Free Subject Seven by James A. Moore Page A

address on the folded envelope he’d pulled from his jeans pocket. It matched the one on his learner’s permit. He stared at the road where 138 Willoughby Way should have been. No houses, just a lot of torn-up buildings and construction vehicles. Oh, and the sign that said there were new houses going up in the Silver Hills Community!
    His stomach did a nervous drop and he shook his head. It hadn’t been much of a chance anyway, had it?
    There weren’t a lot of chances for things to go right around him. Nothing had been going his way in the last five months and before that, well, he couldn’t remember much of anything anyway.
    Five months. That had been when he woke up in Baltimore, Maryland, in a sleazy hotel room with two suitcases full of clothes and very little else. He hadn’t expected to wake up there. He’d expected to wake up in his bedroom at 138 Willoughby Way, which should have been in front of him.
    Five months to learn that nothing was what he’d expected it to be. Five months to try to understand why the face in his hotel mirror looked much older than the face he thought he remembered or even like the crappy photo on his learner’s permit.
    Time had gone wacky around him, maybe, or he’d been out of his mind for more than five months because he didn’t for a second think he could have changed as much as he had in less than a couple of years, at least if the picture on the ID was right.
    If he thought about his past a lot—and he did—he could get glimpses, flashes of memories, but none of them made much sense. There was a man he thought might be his father and a woman whose face made him feel happy. He was almost certain she had to be his mother, but he couldn’t come up with a name to go with her face to save his life. There was another boy, smaller, younger, with a bright smile. He thought his name was “Gabby.” He wanted to know all about them, all of them. He wanted to know about the others he saw now and then, kids in uniforms, sometimes just eating lunch together and other times studying. He knew he’d gone to school with them, but that was all. There were no names, not even the name of the academy they’d attended.
    They might as well have all been images from a stranger’s scrapbook.
    Even after he woke in the hotel in Baltimore, things hadn’t gotten any better. He’d spent most of the last five months as a slave to some punk whose name he didn’t even know.
    Five months! The thought sent his blood pressure soaring.
    He’d been trying to get back to Boston for a long time but never managed it until now. Sometimes he’d get close, like all the way into Rhode Island, but as soon as he closed his eyes, he found himself somewhere else. That unknown, unnamed bastard that gave him orders kept him enslaved so well that sometimes he almost gave up on trying to get away.
    Blackouts. Or maybe the kid was drugging him. He couldn’t say for sure. All he knew was that the faceless voice from the recorded messages could steal his life away at a whim.
    Worst of all, whenever it happened, days or weeks had gone by. The first few times it was days. This last time he woke up almost a month later.
    â€œNot this time.” His voice was deeper than he remembered too. Another thing to mess with his head when he was trying to concentrate.
    He walked back over to the motorcycle he’d borrowed to get up here this time. Borrowed, a lovely way of saying that he stole it but meant to return it. If he could remember where to send it back to because he’d been in a bit of a hurry when he hopped onto the bike.
    There were no answers for him here, so maybe for a change of pace he could actually return the bike. Part of him was going to miss the feeling of riding. Had he ridden before his memories vanished? He must have, otherwise how could he ride so well now?
    He hopped on and slid the key back into the ignition and the