The Unseen (29 page)

Kennedy was working his way out the window now, and Snake had drawn a gun. He aimed it at the security guards and pulled the trigger twice; both guards slumped to the ground at the gate.

Lucas turned to look at Snake again, and the gun had disappeared.

“Something tells me that's not the first time you've fired a gun,” Lucas said.

Snake nodded grimly, then went out the window.

Lucas followed and dropped to the ground, following the other three to a nearby van. The driver, wearing a black ski mask, listened as Snake whispered something to him, then put the van into gear and wheeled away from the curb.

Two blocks later, headlights bounced into place behind them. The back window of the van spiderwebbed and shattered as a bullet hit it.

“Go!” screamed Snake as he moved to the back of the van, his pistol drawn. He sat beneath the shattered back window, his eyes boring into Lucas.

“What are you waiting for?” screamed Clarice. They raced around a corner, tires screeching as the top-heavy van tipped onto two tires. A few seconds later, the SUV caught up to them and tapped the back bumper.

“That's what I'm waiting for,” said Snake. He stood and swiveled, pointing his gun and firing at the driver's side of the large SUV before it drifted away from their rear bumper again. It plowed into a row of parked cars, coming to a stop with a shuddering screech of steel.

“I really hope there's something good in those files, Humpty,” he said as he looked at Lucas again. “I'd hate to go through all this only to find out your friend's been hiding downloaded photos of swimsuit models.”

The van's driver made a couple more turns, throwing them around in the back of the van, and then they were on an interstate, picking up speed.

The air being sucked out of the broken window sounded like a jet turbine. Snake stood from his crouch a bit and surveyed the area behind them for several minutes before he was satisfied they weren't being followed.

They stayed quiet for a few minutes, all of them catching their breath and collecting their thoughts as the wind whistled through the giant hole at the back of the van.

Twenty minutes later, the van slowed, took an exit, and pulled into a parking lot. Lucas recognized the surroundings as a rest area, even though he couldn't say where, exactly, this one was.

The van parked, and Clarice pushed open the back doors.

Standing at the back of the van, gun drawn, was someone Lucas recognized immediately— even in the hazy orange glow of the rest area's security lighting.

Himself.

Snake started to raise his gun, but then hesitated as his face blanched. “Dad?” he said as he stared at the figure for a moment.

Snake's head snapped back as a shot hit him in the forehead, and before Lucas had a chance to move, he saw/felt/heard bullets hitting Clarice and Kennedy.

Now he stared at his own face behind the sights of the pistol. He felt the van rocking, and heard the driver screaming as he tried to get out the door.

His Bad Twin moved the barrel of the pistol a few inches and fired at the driver, then swung it back on him. Lucas stared back at the face of the shooter, hearing the struggled gurgling of the driver dying behind him.

Staring into a mirror reflection of himself, especially one who killed so easily, terrified him in a deep place inside. A deep place usually only occupied by the Dark Vibration.

“Go ahead,” Lucas said, hearing his voice come out as a strained whisper.

With his gun, the shooter pointed to the bag that had fallen from Kennedy's dead grasp. “Don't forget your papers,” his own voice said to him.

And then, the shooter replaced the gun in a hidden holster and casually strolled away.

Lucas stayed frozen for a moment, waiting. Surely something else was going to happen. Surely he would be taken or shot or captured or . . . something.

But nothing did.

After a few moments, he slowly crept to the open door at the back of the van and scrambled to the pavement, clumsily falling as he did so. His actions, normally so fluid and natural, felt stiff and awkward. It was the fear, he knew, coursing through his veins.

Lucas had rarely felt fear, true fear, in his life. And yet, in the last few days, it had been a steady part of his diet. Why did the sight of this pursuer, the one wearing his own face, terrify him so much?

He ran around the side of the van to the driver's door and opened it. The driver was breathing wheezily, and he looked at Lucas with panicked eyes. No doubt he'd seen the face of the man who shot him, and thought he'd returned to finish the job.

Lucas spun around his backpack, looking for his TracFone. Then he thought better of it and looked inside the van; sure enough, a cell phone sat on the console between the seats. He reached across the dying man to grab the phone, flipped it open, and dialed 911. He panicked again when he realized he didn't know exactly where they were, but the 911 dispatcher said he had pinpointed the location on GPS.

Good thing he'd decided to use someone else's cell phone. Did TracFones have the built-in GPS feature? He didn't think so.

He closed the driver's cell phone and put it on the dash, then looked into the man's face. “Help's on the way,” he said. “You're gonna be just fine.”

A lie, but he felt the situation called for it; no one should die without thinking he had a chance.

The driver closed his eyes for a few seconds, and Lucas thought he was going to lose him. But suddenly the driver grabbed his arm in a painful vise.

“The shooter,” he said, his voice sounding like liquid. “Did you see him?”

Lucas nodded. “Yes,” he said. “And I'm sorry. It wasn't me, even though—”

The man tightened his grip, shook his head. “'Course it wasn't you.”

He took a pause for a labored breath. “It was Charles Manson.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

10:41:43 REMAINING

Later, after Lucas had made his way to the rest stop on the opposite side of the interstate and flagged a ride from a trucker, after he had spent a sleepless early morning wandering the streets, he was, once again, caught in that dead zone between night and day. The Metro wouldn't start running until five thirty, so he decided to walk.

He now had about eleven hours to go before his leg was blown off. And that was just the start of his problems.

As he walked, he glanced down one of the side streets and saw the bright sign of a convenience store still glowing; someone hadn't shut off the lights even though it was now past daybreak.

He needed something, anything, to eat. He could just slip into this store, grab something quickly, and be on his way again.

He approached the store and opened the front door, looking around for the ATM machine he knew had to be there. There was one in the back corner, but not one of ATM2GO's machines. At least he didn't think it was; he didn't see any signage to that effect. Unless ATM2GO had ways of tracking the cameras inside every ATM machine, in which case he was in serious trouble no matter where he went. Not that it mattered now; they didn't need to find him to kill him. The lovely anklet he wore was proof of that.

He nodded at the cashier, who sat behind the counter watching a small television. The cashier didn't even look up as he passed.

After pouring a cup of coffee and grabbing a sandwich from the cooler, he went to the counter and set down his purchases.

The cashier, annoyed, finally was able to tear his eyes away from the program. When he saw Lucas, he immediately did a double take. He tried to hide it, but he wasn't much of a poker player.

Lucas became dimly aware of the sound from the television, even though he couldn't see the screen.

It was one of the news channels. “Once again, we're following this breaking news story. Officials are searching for a suspect in the shooting deaths of four people found in a van at a rest stop on the Beltway. This image, taken from security cams at an office break-in earlier in the evening and enhanced, shows the suspect.”

Lucas didn't need to see the screen to know who they were talking about. He stared at the cashier, who had obviously gone into stall mode, visions of his own television interviews dancing in his eyes. “You gonna ring me up?”

“Something's wrong. Register's locked. If you give me a few minutes, I'll see if I can get it working.”

Obviously, the cashier wasn't much of a liar either.

“No worries,” Lucas said, acting as if everything were perfectly fine. “I'll just use the bathroom.”

“Oh, yeah. Okay.”

Lucas turned and moved toward the back of the store, sure the cashier had already pressed a silent alarm. He walked beneath the sign marked RESTROOMS, but instead of turning down the small hallway to the bathroom, he kept going straight, through the area marked Employees Only and out the back door.

Immediately he began to run, moving as fast as he could go and not stopping until he'd run several blocks. In the distance behind him, he heard a siren.

Sounded like the kid at the convenience store had fixed his cash register.

This day was getting better all the time. He'd been tied to the disappearances of Anita Abkin and Ted Hagen (who were now dead, he reminded himself), then to a break-in at a secret government agency, and now to the murders of four other people.

And to top it off, the person who had killed the last four people wore his face. He wasn't sure what the dying driver was talking about with that Charles Manson comment—perhaps his brain had been flashing random images as he died—but Lucas knew what he had seen: himself. Killing.

After resting and catching his breath, he began walking again. He turned toward the west, walked two blocks, than went down a back alley until he came to a manhole cover. Once there, he went to the Dumpster nearest the manhole, felt around the back, and retrieved the length of construction rebar he'd hidden there months ago. With that in hand, he went to the cover, pried it out of its seat, and returned the rebar.

He crawled down the iron rungs, paused to replace the manhole cover, and disappeared into the depths of the DC sewer system.

Several tunnels and shortcuts later, he was hiding under the catwalk at the nearest Metro station, waiting for the trains to begin running. He had changed into the extra set of clothing he carried in his backpack and put on the Washington Nationals cap backward. That and the sunglasses were the best he could do now. There were cams in the Metro stations, he knew, but very few of them actually on the cars themselves; most of the security cams were at the gates, which he'd bypassed.

He stared at nothing, curled into a ball, until he heard the rumble of a train approaching the platform. He had no destination in mind yet; his plan was to simply ride the train for a while, collect his thoughts, make his plan. There was nowhere else he could go at the moment. He didn't want to take another cab, because . . . well, because the Metro was part of his home. He needed to get back to some familiar territory, and the Metro was it. Yes, it was dangerous, but at this point, everywhere was dangerous.

The train pulled up to the platform with a hiss, and he waited for the doors to open. He took off his backpack, chose a seat at the back of the last car, hunched down, turned his cap around again to pull it over his face, and tried to rest. As soon as his eyes closed, his mind began to wander.

(Humpty Dumpty had some great falls.)

The words hovered in his mind, but he let his thoughts go deeper as he listened to the shudder of the train join the rising Dark Vibration deep inside his own soul.

Soon his mind took him back to the rooftop of the orphanage. As he crouched on the rooftop, the last vestiges of twilight disappeared into the dark purple of night, and the sounds of far-off activity—people laughing? people singing?—filtered to him on the breeze.

He looked at the city, admiring the lights wavering in the dissipating heat of the day, and he knew those lights were close—so close he could touch them. And so he put out his hand, his small, ten-yearold hand, to grasp the lights that were so near.

But then he felt the wetness on his hand. His hand wasn't reaching into the night sky, but into a deep pool. A deep pool formed by burbling springs. And he wasn't on a roof but on a stone walkway that ran beside the springs. Those lights, the lights that he wanted so desperately to touch, were deep inside the pool, and the water created optical illusions; each time he felt sure he was about to touch one of the warm, glowing orbs, it shifted direction, darting away from his grasp.

Frustrated, he looked on the pathway ahead of him, sure he would see the backs of the couple walking away. Maybe he could call out to them, stop them, convince them to come back and catch the lights for him.

But there was no couple on the walkway. Instead, it was an old man, sitting on a crate, battered guitar clutched in his hands. His fingers moved over the strings, and he rocked back and forth, his eyes closed in pain, as he sang.

Got those crumblin' down blues, baby
Got me some crumblin' down blues
Got those crumblin' down blues so bad
Feel 'em clear down in my shoes
Did me some dancin' with the devil
Said he'd have to take his dues
Now I'm digging with that shovel
Cuz I got them crumblin' down blues

As the man sang, Lucas saw it was true. He was crumbling, his hand cracking and turning to dust, and then his arm, and then his shoulder, and then every bit of him, disintegrating into dust and falling toward the deep lights in the bubbling spring.

He awoke with a start, immediately holding up his hand and looking at it, as if to make sure it was there before his mind totally left the dream. He looked around him; there were only three other passengers in his car. Outside, unfamiliar terrain rolled by.

At the next stop, he stepped off the train onto the platform and wasn't surprised to hear the nearby wail of a familiar guitar, the hushed growl of a man singing.