Subject Seven Read Online Free PDF Page A

this?”
    There were no answers. There was no one but him in the room, and that meant there was no one to help him figure it all out.
    He stood up again, slowly, carefully, just in case his legs got away from him a second time. He could feel his pulse speeding up, and his breaths were coming too fast.
    â€œOkay, okay . . . Just . . . I dunno, just try to relax. Call home, get hold of Mom and Dad and then we can see what’s happening.”
    He reached for the phone and his finger took careful aim at the buttons, ready to dial home, but there was a small problem: he couldn’t remember his number.
    He blinked back tears and bit back a laugh that felt completely wrong. “Oh, come on. This is getting stupid now.” His fingers searched the keypad for the right sequence—hell, even the right first digit would have been nice—but nothing came to him.
    He clenched his hands together and made himself take a deep, slow breath.
    â€œOkay, come on, numbers . . . numbers. There’s got to be a way to remember this. It’s my damned home phone number.”
    He closed his eyes. His mom, she’d always drilled it into him. If he was lost, he was supposed to tell people his name, his phone number and his address, in that order. She’d gone over it so many times.
    â€œSo, what do we tell people when we’re lost? My name is . . .” And there he stopped. One more obstacle, a little thing really, but there it was. And this time when the tears threatened, he couldn’t stop them.
    â€œWhat’s my stupid name?” His voice wheezed out of his chest, squeezing past a constriction that felt like a brick wall. “Come on, damn it all, who the hell am I?”

    Three hours later, he was only a little closer to finding the answer to that question. A look around the room revealed a suitcase full of clothes, fifty-seven dollars and eighty-seven cents in cash and a wallet that held nothing but a learner’s permit for Boston, Massachusetts, in the name of Hunter Harrison. The picture on the ID looked a little like the face he saw in the mirror, but only vaguely. The face was too young, and he guessed he was at least a few inches taller than the five feet, seven inches that Hunter Harrison was supposed to stand in height.
    There was an address, and that was a starting point. He figured he could find out where the address was in Boston and go there. Maybe it was his home and he’d get lucky and something about the place would help him remember who he was and what was missing from his life.
    There was another problem, of course, and this one was a doozy. The address on the license said Boston, but as he discovered by checking out the local news, he was in Baltimore, Maryland. He couldn’t remember his name without help, or much of the past, but his geography was just fine. A few hundred miles stood between him and his destination.
    He paced the room like a caged tiger for a while, doing his best to solve the puzzle of his existence, but it wasn’t going well.
    He stood in front of the mirror, studying himself. The body was muscular, with broad shoulders, a solid chest and the sort of build that only came from years of hard workouts. Brown hair, tan skin, blue eyes. The face was a puzzle. He didn’t know why, but he somehow knew that his face was . . . older than it should have been. There was a small scar over his left eyebrow, like he’d run into something once upon a time. There were no other distinguishing marks.
    How could he remember anything if he couldn’t remember his own face?
    His stomach growled, and Hunter stood up, stretched and gave thought to eating something.
    â€œWhatever. I need to get out of here. I don’t even know if the room is paid for.”
    He reached for the jeans draped over the back of the cheap chair that went with the cheap desk in the cheap room and—
    The car horn startled him out of his thoughts, and Hunter stepped back