When I had finally found Chealsy it was completely by chance. Connor, Garrett, and I had been in the car, sitting at a stop light while a crowd of people walked by. She was right there at the edge of the gagle. I unrolled the window.
"Hey! Chealsy! Over here!"
Her head whipped to the side upon hearing her name. When she saw me she made a beeline for the car, nearly getting mowed down by a truck in the process. In less time than it took to blink I found her pounding on the passenger side window. I unlocked the door, which she nearly ripped off the hinges from opening so wildly.
"What the fuck happened to you!? Where the hell is Waylon? Are these his kids?" She fired off the questions one after the other.
"Slow down," I glanced into the rearview at the back seat.
Garrett had curled into a quivering ball at all of the commotion, a few quiet sobs made their way out from him. Connor just sat there, staring back at me in the mirror with glazed over eyes.
"We can talk about this later. In private. Where can we go?"
Chealsy may have no filter or a sense of tact, but something in my voice or just the feeling in the car must of tipped her off that something big had happened. From the stop light and the street she directed me to the run down hotel she had been staying at. We walked into the dim room to find nothing other than a suitcase, a laptop, and Waylon's camera.
"Micky must still be out making calls, after Waylon disappeared I assumed Murkoff must have done something"
I walked into the room with Connor and Garrett following close behind "about that, I need to talk to you." I took a look at the kids, "Alone."
Without a word she walked over to me, the look on her face was one of worry. I stepped into the hall.
Before leaving she gave a quick "we'll be just outside" to the boys as reassurance. They didn't even look up as the door closed.
As soon as the handle clicked into place Chealsy's entire demeanor changed.
"Where the fuck is Waylon!?" the panic of her voice told me that she had her suspicions.
"Chealsy," there was no easy way to say it, "Waylon's dead."
"Shit! Those asshole sons of bitches couldn't even-" tears that hadn't been there a second ago ran from her eyes to her chin, only to drip down to the soiled carpet, "but, this shit was over. How could- I don't-! No!"
She sobbed for I don't know how long. At some point I ended up being her shoulder to cry on. She hadn't even been there through the worse of it, and she'd never been the crying type to begin with. Things must have taken a bigger toll on her than I'd realised.
"Hey, we need to do something about-"
"Not now!" she said between sobs
"But, the kids"
"...shit" with some amount of effort she pried herself from my shoulder. After only a second's pause she went back into the motel room without another word to me.
I'm not really sure when or where she got the idea to send the boys to live with their grandparents, and I have no idea how she figured out where they lived, but the whole mess was over much too fast for comfort. It was only a day or two afterwards that I was dropping off the boys on that snow covered doorstep in Iowa. There seemed to be something just wrong about it at the time. I haven't been able to put my finger on it, and I'm still missing most of the pieces, but-
Would you come off of it, everything seems so important to you now.
I wasn't that focused on it until you said something.
A near silent huff of static sounded off in my mind.
Either way, the only ones to have left the Zeichner facility alive were me, Connor and Garrett, and the dreamers. I had no damn clue as to what was going on, there were no leads in the documents as to how I could track down the dreamers, and the kids were, well kids, so they probably didn't know anything.
I sat quietly in my spot on the bus. There were maybe half a dozen people besides me, Greyhounds had not been a popular way to get around since the seventies, but it was my best bet for getting back to California to take a second look at Zeichner.
You won't find anything there.
Weren't you telling me to get out of Chicago before we got on the bus?
Only for the sake of leaving town, not for going on this wild goose chase.
This will go alot faster and be alot easier if you would just tell me what you know about the dreamers.
A response never came and I had to work to hold in a sigh.
With little else to do on the ride I rummaged through my duffle bag and pulled out the files on the Dreamers.
At least there weren't any nazi scientists involved with this one. At least not from what I could gather. Knowing that these things were supposed to be psychological weapons a few things made sense, the hallucinations, the feelings of paranoia, the fact that they were ridiculously strong meant that they could be dropped in just about anywhere. What the hell was Murkoff thinking? Scratch that, they were thinking of their wallets. It's been hours but I continued skimming the pages in front of me.
"...for all intensive purposes patients 14306-8, 14279-1, and 14868-1 exhibit power tracking capabilities. When exposed to various fields, be they electric, magnetic, or otherwise undefined the subjects automatically gravitate towards and attack the strongest source. Further testing suggests…"
Wait a second. Attracted to strong undefined fields.
Does that mean what I think it means?
…
Are these things following us? Is that why you were so eager to get the hell out town?
Maybe.
Why are you so-
Wait a second.
This is actually great.
No it's not. They are hunting us do you realise what this means?! You have no idea how serious this is.
I don't think you realise what this means. We can choose where and kind of when we go up against these things next.
That won't help! It's better if we just keep traveling the country, or better yet we could move to a different continent. Germany's a nice place.
No. We have to kill these things.
No, it's not our job to go around killing monsters.
That's not how you felt about murkoff.
That was revenge, and it was fun. Besides, I like causing death and destruction, the blind dreamers do the same, as far as I'm concerned we have a mutual goal.
Hold the damn phone. I'm nothing like those things, I have this thing called a conscience, and I'm not, you know, a complete and total monster.
Don't flatter yourself. We've been going around slaughtering Murkoff workers for the last few months. Do you really think that you're anything more than an unfeeling monster to them?
That's different. They killed people for profit.
And you kill people for revenge.
A few forced memories of dead and dieing Murkoff workers flashed before me: a manager driven to insanity, a regional supervisor bleeding to death on his kitchen floor, the company's head of security watching his intestines fall to the ground, and best of all the CEO falling out the window as a broken man
...and pleasure
It's not the same and you know it.
All I know is that you've run out of reasons to justify your quest for revenge- excuse me 'justice'- so now you're looking for a new pet project. And this one is going to get us killed.
You're just scared.
No, I'm reasonable.
The idea that it thought it was reasonable had me fighting the urge to gag and laugh at the same time. Knowing that there was no way I could out talk the Walrider I looked out the window in silence instead. If the dreamers were coming after me it probably would have been better if I'd stayed in Chicago. Actually, with the ammount of hell I'd raised at the courthouse and hospital, maybe it'd been better that I'd left. I couldn't help but get a bit twitchy, there was nothing I could do but wait until I got somewhere useful. I wasn't going to California any more, that much I decided, there was no reason to run that far, especially if I was waiting for the dreamers to catch up to me.
That's a terrible idea
Not now.
The only real thing to decide now was where I wanted this to happen. Somewhere empty would be the best choice, the fewer random people around, the better. Where was I now, the midwest? Missouri? Iowa? We passed a sign on the highway, 50 miles to Des Moines. So it was Iowa after all. That would work it was mostly farms around here, you could probably be miles away from another person without much trouble. And it was flatter than a table top, so visibility wasn't a problem. The dreamer from Chicago seemed to be weak to gun fire, getting something on short notice should not be undoable.
At least you're planning our doom, thank goodness for that.
I didn't bother to talk back. there were too many things on my mind, the most I could do now was to wait and to plan.