Subject Seven

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.