*
I dreamed. Everything was dark. I was being dragged and I couldn’t stop it. Then I was being carried, but I couldn’t see by whom. I felt warm and secure. Maybe it was my mother carrying me. My limbs wouldn’t respond; I was like a baby. I could hear a voice. Then I was dropped, and I felt afraid. But I landed on something soft, like a pile of fresh earth. I could feel that I was moving forwards in space, and I could feel that I was turning. The darkness began to lift from my eyes, and I could see a network of lines in the distance, blurry and moving fast. I blinked my eyes and the lines came into focus. They weren’t distant; they were only a few feet away. They were ceiling tiles. I raised my head with a great effort and looked side to side; I was in a wheelbarrow moving down the hall. I was lying in fresh earth. I hadn’t been dreaming. When I hit my head, it must have given me a brain concussion and knocked out my motor control and main senses for a few minutes. I leaned my head back and looked up. Penelope was pushing the wheelbarrow. I looked back and saw that the checkpoint guard was lying on the hallway floor outside Penelope’s room. She jammed the button for the elevator to open the doors and then wheeled me inside. When she turned to fit the wheelbarrow in properly, I saw that she had my truncheon slipped into her pants at the hip.
I struggled to get out of the wheelbarrow. If I could only stand up, I could resist. My muscles still weren’t responding very well, though, and I was only able to raise myself a little bit. Penelope put her hand on my chest and pushed me back down.
“Just rest,” she said.
“How could you do this to me?” I asked, knowing how pathetic I must sound to her, now that I knew she didn’t care about me. It didn’t even matter why they had done it anymore. I wished I could die.
We had only been going up for a few seconds, and the elevator dinged. I thought I must have blacked out again and missed the long journey up. Penelope pushed the wheelbarrow out the door.
“Look down the hall,” she commanded. I looked. It seemed that we were still on the same floor. Then I looked at the numbers on the doors; the one right in front of me was room 41. How had the numbers changed? Why?
She pulled me back into the elevator and started it again. I noticed that she pushed the ‘up’ button more than once, in a certain sequence, but I couldn’t follow it. We went up longer this time, but still not as long as the usual time, and the elevator dinged. She pushed me out into another hallway and I looked without prompting. The room at the end of this hallway was number 101. It must be different floors, with twenty rooms on each floor. The floor with room 101 was the fifth floor from the bottom. Why was she showing me this?
“This is why the rooms are so far underground,” she said. “It’s just not one set of rooms; there are twenty floors on the secure wing. Anyone they don’t like is kept here; anyone who knows anything, anyone who could harm them, or anyone who might tell other people what they’re doing. If it’s actually their mental condition causing it then some people get a chance with this or that variation of Psylocybin – on a short leash, of course, like with the cameras in your house. The bottom two floors, rooms 1 through 41, are for the intractables, people who have already been tested outside and failed, people who are thought to be incurably violent, or sometimes just people who know too much. In your case, it’s because you had the potential for finding out too much.”
“Why are you telling me this? I feel like James Bond, with you telling me your whole plan instead of just killing me.”
“Jesus, Oscar, this isn’t a movie. It’s not my plan. I’m not with them. I convinced you to take Psylocybin, but that was only so you could get out. If you were out, then you could help me, you could do good; there’s nothing you can do from inside. What could you have done if you were still in one of those rooms down there, refusing treatment? I was going to tell you everything that night at my house, but then you spooked me by talking about cameras.”
“Because you weren’t taking your Psylocybin,” I said, remembering.
“I never took it. I only pretended to, so I could get close to them. I’m constantly paranoid, especially about things like cameras. Even when you were in here and I was your nurse, I was paranoid. Every single time I came to this place – to the stronghold of our enemy – it took an enormous amount of will, and I always left feeling exhausted.”
“You have to believe me,” she said, “I meant to tell you all about it the next day, but then Boggs showed up. I let him in, because to do otherwise would surely have made him suspicious – although that particular worry turned out to be a waste of time because he was clearly already suspicious, although I have no idea what I did, I was always scrupulously careful.” I would have hidden my face away when she said that, had I been able to, but there are very few places to go when you’re lying in a wheelbarrow. “Once I had unlocked the door a bunch of the guards from here pushed in too. I managed to hit one of them in the face with a brick, and I think I broke his nose because of all the blood he left. There were too many of them though, I couldn’t get away. They brought me here and stuck me in the bottom floor. They never would have let me out.”
I contemplated what I was going to say next. I believed Penelope, if for no other reason than that I was desperate to believe she wasn’t involved in this vast plot against me, that we truly were on the same side. If everyone was with Ron, then no one was with me, and I needed someone on my side. I needed friends, and friends are honest with each other.
“Dr. Boggs was suspicious because of me,” I said. “More than suspicious, in fact. That night after you made me leave, I told him that I thought you weren’t taking Psylocybin. I told him about how you were acting that night, after I told you about the cameras in my house, I told him that only someone who was extremely paranoid would have such a variety of locks and bolts and latches like you did.” I fidgeted with my hands – my muscle control was starting to come back – and looked steadily at the ceiling as I spoke. “I was using Psylocybin at the time, so I didn’t know anything about Dr. Boggs. I worried something bad would happen to you if you weren’t taking it like you were supposed to be.”
“I understand,” she said, after a pause. “Don’t worry, I’m not angry with you. I know you did it with good intentions, because you were worried about me. And you also came here to get me. I forgive you for it.”
Knowing that she wasn’t angry at me for what I had been feeling was a betrayal seemed to give me energy, and I was able to stand. I got out of the wheelbarrow, and we pushed it to the back of the elevator, out of the way.
“I came here to rescue you, but I guess you ended up rescuing me,” I said, pointing to the wheelbarrow. “How did you get us out of the room past that huge guard? I felt sure he was going to pull out a bottle of hot sauce and eat us both.”
She pulled the truncheon out of her pants and handed it to me with a grin. “One of the most useful things I’ve ever learned is that nobody likes to have their boys whacked with a metal stick.[37]”
The elevator dinged; we had reached the top floor. When the doors opened, I expected that a cluster of guards would be there to greet us since they would have seen Penelope take out the huge guard, but there was nobody.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“They don’t know where we are,” Penelope said. “Months ago, I was able to put the cameras for the secure wing on an infinite loop showing empty hallways, so they didn’t see either of us down there, and they don’t know which floor the guard went to either. Once we leave the elevator, they’ll see, but I think we can escape in time because right now they’re spread out over the hospital.”
“But can’t he just call on his radio once…” she held up two of the radios in her hands, and I stopped. She had taken the guard’s radio so he wouldn’t be able to call for help. It was something I never would have thought of, and I was very happy to have her with me at the hospital.
“We can’t leave just yet, though,” I said. Before she could ask why, I reached into my pocket and held
up Mr. Hodge. It must have been the same pocket that the guard kept his peanuts in, because Mr. Hodge’s head was covered with peanut crumbs and they dropped from his face as I lifted him out.
“Squeak,” he said, looking very small and deceptively fuzzy in my hand.
“You remember Jim, the hedgehog guy, don’t you?” I asked her.
“The guy with attachment personality disorder who thought his hedgehog was his best friend?”
“That’s the guy. His name is James Hodge. And this is the hedgehog, Mr. Hodge. I came here tonight to bust Jim out so I could get his help finding you, and it was only coincidence that I found out you were here too when I looked in the patient database. I had to get you out first, but now I can’t leave Jim here, not now that we’re so close. I owe it to him. It’s going to be a lot harder now that they know I’m in the hospital and soon they’ll discover that you’re out of your room too, but I have to try.”
I told her what I knew about where Jim was in the hospital, and after she locked the checkpoint gate so the guard from below couldn’t follow us, we were off.
She said she would take us the safest way even though it was longer. As we walked, I remembered that I had more to tell her.
“I’ve figured everything out,” I said. “All of it. They only wanted us to take our Psylocybin, but I don’t know why. RonCorp, though. RonCorp!”
She just looked at me, without the instant recognition that I had expected when I revealed Ron’s clever trick. “Don’t you see?” I asked. “NorCorp? I saw it backwards in the mirror; it’s RonCorp. The company that makes Psylocybin is owned by Ron, he’s behind everything.”
“Oscar, NorCorp just stands for Nordic Corporation,” she said. “I think it’s based in Greenland. Maybe Sweden.”
I decided I would explain everything about Ron to her later, she just didn’t know as much as I did. “Alright then, Sweden,” I said.
We carried on walking until I felt sure we must nearly be there. She walked around a corner and then stepped back.
“Get out of sight,” she said quietly. “I’ll take care of this.”
“What is it?” I asked, but she had already moved out into the next hallway again. I stepped back around another corner but kept my head out so I could see. I didn’t know what she had seen, but she knew the hospital much better than I did and was apparently much better with a truncheon than I was, so it was sensible to let her take the lead in any situation she wanted.
I couldn’t tell what she was trying to do. She looked from left to right, and appeared to be surprised. Then she leaned against the far wall and briefly put her hands up. She was talking, and I strained my ears to hear what she said.
“Out all on our own, are we?” I heard a man say from around the corner, out of sight.
“Please don’t sound the alarm,” she said. “I only want to get out of here.” She put her hand on her breast. “If you help me, I can… help you.” As she spoke, she slowly moved her hand down over her stomach and onto her thigh.
A hospital guard stepped into view and moved close to her. Something about him was familiar, like I had seen him before. He put his hand on her hip, and I felt jealousy seething inside me, burning at the base of my skull; I forced myself to ignore it, I was going to let her handle the situation.
“I’m willing to negotiate,” he said, sliding his hand around to her bottom. I could see his fingertips making impressions in the fabric at the rear of her patient’s uniform. I changed my mind about letting her handle it, and stepped out from around the corner, leaving the wheelbarrow. As I did, she reached back, pulled a previously hidden truncheon from her waistband and swung it right at the face of the guard. She moved so fast that he had no chance to react before it impacted across his mouth; even from a distance of ten paces I heard the crunch of metal against his jawbone. He uttered a loud moan and staggered back, moving the offending hand up to his mouth to catch the bits of teeth which were being washed out in a stream of blood, and holding his other hand out in front of his face to defend himself. Penelope swung the truncheon back, down, and then brought it up between the guard’s legs, and I heard a dull thump and what might have been another crunch. He groaned again, pulled his knees together and bent his body forward with one hand between his legs and one over his mouth, with blood dripping between his fingers. He swayed from side to side, and she used the tip of the truncheon to give him a small push; he toppled over backwards, slowly and without resistance, dripping blood down onto his uniform as he went, and then lay unmoving on the floor.
I went up to join her. The guard’s nametag said Steven, and the mole to the left of his mouth confirmed that I had seen him before – he was one of the guards that had gone outside with me and Penelope when she was convincing me to take Psylocybin. His face was a mess, and he was going to be in a lot of pain once he woke up. I never liked him much anyway.
At the end of that hallway, there was a young guard moving towards us with uncertain steps; he must have watched everything. Behind him, I saw several faces poking out around the corner, watching. She menacingly raised the bloody truncheon in her fist and he turned on his heel and left.
“Come on,” she said. “Jim’s room is just up ahead.” She dropped the truncheon on the floor, leaving it as a reminder for the unconscious guard with the broken mouth.
There was the sound of a scuffle from the common room. We turned the corner and entered the room where I had sat at a table a month before while Stanley and Dave unkindly kidded Jim about Mr. Hodge until he left the table in a suicidal depression. It had been full of patients then, and it had contained ten or fifteen patients earlier when I saw it on the security monitor. Now there were only four patients, the ones I had seen playing poker who looked as if they were planning something. Two of them were holding the young guard by the arms, one was on the floor and had him around the legs, and the fourth was unbuttoning the guard’s shirt. Several pillows were on the floor behind him, as if intended to be a bed for him to rest on, and a tub full of a thick, clear liquid sat nearby.
They turned around when we entered the room.
One of the patients holding the guard’s arms whistled at Penelope.
The other said, “Nice moves, Nurse.”
She stopped walking and gave them a withering look of medical authority. They quietly returned to their work.
The fourth man now began to undo the belt of the guard. They couldn’t have been intending to help us, but it was helpful anyway for them to have gotten this final guard out of the way. I wasn’t sure what they were planning to do to him, but I didn’t ask. I figured he was getting off easy; they didn’t have any truncheons or other dental equipment around that I could see, so at least he would keep all his teeth.
We went to Jim’s room, and found the door unlocked. Once inside the dark room, Penelope locked the door behind us, and I roused Jim by gently shaking his shoulder.
“Jim, it’s Oscar,” I said.
He opened his eyes halfway and looked at me in an unfocused manner.
“Hmmaphmm,” he mumbled with heavy lips, then closed his eyes and seemed to go back to sleep.
Then his eyes opened all the way, and he looked at me. “Oscar, you’re in my bedroom, in a mental hospital.” Then he looked at Penelope. “Nurse, you’re wearing a patient’s uniform.” He looked at his bedside clock, and added, “At midnight.”
I reached into my pocket and took out Mr. Hodge. I set him on Jim’s chest. Jim put his hands around his best friend and sat up in bed. Tears dropped from his eyes and he looked at us. “I’ve been so lonely,” he said. “It’s so good to see all of you. I know this is only a dream,” and he sighed, with a happy contentment, “but it’s the best dream I’ve ever had.”
“Jim, it’s not a dream,” Penelope said.
“At midnight,” Jim said, shaking his head.
“Jim!” I shouted, shaking him by his shoulders. He looked at me, still uncomprehending, in a daze. Maple Ridge was a mental hospital, after
all; I don’t know what else I expected to happen. For him to be some sort of mastermind who would take us out of the hospital through a secret tunnel he had made through the wall and concealed expertly, and then once we were outside he would fit all the pieces of the vast conspiracy together for us?
Jim stroked Mr. Hodge’s prickly body and continued looking up at us with a silly smile. The hedgehog puffed in what you could almost take for exasperation, and dug his teeth into Jim’s thumb. Jim said, “Ah,” like someone who has just discovered some small fact he was searching for, stood up out of bed, and walked over to a mirror on the wall. He held his thumb up in front of the mirror; a single drop of blood issued from the wound and ran down his thumb. He turned around to us.
“I’m not dreaming, am I?” he asked.
I thought that Mr. Hodge rolled his eyes as he sat in Jim’s unbitten hand, but it was hard to say for sure.
“You’re not dreaming, Jim,” Penelope said. “Get your things together, we’re getting out.”
“There’s a bag of my things there,” he said, pointing to it, “but I’m not allowed to leave. I’m not a voluntary patient anymore, that’s what they said.”
“That decision has been changed,” Penelope said.
The doorknob rattled.
“Nurse… you’re not in your uniform,” Jim said.
“Jim, we have to get out of here. They’re not going to let you keep Mr. Hodge if you stay.” When I said that, Jim’s eyes lost their sleepy look and he held the hedgehog close against his body. He picked up his bag of things. I got his old shoelaces from my underpants and he laced up his shoes; we were ready.
Someone pounded on the door, making it shake in its frame. I picked up the bedside table and moved to throw it through the window, but Jim put his hand on it and stopped me. He put his finger up to his lips to let us know that we should be quiet, and pulled the bed away from the wall to reveal a secret tunnel he had expertly concealed.
“I’ve been digging this for a few weeks. I didn’t really intend to use it, but it did keep my mind off of things when I was tunneling.”
Jim went first with Mr. Hodge riding on his shoulder. Penelope went next. I picked up the bedside table again and threw it through the window, setting off a distant alarm. Then I went through the tunnel as well, and pulled the bed against the wall behind me. I expected to hear the sound of the door falling into splinters or bursting open back in Jim’s room, but instead I heard it opening normally; whoever was doing the banging had been replaced by someone with a key.
The tunnel was large, as far as secret tunnels go, but still small enough that we had to go on our hands and knees. Penelope’s bottom swayed from side to side in front of me as she crawled forward, and I was amazed by my ability to focus on it to the exclusion of all else, even though we were faced with imprisonment, torture, and probably even death if they discovered the tunnel before we were out. It was a great comfort to me.
Instead of going directly for the outside which was several feet away – as you might do if you were making a secret escape tunnel – Jim’s tunnel took us on a tour of the inner walls and vents of Maple Ridge.
“I really wasn’t intending to use it for escaping,” he apologized from up ahead, “I was just trying to stay busy.”
We had been crawling for several minutes when we passed through ductwork leading beside the common room, and through the vents I saw a group of guards gathered, talking. One, the young guard who had been captured by the four patients, was naked except for a coating of white feathers, almost as if the contents of several pillows had been stuck to him with glue. We moved slowly through there, shuffling on our hands and knees so we wouldn’t make any noise, and I watched through the vents as we passed by each one.
“They couldn’t have gone far,” the feathered guard said. “You got into the room just a few seconds after they went out the window. They have to be hiding in the woods close by the hospital; the guys patrolling out there will find them.”
I shuffled past that vent, so I couldn’t see them, but I could still hear.
“When we find them, I’m going to show her what this truncheon is really for,” another voice said, sounding like someone with a speech impediment. I could hear the sound of metal tapping against flesh; he was hitting his truncheon into his palm for emphasis. Then I heard someone else striding across the room, and then the same man saying, “Hey, that’s——”
We passed by another vent just in time for me to see Dr. Boggs raising the truncheon and bringing it hard against the guard Steven’s face. The lower half of his face shifted sideways to accommodate the bar of metal, and he fell to his knees with fresh blood flowing down his chin. He held his hands up in a pleading gesture, and tried to say something through his ruined mouth, but it was unintelligible.
“That’s what the truncheon is for,” Dr. Boggs said. “If you’d been thinking with the head on top of your shoulders, that patient wouldn’t have been able to escape at all.” The doctor spat in the guard’s face. “Get him out of here,” he said to a pair of orderlies who stood nearby. They each put one of the guard’s arms over their shoulders and dragged him off; his feet didn’t appear to work very well.
Dr. Boggs turned to face the rest of the guards in the room. “I don’t want that to happen to any of you,” he said. “Everything has already started. This town will be mine tonight, and anyone who gets in the way of that is going to get more than a crushed jaw. The escaped patients and their accomplice are somewhere in this hospital. They did not go out through that window. You,” he said, pointing to one of the guards, “go to the west wing. You,” pointing to the feathered guard, “patrol the front entrance. Stay out of sight.”
We passed by the last vent and went into a wall cavity, and I couldn’t see what was going on the common room any more.
“Doctor,” a new voice said. “There’s a handmade tunnel behind the bed in the patient’s room, I think they might have gone through that.”
“Of course they’ve gone through that!” I heard Boggs shout. “Find where it comes out. Find them!”
We sped up, as much as you can when you’re crawling in a confined space.
“What did he mean about the town being his?” Penelope asked.
I shook my head. I had wondered that myself, but couldn’t figure it out. Just thinking about made my brain ache, and it didn’t matter anyway. The important thing was to get Penelope and Jim out safely.
“This is the end of it, just here,” Jim said, after we had gone forward a few more minutes. We were in ductwork again, at an intersection large enough for the three of us to be side by side. I pressed my face to the vent and looked out onto a hallway. There was blood on the floor, and what looked like several teeth. I looked to the right, and saw the wheelbarrow Penelope had carried me in. We were at the hallway intersection where Penelope had taught the guard his first lesson about the use of truncheons.
“Jesus, Jim, we’ve only moved a hundred feet in the past ten minutes. This is right back outside the common room.”
“You heard what bird man back there said about patrols in the woods,” Penelope said. “If we hadn’t gone through Jim’s tunnel we’d already have been caught.”
She was right, and I apologized to Jim.
“It’s alright,” he said. “I know it’s not a very good escape tunnel, it was never meant to be.”
“This is where we get out, anyway,” I said. I turned around and horse-kicked my leg out behind me, bending the vent. I kicked it again and it clattered out and onto the floor below. Jim went first, with us holding his arms to lower him down to the floor, then I lowered Penelope down to Jim, and then they both received me in their arms.
“Get in the wheelbarrow,” I said to both of them. “I’ll push.”
They climbed in, making the wheel squeak with their weight, and I pushed. Penelope directed me, and we soon came to the hallway which led to the front of the hospital. I could see the glass at the reception area and the parking lot
beyond.
“Hold on tight,” I said. I backed up several feet, so that I was against the wall, and then pushed as hard as I could.
“Oscar, I don’t think this is a very good idea,” Penelope said. Jim didn’t say anything, but from his face I could tell that he agreed with her. I was picking up speed, and then I was running, pushing the wheelbarrow in front of me like a battering ram.
“Keep your heads down,” I said, “it’ll work.”
“Oscar,” Jim said, “slow down. This is a wheelbarrow.” He started to get out, but I only sped up; we were committed to my plan. He hunched down in the wheelbarrow and put his arms around Mr. Hodge.
As we neared the reception area, the feathered guard walked across the hallway. He heard the sound of the wheelbarrow’s squeaky wheel and turned towards us. He stood still, like a nocturnal animal caught in the beam of a bright light – he definitely wasn’t cut out for his line of work. I didn’t slow down; I pushed the wheelbarrow straight into him and he toppled over into it, falling across Penelope and Jim.
I continued at full speed and crashed the wheelbarrow and its occupants through the front window. The shatterproof glass was carried forwards in a single spider-webbed sheet by the force of the wheelbarrow and the several hundred pounds of humans in it, and we rode out over it, sliding down the front steps of the hospital and crunching the glass underneath. I skidded the wheelbarrow to a stop, and the guard rolled off onto the grass in a trail of feathers, dazed but unhurt. Penelope and Jim climbed out of their noble steed, and we ran into the parking lot. We reached the edge of the asphalt; ahead of us I could see flashlight beams moving in the woods near the exit road. Behind us, back at the hospital, guards emerged from the shadows and shone their flashlights on the broken front window.
I put my arm around Penelope and pulled her close to me. We were trapped; at least we were trapped together.
Jim, not having any answers to our predicament, took the opportunity to hold Mr. Hodge close to his mouth and whisper something to him in what might be their last moments together. Then he set him down on the hood of the silver Cadillac which had passed me on the road earlier in the night, and Mr. Hodge trundled under the hood, out of sight.
It was a good idea for the hedgehog, but the rest of us wouldn’t just be able to hide under a car until the guards went away. I closed my eyes and put my free hand over my face. I had to think. Then my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a car engine starting, and I opened my eyes to see Mr. Hodge running out from under the Cadillac. He sat on the pavement next to the car’s front tire, looking very satisfied with himself. Jim scooped him up and got into the car, moving over to the passenger seat. Penelope followed after, sitting in the middle. There wasn’t time to consider the fact that Mr. Hodge had apparently just hotwired the car, so I just got into the driver’s seat and put that to the back of my mind.
I reversed out of the parking space and then pointed the car towards the exit. Two guards stood barring the way, although I had a strong hunch that a human body – or even two human bodies – is a very ineffective bar to a four thousand pound vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine. I revved the engine, but they didn’t move, so I let my foot off the brake and moved slowly towards them. I intended to give them every chance to move, but if I had to choose between us and them, I knew that I would choose them: them being smashed by the car.
In the bright beams from the car headlights I saw what looked like a giant, frenzied duck running towards the guards that stood in our path. I pressed the gas down partway and the car lurched forwards. The feathered guard waved his arms to the others and shouted something, which I couldn’t make out exactly but it sounded roughly like “He’s a maniac!” It convinced them, anyway, and the guards moved out of the way just a few seconds before the car’s steel frame would have been trying to occupy the same physical space as them.
In the rearview mirror, I saw Dr. Boggs slowly descending the steps at the front of the hospital. He wore a red glove on his hand and was still clutching the bloody truncheon in his fist. I had seen that before! It was the red fist I had seen it in my dreams, and I had seen it on the walls. I shook my head. That was months ago, there couldn’t be any connection between the things I had seen then and the fact that Dr. Boggs was wearing a red glove now. Sometimes people wear red gloves.
A guard near him got into a car, but Dr. Boggs said something to him and shook his head; the guard got back out of the car. From that distance of a hundred yards or more, the doctor’s eyes seemed to meet mine in the mirror and burn into my mind, and I could not hold his gaze. My head hurt and the pain caused me to close my eyes. When I looked again, we were out onto the road and the maples concealed the hospital.
We drove in silence for a while, except for Mr. Hodge who sometimes made a light purring noise as he sat fuzzled against Jim’s neck. The first few minutes were tense, particularly when we briefly heard the rapid tht-tht-tht-tht of a helicopter passing overhead, but after we had been driving for several miles and no headlights appeared behind us I felt the air in the car change as we all were able to relax. For some reason they apparently did not feel the need to pursue us. Maybe Dr. Boggs had realized that we were no danger to them after all.
Jim moved into the back seat with Mr. Hodge, and Penelope scooted over next to me and leaned her head on my shoulder. Just feeling her warm body against mine and the weight of her head on my shoulder was exquisite. I put my arm around her and drove with one hand; my high school driving instructor would have been displeased, but I felt supremely happy. We had done it.
We continued on in that way, until I brought up the subject of where we would go; the half tank of gas in the car wouldn’t last forever.
“Why don’t we go to Jacob’s house?” Jim suggested.
“Jacob?” I asked. “Who’s that?”
“My brother. Didn’t you get his name when you got Mr. Hodge?”
“I… no. It didn’t come up.” I decided not to tell him that I had broken Jacob’s window with the intent to steal Mr. Hodge. That was all in the past.
I was against going to Jacob’s house. In fact, I was against going back into town at all, I felt an unexplainable paranoia about it.
While we talked, I got a dim image of Dr. Boggs pointing a gun at me. I knew he would kill me if he got the chance; he would kill all of us, so it was important that we get as far away from him as we could, and Jacob’s house would be pretty far. I still felt uncomfortable with the idea of going there, but Penelope was with Jim, and since I had to assume Mr. Hodge would be with him on that issue as well, I felt outvoted by a large majority. Jim assured us that Dr. Boggs didn’t know about his brother’s house and that it wasn’t even listed as belonging to the Hodge family.
My paranoia was eased somewhat by the fact that Penelope’s own paranoia was not bothering her about it. I decided that perhaps my fears were unfounded, and relaxed again. I turned onto the road which would take us toward Jim’s brother’s house, a place where we could rest and talk.
As we came closer to town, we had more to worry about. We drove by a corpse lying beside the road. From the amount of blood on the ground and from the size of the hole in the body, the death appeared to have been caused by some large caliber weapon.
“Did you…” I started, hoping someone else saw it.
“It could have been a hunting accident,” Penelope said. I supposed it could have. People do hunt, and accidents do happen.
Closer towards town, we passed a house which was surrounded by a group of police in military-style SWAT uniforms. One in front knocked on the door, and when a man opened the door, the leading police officer shot him in the face without a word. I almost lost control of the car when it happened, but I drove on.
As much as I wanted to by then, we could not turn back. We saw that vans and trucks blocked certain roads as we drove on, mostly roads that led out of town. We had gone around a curve in the road so I couldn’t see if they had blocked it behind us after we
drove into town, but I felt sure they had. Still, nobody on the street and none of the large number of police patrols seemed to take any special notice of us, and I allowed myself the irrational hope that there was just a higher than usual amount of law enforcement going on. The man who they had shot had looked a bit dangerous. We drove on.