Chapter Sixteen

Flynn Beaman paced the section of the library deemed safe for ‘inners’ due to the protective shield that blocked satellite signals from reaching his head. After a week, the claustrophobia was driving him nuts. He was one of the youngest people in the sanctuary and had no one to relate to. He spent a lot of his time poking in the book stacks, sampling pages and collecting a short stack of reading material. He was already halfway through Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and had started Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.

There were maybe fifty people living in the sanctuary, most of them over the age of fifty, and they enthusiastically set up events and recreation like any other community, ranging from board game nights to old movies on disc. Right now, a group had cleared space in the children’s books section and they were practicing yoga and meditation.

Flynn had his own preferred way to relax. He craved a joint.

The day before, he had attempted a quick smoke between the book stacks and been caught and reprimanded. Two old biddies scolded him and said he was ‘breaking the rules’ of the sanctuary, which was bogus since the whole idea of the sanctuary was to escape the hovering watch of Big Brother into every aspect of daily living.

There was some legitimacy to their beef: he might set off some old smoke alarm or worse, accidentally start a fire in a building packed with dry paper. But he suspected the real reason was that the old ladies – who drank wine liberally – disapproved on moral grounds. This was irritating, because weed had been largely decriminalized across the United States for years.

Flynn had a decent supply of pot in his backpack and the idea of the tasty buds going to waste was just too grim. He concluded that if he ducked outside for maybe just three or four minutes and had a quick smoke, it wouldn’t do any harm. If the chip in his upper neck caught a signal, it would be so brief, it would be meaningless. The connection would break again before anyone could react.

Flynn’s mom was part of the yoga group, so he was able to dig into his backpack without her disapproving presence and pull out the well-hidden bag of weed and a lighter. He wore an old hoody and added a cap to his head bearing the Grateful Dead logo of a red, white and blue skull with a lightning bolt. He slipped downstairs and silently slid through an exit door used by the outers for accessing the rest of the world.

Flynn stood outside the door and felt the sunshine on his face. He had missed it. He had also missed the earthy, sweet strain of ‘silk dream’, his favorite cannabis, handrolled into a chubby joint and now being absorbed into his lungs. He inhaled the vapor and it delivered his own form of stress relief. To hell with yoga.

In the past year, most of his peers had turned to a simulated high offered by the chip technology, but Flynn stubbornly stuck with the original recipe. Real pot was way better than brainwave pot. It was organic and natural and he knew what he was getting versus some creepy, invisible ray from the sky.

He allowed himself four minutes of deep inhalation and felt calm and happy. He ditched the stub and quietly reentered the library, without being observed from the outside.

However, he bumped into Aaron on his way inside. Aaron was a serious dude who was one of the sanctuary council members. His reaction was immediate and very angry.

“What the hell, did you just go outside?”

Flynn’s mellow vibe was being invaded by an extremely harsh attitude. He tried to remain chill. “Just for a couple minutes. Hardly anything.”

Aaron wasn’t letting up. “It doesn’t matter how brief you were out there, you probably showed up on the government tracker.”

“Like maybe a blink.”

“That’s all it takes! God damn it, are you high?”

Flynn shrugged.

Miles came over, responding to the shouting. “What’s going on?”

Aaron told him, and Miles grew panicked. “The regulation patrol is going to show up here! If you showed up on the radar— This is really, really bad!”

“I’m sorry?” offered Flynn.

“What do we do now?” Aaron asked Miles.

“We need to create a decoy. Immediately,” Miles said. He jabbed a finger at Flynn. “You are coming with me.”

“What?”

“We’re getting in the van and going for a ride.”

“Where?”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re going. Now!” Miles turned to Aaron. “Alert the others. Get everyone to lay low. If the patrol enters the library, hide everyone in the tunnel.”

Aaron nodded and left to notify the occupants of the sanctuary of a possible raid.

“I was barely out there,” Flynn said meekly.

“Shut up and follow me,” Miles said.

They hurried through the underground tunnel that led to the garage. Flynn climbed into the back of the van, and Miles scrambled behind the steering wheel. Miles ordered Flynn to put on one of the silvery robes and a helmet to provide maximum protection from satellite exposure. Then he drove out of the garage and onto the Santa Barbara streets.

“Where are we going?” asked Flynn.

“Lots of places,” Miles responded.

Miles drove seven blocks, then pulled in front of a shuttered Starbucks. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he told Flynn. “We’re going to drive around Santa Barbara to a bunch of different locations. At each stop, you will get out of the van, without any protection. I will pick you up a short distance away. This way, you will appear and disappear all over town, and it will diffuse the focus on the library and create confusion. We just have to be fast, so they don’t catch up with us. We have to stay at least one step ahead. Got it?”

Flynn tried to follow, but his head was somewhat muddled from the big intake of marijuana. “I think so.”

“Get out,” ordered Miles. “I’ll meet you one block ahead.” He pointed. “Down there. GO!”

Flynn started to open the side doors of the van.

“Take off the helmet and the robe!” Miles shouted. “I want you to show up on the tracker!”

Flynn nodded and did as he was told. He put his Grateful Dead cap back on and stumbled onto the sidewalk. There were a few random pedestrians in the distance, but not many. The Starbucks had recently gone out of business with the rest of the chain. A sad, final attempt to retain customers was on display in a big sign in the window: ‘Re-engage with REAL caffeine from yesteryear – it’s not just a state of mind.’

Flynn walked along the sidewalk for one block, nervously looking around for any bounty hunters. Miles drove past him, parking at the next street corner. When Flynn arrived, he climbed back into the van and sat under the protective layer of insulation in the roof. He threw the silvery robe over his head.

“Good,” Miles said, accelerating the van. “If all goes well, they’ll ignore the library and go on this new trail.”

“I’m feeling really paranoid right now,” Flynn said, fully consumed in a bad trip.

“You should.”

Miles drove to the Santa Barbara Bowl, a desolate, concrete outdoor music venue. “Get out, walk around without the robe, I’ll meet you on the other side of the parking lot. Don’t be out for more than a couple of minutes.”

“Okay.” Flynn was becoming familiar with the drill.

After the Santa Barbara Bowl, they went to the former Santa Barbara Zoo, followed by a high school, a public park, and then a stop on Stearns Wharf, a long, wooden pier that stretched out into the ocean, once a hotspot for restaurants and tourist shops. The view was beautiful and reached down to the beachfront. Flynn took a long moment to soak in the surroundings before Miles called him back into the van.

“Now where?” asked Flynn.

“A few more places in town. Then a few places out of town. You’re lucky I’m letting you back in the van. If this happens again, I will take you somewhere and leave you.”

When Miles and Flynn returned to the sanctuary later in the day, Aaron provided an update.

“I think we’re good,” he said. “There was a patrol car out front for maybe a minute, and then it sped away. We’ve been listening in on their radio frequency, and they’re confused – basically bouncing around from place to place. They don’t know why his tracker light is popping on and off all over town. We’ll stay on alert in case they come back.”

Miles let out a big sigh of relief.

Lorraine Beaman stepped forward from a gathering of sanctuary members. She slapped her son. Then she embraced him.

“Don’t ever do that again!” she said to him, and she started to cry.

“I won’t, I promise,” said Flynn, still in a frightened daze. “Never again.”

* * *

At six-foot-seven, all of it solid muscle, Nash Wenzel towered over most people. He had stringy, dirty red hair. He rarely cracked a smile. And he usually got what he wanted.

Today, however, the massive bounty hunter had failed to capture his prey – a missing teenage boy who had gone off the tracker with his mom and briefly reappeared at more than a dozen spots in and around Santa Barbara – never for more than a few minutes at a time.

It was puzzling and infuriating.

Nash had arrived at the latest missed opportunity and realized somebody was intentionally messing with him. And it put him in a rage.

Nash stood in the middle of Calvary Cemetery, the latest in a long string of location IDs for Flynn Beaman. A Grateful Dead cap had been slung over the edge of a random tombstone, as if to taunt his pursuers.

Nash did not like to be toyed with.

He returned to the regulation patrol car pulled to the side of a nearby curb. “Somebody’s fucking with us,” he told the driver.

The driver nodded wearily and reported back to the local headquarters with the news.

On the other end, Bruckner’s voice came loud and clear. “As long as we’re getting these signals, you will follow,” he said angrily. “He can’t remain one step ahead of us forever. Somebody has figured out how to interfere with the system. That is a major offense.”

“I’m thinking this is bigger than some random teenager,” said the driver.

“Yeah,” Bruckner said. “I’m thinking the exact same thing.”