Subject Seven

Chapter Forty
Gene Rothstein

Genehung up the phone. His call to his parents hadn’t gone well. They believed he was still trying to punish them for the adoption thing. He was sure his parents were already calling a private detective to hunt him down.

Gene closed his eyes for a minute and let out a deep, shuddering breath. His heart felt like it would never slow down.

Tina looked at him, a hundred unasked questions dancing over her pretty features. She wasn’t cute. She wasn’t beautiful. She was pretty. There was a difference. Kyrie could have been called cute or beautiful, but Tina didn’t quite qualify.

He handed her the phone. “Thanks.”

Tina nodded and a second later took the battery from the phone. When she was done putting the now dead phone back together, she stood up and walked over to the wastebasket not far from where they were sitting and dropped the pieces in.

“Why’d you do that?” Gene had been raised to never throw away anything useful.

Tina flashed him a short smile. “Can’t trace us if we don’t have that phone anymore. I’ll buy some more when we need’em.”

He frowned in thought and she continued. “Your folks love you. They ain’t letting you run away without looking for you. So, we can’t let them track us with a cell phone. They can do that these days. I saw it on one of the news shows. We’re on the lam. We gotta be smart enough not to get busted.”

“But what about your folks? Don’t you need to call them?” The words were out before he could stop them. Hadn’t the recording of Joe Bronx said something about her family?

Tina’s face lost all emotion again, and for a moment she was a pretty statue and not a teenage girl. “My folks are dead. Didn’t you listen when Joe was going over that on his tape? My dad got himself shot when I was just five so he was never in the picture. And they pulled my mom out of the river a few days ago.”

“Oh my God, I’m sorry.” That was Kyrie. Gene looked down at the ground, hating himself for being a moron.

“Don’t be.” Tina’s voice was as cold as her expression. “She wasn’t much of a mom anyways.”

Gene kept his mouth shut. She was lying. She was hurting. But who was he to call her on it?

Ten minutes later Joe and Cody’s other self-Hank? Yeah, Hank-pulled up. The car was a big old gas guzzler. It was big enough to seat them all comfortably and that was what mattered, he supposed.

Joe stayed in the driver’s seat while everyone piled in. He was wearing a pair of sunglasses and his eyes were hidden behind the dark lenses. It was almost impossible to guess what he was thinking.

“We ready to leave, kids?”

Tina climbed into the backseat and settled herself directly behind him. “Just drive, Jeeves. Chicago is a long ways off.”

In the passenger’s seat, Hank grunted and shifted and moved nervously as the change started. He shrank before their eyes, his rough features growing younger, his thick muscles slipping away until he looked like a little kid playing dress up in the clothes that had stretched to accommodate Hank’s bigger body mass. The pants were suddenly loose instead of tight and the shirt he was wearing looked like a tent. Hank had closed his eyes. Cody opened them, looking a bit disoriented. He looked around for a moment, not saying a word.

Tina cursed under her breath and climbed out of the car. “You stay right here, big boy.”

“Where are you going?” Joe scowled.

“Cody! Get over here!” Her voice was a sharp snap and Cody followed her without question.

Tina bent at the waist and fished into the wastebasket until she found the missing pieces of the phone and then put them together.

“Call home. Tell your folks you’re alive, Cody. Okay? Talk to them and tell them whatever you want, but let them know you’re okay.”

Cody looked at the phone for a long minute and licked his lips nervously. “What should I say?”

Tina shrugged. She had that expressionless look on her face again. “You love your parents?”

“Yeah.”

“Then tell ’em you love ’em and tell ’em you’ll see ’em soon.”

Cody nodded and started punching in the number. A moment later he turned away from everyone and started talking.

When he was done, Tina took the phone from him and once again broke it apart before throwing it away.

Cody climbed back into the car and said nothing, but he wiped at his eyes as if offended by the tears that had fallen when he spoke to his father. He hadn’t dared talk to his mom. He’d surely have taken the first bus back home if he had heard her voice.

Joe started driving. He pulled onto I-95 a few minutes later and accelerated to almost seventy miles per hour. Soon enough they were switching onto a westbound interstate, aiming for Chicago and a part of the country none of them but Joe had ever seen before.

There was a long road ahead of them, and each of them had many things to consider in the silence between them. Behind them, they were leaving all that they had once thought they knew about the world, leaving behind the lies that had been their lives and in most cases desperately wishing they could go back to those sweet lies. Instead they moved forward, seeking answers to truths that made no sense, haunted by the other selves who hid inside of them and wanted answers just as desperately.

And on the highway Joe Bronx drove, a half smile playing around his mouth, his fingers tapping on the steering wheel the beat of a Disturbed song that was playing on the radio as he cruised at just the right speed to look like just another driver, just another normal teenager heading down the long road.

And lost inside of his head, trapped away, Hunter Harrison said nothing, perhaps thought nothing or possibly dreamed of the world he’d known before Joe came into the universe and started destroying his life.

If he was aware of anything at all, he hid it away as surely as Joe did.