Toys

Chapter 80

I left my apartment in a slight daze and walked the short distance to a favorite running path along the winding, and quite beautiful, Imperial Lake.

I busied myself stretching and limbering up along the way. Then I took off, going easy at first-testing myself to find out if I was more weakened than I thought.

But my body felt better than I had any right to expect, and I cranked up my speed until I was flying along in smooth, ten-yard strides.

There was hardly any traffic along the narrow lake road-one of the reasons I liked it here. A delivery vehicle with the logo of Ultima Medical Supplies zipped past me, and a few minutes later, I saw that it had pulled into a service area ahead.

When I got there, the driver was leaning into the rear door, struggling with what appeared to be a large machine for delivery.

I slowed to a trot. “Need help?” I called. This was the kind of thing that Lizbeth hated about me-what she called my “mindless do-gooder impulses.”

“Would you mind? Damn thing slipped off its tracks,” called the driver-a female worker, as it turned out.

Her voice set off a tiny tick in my mind-like maybe I’d heard it before. But the sound was muffled, and where could I have run into this particular delivery person? I dismissed the thought as another one of my recent quirks, exactly what Lizbeth had warned me about.

As I walked closer, she hopped inside the vehicle and began moving her fingers expertly across the machine’s controls. As I looked on, the machine came to life with little clicks and whirs, the monitor readouts flashing.

“That’s an impressive piece of equipment,” I said. “What’s it do?”

“Oh, it’s an ultrasound scanner-uses sonic waves to destroy foreign objects in the body, like kidney stones or blood clots,” she answered.

Then the delivery person swung around and looked straight at me.

“Or the tracking chip that effing Lizbeth planted in your brain,” she said. “Hello, Hays.”