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Major sat through the hearing at his lawyer's side trying his best to follow the instructions he'd been given: Sit up, be alert, and look like the kind of clean-cut All-American football player who would never in a million years kidnap and kill rich people. That one should have been easy for him—other than the fact that he'd been blackmailed into kidnapping rich people, he was exactly that kind of All-American boy. He'd even been a Boy Scout, for heaven's sake!
But now he was rapidly becoming less and less Major Lilywhite and more and more hungry zombie. Every minute that passed without brains felt like an eternity. Every time someone spoke to him, he stared at their heads as if he was listening but actually he was thinking about how tender and juicy their brain would be, how filling and satisfying.
As he sat there, looking as alert as he could, he was mostly letting the words spoken by the lawyers wash over him in a meaningless blur of sound. Sound made by brains, he thought longingly.
At last everyone was standing, so he stood, too, trying not to sway in his utter exhaustion. Only when his lawyer turned to him with a clap on the back and some more words that sounded like waves breaking on the shore in his ears, like the inside of a seashell, did he realize he was able to leave. To go home. To sink into his warm bed, to eat—
"Let's get you home," said a familiar voice, cutting through the fog of hunger. An equally familiar arm wrapped around his waist just as he was about to reach for that big fat lawyer brain.
Major looked down to see Liv there. "Liv."
"It's me. Come on, let's get you out of this crowd before—well, fast." She glanced up at him. "Faster than fast."
There were so many people. So many brains.
"Liv, what happened?"
"In the courtroom? Weren't you listening?"
"I'm so hungry."
"I know. We're getting you out of here, just hold on." She found a space between two people and maneuvered Major through it. He was content to let her lead; he trusted her. When they were in the flow of the crowd, moving as best they could, Liv said, "You've been charged with the Chaos Killings, but they let you out on bail."
"Bail?" What he meant was that he hoped Liv and Ravi hadn't spent their money on bail.
"Yeah. Max Rager put it up."
"Max Rager?" God, he sounded like an idiot, repeating everything she said. He supposed it made sense that Max Rager would put up his bail—after all, they didn't want the truth coming out any more than he did.
At last they were outside the jail. The fresh air on his face helped, as did Liv's comforting presence at his side.
"Okay," she said as they started down the steps. "Almost there. Ravi's waiting for us in the car," she told him, ignoring all the reporters who kept trying to shove microphones in Major's face. "And there's a nice shake with your name on it."
He sighed in relief. Almost there, then. This nightmare was almost over.
There was a TV camera pointed at him now. He was not going to look good on the nightly news. Once that would have mattered. Right now, he wondered what would happen if he tore the camera out of the man's hands and ripped his skull open with his bare hands.
Whoa. No ripping of skulls, he thought. None of that.
"Okay," Liv said again. He dimly understood that she kept talking in order to keep him with her, to keep him Major. "Just down the steps. Another hundred feet, and we're home free."
He could see the car ahead of them. Ravi got out, holding a shake in his hand. Major's mouth watered. He could almost taste it. It would taste—well, it would taste horrible, but it would feel so good once it was in his veins, warming him all the way through.
"Sure," he said to Liv, feeling bad that she'd been doing all the talking. "Thank you."
They kept moving down the steps. Which were endless. Was this the Twilight Zone? Would he be moving down these steps with Liv at his side forever? Sure, it was better to have Liv at his side than go it alone the way he had in jail, the way he had all these months as the Chaos Killer, but he wanted the steps to end, the nightmare to end, this whole life as something he hated to end. He wanted a cure.
Liv looked up at him, worried. "Almost there," she assured him. "Almost there. Almost—"
By the car, Ravi lifted the shake cup in a silent toast, smiling.
Then a large man in a uniform stopped in front of Major, blocking his way. For a moment, Major considered tackling him, just like they were on the football field, and making a run for it. He could maybe get to Ravi, close enough to grab the cup and take a life-renewing chug of those beautiful brains …
"Excuse us," Liv said, "we—"
Clive pushed his way through, past the big man in the uniform. "Major Lilywhite, you're under arrest."
How could he be under arrest? He'd been granted bail.
At his side, Liv said, "Clive, what—what are you—?"
"You're under arrest for the Meat Cute murders," Clive said triumphantly.
He'd wanted to nail Major for those murders for such a long time. What had happened to let him do it now? Was this grandstanding to keep Major in jail, to hope he would crack eventually? They had to have noticed how badly he was doing in jail, even though they didn't know why. Maybe they thought if they came at him from a different angle it would throw him just enough off-guard to make him slip up and tell them something.
But whatever they thought—he'd been just steps away from the life-giving brains in the cup Ravi was holding, and now he was going back to jail, back to sitting and shivering and fighting to remember who he was and who Liv was and why he couldn't have the brains that were so close and so tempting.
Clive was reading him his rights, taking him by the arm and dragging him away from Liv, from Ravi, from the brains.
They dragged him straight back to the precinct, where his lawyer was waiting for him. At least that was something—at least he wasn't sitting through this interrogation on his own. He had someone to speak for him.
Major was chained to the table—probably a good precaution, considering that Clive's brains sounded damned good right about now—and his lawyer had some papers spread out on the table that he was studying.
"Detective," he said in annoyance as Clive came into the room, "I don't even know where to begin. Constitution, maybe? Arresting my client again after he's just been charged, that is textbook cruel and unusual. I mean, look at him. Look at my client. He looks like a …" He studied Major, trying to come up with the right analogy, eventually settling on "day old-dog dump." He leaned over to Major. "No offense."
None taken. Major felt about like that—only if the dog dump was in a horror movie and it was endlessly hungry for brains.
Clive ignored it all, taking off his jacket and carefully hanging it on the back of his chair. "Bryce Butin. Name ring a bell?" he asked Major.
Major knew better than to answer. Not that the name meant anything to him in this state. Maybe it would have if his brains hadn't been busy wanting other people's brains.
"Inmate at King County," Clive went on. "Claims he sold you some items. A Grizzly twelve-gauge, Smith & Wesson .44. A hand grenade."
Oh. That guy. Crap, they found that guy? Maybe this was more than a tactic. Maybe Clive really had found the evidence he'd been looking for all this, something hard that could connect Major to Meat Cute.
"All of which match shells and slugs found at the Meat Cute massacre site."
Stone looked up from the paper he'd been jotting notes on. "Okay, slow down a second, I'm just getting up to speed here. Just slow down."
Clive ignored him, continuing on with the layout of his evidence. "Which is interesting because I also had them test some urine found in the Meat Cute freezer, and guess what?"
Major didn't have to guess. He knew. He remembered that freezer all too well.
Leaning across the table, Clive said, "It matched your DNA."
"You're saying my client shot up a butcher shop and peed in the freezer?"
"You used to do social work, isn't that right, Major?"
Had he? It was hard to remember.
"Working with troubled kids?"
"Don't answer that," Stone told him.
"Yeah," Major said, tired of sitting in misery. Clive already knew this part anyway.
"And several of your kids wound up dead. Isn't that right?"
Major nodded a little. Or his head bobbed in weariness. It was hard to say which.
"There was a kid in the Meat Cute freezer. His brain missing. He was one of yours."
"Missing brain, what?" Stone asked, clearly thinking someone in the room had gone a little over the deep end.
"Yeah," Clive said. "That's come up a lot, brains. Missing brains, brains in people's freezers."
Major really wished they could stop talking about brains.
"Here's my theory," Clive told him. "There's some kind of weird brain cult out there. They killed some of your kids, you went after them."
"Okay," Stone said, throwing up his hands, "can we just get Jules Verne in here, because I am only licensed to practice law in this dimension, all right?" He turned to Major. "What the hell is he talking about? Don't answer that."
Clive got to his feet. "I want you to think about your next move, Major." He leaned across the table, looking Major in the eye, and Major did his best to hear the words and not the siren call of the brains. "This case is different. We've got bodies, we've got DNA, we've got witnesses. I think we've got you. So just think about it."
What Clive didn't know was that Major's thinking time was numbered. Before too long, he would lose this fight and give in to the primal urge of his body to feast on a brain—and then the entire city, the country, would have a problem. If only he could have reached Ravi in time for just one sip!
He would have to trust that Liv and Ravi would think of something. They had to, because time was running out.