GPS (39 page)

Paulo hadn’t figured out what Hawkins had, or he would have traveled back and forth at least once or twice. And Simmons, Mr. Big Shot, even with his non-stop jumping from one side to the other, wouldn’t be so goddamned protective of his own GPS if he had any clue.

Since Hawkins had never had a voice here, and never had a listening ear, no one ever heard about how he’d gotten here. Now he was glad they didn’t know. He was glad they didn’t know that when a man so cursed as to own a Warren GPS died, the unit went through a brief reprogramming routine. If you happened to be sitting behind the wheel of that man’s vehicle when that happened — like he had been on the night when the robber in the liquor store had been shot — the wild world of Warren became yours. It attached itself to you. That was the way he’d gotten here, and that was the way he was getting back.

He’d watched Fonseca prance over to his backpack sitting in the bed of a truck that morning, no doubt pleased he’d found his favorite sucker to watch camp. When he asked him to do it, Hawkins had to take a deep breath and compose himself. He couldn’t do anything to blow the only chance he might ever get. He couldn’t run off too quickly. So he stood watch for about two hours, and just before the first javelin of sunlight crashed into the campsite, he bailed.

He slowly tip-toed across the backside of the clearing, his own backside facing the campsite and all the trucks. In his brain, footage from seventh grade had begun to play. He’d filled his pockets with gum and candy bars at the Dairy Mart up the street from home, and now walked stiffly for the door, his entire body bracing for the store clerk to shout, “Hey you!” from behind him. But just like all those times during his formative childhood years, Hawkins slid out unnoticed, creeping up the shallow hillside on the west side of the camp.

He drew on all his years of living life through the thumb-pressed feats of various video game heroes. With them, he’d marched successfully past entire armies, slain countless dragons and other beasts and traveled through multiple planes of time and existence. On some of his more gooned-up nights as a teen, Hawkins had often pretended that guy on the screen — the one in all first-person games that he controlled but whose face was never fully revealed — was him. Now it
was
him.

The hill steepened, and he began a stiff, nervous scurry, looking behind him in panicked glances until he was about 50 yards up the sharp incline toward the foothills. He paused, lurking behind an outcropping of rocks. He proceeded up the next incline at a light jog, trying to keep the jutting rocks between himself and the campsite. When he’d found a long, smooth plateau, he turned one last time and held his breath, scanning for any movement down below on the desert floor. He pulled the rifle off his back and peered through its scope. There was nothing.

On the move again, he thought suddenly of the flashing lights in his rearview mirror and at once took off in a frantic sprint across the open ground and then up another incline, aiming toward the next scramble of trees and scrub.

Head pounding, he focused on the mountains slowly coming into view on the brightening horizon, where he planned to lie in wait for the next couple of days. He could faintly see their peaks in the early morning light, and could sense their massive presence miles in the distance.

He sprinted as long as he could, then slowed to a jog, thinking maybe he could get a mile or two or even three away from the camp if he pushed himself, but his constant fear of a misstep kept him unsteady. When he stopped and again began scanning his wake with the rifle scope, he thought every swaying branch and every sound meant they had come to find him, if for no other reason than they would have been pissed as hell that he’d left them unattended.

As soon as he caught his breath, he got up and ran again. It was getting brighter by the minute, and Hawkins knew he’d better get further away than he was now if he was going to be safe.

He ran, then stopped, then ran again until he’d reached the base of the mountain range, nearly five miles away from the camp outside of Victoria. By the time he stopped, the sun was scorching down from above. He climbed a short cliff to set up an afternoon refuge on a tiny, grassy plateau. He figured he could doze there in the partial shade, have a birds-eye view of the terrain below him and be virtually unseen in the tall grass.

He’d succeeded in sneaking out of camp without being noticed by the transients, but soon Hawkins fell under the watch of a more sinister eye.

- 50 -

It was perfect. The handheld Warren GPS was light, well-worn but appeared to be in working condition. The only imperfect thing about the whole scene was that the GPS wasn’t inside a running car and it didn’t say REPROGRAMMING on its screen. He found it resting on a rock, and it didn’t have a charger with it, so perhaps it was only temporarily perfect.

But Hawkins’ scheme was moving along at a blinding pace already, and now he’d found a device which rendered much of his planning over the last two weeks pretty pointless. This little gadget would take the mystery out of his journey, which was a good thing on escape missions.

Hawkins couldn’t help but wonder if this was the same way smartass Paulo had come into ownership of his own little Warren handheld, had just found it lying in the middle of nowhere. He probably made that shit up about taking out the FB ranchers at their campfire. In any case, life never felt more like a video game to Hawkins than now. He was picking up bonuses and everything, charging toward the next level.

He plopped down on the same rock on which he’d found the GPS completely unattended, and he wondered if this was something big enough, great enough, important enough to make him go back, to find his way back to the transient camp. Maybe it would have the same effect for him that it had for Paulo, and he could finally have his own share of the power. Maybe his GPS, too, would help them find the newcomers and travel from camp to camp.

If he went back — it was late afternoon now and Paulo’s crew would have discovered Hawkins missing half a day ago now — he would now have his own FB legend to tell, or at least he could make one up like Paulo had.

He knew the power this handheld device possessed, had seen it first-hand by watching Paulo watching his, completely consumed. It was clear to Hawkins since he first got trapped over here that without his GPS, Paulo would be just as clueless, just as powerless out here in the scrub as Hawkins himself had often been.

But they would likely kill him if he returned, and even if they didn’t, the GPS would undoubtedly be snatched away from him forever, and he would forever regret not taking his chance to get out. He powered the GPS on for the second time, already cognizant that he should use the thing sparingly. But it had a full charge, and immediately unfolded the terrain around him. What sinister being, he wondered, had crafted a GPS that contained an entirely different world in its blueprint, and a means for getting there?

Hawkins zoomed the map out as far as it would go, and when it fully developed, it revealed dozens of red dots, marks made into the history of the image. He didn’t know what they meant, but there were plenty of them and they were plenty close. For now, he would avoid them and keep moving up the side of the mountain.

He didn’t know it, but he’d already found trouble out on his own — or more correctly it had found him — just as sure as Paulo, Simmons and the rest of them always promised he would. He was being watched and being tracked via satellite as well.

But even the eyes that watched him from afar — as he sat on the rock and studied the GPS, pondering his impending freedom a moment longer — could not see inside the man’s head and did not know what he now knew. Hawkins knew something special, a way to get home, and now he’d found something he thought would help him get there even faster.

He promised himself to rely mostly on his own game plan for getting out, not the GPS. He rose to his feet again for a moment and wiped the sweat from his brow. He wondered how far away the GPS’s former owner was at the moment, if he was still alive and how long the little unit had been sitting out here. How do you lose your GPS in the middle of the jungle? He couldn’t imagine. He took one last look at the screen.

Should he be avoiding the little red dots or should he be targeting them? He needed to stop thinking like a victim, needed to stop fleeing and start chasing if he was going to survive this.

Instead of turning off the GPS, like he knew he should, Hawkins collected his belongings and began making a painstaking, zig-zagging path up the steep mountain face. The Glock 9mm he’d faithfully carried in his right hand since the moment he fled camp was now tucked back into the waistband of his shorts, and he slowly trudged up the mountainside with the GPS in his hand instead, checking the screen almost constantly as he went.

He figured he would creep as close as he could get to one of those red dots. There was no sense in slowing down now. All he needed was a chance, and he would never get one by avoiding contact with people. As Hawkins moved steadily upward, Simon Charles watched his every move from his darkened master bedroom at the Destinoso ranch. The blinds had been drawn and the door latched for three days.

“Keep runnin’, little fishy, keep runnin’,” Charles said, oiling his rifle for the second time that day, then reaching forward in his giant office chair and clicking a computer mouse on his desk. He squinted up at a flatscreen monitor on the desk. When it flashed to life, another gigantic projection screen on the wall blinked on as well, illuminating the entire master bedroom with a GPS map image. The monitors showed the target was on the move, heading west and probably inching ever closer to where a revolucion ambush division was holed up.

Charles was not given to patience, nothing close to it. He spent the rest of the day spinning in his chair in a daze, hoping that when darkness crept across the desert and up the mountain peaks, he would put the net down and scoop up the wriggling little fish.

The afternoon heat hammered away at Hawkins. An hour into his climb, he was riddled with bouts of dizziness. There was nowhere to stop because there was no shelter from the sun if he did, and he was halfway up the face of the cliff so he could hardly sit down.

So he kept climbing, trying to envision reaching the green-crested shelf that teased him in the distance. He drifted in and out of awareness, often losing his footing but always keeping his body aimed upright.

He’d taken a dozen or so gulps of water from the first of his two canteens, and poured the rest into his T-shirt-sleeve bandana. As he climbed, he routinely switched the GPS on and off, agonizing over the idea that the bookmarked addresses were likely enemy camp locations. But then, everyone was the enemy now. Whatever or whoever the dots represented, he would know soon. First, he needed to get off the side of the mountain and collapse into hiding for a few hours. If the GPS marks were true, he would find something on the plateau above. He just had no idea what it would be.

- 51 -

Jeff scrolled down the menu and stopped on My Trips. He pressed SELECT and scanned a short list of addresses until he found the obvious one, the one he’d been thinking about. Though it was a perfectly fluid doorway to a different world, its physical appearance on the screen on Jeff’s GPS was something of utter nonsense: 340382-NNW40SW039754-9W49KWERF.

Never before had the moments leading up to leaving for a trip been so stressful, even by Jeff’s standards. Though most of the items he was taking with him were new and had been laid out on the kitchen table since he’d bought them, Jeff scrawled out a checklist for himself to make sure nothing was left behind. He had idiot-proofed it as much as possible, making complete notations about things —
“Wear your sneakers but pack your hiking boots”
— and only checking off items after he had put them into the car.

Instead of buying clothes, he decided to alter much of his existing wardrobe into desert gear. What money he had he spent on such things as a compass, a machete, a tent, a first-aid kit, a sleeping bag and nearly 200 bottles of water. He paced on the sidewalk next to the car for nearly five minutes in the heavy air, trying to think of anything else he could or should take, then marched back upstairs one last time.

He sat on the couch and began rattling the keys on his laptop, keeping his baseball promise as best as he could, even if just this one last time. Jeff had soberly attended the first two games of the Fresno-New Orleans series, and had dissected the current strengths and weaknesses of the likes of Sammy Ricard, Blane Ainsley and Tyler Mack, a man who was already exuding the swagger of a major leaguer. Jeff had actually enjoyed himself, had watched every inning of the two games — both Zephyrs wins — and had even yucked it up with some of his favorite ballpark regulars.

But he did so with a strange feeling of farewell, and even though he was in no way thinking he’d never be back at Zephyr Field again, Jeff enjoyed the games because he knew he was about to get away again. He emailed everything pertinent to Sandy and dialed his number.

“My, my, an email followed by a phone call, Jeffrey! No sooner did my little email alert go dinging off, you were calling too! I nearly stumbled off my treadmill and spilled my coffee! Did you have something further to expound upon, or were you merely making sure I knew you were still scouting for the Mets?”

“Pretty much the last part,” Jeff said. “Enjoy that stuff Sandy, won’t you?”

“Oh, I intend to, Jeff. I expect you’ll be camping out for the week and watching your favorite New Orleans club, but we will need you to hop back on the trail soon. We do have the draft coming up, and while I would think most anyone would quit the game if they were told they’d been drafted by the Mets, it would still be nice to go in there armed with some sort of game plan. Perhaps you could help. Good day, Jeff — .”

Should he call Felix? Riley maybe? Just to leave some final word or something? He squeezed his phone in his hands as he stood in the living room. God no, he thought. That would only give him something else to feel stupid about when he came back.