Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

The snow started as a few flakes, but within moments of entering the fog, they were in a virtual whiteout. An enormous vortex of snow swirled over and around the van and was so thick, John could make out nothing ahead.

Beside him, Matvey was babbling; he caught snow and bad. “Yeah, I can see where you think it’s bad,” he said, snapping on the wipers. The snow was coming down hard in a thick fall of fat flakes that hurtled headlong, hard and fast, into the windshield where they blasted apart into icy gobbets that the wipers shaved away. Carefully nursing the accelerator, he kept them grumbling along in second gear. Belatedly, he thought he should’ve checked the tires. An oversight. He’d been a bit preoccupied, what with worry about just how dead Davila might be and trying to figure out his next move. “Just take it easy, kiddo. Nothing to be worried about. ”

Which was a great big lie. Here he was, miles from any kind of help, driving a decrepit Russian-made van on what he bet were balding tires on a mountain pass in the middle of nowhere Tajikistan—and, oh, by the way, there were a couple of dead guys back a ways...okay, okay, he’d rolled all the bodies off the main road, so it would take time for anyone to find them... but, now, here he was: his partner, wounded and concussed, and a kid along for the ride.

What were you thinking? This was a stunt Roni would’ve pulled. For all the good that had come of that. All Roni had to show for her good deeds and best intentions was having gotten herself killed.

Except...he couldn’t have left the kid, not knowing what the boy was. Where was a child like that supposed to go anyway?

Matvey asked something…he had no idea what, so John settled for a shrug and a faux cheeriness. “Well, like I told you, fog’s just another form of cloud. Now, clouds…well, you know, they’re mostly moisture and, when the air temperature is at freezing or below, then you get crystal formation. You get snow. I actually once ran into this when I was a kid.”

The boy, Matvey, said something else, and he nodded as if they were having a conversation. As if the kid had said, Oh yeah? Really? Where?

“Wisconsin.” The road was going up, which tallied with what he remembered of the map, and he edged the van just a little bit closer to the mountain’s flank. This was a good omen, too; going up meant they might well leave the fog layer behind in a few moments. The higher they went, the lower the atmospheric pressure, which meant they’d leave this warmer air behind. He only hoped that happened soon. He’d been stupid not to consider this problem when looking at the map. Where they were headed might not be quite high enough. If he’d guessed right, anyone looking up might not see beyond this fog layer. Just so long as I haven’t led us into a whiteout.

The boy’s voice—the question he heard—jogged him from his thoughts. What had he been talking about? Right. The move from Kansas. “I saw something like this the evening of the second day after I got to Wisconsin. See, I was born in Texas. Never lived anywhere else before that except Kansas. Things in Kansas weren’t great, though, and they got worse on account of this smart-ass kid named Ben.”

He broke off as the road steepened. For a heart-stopping second, the van’s wheels spun then caught. Just a little bit farther. Where they were headed, the place he’d picked out, it just couldn’t be that far up the mountain, could it? He wished he could look at a map, but he worried that if he stopped, the incline would work against him. In the van’s headlights, he could see how the paved road sparkled and glittered with icy crystals. The pavement was a good sign, though. It meant the place was still used, the way kept up.

“Anyway” he said, “Ben happened. He was just nasty . Like, he had it out for me the day I started in my new school with a new name. See, I wasn’t John then. I was Danny, Danny Hopkins. That was the name Marshal Stan picked out for me. Problem was…it’s hard to grow into being someone else. I hadn’t been Danny all that long. I was…” He nearly slipped, caught himself, and swallowed back the name that had nearly leapfrogged off his tongue.

Not going to say it, not ever. Stan warned me about that. So had the government shrink before they turned him loose.

He cleared his throat. “Anyway, when I moved to Kansas, I was still raw inside. Bad dreams, that kind of stuff. Stan took me to live with this couple, Tom and Bev. Nice people. Tom was a pastor, actually. United Church of Christ, which was weird seeing as how I’m Jewish and all. But in that part of Kansas, I was the only one in town. So, everyone figured it was best if I kept that on the down-low and blended in. Anyway, Tom and Bev really tried hard to help me settle down before school started. It’s hard enough being the new kid in school, especially when you’re a teenager. I was fifteen, almost sixteen, and pretty freaked out. Petrified, actually, that people—teachers, the other kids—would find out who I really was. I didn’t mean to get into it with Ben, but when he started hassling me at lunch, kind of pushing me around…I got scared.”

Scared was too mild a word, though, wasn’t it? Danny Hopkins—his new alias—had been born only a few weeks before school started up. In retrospect, Stan or whomever had decided on Kansas should have known that, in a small rural town, forget about the Jewish part. Man, a new kid was an event. Everyone was curious about the outsider.

It was natural, he supposed, for a boy like Ben to wonder about the new kid. Ben’s mistake had been in trying to bully him into talking.

“Like I said, he came up at lunch and started pumping me about my family and…I didn’t do a great job of answering. It’s easy to get tripped up when you’re scared and alone. Like I said, we got into it and I…” He swallowed. “I didn’t mean to break his finger. He just wouldn’t let go of my wrist.” Even now, almost two decades later, he saw Ben’s fist close down around his wrist; noticed where Ben had skinned his knuckles and that small worm of a scab around the second knuckle of the boy’s right thumb. He remembered thinking that he even knew why the scab was there: because Ben hadn’t tucked his thumb into his fist when he’d popped a punch. Which meant the kid didn’t really know how to fight.

Thing was, thanks to his Uncle Dare, he did.

“He grabbed me, but I got loose.” Which wasn’t hard, given that he’d broken the kid’s grip with a quick flick of his wrists but then, instead of dancing away, he’d moved in on the kid the way Dare had instructed, ducking low, bulling past the kid’s ineffectual attempts to ward him off. Then he was in so close, he smelled the other boy’s breath: that tuna fish sandwich Ben had chowed down for lunch. Twisting to his left, he braced his left foot against Ben’s right side. Then, using the boy’s weight for leverage, his left hand flashed out to grab and then bend the boy’s right thumb in a hard, expert twist.

Even now, the memory of the sound—of that knuckle giving way with a clear, crisp snap—filled his chest with a feral burn of pride. As Ben howled, he had danced back, fists up, and savored the hot sweetness of his fury and grief coursing through his veins to fire his heart. God help him, but given half a chance, he’d have pounded that boy into jam.

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s a long story. Let’s just say I got in trouble and then this guy, Stan…well…he wasn’t exactly just a guy , know what I’m saying? He was a marshal. I met him after…” His tongue tangled and he had to clear his throat. “Stan was assigned to me after I…”

He stopped, the words snarling in his throat. What was he doing? Why was he telling this boy? Because he doesn’t understand. This is like talking to myself. But hadn’t he gone over the story of his life in his head a thousand times? A hundred thousand?

He heard Matvey stir as the silence grew. The way ahead was still a ghostly white maelstrom, and he thought, somewhat inanely, of an old show about these guys who’d fallen into a time vortex and kept getting yanked from one crisis to the next. Time Tunnel, that was the show’s name.

Is that what he was doing? Had been doing for the last two years? Looping back on himself? Endlessly revisiting the disasters of his past?

“Stan was driving me to my new home, where I was going to live next. He’d picked this little town about a half mile from Lake Superior. Just outside of the town, there was this big dip in the road and, when you looked into it, there was nothing but fog on account of the air above being warmer than the air below. Anyway, Stan just drove us on down into that fogbank. All of a sudden, Matvey, it was just like this: fog everywhere and a tunnel of snow and I had this weird feeling for about ten seconds that everything had been a dream. That it wasn’t July anymore and I hadn’t messed up, hadn’t ever needed to become Danny Hopkins, hadn’t ever left Texas. But then we came out on the other side,” he said, as this fog suddenly pulled apart and the way ahead cleared. “And then, boom , we were back in July. I remember thinking that I’d left who I’d been in that fog and come out the other end a whole new me: new name, new town. New guardian.”

Matvey said nothing.

“Bet you’re wondering about that,” he continued. “About Stan and why Kansas, where I was Danny Hopkins—and when that didn’t work out, going to Wisconsin.”

Where he was reborn as John Worthy: a name that neither his parents nor his Uncle Dare, a man he missed so much his heart hurt, would recognize.

“Thing is,” he said, because Matvey wouldn’t understand a word, “Stan was assigned to me after I shot someone.” He cleared his throat. “After I killed him before he could kill me.”

And that was the moment John Worthy remembered something else about the day that the new boy with a made-up life broke a bully’s hand.