Mine (19 page)

After she surprised him, it had taken some prodding to get him to say her name. But she knew he remembered it, not from when she’d said it before, but from years ago, when they were kids together. On another shelf on another night, she had found a brochure for Camp Red Hawk, and in the margins had been written her name and Joel’s, and several other names she had forgotten but apparently he had not.

“I know who you are, too,” she said.

In his panic, his form changed again, this time into the teen she had once known. “Please. Don’t.”

“Your name is Mike.” That was the name scrawled across the top of the brochure in big letters.

He was the do-good boy. The rule follower.

One of the Three Who Returned.

“You’re Mike, and I’m Leah. We met at Camp Red Hawk. There were others, too. Joel Madsen and George Dooley and Antonio Ca—”

“—navo and Courtney Reed and Kayla Witten,” he finished.

“You do remember.”

“Always remember. Always, always, always.”

“What about your last name, Mike? Can you tell me what that is?” His surname had not been on the brochure, or on anything else she’d come across, and for the life of her she couldn’t recall it.

“I-I-I…uh, no, don’t have one. Don’t have one.”

“Everyone has one. Just think for a moment. What’s yours?”

“Don’t have one, don’t have one,” he said.

She decided to try something different. “Do you remember when we were at camp?”

He bit his lip and nodded.

“Something happened to us there, didn’t it?” she asked.

“I can’t talk about that.” He tried to pull his hand away from her but she wouldn’t let go. “Can’t. Can’t. No, no, no. Can’t talk about that.”

“The thing is, I remember almost nothing from then. I really need you to help me.”

He shook his head over and over as he shouted, “Can’t! Can’t!”

She’d pushed too far, she realized. She should have waited, maybe made another visit or two and let him get used to her first. Now she was sure that wouldn’t be an option. He would never let her get this close to him again.

“Tell me where you are.”

He looked at her, confused. “My hideaway. My
secret place
.”

“No, where are you physically? Not in the dream.”

“Not a dream. My
secret place
.”

“Your physical body, Mike, where is it?”

He started shaking his head again. “No, no, no. No.”

As he tried to yank free from her again, she gripped harder.

Suddenly images began flashing in her head: Mike on a bed in a dimly lit room; another bed with a small man restrained to it; a different room, a big room, with lots of people moving around, some shouting, some rocking, a few talking with one another or to themselves; a window with bars on the outside and a view of a parking lot.

“No!” Mike yelled as he finally pushed her away. The moment he was free, he disappeared.

But he gave her one last gift right before he broke contact—an image of a metal door with a small placard beside it reading:

307

Lowell, J.

Hurst, M.

Mike Hurst.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

She still didn’t know where this room 307 was, but she was confident she could figure it out. And when she did, she would help him like she was going to help Joel. Whether or not they wanted her to.

And then together they would find out the truth about that night long ago.

THE END OF HIDE & SEEK

F
ORTY-SEVEN

Northeast Mexico

Spring 2016

Joel

J
OEL WISHED HE’D
seen the punch coming, but that’s not how things worked.

A nice solid hit to his cheek, something he knew he’d be feeling for a few days.

His opponent sneered, fists balled, ready to punch again.

“Don’t get cocky,” Joel said in flawless Spanish. “That’s the best shot you’re going to get.”

Growling with anger, the creep threw a wild right hook even a child would have seen coming. Joel juked to the side, letting the guy’s fist fly by. Momentum twisted his opponent to the side, exposing the man’s lower back, just the invitation Joel had been waiting for. He smashed his fist into the guy’s kidney, and mentally placed a checkmark next to the corresponding item on his imaginary to-do list.

Enraged, the man whipped around and tried to grab Joel’s arm, but Joel’s other fist, already on the move, slammed into the guy’s jaw before the a-hole’s fingers touched Joel.

Another checkmark.

The guy stumbled out of range, glaring at Joel and breathing heavily as he rubbed his chin.

“Enough?” Joel asked. “We can stop anytime.”

The creep should have given up right then, but he wasn’t a smart man. With a huff, he came at Joel again, his arms throwing punches as if he had a surplus. Most either glanced off Joel’s arms or missed entirely. Joel, on the other hand, landed hits to the creep’s face (check), stomach (check), shoulder (check), and, using a knee, a painful blow to the guy’s groin (check).

The creep doubled over, sucking in air.

“Come on, you want to stop, you know you do,” Joel said. “Just say it. Please. Surprise me.”

But as much as he wished the guy would walk away, Joel knew the fight wasn’t over yet. There was still one item left to mark off his list.

The yell started low in the a-hole’s throat. When it reached a crescendo, the guy shot toward Joel. Right before he reached him, though, Joel slipped below the creep’s outstretched arms and smacked his shoulder up into the guy’s chest. Something snapped, and the creep instantly dropped to the ground and rolled onto his back, screaming.

Broken rib, heart high.

Checkmark and done
, Joel thought.

Gently, he placed his foot at the base of the injured man’s rib cage. The guy tried to push it away, but his body was not cooperating.

“That hurts a lot,” Joel said. “Trust me, I know. But I did give you a chance to stop. Twice.”

Joel looked over at the small group of people gathered in the alley. They had all come at his request. He picked out the woman, Liliana. As far as he knew, she was the only English speaker in the group.

“Everybody knows what he did?” he asked in his native tongue.

“
Si
,” she said.

“And will they let him do it again?”

“No. Not again.”

Joel wished he had some way of knowing for sure they’d be able to prevent the guy from abusing his own kids anymore, but that wasn’t how Joel’s “gift” worked.

Liliana trailed him back to the roadhouse where he’d been staying, and watched him gather his things and put them in the back of his beat-up car.

“You can stay,” she said. “The others are thankful for what you did and would never tell anyone.”

“I appreciate that. But I have places to go.”

He climbed into the car, coaxed the engine to life, and headed down the road.

The truth was, staying had never been an option. He’d tried that a few times, but at some point either the person he’d taught the lesson to or the person’s friends always found their way to him. He’d known they were coming, of course. His waking injuries never lied. But he could avoid these fights, so now he did.

He had no idea where he was going next. He’d been in the small town near Tampico for over two weeks, part of the grand tour that had taken him south along the west coast of Mexico and through Central America, all the way to the canal before heading back north to come up the Gulf side.

There wasn’t a lot of territory left between him and the US border, though, so he would have to figure out someplace new soon. Maybe Asia again. He’d done that for a while a couple of years ago. He could still go to plenty of places there where no one would recognize him. All of India, for instance. He should be able to get lost there for a few years at least.

The first main road he came upon gave him the choice of southeast or northwest. He picked the latter only because the southeast route would end at the Gulf Coast an hour away.

He settled back in his seat and tried not to think about what mess he would get into next. Because there would be a next. There was always a next.

He seldom thought about his nomad existence anymore in terms of
have I made the right decision?
or
should I be doing something else?
He’d come to accept it for the escape it was.

After finishing college, he had run from his old life, from the pressures of his parents and his teachers and a society that wanted him to use his intelligence in ways
they
saw fit. Maybe if their expectations had been the only things weighing on him, he could have found a way to make that kind of life work and would’ve already been on the path of becoming the researcher his professors encouraged him to be, or the doctor of his mother’s dreams.

But other things were crushing him, too. The death of the girl he couldn’t save had been a big blow, but as far has he’d been able to tell, the pattern of repeated tragedy had not occurred to any of the others he’d helped Perhaps the biggest reason for leaving was his need to escape the Voice.

Two months after he walked out of his Palo Alto apartment, he’d left the country and had yet to return. The reason was simple. He wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and the last place he’d been when the Voice came to him. For a little while it worked, but it wasn’t long before he could feel the Voice reaching out to him again. He did everything he could to keep it away, but it was relentless, so he had let it back in once for the sole purpose of telling it to never come back. Much to his surprise, it had worked.

Without the Voice in his head, he thought he’d be free from his assignments. But what he ended up being free from was someone telling him what he needed to do. Because the curse continued to wake him, bruised and battered, with the knowledge that at some point before he slept again, he would inflict the same injuries on someone else.

He’d begun to think of himself as a fight magnet. He didn’t ask for confrontations but they came looking for him anyway. He kept hoping they would stop, but the violence followed him wherever he went.

He realized he had a choice to make. He could continue stumbling into events haphazardly, or he could keep his eyes open and look for opportunities to channel his curse into something useful. In other words, revive the assignments he’d been so determined to put behind him.

It took him a while to get the rhythm of things. Without the Voice, he was initially operating blind. But over time his unique abilities adapted to his new situation. It was harder than it had been with the Voice, but it worked, and the incidents of random violent encounters decreased until they hardly happened anymore.

Money was never a problem. With the Internet, he was able to get work whenever he wanted, doing things like programming and freelance writing and even some scientific analysis.

About an hour into the drive, he felt a slight tingle on his right cheek. Less than a minute later, he came upon a sign indicating an upcoming turnoff for the town of San Ernesto.

Apparently he’d found his next stop.

F
ORTY-EIGHT

J
OEL WAS BEWILDERED.

This was the fourth morning in a row he’d woken without any cuts or breaks or pain of any kind. He usually experienced something by this point at one of his stops, but there hadn’t been even a scratch.

He’d already identified three people in San Ernesto as potential targets for his unique form of justice—a farmer Joel suspected was stealing from his neighbors, a thirty-year-old mechanic Joel had heard was fond of forcing himself on women, and the chief of the local four-person police department who seemed to be the richest man in town.

While he’d been waiting for the inevitable confrontation with one of them, he found out as much as he could about the men without raising any suspicions, and came up with plans on how to deal with each. The cop would be the trickiest. Joel had experienced only one run-in with a law enforcement official over the four-plus years of his self-imposed exile. That had nearly ended with him in prison for life. Not wanting to repeat that experience, he hoped this cop was on the up-and-up.

After showering and dressing, he left his hotel and headed down the street to grab breakfast at one of the town’s five restaurants. As was the case on the previous two mornings, potential target number three was already sitting at his usual table with one of his officers. The chief looked up as Joel walked in, and tracked him all the way to an empty table before moving his gaze away.

Joel ordered
chilaquiles
and a coffee, and then opened the newspaper he’d picked up as he left the hotel. He’d barely started skimming the headlines when he had the feeling someone was watching him. Assuming it was the chief again, he casually glanced toward the cop’s table, but the man was engaged in conversation with his officer and seemed to have forgotten Joel was there. Joel scanned the room, but neither of the two other customers was facing him.

I’m just keyed up from the wait
.

Focusing on the paper again, he listened in on the cops’ conversation, hoping it might prove useful. But all they talked about was a TV show they’d watched the night before. Not long after Joel’s meal was served, the two cops left.

Joel took his time eating, and then leisurely strolled across town to the auto shop where potential target number two was servicing his car. Joel had brought the vehicle by the day before, knowing it would be a good way to get close to the mechanic. Roberto—that was the guy’s name—had told Joel to leave it there and come back in the morning.