line into New Jersey and counting his change so he could maybe grab another soda at the next rest stop.
“Before you get any more stupid ideas about spending my money, I’ve hidden it all away. You won’t find anything. You got nothing. You don’t even have the money for a newspaper, loser. There’s two cans of spaghetti and there’s water in the closet. Do your job the right way and the food will look better next time around.”
The tape went silent.
And Hunter went postal.
He screamed and thrashed and cursed his captor. He punched at the wall because he couldn’t find the voice’s owner, and the impact scraped his knuckles bloody. That was okay-the pain was just another reason to be furious. He’d find the source of the voice! He’d find it and he’d destroy it!
If he’d had a gun and a target, he’d have killed the man who left the recordings. His hatred was a growing, living thing that wanted out, wanted to burn everything in his path. He cursed the man and demanded that he show himself, knowing full well that the bastard was too cowardly to ever answer the challenge.
It didn’t make sense! The bastard was watching him somehow. He’d checked the last hotel room and this one too, looking for cameras, trying to understand how the man could knock him unconscious and keep him that way without even trying, and so far he’d found nothing. When he finally calmed down, he pulled out the computer and powered it up. The names were taped to the top of the case. He thought about his options for all of ten minutes and then he started searching for information.
It was a puzzle; he knew that. He understood that he was dealing with pieces of a bigger mystery and that he was being given only a handful of clues to work with.
His enemy hadn’t thought of one important thing.
He was good at puzzles.
At least he thought so.
He still couldn’t remember enough of his past.
For now he would do as he was told. But only for now. There would be other chances to escape. When they came around, he’d take them.
Chapter Six
Subject Seven
He’d been on the go for almost fifteen hours without stopping, without resting. His hands ached from the business he’d taken care of only an hour earlier.
Poor Dan had an accident. Pity, really. He hadn’t held any malice for Dan. He just needed to know that what the man knew was going to stay secret. So he’d waited for him outside of his home and then he’d removed the last person who knew his secret before he could start flapping his gums. Then he drove Dan’s vehicle all the way to New York and then into the Hudson River. He wore gloves the entire time.
And it seemed like he was wise to get rid of the evidence. Somebody had taken Marty Hanson from his home in the middle of the night. Just come and pulled him out of his home and left his family wondering what had happened. It very well could have been the people who had kept him prisoner for ten long years.
He wondered how Hunter would feel about waking up in another strange town. It probably meant the fool would be ready to run again. “Poor Hunter,” he mumbled. “I think you’re actually getting desperate enough to be stupid.”
He looked at the darkened streets around him and felt no fear. Fear, he knew, was for the weak. He was strong, oh, so very much stronger than the would-be predators around him.
The Bronx was alive but slumbering around him. Only a few of the more foolhardy people who called it home were awake. It was a weeknight, so the rest caught up on their sleep in preparation for another day of work or school. Seven could hear them in their rooms, sleeping or talking softly with lovers or even reading a book.
A window across the street showed him his reflection: a dark-haired teenager with broad shoulders and a face half hidden by shadows.
He looked at his watch and felt his lips peel away from his teeth. The three punks who’d been eyeing him like maybe he needed to be separated from his wallet suddenly thought better of messing with him.
Pity, he thought. I could have used a little exercise.
The heat of the day was still in the air, but he knew it couldn’t last much longer. Autumn was creeping in fast and the air temperature was bound to drop by at least fifteen degrees before the night was over.
He checked the time on his watch. Eleven p.m. That felt like about the right point to start everything going.
“Wake up!” he called out, his deep voice loud and clear as it cut through the darkness and the miles of distance that separated them. He called out with his voice because he liked to hear himself. He called out with his mind at the same time.
He listened with his mind, the same as he’d called out with his mind and not just his vocal cords. There was silence at first and he wondered if everything poor, dead Daniel had told him was a lie. He hadn’t thought too hard about that before he took care of business and maybe he should have.
Then he felt it, heard it, the tentative sound of their thoughts, their inner voices. They awoke to the sound of his call.
There were more than he had honestly expected and it took a few seconds to sort out the voices and the noise. Most of them were in their bedrooms, but a few were up and walking about. He didn’t know where they were, but he could sense that some were closer and others were a great distance away. Of course that didn’t guarantee that all of them would show up when the time came.
“Who’s there?” The voice that came to him was closer than he expected, and though the others didn’t ask, he could sense them listening. Could they hear each other? He wasn’t sure. Perhaps, but he didn’t think so. He thought they could hear what he let them hear.
“Me.” Did he have a name? He had to think about that for a minute. No. No he did not. He’d need one.
“Who’s ‘me’?”
He thought about where he was, where he was standing as he spoke through the darkness of night and sent his words to them. The building he leaned against, for all its slow degradations, would work for a good first name. St. Joseph’s cathedral was a beautiful building and he could live with the name Joe.
“Call me Joe Bronx.”
“Okay.” Another one spoke up. Her voice was soft but held an edge. “So who am I?”
He shrugged and then remembered they couldn’t see him. At least he didn’t think they could. He hadn’t ever consciously linked to others before. When he was a child, the linking had been instinctual. Part of him thrilled to feel them again, the others out there, the ones that were at least a little like him. “You’ll have to figure that out for yourself. I can’t help you with that part. Not yet.”
“Why did you wake me?”
“You’ve been asleep for a long, long time. Don’t you think you’re overdue for waking up?”
“Where am I?”
“I have no idea. You’ll figure that out all on your own.”
“What do you want from me?”
Joe Bronx smiled. “Ahhh… That’s the very question I was waiting for.”
Chapter Seven
Gene Rothstein
The sound of the garbage truck rumbling a few feet down the alley woke Gene Rothstein from his troubled sleep. He opened one eye first and looked around, seeing garbage, graffiti-covered brick walls and a rat gnawing on
