The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 29

They left the highway, and drove for another ninety minutes, and reached the area where the missing kid had last been online. There was a rough circle of tracker blips and financial transactions centered on a small town in the middle of nowhere.

It was actually the middle of nowhere, that far from the highway, and it was away from any noticeable landmarks like rivers or hills, too. Just a town in a flat plain that was there because every so often you needed a town, Ellie supposed.

They drove slowly along the main street. It was still very early, only a little after dawn, and no-one else was around. What few shops there were all seemed to be closed. There weren’t very many shops, though, Ellie noticed. It was a very small town, and there didn’t seem to be very much here.

It was strangely small town, Ellie suddenly thought. Strangely small for a wealthy corporate heir to be taking a holiday in.

She wondered whether that was significant.

She would have expected someone in corporate intel to have thought of this, and to have checked, but if they had then they hadn’t told her. She decided to make sure. She got out her tablet and asked it whether anything had ever happened here, but it found nothing. This wasn’t a historic site, the nearest of those was a hundred miles away and something to do with nineteenth-century railroads. It wasn’t the birthplace of someone famous, which was what Ellie had wondered for a moment, or the death-place either. If the kid had been on some kind of a pilgrimage, then Ellie couldn’t work out what he’d been coming to see. She searched more broadly, and the only tourism hits were very old ones, and exactly what she’d expect. People had used to come here to fish, and to get away from cities, and houses had once been cheap, and there had been agricultural shows here, long ago.

It was just a small town, a long way from anywhere, and there didn’t seem to be any reason for the kid to be here.

It was odd, Ellie thought. It was odd, and something to keep in mind, in case it actually mattered. She decided she’d think more about it later on.

They drove along the main street, which took less than a minute. The actual town was only three or four blocks long. The town didn’t properly start or stop, though, rather the side-by-side buildings in the main part of town became more widely-spaced at the edges, until they were separate houses on larger squares of land. Not really farms, Ellie thought, just older houses in the middle of bits of grass, sometimes with trees or animals around them.

The sky was big, Ellie noticed, and there weren’t many clouds, and when she opened the window, the air was cool and dry.

They drove a little further, and found a roadside lay-by at the very edge of town, with a small permanent settlement of mobile homes at the end of it, next to a toilet block. They had been seeing fewer encampments like this, the further they got from the border, but transient debtors were still around.

That camp seemed quiet, and settled. All the inhabitants were probably still sleeping.

“Stop here,” Ellie said and pointed to the far end of the lay-by.