Authors: Ken Goddard
Cellars’ frontal lobes again, churning through the visual data stream, and coming to the perfectly logical series of conclusions that sent him charging back toward the Humvee with harshly ringing ears and the Baretta outstretched in both hands.
But when he got there, the scene was the same as before: one set of boot prints in the snow leading away from and back to the driver’s side door … his boot prints … the only difference being the three starred impact points in the Humvee’s rear-side window where his three instinctively-aimed shots had hit.
There were alarm bells pounding in Cellars’ head now — effectively blocking out the shrill ringing noises in his ears — as they screamed at him to get his ass back in the Humvee and get the hell out of here now!
But some deeper instinct — or habit, he couldn’t tell — caused him to look down at the snow-strewn area around his boots … see the four small irregular grooves in the smooth white expanse of snow surrounding the left rear side of the Humvee … and then to kneel down … reach into each of the grooves with his bare left hand … and come back up with three deformed bullets and what appeared to be a small stone, all of which — incredibly — felt warm to the touch.
It made perfect sense to Cellars that the bullets would still be warm. But he was still staring at the stone, ignoring the now-screaming alarms and trying to understand how an inanimate chunk of rock that had been lying in four inches of snow for however long could still be emitting heat —
and from what source?
— when his frontal lobes brought up a far more important issue that was still unresolved.
Two shadowy figures … where the hell are they now?
Reacting on pure instinct and adrenaline now, Cellars dropped the bullets and stone into his left jacket pocket, made a sweeping three-sixty-degree turn with the Baretta outstretched at eye-level in both hands.
Then, having seen nothing out of the ordinary, he holstered the pistol, yanked open the Humvee’s driver’s-side door, got in, pulled the door shut, and quickly accelerated the heavy vehicle down the middle of the dark, show-strewn road.
* * *
Cellars had traveled a little more than a mile in the still-intense snowstorm, his brain churning in an effort to make sense of the visual data that made absolutely no sense, when he realized that he was going too fast for the increasingly poor road conditions.
Don’t want to get into an accident and get stuck out
here
, he reminded himself as he eased his boot up off the accelerator, allowing the Humvee to drop back down to a more reasonable speed.
Moments later, the wide tires of the heavy military vehicle were steadily churning through the snow drifts in a smooth and easy pace.
Okay, that’s better
, he told himself, feeling his heart rate starting to come back down into what felt like a normal range.
Everything’s okay. Relax. Focus. Concentrate on the road.
Which he did for another mile or so as he tried to ignore his still-ringing ears; but the fact that everything was obviously
not
okay — in fact, anything but — continued to ping at his subconscious.
What did I just do … shoot three rounds at a goddamned shadow for no reason at all? What’s the matter with me? Christ, maybe I do have brain damage after all.
The growing realization that the U.S. Army might have had a perfectly good reason to place him in custody and under psychiatric care was disturbing, at best; and nothing that he really wanted to think about.
Wish this thing had a radio, something to take my mind off of —
Then he remembered the hastily discarded j-Connector.
Fumbling around with his right hand, Cellars found the little electronic device sticking out from under the left edge of the front passenger seat.
Then, remembering the difficulty he‘d experienced earlier trying to turn it on one-handed, he quickly pulled the Humvee over to the side of the road, plugged the tiny earphones into his ears again, thumbed the device into action, and worked his way to the colorful graphic options menu.
Deciding that he really didn’t want to hear an encore of ‘
This Magic Moment’
— that would likely bring a whole bunch of very recent memories to the surface that he wasn’t sure he wanted to think about right now — and that ‘drifting away again’ under the apparently hypnotic effect of ‘
Symphonic Rock’
probably wasn’t a good idea either, he tapped the ‘LOCAL RADIO’ option, selected ‘SCAN – 15 SEC’, and then accelerated the Humvee back onto the road.
It didn’t take long for Cellars to discover that there weren’t many local radio stations broadcasting at this time of night, and that the reception for most of those that were was poor at best.
So he left the radio set to scanning every fifteen seconds, mildly amused — or at least distracted — by the intermittent and unpredictable signals that cut in and out. Until, suddenly, as he came around a bend in the narrow mountainous road, a sense of very enticing background music playing very softly and one voice — a very familiar voice — suddenly came in beautifully clear.
The response of his frontal lobes was almost instantaneous.
Hey, I know her!
He tried to listen to what the now-extremely-familiar voice was saying, but kept getting distracted by his efforts to remember
who
she was and
why
he knew her.
Then, all of a sudden, the faint-but-very-soothing background music, and the all-too-familiar melodic timbre of her voice, was replaced by the high, sing-song pitch-voice of an obnoxious telemarketer that seemed to rip through his auditory sensors like a suddenly-turned-on jackhammer …
“Shit!” Cellars cursed as he pulled the Humvee over to the side of the road again, stopped, and then fumbled with the j-Connector’s menu until he had it back on the station with the familiar voice of …
Eleanor.
He blinked. Like ‘Jody’, the name had come out of nowhere.
No, not
nowhere
... memory fragments have to reside
somewhere
, a deep analytical portion of his frontal lobes reminded. Just a simple construct … the orbito-frontal cortex, being clever again, picking up on the melodies.
What? Eleanor? Eleanor who?
Eleanor Patterson, the orbito-frontal cortex responded as more memory fragments cross-linked at unfathomable speed. Definitely her … no question about it … positive ID based on tone, rhythm and timbre … much more accurate and definitive than a fingerprint.
Okay, who the hell is Eleanor Patterson?
Cellars demanded of his memory, but lacking relevant data, the frontal lobes and all their inter-connected cortexes remained silent.
“Crap,” he muttered, and then forced himself to concentrate on the broadcast.
“… been talking with Eleanor Patterson, an absolutely fascinating woman who has some absolutely fascinating ideas about who and what we are … and possibly were long ago. Deep topics, my friends… very deep indeed! And don’t forget, if you’d like to take part in our fascinating discussion and ask Eleanor Patterson a question of your own, all you have to do is reach for your phone and speed-dial our call-in number. For our new listeners, that’s area code five-four-one, seven-seven —”
Cellars scrambled to pull MacGregor’s field notebook and pen out of his jacket pocket, repeating the numbers over and over in his head — knowing he couldn’t depend on his seemingly porous if not absolutely vacant memory! — until he was finally able to scribble the numbers down on a flipped-open sheet of note paper.
Then he had to make a choice: keep on listening to the broadcast, in the hope that Eleanor Patterson would say something that would trigger his personal memories of
why
and
how
he knew her, or —
MacGregor’s pack set radio sudden came to life.
“Major Colin Cellars, report your location immediately!” an enraged voice demanded.
MacGregor.
A long pause, and then: “Cellars, goddamn it, report your position!”
Cellars smiled coldly, guessing that the MP sergeant hadn’t reported the loss of his vehicle and weapon yet, probably hoping that —
At that moment, another possibility occurred to him.
He quickly pulling the pack set radio out of the belt holder, turned the Humvee’s interior light on again, found the channel select button, switched to the next channel, and heard a different and far-less-emotional voice say:
“— subject last seen driving a military police Humvee, model Mike-one-zero-two-zero-five-alpha-one, unit ID Sam-Ocean-Delta-one-three-slant-Mike-Papa-two-three, believed in transit to Grants Pass from —”
“Shit.”
Cellars shut the radio off, and then stared out at the now-huge clumps of snowflakes drifting through the beams of his headlights for a long moment before he finally made his decision.
Setting the now-silent pack set radio aside, he quickly reset the j-Connector from ‘LOCAL RADIO’ to ‘TELEPHONE’, punched the series of numerals with the tip of his finger, hit the ‘CALL’ button, and then listened to the connection ring twelve times before an audibly tired and harassed voice finally answered.
“KMAD, how can we —?”
“I’d like to ask Eleanor Patterson a question,” Cellars interrupted.
“I’m sorry, sir, but we’ve had an awful lot of people calling in tonight. You’re number … uh … seventy-two on the waiting list, which means you very likely won’t get on the air this evening.”
“Oh, uh —” Cellars hesitated. “Can you tell me where your station is located?”
“Certainly, do you have a pencil handy?”
“Go ahead.”
Moments later, Cellars terminated the call, set the handy j-Connector aside, and started to reach for the dash-mounted GPS unit controls when he remembered the additional functions of the unit’s locator signal that the instruction card had so proudly detailed.
Yeah, right, turn it on for fifteen seconds and they’ll know exactly where I’m at.
He sighed.
“Okay, so we don’t get to do things the easy way,” he muttered to himself as he quickly started up the Humvee’s engine again, and then pulled it back onto the snow-covered road. “What else is new?”
CHAPTER 7
After arriving at the outskirts of Medford, it took Cellars another ten minutes to find an open-all-night gas station with a shopping mart that sold local maps.
As it turned out, the KMAD radio station was back the way he came — less than a mile north of Medford proper, and an easy side-road exit turn off of Highway Sixty-Two.
The KMAD building was a boxy, tilt-up-concrete-walled structure, with a few tiny windows and several sprouting antennas on the roof, that looked pretty drab and even a little claustrophobic next to what appeared to be its sister KMUD-TV station — a much larger, and far more elaborate two story structure that looked to be mostly tinted aluminum concrete pillars, aluminum, cross-beams, darkly tinted windows, ear-like satellite dishes, and a considerable amount of artful neon-tube signage.
Guess radio people aren’t much into the visuals
, Cellars thought as he idled the Humvee in front of the two buildings, watching the intermittent and now-much-smaller snowflakes swirling in the air and covering the surrounding area with a light dusting of fine white powder.
Suppose that makes sense.
He pulled the squat military vehicle into the dimly-lit parking lot located directly behind the KMAD building, found a mostly concealed space next to a large trash dumpster, parked, shut off the engine, started to get out … and then hesitated as he considered his appearance, and the possibility that someone at the VA base might have notified the local police and media about his escape.
He tried to imagine what a local broadcast might sound like …
Something along the lines of “be on the lookout for a man in a U.S. Army field uniform who just escaped from a psychiatric ward with a loaded pistol and a military police vehicle”?
...and finally came to the logical conclusion that the Army — and more specifically, the base and MP commanders — probably wouldn’t want that kind of publicity getting out. They’d want to clean up an Army mess out of the public eye where it wouldn’t negatively impact future promotions and new duty assignments.
Or, at least, that’s what I’d do
, Cellars told himself.
But even so, he realized that he probably shouldn’t go in the radio station looking like some kind of storm trooper on a mission; thinking that if he did, someone might call the cops anyway … and he wasn’t sure if that would turn out to be a good thing, or not.
Finally deciding there was no point in taking unnecessary chances, Cellars got out of the Humvee, closed the front driver’s-side door, pulled open the rear door … and then took a few moments to remove the MP brassard from his jacket sleeve, and detach the holstered pack set radio from his belt.
He put the brassard and radio in the concealed storage container under the Humvee’s left rear seat, along with his gun belt, The Mini Stun Baton®, the j-Connector and his two-syringe drug kit, closed the door, slid the Baretta pistol inside the waistband of his pants at the small of his back, and dropped the extra magazines in each of his jacket pockets.