(01) County Park


A man comes into a cafe in a small mountain town. The waitress looks at him and the moment pauses. He slowly removes his black driving gloves as the moment resumes. He goes toward the end of the counter. The waitress scatters schoolgirl charm over a couple of truck drivers and pours them more coffee so they won’t bother her again before they leave. In the background she is thinking only of the man behind her, the one she has been in contact with over the internet.

When she looks back he has gone. She realizes he went on past the counter and back to the men’s room. It is five minutes past the time she told him she would be off work. One more table that she can collect tips on if she takes the check now. She told him she might be a lilttle later than nine. Her hands feel damp and her chest is being squeezed by a soft vice. She becomes aware of herself running the total on the credit card. Something is happening to her but it isn’t anything she can control with effort. She feels suddenly very tired. She is falling into a tunnel of darkness and there is a relief in it.

The man is coming out of the men’s room, replacing the gloves as he walks toward her. He catches her from behind as she faints, folds his palm into her belly and expels air from her with shocking force. “Breath!” he whispers sharply. The shock of air rushing back into her lungs and his having her locked in an embrace in the cafe creates embarrassment, and a smile freezes on her face.

“Oh my god I was about to faint, thank you so much.” Her voice is forced as she moves from him in increments, turning and adjusting her dress and laying a palm over her heart to make sure everything’s okay now. There are single men at two tables and a couple at a third, all looking toward them with vague interest.

“They didn’t see anything,” he says. “Just give me change from the register for a five.” He hands it to her and she obediently puts it into the register and hands him four ones and four quarters. “I’m parked in back.”

She gets a better look at him as she steps into the car. He is short, probably not over five foot eight. He is thickly built but not fat. His forearms are large and she thinks of Popeye the sailor man. “Were you in the Navy?”

He looks up from her legs to her face. He slightly blushes. “I was,” he admits. “Is it obvious?”

“Yes it is,” she replies, with a mischeivious smile. “Maybe we should get out of the parking lot and drive to the place where it happened.”

He obligingly starts the blue Saab and pulls away from the neon “Cafe” sign. The traffic is light on the highway, and he allows the Saab to operate on automatic pilot. “It was near a country park?”

“Yes. Masterson County Park. It’s deserted this time of the evening. Why do you keep changing the speed setting?”

“There’s a car staying behind us about a quarter mile back, whether I’m going fifty or seventy, so I’m assuming it has a tracker on us.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Scramble them and lose them,” he answers. He operates the auto’s computer mouse on the steering wheel with deft movements, scans and clicks, choosing from a menu of options appearing on the dash panel.

Sensors read the tracker signals and options appear. He adjusts the signal rate, causing the signals to read back to the tracker quicker, giving it the impression of being closer than the range for which it is set. Adjusting the signal rate is done by a D-24 unit, which is illegal, because it can manipulate radar readings. The D-24 has a two minute window before the unit tracking it picks up its signature and eliminates it from the equation.

During that two minute window, he knows, it will appear to the computer tracking them that they are maintaining a speed of about fifty, as the signals will be accelerated progressively to give him cover. Nobody uses his D-24 unless he plans to make a serious attempt to lose whoever is tracking him. The Saab was doing almost a hundred and thirty by the time the D-24 indicated it was hitting it’s window and going automatically to Cloak mode.

Any further signals locked on to his fuelcell-embedded HSD (Highway Safety Detection) panel, would disappear into a frequency neutralizing program. “If it’s a police vehicle we’ve just cloaked and dropped of their screen, which is a grade two highway crime,” he says.

“Who do you think it is?” the waitress asks. Her hair is light brown and has a French braid. She is concentrated over her purse, from which she now pulls a package of brown cigarettes, made from tobacco and high grade marijuana. She lights one, then touches a control panel on the door and reclines back another ten degrees.

He doesn’t answer right away. He knows he can’t do a hundred for long without getting picked up by a tracking unit, photographed by a digital relay device, and turned in electronically to the next police grid. “Fewer and fewer roads that haven’t been wired,” he says. He uses the old term, “wired,” naturally, and she turns toward him with renewed curiosity. It was a term popular with the criminal class.

The cultural term was “Encoded.” The roads were encoded for service, first. Trackers were a way of knowing if you were coming up on a car too fast, or one coming toward you in the wrong lane. But of course they were interactive devices, and you have to send out the same signals to other drivers. Now it was a crime to try and remove them from the fuel cells necessary to power all highway vehicles, because traffic speed and behavior was connected to computer centers which were generating huge amounts of money from automated fines.

Don’t pay the fine? When your fuel cell has to be replaced it will be detected as belonging to a non-paying motorist. You can’t get another one until you clear the fine. “I’m going to have to turn off,” the man says, “but I didn’t want to take the first one because it’s too obvious.” He pulls into the driveway of an estate set off the highway.

“You can’t get in there,” the woman says. “SecurityCraft would be here in no time.”

“I’m just turning around.” He expertly backs onto the highway and accelerates back in the direction of his pursuers as he uncloaks. “I’m betting they think I took the first turn, because it was so obvious I had to get off the highway or get fined. I estimate they’re about a mile down that turnoff by now.”

She accepts his decision without questions. If he was wrong and there was a police car coming toward them that knew they had no HSD signal because of an illegal D24 installation, they would be considered armed and dangerous.

A car comes up fast behind them, now. The driver, a fiftyish man with a chunky face, glares at them as he passes, angry at not getting a signal that they were there. He points to his glasses and then speeds on. The driver turns off onto a narrow, unwired road.

“This is the right road,” she says, but if you think they went this way why are we following them?”

“We want to know when they come out,” he says, turning off on what looks like a logging trail and driving slowly into the trees. It is twenty minutes before a black sedan with dark tinted glass comes speeding back along the two lane, toward the Interstate. They can see it at the intersection. There is no traffic but the driver seems unable to decide which way to go. Finally he turns right and accelerates toward the East.

“Okay,” the man says, “I suppose we can continue to know each other by our screen names, if that’s okay with you.”

“It’s okay with me, Jukebox.”

He grins. “And it’s okay with me, Legggs. Now, you say you were just walking along a hiking trail in this park when it happened?”

“That’s right. It was early afternoon, and I was just getting some exercise. I walked off the trail to pee, and I saw these white pebbles. They didn’t belong there. They were perfectly smooth and polished, and I saw that there was one about every ten or twelve feet, as if somebody had dropped them along as a trail to follow.”

“And you followed it ...”

“Yes, I followed it. At first the opening didn’t look real, because it was perfectly round, like a man hole is round, and you aren’t going to find a natural cave that’s perfectly round. It was like a machine had drilled a hole straight back into the ground at the base of the mountain.”

“And you say it was lit up?”

“Not brightly, but it glowed with enough light you could see ahead, like bright moonlight. But I was afraid to go very far into it. I was afraid to go into it at all, being by myself. That’s why I advertised for somebody adventurous.”

“Well, let’s go take a look, Legggs.”

“You aren’t scared?”

“Not so’s you can tell.”

Posted: Mon - May 9, 2005 at 02:38 PM