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pitch dark, but one of the few advantages to his Spruce Ridge brain makeover was night vision. He could hike through trackless woods at two A.M. as easily as at noon. He hoisted his pack.
    He was a couple of hours into it when the beep sounded. At that point, he didn’t even try to resist. It was useless effort.
    The screen read u there?
    He had nothing further to lose at this point, not even his sanity. It was already long gone, so what the fuck. He mentally typed out lara?
    There was a long, shocked pause. Then,
    how do u know my name?
    I know who u r. l c u when I dream. Wt r u doing in here?
    hiding out was her terse reply.
    huh?
    this is the only place they can’t get me
    dont understand, he typed.
    i dont need u to understand. I just need a place to hide.
    bad day? he asked.
    oh u have no idea was her reply. Then she winked out again, like she had last night. But this time, she was gone completely.
    His senses kept on groping for her.
    His pace quickened to a run as he reflected upon two unsettling things. One, the brief conversation had given him an erection. His crotch strained against his jeans. Two, his headache was gone, for the first time in what felt like forever. Not that he was complaining. He felt almost giddy. Probably it was all about blood flow. The erection, the headache relief. Vasodilators doing their thing. But still. The sensory input was as intense as ever, but he was taking it all in and processing it, as if it were normal to see in the dark at two in the morning. Or hear a bird’s heartbeat. He had more bandwidth. A lot more.
    Talking to Lara was evidently therapeutic.
    God forbid he get obsessed over a ghost girl. Granted, he had a tendency to fixate on unattainable chicks. But getting all wound up about a figment of his own imagination? A woman who had shuffled off this mortal coil before he even met her? Come on. Get real.
    No further beeps sounded on his Lara sensors in the time it took to hike down to the truck. That was good, since his current plan was to medicate her out of existence. The idea made him uncomfortable. Like he would betray her by smashing a pharmaceutical hammer down onto that part of his brain that could talk to her.
    i dont have anyplace else 2 go. this is the only place they cant get me. Her texted words reverberated in his head. Plaintive, desperate.
    What would happen if he took those meds, made the messages go away? Would she still have a place to hide? And what did it indicate about his mental state, that he was even asking questions like this?
    Oh, man. Don’t even go there. Just keep running. Just outrun it.
    The Dodge Ram he’d bought from Sean waited patiently under its forest camo tarp. He shimmied beneath the vehicle to take out the box attached to the undercarriage, where he stashed his electronics.
    The engine fired up with no hesitation, even after weeks of abandonment. He plugged the phone in, and started down the long, twisting logging road. About a mile from the town at the pass, he got some cell coverage, so he stopped to assess his social situation.
    Eighteen missed calls. Forty-two text messages. Twelve from his mother. Six from Sean, nine from Aaro, four from Bruno. Seven from Cindy, his cheating ex-girlfriend, whose face he had difficulty recalling. If Cindy was texting him, probably the wanker rock musician she’d dumped him for had moved on, and she was ready to take up with her default chump again.
    Huh. If there was one good thing about getting his ass kicked to hell and gone, it was that it put his love life sternly into perspective. The Cindy thing seemed so small to him now. Something that had happened to a much younger self. He deleted Cindy’s messages unread.
    He deleted his mother’s messages, too, except for the most recent one, which he glanced at. Standard hysterical maternal anxiety. He would call her as soon as he had filled the prescriptions in his wallet. He could face his mother only if drugged into a state of catatonic