Chapter 5 - The Missing Years
Elias read the horrifying sentence over and over again until the words blurred.
His breathing quickly became ragged and painfully shallow.
He forcefully closed his eyes and tried to remember the exact moment of the tragic crash.
He recalled the loud screech of tires and the terrible sound of shattering glass.
But when he tried to picture Anna sitting in the passenger seat beside him, there was only a strange, empty void.
His most painful memories were entirely synthetic.
They had been surgically implanted to make him stop looking for his missing wife.
He slowly raised his shaking hands and stared deeply at his own palms.
If the horrific crash was a fabricated lie, what else about his life was completely fake?
He walked slowly into the cramped bathroom and stared at his pale reflection in the dirty mirror.
He looked exactly the same on the outside, but he felt like a complete stranger occupying his own body.
He aggressively pulled off his heavy wool sweater and examined his left shoulder.
There was a long, jagged pink scar that the hospital doctors had claimed was from the shattered steering wheel.
Elias pressed his cold fingers firmly against the raised, uneven tissue.
He felt something incredibly hard and metallic buried deeply just beneath his skin.
It was a tracking device.
David had not needed to call the armored SUV to chase them through the city.
The mercenaries were flawlessly following his exact biological coordinates the entire time.
He rushed frantically back into the main motel room.
Lily was fast asleep on the lumpy bed, completely exhausted from the night of terror.
Elias grabbed a small, sharp razor blade from his leather toiletry bag.
He firmly bit down on a dirty washcloth to muffle his own agonizing screams.
He made a deep, agonizingly precise cut right through the center of the old scar tissue.
Warm blood poured heavily down his arm, instantly soaking his white undershirt.
He dug his trembling fingers deep into the fresh wound and violently pulled out a blinking microchip.
He dropped the bloody device onto the floor and smashed it repeatedly with the heavy heel of his leather boot.
Suddenly, the old television sitting in the corner of the motel room flickered to life on its own.
It boldly displayed a crystal-clear live camera feed of the very room they were currently occupying.
The hidden camera lens was perfectly concealed inside the ceiling smoke detector.
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A distorted, mechanical voice abruptly echoed from the television speakers.
“You cannot ever hide from us, Elias.”
