John Gone (16 page)

“I don’t care,” John said. “Boone!” he
yelled. “Are you hearing me?” He rifled through his messenger bag
for something that could cut the yellow rope binding his door. “I’m
not letting any more people die because of me and this stupid
watch.”

“Aren’t I also someone worth saving?” Kala
asked quickly. “Keep yelling and you’ll never have the chance to do
it!”

Boone shouted back over Kala’s voice. “What
did you say, pal?”

John started to yell back. “Get out of--” His
shout was interrupted by the deafening sound of a gunshot. John
looked around his unit. There were no small, circular holes in any
of the walls. Then, a second bullet was fired, somehow even louder
than the first.

Jordan Hal let his eyes leave the straight,
unchanging road in front of him to glance at the leather-bound
journal resting on his passenger seat. An idea for a new poem had
just struck him, and he was feeling anxious to write it down among
the others before he forgot its words. The next stop was still
another fifty-three miles out, and he was in serious danger of
losing at least some of the carefully chosen stanzas before
then.

He’d managed 148 poems in his eighteen years
of trucking, though he’d not shared even one with his family or
friends. No one but the other boys at the depot could understand
road-poems, and though outsiders wouldn’t know it to be true, most
of the truckers he knew shared the same hobby. After all, there
wasn’t much else to do on those long three-day drives up the
coast.

A deafeningly loud noise suddenly broke
Jordan’s train of thought. His hands inadvertently jerked the
steering wheel of his truck. He recovered from the sudden swerve
quickly and checked all five of his mirrors.
Thank God
, he
thought.
No one else on the road
. Even a small swerve could
mean catastrophe in a vehicle this size. He eyed his mirrors again
and glanced to the back of his cab.
What was that noise?
It
had almost sounded like a gunshot.

Crinkling his nose, Jordan sniffed at the
air. The cab smelled like melting plastic. That’s when he noticed
the small hole in the passenger seat beside him. He reached his
hand to the tear and felt the hot, blackened edges around it. What
was going on here?

A second sound, identical to the first,
exploded through the truck. A bullet tore into the cab through the
metal behind the seats and passed through Jordan’s right forearm.
He screamed out in pain and clutched the wound with his other hand.
Hijackers,
he thought through the sting and shock.
But
why would they want a shipment of Port-a-Potties?

With his hands off the wheel, the truck moved
right, slowly drifting into the opposing lane. Jordan released his
wound and grabbed at the steering wheel with his good hand. He
caught its top and spun it left with more power than he’d intended.
The truck jerked again. Worried he was losing control, Jordan
straightened the wheel and applied the brakes, but the torque of
his previous turn had shifted the weight of the truck’s bed too
quickly.

He looked outside to his modified side-view
mirror in horror as his truck’s bed began swiveling independently
of the cab toward the deep, forested hill bordering the left of the
highway. Panicked, he yanked the steering wheel right again and
crashed his boot onto the gas pedal, hoping to power back onto the
road. Despite the effort, the back of his truck continued swinging
wide until finally placing the majority of the vehicle’s weight
along the side of the steep hill to the cab’s left.

The next sound Jordan heard was an awful
creaking as his vehicle’s balance finally shifted and the cab lost
control to its weighty cargo-area, now dictating a new and opposite
direction for his truck. Led in reverse by its bed, the vehicle
began a furious and uncontrolled descent down the steep, wooded
incline of the hill toward an unseen bottom below.

A moment later, the back left tire blew out.
The bed spun over wildly, releasing its cargo to the hillside. With
the cab on its side and faced backward, Jordan weakly lifted his
body enough to see from the window. An avalanche of Port-a-Potties
was snowing past him down the side of the steep hill to its bottom,
harshly colliding with the forest flora and each other.

Jordan felt the temperature of his cab
rising. Then, he saw the smoke. Using the last of his strength, he
reached for his poetry journal lying open on the metal beside him.
His fingers caught its spine and dragged it close. Against the
shaking of his truck and through the black smoke filling his cab,
he was able to read the first few lines of the first poem he’d ever
written before the engine exploded.

After the second gunshot, John heard the thin
yellow rope snap just before his unit, along with the rest, was
upside-down and tumbling out from the back of the truck and down
the slope. His body lifted and bounced against the grey sidewall.
He reached down for the hard plastic toilet seat beside him, still
hinged to the unit’s most sturdy section. It was wet, but so was
everything else.

Suddenly, the Port-a-Potty’s door snapped off
sharply against a log. John watched a green blur of grass and
wildflowers wash quickly past the newly created opening as his unit
continued to spin down the tall hill.

“What’s going on?” he thought he heard Kala
yell between the harsh bangs and bumps of the circling tumble.

Meters later, the unit stopped suddenly,
sending John’s backside uncomfortably against the wet plastic
toilet seat behind him. From the open side of his Port-a-Potty,
John watched ten other units break apart higher on the hill and
trundle toward his at frightening speed. He braced his body for the
coming impact.

The first stall collided with John’s unit
just a moment later, shaking him to the ground again and breaking
itself in half upon impact with the side of his unit. A second and
third unit crashed behind the first. Their impact shot its contents
into John’s Port-a-Potty. A grisly looking man with a knotted beard
tumbled uncontrollably on top of him.

Looking past the man, John could see the cab
of the truck and its flatbed, mammoth and twirling, headed down the
hill after them, breaking small trees in its wake. John stood from
beneath the grisly man and, moving solely on adrenaline, grabbed
his tattered collar.

“Ready?” John yelled into the man’s ear over
the noise of the spinning carnage above.

The bearded man wobbled his head. John
couldn’t be sure if it was a nod or a byproduct of his daze, but
there was no time to decide.

John bounded deftly from the wreckage of the
portable toilets and landed roughly on the grass a few feet to its
side. The bearded man had leapt with him, but less aptly, and had
only narrowly avoided losing both of his legs to the cab of the
truck that smashed to a halt behind them a moment later. Its impact
splintered and launched sections of grey semi-translucent plastic
from its cargo into the air.

John and the man looked over the flaming
wreckage in awe of its scope. The bearded man shook dust and
plastic from his beard before speaking.

“Boone,” Boone said.

“John,” John replied, breathing again.

“Those your friends?” Boone asked, pointing
toward a dark-haired man in a gray suit twenty yards away trying to
help a blond-haired man from underneath a large tire.

John cupped his hand over Boone’s mouth and
shook his head. He slowly removed his hand and used it to gesture
Boone to follow him. With his other hand, John lifted a finger
perpendicularly to his lips.

Boone looked at John with confusion and shook
his head. “We need to help them,” he asserted.

“Who do you think fired the gun?” John
whispered rapidly. “They’re here to kill me and anyone who’s seen
me. I’m sorry you got wrapped into this, but we have to move if you
don’t want to die.”

Boone looked stunned by John’s assessment,
but slowly walked after him when John turned and moved quietly away
from the hillside toward the thicker part of the forest.

“What about your lady friend?” Boone asked,
moving a branch from his face.

“We’ll check on her in a few moments when we
get somewhere safe,” John responded.

“Are these men tracking you?” Boone
asked.

“Yes.”

“See what it’s like when someone is
constantly asking you inane questions?” Kala interjected.

“What was that?” Boone asked.

“A walkie-talkie,” John answered, not
allowing himself to be distracted from moving as quickly and as far
from his pursuers as possible.

“If these men are tracking you, you’re sure
leaving them an easy trail to follow.”

John stopped and turned back toward Boone,
frustrated past his limit.

“I can help,” Boone said. John calmed
immediately.

“How?”

“You’re breaking twigs and snapping
branches,” he explained. “It won’t even take much skill to find us.
I’ll tell you what. Keep moving straight toward the sun. Be careful
not to disturb more of the forest, even if it slows you. I’m going
to break off and circle a fake trail in the other direction and
catch up to you after. Just keep moving at the sun.”

Before John could respond, Boone sped off
quickly, skillfully shooting his hands in and out of the foliage
and lightly shuffling his feet beneath him as he left.

“He’s right,” Kala said. “Follow his
instructions.”

“Yeah, what else am I going to do?” John
answered.

Mouse,
he thought suddenly. John
looked into the pocket of his bag and found Mouse turned
upside-down and missing an arm.

“Hey! You there?” he said to the robot.

“Yes!” Mouse replied, whisper-quiet.
“Couldn’t you hear me?”

“No,” John answered, “and I can’t hear you
very well now.”

“Turn the horizontal dial on my chest where
the ribs would be,” it responded.

John looked more closely at Mouse’s torso and
saw the dial. The robot’s entire body was solid black, so seeing
small components was difficult without first knowing where to look.
He spun the dial to the right.

“Better?” Mouse asked at normal volume.

“Much,” John answered.

“That’s the master volume for the unit. It
must have been turned down by accident when we were rolling down
the hill. I have a volume control on my end, but it’s superseded by
Mouse’s dial,” Mouse explained. “What happened? I missed
everything.”

“I’ll explain later,” John said, carefully
ducking beneath a delicate-looking branch. “We’re in the
forest.”

“Well, I can see
that
,” Mouse
said.

“And those guys with guns are out here
somewhere too,” he explained. “Boone, that hobo guy from before, is
leading them off our trail, or something.”

“My arms aren’t working,” Mouse said. “I
think something happened to them during the crash.”

“One of them is still in the pocket,” John
said.

“What? For real? Oh well, I guess I can fix
it later. Just bring the arm back with you if you can.”

John continued through the trees for hours
more, scared to stop for even a moment. The sun was setting and he
worried at the prospect of late-night, pitch-black Canadian
forest-travel. He’d been carefully following Boone’s earlier
instructions and wondered when and if the man would return.
Maybe they got him
, John considered.

“This can’t be fun for you, Mr. Popielarski,”
Kala said.

“I’ve never been hiking before,” John
answered happily, already seeing where the doctor’s comment would
lead. “I think I like it just fine.”

“I mean living like this,” the hologram
replied. “Running for your life from two men trained to find and
capture you. You’ve been lucky thus far.”

“You call this luck?”

“Come to my lab. Let me help you!”

“You sure define a lot of words differently
than I do. Getting me stuck in a concrete box underground sounds a
lot like not helping.”

“Play the odds, John! What’s more probable?
The eighty percent chance that I find a way to get you out in a few
years or the zero percent chance you have of surviving otherwise.
Even if the Advocates don’t get you--and they
will
,
eventually--the sixth jump will kill you. What part of this do you
not understand?”

John ignored him and kept walking.

“If you die before the last jump,” Kala
continued, “or get caught by those men, then it will be too late to
come to me.
Too late
, Mr. Popielarski.”

Boone somersaulted in front of John from
behind a nearby bush. John stumbled back in surprise.

“Boone! Wow. What are you doing?” he
asked.

“We’re going to finish this conversation, Mr.
Popielarski!” Kala yelled. The hologram vanished.

“Who’s that on the other end of that
walkie-talkie there?” Boone asked, back on his feet. “Was that a
little blue man on your arm? Who are you people?”

“Boone, can we talk about the little blue man
later?” John asked. “How are we doing? Did you fake the trail?”

“Only so much you can do,” Boone said. “Now
it depends on how good they are at tracking folk. Almost dark
though. Maybe they’ll quit and go home. Speaking of such, we need
to stop for the night. Dangerous out here when the sun ain’t
up.”

“Stop and do what?”

“Just follow me a bit. I’ll find the right
spot soon enough. I’ll show you what we do for the predators,
animal and person alike.”

Forty minutes later they came upon a giant
mass of leaves beneath a tree. The sun had set, and moonlight alone
now illuminated the forest floor, giving the edges of John’s
surroundings a surreal blue highlight. The noises coming from
behind the trees had changed, as had the types of insects buzzing
about his neck. The forest had a much different feeling after
nightfall, more menacing and secretive. John was glad Boone was
with him.