Mindbenders by Ted Krever Page A

the seat. The car’s owner handed me the keys and said apologetically “It’s just half a tank.” I took the keys and stood staring at him.
    “Say ‘thank you,’” Renn muttered, pulling on his seat belt.
    “Thank you,” I mumbled.
    “Now get in the car, dammit!”
    I dropped into the driver’s seat. It was really beautiful, chrome and carbon-fiber and all that stuff they talk about in the car magazines. As I closed my door, a middle-aged woman came out of the house, locking up behind her. She had an overnight bag in hand.
    “Time to go, Herb,” she called and they climbed into a Winnebago parked outside the garage.
    “Don’t stare—move!” Renn gasped, smacking me on the shoulder. “That way!” He pointed to a sidestreet a few yards away. I pulled out of the driveway. As we made the turn, I saw the Winnebago head off in the opposite direction.
    Max laid way back in his seat now and talked me down the long hill, panting little breaths as though he’d just carried someone up a hillside and around a house. We went nowhere and took the most complicated route to get there—right here, left there, his eyes closed the same as when we’d found Tauber and Miriam Fine’s house. This time, he was finding a way for us to get lost and stay that way. We kept turning and doubling back on ourselves as we moved progressively through the vast development. More than once I saw a black SUV turning onto a street we’d just turned off of or going down a one-way street we’d just passed.
    This cat-and-mouse took more than fifteen minutes but at the end, we were all the way to the other end of the project, having never gotten near a main street. When we finally did turn onto one, we were a hundred yards from the highway entrance.
    “There!” he pointed but I didn’t need prompting. We were on the ramp before I could ask a single question, before he could fail to answer even one.
     
    ~~~~
     
    “Ruben Crowell, Gettysburg Pennsylvania,” I said after we’d driven about an hour.
    He’d been sitting up properly  for a while, his color—never very far from pale—returning. “Ruben who?”
    “Ruben Crowell, Gettysburg Pennsylvania. That’s the next nearest. You would have asked eventually.”
    He sat taking me in for a moment. “You’re taking ownership of it,” he said, nodding. “That’s good. And the words are coming back, aren’t they?”
    It was what I’d been thinking. I certainly wasn’t what I’d been—the kid who thought he was going to be Peter Jennings was long gone—but more than words were coming back. I was seeing the story—I was beginning to pull the threads together, to see a bigger picture. It was more than a little creepy, knowing he was inside my head, but at least I believed it now—that uncertainty was gone. Whatever satisfaction I got from that knowledge lasted half a second.
     “How the hell many guys are after us?!!” I yelled suddenly.
    “What do you mean?”
    “What do you mean, what do I mean? There were at least six, seven guys following us out of her house, the two with the serious guns—you sure attract a whole lot of serious guns—by the rockpile and two or three more on the ridge where the houses were. How many fucking guys are after you? How did they get there so fast? Who are these people?”
    “Good questions. Those are all good questions,” he acknowledged with a nod.
    “Fuck you! Good questions! You’re the mindbender extraordinaire —why am I asking the good fucking questions?”
    He smiled. He seemed to actually find this amusing, which did nothing for me except get me driving 90 instead of 85 miles an hour. Now that we were out of the situation, the fear and anger were all over me. It was amazing my shaking hands could drive straight.
    “I don’t have answers—not yet,” he said. “They’re not powerful minds, but the first thing they’ve been taught is a good blocking scheme. And my stamina isn’t what it used to be. Throwing several hundred