The Eighth Day

Chapter 24

Shawn Jaffe rubbed a hand over the stubble on his jaw. The glare of oncoming traffic cut a swath through the darkness. The burning in his eyes reminded him he'd been on the road for over thirteen hours. He blinked and stifled a yawn.

He'd stopped two times since Oklahoma. The first had been just over the Missouri border, where he'd paid a grand in cash for an ultra-compact two-seater with an odometer that read just shy of two hundred thousand miles. He transferred the pistol to its center console compartment and left the Tesla in the parking lot of a Synthcorp burger joint.

In Saint Louis, he stopped to recharge, paying with cash, and pulled away without incident, no signs of pursuit in the rearview as he merged onto the interstate.

That was an hour and a half ago, and now the weight of the day ground into him. Shawn wore it slumped forward in his seat and strained to keep his sagging eyelids open and his attention focused on the road.

Darkness filled the jungle. A dense canopy of leaves blotted out the sky, the stars, and the heavens. The night hung like a blackened veil, still and silent but for the buzzing of tiny insects. He lay in the mud on a bed of foliage and swatted at his face, a gesture as futile as this entire godforsaken war. He groped for the canteen on his hip, slid it out of its canvas sheath, and took a long pull. It tasted like dirt and rust.

An audio alarm went off, and the steering wheel vibrated and moved of its own accord. His heart pounded inside his chest, and at first he thought they'd hacked into the navigation system and were routing him toward a trap on a backcountry road. But he'd dozed off, dreaming he was in some war in a jungle, and the compact's lane-keeping system had steered him off the shoulder and back between the lines.

His head nodded into the mud, and he jerked and resettled it on his M16 as he shifted around and fought back the weight of his eyelids. He lay in a jungle in Vietnam, a million miles from his wife and daughter, not because he was drafted. Oh no. He'd volunteered for this.

The audio warning brought him back to reality again. What the hell was going on? He hadn't dozed off. That was no dream. It was more like a vision. But why of Vietnam, a war that had happened a half-century before he'd been born? And a wife and daughter? Not Victoria. It hadn't been her. They'd never had children.

Shawn shook his head and tried to tell himself it was exhaustion. He needed to stop and get some sleep before he got himself killed. He took the next exit toward a Holiday Inn Express in Effingham, Illinois, less than a mile off the interstate, tucked behind a copse of evergreens amid a scattering of other hotels; their glowing logos thrust upward in a competitive array of colors.

He steered the compact into the parking lot of a charging station on the opposite side of the street. If they discovered he'd bought the car and tracked him here using its navigation system, they'd find the car but have no idea which hotel he'd checked into or if he'd checked into one at all. For all they knew, he'd ditched the vehicle, thumbed a ride toward Nowhere USA, and was a million miles from here. He jammed the pistol into the waistband of his jeans and hauled himself out of the car.

Wind and darkness rushed across the otherwise empty road that led back toward the interstate. No one followed him. He hurried across the street toward the hotel and wove his way through a scattering of vehicles in the parking lot. The automatic doors slid open as he approached, and he trudged through them.

The lobby's white marble floor gleamed beneath the ceiling's glow, its walls a contrast of green and peach. A handful of matching checkered chairs stood in a meticulously haphazard arrangement around squat tables topped with crystal vases. A late-night talk show played on a holo-screen that stretched the length of the back wall, the host behind his desk chatting with a lanky actress seated on a couch. The lobby was deserted save for the clerk, a paunchy bald man with round wire-rimmed spectacles who sat behind the front counter on the opposite side of the room. He rose to his feet as Shawn approached.