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He pulled the sheet down after him. Then he bent over and let the pain subside. Yep. That hurt, all right.
He had left a note on his bed. The note said, Poof! He hoped the police guards would find it funny.
On the roof of the secondary hospital wing he could literally walk up to windows in the main building. He saw patients inside. One of them, an old man, waved. Sam waved back. A woman just stared. He smiled.
He found one window open. It was to a doctor’s office. He slid inside and took a quick inventory. In the closet was a suit on a hanger. No wallet, no money, unfortunately. Frustrating. It was hard to do much here in the out there unless you had money.
There was a computer. It was password protected, but the password turned out to be “password.”
“People did not get any smarter while I was away,” Sam said with a laugh.
Now, the question was: Who would help him? And who could he find a number for? He only remembered one number from the old days, and what were the odds that Quinn had a phone? Or that it was the same number?
He opened a messaging app.
It’s Sam. I need help.
He went on then, searching the office while waiting, expecting a notification that the message was undeliverable. He found five dollars in a junk drawer in the doctor’s desk. Yay. The doctor wouldn’t even notice.
There came a ding. A reply! It said, Sam? Sam T?
Hey, Fisherman, Sam typed. I’m busting out of the hospital.
The reply came quickly. Obviously to go surfing.
Sam laughed. Wow. Just how much would he love to be surfing right now?
Before he could answer, another message came. On my way. Q.
Quinn did not have a car and he was too young to drive. But he did have a mother who had already heard Quinn’s account of life in the FAYZ.
“This is the same Sam?” she asked. “Our Sam? Your Sam?”
“My Sam,” Quinn said.
“Get in the car.”
Quinn kissed her spontaneously for that. It was an hour’s drive. The Gaither family had relocated to Santa Monica, where his father had a better job than before. In fact, to Quinn’s amazement they lived just ten blocks from the Santa Monica Pier.
Sam had instructed them to enter the parking structure, but not the one nearest the hospital. That one would be searched. Instead he’d given them the location of a parking structure adjoining a different campus building.
As instructed, they drove to the third floor, southeast corner, and honked their horn, just a couple of taps.
Sam emerged from a parked car and slid into the backseat behind Quinn.
“Dude,” Quinn said.
“Thanks, Mrs. Gaither,” Sam said. “I don’t think they’ve even noticed I’m gone yet. But they may have, so I’m just going to duck down behind the seat.”
“Don’t you worry about it,” Mrs. Gaither said. “This campus is wide open. We’ll get you out of here.”
They drove for half an hour and then, finally, Sam raised his head cautiously. Quinn tossed him a stocking cap. “Put that on.”
They were on a freeway jammed with cars, doing a stop-and-go, heading north. Toward Santa Barbara. Toward Astrid.
Mrs. Gaither turned the radio on to NPR, and naturally Quinn reached over to switch to a music station. But he was a little slow, and when he heard what was being reported, his hand froze.
It was a press conference. The voice speaking was calm, assured, audibly intelligent, and very familiar.
