Subject Seven (9 page)

Even after he woke in the hotel in Baltimore, things hadn't gotten any better. He'd spent most of the last five months as a slave to some punk whose name he didn't even know.

Five months! The thought sent his blood pressure soaring.

He'd been trying to get back to Boston for a long time but never managed it until now. Sometimes he'd get close, like all the way into Rhode Island, but as soon as he closed his eyes, he found himself somewhere else. That unknown, unnamed bastard that gave him orders kept him enslaved so well that sometimes he almost gave up on trying to get away.

Blackouts. Or maybe the kid was drugging him. He couldn't say for sure. All he knew was that the faceless voice from the recorded messages could steal his life away at a whim.

Worst of all, whenever it happened, days or weeks had gone by. The first few times it was days. This last time he woke up almost a month later.

“Not this time.” His voice was deeper than he remembered too. Another thing to mess with his head when he was trying to concentrate.

He walked back over to the motorcycle he'd borrowed to get up here this time. Borrowed, a lovely way of saying that he stole it but meant to return it. If he could remember where to send it back to because he'd been in a bit of a hurry when he hopped onto the bike.

There were no answers for him here, so maybe for a change of pace he could actually return the bike. Part of him was going to miss the feeling of riding. Had he ridden before his memories vanished? He must have, otherwise how could he ride so well now?

He hopped on and slid the key back into the ignition and the blackness swallowed him. He had just enough time to realize that the nameless monster had found him again before the drugs took over and dragged him into the darkness.

Hunter came out of his stupor in a different place. It was nighttime, and the darkness was cut by blue and red strobes. He heard the screech of tires even over the sound of wailing sirens and knew that it had happened again. His life, his world, snatched away from him.

His hands were cuffed behind his back and there were two cops in the front seat of the squad car. The one on the passenger's side was looking at him and scowling. He had a fat lip and a bruise on his face that looked like it would be growing darker very soon. At a guess, the cop wouldn't have minded pulling out a pistol and shooting him.

“Don't know what got into him,” the cop was saying. “I'm just glad he's unconscious.” The cop shook his head. “No, wait. Looks like bright boy's waking up.”

“Is he restrained this time? I don't want him getting loose again.” That came from the driver. All Hunter could see of his face was the eyes looking back at him in the rearview mirror.

His vision grew darker, the sun setting at high speed, and his heartbeat thundered in his ears. How the hell could the man have found him in the back of a moving cop car?

“Don't—” He started to speak but had no idea what he was going to say. His head hurt so badly he thought maybe someone had broken his skull when he wasn't looking.

“Don't what?” The passenger cop was scowling even more and reaching for something. “How about don't make me hit you with the Taser again, boy?”

“I—don't—”

“Shut your face. We'll have you in a cell soon enough.”

He closed his eyes and heard a distant roar, a sound like a giant waking up in a bad mood. When he opened them again—

—Everything was different. He was in the same car. But there was blood all over the place and the windshield was gone, shattered into a billion shining pieces on the dashboard and across the seats. Even across the hood. A billion shining pieces, all of them soaked in red and glistening.

At least the car wasn't moving anymore.

He saw red marks across both of his wrists, deep and angry marks that didn't look like they'd be healing anytime soon.

He tried to climb out of the car, but the doors were locked. No, wait, not locked. Blocked. There were trees crushing into the car from both sides. Hunter stared at them for a moment, unsettled, and then looked around them to the pasture up ahead.

There was no sign of the cops that had been yelling at him before, just the blood all over the place.

“What the hell is going on around here?” The policemen were gone and he found himself wondering if somehow his parents had found him. Maybe that was why the cops had shown up. Maybe that was why they'd been driving him in the car—

No. They'd hit him with a Taser. That was serious stuff, one step down from putting a bullet in his head. And they had been beaten, both of them.

He shook his head. None of it made sense and his skull still felt too small for his brain.

The radio in the front of the squad car was ruined, smashed into broken plastic and glass. There was a smell like gunpowder in the air, though he couldn't remember when he'd have ever smelled the scent before.

Hunter climbed over the headrests between him and the front of the car and then slid out of the broken windshield and onto the hood of the car. The metal under his butt was still warm as he scooted across it. Too warm for the early morning sunlight to have heated it up. The engine beneath him had been running recently and running hard by the looks of the damage to the car. Broken glass and blood scraped at the paint. How the vehicle got wedged between two trees was another of those mysteries that kept trying to sink him.

His clothes were all wrong. They were torn apart, bloodied and not his. The fabric was fine and expensive, and he couldn't remember a time in his life when he'd ever worn a three-piece suit. Then again, he couldn't remember that much of his life, but even if he could, he wouldn't have put on clothes that were the wrong size.

Hunter shook his head. He didn't have time to worry about anything like clothes! He was standing next to a wrecked cop car. He didn't think much of his chances of explaining why he shouldn't be arrested if anyone else came around.

“Screw this.” His voice rumbled and he shook his head again. He didn't remember sounding like that, and even after five months it was weird.

Hunter looked around. The cops would be back soon. Nobody left a wrecked car behind without plans to come back. He wanted to be long gone before they came back.

He stared at the sun and then at the watch sliding loosely on his wrist. Four in the afternoon. That meant the sun was already in the west. A quick look at the side of the squad car told him that he was in Pennsylvania.

He wanted to go north and he had a long ways to go if he wanted to get back to Boston.

He started walking, staying off the road itself and trying to keep in the cover of low-lying bushes whenever he could.

He never saw the bodies of the two policemen that had been shoved out of sight behind the bush closest to the car.

CODY LAUREL SNIFFED THE air and winced. Even with his eyes closed, he could tell that he wasn't at home. If the sounds of two people arguing hadn't told him he wasn't in his room, the rancid body odor and the stench of stale booze would have made it clear.

He opened his eyes and looked around. Yep. Not home. Looked like a jail cell. He wanted to panic but forced the fear back down. He knew that showing fear was the best way around to get all the wrong attention. That's the kind of stuff you learn when you're the class loser.

Still, the man lying next to him on the narrow cot was enough to get him moving. The old dude looked like he was asleep, but he was also trying to spoon with Cody. “Ugh.” He rolled away from the mattress and shivered in the cold air.

There were five other men in the same cell, and all of them were asleep, a few of them snoring loud enough to wake the dead.

Cody pulled at the pants around his waist. They were way, way too big and even the belt that held them up wasn't helping him any.

He didn't have any shoes, just socks. He didn't have a shirt either.

Not far away, he could see a couple of police officers struggling with a man who didn't want to get locked up. The cops were winning.

When they were done locking the door to the cell a few feet down the way, Cody called out to them. “Excuse me? Excuse me!” His voice broke, the already high tone jumping even higher for a second. Puberty sucked. “Help, please!”

The man who came over to see him had steely gray hair in a crew cut over a face that was sagging. Cody guessed he was on the other side of fifty.

“Kid? What the hell are you doing in that cell?” The voice was rough and deep and fit the face perfectly.

“I was kind of hoping you could tell me that.” His heart was pumping along at way too high a speed and his knees wanted to shake themselves off.

Ten minutes later he was sitting in an interrogation room and sipping a hot cocoa from a coin-operated coffee machine. The hot chocolate was weak and watery and he savored every scalding drop of it.

His parents were on the way. He knew that only because Sergeant Tooley, the man who'd found him in the cell, had been nice enough to tell him. Tooley also demanded to know what he'd done with the other man in the cell, but Cody had no answer for that. He was still trying to work out why he was in jail and not the morgue.

The last thing he remembered clearly was running for dear life from Hank Chadbourn and Glenn Wagner. The two had been after him at the football game, ready to pound his head into the concrete for reporting them to Principal Corcoran. He'd known he was going to get a stomping if they found out. He'd been discreet and he couldn't think of anyone who'd been in the office when he reported them.

So when Jeremy and Will convinced him to go to the pep rally, he thought everything was just fine. Besides, it was a chance to see Melanie Chambers in her cheerleading outfit. Hell, seeing her endless legs alone was enough to risk a beating. Add in the shape of her butt and he was willing to face a pack of lions.

The pep rally was less annoying than he'd expected and Melanie did a couple of splits that fired up his imagination, and when he went to the game afterward, he never had an idea he was in trouble.

He caught on around the same time Chadbourn hit him on the shoulder. The ape walked up with a scowl on his ugly face and slammed his fist into Cody's shoulder hard enough to rock him in his seat and to leave a bruise. Cody was still trying to recover when Wagner said, “You're a dead man.”

Wagner had been standing next to Hank, and both of them had smirks on their butt-ugly faces that said they were going to enjoy stretching his entrails around a few trees before they got serious about hurting him.

He got up and hauled his ass as fast as he could because no way in hell did he want to get his face rearranged. That didn't seem to matter to Chadbourn and Wagner. The two were rednecks in training and seemed to really want to start their criminal record as soon as possible. The only thing going for him was dry air that stopped his asthma from acting up too much.

He ran and they followed, calling after him and demanding that he stop, like there was any way he was going to make it easy for them to break every bone in his body.

He'd just cut around the corner of the access road to the football field and could hear their heavy footsteps catching up fast and he'd known—absolutely known—that he was about to die when—

—there had been a loud noise and after that, the only thing he remembered was waking up in the jail cell with a drunk trying to use him as a teddy bear.

The door to the interrogation room opened and Cody saw his parents heading in his direction. He felt both a thrill of excitement at seeing them and a chill of fear at the looks on their faces.

His father was a big man, six feet tall and round, growing an intimidating beer gut to match his broad shoulders. He was normally cheerful, but the scowl on his face told Cody it wasn't going to be a good day. His mom was slender and pretty, dark hair, dark eyes and an olive complexion that made her look younger than her years. Half of his friends had made clear that they thought she was hot, and he could understand that even if it was a little freaky. He got his complexion and hair color from her. Unfortunately he also got his build from her, which was to say he was skinny. It worked better on her. Much better. Mom's eyes were puffy from crying, which explained the expression on his dad's face. The best way in the world to make his father angry was to make his mother cry.

He flipped his bangs back from his face.

“Mom. Dad. Hi.” Despite himself, he let the relief win over the nervous edge. It was good to see them, even if he figured he was about to be grounded for a year or two. He couldn't remember doing anything wrong, but he knew there was no way he was going to get out of this without some sort of punishment.

Linda Laurel looked at her son and started crying again. He was her baby and he knew it. She spoiled him rotten and here he was making her cry. Guilt cut through him like a knife.

“Mom, I'm sorry. I don't even know how I got here.” His mom threw her arms around him and hugged him tightly enough to make his ribs creak. His father looked at him and the face he'd known for as long as he could remember softened for a moment. Neither of his folks was exactly strict, but he'd never given them a reason to be. The stony expression crept back over his father's face and Cody swallowed.

“Cody, where the hell have you been?”

“Dad, I don't know. The last thing I remember was being at the game and—”

The broad face that he normally saw smiling or cheering at a football game darkened and his dad fairly snarled. “That was four days ago, Cody! We've been worried sick!” His father stepped in closer and Cody half expected the man to hit him.