Final Disposition (9 page)

      “Right at the intersection, right onto Two-Twenty-Seven, and then south on I-Five,” Cellars repeated.

       “That’s correct, sir.  If you do get lost, just type the two-two code into the GPS, and it’ll take you right into town.  Or, if you’re not sure about your situation, just code in nine-nine to activate your beeper, stay where you are, and the signal will lead us right to you.”

      “Any decent hotels or motels in the area?”

      “Several, sir, and most of them are real good about offering government rates to the troops.”

      “Then I should be just fine,” Cellars said.   “Appreciate your help, soldier.”

      “No problem, sir, have a good night.”

      Cellars waited patiently until the barrier gates rose up out of the way.

      Then, humming cheerfully to himself, he slowly accelerated the heavy Humvee down the narrow dark road toward the promised first intersection as he began to seriously consider his options.

CHAPTER 6

      The GPS unit turned out to be a lot easier to operate than Cellars expected, especially after he found and read the plastic instruction card and hand-printed addendum that someone had thoughtfully taped to the side of the unit.

      One of the first things he discovered — after pulling of the road a couple of miles past the first intersection and reading the instructions — was that coding the number ‘24’ into the unit instead of ‘22’ gave him a very-easy–to-follow map from his current location to Medford.

      
Okay, continue on down this road, right on Highway Two-Thirty, right on Crater Lake Highway, and pull into Medford an hour or so later, depending on the weather,
Cellars said to himself as he manually keyed his way long the brightly-lit-graphic route. 
Narrower roads, and probably lousier conditions, but this beast ought to be able to handle it.  Is there anything else I should know?

      As it turned out, there was.  The back of the plastic instruction card went on to explain, in cheerful detail, how the GPS unit would continue to send an intermittent signal back to a satellite receiver — revealing its precise location every fifteen seconds — as long as the unit was turned on.

      “Snitch,” Cellars muttered as he reached over and pressed the power button to the OFF position.  The colorful GPS screen immediately went black.

      
And, just to be sure —

      Cellars reached behind the unit and disconnected the power cord.

      
Now, then, any back-up batteries that I need to worry about?

      He quickly re-read the instruction card one more time; but if there was one, the card wasn’t telling, and he couldn’t find any obvious battery chamber cover on the dash-mounted unit.

      Okay, so be it, let’s get this show on the road.

      Cellars’ basic plan was simple in purpose and scope: put as much distance between himself and the VA facility as possible before MacGregor and Harthburn came to — or someone found them — and put out a general alarm.  At that point, he was going to find some place to hide the Humvee and then monitor the traffic on MacGregor’s radio to see if he could get some specific information on a wide range of topics, such as what was going on … who he was … and why he was being prodded, played with, and closely monitored by a team of Army doctors and shrinks, along with a music-loving neuropsychologist posing as a floor nurse.

      In that regard, Cellars had a general idea of the role that a guinea pig played in a scientific experiment.  Unfortunately, and for reasons he couldn’t even begin to grasp, he had an uneasy feeling that the term might apply to him in some not-very-nice way.  And if that proved to be the case, he was going to find out why … and how … and by whom, and then put an end to the experiment while he still had some control over the situation.

      The storm hit hard just as Cellars swung the wide-beamed Humvee onto Crater Lake Highway.

      The resulting impact was emotionally intense, and completely unexpected.

      Cellars understood the basic idea of a snowstorm — fluffy white stuff crystallizing and then falling out of a cold and cloudy sky — and that was exactly what he expected to see out of his windshield at some point during this trip.  But he hadn’t expected the first drifting clumps of glistening snowflakes to trigger vivid memories of the terrifying dream that had seemingly roamed through his subconscious in the minutes before he’d regained consciousness in the MRI lab.

      The unearthed memories were immediately illusive, fragmentary, and seemingly even out of order; but the effect on the primitive portion of his brain was instantaneous.

      Without conscious thought, Cellars slammed his right foot on the brake.  He felt the heavy vehicle first start to slide and then completely lose contact with the slickening road.  He tried to regain control over the situation, but his hands refused to react because the Humvee was starting to do exactly what the primitive part of his brain wanted it to do … which was to stop, turn around, and get the hell away from the falling snow.

      
But why … what the hell’s the problem?

      Cellars’ frontal lobes … demanding an explanation … all the while frantically searching for relevant data in the temporal lobes that — once again — simply wasn’t there.

      He blinked and shook his head — trying to hold onto the fleeting, will-o-the-wisp memories so that he could try to understand the who, what, when, where, why and how … but they wouldn’t stay still — as the Humvee came to a sudden, tire-skidding, off-road stop in what felt like mud and loose rocks.

      
Oh shit.

      The idea of being stuck in the face of the oncoming storm clearly appealed to his primitive brain even less than going forward, Cellars realized, because he caught himself starting to jam his foot onto the accelerator, working desperately to get out … and
then
get away.

      
Oh no, you don’t
, Cellars thought, willing himself to ignore his deep-seated instincts and take a few seconds to re-consider his situation.

      
I’m off the road, in a pretty serious snowstorm that seems to be causing me to relive a scary and crazy dream; but it’s only that — a dream.  What else can it possibly be?

      His frontal lobes remained unresponsive.

      
And, more to the point, I’m off the road in a military vehicle that was
designed
to drive across far worse terrain than this under combat conditions.  So what exactly is my problem anyway?

      He thought about that for a few more seconds, came to the conclusion that he really didn’t have a problem — apart from having just recently been in military custody and under psychiatric care before stealing a military vehicle, a pistol and a radio from a military police officer he’d drugged, who was probably going to be seriously pissed when he woke up — and started examining the controls of the Humvee a little more closely.

      Two minutes later, Cellars was back on the road, still heading south toward Medford, but at a much slower and more careful pace; the snow still falling in what was now a soothingly rhythmic pattern.

      He was tempted to speed up — knowing that the volume-to-mass-ratio of the sedative cocktail he’d given MacGregor and Harthburn was such that the two MPs might start to regain consciousness at any time.

      But the Humvee seemed oblivious to the snow build-up on the road, and was steadily eating up the miles.  And he reminded himself that any pursuit by the MPs couldn’t possibly be conducted at much faster speeds on these roads.  So he maintained a steady pressure on the accelerator and continued to focus his entire attention on the narrow winding road ahead.

*     *     *

      Thirty minutes and approximately twenty miles later, Cellars decided that the rapidly falling clumps of snow were no longer frightening or soothing.   They were actually starting to get repetitive, and — apart from the fact that the road was getting increasingly difficult to see beneath the snow drifts — a little boring.

      
Be nice to see something else on this road
, he thought;
another car, a deer, something
.

      Realizing that he needed some kind of additional stimulus to keep his mind busy, he checked to make sure that MacGregor’s pack set radio was still on — it was — and then switched on the Humvee’s interior lights in an attempt to locate the dash radio, only to discover that there wasn’t one.

      
Christ, how do they expect soldiers to stay awake on these long drives?

      He was in the process of working through the logic that military vehicles were designed for combat … and it probably wasn’t all that difficult to stay alert when people were shooting at you … and it probably wasn’t a good idea to be listening to distracting music in a combat zone in any case … when he remembered the songs that Lisa Marcini had said were loaded into his j-Connector.

      The ones he could listen to any time he wanted.

      
Can’t think of a better time than right now
, Cellars decided as he fumbled in his jacket pocket for the small electronic device.

      He finally managed to pull the small electronic device out his pocket, and tried to turn it on one-handed.  But that simple task proved to be an extremely difficult — if not impossible — thing to do while driving a lumbering Humvee in a now-raging snowstorm.

      So he came to a careful stop in the middle of the road, tucked the earphones into his ears, turned the device on, found the music file labeled ‘Colin’s Favorites’, opened it up, found the track titled ‘This Magic Moment’, selected it with a tap of his fingertip, and then began to accelerate down the road again as a wondrously complex melody began to echo across the dark recesses of his mind … 

      Quickly lost in the music, Cellars found himself driving by rote and instinct, his hands keeping the Humvee centered in the snow-covered road, and his right foot maintaining a steady speed …

      The tempo, timbre and reverberation of the words ‘summer night’ shifted slightly, as though the Drifters were trying to create the mental image of such an enchanting night by singing the words in a slower, deeper, and more stretched-out manner, and a name suddenly popped into Cellars’ head.

      Jody.

      
Who?

      He didn’t know
who
, had no idea
who
, but the sound of her voice — and the soft accompaniment of the nylon-stringed guitar she was playing — was a distinct memory now, retrieved or possibly reassembled from some tangential storage space in his subconscious.  Definitely Jody … she had sung the song just like that, whoever she was.  He could hear
her
singing the song now, in a slightly huskier voice ...

      … at some time in his past — a long time ago — when he had to have been somebody else.

      He could almost see her singing now … wanted desperately to see what she looked like … as his frontal lobes reached deeper and deeper into his temporal memories, searching for that crucial connecting link … that simply wasn’t there any more … when he suddenly saw, up ahead, at the far edge of his visibility, a lone dark figure standing on the far side of the road.

      Cellar’s first instinct was to brake — bringing the Humvee to a swerving and sliding stop in the middle of the narrow road — thinking that the figure was a fellow driver who had managed to get lost or disabled in the storm, and needed help.

      He started to unroll his driver’s-side window, intending to call out to the apparent male adult — who was now only ten yards away, but still an oddly dark and indistinct figure in the falling snow — when the figure suddenly turned away … and then, in a flash, disappeared into the darkness.

      
What the hell …?!

      Cellars felt the cold chill surge down his spine as his frontal lobes instantly retrieved the frightening memory of the flickering shadow disappearing across the VA clinic’s expansive lawn.

      But there wasn’t time to be frightened now because Cellars’ more primitive instincts had already taken over, causing him to rip the earphones out of his ears and sending him lunging out of the Humvee — instinctively chambering a round into the 9mm Baretta pistol as he charged through the several inches of accumulated snow on the road — toward the spot where the figure had disappeared.

      But when he got to that spot, and looked around, he saw no one — in fact, nothing at all except more falling snow — as far as he could see in the reflective glare of his headlight beams.

      Then he looked down, and felt his brain go numb as he realized that — as far out as he could see — the only boot prints in the four-inch deep snow were his own.

      
Wait a minute … how can that be?  I saw him … I know I —

      Some primordial instinct housed in the base of Cellars’ brain snapped his head around, and he saw — to his absolute disbelief — another dark figure black-lit by the reddish glow of his tail-lights and reaching for the driver’s side door of his Humvee.

      Cellars saw the blinding fireballs explode in front of his eyes … heard the eardrum-splitting concussive roar of the Baretta … and felt it recoil in his hand before he was aware that he had brought the lethal weapon up to eye-level in both hands and triggered three rounds.

      An instant later, as he desperately tried to blink away the glaring shadows coming off his seared retinas, Cellars saw the reaching figure hesitate … crumble forward … and then — in the span of one more eye-blink, and amid a flashing cloud of condensing vapor — disappear.

      
What?! … no way in hell … that’s complete bullshit!