Public Enemy Zero

38

After driving all night, Mitchell arrived at the small island in the Intracoastal before dawn. He’d pulled the boat as far ashore as he could and covered it with palm fronds and branches. From just a few feet away, the boat blended into the thick brush.

The island was a one-acre dense tangle of mangrove trees, palm trees and various shrubs. To move more than a few feet required climbing over and stepping through a labyrinth of vegetation. Inside there he felt safe. He would be able to hear anyone coming and have time to move away from them as the island slowed them down.

His camp was a green tarp he’d stolen from the Super Center laid across the ground. That morning he’d used a life preserver from the boat as a pillow, wrapped part of the tarp over himself like a blanket and slept.

The island was filled with a hundred different sounds from small insects to larger things rooting around. Despite the surroundings, the exhaustion and stress washed over him and he slept for six hours.

He awoke to the sound of something moving through the brush near his encampment. His body jerked upright while his hand grabbed the hilt of the baseball bat he’d slept next to all night.

The masked face of a raccoon looked back at Mitchell, trying to figure out what he was doing on his private domain.

“Sorry, pal,” said Mitchell. “You’re going to have a guest for a little while.”

The raccoon seemed placated enough with the answer to wander off. Mitchell pulled an energy bar from the duffle bag and turned on his radio to listen to the news.

His original plan was to keep going up the Intracoastal during the day when all the other boat traffic was on the water and make camp at night. He’d figured that hiding in plain sight was better than getting caught by Marine Patrol alone at night.

After driving the boat that night, he’d seen that there was more traffic than he’d expected late at night and early into the morning as different boats headed out to go fishing or came back from late-night expeditions. Traveling by night seemed like a better option. He could run without his running lights and stick close to shore by the small islands that dotted the waterway and be invisible to anybody looking out across the water.

He was certain that Marine Patrol had night vision and could spot a small boat trying to go by unnoticed. But seeing him meant looking for him in the first place. As far as he knew, nobody had made the connection between him and a missing boat.

Until the event with the Postal Service truck made news, the big talk was still on the events of the mall, the tractor-trailer truck crash and his YouTube video. Everyone seemed very confused by what was going on.

Mitchell didn’t fit into anyone’s profile of a mass murderer or master criminal. The YouTube video increased demand from the media that authorities release the surveillance videos. People were having a hard time trying to understand what it was that Mitchell was supposed to have done.

His heart skipped a beat when he heard a reporter interrupt a discussion with a legal expert to say that they’d gotten word that authorities had pinned Mitchell down and were about to make an arrest. When Mitchell heard a helicopter fly overhead, he dropped the radio and scrambled through the brush to look out onto the waterway.

All he could see were a couple of leisure craft. The helicopter blew right by the island and kept heading north. A half-hour later the news reported that police had stopped a tractor-trailer truck on the highway and were searching it. Mitchell hadn’t realized how closely the path of the mailed iPhone would match his. He’d addressed it to the FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, for lack of a better idea.

Mailing it seemed like a better way to put some distance between himself and the phone. The onscreen note about using three flares to signal them was an afterthought when he realized that without the phone, he’d have no way to tell police he was ready to surrender.

Mitchell knew that it was only a matter of time before they caught up with him. The best he could hope for was to make sure that when they did, they understood that something was wrong with him and took the right measures to make sure nothing bad happened to him.

The police told news agencies that the phone had a note on it but left out the part about three flares to avoid having pranksters send them on false leads. Interesting and frustrating to Mitchell was that they were calling his request for medical containment a “demand,” like he was a terrorist asking that they let his friends in prison go free.

From what he could make of the coverage of the mail truck incident, it didn’t sound like the arresting police were using protective gear of any kind. He was certain that if he had been driving the truck or hiding in the back, he’d be dead by now.

News reports were still calling it “contagious hysteria” until the surveillance video footage was scrutinized. A retired Army chemical and biological weapons expert speaking on Fox News pointed out the reactions of people who didn’t have Mitchell in the line of sight. The idea that there was something actually causing people to behave this way besides Mitchell’s actions was gaining traction.

When the FBI and DHS held their press conference, Mitchell felt good to hear them finally say they thought there might be some kind of chemical agent involved. The idea that he had something on him was ridiculous, though in a fit of paranoia, he searched through the duffle bag and his backpack again for anything strange. He, of course, came up short. Mitchell was certain that when he surrendered the authorities would see that something was wrong with him and then they’d understand. He was one of the few people, if any, who was relieved to find out that he’d gone from a local fugitive to the target of a federal manhunt.

To Mitchell that meant agencies like the FBI and Centers for Disease Control taking what happened more seriously than a local police department that wanted to charge him for shouting “fire” in a crowded movie theater.

Mitchell began planning how he would surrender. He wanted to wait another day to make sure that the authorities had the right precautions in place. In Mitchell’s mind that meant men wearing hazardous-material suits and some kind of hermetically sealed chamber in the back of a truck where they could take him to a special hospital and find out what was wrong.

He was ready to be treated like a patient and not a criminal. As soon as he knew they were going to do that, he’d walk right into their hands. Mitchell was confident everyone would understand his actions once they could see for themselves what was going on.