Final Disposition (13 page)

      But even as the last question formed in his mind, his ever-logical frontal lobes offered up the obvious answer.

      
Jody … the guitar-playing singer from somewhere in his past … had to be.

      “Kinda tough playing catch-up when the world’s moving so fast and crazy-like, huh, bud?” the Bobby voice chuckled.

      “You think this is funny?”

      “Matter of fact, I do.  The Tillman broad was a little too uptight for my tastes, but I thought the Reverend Slogaan was a real hoot.  Man’s supposed to have a whole legion of fire-breathing fanatics at his beck and call.  Gotta hand it to you, bud, you’ve got a real talent for making interesting friends.”

      “I wouldn’t exactly call them my friends.”

      “No, probably not, seeing as how one of them is working real hard to lock your ass up right about now … and the other one seriously wants to see it burned at a stake before the sun rises.”

      “You got any advice?” Cellars asked, probing for something — anything — that might give him a connecting link to who Bobby Dawson might or might not be.

      “Fact is, I’m still in the catching-up phase myself … maybe only twenty-four hours or so ahead of where you’re at … but yeah, I’ve got some good advice which I really think you ought to consider following right about now.”

      “And that is?”

      “Seeing as how you’ve got about twenty nasty characters of every imaginable stripe vectoring in on that radio station as we speak, every one of them looking to get themselves a figurative piece of your hide, I strongly suggest you get the hell out of Dodge while you still can.”

CHAPTER 8

       “No, wait, you can’t leave now, we’re just getting started!” Ace Bellringer cried out, his eyes widening in horror when he saw Cellars fling off the headset and start toward the door to the Green Room.

      “Oh, yes, I can,” Cellars said as he stopped at the doorway and briefly looked back, “and I am … but I’ll be back.  You both can count on that.  We’ve got a lot more to talk about.”

      “Wait — let me call security,” Bellringer pleaded.  “You’ve got to be careful going out there by yourself.  That friend of yours who called — Bobby — he got it exactly right.  The Reverend Slogaan and his legions really are fanatics, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get that evidence they think you have.”

      “
What
evidence?”

      “You know, of extraterrestrial contact.”

      “But I don’t
have
any evidence of extraterrestrial contact!”

      “Yeah, but now they think you do,” Bellringer said, looking stricken.

      Cellars blinked in sudden realization.

      “Oh, great … thanks a lot.”

      “Sorry …”

      Cellars was through the Green Room and moving at a steady trot down the hallway toward the front door, trying to give his frontal lobes a few seconds to come up with a plan, when he saw the young receptionist throw up her hands in frustration.

      “My God, this switchboard is going nuts!” she exclaimed.  “Look at it, there’s a caller on every incoming line, and every one of them’s a frigging lunatic!”

      Cellars paused to stare at the switchboard, noting reflexively that every one of the sixteen panel lights was flashing impatiently, demanding attention, and then blurted out: “phone book?”

      The receptionist stared at him blankly.  “What?”

      “A phone book,” he repeated, “for the Medford area.  Do you have one?”

      I … uh … think so,” she said, and began rummaging under her desk.  “Yes, here it is —” she started to say, holding the inch-and-a-half thick volume up in one hand triumphantly, and then gasped in surprise when Cellars grabbed it out of her hand.

      “Thanks,” he yelled over his shoulder as he quickly yanked open the door leading to the lobby, “I’ll try to bring it back.”

*     *     *

      When Cellars exited the KMAD station at a fast walk, trying not to attract any attention, he discovered the snowstorm that had raged furiously in Jasper County had followed him into Medford.

      The mostly empty parking lot was now blanketed with about four inches of freshly fallen snow, and large clumps of barely-adhering snowflake crystals were swirling in all directions.  The sky above appeared to be a sea of fluffy, neon-reflecting white as far as the eye could see.

      The rapidly falling snow — and the fact that the parking lot was already dimly lit — made it hard for Cellars to see and get his bearings.

      But that turned out to be an advantage a few moments later when a small pickup truck suddenly appeared, coming down the service road at a very high speed and then sharply swerving into the KMAD parking lot with a tire-spinning squeal … the wide-eyed driver apparently never seeing the curb, or realizing how narrow the entrance was at that point.

      He quickly discovered his mistake.

      The narrow and almost bald tires hit the four-inch curb with a solid WHUMP, sending the small truck airborne for a good two seconds before slamming down on the left front and rear tires at a nearly forty-five degree angle to the pavement.

      For a brief moment, it appeared as if the truck might actually land upright on all four tires.  But the force of momentum quickly overcame gravity.

      The truck continued on into a complete one-eighty-degree flip, its roof crumpling loudly against the rough asphalt – sending chunks of window glass flying in all directions — before grinding to an upside-down stop a few feet from where Cellars he was standing.

      Moments later, to Cellars’ complete amazement, the driver of the small truck managed to pull himself through the shattered remains of the driver’s-side window and stagger to his feet with a wooden baseball bat held loosely in one hand.

      Looking dazed and otherwise nearly out on his feet, it took the driver a couple of seconds to see the Army-uniformed figure walking in his direction with a telephone book in one hand.

      “Hey, soldier, where’s that heathen KMAD radio station?” the driver demanded, swaying dangerously as he tried to blink his burred eyes into focus.  “I got myself a date with a devil-worshiper, and I’m not going to let him get … hey?!”

      Having the bat suddenly wrenched out of his grasp nearly caused the dazed driver to lose his balance.  But he managed to stagger forward and catch himself just as the thick end of the bat slammed into his right shin.

      There was a slight reactive delay — apparently caused by the neural signals from the shinbone having trouble getting through to the appropriate receptors — whereupon the driver screamed out in agony and flipped backward onto the pavement while grabbing desperately at his leg.

      He was still screaming when the bat slammed into his other shin.

      The resulting serge of neural signals mercifully overloaded the driver’s severely limited mental resources, sending the misfortunate heathen hunter into blissful unconsciousness.

      Muttering to himself, Cellars walked hurriedly over to the Humvee, opened the driver’s-side door, tossed the phone book and bat into the back seat, and was settling into the vehicle — thumbing the ignition switch over to ‘RUN’ — when he heard the sound of sirens starting to shriek in the distance.

      
Great
, he thought as he impatiently waited for the glow plug light on the starter box to go out. 
Wonder what’s coming next on this crazed hit parade?

      He found out, moments later, when he used the heavy front bumper of the Humvee to shove the upside-down truck out of the way, drove cautiously but expeditiously out of the parking lot and onto the adjoining service road, and found himself facing what looked like a white private security SUV coming in fast with sirens screaming and roof-mounted red lights flashing wildly.

      Having no other obvious option, and being leery of the rapidly deteriorating road conditions, Cellars kept on accelerating the Humvee straight down what he hoped was still his lane.

      As the distance between the two oncoming vehicles quickly narrowed to something less than fifteen yards, the security guard suddenly swerved his car around into a sliding ninety-degree turn that effectively blocked both lanes.

      Responding with instincts that Cellars didn’t know he possessed, he tapped at the Humvee’s brakes, dumping speed rapidly but maintaining his directional vector … until he was only a few feet away from the blocking vehicle.

      Then, at the moment when he felt his heavy bumper impact and start to crumple the security patrol car’s relatively thin side panel, he quickly dropped the Humvee into low gear, yanked the Humvee’s steering wheel over in a counter-clockwise rotation, and then slammed down on the accelerator pedal.

      Cellars saw the uniformed security guard’s expression switch from disbelief to panic as he frantically tried to release himself from his safety belt.

      But the guard didn’t look to be in any serious danger, so Cellars continued to keep his foot pressed against the accelerator as the Humvee’s powerful diesel engine and transmission propelled the white SUV sideways off the road and tilting into the abutting deep runoff ditch.

      A quick series of gear reversals brought the Humvee back onto the service road proper and accelerating away from the KMAD parking lot at what Cellars hoped was a maximum safe speed as he felt the wide tires churn through the rapidly accumulating expanse of snow.

      Two quick turns and a dash through an array of red lights dancing in the wind over a completely empty intersection brought him back to what was now a seemingly deserted Crater Lake Highway.

      Figuring that situation wouldn’t last very long if Bobby Dawson’s warning was accurate, Cellars continued driving in what the Humvee’s dash-mounted compass said was a south-westerly direction.  He paused at the bridge over the I-5, saw that the freeway wasn’t deserted — there were several semis and other vehicles seeming to maintain a steady albeit slow pace in their north- and south-bound directions — realized he was getting increasingly tired and hungry, and decided it was about time he came up with that plan.

      He continued driving into downtown Medford for another quarter mile or so, pulled off on a side street, reached into the back seat for the map, and turned on the over-head light.

      The idea of checking into one of the several hotels or motels he’d already seen near the Crater Lake Highway and I-5 intersection was tempting.  But he didn’t think he was far enough away from the KMAD radio station yet, and he didn’t know how much a room cost.  So he decided the better option was to hide the Humvee in some spot where it wouldn’t be noticed and then —

      
Where it wouldn’t be noticed?

      Cellars reached into the back seat again — this time for the phone book.

      A quick check of the Federal Government Listings showed no military bases in the immediate area, but the State listings revealed the presence of a National Guard Armory on Pacific Coast Highway.

      
Even better
, Cellars thought,
especially if Armory means what the word implies — a place to store military things, as opposed to an actively manned base
.

      Figuring it was worth the effort to find out if that
was
the case, Cellars searched for the armory’s location on his map; but quickly discovered that the scale was wrong.  There were no street addresses on his map, only the names of highways, streets and towns.  Worse, his map showed Pacific Highway — apparently old Highway 99, a narrower road running parallel to I-5 — stretching the entire length of his map … from Central Point, five miles north of his position, down to the town of Ashland that was fifteen miles south.

      
Crap.

      He glanced briefly at the dash-mounted GPS system, knowing that it could give him a precise location for the Armory in seconds.  But he didn’t know how long it would take for its tell-tale transmitter to give away his location to the satellite array overhead.

      
Every fifteen seconds
, he remembered,
but when does the counting start?

      Having no idea, he decided the best thing he could do was to forget about the GPS and go with simple logic.  The phone book said the Armory was located in Medford, so all he had to do was get himself on Pacific Highway, in the center of Medford and in a manner least likely to attract the attention of a patrolling police officer, and then see what the addresses read.

      
And to do that
, he mused, examining the map closely,
the best thing to do is probably to go back to the I-Five freeway onramp, head south, take exit twenty-seven, go west on Barnett Road, and there I am.

*     *     *

      Ten minutes later, after following a huge semi that seemed to have no trouble maintaining its fifty-five mile per hour speed in the middle of a blizzard, Cellars was approaching the two-seven off ramp when he saw the billboard advertising ‘Shari’s – twenty-four hour dining – next exit.’

      
Really?

      Feeling even more hungry now, not to mention grateful that there were no other vehicles in or near the intersection, Cellars took the two-seven exit and — in a matter of two minutes — found himself pulling into the parking lot of a brightly-lit green-metal-roofed restaurant that certainly appeared to be open for business.

      Humming to himself, Cellars pulled the Humvee into a parking space next to another large trash receptacle —
getting to be handy things, these big dumpsters
— exited the vehicle, walked around the building through the still-rapidly-falling snow to the front entrance …

      … And then stopped in his tracks when he saw the old bearded figure sitting against the restaurant’s brick wall with what looked like a threadbare woolen blanket clutched around his shoulders, and some kind of radio headset clamped over his dirty knit cap.