Orphans of Wonderland (18 page)

“You've made your point, please—”

“But on the other hand—”

“Novak, don't!”

“—Barney's decisions have also led to him to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You see what I mean, Joel? You see how Barney's in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

A deafening blast exploded through the building, echoing along with Joel's cry as the homeless man's head exploded, spraying him with a mist of blood, brains and bodily fluids.

As the body fell over, the can of stew dropped into the growing puddle of blood around Barney's mangled head, and Joel scrambled away as best he could, vomiting onto the floor as he went.

The ringing in his ears eventually subsided, and Joel worked himself up onto his hands and knees and vomited again. With a shaking hand, he wiped his face clean with the back of his sleeve.

“You with us, Joel?” Novak asked. “Need your attention on this. You think you could give me just a few more seconds of your undivided, Joel?”

With blood and gore dripping from his face and chin, and his body violently trembling, Joel forced himself to look Novak in the eye again.

“It's all up to you, Joel. We're not playing games here. I'm going to go ahead and assume you've got that through your head now. What do you say, Joel? Is that a safe assumption for me to have? Have you got it through your head now?”

“Yes,” he answered softly.

“Speak up for me so I can be sure I heard you properly. Think you could do that for me, Joel? Think you could speak up for me so I can hear you properly?”

“
Yes
.”

“There you go. I knew you could do it.” Novak smiled. “It's all up to you from here, Joel. Do the right thing and you won't ever see us again. Do the wrong thing and you'll see us one more time. The choice…the
decision
…is yours.”

Joel hung his head, drooling blood now, still in shock and unable to process or fully comprehend what he'd just witnessed. A few feet away, Barney's body continued to twitch and convulse after death.

“Don't worry about ole Barney and the rest of this mess,” Novak told him. His voice seemed farther away now, and Joel could hear his and Kavon's shoes clicking against the cement floor as they walked off. “We've got people that'll come in and clean this all up nice. Be like it never even happened. Who knows? Maybe it didn't. Maybe it was all a dream. You have a nice day, Joel. Bye now.”

Joel had no idea how long he lay there with the corpse in that blown-out old factory, praying for his strength and sanity to return, but it seemed like forever.

Eventually he got to his feet and stumbled around the building until he found an exit. Without looking back, he made his way through several yards of tall grass until he reached the side of the road. His car was parked nearby, as if he'd left it there himself.

His stomach, back and jaw throbbed with pain, his mouth tasted like blood, his head was pounding and his arms and legs felt shaky and weak. His emotions were raw and all over the place, switching second to second from tears to rage to fear to disbelief, then back again. Head spinning, Joel dropped behind the wheel and hit the ignition, savoring the warm embrace of the car heater.

When he closed his eyes, all he saw was Taylor staring back at him. There could be no life, no happiness until this was over. To solve the mysteries tormenting him, to stop whoever these people were and the horrible things they were up to, Joel knew what he had to do, and running home with his tail between his legs was not it. He'd come for answers—not just about Lonnie but himself, the others, all of it—he understood that now. People had died for those answers, and he was closer than he'd ever been or ever would be again to getting them.

Novak was right. The decision was his.

Slumped in his car, alone in a dead zone long forgotten, at the edges of a haunted old city, a city of ghosts and shadow, Joel made his choice.

There was no turning back. He'd find the truth or join the dead trying.

Chapter Eighteen

Joel steadied himself against the wall, negotiated the stairwell, then the long hallway to his room. Legs still shaky, he fell against the room door, stuffed a hand in his jacket pocket and retrieved his room key. He inhaled slowly, did his best to ignore the sharp pains that fired along his side and up into his chest with each breath, and exhaled through his mouth. He unlocked the door, pushed it open with his shoulder and staggered in. The door closed on its own and he leaned back against it, eyes slowly adjusting to the low light. The ticking of a clock on the nightstand transcended the constant din in his head, and he focused on it a moment, counting along with the clock, concentrating on something—anything—but the pain. His mouth still tasted like blood. He'd been spitting out globs of it all the way back. He slid a hand along the wall until he found the switch, then flipped the overhead light on.

The fixture came to life, casting the room in a dull yellow haze. It was only midafternoon, and the light wasn't necessary, but it made him feel better. He waited a while, and once his heart rate slowed, he pushed himself away from the door, struggled out of his jacket and tossed it onto the bed.

Swaying a bit, he made his way to the bathroom.

Joel turned the light on so he could see his reflection in the large mirror over the sink. Although he'd wiped his face and neck clean as best he could, they were still speckled and stained with blood. He looked down, studied the dark crimson soaked into the front of his shirt, which was pasted against him like a second skin. He pulled his shirt off and let it fall to the floor. It hit the tile with a splat. He leaned forward, hands on the counter in front of him, and slowly raised his head. There was a tiny hole in the flesh near the base of his neck, a reminder of the needle Kavon had stuck him with, and the lower part of his throat was slick with the homeless man's blood. He touched his jaw, worked it up and down and back and forth. It wasn't broken, but it was stiff and sore and still grinding a bit. He bit down and felt pain up into his ear. Running the water, he spit blood into the sink, then began checking his teeth. One bottom tooth on the right and near the back was loose and bleeding, courtesy of Kavon's uppercut.

“Sonofabitch,” he sighed, spit more blood, then cupped water in his hand and drank, swishing it around the tooth before spitting again. A quick inspection of his remaining teeth revealed the rest were intact and undamaged.

Once the water had warmed, Joel washed himself, gently around the right side of his rib cage, which was already sporting a bright purple bruise. His stomach was red and hurt to the touch. He cleaned himself for several minutes, then toweled off and pressed a wet cloth against the back of his head. When it slammed against the wall, it hadn't broken the skin, but a lump roughly the size of a marble had already formed, and there was a pulsing pain all the way down into his neck.

He left the bathroom, grabbed his bag and dug out a white tank-top tee, a pair of jeans and a black sweatshirt. As he dressed, he groaned occasionally, reminded of the pain even such basic physical maneuvers caused. Gathering his old clothes, right down to the jacket, which was also stained, he threw them into a plastic bag and then into the closet. Once night fell, he'd ditch the bag in the Dumpster down in the parking lot.

An urgent knock on the door froze him in his tracks. Had he locked it behind him? No. The knob turned and the door swung open, the sound echoing through the room like a warning.

Joel was about to snatch the lamp from the nightstand and swing it like a baseball bat when he realized the person tentatively coming through the door was Billy Gill.

“Joel?”

“Billy,” he said. “Jesus Christ, what are you doing here?”

“Yeah, nice to see you too, my man.” Billy finished his entrance, let the door close behind him and then looked around. “Wow, this place is…um…adequate.”

“The Ritz was booked. What are you doing here?”

“I talked to Taylor this morning and decided to come check on you. She's worried.” He walked deeper into the room. “Haven't made that drive in a while, forgot how mind-numbingly boring it was.”

Joel lowered himself onto the edge of the bed and slipped his shoes on.

“What's the matter?” Billy asked. “You're moving and groaning like you got hit by a train.”

“Close. The guy hit like one.”

“What? Somebody tuned you up?”

Joel nodded. “Yeah, kind of.”

“You all right? Did you go to the hospital and get checked out?”

“I'm fine.”

“You don't look fine. You look like shit.”

“You shouldn't have come here. You need to go home.”

“Hey, I came all this way,” he said, wandering over to the window. “If you think I'm getting back in that car anytime soon, it's not happening. Unless I've got you with me, in which case you can drive and I'll take a nap because—”

“
Billy
,” Joel snapped.

“What?”

“You've got to go.”

He stood there in his cheap and wrinkled trench coat and his cheaper polyester suit, looking uncomfortable and overweight, his comb-over mussed and his chubby cheeks bright red from the cold. “Why?”

“I've got this.”

“Taylor's worried about you. Hell, I am too.”

“She shouldn't have asked you to come here.”

“She didn't; this is on me. She's worried to death, Joel. I heard it in her voice, so I told her I wanted to give you a call and needed to know where you were staying. Once I had the info, I decided to get in the car and come find out for myself what you'd gotten yourself into. From what I'm seeing so far, kemosabe, it's not good.”

Joel got to his feet with a muffled grunt, then grabbed his coat from the closet and laid it on the bed. What was he supposed to say? That an hour or so before, he'd seen a man executed in cold blood right before his eyes? That the man had been so close to him that his blood and brains and God knew what else were all over his clothes and soaked into his skin? That this whole thing was tied to government mind-control programs, secret radio stations and evil entities running around in the dark? That the same men he'd seen kill the homeless man could very well be the same duo who murdered Lonnie and left him dead in the street? That at any given moment those men could come looking for him again, and that this time he might not walk away at all? Or maybe he could tell him about how the big black car that terrorized him and his friends in their youth was somehow connected to this mess as well? Whatever was real, whatever wasn't, and whatever existed in between, Joel knew one thing for sure. What he was into was deadly, and no place for anyone he cared about.

“Who kicked your ass?” Billy asked. “Did it have something to do with that license plate you had me run?”

“Billy, listen to me. I appreciate you coming all this way to check on me. But you need to go home and you need to do it now. Should Taylor ask, you were never here, okay?”

“What are you talking about? What's happening?”

“Go home, Billy.”

“Joel, I—”

“Go home.” Joel walked to the door and held it open. “Now. Go.”

“Close the door and sit down,” Billy said, using his best authoritative voice. “You heard me. Close the goddamn door and sit down.”

Joel let the door go.

“Sit down.” Billy pointed to the bed.

“I'm too fucking sore to sit down.”

“Fine, then stand up, you miserable prick.” He put his hands on his hips. “Now
what
is going on?”

“I can't tell you everything, I—”

“Everything? You haven't told me anything.”

“It's not safe here. I need you to get back in the car and go home. You need to keep an eye on things for the next few days, and you need to make sure Taylor's safe. I might still be able to defuse this; I don't know. If I can, I'll be back and everything will be okay. But if in the interim anything unusual or strange happens, or if anyone suspicious shows up or calls or emails or texts or sends smoke signals or fucking carrier pigeons, you need to let me know. In the meantime, you two get out of there and go to your cabin up north. You tell no one what you're doing or where you're going, and I mean no one. Hit an ATM on the way out of town and use cash only from that point forward. No credit cards or checks. Don't use your cell phones. Once you land, stay there until you hear from me, got it? You still have the shotgun?”

“The shotgun?”

“Yes, do you still have it at the cabin?”

“Yeah, I—”

“Load it. Anyone shows up you don't know, use it. Ask questions later.”

Billy frowned. “Christ, what in the hell are we dealing with here?”

“
We're
not dealing with anything.”

“Oh, we're not?” Billy held his hands out to his side, then let them slap against his thighs. “You've got some granite fucking balls, my man. You're really going to stand there and tell me my life and your wife's life are in danger, to the point where I have to round her up and hide her away at my cabin in the woods, and that—oh by the way—I might have to fucking
shoot
someone, but you're not going to give me any indication as to why or what's going on? Really? What the hell is the matter with you?”

Joel ran his hands through his hair, crossed the room and began to pace near the table. “In investigating Lonnie's murder, I've unintentionally rattled some cages, all right? And there are some very dangerous types who aren't happy about it.”

“There are these people called the police, maybe you've heard of them?”

“The police can't help me.”

“Why not?”

“Because they can't.”

Billy thought a moment. “Are you saying the police are a part of this, or somehow in on whatever it is that's going on here?”

“Doesn't matter. They can't help me either way. It's bigger than the cops.”

“Bigger.”

“Yes.”

“Than the cops.”

“Yes.”

Billy shook his head and sighed. “Okay, then why not take the hint from these people, quit while you're still alive and come home?”

“Because I can't.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong,” Billy said, stabbing a finger at the air between them, “but wasn't this supposed to be some basic, half-assed snooping around that wasn't going to amount to a piss hole in a snow bank? Isn't that what you told me?”

“That's what I thought.”

“Well, obviously you were wrong, so cut your losses and jettison your ass out of here.”

“I can't do that.”

“Am I missing something?”

“I can't, Billy.”

“Joel—”

“I
can't
!” He slammed a fist onto the table. “Goddamn it, you're just going to have to trust me on this one.”

“Okay.” Billy took a step back as what little color was left in his face drained away. “Take it easy.”

“This goes deeper than you can understand. For Christ's sake, it goes deeper than I can understand.” Joel turned to the window and looked out at the cold afternoon and parking lot below. Every car seemed suspect now, every person walking the street a potential threat.

“I'm concerned, man, okay? Taylor is too.” Billy forced an awkward smile. “With the things you went through before and all, we just—”

“I'm not crazy.”

“Never said you were.”

“I wasn't then and I'm not now.”

“Okay.” Billy held his hands up like the victim of a robbery. “But in the past you had problems that made you ill. I need to know you haven't run into those problems again. Try to see it from my side, okay? I'm not here to hurt you, Joel. I'm trying to help. You look terrible, someone's physically assaulted you, and you're talking about this whole thing—whatever it is—being bigger than the cops and going deeper than either of us can know and being dangerous to the point where people could die, and—don't get pissed but—a lot of this sounds kind of familiar, okay? I'm seeing similarities here is what I'm saying.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I need to know you're all right. You're not exactly coming off rational.”

Maybe because I just washed another human being's brains off my face
.

“I wish I could tell you more,” Joel said. “But I can't.”

“Taylor said you have pills that calm you when you need to—”

“I don't need pills.”

“Look me in the eye.”

Joel did. “I don't need my pills. I'm not coming apart like before. I'm
not
.”

“Okay,” Billy said softly.

“Do you really want to help?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then you need to listen to me and trust what I'm saying.”

“All right.”

“Please—
please
, Billy—go home and do as I asked. This is serious shit, and I need you to have my back. I need to know I can count on you.”

“You know you can.”

Flashes of the homeless man's head exploding blinked in Joel's mind. He squeezed shut his eyes but it only made the images more vivid. “I don't want you to get hurt. I don't want anyone to get hurt.”

Billy stood there staring at him, disheveled and confused.

Joel reached out, took his friend by the shoulders, pulled him in close and hugged him tight. “You're my best friend,” he whispered in his ear, “and I love you like a brother. I know you're worried about me, but you need to do like I say.
Exactly
like I say, Billy. There's no other way. Now go home.”

Moments later, from the hotel room window, he watched Billy cross the parking lot to his car. As he pulled away and out of sight, Joel could only wonder if he'd ever see him again.