The Scrubs by Simon Janus Read Free Book Online Page A

boy yelled out again.   The crying had changed.   No longer was it light and vapory.   It had intensified, the tortured pleas bouncing off the trees only to be reflected back on themselves.   Keeler’s earlier bravado to retrieve the child at any cost leaked from him.   This had to be a trap, but the boy’s despair sounded so real.   How could it be manufactured?   Keeler looked up, staring between the branches at the fragments of hazy sky sliding by.   He glanced back at the endless fields.   He wasn’t getting out of here.   He knew that, so what did it matter?   Jeter wanted him to find this boy for some reason, so why not do as he was told?   That was what a good inmate did.   He followed the rules and if he did it well, the powers that be might let him go early.   Keeler would find the boy and maybe Jeter would finish him off just that little bit more quickly in return.
    “Help me,” the boy sobbed.
    “There in a minute,” Keeler called back and broke into a run.  
    As he darted between the trees, the child’s pleas grew louder.   Even though the trees deflected the boy’s cries, Keeler still managed to zero in on his location.   He didn’t seem far away now.   A wall of unkempt juniper seemed to be the only barrier between Keeler and the boy.   He could have gone around the juniper, but he didn’t bother and hurled himself through the obstruction.
    He penetrated the hedge with ease but lost his balance and crashed to his knees.   His fall winded him, dissolving his vision to blobs of primary color and he struggled to take in his surroundings.   He tried blinking away the confusion, but confusion remained.   Instead of kneeling on a blanket of woodland leaves, he was kneeling on well-trodden industrial carpeting.   The boy’s screams were nowhere to be heard.   A security alarm wailed instead.   Keeler rose to his feet and stared into the faces of two-dozen frightened people.   They edged away from him.   He raised his hands to calm them, but found a sawn off, double-barreled shotgun in his grasp.  
    He turned to look behind him.   The forest was gone.   Jeter’s world was gone.   He took in the illuminated prancing black horse logo.   All confusion left him.   He knew where he was.   This was his nightmare.   The single moment in his life he wished he could erase.   He was in the Brentford sub-branch of Lloyds Bank.  
      What was going on?   Was this a hallucination handed to him by Jeter to confuse him, to send him in the wrong direction to prevent him from saving the boy?   Or was this his chance to rewrite history?   All of the above?    None of the above?   Keeler didn’t know, but he did know what was going to happen next.
    Tim Mitchell sprang out from behind the carousel of leaflets with the toy gun in his chubby hand.   Tim’s mother screamed at her son to stay where he was.   Keeler whirled on the boy and returned Tim’s little boy grin.   This time, he didn’t shoot.   He knew better and let the sawn-off drop to his side.
    Tim raced toward Keeler, giggling and squealing with the toy 9mm pointed at him.   Keeler crouched to receive the charging boy.
    “Give me all you got,” Keeler teased the child and opened his arms wide.
    And Tim did.   He squeezed the trigger three times and the simulated report sounded from the recording device inside the toy weapon, but real bullets left the muzzle.   All three bullets thudded into Keeler, one in the stomach just above the navel and two in the chest.   An inferno of pain raged where he’d been hit.   The impacts lifted him off his feet and left him prone on his back.   The bank’s customers closed in around him.   As they all watched him die, Tim pushed his way between the legs of the crowd, jabbed the toy gun that fired real bullets at Keeler and shouted, “Bang.   Bang.   Bang.”  
     

Chapter Four
     
    The Rules Change
     
     
    “Governor,” a lab-coated man with a receding hairline