Masked (9 page)

As we entered the cold empty training
hall, I was filled with a mixed sense of anticipation and apprehension on what
was to come. I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I was flying
blind, guided only by an uncomfortable faith in people who were strangers and a
slight echo of the person I once was. I guessed the others were as well. The
only thing to do was to jump in and hope for the best.

Three hours after I made my way
down from the dark mountain road I was again back in Idaho, driving west on
highway 200. It was almost 5:00 am with no sign of a sun rise. Dense forest surrounded
the dark highway which had been mostly quiet. I could have counted on one hand
the number of cars I’d passed in the last hour.

I’d gone over the facts multiple
times, trying to determine why Titan was after me now and how they’d been able
to track me down. I’d been on the run for over a year, without any sign of them,
so why were they popping their heads up now? Somehow they’d been able to track
me, but surely there hadn’t be anything on me or any of my possessions for them
to track; otherwise they would’ve come after me before.

My activities over the past year
had made the news, but nothing to blatantly point to me. Surely they hadn’t
found me based on any of that, but then again maybe they’d been able to put
together a pattern based on seemingly random news stories. I needed to be more
careful, even lower key than I had been. I knew better. Hell, they trained me
better.

I decided Seattle was my next
stop. Distancing me a little further from the HUB was probably a good idea.
Back at the motel I’d seen several articles related to a string of unsolved
murders recently in the downtown Seattle area. I’d never been there and if they
were somehow tracking my patterns, the move would throw them off the scent.

If I profiled myself based on my
activities over the previous year, I’d have said I tended to stick to smaller
communities where I might better be able to use my talents to help. There were
limits of range and frequency that went along with my ability. Also, I was somewhat
intimidated by larger populations. My limited exposure and experience with so
few people as well as the overwhelming feeling my ability channeled, with too
many around, was the main driver of this aversion.

Just the thought of so many
people together, crowding and surrounding me, made me extremely nervous. Even
though the larger population of Seattle would take me from my zone of comfort
and provide several challenges to what I’d be able to do, by going to a larger
city I’d be able to better hide and hopefully throw Titan off of my trail.

I wasn’t entirely sure why I had
limited myself to the general area of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.  There had been
plenty to keep me busy, plenty of monsters out there to stop, but there were
plenty of small towns with the same elsewhere as well. There hadn’t been any conscious
decision to do so. It’s just what I did. I realized now though staying so close
to the HUB was idiotic at best and I needed to get away.

I hadn’t been able to figure out,
why I’d been allowed to go. It didn’t make any sense to me. I checked the truck
as best I could for any type of tracking device and found nothing. Surely they hadn’t
let me go without some way to find me. I decided I’d take my time, taking an
indirect route to Seattle, ditch the truck along the way and find something to
replace it. I hated to do it. I loved that truck, but I couldn’t afford the
risk. With the trade in, I’d have enough cash to get something else that would at
least get me to Seattle.

My beloved Land Cruiser entered
my life shortly after leaving the HUB. I walked for days after waking alone in
the dense dark Montana woods. I stayed under cover and rested during daylight,
moving only at night until I finally came upon a small town. The truck was parked
in front of a house with a sale sign for $1,000 in the window. That was the night
of my first bank heist. I went into the only bank in town and acquired the cash
I needed. I paid the trucks owner the $1,000 and was on my way. There were a
few minor repairs along the way, but overall it served me well and I’d grown
attached. As sad and pathetic as it might seem, it pretty much was the only
constant in my life over the previous year. I hoped I’d be able to find something
similar to replace it.

I looked down to check the fuel
gage and, as suspected, saw I was close to empty.

“Maybe I can find something with
better gas mileage,” I muttered.

After a few more miles, I saw a
sign indicating fuel at the next exit. I hadn’t seen other signs of civilization
in the area, so I guessed it was probably one of those large middle of nowhere
truck stops, an oasis to weary travelers, where it would stand alone off of the
exit. When I got to the exit and turned off of the highway, my suspicions were confirmed.

The yellow and red neon illumination
showed brightly through the still dark night as I pulled up to one of the empty
pumps. The light revealed the building sat in front of the same dense forest
that surrounded everything. Everything beyond the glow of the lights was black.

There were only two other
vehicles parked at the pumps, a blue sedan and a silver minivan. There was another
vehicle parked in front of the store as well as two big rigs parked to the side.
I got out of the truck and as I closed the door I noticed a sign informing cash
customers to pay first. I, of course, was a cash customer.

“Where’s the trust?” I mumbled
under my breath.

Apparently it was a pet peeve of
mine.

I walked towards the store from
the pump area and as I entered through the glass double doors, I heard another
vehicle, loud, pull up to the store from behind me. I turned to see two middle
aged white men in a late 80’s era yellow Ford pull into one of the empty spots
directly in front of the store. The two men looked exactly like what I would have
expected a local from around there to look like. I don’t mean to stereotype,
but I do have my preconceived notions. Shoot me, I’m human.

I turned back uninterested and
continued into the store.

As I walked in, the aromas of old
grease and cigarettes rushed at me from all sides. The smell of a truck stop is
one of those constants you can count on. Those of us who are ‘of the road,’ can
find comfort in its familiarity no matter where we might be.

There were two clerks behind the
front counter, both men. One was of middle-eastern descent and probably in his
forties. He had medium length black hair parted neatly to the side with a thick
black moustache. The other was a younger white man probably in his twenties.
His long brown hair was held up in a ponytail and his beard had a few days
growth. They both had on light blue button down shirts with their names on the
right hand pocket. If the shirts were accurate, the clerks’ names were Ahmed
and Jack.

I wasn’t the only customer in the
store. There was a young black couple, probably in their early thirties with
two kids, one boy and one girl. The girl couldn’t have been any older than six
and the boy was younger than that. The two kids seemed to be trying to make the
difficult, yet apparently important decision of what type of candy to get as
the parents had a quiet conversation with each other just behind them. I
thought it was a little early for candy, but whatever.

Over by the beverage cooler was
an older white man wearing faded jeans, a red flannel shirt and a green John
Deer hat. He was shorter in stature, but looked to weigh twice as much as I did.
His abdomen protruded out in front of him causing the tucked in flannel shirt
to probably be always untucked at the front as it was then. He scratched the
bulge as he was deciding what to get.

Next to the man in the hat was a
young Asian woman, probably in her early twenties. She was wearing a red Boise
State sweatshirt and had her long black hair tied back in pony tail. She looked
like she was waiting to get into the same cooler the man in the hat was busy
with, but he was in her way. The man in the hat backed up some and almost ran into
her. She had an irritated look on her face.

“Excuse me sweetheart,” the hat man
said to her with a smile.

“That’s ok,” the girl responded with
a smile no one could ever have been forced to believe was sincere.

I saw the sign for the restroom
in the far right corner of the store and headed in that direction. The bell rang
as I walked that way, indicating the front door of the store had opened again.
I looked over and saw the two men with the truck walk in. I turned back and
continued on to the restroom.

It took a few minutes to complete
what I’d come in to do. When finished, I walked over to the dirty sink and turned
the handle indicating hot water and got cold. I lathered the standard pink
dispenser soap in my hands and rinsed it off under the cold water. Once free of
soap, I filled my hands with more water and splashed it onto my face. I turned
the faucet off and waved my hands under the automatic paper towel dispenser
just to the left of the sink. It took a few seconds, but finally the towels came
out. I was finishing drying my hands and face when I heard the toilet flush in
the stall that was occupied when I had walked in. A few seconds later a guy walked
out as he was still fastening his belt.

“Hello,” he said as he walked to
the sink to wash his hands. He looked around twenty. He was tall, pale and
slender. He was wearing worn and faded jeans tucked into tan work boots and a
beige canvas work jacket. His hair was long and untidy and the attempt to grow
a beard on his face wasn’t working out very well for him.

“Hey,” I said, nodding my head. Since
I wasn’t big on chit chat with strangers, especially restroom chit chat with
strangers, I turned to walk out the door, back into the store.

The store was quiet. All of the
customers were gathered near the front counter. I heard a “click” as something
cold and hard pressed to the back of my head.

“Don’t move,” said the same voice
that had just greeted me in the restroom.

“Crap. This is just what I need,”
I muttered.

You would think because I could read
people’s thoughts, I could avoid such a situation. Unfortunately it doesn’t work
like that. My thoughts need to be focused on a specific person in order to be
able to hear what they’re thinking. For me to have known my restroom companion
was going to put a gun to my head, I would have needed to focus on him while we
were still in the restroom. I could have tried to read him with the gun to my
head, to see his intentions, but it would have taken a tremendous amount of
concentration to do so, not leaving room for other distractions, like being
held at gun point for example.

“Bobby, bring him over here,” said
a man at the front of the store, one of the two who had arrived in the truck.

“Alright, we’re comin’,” answered
Bobby as he shoved me forward. “Move,” he shouted, pushing me.

I knew what I could do and was confident
in my abilities and the fact I could disarm Bobby before he even thought about
pulling the trigger. My hesitancy to react though was twofold. First, he had the
gun to my head and in the slim chance, I mean the very slim chance he could have
gotten a shot off, I would have most likely been killed. The very convenient
ability I had to heal from injury did have its limitations. For example, if I
was shot the wound would heal, but around the bullet. The bullet had to be removed
for me to fully recover. If I got a bullet lodged in my head, the wound may
heal, but the bullet wasn’t going to go anywhere. A bullet lodged in the head was
still a bullet lodged in the head, after all.

Also, I didn’t know enough about
the situation to be sure no one else would get hurt. I had to assume the men at
the front of the store were also armed and any action from me could cause a lethal
reaction. Again, I had no doubt I could have them all disarmed in a matter of
seconds, but how many others could get hurt in those seconds?

It went against my nature, but
the best course of action was to comply with Bobby’s request and allow myself to
be escorted to the front of the store.

“Is it all clear back there?” The
same man asked Bobby as we approached the rest of the group.

“Yeah man, its all clear,” said Bobby.

Both of the other men had hand
guns as well. The man who was giving orders to Bobby seemed to be the one in
charge. He was of average height and weight with long graying brown hair that hung
to his shoulders, and a thick graying beard. He was wearing a grey canvas
jacket, faded black jeans and black combat boots.

His partner was of a similar
build and age. Their faces had a lot of similar traits. They looked like they could
have been brothers and I guessed probably were. He was wearing a black and grey
flannel shirt with faded blue jeans and work boots. His hair was shorter than
his partner, but with the same coloring and with no beard.

“Billy, go lock the front door,”
the bearded man said to the other. At that order, the beardless gunman went to
the front doors and turned the lock.

“Where are the lights?” Asked the
bearded man again.

“Bbbback behind the counter,” said
Ahmed, his false look of calm composure betrayed by his shaky high pitched
voice.

Billy went behind the counter to
find the light switches. He found them. The room and the lights outside all went
dark.

The little boy started to cry
once the lights were out. “It’ll be ok baby,” his mother told him as she
stroked his head. The little girl was held tightly in her father’s arms.

“Shut him up,” the bearded man shouted
at the mother.