The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (7 page)

“Do you think it has a pool table inside?” Johnny asks.

But Lane doesn’t answer. He is looking beyond the bay, out into the open sound, at the vast stretch of unobstructed water that terminates miles away against the buildings of the Seattle skyline.

Don’t ever leave the bay. Not ever. Don’t ever go out into the sound
.

It was the second-biggest rule, right behind the life jacket rule. If you disobeyed, the consequences were almost unimaginable. Lane looks back toward the cabin, which is a small, brown rectangle against the looming old-growth forest behind it. But even at this distance, his sharp eyes can tell that no one is out on the porch, no one is watching. Then he turns back to the sand spit and the mouth of the bay.

What if they crossed the mouth, and then hugged the sound side of the sand spit until they were lined up with the yacht? Then they could row out a little closer, maybe twenty-five yards, where they could get a really good look, the look of a lifetime.

Only on this luckiest of days would he even consider such a plan. It takes only another moment to justify it: They weren’t
really
going into the sound. They were just following the shoreline and then ducking out for just a minute, that’s all.

“Hey, wake up!” Johnny interrupts. “What about the pool table?”

“What about it?” Lane asks as he takes to the oars once again. It’s better just to do it and not tell Johnny. Otherwise, he’ll freak out for sure.

“Do you think they’ve
got
one?” Johnny asks impatiently.

“Yeah. Down in some big room below decks,” Lane replies. He is quickly closing the
distance to the mouth. The green water of the bay dances with diamonds in the afternoon sun. A gentle breeze blows crab and kelp across his nostrils. His oars bite the water in perfect synchrony and push the boat forward in long, easy pulses.

He twists his head and sees that the stern of the great boat is now visible around the edge of the dead forest of sand and driftwood. His young eyes quickly resolve the block lettering painted in black on the stern, and the vessel’s name jumps out at him:

The Eternal Heart
.

Then he turns back and notices that they’re nearing the outer edge of the mouth, the point of no return, and doing so much faster than he’d anticipated. He looks to his left and sees the marshy shore rapidly passing by. Way too quickly. What happened?

The tide.

Oh Jesus! He’d forgotten about the tide. When the tide changed from high to low, maybe half the volume of the water in the bay was forced out through this single inlet. His father had explained it once, when they were roasting marshmallows in the cabin’s stone fireplace stuffed under the grizzly’s head. The force of the outgoing water created a powerful current, and it went on for hours and hours. And now the current would expel them like a tiny twig out into the open waters, the big, choppy waters that went on forever. And there would be no way to get back.

Suddenly, this lucky day, which had expanded to the very edge of his vision, this luckiest of all days implodes into a hard ball of almost unbearable density.

Lane lifts one oar, and rows mightily with the other to turn the skiff around. They’ve got to get back. Now.

“Hey! Whatya doing?” Johnny cries as he catches his balance while the boat heaves around.

“The tide,” Lane gasps. “I forgot about the tide.”

“What do you mean?” Johnny asks worriedly. He has already caught a whiff of his brother’s fear.

“We gotta get back,” Lane mumbles as he completes the turn and starts frantically rowing back into the bay.

“How come?” Johnny asks from behind him.

“If we don’t, we’ll get swept out.”

“Swept out?”

“Yeah,” Lane replies with angry anxiety. “Swept out.” As he pulls on the oars, he looks over at the marsh shore. Stationary. They are making no progress. He is simply rowing in place against the current.

“You mean we won’t get back?” Johnny asks with a quiver in his little voice.

“That’s exactly what I mean,” puffs Lane. “Now shut up so I can row!” He checks the
shore, desperately searching for a reference point to measure their progress. He spots a bit of broken branch, then centers himself to maximize his rowing power. The great tidal current surges under the keel of the skiff with a soft but relentless rush.

Lane waits for what seems the longest of times, and rechecks the position of the broken branch on shore. They’ve gained maybe a foot, if they’ve gained anything at all.

“I’m scared, Lane,” comes the sob from Johnny behind him. “I’m really, really scared.”

“I know,” Lane responds as calmly as he can. He digs the oars in even deeper. His arms ache, his shoulders hurt, his belly burns. He checks the branch again. They’ve gotten nowhere. Sick with fear, he rows on, prolonging the inevitable.

He is down to his final reserves of will and strength when he hears the motorboat approaching. His arms and shoulders throb in agony as the people on the boat throw a rope to Johnny. He barely notices.

It’s over. Their lucky day wasn’t quite so lucky after all.

Lane turns away from the billboard and the boat and looks back into the interior of his apartment. Fuller Bay recedes into the distant past.

He has the sound down on the Feed, but it visually screams about some kind of airplane crash. The Feed loves disasters. He’s not interested, especially this evening. He turns it off and fixes himself a whiskey and soda.

“You really didn’t need to come along,” Arjun tells Zed. “I can handle it.”

“Handle it, huh?” Zed spits back. “If things were being handled, we wouldn’t even be here.” The old man looks out into the night through one of the van’s armored windows. The dim outline of a flat, arid plain rolls by as they travel eastward. Road signs creep up, then vanish in brief flashes of brilliant green and white.

“Let me get this straight,” Zed says. “First, he got off the plane. Second, he slipped in up on Tabor. Third, he left with proof positive. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“So how in the hell did he get past the gate and up and into the lab?”

“A procedural error. Before we arranged the crash, he had a Type A security clearance on his access card. We had no idea that he’d survived, and he managed to get in and out with the van before we canceled it.”

Zed scans the road ahead through the windshield. Black, empty, devoid of headlights. Nobody takes casual nighttime trips out here. The law ends at sundown. “So now what?”

“We know he stopped for gas about twenty miles back. We intercepted his lobe scan and confirmed the license number on the van. It’s definitely the same vehicle that he loaded up before he left Mount Tabor. Anyway, we’re closing in. The next town is La Grande, and we already have assets on the ground there.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“Yes, we will.”

***

Frank Turner hunches over the wheel of his old Ford pickup and stares out at the spray of his headlights on the freeway ahead. He pushes his face even farther toward the windshield, as if it will somehow improve the view. It’s just too damn dim for him to go any faster. He simply can’t
see well enough. Too bad. When he was young, he once tracked a rabbit by moonlight.

Frank checks the speedometer. Fifty-five. Pitiful. But it’s the best he can do. Damn! He shouldn’t have fallen asleep at his daughter’s place back in Hermiston. When he woke up, they’d gone to bed, so he just took off.

Oh well, he’d phone her in the morning. A preemptive call, so he could defuse some of her scolding. He wasn’t a little kid. He just wished she could understand that. But how could she? Like all farmers, he has a fatalistic streak that rapidly sorts the impossible from the possible and moves on.

He pulls his face back from the windshield to check the speedometer once again. Hell. The damned dash lights are out. He fiddles with the rheostat that controls them. They flicker on, then off again. Goddamn. Thought it was fixed. He’ll have to take the old rig back up to his son-in-law tomorrow and see what they can do.

Far ahead, Arjun spots twin pinpoints of red light on the black horizon. They quickly disappear. He doesn’t bother asking Zed if he saw them. The old man’s night vision is largely a thing of the past. Maybe, if they’re lucky, it’s Anslow and the van.

Prince Vegas. It’s the only logical destination given Anslow’s direction of travel. If he can make it, he’ll seek asylum and probably get it. Because the Principality of Las Vegas is no longer officially part of the United States. It operates as a U.S. protectorate administered by an international entertainment cartel, which shares the profits with a cash-starved U.S. government. A place of princes and their princesses, but not from the lumpen backwaters of the United States. The Vegas customer base is worldwide now, with Americans in the minority. As they roll along, Arjun visualizes the enormous complexes, the exotic architecture, the maze of brilliant distractions, each more astounding than the last.

The two red taillights suddenly appear up ahead again.

Arjun presses the mic button and speaks to a second vehicle that’s following them. “We’ve got a vehicle about a hundred yards in front of us. Stand by.” By the time he finishes, the red lights disappear.

“Damn!” Frank mutters. This time, he’s lost the headlights as well as the dash lights. He reaches down to jiggle the exposed wiring. The headlights come back on.

Just in time to expose the deer. A big buck, fifty feet dead ahead.

No time to brake. He yanks the wheel to the right. His left fender collides with the deer’s left haunch. A sickening thud sends his old truck onto the shoulder and off into the desert beyond.

It happens so fast, Arjun has to wonder if it’s real. Up ahead, the vehicle’s lights come back on just as it collides with what looks like a deer. It sails off the road and down a short embankment, which launches it into a violent series of rolls. Its headlight beams rotate rapidly across the grass, sky, dirt, and sagebrush. It finally comes to a stop in a great cloud of dust.

Frank Turner hangs upside down in his seat belt. Hot oil, gasoline, and coolant mix together like smelling salts and yank him back to his senses. In a terrible moment of fright, he tries to remember what got him here, the world inverted and lit only by the beams cast at crazy angles onto the dry grass and dirt. His head is mashed up against the ceiling of the truck, and he feels the warm, wet flow from a huge laceration on his scalp. His left arm is numb and his broken right clavicle shoots out a gusher of pain. He tries to move his right hand to unbuckle the seat belt, but it’s wedged in between pieces of wreckage. When he attempts to move his legs, he finds his knees jammed into the collapsed dashboard. All the while, the electronic warning beep for an open door pulses through the darkness. In the engine compartment, something rips loose and bangs down onto the hood.

The last thing he remembers is dozing off at his daughter’s, sitting in the big old recliner with his shoes off.

The warning beeper stops and the only sound is the bubbling of the various fluids as they follow whatever path the twisted debris allows. The truck is upside down, with the hood tilted down into the dirt and undercarriage raised toward the sky. The repeated rolling has severed the fuel line, and gasoline now begins to bleed out into the cab.

Then Frank hears the rush of rubber on pavement. As it grows closer, his fear turns to humiliation. Whoever it is will stop and find him in this awful predicament, hanging helpless in his overturned vehicle, and will ask him what happened, and he will have no answer. None at all.

He can turn his head just far enough to make out an inverted image of the highway. Any farther, and his cervical vertebrae register a sharp pain. Headlights come into view and the night is filled with the snap of small rocks as a pair of big vans rolls to a stop up on the shoulder. A door opens on the far side of the rear one and the bouncing beam of a flashlight comes around and descends the embankment. In the moonlight, he can now make out the faint figure of a man behind the light.

And even through the shock of his injuries and befuddlement, something strikes him as odd. The man should be yelling toward the flipped vehicle, asking if anyone is in there, if anyone is hurt. Instead, the man advances in silence, his boots pushing little poofs of moonlit dust.

By the time the man reaches the wreck, Frank’s humiliation has turned to fear. This is not right. The dark outline of a muscular figure descends to a squat about a yard away from the truck. The beam of a flashlight probes the cab and settles briefly on Frank’s face.

“You see a white utility van out here tonight?” The voice of Zed’s security man is hard and pitiless.

Frank stares at the figure. Nobody’s ever pushed him around. Nobody’s going to start, now. His dignity is all he’s got left. He remains silent and motionless.

The figure thrusts the light out at arm’s length, so it’s closer to Frank. “I know you can talk. I saw your eyes move. Let’s make a deal. You answer me, and I’ll get you out of there.”

Franks looks away from the light.

The figure sniffs the air. “Hey, you smell anything funny? I sure do. Smells like gasoline around here.”

Frank tries desperately to move, to gain some semblance of control. But he’s hopelessly wedged.

“You look a little squirmy to me. Maybe you’re trying to tell me something, huh?”

The figure backs off a few feet, takes out a cigarette, and lights it. “Saw a man burn up once. Only it wasn’t like this. It wasn’t an accident. You don’t die right away, you know. He just screamed and screamed.”

Frank can’t help himself. “I didn’t see nothin’!” he blurts out. “I don’t remember nothin’!”

“Now, that’s better,” the figure says. “That’s much better.”

Then he flicks the cigarette into the cab, where it sails past Frank’s face, lands on the ceiling, and comes to a stop by the shattered dome light.

“Let me go,” Frank pleads in a weak voice.

The figure rises. “You’re already gone.”

The security man is halfway up the embankment when the truck explodes. No screams come from the burning wreck. The old driver is lucky. The explosion itself must have got him. The contractor recalls a similar incident in Yemen, during the third incursion.