Centralia (22 page)

“It is Lilly. It’s your daughter.”

“No.” Peter grabbed his head with both hands and studied the scenario unfolding on the monitor again. The girl had blonde hair; his Lilly had dark-brown hair, like Karen. And the girl in the chair looked nothing like Karen; his Lilly was the perfect image of her mother. “That’s not her.”

“It
is
, Peter.”

Peter felt the same anger again climbing up his chest, that wolverine with claws and teeth, scratching at his mind. “I know what my daughter looks like and that’s not her.”

April pushed back her chair and stood.

Peter took a step away from April and lifted the gun to aim at her. He couldn’t trust her, couldn’t trust any of them. This was a trick, had to be. She’d lured him into this room to trap him, to mess more with his mind
 
—as if they hadn’t muddled it enough already.

April backpedaled to the wall and lifted her hands. Fear widened her eyes. No longer did she look like the venomous villain Peter had imagined just moments ago. “Whoa, listen; I can explain.”

But Peter kept the gun on her. On the screen, in the concrete room, the girl took the electrical current like no human should be able to. The meter’s needle hovered around a hundred volts, but she remained calm. It was an incredible sight. “Who are you? Who is that girl?”

“My name is April LaBarrie. I’m a counselor here, like I told you. And that girl, Peter, is your daughter. It’s Lilly.”

April moved slowly to the computer desk and tapped a few keys; the image on the screen froze. She enlarged the girl’s face so it took up most of the screen.

“Look at her,” April said. “Look at her face. Look into her eyes. You have to remember. Do you see how she resembles you?”

Peter studied the girl’s face. It wasn’t Lilly, at least not the Lilly he remembered. But he’d already learned that what he knew, or thought he knew, wasn’t necessarily reality. He found himself wanting to believe April. “Okay. I’ll play along. Convince me.”

April shifted her eyes from the gun to the monitor to Peter. “It’s all part of the imprinting they did on you. They intended to bring you back into the project to be part of these kids’ training, but there was always the possibility you’d see footage like this, so they changed the image of them. To change their names, their whole identities, would mess too much with something you had such an emotional attachment to, but they changed the way your brain remembered them to make sure you’d never recognize them.”

Peter lowered the gun. “How can they do that?”

“What is your past other than a series of memories? Without
memories, nothing exists in your past. You have no history. Change the memories, change the past. Change the past, change the present. They scrubbed your mind of all images of Karen and Lilly and replaced them with the images they wanted you to remember.”

Peter stared at the screen as he scrolled over this new line of thinking. He understood what April was getting at, but she was wrong on some crucial points. He had a past. Maybe he didn’t know which past he could trust, but one of them was empirically real, beyond the scope of his own perceptions. And more than that, there were some truths that Peter had encountered over the past couple days that transcended facts and evidence and whatever mixed-up stories people had tried to feed him. His love for Lilly and Karen. The verse in the Bible in his dream. And now, as he stared at the still image of the girl on the monitor, he realized another truth that had been buried deep: he’d had some faith they tried to scrub out of him. They’d tried to take him away from God, but God just wouldn’t let go.

The girl on the screen looked into the camera as if she knew he would be looking at her at this exact moment with the image frozen and her eyes studying his, pleading for him to remember her. But the girl was not his Lilly. As much as he wanted her to be his daughter, as much as he longed for his memories to be wrong, he simply could not bring himself to accept that they were. There was such a strong emotional attachment to how he remembered Karen and Lilly. How could that possibly be wrong as well? “Images of another woman and another child. But why?”

“Their work on Lilly and the other children took higher priority than their work with you. Once you were released into society again, they couldn’t have you clinging to Karen and Lilly,
so they made you believe they died in a car accident.” She glanced at the monitor. “And they told Karen and Lilly you died in action, a hero.”

“But Nichols said they never really existed, that they were fabricated to give me an anchor in each of the realities created for me.”

April frowned. “Nichols is a liar, then. Another reason to not like that man.”

“So how do I know if anything else he told me is true or not?”

April walked to the door. “Follow me. You can’t trust your memories. Don’t trust them. Whatever you think is true may or may not be. Your reality has been so tampered with that you can’t know for sure that anything is real. But seeing is believing, right?”

“You know where they are?”

She cracked the door and peeked out into the hall. “All clear,” she said to Peter.

He followed her, gun raised, senses alert. The corridor was empty, quiet as a tomb full of dead men who kept the best secrets. In fact, though, it was too quiet. Something wasn’t right. They should have guards swarming the tunnels looking for him.

April led him to the end of the corridor and down another tunnel that branched to the left. This one had no doors but stretched no more than fifty feet to a T junction. They turned right and stopped in front of a door.

April looked at the door, then at Peter. “This is it, Peter. Karen and Lilly are in that room.”

The door was protected by a fingerprint scanner like the others. With his mouth suddenly as dry as sand, Peter motioned toward the scanner. “You gonna open it?”

April hesitated. She suddenly appeared very nervous. Her eyes shifted side to side, and she wrung her hands.

“April,” Peter said. His intuition screamed at him, sounded an alarm, and warned him away. “Open the door.”

He should run, get out of there, but not without Karen and Lilly. His desire for the truth continued to push him forward. And his desire to find his wife and daughter overrode every tactical instinct screaming at him.

“April, please, do it. Open it.”

She looked to her left, down the empty corridor, then placed her thumb on the scanner. The lock clicked and Peter pushed open the door.

The room was furnished like a cheap motel. A little table and two chairs, a double bed. On the bed sat a woman. Brown shoulder-length hair, slender figure, attractive. Next to her sat a girl, the girl from the monitor.

Peter stepped into the room, confused. The woman’s mouth hung open like she’d stopped talking mid-word. Tears quickly pooled in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. The girl next to her slid off the bed and, still holding her mother’s hand, smiled widely. She too began crying.

Peter couldn’t think of a single thing to say. The woman stood and approached him, her mouth still open, eyes still leaking tears. When she stood before him, she let go of the girl and lifted a trembling hand to Peter’s face.

“Is it really you?” she said. Her voice was weak and tight. She appeared to be doing all she could to restrain sobs that wanted to burst out of her like water breaching a dam.

Still Peter said nothing.

The woman looked deeply into Peter’s eyes, studied them as if determining for herself if he was who she thought he was.

In her eyes Peter saw love and kindness and a deep sadness
that shocked him. But they weren’t the eyes of his wife. At least he didn’t think they were. But standing there before the woman, she peering so deeply into his soul, he lost his handle on his memory and found it too difficult to conjure an image of the Karen he knew and loved in his mind.

They stood there like that for what seemed way too much time, the woman’s hand on Peter’s face, his heart thumping in his ears. He realized the girl had been clutching him, her arms around his waist. The weight of her against him was familiar but surely not unlike the hug of any child.

But still, there was something about this woman and child, something
 
—

From the corridor outside came the sound of heavy boots moving fast. Peter’s eyes darted to April. Had she led him into a trap? But she appeared just as surprised as he was.

She took a deep breath and called, “Don’t come any closer. He has hostages.” April looked at Peter, eyes wide, lips pressed together, and flicked her hand, motioning him toward her. She was a quick thinker.

Peter stepped behind her and pointed the gun to her head, grieving over how this might appear to the mother and daughter in the room, but one look reassured him that even the young girl had noticed April’s ruse and caught on.

Peter moved April into the doorway, half in the room, half out. Down the corridor at least five guards had gathered, all brandishing handguns. None had taken a shot yet, which confirmed they didn’t want to risk hitting April.

Peter moved into the corridor, staying close to the wall and keeping April between him and the guards. He glanced in the room and said to the woman, “You coming with us?”

She gathered up her daughter and they both hurried to the doorway.

“Get behind us,” Peter said.

The woman, holding her daughter close, did as instructed.

“Now,” Peter said to April, “how do we get out of here?”

“Back. Go back,” April said.

Peter backpedaled down the tunnel, holding the gun to April’s head with one hand and keeping his arm wrapped around her neck with the other. She clung to his arm to avoid losing her footing. The woman and girl from the room stuck close, staying behind Peter and out of direct line of any guns. The guards followed cautiously, crouched, guns trained on him, keeping a distance of fifty feet between them.

At the next intersection, the corridors stretched in each direction like catacombs built to house the remains of long-dead saints. Dim lights illuminated the pale concrete in sections, giving it an appearance of motion as if it billowed and rolled to some subterranean tidal force.

“Which way?”

April pointed left. “That way.”

They ducked around the corner, and the scuffing of boots on concrete grew closer as the guards hurried to close the distance between them.

Peter picked up the pace, but April’s feet couldn’t keep up. She stumbled and nearly fell from his grip. Peter pulled her up as easily as if she were made of fabric and stuffed with cotton. “Hurry. C’mon.”

A moment later two of the guards peeked around the corner, guns raised; then the others joined them. They had closed the distance to no more than thirty feet now.

They approached another intersection. “Now where?” Peter asked.

April squirmed under his grip. “Straight. Keep going straight.”

At the intersection, they paused. Peter could feel April’s heart beating through her back against his chest. Their pursuers were still steadily closing the gap.

Behind him, in the intersection, there was a scuffle, a whimper, and the woman screamed.

Peter spun around in time to see one of the guards dragging the girl down the tunnel, one hand over her mouth, a gun to her head.

Peter nearly dropped April. “No!” he shouted. Things were unraveling quickly.

The woman, caught in the middle of the intersection between Peter and the guard, glanced at her daughter, glanced at Peter, a look of terror and hopelessness in her eyes. Her skin went pale, and her lips trembled at the sudden chill that had descended on the subterranean maze.

“You have to remember,” she said to Peter, her voice cracking on every word.

And then she turned and fled in the direction the guard had taken her daughter.

The pursuing guards were now less than thirty feet away, so close Peter could see the intensity in the lead’s eyes.

Confusion fogged Peter’s mind, and for a moment he thought of surrendering. The way the woman had looked at him . . . Those eyes . . .

“You have to remember.”

“Let her go, Ryan.” It was the lead guard. Guns aimed and ready to open fire, they continued their slow advance.

Peter began to backpedal again. Karen and Lilly. After all he’d been through to find them, losing them like this . . . But he’d have to leave them. He couldn’t catch up to them, and he might never find them in this labyrinth. He found them once; he’d find them again. “We have to get out of here, April. How do we get out?”

“End of the hall,” April said, her voice tight and strained. “There’s a door. It’ll take us out.”

Just as April had said, at the end of the hall there was a solid door protected by a fingerprint scanner. Peter placed his thumb on the scanner. Nothing happened. He tried once more with the same result.

“You don’t have access,” April said.

Peter swung her around to face the door. “Unlock it.”

The lead guard, a thin, muscular guy with short graying hair stepped forward, crouched at the waist, and pointed his handgun at Peter. He had a kind face, the face of a dad and granddad, and when he spoke, his voice was smooth and friendly, not forceful and commanding as one might expect. “Don’t do it, April. You can’t trust him.”

So kindly was his voice, in fact, that Peter almost believed him and released April.

April hesitated, her thumb hovering over the scanner.

Returning to his better senses, Peter pointed his gun at the paternal guard. He spoke to April. “Do it! Open the door.”

“No,” the guard said. “He’ll kill you once he’s out. He’s a killer; it’s what he was trained to do. He doesn’t care about you or anyone. He’ll do what he needs to do to survive and in this case that means killing you.” Again the guard spoke as if he were April’s father giving her advice about the kind of men she chose to spend time with.

Peter loosed his grip on April. “I wouldn’t do that. Now it’s your turn to trust me. Trust me, April.”

“You can’t trust him,” the guard said. “He’s a robot, and he’s been programmed to fulfill the mission at all cost, and you’re not part of his mission. You’re an obstacle.”

April whimpered but didn’t move her thumb.

“April, listen to me,” Peter said. “You didn’t want to be part of all this. I know you didn’t, okay? I know it. I could see it in your eyes. Now open the door and let’s both get out of here.”

The guard stepped closer. He was now only twenty feet away. “April, if you unlock that door and go with him, you’ll be considered a traitor
 
—”

“You can’t be a traitor,” Peter said, “if I’m holding you against your will.”

The guard inched forward. “You’ll be a traitor in our eyes because we know you had a choice. Aiding the enemy. It’s called treason. Do you want that?”

April began to cry. She dropped her thumb on the scanner. The guard yelled, “April!” but it was too late.

The door’s lock disengaged.

The other guards advanced in a quick run, keeping formation.

“Go, go!” Peter said. He pushed April through and shut the door as the guards arrived on the other side.

Peter leaned against the door, his heart beating through his spine and into the thick metal, and surveyed the area. They were in another tunnel, this one more dimly lit; the bulbs were spread at farther intervals. Ahead was another door, another fingerprint scanner.

“They can’t get in,” April said. “Only certain job codes have access and they’re not one of them.”

Peter’s head spun. “Was that really my Karen? My Lilly?” he asked, mostly to himself.

“Yes. That was them.”

But it wasn’t possible. They couldn’t be his family. Surely the sight of his own wife would trigger something inside him, some kind of authentic memories. The woman had an emotional effect on him, but it was an emotional situation. But then there was the fact that, though they looked like strangers in his eyes, they both seemed to instantly recognize him. After all he’d been through in the past few days, was it really so impossible to believe that his wife and daughter might look different from how he remembered them?

They didn’t have time for this. The guards would find someone who had clearance to enter this corridor and would be opening the door any minute, maybe any second. “Where are they?”

April slumped against the wall. “He took them.”

“He who?”

“Nichols.”

“Took them where?”

“Probably up. To the top.”

“Then we need to get moving,” Peter said.