GPS (37 page)

Until now, the night of the ambush on the ranch was the night he had expected he would finally die. But now he had a plan to live instead. It was a desperate one, cowardly even, but he believed it would take just that kind of a crazy act to counterpunch the bullshit testosterone which fueled this world.

For the last week or so, Hawkins had been contemplating. Out of nowhere, something had come to him while he was driving to the old stadium for training, a possible answer to it all. The only possible answer to it all. It was a guaranteed ending, a way to get out or get killed once and for all, and it would be done on his own terms, which was more than could be said for dying as one of Paulo’s unwilling pawns.

So now, when the others figured Hawkins was pouting, he was actually plotting, biding his time. He rode farther and farther into the nothingness toward Old Victoria, knowing a chance to take his life back was looming out there somewhere in the distance.

- 46 -

Hawkins’ path here had been quick and, he was told, permanent. He’d never gotten the chance the others out here did to just stroll on home after a couple of days, let it all sink in and then just start coming back on weekends like it was a beach house.

If this was the final chapter in his pathetic life, he wanted it to be just as quick as his extraction from reality into hell. Even if the plan amounted to nothing more than “running off and eating a bullet” like Paulo always said Hawkins would, that was better than the day-to-day struggle of packing, moving, shooting, ducking, running, climbing mountains, trudging across deserts and generally starving to death.

Hawkins believed that no one like him had ever run off before, and Paulo thought he was exactly like everyone else who had. Even with the damage Hawkins had done to his brain in the last 10 years, he thought no line of cocaine could rob him of his capacity to think under pressure, or at least he wanted to think that. In truth, he’d never faced any pressure in his entire life before coming here. Nothing, that is, beyond getting hopped up and stealing a car or two out of a parking garage and maybe a few from the malls and a couple more from the college.

He could survive out there in the cliffs and on the desert plain, he truly believed that and always had. From the minute he arrived here, he’d been pondering escape possibilities, despite the assurance from others that for him, there could be no escape.

It had begun with the most obvious plan of just running off so he could at least be alone. He couldn’t stand the transients and would rather have lived or died alone than with them. For a while, he thought that maybe he’d be able to make his way north and east, skirt the FB somehow and get back across the border to see what the world looked like up there in this time and version of it. He thought maybe he’d get back to Pennsylvania and see if anything was still the same, see who was alive and who wasn’t. But the longer he’d been here, the more he understood that would be impossible.

He’d even tried to get back over as a stowaway. About three weeks into his misery in the revolucion, Hawkins had hidden himself behind the seats of Rico’s pickup truck while he was supposed to be standing watch. Earlier in the day, he’d overheard Rico telling Paulo he was heading back home that night to get some pain pills for his back. Hawkins thought it was as simple as just not being seen and going along for the ride.

But for some reason, the GPS wouldn’t take Rico or Hawkins across that night, causing Rico to totally flip out. He yelled and screamed and opened and slammed the truck doors until he spied the unusually large mass beneath his blanket behind the seats. Rico was so pissed when he discovered it was Hawkins, he’d pulled his knife on the kid and chased him with it. For whatever reason, traveling back and forth with the GPS was a one-man show. There wouldn’t be any families or brothers or best friends or father-and-son tandems coming across together, so hitching back across was out.

But now, Hawkins had a much more daring, much more sinister plan for escape. It was a way to get back to the real world and to never have to see this place again. And it was absolutely perfect. It was a plan that would not only get him out of here, but also prove that he had figured out something the other idiots had not. It was a very simple concept, and all it required was for him to murder someone, then take command of their vehicle and the GPS inside it. Take out whoever needs taking out and wave bye-bye. If anyone deserved a pass out, it was him.

Through the entire ordeal, the thing he never got to tell anyone, the part that never got tried in any district court, was this: Hawkins would have begged for jail time if he’d known this was the alternative. He wasn’t cut out for jail either, perhaps, but he most certainly wasn’t fit for this life.

The transient convoy crawled along into the night, and as it went, the familiar, painful home movies again began playing in the mind of Hawkins.

- 47 -

For the 12
^th
time, at least in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, that was, David Hawkins had promised himself that night, now much more than a year ago, that this would be the last car he’d ever steal. He’d made himself that same promise as he sat behind the wheel of each and every car he’d ever stolen before that.

He’d crept up to the black Cadillac Escalade in a poorly lit liquor store parking lot in Newcastle. He was not even certain it was a car he
wanted
to steal or even if it was empty of all of its passengers. But it was left running and looked vacant. And when he spied the giant GPS glowing on the windshield, looked through the liquor store window and saw the scene starting to unfold within, he just couldn’t resist.

He flung the truck’s door open, climbed inside and then promised himself he would only go far enough around the corner to yank the GPS off the windshield, fish around for some loose change, CDs, pot, coke, whatever he could grab, and abandon the thing right there and run the 10 or so blocks back home. He didn’t need to go down for grand theft auto after all he’d gotten away with already.

But he did need money. Man, did he need money. And he was already inside. So maybe just this one last one. Petey would pay some serious loot for an Escalade with rims
and
a sound system
and
a GPS. The Escalade’s owner and passenger were robbing the liquor store at the moment and were a little preoccupied, making his path out a little more certain.

What Hawkins didn’t know was that the little red button behind the liquor store’s counter had been pressed two minutes before, as he arrived on foot walking home from Bennie’s Tavern and spotted the SUV. The first-time robbers inside the store had spent a good deal of time trying to establish to the store clerk that they were serious, that the guns were real, and apparently the clerk had brandished his own, seriously-real gun.

The shots which rang out the second Hawkins slammed the truck into drive and hit the gas made him grit his teeth, duck his head and put the pedal to the floor. There was no time to consider whether or not the shots were coming at him, but as he stole a terrified glance across the parking lot and steered the Escalade toward the alley, he caught a glimpse of one of the two robbers on the floor inside the store, apparently shot by the clerk.

No one seemed to be looking at him from inside, so he kept the pedal slammed and squealed into the narrow alley in what suddenly seemed a Godzilla-sized SUV. As he did, he noticed the GPS on the windshield blinking on and off, malfunctioning in some way.

The big, colorful screen now was displaying the word REPROGRAMMING, with a little percentage bar running along the bottom. It was only at 12 percent, then 13, then 14. Hawkins wondered if he’d set off some sort of security device when he jumped in the car. But then the line zipped right across to 100 percent, the screen went blank for a second and then flashed back on in blinding blue light.

“
Warren GPS Technology. Welcome,”
a woman’s voice cascaded through the truck.

Hawkins reared back in the face of the sudden blast of light. The SUV slowed to a crawl for a few seconds as he pondered the big screen, which was processing information feverishly, spitting out long fronds of gibberish. He sat waiting, foolishly, to see what it would do next. Before it was done, he saw something in the rearview mirror that diverted his attention.

It was the thing he’d spent every minute of his thieving life fretting about but never actually seeing until now. Flashes of red and blue burst to life behind him, several sets of them. They came from out on the street by the liquor store, and then more came from the front end of the alley.

The GPS screen kept flashing, processing, and it lit up Hawkins’ own frightened face in the mirror. He wondered how soon he would be in handcuffs, whether he should just pull over and accept his fate or whether he should take the cops on a little chase he knew he would not win. He started moving again.

“
Arriving at destination, in, point, two, miles.”

A panicked scream escaped the throat of Hawkins. The GPS was up and running, the speaker bleating out an apparent destination, but one that most certainly didn’t help Hawkins out of this mess. It was probably the address of one of the robbers, or a safehouse, and he sure as hell didn’t need to go there. There was a map on the GPS screen again, and it zoomed in on some bizarre, orange-and green blob with a single road splitting through it. Hawkins was moving faster and faster now toward the end of the alley. He was staring at the road now, forcing his eyes away from the screen and trying to decide which way, left or right, to turn, and again, whether or not to just pull over.

“
Arriving at destination on right, in, five, hundred, feet.”

He looked back, saw a police car charging up the alley behind him and another one coming toward him from the left, driving the wrong direction up a one-way street and trying to head him off.

“
Arriving at destination, on right.”

He steered the car wildly to the right, bounced up and over the curb as he did, and again floored the gas pedal. Hawkins never looked at planet earth the same way again, and didn’t have much choice.

When he skidded to a halt a few seconds later and found himself sitting in the middle of the dark desert, he had no idea yet just how alone he would feel for the next year or more. Before the first sun rose in his new world, the Escalade and the portal between worlds on its windshield had been snatched by the FB and never seen again.

It was explained to him that a man’s GPS was his DNA for life in both worlds. Without it, he could only live in one world or the other, regardless if it was the one he called home or not. Hawkins learned this after it was too late, after he’d been stranded on the wrong side. If he’d known, he would have fought the Freemen to the death that first night in order to save the SUV and the GPS.

His life sentence had been explained to him by Paulo and the others after his lifeline had already been cut. They said that it didn’t matter which side you got stuck on, only that if you got stuck, you could never get unstuck. They told him that another man’s GPS was of no use other than for finding regular old directions.

That was why people like Simmons fiercely defended their cars and went to such great lengths to stay close to them, to find ways to hide them or even pay people to watch them. The thought of being stuck now made Hawkins smile. “We’ll see about that,” the man on the back of the truck said aloud into the moonlit night, which cast just enough light to illuminate the desert floor and reveal the peaks of the massive mountains approaching in the distance. “We’ll just see.”

Like always, he fell right back into replaying the final moments of his former life, over and over. He just couldn’t help it. Only now he did so with a hopeful feeling. Through his misery, he had found the one thing that could save him.

He was hopeful there
was
a way for him to get back home on someone else’s ticket. If it was true, and if he was able to make it happen, it was something far better than suicide or being mauled in the desert.

It was survival, and that actually meant something. Home would become a much different place for Hawkins if he ever got back. Fuck Newcastle, he was headed for Hollywood if he made it back to the other side. He had a story to tell now. He couldn’t wait to try it, to prove them all wrong, though Paulo and the rest would never even know for sure what had happened if his plan worked.

A bump in the road big enough to make Hawkins bite his tongue brought the 21-year-old back into the present again. His first thought every time he snapped out of his daydreams was simple. Until he tried something daring he was trapped in the desert forever. Much like his failed previous life, he lived in a world that did not trust him, and its people did not believe there was anything other than rudimentary information being processed in his brain. They were wrong.

Fonseca’s transient division crawled cautiously through the night, aiming toward the highway that would carry the convoy through the treacherous mountain passes. On the other side, the ruins south and west of Victoria and another scary day in the desert awaited. When the caravan reached its destination, Hawkins was calling it quits.

He’d built up about enough good faith with Paulo at this point to pull some mundane desert detail when they arrived in the morning. He would get assigned manual labor for sure, or even night watch, and probably on his own. When he did, the kid from Pennsylvania who was expected to be nothing more than a hose man in the blaze at Destinoso would have a leg up on all the others about something.

Hawkins had already plotted a way in and through the mountain passes to the west of Victoria in his journal. He would drop out of sight, then covet a victim. He had the luxury of not caring which side of the battle that victim came from. What mattered was that his victim had a GPS of some sort that was attached to a worthy vehicle. It was perfect — the life of stealing on the other side that got him trapped here would now help him escape.