The Immortalists (16 page)

“Don’t run,” Seeger warned as Carly threw open the car door and jumped out.

She slowed, trying to look natural as she started around the side of the ramshackle motel. Richard caught up just as she came around the front, pulling the brim of his baseball cap low over his eyes when they became visible from the lightly traveled street.

“Relax,” he said. “It’s going to be fine.”

She didn’t respond, instead fixating on a door midway down the building’s façade. She knocked gently and tried to peek in the window, but the curtain was tucked tightly against the wall.

Probably no more than five seconds passed, but they seemed to creep by in slow motion. She knocked again, this time a little harder, and was about to rap on the glass when a muffled voice came from inside.

“Who is it?”

“It’s us. Hurry.”

The door came open a crack, and an eye peered out before it closed again and the chain came off. Carly rushed inside, kneeling on the stained carpet and gripping her daughter’s frail shoulders. “Why did it take you so long to answer?”

“I was tired and I went to sleep. But you have to see what I found on the Internet! Come and—”

“I don’t
care
about that stupid computer. When we knock, you need to come right to the door. You scared me to death.”

“But, Mom! They—”

Carly threw her arms around Susie, muffling her protests while trying not to cry. When they’d given her an envelope containing an explanation of everything that had happened and told her to call Seeger’s friend at the FBI if they didn’t return, she’d just stared in horror. Leaving her there alone had been the hardest thing she’d ever done.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Susie said, clearly pandering. “I didn’t want it to get dark.”

Carly released her, and she ran over to grab her father’s hand. “Come look at the computer. See what’s on it!”

She led him to the bed, and he looked down at the memorial Website on the screen.

“People think we’re dead!” Susie said. “They think that we went on Uncle Chris’s plane and then it crashed! When we were on it! Why do they think something crazy like that?”

Seeger came through the door and closed it behind him, looking a lot worse for the wear. His leg had stiffened up badly in the car, and he was struggling just to hobble along at a normal pace.

“Are you OK?” Susie said, clearly alarmed.

“Oh, I’m fine, honey. I just hurt my leg a little.”

“How?”

“Climbing a tree.”

“You were not.”

“I swear! In fact, in my day, I was a very fine tree climber.”

She shook her head and pointed to the computer. “Come and see what I found! People think we crashed in a plane!”

“Susie,” Richard said, sitting on the bed so he could look her directly in the eye. “I don’t know why someone thinks we crashed on your Uncle Chris’s plane, but we’re going to call and tell them we’re fine, OK?”

“When?” Susie whined. “’Cause all my friends think I’m never coming back now.”

“Soon. We’re going to do it soon so your friends aren’t sad. But right now you have to go with Burt.”

“Why? Aren’t you coming?”

“Not yet. We have a few things we need to do.”

“Why can’t you do them from Burt’s house? We could all stay there.”

Richard managed to conjure a smile, hoping it didn’t look as forced and desperate as it felt. In his peripheral vision, he saw Carly wipe surreptitiously at her eyes. “We’ll be there soon. But your mom and I have some work to do.”

The painful truth was that Susie was better off as far away from them as she could get. Seeger was a hell of a lot better equipped to protect her than they were.

“Are you going back home? Burt and I could—”

“No. We’re trying to make you better. That’s what we’re working on.”

“At the lab? But—”

“There are no ‘buts,’ Susie. Sometimes grown-ups have to do things that are hard to understand. Even for us.”

Seeger held out a hand. “Come on, honey—we have to hurry and get to the house. Your parents have a lot to do, and the sooner they can get it done, the sooner they can come back.”

Richard and Carly ate what remained of the pizza they’d left with Susie while daylight faded through the room’s curtains. The local news was on the television, reporting from a world that they no longer seemed to inhabit. There was nothing at all about the gunfire at Chris Graden’s house or them smashing through his front gate. It was like they didn’t exist.

“How much money’s left?” Richard asked. Carly was sitting on the bed surrounded by neat piles of cash she’d finished counting a few minutes before.

“Ten thousand and change.”

They fell silent again, and he leaned back in his chair, listening to the old wood protest.

“Do you think she’s going to be all right?” Carly said finally.

“She’s going to be fine. Burt can look after her.”

“That used to be our job.”

He didn’t respond.

“We have enough now, Richard—Chris confirmed that it’s all true, and we have the photo of Mason. That’s enough to at least go to the papers.”

Again, he didn’t answer.

“Isn’t that what we want? To shine a light on them?”

He reached for the pizza box, but then thought better of it as his appetite abandoned him. “If we make all this public, they won’t have any reason to keep coming after us. We might survive. But Susie won’t.”

“I don’t understand. If the whole world knows what Mason’s done, he’ll have to talk. He’ll have to tell how he did it.”

“That’s not the way it’s going to work, Carly. Mason and the rest of them will run for the corners of the earth. There’ll be a big bureaucratic investigation involving God knows how many countries, about half of which are hopelessly corrupt. And what if we do get them? Any company or university that Mason ever worked for will claim ownership, and the lawsuits will start flying. Then, when all that gets sorted out, the FDA will want to start controlled animal trials. And then there’s the politics. Assuming a treatment ever does make its way to the marketplace, how long do you think it will take?”

“Longer than Susie has,” she admitted quietly.

“Yeah.”

Carly fell back on the dirty bedspread and pulled the laptop to her, scrolling down the screen. He took a seat next to her, looking at the pictures—her at the restaurant, him at the lab, parties for the kids. A different lifetime.

There was a place for people to make comments, and they read through them for a few moments.

“Kind of nice,” she said, finally.

“Yeah. With the way our lives turned out, it’s sometimes easy to forget the friends you make along the way. Who set up the site? Eric?”

She scrolled to the bottom, but there was nothing to indicate who was responsible, and there didn’t seem to be any moderation. “Doesn’t say.”

Richard stared down at it for a moment and then sat up a little straighter against the headboard. “Go back up to the pictures.”

“Why?”

“Just do it!”

He quickly scanned through them and then leapt off the bed. “Put the money in the duffel, Carly. We’re getting out of here.”

“What?” she said as he went to the front window and pulled the curtain slightly to the side. “What are you talking about?”

A late-model SUV came to a stop across the street, and four very serious-looking men got out and started toward the motel.

“Shit!”

“Richard,” she said, starting to sound panicked as she scooped their money into the bag, “what’s happening?”

He ran into the bathroom and checked the window, but it was probably only eight inches square. Even Susie wouldn’t have been able to make it through.

“The Website,” he said when he came out and went for the door leading to the adjoining room. Dead-bolted. “They’re all photos from the Internet—nothing personal.”

“So what?”

“Mason’s people set it up! They’re using IP addresses to track who’s hitting the site, figuring we’d stumble on it sooner or later. When someone from a run-down motel not far from Chris’s house pulled it up and then left it open, it was a good bet it was us.”

“But…” Carly stammered as he ducked back into the bathroom in a futile attempt to find an escape route he’d missed. “Are they…are they out there?”

“Four of them,” he said, coming out and dropping to the floor in order to examine the bed. It looked like a platform, but when he shoved the mattress back, he discovered the base wasn’t solid. There was space between a set of wooden slats and the floor.

“Get in!”

“What are you talking about? We can’t fit in there! It’s not even a foot deep!”

He grabbed the duffel and wedged it near the headboard, then pushed her in after it. She managed to thread through the slats but got stuck trying to slide into the darkness beneath the section still covered with the mattress. He put a foot against her shoulder and heard her grunt in pain when he shoved her far enough to make room for himself. The creak of hinges penetrated the thin wall separating them from the room next door, and he immediately knew they would be coming from both directions— two armed men through each entrance.

He reached for the computer still on the bed, but then hesitated. They’d know it was here, and someone was undoubtedly monitoring the connection. If he severed it, they’d know the moment it happened.

“What are you doing?” Carly said in a harsh whisper. “Get in!”

Instead, he grabbed a marker off the top of the TV and used it to scrawl across the computer’s screen.

The sound of creaking hinges was replaced by the quiet rattle of a hand on a doorknob, and he crammed himself in next to his wife before heaving the mattress back into position. The last edge was just falling into place when the muffled crack of the door bursting open filtered through.

He expelled the air from his lungs, feeling the mattress fall with his chest and taking quick, shallow breaths that he prayed wouldn’t create visible movement. Footsteps pounded in the room, and he tried to mentally track the men’s movements, his mind already starting to suffer from lack of oxygen.

Carly moved a hand against his leg, and he hoped that her size made her position more bearable. Not that it really mattered. It wouldn’t take long for the carbon dioxide from their breath to build up and suffocate them.

“Bathroom’s clear,” he heard a voice say.

“Check the bed.”

A sense of complete helplessness came over him as the mattress began to rise. He was dizzy from lack of air and crammed beneath a set of wooden slats. They wouldn’t go down fighting. They’d go down like trapped animals.

Instead, darkness enveloped them again as the mattress dropped back onto his chest.

“Shit!” someone close to the bed said.

A more distant, lightly accented voice followed. “What is it?”

“The computer. Draman left a message written across the screen.”

“What message?”

“It says, ‘Nice try, asshole. Now I know what you look like.’”

Less than a second passed before the man with the accent started barking orders. “Pull back! Now! We’re getting out of here.”

There was an orderly retreat and the slam of a door, but Richard moved only enough to take hold of his wife’s hand. The space was too confined to allow him to see his watch, so he didn’t know how long they stayed like that. When the darkness turned gray and his oxygen-starved brain began creating flashes of reddish light on his retinas, he was force to shove the mattress back.

The men he half expected to still be there waiting were gone.

He rolled weakly onto his side, gulping the cool, fresh air, but his wife didn’t move.

“Carly!” he said, pulling her to him. “Wake up! Please wake up.”

She remained completely limp as he dragged her out of the bed frame and collapsed next to the nightstand.

“Carly!” he said again, shaking her. “You’ve got—”

Her eyes fluttered open, and a slow smile spread across her face. “I’d have bet against us on that one.”

Satisfied that she was all right, he tucked a pillow under her head and staggered to the window.

“Are they…” she barely managed to get out. “Are they gone?”

“I think so. But not for long. Chris was telling the truth about these people. They’ve got a billion dollars and an army. We’ve got a few grand and an old soldier who can barely make it up a set of stairs. Next time we won’t be so lucky.”

She pushed herself upright and propped her back against the edge of the bed. “We can’t let them find us, Richard. Susie has a chance and so do the other kids. They can’t win.”

“We’re not going to last another week alone,” he said, his mind clearing as he continued to scan the parking lot. “But I’ve been thinking. What if we had our own army?”