he could find the nearest police station. By then he might be able to talk without sounding like a lunatic. Or not completely like one. They might not believe him, but he was sure they would give him something to eat, and maybe some Tylenol for his throbbing ear. Telling them about his parents was his trump card. That was something they could verify. He would be returned to Minneapolis. That would be good, even if it meant going to some kind of kiddy facility. There would be locks on the doors, but no immersion tank.
Massachusetts was an excellent start, he had been fortunate to get this far, but it was still too close to the Institute. Minneapolis, on the other hand, was home. He knew people. Mr. Destin might believe him. Or Mr. Greer, at the Broderick School. Or . . .
But he couldn’t think of anyone else. He was too tired. Trying to think was like trying to look through a window bleared with grease. He got on his knees and crawled to the far-right corner of the Southway Express box and peered out from between two rototillers, waiting for the men from the truck to come back and finish loading the furniture destined for Bender and Bowen Fine Furniture. They might still find him, he knew. They were guys, and guys liked to inspect anything with a motor in it. They might want to look at the riding mowers, or the weed-whackers. They might want to check the horsepower on the new Evinrudes—they were crated, but all the info would be on the invoices. He would wait, he would make himself small, he would hope that his luck—already stretched thin—would stretch a little further. And if they didn’t find him, he would sink back into sleep.
Only there was no waiting or watching for Luke. He lay on one arm and was asleep again in minutes. He slept when the two men came back and finished their loading chores. He slept when one of them bent to check out a John Deere garden tractor not four feet from where Luke lay curled up and dead to the world. He slept when they left and one of the yard workers closed the Southway’s door, this time all the way. He slept through the thud and thump of new cars being added, and stirred just slightly when a new engine replaced 4297. Then he slept again, a twelve-year-old fugitive who had been harried and hurt and terrified.
Train 4297 had a pull-limit of forty cars. Vic Destin would have identified the new loco as a GE AC6000CW, the 6000 standing for the horsepower it was capable of generating. It was one of the most powerful diesel locomotives at work in America, able to pull a train over a mile long. Running out of Sturbridge, first southeast and then dead south, this express train, 9956, was pulling seventy cars.
Luke’s box was mostly empty now, and would remain that way until 9956 stopped in Richmond, Virginia, where two dozen Kohler home generators would be added to its load. Most of these were tagged for Wilmington, but two—and the entire assortment of small-engine appliances and doodads behind which Luke was now sleeping—were going to Fromie’s Small Engine Sales and Service, in the little town of DuPray, South Carolina. 9956 stopped there three times a week.
Great events turn on small hinges.
HELL IS WAITING
1
As Train 4297 was leaving the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, yard, bound for Sturbridge, Mrs. Sigsby was studying the files and BDNF levels of two children who would shortly be residing at the Institute. One was male, one female. Ruby Red team would be bringing them in later that evening. The boy, a ten-year-old from Sault Ste. Marie, was just 80 on the BDNF scale. The girl, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago, was an 86. According to the file, she was autistic. That would make her difficult, both for staff and the other residents. If she had been below 80, they might have passed on her. But 86 was an outstanding score.
BDNF stood for brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Mrs. Sigsby understood very little of its chemical underpinnings, that was Dr. Hendricks’s bailiwick, but she understood the basics. Like BMR, basal metabolic rate, BDNF was a scale. What it measured was the growth and survival rate of neurons throughout the body, and especially in the brain.
Those few with high BDNF readings, not even .5 per cent of the population, were the luckiest people in the world; Hendricks