The Fourth Year

The Fourth Year

The government had spent four years hunting me.

At least, that's what I wanted to believe.

Every safe house lasted less than a week. Every fake identity eventually unraveled. Cameras always seemed to linger on me a second too long. Cars appeared in my mirrors, disappeared, then returned days later in another city.

I'd stopped sleeping through the night years ago.

They called me the Ghost.

I used to work for them.

Not as a soldier.

Not as a spy.

I was a hacker.

One of the best.

Then I found a server that wasn't listed on any government network.

No owner.

No administrator.

No physical location.

It simply existed.

Curiosity has always been humanity's greatest flaw.

I broke in.

The database contained nothing but names.

Hundreds of thousands of them.

Each name had a photograph, a location, and a countdown timer.

When one timer reached zero, the name disappeared.

The next morning, I searched the news.

The person was dead.

Heart attack.

Car crash.

Suicide.

Lightning strike.

The cause never mattered.

The timer was always right.

I searched my own name.

There it was.

Jacob Elias Mercer.

Time Remaining: 3 years, 11 months, 28 days.

I copied everything I could before the server erased itself.

Five minutes later, every federal agency in the country wanted me.

Or so I thought.

The strange part came months later.

My countdown changed.

Every close call...

Every escape...

Every mile I put between myself and the people chasing me...

The timer gained another day.

Sometimes a week.

Once, nearly an entire month.

I convinced myself I had found a loophole.

Stay moving.

Stay alive.

Keep running.

Four years passed that way.

Then something changed.

The timer stopped increasing.

No matter how far I traveled...

It only counted down.

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