. He was already bruised and banged up from the past several days; all he cared about was if any bones were sticking out of places where they shouldn’t. Everything seemed to be where it was supposed to have been. It was dumb luck that he’d found the safest place on the train: inside a car with front and side airbags. If he’d found the open rail car like he’d been hoping for, he was certain his body would have been bounced around like a jelly doughnut inside a blender.

On top of everything else, thought Mitchell, now he was trapped in a train accident. He unfastened his seat belt and shifted his back to the side door so he could kick out the windshield. Accident? He cursed himself. There were no accidents of late. This was deliberate.

He thought for a moment. If it had been the cops and the feds, they would have just stopped the train. This was someone else. This was the work of the people who’d sent the helicopter after his boat. Somehow they’d tracked him. Mitchell had shut off the phone he’d taken from the pier and made sure that Steinmetz’s laptop’s wireless connection was turned off. Damn it. It was a government computer and undoubtedly had some kind of computer tracking system in it. The fact that the people who tracked him had used train derailment as a means to stop him meant that Steinmetz’s bosses hadn’t told the feds where he was at.

Mitchell needed to get away before the scene was flooded with emergency personnel. He grabbed the duffel bag and climbed through the front windshield. There was a crevice of space between the top of the SUV and the carrier ceiling. Mitchell squeezed his body into it and moved toward the bright light streaming from the back of the car hauler.

It probably would have been easier if he’d just crawled through the back window, but he didn’t feel like going back into the SUV. The airbag smell and broken glass would only depress him even further. If he stopped to think of himself as an accident victim waiting for help, that would just make him vulnerable.

Mitchell pushed himself through the tiny space and then froze. Outside he could hear the sound of feet on gravel. Someone was walking toward the car carrier.