Subject Seven (11 page)

The restaurant was covered in chrome and neon, which seemed to be a state law for the way diners had to look in Jersey. He hiked his oversized pants a little higher, reached into the pocket and found a wad of bills that had no reason to be there. So be it. At least he could eat.

The place was crowded and smelled like heaven must, full of food and coffee. He didn't even know when he started liking the stuff, but these days he was happier if he got his caffeine. He ordered a burger, rare, and a cup of his favorite drink. He'd knocked back two cups before his burger showed up. After that the coffee didn't matter nearly as much as feeding his face a ton of hot fries and grilled cow.

The waitress looked a few years older than him, maybe eighteen, with heavily dyed red hair and light makeup. She smiled when she looked at his plate. “Somebody was hungry.”

“Still am. Can I get another?”

“Of course you can! Keep it up, you're gonna fit into those pants real soon.” She laughed and looked him in the eyes. He wasn't used to that.

“Well, that's the idea. Need to build up my body.” He flexed, meaning the gesture as a joke, and was shocked by the size of his arms. No matter how much time had passed, he still had trouble with the changes. Muscles flexed and rippled smoothly and his bicep bulged. It looked damned near as big as his thigh used to be before his world went crazy. He could remember looking in the mirror and brushing his teeth while Mom watched him, her eyes smiling, and went over his homework answers with him.

The waitress laughed again and patted his arm, her fingers lingering for a second and her eyes taking on a different light. “Don't change too much, hon. You're looking pretty good to me.”

She left to take care of his order before he could open his mouth and say something stupid. The way things were going, he'd never get good with talking to girls. He couldn't even find his way home.

He felt the skin on his scalp crawl and looked around at all the tables. People laughed, they talked, they snuck fries from each other's plates, hell, one couple sat together and read different books as they ate, but they were
together
. He envied them for that.

At a few tables other people ate alone, but even they seemed more relaxed than he did. Every nerve in his body was telling him that he was being watched by someone nearby. He looked everywhere, even shifting around enough to see the people behind him, but there was nothing, no one. They couldn't have cared less about him. He might as well have been invisible.

Was it someone outside, maybe? He looked out the window, but all he could see was a line of cars with the sun flashing from the windows and windshields. The day was too perfect, and the resulting glare made seeing anything in the cars around him impossible. They could be staring at him and there would be no way he could prove it.

He
could be staring, the bastard who'd locked him away. Or had he? His heart raced at the thought.

He rose on shaky legs and moved toward the men's room as the waitress was bringing his next burger. He had to get away, now, before something horrible happened. Before someone broke down the doors or the police came swarming in or something even worse.

He pushed into the men's room, drawing in the chemical smell of air fresheners trying to hide the stench of what happened in toilets, and almost knocked a man over in the process.

“Hey!” the older man squawked, indignant.

“Sorry.” He mumbled the word, already too busy to even acknowledge the man. His voice shook, sounded stranger than ever.

“You need to watch where the hell you're going. You almost knocked my teeth out.” The man's voice grew softer and his face lost its angry edge and grew worried. “Say, are you okay?”

No! He wasn't okay! His heart was hammering crazily, his throat was dry and his skin felt like it was baking in an oven.

He opened his mouth to warn the stranger away because that feeling, it was worse than ever and something was happening, something bad.

“Mister—”

The darkness swallowed him whole, ate his mind and tore him into shreds, and something else came with the darkness, ripping him apart and throwing away the pieces.

He tried to speak and—

His head hurt, throbbed with each pulse of his heart, and he knew without even opening his eyes that it had happened again.

Hunter opened his eyes and stared at the stucco ceiling above him, studying the cracks in the plaster and the water stains that ran in odd patterns from a few different locations.

“No. Not again.” His voice broke, sounding more like it was supposed to than it had in a long, long time. “Not again, please. Just let me have my life back, okay? Just, please, God, let me have my mom and dad and everything else again.”

He didn't cry, exactly, but his vision broke up as the tears ran to the edges of his eyelids and stuck there. He closed his eyes and wiped them angrily, hating it when he felt like crying. His dad had always looked at him like he was a loser when he cried, and he hated disappointing the man.

At least he thought he did. He couldn't remember for sure, but it felt right to think that way.

Hunter sat up and listened to the mattress under him creak and groan. His head throbbed and he clutched it, holding on and hoping it wouldn't shatter.

There was a new, clean and starched white shirtsleeve covering each arm to the wrist. He looked himself over for a moment and saw the charcoal gray slacks, the polished black dress shoes. He didn't know anything about suits.

There was a wallet on the dresser in front of him. It was stuffed with bills and a driver's license that had the name William Carter, along with an address for an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia.

He looked at the picture on the ID. It looked nothing like him.

“Okay, this is just crazy now….”

There was a suitcase on the battered dresser in front of the bed. Above the suitcase, there was a message written on the stationery pad he saw to the left of the suitcase and taped in place.

It said: BEHAVE YOURSELF. NO MORE GAMES.

A lot of things had changed in Hunter's life. Okay, almost everything had changed, but at least one thing was the same. He recognized the handwriting. It was the same as he'd seen on hotel mirrors and the occasional note for a long time now.

Oh, the rage that seared his mind was huge. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth and tried his best not to let the anger out again.

“How do you keep doing it? How are you finding me, you bastard?”

No one answered. No one could. He was all alone. Again.

CODY PACED IN THE waiting room, his entire world revolving around a blood test. He wished Jeremy was there. Or Will. Anyone he could talk to.

He'd gone back to school after his folks took him home, and nothing was quite right. First, Hank and Glenn were avoiding him like the plague, not that he was complaining, and he heard from Jeremy that the same night he disappeared, they got their asses handed to them in a big way. The proof of that was in the casts they were wearing on their hands. Matching casts, only Glenn's was a little bigger. Since then, every time he saw them in the hallway, they did their best to avoid him.

That didn't help make his life much easier, though. His folks were still having trouble with the whole idea of him just losing four days. So now they were looking into other possibilities, like maybe whether or not he'd started experimenting with hard-core drugs.

He knew he was innocent, he knew the test should be negative, but he wasn't stupid. Just because he didn't take any drugs didn't mean there weren't any involved. He'd heard the stories from time to time. It was always possible someone had slipped him something at the football game. He couldn't think of anyone who would—or why—but you never knew. His friends weren't that stupid and neither Chadbourn nor Wagner had the brainpower to come up with the idea—but it could have been someone else or even a random thing, so yeah, he was worried.

And right now his parents were talking with the doctor who'd taken the test. Not Dr. Talbot, the usual physician they saw, but a different man, a specialist who'd been hired to give him a full battery of drug tests to make sure that he wasn't a hardened drug freak. He'd heard his parents talking at home about how much the tests would cost, well, arguing really, about whether or not they could afford to get them done at all because apparently insurance didn't cover paranoid exams of your son's blood for illicit substances.

His dad had been against it. His mom had insisted. In the long run, Mom won. Mom always won. It had always been that way.

He kept pacing, worrying, doing his best to ignore the constriction in his chest and the fact that his lungs wanted to whistle. Asthma sucked. He wished he'd brought his Game Boy.

The door opened and his parents walked out with a man he'd never seen before. He had to guess the stranger was their new friend, the doctor.

“Cody?” The man walked forward and offered his hand. He had a very strong grip and a smile that looked like it belonged on a politician. “I'm Dr. Peebles. I've been talking to your parents about your blood test results.”

Cody looked at his mom first; her face was set and worried. Then his dad, who seemed a little more relaxed but only a little.

The doctor was still smiling when he looked back.

“Yeah? What was the verdict?”

“Well, there's no evidence that you took any illegal drugs, and aside from a few tests that are very painful and cost prohibitive, I doubt we'd be able to check any more thoroughly than we already did.”

He nodded. He didn't like the man. He didn't trust the man. Everything about the guy just rubbed him wrong.

“I get the idea there's a
but
in this.”

The doctor blinked. “A
but
?”

“Yeah, you know. You seem all good, BUT, we have to consider this or that other thing.”

The man nodded and got a serious look on his face. Cody had to wonder if he practiced the expression in the mirror to make it look so sincere.

“Well, Cody, the thing is, we have to consider blackouts very carefully.”

“Blackouts?”

A nod from Dr. Sincere. “Yes, blackouts, or fugues, or amnesia. The fact of the matter is, you lost four days of your life and we can't figure out why.”

Cody swallowed hard. This was about to get bad, he could feel it in his stomach, like the way he felt at the top of the first roller-coaster hill when he knew the car was about to take a giant plummet downward and there was that chance that he was about to crash into the ground.

“The thing is, Cody, we've checked your head for possible causes, we've done examinations of your electrolytes for possible imbalances . . . and you're in remarkable physical shape.”

He shook his head. The man had to be looking at someone else's medical records. “No. I have asthma. My mom is always telling me I've got health problems.”

Another smile, but it was fast and lacked conviction. The doctor looked to his mom for a second and she in turn looked down, like she was guilty of letting out a shameful family secret. What the hell?

“Well, you're in better shape than you think. At least physically.”

“What do you mean?” And there it was, that feeling like falling. The roller coaster was dropping fast and hard and it was a doozy, too.

“There are no signs of drugs, no physiological signs of trauma, and Cody, that only leaves one alternative that we can think of.”

Cody stepped back and looked from adult to adult, his eyes widening in his head. His mother and father looked away. Mom had a fretting look on her pretty face and Dad, well, Dad was looking about as happy as he probably would if Cody suddenly decided he needed to get a sex change. “You're kidding me. You think I'm mental.”

“We just need to take a few more tests to make sure that the fugue state was just a fluke, a one-time thing.”

“Oh, hell no.” Cody shook his head. “I am not going to a mental ward.”

“No, Cody, it's nothing that serious.” The doctor was speaking.

His mother interrupted. “Cody! We don't use that sort of language!”

He shook his head again, scowling. “Yeah, well, no offense, Mom, but no one is calling you a mental case.”

“Just calm down, Cody. It's a test, that's all.”

“Well, what if I'm done with tests?” He took a step back toward the doctor, his head aching. “What if I just want to go back home and get on with my life?”

His dad stepped forward and swelled up with a deep breath. “It's not your choice, Cody. It's going to happen and you're going to answer all the damned questions carefully and truthfully, you understand me?” Dad stepped in closer still and Cody looked up at him, reminded forcefully of exactly how large the man was. “I'm done playing games here, Cody. This is serious stuff and you're not going to pull any stunts.”

Stunts? What kind of stunts? He'd never pulled anything until he woke up in a damned jail cell and yeah, that was a big one, but he hadn't done it.

“Fine! Just get out of my face!” The anger surged hard into him and his voice came out louder than he meant it to. He'd never, ever yelled at either of his parents. He knew better, was raised better.

“What did you say to me?” Dad's face was red with anger. Cody knew just how he felt. He would have backed down instantly in most cases, but not this time. Not today. That throbbing, thrumming headache was giving him balls the size of Texas. The world swam for a second, growing darker and then lighter and then darker again and Cody forced himself to take a deep breath and calm down. Asthma, no matter what Dr. Sunshine said, was a real issue and one he couldn't take lightly.