Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (free books to read TXT) 📖

I sank back into the rear seat as the car continued its slow reversed crawl. More honking, more screeching brakes, more near-misses. I had to get out of this stupid little foreign car.

Well, I suppose it wasn’t foreign to these people. Why was I thinking about that?

I tried hitting the window nearest me with my shoulder, then spun around and tried clanking the handcuffs against them, but that just dug them into my skin. I laid back across the bench seat and tried kicking at the window to no effect. I adjusted my position, put my back against the opposite door and pressed against it to counterbalance my kicks against the glass. I used both feet, felt a heat in my left ankle with each impact. Two more times I kicked both feet against the glass, the second time I felt it give away slightly. One last time I heaved all my strength through my feet and slammed them through the window. The glass broke into thousands of tiny fragments adhered to a sheet of clear plastic and folded forward slightly. Safety glass. I spun on my knees and used my elbows to push the glass and plastic away from the window frame.

I laid back down in the backseat and tried to curl up into a ball, wiggling myself off my back and onto my shoulders so I could shimmy my arms down my back then up and over my legs, returning my hands to my front. I reached my arms out and felt for the outside door handle, felt it, and pulled at it but accomplished nothing. The door must have been locked too. Rather than try to deal with that, I just used the handle to pull myself head-first through the rather small window. When my chest was out, I spun around and pushed against the roof of the car to drag myself out the rest of the way.

The car had moved through the two lanes on one side and was now into the opposing lanes. I cleared the window and fell flatly onto the street as cars were now heading straight for me, all honking and swerving much later than I would have appreciated. I pushed myself up to my feet, both hands pressed against pieces of glass scattered on the street. I turned and ran away from the street, passing the car I’d just escaped from as it gently brought itself to a stop by backing into a car parked against the sidewalk.

I heard glass break behind me as I awkwardly ran down the sidewalk in the direction of my hotel, slightly limping to keep weight off my left ankle and my arms swinging weirdly bound together. It was probably around 5 PM; traffic was getting heavy as people got off work and the sidewalks filled with pedestrians. I had to cut through a lot of people as I ran against the foot traffic to get away. I tried to hide my handcuffed wrists inside my jacket, when I felt something light and wiry in one of the inside jackets. I stuck a hand in the pocket to see what it was, and pulled out the pair of reading glasses I’d bought as part of a disguise.

Still limp-running, I gleefully bent one of the sides of the frame and tore it from the rims and dropped the rest on the street. Left with only a thin metal strip bent at one end to curve around the ear, I stuck the broken end into the keyhole of the cuff on my left wrist with my right hand and bent it sharply to the left, turned it around, then bent it to the right. This made the frame into kind of Z-shape at the end, which I stuck back into the keyhole and fiddled around, still running, until the ratchet of the cuffs came free. The cuff wouldn’t come off, but it could get tighter. I spun the strip of metal around and fiddled in the opposite direction for a few seconds until the cuff came loose and slid off of my hand. I did the same thing with other cuff, deciding I must have seen this on TV somewhere, and dropped the cuffs onto the sidewalk once the other cuff came free.

Behind me, I heard a squeal of tires and a familiar slam of metal against metal and sheets of glass turning into a dancing rain of fragments against pavement. I stopped and turned around. I couldn’t see the car anymore, but assumed someone had finally crashed into it. I hoped to myself that I hadn’t just killed two more people. Presuming I didn’t, I still needed to get back to my hotel and collect my things as fast as possible.

I packed my clothes together quickly and threw them into my small suitcase, then shut off my laptop and slid it into my backpack. I quickly circled the room that had been my home for the last 24 hours and made sure I had everything, then used the menu on the TV to check out, and was outside the building within two minutes. Pratt knew where I was staying, he knew my name, and he knew about my travel plans. I had to get to the airport and get outside of the country before he recovered enough to start hunting for me again. I realized that if he’d previously assumed I was some kind of killer teenager, I’d just confirmed that for him. I hadn’t killed him, though. At least, I really hoped I hadn’t.

I got a cab and went to the airport.

My flight wasn’t for more than 12 hours, but I didn’t feel like sticking around that long. I’d assaulted two Interpol officers. If Pratt didn’t have any concrete reason to hold me before, he at least had me for assault. For that, he could get the actual police on me. My passport would be flagged. I’d be a wanted fugitive. Why, oh why, did I not think about things before I started hurting people?

I was dropped off at the departures terminal of the Vienna airport and stood on the curb, checking out all angles. It was too soon for a search to be organized, but I felt like being cautious. If I hurried, I might be able to get on a plane before the wrong people knew my name. This could follow me back home, I realized. Interpol and the US government worked together all the time, I’d heard. I started to hope Pratt was dead.

I went into the airport and found an ATM, used it to withdraw a thousand euros, not knowing or caring how much that was in dollars. I’d need one heck of a story to justify a kid my age paying cash for a flight to America. I also needed to not be me.

There was a gift store before the security checkpoint. I went there and looked at postcards until I heard someone speaking English. Behind me, looking at shot glasses with “Austria” etched on them, were two Americans. One was about my age, maybe older; the other was in his twenties. They were joking about some stupid thing having to do with drinking. The one closest to my age was wearing an orange and blue backpack, and his blue US passport was tucked neatly in a pocket on the side. I stepped around them to get a look at his face, his hair was shorter than mine, and he was a bit pudgier than me, but he was close enough. I stepped back around, bumped into his backpack, and walked away without saying anything. I heard him call me an asshole under his breath as I walked away.

In the bathroom, I looked at Ryan Tambour’s passport and compared it to my own. He was 18, according to his birthday, and was from North Carolina. His photograph wasn’t exactly a striking resemblance to mine, but to someone who looked at thousands of passports per day it might just work. Flipping through the visa pages in the back, it looked like he’d been to Germany, Switzerland, and France, and had just arrived in Vienna. It’d probably be over an hour until he’d need his passport again and find it missing.

I went back to the ticketing area and paid cash for a flight leaving in two hours for Reagan airport in D.C., not Dulles which I’d come from. I checked my bag as Ryan Tambour, passed through security as Ryan Tambour, sat around the gate as Ryan Tambour, and boarded the plane as Ryan Tambour. I took two of the sleeping pills I’d bought from a store as Ryan Tambour, and slept for most of the flight to Reagan. I went through US customs as Ryan Tambour, turned the rest of my euros into dollars, and took a cab from Reagan to Dulles to retrieve my car.

It was Friday afternoon by my best guess and according to the clock on my car’s radio, when I got to my house and went straight to my bathroom and fell asleep in the shower.