The Bar Code Prophecy by Suzanne Weyn Read Free Book Online

haywire mess, full of jagged holes.
    Normal life already seemed like a lifetime ago, like she was now acting out a life that belonged to someone else. At what moment had this new life begun? As the truck raced on, she tried to pinpoint it.
    Somehow everything that happened had led to this strange and unlikely moment that she now found herself in — speeding toward somewhere unknown in the back of a tractor trailer.
    Wait for my phone call, Dr. Harriman had said. But it was too late for that now. It was too late for her to go home, too late to see if her family had left her any word, any instructions. It was too late to call Emma, too late to do anything without fear of getting someone she loved in trouble.
    It was dark in the back of the truck, with scant light trickling in from the outside. She had no sense of where she was anymore, and barely had a sense of who she was with. In the near-dark, she looked at her wrist, tried to make out the details of the Bar Code. But they were as unreadable as anything else about her life. Other people might know the truth of it, but she didn’t.
     
     
    Time passed. She had no sense of how much time. She could have checked her phone, but Eric had taken it from her and immediately dislodged the battery and the info-sim card. He’d thrown the phone forcefully out the back of the truck, then smashed the sim card under his foot, grinding it with the heel of his boot.
    “You could have just turned it off,” Grace grumbled, upset to see her phone, especially Tilly, so utterly destroyed. For most of her life her Android cell phone had been her link with friends, family, and the world in general. It was on all the time. Grace even slept with it under her pillow. And Tilly, in a crazy way, had become her guide, always tracking her location by satellite so she could direct Grace to the nearest public bathroom, the best restaurant, the closest bank ATM and so much more. Without Tilly’s soothing voice, without the phone’s comforting connections, Grace felt lost — so lost that her stomach clenched with the stress of it.
    “I couldn’t just turn it off,” Eric said, still standing by the back door of the truck. “It emits a signal even when it’s not on. Every part of it does.”
    The truck swerved just as Eric opened the back door once more and hurled the phone battery out. He grinned, watching it go. “Final level!” he cheered. He turned back to her, still smiling as he latched the door. “Got it right into Hollowbrook Creek. Let them try to find that! As long as that phone is in your possession, off or on, Global-1 can find you.”
    “Why am I hiding from Global-1 at all?” Grace needed to know. “What’s happening?”
    “Does it scare you?” Eric asked, ducking the question, in Grace’s opinion.
    “Yeah, it does,” Grace admitted. “Of course I’m scared! I’d be stupid not to be scared.”
    “Try not to be,” Eric advised, “because this is only the start. The wild ride is just beginning.”

 
     

 
    When the speeding truck finally stopped, Mfumbe — and she was now certain it was him — opened the door. Eric and Grace jumped down beside him. A woman in her early thirties, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, descended from the driver’s seat and walked toward them.
    They were underneath the Los Angeles freeway. The woman introduced herself as Katie and extended her hand to Grace.
    Grace shook hands and trained her eyes on the woman’s face. “Have we met before?” she asked. The woman looked so familiar and yet she couldn’t figure out why.
    “You might have seen pictures of me in the papers lately,” Katie replied. “They called me Dusa the Drakian Menace in some of the papers, or at least the ones Global-1 owns, which is a lot of them.”
    “That’s it! I saw a story about you on the TV,” Grace recalled. About six months earlier, Grace had sat down beside her mother, who was watching the TV report with avid interest. She remembered the reporter