“You think he’s going to ride it to the end of the line.” Trevor, she thought, you keep climbing higher and higher on the assumption tree, and each branch is thinner than the last.
But what else was there, now that the kid was gone? If she had to use the Zero Phone, she would be told they should have been prepared for something like this. It was easy to say, but how could anyone have foreseen a twelve-year-old child desperate enough to saw off his own earlobe to get rid of the tracker? Or a housekeeper willing to aid and abet him? Next she would be told the Institute staff had gotten lazy and complacent… and what would she say to that?
“—the line.”
She came back to the here and now, and asked him to repeat.
“I said he won’t necessarily ride it to the end of the line. A kid as smart as this one will know we’d put people there, if we figured out the train part. I don’t think he’ll want to get off in any metro area, either. Especially not in Richmond, a strange city in the middle of the night. Wilmington’s possible—it’s smaller, and it’ll be daylight when 9956 gets there—but I’m leaning toward one of the whistlestops. I think either DuPray, South Carolina, or Brunswick, Georgia. Assuming he’s on that train at all.”
“He might not even know where it was going once it left Sturbridge. In which case he might ride it all the way.”
“If he’s in with a bunch of tagged freight, he knows.”
Mrs. Sigsby realized it had been years since she had been this afraid. Maybe she had never been this afraid. Were they assuming or just guessing? And if the latter, was it likely they could make this many good ones in a row? But it was all they had, so she nodded. “If he gets off at one of the smaller stops, we could send an extraction team to take him back. God, Trevor, that would be ideal.”
“Two teams. Opal and Ruby Red. Ruby’s the same team that brought him in. That would have a nice roundness, don’t you think?”
Mrs. Sigsby sighed. “I wish we could be positive he got on that train.”
“I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure, and that’ll have to do.” Stackhouse gave her a smile. “Get on the phone. Wake some people up. Start with Richmond. Nationwide we must pay these guys and gals what, a million a year? Let’s make some of them earn their money.”
Thirty minutes later, Mrs. Sigsby set the phone back into its cradle. “If he’s in Sturbridge, he must be hiding in a culvert or an abandoned house or something—the police don’t have him, there’d be something about it on their scanners if they did. We’ll have people in both Richmond and Wilmington with eyes on that train when it’s there, and they’ve got a good cover story.”
“I heard. Nicely done, Julia.”
She lifted a weary hand to acknowledge this. “Sighting earns a substantial bonus, and there will be an even more substantial bonus—more like a windfall—if our people should see a chance to grab the boy and take him to a safe house for pickup. Not likely in Richmond, both of our people there are just John Q. Citizens, but one of the guys in Wilmington is a cop. Pray that it happens there.”
“What about DuPray and Brunswick?”
“We’ll have two people watching in Brunswick, the pastor of a nearby Methodist church and his wife. Only one in DuPray, but the guy actually lives there. He owns the town’s only motel.”
20
Luke was in the immersion tank again. Zeke was holding him down, and the Stasi Lights were swirling in front of him. They were also inside his head, which was ten times worse. He was going to drown looking at them.
At first he thought the screaming he heard when he flailed his way back to consciousness was coming from him, and wondered how he could possibly make such an ungodly racket underwater. Then he remembered that he was in a boxcar, the boxcar was part of a moving train, and it was slowing down fast. The screeching was steel wheels on steel rails.
The colored dots remained for a moment or two, then faded. The boxcar was pitch black. He tried to stretch his cramped muscles and discovered he was hemmed in. Three or four of the outboard motor cartons had fallen over. He wanted to believe he’d done that thrashing around in his nightmare, but he thought he might have done it with his mind, while in the grip of those damned lights. Once upon a time the limit of his mind-power was pushing pizza pans off restaurant tables or fluttering the pages of a book, but times had changed. He had changed. Just how much he didn’t know, and didn’t want to.
The train slowed more and began rumbling over switching points. Luke was aware that he was in a fair amount of distress. His body wasn’t on red alert, not yet, but it had definitely reached Code Yellow. He was hungry, and that was bad, but his thirst made his empty belly seem minor in comparison. He remembered sliding down the riverbank to where the S.S. Pokey had been tethered, and how he had splashed the cold water over his face and scooped it into his mouth. He would give anything for a drink of that river water now. He ran his tongue over his lips, but it wasn’t much help; his tongue was also pretty dry.
The train came to a stop, and Luke stacked the boxes again, working by feel. They were heavy, but he managed. He had no idea where he was, because in Sturbridge the door of the Southway Express box had been shut all the way. He went back to his hidey-hole behind the boxes and small engine equipment and waited, feeling miserable.
He was dozing again in spite of his hunger, thirst, full bladder, and throbbing ear, when the door of the boxcar rattled open, letting in a flood of moonlight. At least it seemed like a flood to Luke after the pure dark he’d found himself in when he woke. A truck was backing up to the door, and a guy was hollering.
“Come on… little more… easy… little more… ho!”
The truck’s engine switched off. There was the sound of its cargo door rattling up, and then a man jumped into the boxcar. Luke could smell coffee, and his belly rumbled, surely loud enough for the man to hear. But no—when he peeked out between a lawn tractor and a riding lawnmower, he saw the guy, dressed in work fatigues, was wearing earbuds.
Another man joined him and set down a square battery light which was—thankfully—aimed at the door and not in Luke’s direction. They laid down a steel ramp and began to dolly crates from the truck to the boxcar. Each was stamped KOHLER, THIS SIDE UP, and USE CAUTION. So wherever this was, it wasn’t the end of the line.
The men paused after loading ten or twelve of the crates and ate doughnuts from a paper sack. It took everything Luke had—thoughts of Zeke holding him down in the tank, thoughts of the Wilcox twins, thoughts of Kalisha and Nicky and God knew how many others depending on him—to keep from breaking cover and begging those men for a bite, just one bite. He might have done it anyway, had one of them not said something that froze him in place.
“Hey, you didn’t see a kid running around, did you?”
“What?” Through a mouthful of doughnut.
“A kid, a kid. When you went up to take the engineer that Thermos.”
“What would a kid be doing out here? It’s two-thirty in the morning.”
“Aw, some guy asked me when I went to get the doughnuts. Said his brother-in-law called him from up in Massachusetts, woke him out of a sound sleep and asked him to check the train station. The Massachusetts guy’s kid ran away. Said he was always talking about hopping a freight out to California.”
“That’s on the other side of the country.”