Chase

Twenty-Eight

When Jeff saw Aunt Flo drop to the ground, he had to put a hand over his mouth to stifle a scream.

A huge NOOOOOOOO! was about to burst from his throat as he stood at the second floor window of his aunt’s house, but he managed to hold it in as he jumped back from the window.

Jeff had had a funny feeling about that guy the moment he saw him at the dump. When he asked whether Jeff had seen a dog, he just knew. Chipper had been telling them the truth. He really was on the run, and there really were people looking for him.

Bad, bad people.

Jeff had overheard some of the conversation between his aunt and the man — enough to know they were looking for him and the dog.

He wondered how he’d given himself away. Was it written all over his face, when he’d been asked if he’d seen a dog around the dump? Was he that poor a liar? Or had they been tipped off some other way that the dog—

Whoa, wait a minute.

Chipper’s eyes.

Just before Emily said she had killed the video link, there was this tiny spark in one of Chipper’s eyes. Was it possible? Could the dog’s eyes be cameras? Could they be a kind of window that those people, the ones who’d turned him into a weird hybrid thing, could see through?

If that was true, Jeff believed there was a good chance those people at The Institute had seen him.

Emily, too!

Given what had just happened to Aunt Flo, he knew these people would stop at nothing to get the dog back.

Call the police! a voice inside his head shouted.

Jeff got his thumb in position to hit 9-1-1 on the phone in his hand, then remembered Chipper’s warning about telling Emily’s ex-cop father.

No police. They will know!

These bad guys might be monitoring calls to the police! What had Chipper called them? The White Coats? These guys in the SUV were wearing dark suits, but it wasn’t hard to imagine that they were all working together.

If calling the police wasn’t safe, then what was Jeff going to—

They were heading for the house!

He bolted from his bedroom and was about to run down the stairs and sneak out the back door, but then he heard the front door opening. The stairs led right down to them.

“Crawford, Bailey, you check upstairs,” Jeff heard the lead guy say. “I’ll check down here.”

“Got it, Daggert.”

Daggert.

Jeff slipped across the hall and into Aunt Flo’s bedroom. Her window opened onto a roofed porch. Once on the roof, he could grab one of the tall branches of an overhanging tree, and shimmy down to the ground.

He went to the window, grabbed it by the handles, and tried to lift it up.

It wouldn’t budge.

He could hear two sets of footsteps on the stairs.

He pulled harder, but the window was stuck.

“You take those rooms, Crawford, I’ll take these,” Jeff heard the woman — she had to be Bailey — say. He could tell they were at the top of the stairs.

That was when Jeff noticed the latch on the top of the window was still in the locked position. Idiot! He unlocked it, but there was no time now to open the window and slip out onto the roof without being seen.

Jeff dropped silently to the floor and rolled under his aunt’s bed.

Someone came into the room.

Jeff turned his head towards the door and saw a dirty pair of women’s shoes moving briskly down one side of the bed, then over to the window.

Please don’t look under the bed. Please don’t look under the bed.

The shoes didn’t move for several seconds.

“Nothing over here!” Crawford shouted. It sounded like he was in Jeff’s room across the hall.

“See if there’s a way up into an attic or anything,” Bailey said.

Footsteps back in the hallway. Then, “Yeah! There’s a hatch in the hallway ceiling here!”

The woman moved hurriedly out of the room. That hatch was at the end of the hall, which meant Jeff had time to try the window again without being seen.

Crab-like, he moved out from under the bed, his front covered in matted balls of dust. For a second, he thought that it would only be a matter of time before Aunt Flo ordered him to vacuum under her bed.

Then he thought, Not if she’s dead.

He went to the window and slid it open as far as it would go. He put his left leg out first onto the rooftop, ducked his head under and pulled the rest of his body outside. Stepping as noiselessly as possible — for all he knew, Daggert was standing right below him on the covered porch — he made his way to the corner of the roof, where the branch of a tall oak was within easy reach.

Jeff grabbed it, swung off the roof, legs dangling, and edged his way the six to eight feet to the trunk.

Inside the house, Bailey called out, “Was this window open before?”

Idiot! Jeff cursed himself again. But he had to keep moving.

He reached the trunk and scrambled down to a lower branch below the roofline. There was no outcropping to place his feet on, so he gently swung there.

The woman, louder this time — suggesting to Jeff she had her head sticking out the window — said, “I could have sworn it was closed.” He was glad the leaves on the tree were so thick that they hid him from view.

Muffled, from inside the house, “Are you gonna help me get into this attic or not?”

“Hang on,” she said.

Bailey could just as easily have been saying that to Jeff. He looked down, hoping to find a perch for his feet, but there was nothing there. So he dropped the rest of the way. It was only about eight feet, but real life isn’t like the movies, where spies and superheroes jump off the top of buildings and do a little tuck and roll when they hit the ground and walk away like they’d just stepped off a curb.

When his feet hit the ground he felt the shock go all the way up to his neck, as though his whole body had compressed a couple of inches. He scurried around the other side of the thick-trunked tree and held his breath, thinking that if anyone had seen him, he’d know in two seconds.

When no one came rushing out of the house, he figured they were all still in there. Bailey and Crawford were exploring the attic, and Daggert was probably skulking around the basement, expecting Jeff to be hiding behind the furnace. He moved from one tree to another, tiptoeing along like some cartoon character, then dashed for cover behind a row of shrubs, until he was back to his aunt’s truck.

Only a few steps from Aunt Flo herself.

He was desperate to check on her, see if she was really dead, and get help for her if she wasn’t — maybe the bad guys weren’t monitoring calls for ambulances — but he’d be out in the open if he approached her. He couldn’t risk it.

He crouched behind the passenger side of the truck where he could not be seen from the house, and peered in through the window. The keys were still in the ignition.

But hold on.

The black SUV nosed up behind it was making a lot of noise. Daggert had left it with the engine running.

Jeff quietly opened the passenger door on the pickup, leaned across the seat to the steering wheel, and took the key from the ignition. Then he moved back to the SUV, opened its passenger door, and got inside.

The windows were heavily tinted, so there was little risk that anyone would see him. There was a huge console between the two front seats that he had to climb over to get behind the wheel.

Jeff had only driven two motorized vehicles in his life: Aunt Flo’s truck and her lawn tractor. No, wait. One time, his father had taken him to a go-kart track. But those experiences did not prepare him for this.

The seats were plush leather, there was a huge screen in the dashboard and there had to be like a million buttons all over the place. Now that Jeff had decided to use this as his getaway car, he wasn’t sure how to make it go.

But how complicated could it be?

He got himself settled behind the wheel but found that his feet could not quite reach the pedals. That Daggert guy was a lot taller than Jeff. He reached under the front seat, looking for a lever to pull the seat forward, but there was nothing there. Then he ran his hand down the side of the seat and found a whole bunch more buttons. He pressed one and the back of the seat began to vibrate.

“What the—”

He tried another button and the seat began to lower. He did not want that! He could barely see over the dash as it was. He slid the button the other way and the seat went higher. He kept it going until he had a good view of the hood. Finally, he found the button that moved the seat forward and gave the gas pedal a nudge.

The car was so well sound-insulated that Jeff barely heard the engine respond. But respond it did. He was good to go.

The gearshift was in the console. Jeff pressed on the brake, moved the shift lever into reverse so he could back far enough away from Flo’s pickup to turn around, and even though he felt he’d barely nudged the gas pedal, the SUV shot back like a rocket, pitching his head towards the steering wheel.

His foot found the brake and hit it hard. The SUV stopped abruptly, this time throwing Jeff’s head into the headrest.

Jeff saw Daggert charge out the front door of the house and lock eyes on the SUV.

Jeff tromped on the gas and turned the wheel as sharply as it would go, clipping the corner of the pickup with a huge crashing noise. The car lurched hard to one side but Jeff kept pushing down on the accelerator. The back end fishtailed and it took him a second to get the SUV going in a straight line, but before he knew it, he was tearing back down the driveway and headed for the highway.

All Jeff had to do now was figure out what to do next.