Beyond Recognition

68

Ben had cowered in his hiding place while the Face walked over to the fence, grabbed hold, and shook it. It rattled loudly, at which point he glanced around the facility, surveying it. He seemed to know.

He patrolled the place then like a soldier, walking along the first row of storage units, occasionally leaning an ear against one of the doors, passing not twenty feet from Ben, who held his breath, his one good eye fixed on the man in full concentration. The man with the strange face walked on by, his attention seemingly attached to the storage units. A few minutes later he rounded the far corner, and Ben guessed he was going to check each and every row of units-there had to be ten or fifteen of them total.

He didn’t dare make his break for the fence with the Face out patrolling. It wasn’t until several minutes later, when he heard the same sound of a garage door opening and shutting, that he decided the man had gone back inside his unit. Ben waited another several minutes, every pore of his skin alert for the slightest activity. Nothing. But then a feeling of dread came over him. What if the garage door opening and shutting for the second time was a trick? What if the man had done it to fool Ben into thinking it was safe to make for the fence? What if that was exactly what he wanted?

The possibility froze Ben where he was, about dead center between the two fences, both feeling miles away.

It was only as Daphne’s red Honda pulled past out front-missed the place! — that Ben realized it was time to do something. He ran toward the fence, but only about fifteen feet before stopping, hiding once again in shadow.

Where was the army of cop cars like in the movies? he wondered. The helicopters? One car? Daphne, alone? Had 911 screwed up the message?

And what if the man with the Face was in fact in hiding, waiting for whoever had climbed the fence? What if he saw her? What then?

There was only one thing to do, Ben decided: He had to make his move right away, before the whole thing came apart.

He couldn’t see her car, but he cut to his right, away from the gate, as far away from his last sighting of the man as possible, around the office, past an unmarked building, around that corner-and straight into a pair of arms that gripped him like a vise. Daphne! he thought. But then his brain quickly adjusted to the strength of those arms, and he looked up into the white, shiny skin and hollow eyes of that face and his world began to spin. A deep blue haze crept in from the edges of his vision, like the end of a cartoon where the screen collapses to a center speck of light. For Ben, the end of that light, the beginning of total darkness, came as a dry wind issued from the throat of the man who held him. “You?” the voice gasped, as if he too had seen a ghost.