Categories > Celebrities > My Chemical Romance > The Halo Files
6. The Jessica Numbers
The motel room lay in a shambles. Frank’s wardrobe was festooned across the floor, the victim of a frantic last-minute search to find something that would cover Mikey’s bony ankles. The bathroom looked like some kind of gory crime scene; a stray plastic bag blew past like an artificial tumbleweed.
They made cold sandwiches out of leftovers to boost morale before tidying. It had occurred to Frank that it might be prudent to keep housekeeping out of the room as much as possible, to avoid evidence leaks and unfortunate sightings of a certain wanted arsonist. After they’d cleaned up the worst of it, he wandered around the side of the motel clutching a giant armful of laundry; visions of clean and ironed clothes danced tantalizingly before his eyes.
The back of the building was another world. The grass came up to Frank’s waist; a breeze stirred the dead stalks with a sound like the clacking of finger-bones. The detective’s progress left a swathe of bent, brittle stems that made him feel vaguely guilty. Paint was coming off the exterior wall in strips like birch bark, sagging tiredly onto discarded buckets and broken mops and rusting machinery. He stepped hesitantly through the rustling jungle, trying to see over his pile of dirty shirts and not trip over anything hidden in the underbrush. He came to the edge of the woods, surprised he’d managed to reach the run-down shed without incident. One brave chokecherry tree had grown out across the roof with great intent and was raining its purplish fruit down directly over the door. Frank felt a few unsettling impacts on his shoulders as he went inside.
The washer-dryer squatted amid a small army of brooms and rakes. He shouldered into the small space, resisting the urge to apologize, and managed to find half a box of detergent behind the door.
No point in coming out here again, he thought, and went back outside to wait for his clothes. The ground was slippery with rotten fruit; the detritus clung to his shoes even outside the chokecherry’s sphere of influence. He paused in his movements and listened for a minute to the trees whispering. Frank hadn’t been in the woods for a long time.
He began to walk, more out of boredom than out of a particular desire to get somewhere. As he left the yard behind, he realized it must have been a clearing long before the motel had been built. In his mind, it lost its sinister connotations of decaying metal and began to seem strangely peaceful. It was funny, the way things like that worked.
Slowly, although he didn’t want them to, his thoughts turned again to Gerard. He was tethered, a satellite that went around and around but couldn’t break loose, couldn’t stop thinking of him for too long. Gerard painted a sunny picture for his brother; he made death row seem like a playground. It was a far cry from the realities of his existence as he’d told them to Frank, and it made him wonder how easily the story unraveled for him could be false.
If it’s all a lie, I really am fucked, he thought. But he knew it wasn’t. He’d risked too much here for his intuition to be wrong.
It was never something he could really explain, his hunches. For years now he’d been shooting in the dark, but he always hit dead center. They’d loved that when he started — humor was scarce in the Bureau, and what could be funnier than a crack shot rookie, some meek Southern kid who had no idea why his answer was right, only that, instinctively, it was.
When Gerard laughed, the sound hit that sweet spot that lay somewhere between an old man dying and distant bells tolling. Frank felt like a schoolboy with his first crush, caught in some childish, confusing game of does he like me back? Only at his age, it came with a slew of this is wrong and you’ll lose your job and if he doesn’t, then what?
If he doesn’t, how can I make him?
He decided to laugh, and just wait, because it was hard but there was nothing else he could do.
It was fate, then, what happened next. There was nothing else it could conceivably be. He’d been barreling along, thinking only of the iridium implant in Gerard’s brain and the way his hands had felt when they were wrapped around the back of Frank’s neck, tight and calloused, and then suddenly his feet hit — nothing. There were no twigs, no leaf litter, just thick grass shaved so close to the ground that it resembled a smooth carpet. His eyes drifted upwards from the image of his dirty wingtips poking out onto manicured lawn. What he saw was so extraordinary that he hardly dared to breathe.
Impossible—
Because the clearing carved out of the woods was gigantic, big enough to house a football stadium, and there was nothing growing there but that eerily green grass, not even a dandelion. In the half-light, his eyes began to make out patterns, etched into the smooth surface, a series of perfect circles. As he gazed out across the field to the other side, it clicked. The third arm of the spiral was clearly visible, a geometric curve too perfect to be human. Frank Iero pressed a shaking hand to his mouth to hold in the words.
There's a crop circle in the woods behind my motel.
ʬ ʬ ʬ
He ran so fast he thought his lungs might burst. The twilight woods seemed to close in around him; every tree he passed could have someone — something — hiding behind it. The figures in his peripheral vision melted into harmless shadows when he turned to look at them full-on.
The small minority of his brain that wasn’t blank with shock or making up creatures to run from was berating the rest of him for not bringing a camera. He needed a picture to prove it was all some elaborate hoax, because Gerard couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. The man that had walked into his life barely a week ago had brought more than his fair share of nightmarish stories — it was alarming to think they might be real. Things had changed since he’d come home from work one tired night and practically tripped over the Halo Files. If someone had told him then what taking this case would entail, Frank would have laughed.
He made it back to the hotel without further incident, pounding on the door to the room until a bemused Mikey set aside his magazine and answered it. The rosy sense of peace that he’d been cultivating all afternoon disappeared as Frank threw the deadbolt and then doubled over, trying not to hack up a lung. He was making an embarrassing amount of noise; his sweating, panting form radiated panic like a beacon.
“Are you okay?” Mikey asked, tentatively laying a hand on the detective’s shoulder.
Frank looked up. “Yeah. Just spooked myself, I guess.”
Before all this, Mikey had been pondering his anonymity; having evaded detection right under the noses of the prison guards, he’d allowed himself to feel a small modicum of satisfaction. That sense of gratification had vanished without a trace into the black-hole terror that filled Frank’s eyes. “No.” He chewed his lip, trying to calculate what he could get away with saying. “You’re an FBI agent. You must see terrible things all the time; there can’t be much left in the world that you’re honestly afraid of. What did you see?”
The detective just shook his head and reached for the pad of paper on the nightstand. His heart was fluttering in his chest far too hard for a long-winded explanation. “Goddamn perceptive Ways,” Mikey thought he heard him mutter as he sketched hastily. When he’d finished his drawing, he cradled it close to his chest. “Promise me you won’t freak out.”
The younger Way’s brow furrowed. “All right.”
Frank showed him the paper. Only sheer will prevented his hands from shaking as Mikey’s wide eyes traced over the lines there, the series of intricate dots that formed a triple spiral. “A whole clearing had been cut into the woods, a hundred meters in diameter. It was about ten minutes’ walk that way.” Frank gestured vaguely behind them. “I could find it again if it was light out.”
Mikey seemed to be slowly curling in on himself. “Did you take photos?” he asked quietly, faltering.
“No. Can you tell me anything about it?”
“I mean, it’s a crop circle, but it’s not a normal one. Triples are called Julia sets, usually, except I’ve never seen one this complex before. Look at the angles there, how they shift to accommodate the extra patterning and keep it a perfect fractal. It’s a whole new kind of set.”
“The grass didn’t look native; I didn’t see any patches of it in the rest of the forest. And it was all the same length, like someone had mowed it. Do you—do you think it’s real?” Frank asked, swallowing hard.
Mikey turned to stare at him, equally solemn. His eyes had gone glassy and his face bore an expression of great concentration, as if he was staring hard at something Frank couldn’t quite see. “It’s certainly not fake.”
After a minute the phone rang. They both jumped.
“It’s been doing that for a while,” Mikey said absently. “I didn’t think I should answer it.” He went into the bathroom as Frank lifted the handset off of its cradle.
“Hello?”
“Agent Iero.”
“Simmons,” he stammered, surprised, and immediately tried to collect himself. “Sorry to make you wait. I was out today and didn’t know you were trying to get ahold of me.”
“It’s all right, Iero.” The Assistant Director sighed. “Listen, there’s no easy way to say this, but — you haven’t bumped into Mikey Way during the course of your investigation, have you?”
All of Frank’s hairs stood on end. “No, sir, I haven’t. I’ve been so focused on the interviewing process, I probably wouldn’t notice if I had. Has anything led you to believe he might be in the area?”
Simmons paused. Slowly, deliberately, he continued. The harsh depth of his voice cut through the static on the line. “Nothing that would hold up in court.”
“Well, I’ll keep an eye out for him, sir, and with the hard work of all the agents assigned to the case, I have no doubt he’ll be in the hands of the law soon. I don’t harbor any goodwill towards the man, myself.” He was talking too fast, he knew, and the rush of words might as well have been an admission of guilt.
“I trust you don’t, Agent Iero. You just try to get this thing wrapped up and come back to Quantico.”
His teeth were still chattering from the shock. Bracing himself, Frank pushed his luck. “Will that be all, sir?”
“One other thing. The warden at Florence ADX informed me that you brought a guest with you to one of your interviews, ‘a tall, dark-haired man with glasses’—”
“Oh, that—” Frank dragged a hand through his dirty hair, wracking his brains for a plausible reply. “—that was nothing, sir, just an associate of mine. I thought it might be useful to have a qualified psychologist take a look at Way, so I could get an official report of his mental state. The guy’s a longtime colleague; I would have introduced you, but he left the Bureau a few years back and opened up a private practice in Colorado. I didn’t know anyone else off the top of my head whose opinion I trusted.”
Simmons cleared his throat for long enough that Frank knew he wasn’t buying it. “I’d love to meet your friend in person sometime. Perhaps you can put us in touch.”
“Of course, sir. Not a problem.” Frank bit his lip almost hard enough to draw blood. All things considered, he was pretty fucked. “Um, I really should—”
“You do know, Frank, that helping a wanted criminal in any way makes you an accessory to the crimes he committed?” Simmons had been sitting at his desk too long. His back ached, and work was piling up no matter how many nights he stayed late. He didn’t want to have to doubt Iero on top of all that. “If you so much as talk to him…Christ, I’m putting my ass on the line for you already. I wouldn’t be able to protect you from the repercussions, and it would be both our necks on the chopping block.”
Frank heaved in a shaky breath. “I understand. I wouldn’t do that to you, sir.”
Simmons rubbed at his tired eyes. “I know you wouldn’t.”
ʬ ʬ ʬ
Mikey was lying in the empty bathtub, his skinny arms folded around equally bony knees. When Frank cracked the door and peered in, he was fingering his new hair, trying to get used to the texture.
“Hey,” Frank said softly.
Mikey looked up. “Hey,” he whispered back. “Did you get in trouble?”
“A little bit.” Frank shrugged. “Not enough to really matter.” When Mikey held a finger to his lips and beckoned him forward, he tentatively obeyed, shutting the door behind him.
Mikey was reclining in his cocoon. His breaths bounced around inside the porcelain, echoed like miniature ghosts. “It’s safe here,” he said, answering a question that it hadn’t occurred to Frank to ask. “They can’t hear us or get to us.”
“Okay.” The detective eyed him warily. He was immune, or perhaps not yet sensitive to, the feeling of impending danger that suffused every bone in Mikey’s body. “Who can’t?” His spine prickled when Mikey pointed solemnly upwards, past the web of cracks in the ceiling and up to the cold, distant stars. That single, hopeless gesture required no further explanation. “Not that I’m trying to…I don’t know, imply that your feelings are invalid, but you promised you wouldn’t freak out.”
“I didn’t shake on it,” Mikey said faintly. Then a thought occurred to him, and his eyes went dark. “Did I ever show you what they did? The scars…it’s an easy sort of proof; I carry it with me wherever I go. Maybe it would help you believe my story.”
He waited expectantly. Sensing he couldn’t really refuse, Frank nodded once. He looked away as Mikey sat up, knees knocking hollowly against the lip of the bathtub, and tugged his shirt over his head — force of habit, he thought, formed from long experience. He’d learned to avert his eyes instead of letting them skim over exposed skin, studying the barely-visible play of muscle and tendon that went on just underneath the surface. It fascinated him, but the attention made people uncomfortable.
Mikey didn’t seem to mind, though; he perched on the edge of the tub and stared into the array of chipped white tile on the far wall. His skin was pale, almost blue, his shoulders dusted with constellations of freckles. Two rows of thick, parallel scars ran all the way down his spine and disappeared under the waistband of his jeans. The cuts were unnaturally precise; Frank saw no signs of stitches, just a series of perfectly repeated angles. The blade of each shoulder bore a delicate little bulls’-eye tattooed into the skin. At the very center of each was a tiny round scar that distorted the ink. Frank heard a hiss of sympathy and realized afterward that it had come from his own mouth. He couldn’t help but come closer, leaning in to examine the long-healed traces of some horrific mutilation.
“You like them?” Mikey asked with the hint of a smile. “They’re pretty hard to refute. I mean, it wasn’t like I had polio as a kid or anything. It’s not like I asked for these on a whim.”
“I see what you mean,” Frank murmured, his face close enough that his breath skimmed over Mikey’s back and made him shiver. “I believe that you saw what you think you did. But where does that leave us?”
“In danger,” Mikey said immediately, soft, like he’d been punched in the gut. “They’ve come for me, Frank. You shouldn’t get dragged into all of this on my account. I should go.”
He was about to protest, but stopped himself with an effort. “I don’t want you to, in particular. But if it makes you feel safer. If you won’t feel better unless you leave, then I guess…it’s okay with me if you do.”
Mikey gazed at him for a moment with coal-black eyes. His knee twitched, tapping a muffled tattoo against the porcelain of the tub. “I’ll see you again,” was all he said before he got up and left the room. Frank sat there a moment, feeling like he was choking.
Ten minutes later, and his heart still hurt watching Mikey pack his last suitcase. The younger Way had played deaf-and-dumb to Frank’s increasingly illogical pleas that he didn’t need to leave, that Frank and the law could protect him. At one point he’d straightened up and laughed outright.
“No, you can’t. I imagine it must be comforting to think that your little standard-issue gun is some kind of talisman to ward off all evil, but it’s not, Frank. They will find me, and they will take me just like before. There’s nothing you or I can do except run.” Mikey flipped the latches on his suitcase and hefted it towards the door, resting its weight on one hip. He thought he might’ve come off too harsh. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, Agent Iero; I truly do. I probably won’t be able to call for a while, but rest assured, when everything blows over, I’ll let you know how I’m doing.”
“Goodbye, then,” Frank said numbly, and hugged him.
Mikey slung his case over one shoulder, deftly lit a cigarette with his free hand. “Goodbye,” he replied, before walking off into the night. His shape receded quickly into the darkness and left a solitary puff of smoke.
ʬ ʬ ʬ
It was nearly midnight before Frank realized he’d left his laundry in the shed. It took him another twenty minutes to talk himself into going back out there, into risking myriad painful deaths for the sake of a few shirts and some grubby socks.
Come on, he chided himself. You don’t really think a bunch of little green men are coming for you in flying saucers. Someone would take his clothes if he left them there all night.
He rifled through his things before he left, gathering supplies — his gun, a flashlight and a few flares, although he wasn’t sure what good they’d be if he was trying to avoid detection. The air was cool as he stepped outside, full of the relentless chirp-and-rustle of lonely insects seeking mates. He left the door unlocked behind him and headed around back. The beam of the flashlight illuminated everything too brightly; his eyes caught on funny shadows in the tall grass, and he couldn’t bring himself to shine it out into the trees. If something was there, Frank thought he’d prefer not to know.
He made it to the laundry shed without incident, shutting the plywood door behind him with a sense of relief. The walls surrounding him were stained with rust; the ceiling was veined with spiderwebs and their dangling occupants. He collected his clothes in record time, took one last deep breath, and headed back out. Every nerve in his body was tingling. Just setting foot outside the door set his hair on end. Following some sudden instinct, he skirted the open field in favor of the longer, quieter path around the margin of the grass. His breath caught in his throat. He imagined noises that broke the stillness, but none came, and it got so quiet he thought he might scream. Each twig he stepped on snapped beneath his foot like a gunshot.
He was almost back to the motel when it started. A humming, throbbing sound, so low it shook the ground beneath his feet. Frank staggered backward, his heart leaping into his throat. After a moment’s consideration, he turned the flashlight off and waited there, bright spots leaping in his field of vision. It took him a while to realize the spots weren’t fading; they weren’t his eyes adjusting to the dark. Blinking lights floated in the night sky, far too large and bright to be stars. He watched them trace lazy figure-eights as the buzzing grew slowly louder and louder. It began to hurt his ears. He didn’t know what he was seeing right now, couldn’t even — he clutched his laundry tightly. There was an eardrum-shattering crack, and one of the lights was filtering down now, shining a search beam onto the ground. It scanned the field slowly, methodically, almost as if it were searching…
Frank ran to his room as fast as his shaking legs could carry him. He locked the door from the inside and collapsed against it, sobbing as blinding white light shone through the curtains. Shit, shit, and he shoved a fist in his mouth to muffle the noises. And the light passed, leaving silence, and after a while the bugs started their relentless chorus again. Mikey was long gone; the bed was cold and unmade. Frank fell into it, too terrified to do anything else. For hours after the ships had passed, he lay there panting and heaving with fear.
ʬ ʬ ʬ
The motel room lay in a shambles. Frank’s wardrobe was festooned across the floor, the victim of a frantic last-minute search to find something that would cover Mikey’s bony ankles. The bathroom looked like some kind of gory crime scene; a stray plastic bag blew past like an artificial tumbleweed.
They made cold sandwiches out of leftovers to boost morale before tidying. It had occurred to Frank that it might be prudent to keep housekeeping out of the room as much as possible, to avoid evidence leaks and unfortunate sightings of a certain wanted arsonist. After they’d cleaned up the worst of it, he wandered around the side of the motel clutching a giant armful of laundry; visions of clean and ironed clothes danced tantalizingly before his eyes.
The back of the building was another world. The grass came up to Frank’s waist; a breeze stirred the dead stalks with a sound like the clacking of finger-bones. The detective’s progress left a swathe of bent, brittle stems that made him feel vaguely guilty. Paint was coming off the exterior wall in strips like birch bark, sagging tiredly onto discarded buckets and broken mops and rusting machinery. He stepped hesitantly through the rustling jungle, trying to see over his pile of dirty shirts and not trip over anything hidden in the underbrush. He came to the edge of the woods, surprised he’d managed to reach the run-down shed without incident. One brave chokecherry tree had grown out across the roof with great intent and was raining its purplish fruit down directly over the door. Frank felt a few unsettling impacts on his shoulders as he went inside.
The washer-dryer squatted amid a small army of brooms and rakes. He shouldered into the small space, resisting the urge to apologize, and managed to find half a box of detergent behind the door.
No point in coming out here again, he thought, and went back outside to wait for his clothes. The ground was slippery with rotten fruit; the detritus clung to his shoes even outside the chokecherry’s sphere of influence. He paused in his movements and listened for a minute to the trees whispering. Frank hadn’t been in the woods for a long time.
He began to walk, more out of boredom than out of a particular desire to get somewhere. As he left the yard behind, he realized it must have been a clearing long before the motel had been built. In his mind, it lost its sinister connotations of decaying metal and began to seem strangely peaceful. It was funny, the way things like that worked.
Slowly, although he didn’t want them to, his thoughts turned again to Gerard. He was tethered, a satellite that went around and around but couldn’t break loose, couldn’t stop thinking of him for too long. Gerard painted a sunny picture for his brother; he made death row seem like a playground. It was a far cry from the realities of his existence as he’d told them to Frank, and it made him wonder how easily the story unraveled for him could be false.
If it’s all a lie, I really am fucked, he thought. But he knew it wasn’t. He’d risked too much here for his intuition to be wrong.
It was never something he could really explain, his hunches. For years now he’d been shooting in the dark, but he always hit dead center. They’d loved that when he started — humor was scarce in the Bureau, and what could be funnier than a crack shot rookie, some meek Southern kid who had no idea why his answer was right, only that, instinctively, it was.
When Gerard laughed, the sound hit that sweet spot that lay somewhere between an old man dying and distant bells tolling. Frank felt like a schoolboy with his first crush, caught in some childish, confusing game of does he like me back? Only at his age, it came with a slew of this is wrong and you’ll lose your job and if he doesn’t, then what?
If he doesn’t, how can I make him?
He decided to laugh, and just wait, because it was hard but there was nothing else he could do.
It was fate, then, what happened next. There was nothing else it could conceivably be. He’d been barreling along, thinking only of the iridium implant in Gerard’s brain and the way his hands had felt when they were wrapped around the back of Frank’s neck, tight and calloused, and then suddenly his feet hit — nothing. There were no twigs, no leaf litter, just thick grass shaved so close to the ground that it resembled a smooth carpet. His eyes drifted upwards from the image of his dirty wingtips poking out onto manicured lawn. What he saw was so extraordinary that he hardly dared to breathe.
Impossible—
Because the clearing carved out of the woods was gigantic, big enough to house a football stadium, and there was nothing growing there but that eerily green grass, not even a dandelion. In the half-light, his eyes began to make out patterns, etched into the smooth surface, a series of perfect circles. As he gazed out across the field to the other side, it clicked. The third arm of the spiral was clearly visible, a geometric curve too perfect to be human. Frank Iero pressed a shaking hand to his mouth to hold in the words.
There's a crop circle in the woods behind my motel.
ʬ ʬ ʬ
He ran so fast he thought his lungs might burst. The twilight woods seemed to close in around him; every tree he passed could have someone — something — hiding behind it. The figures in his peripheral vision melted into harmless shadows when he turned to look at them full-on.
The small minority of his brain that wasn’t blank with shock or making up creatures to run from was berating the rest of him for not bringing a camera. He needed a picture to prove it was all some elaborate hoax, because Gerard couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. The man that had walked into his life barely a week ago had brought more than his fair share of nightmarish stories — it was alarming to think they might be real. Things had changed since he’d come home from work one tired night and practically tripped over the Halo Files. If someone had told him then what taking this case would entail, Frank would have laughed.
He made it back to the hotel without further incident, pounding on the door to the room until a bemused Mikey set aside his magazine and answered it. The rosy sense of peace that he’d been cultivating all afternoon disappeared as Frank threw the deadbolt and then doubled over, trying not to hack up a lung. He was making an embarrassing amount of noise; his sweating, panting form radiated panic like a beacon.
“Are you okay?” Mikey asked, tentatively laying a hand on the detective’s shoulder.
Frank looked up. “Yeah. Just spooked myself, I guess.”
Before all this, Mikey had been pondering his anonymity; having evaded detection right under the noses of the prison guards, he’d allowed himself to feel a small modicum of satisfaction. That sense of gratification had vanished without a trace into the black-hole terror that filled Frank’s eyes. “No.” He chewed his lip, trying to calculate what he could get away with saying. “You’re an FBI agent. You must see terrible things all the time; there can’t be much left in the world that you’re honestly afraid of. What did you see?”
The detective just shook his head and reached for the pad of paper on the nightstand. His heart was fluttering in his chest far too hard for a long-winded explanation. “Goddamn perceptive Ways,” Mikey thought he heard him mutter as he sketched hastily. When he’d finished his drawing, he cradled it close to his chest. “Promise me you won’t freak out.”
The younger Way’s brow furrowed. “All right.”
Frank showed him the paper. Only sheer will prevented his hands from shaking as Mikey’s wide eyes traced over the lines there, the series of intricate dots that formed a triple spiral. “A whole clearing had been cut into the woods, a hundred meters in diameter. It was about ten minutes’ walk that way.” Frank gestured vaguely behind them. “I could find it again if it was light out.”
Mikey seemed to be slowly curling in on himself. “Did you take photos?” he asked quietly, faltering.
“No. Can you tell me anything about it?”
“I mean, it’s a crop circle, but it’s not a normal one. Triples are called Julia sets, usually, except I’ve never seen one this complex before. Look at the angles there, how they shift to accommodate the extra patterning and keep it a perfect fractal. It’s a whole new kind of set.”
“The grass didn’t look native; I didn’t see any patches of it in the rest of the forest. And it was all the same length, like someone had mowed it. Do you—do you think it’s real?” Frank asked, swallowing hard.
Mikey turned to stare at him, equally solemn. His eyes had gone glassy and his face bore an expression of great concentration, as if he was staring hard at something Frank couldn’t quite see. “It’s certainly not fake.”
After a minute the phone rang. They both jumped.
“It’s been doing that for a while,” Mikey said absently. “I didn’t think I should answer it.” He went into the bathroom as Frank lifted the handset off of its cradle.
“Hello?”
“Agent Iero.”
“Simmons,” he stammered, surprised, and immediately tried to collect himself. “Sorry to make you wait. I was out today and didn’t know you were trying to get ahold of me.”
“It’s all right, Iero.” The Assistant Director sighed. “Listen, there’s no easy way to say this, but — you haven’t bumped into Mikey Way during the course of your investigation, have you?”
All of Frank’s hairs stood on end. “No, sir, I haven’t. I’ve been so focused on the interviewing process, I probably wouldn’t notice if I had. Has anything led you to believe he might be in the area?”
Simmons paused. Slowly, deliberately, he continued. The harsh depth of his voice cut through the static on the line. “Nothing that would hold up in court.”
“Well, I’ll keep an eye out for him, sir, and with the hard work of all the agents assigned to the case, I have no doubt he’ll be in the hands of the law soon. I don’t harbor any goodwill towards the man, myself.” He was talking too fast, he knew, and the rush of words might as well have been an admission of guilt.
“I trust you don’t, Agent Iero. You just try to get this thing wrapped up and come back to Quantico.”
His teeth were still chattering from the shock. Bracing himself, Frank pushed his luck. “Will that be all, sir?”
“One other thing. The warden at Florence ADX informed me that you brought a guest with you to one of your interviews, ‘a tall, dark-haired man with glasses’—”
“Oh, that—” Frank dragged a hand through his dirty hair, wracking his brains for a plausible reply. “—that was nothing, sir, just an associate of mine. I thought it might be useful to have a qualified psychologist take a look at Way, so I could get an official report of his mental state. The guy’s a longtime colleague; I would have introduced you, but he left the Bureau a few years back and opened up a private practice in Colorado. I didn’t know anyone else off the top of my head whose opinion I trusted.”
Simmons cleared his throat for long enough that Frank knew he wasn’t buying it. “I’d love to meet your friend in person sometime. Perhaps you can put us in touch.”
“Of course, sir. Not a problem.” Frank bit his lip almost hard enough to draw blood. All things considered, he was pretty fucked. “Um, I really should—”
“You do know, Frank, that helping a wanted criminal in any way makes you an accessory to the crimes he committed?” Simmons had been sitting at his desk too long. His back ached, and work was piling up no matter how many nights he stayed late. He didn’t want to have to doubt Iero on top of all that. “If you so much as talk to him…Christ, I’m putting my ass on the line for you already. I wouldn’t be able to protect you from the repercussions, and it would be both our necks on the chopping block.”
Frank heaved in a shaky breath. “I understand. I wouldn’t do that to you, sir.”
Simmons rubbed at his tired eyes. “I know you wouldn’t.”
ʬ ʬ ʬ
Mikey was lying in the empty bathtub, his skinny arms folded around equally bony knees. When Frank cracked the door and peered in, he was fingering his new hair, trying to get used to the texture.
“Hey,” Frank said softly.
Mikey looked up. “Hey,” he whispered back. “Did you get in trouble?”
“A little bit.” Frank shrugged. “Not enough to really matter.” When Mikey held a finger to his lips and beckoned him forward, he tentatively obeyed, shutting the door behind him.
Mikey was reclining in his cocoon. His breaths bounced around inside the porcelain, echoed like miniature ghosts. “It’s safe here,” he said, answering a question that it hadn’t occurred to Frank to ask. “They can’t hear us or get to us.”
“Okay.” The detective eyed him warily. He was immune, or perhaps not yet sensitive to, the feeling of impending danger that suffused every bone in Mikey’s body. “Who can’t?” His spine prickled when Mikey pointed solemnly upwards, past the web of cracks in the ceiling and up to the cold, distant stars. That single, hopeless gesture required no further explanation. “Not that I’m trying to…I don’t know, imply that your feelings are invalid, but you promised you wouldn’t freak out.”
“I didn’t shake on it,” Mikey said faintly. Then a thought occurred to him, and his eyes went dark. “Did I ever show you what they did? The scars…it’s an easy sort of proof; I carry it with me wherever I go. Maybe it would help you believe my story.”
He waited expectantly. Sensing he couldn’t really refuse, Frank nodded once. He looked away as Mikey sat up, knees knocking hollowly against the lip of the bathtub, and tugged his shirt over his head — force of habit, he thought, formed from long experience. He’d learned to avert his eyes instead of letting them skim over exposed skin, studying the barely-visible play of muscle and tendon that went on just underneath the surface. It fascinated him, but the attention made people uncomfortable.
Mikey didn’t seem to mind, though; he perched on the edge of the tub and stared into the array of chipped white tile on the far wall. His skin was pale, almost blue, his shoulders dusted with constellations of freckles. Two rows of thick, parallel scars ran all the way down his spine and disappeared under the waistband of his jeans. The cuts were unnaturally precise; Frank saw no signs of stitches, just a series of perfectly repeated angles. The blade of each shoulder bore a delicate little bulls’-eye tattooed into the skin. At the very center of each was a tiny round scar that distorted the ink. Frank heard a hiss of sympathy and realized afterward that it had come from his own mouth. He couldn’t help but come closer, leaning in to examine the long-healed traces of some horrific mutilation.
“You like them?” Mikey asked with the hint of a smile. “They’re pretty hard to refute. I mean, it wasn’t like I had polio as a kid or anything. It’s not like I asked for these on a whim.”
“I see what you mean,” Frank murmured, his face close enough that his breath skimmed over Mikey’s back and made him shiver. “I believe that you saw what you think you did. But where does that leave us?”
“In danger,” Mikey said immediately, soft, like he’d been punched in the gut. “They’ve come for me, Frank. You shouldn’t get dragged into all of this on my account. I should go.”
He was about to protest, but stopped himself with an effort. “I don’t want you to, in particular. But if it makes you feel safer. If you won’t feel better unless you leave, then I guess…it’s okay with me if you do.”
Mikey gazed at him for a moment with coal-black eyes. His knee twitched, tapping a muffled tattoo against the porcelain of the tub. “I’ll see you again,” was all he said before he got up and left the room. Frank sat there a moment, feeling like he was choking.
Ten minutes later, and his heart still hurt watching Mikey pack his last suitcase. The younger Way had played deaf-and-dumb to Frank’s increasingly illogical pleas that he didn’t need to leave, that Frank and the law could protect him. At one point he’d straightened up and laughed outright.
“No, you can’t. I imagine it must be comforting to think that your little standard-issue gun is some kind of talisman to ward off all evil, but it’s not, Frank. They will find me, and they will take me just like before. There’s nothing you or I can do except run.” Mikey flipped the latches on his suitcase and hefted it towards the door, resting its weight on one hip. He thought he might’ve come off too harsh. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, Agent Iero; I truly do. I probably won’t be able to call for a while, but rest assured, when everything blows over, I’ll let you know how I’m doing.”
“Goodbye, then,” Frank said numbly, and hugged him.
Mikey slung his case over one shoulder, deftly lit a cigarette with his free hand. “Goodbye,” he replied, before walking off into the night. His shape receded quickly into the darkness and left a solitary puff of smoke.
ʬ ʬ ʬ
It was nearly midnight before Frank realized he’d left his laundry in the shed. It took him another twenty minutes to talk himself into going back out there, into risking myriad painful deaths for the sake of a few shirts and some grubby socks.
Come on, he chided himself. You don’t really think a bunch of little green men are coming for you in flying saucers. Someone would take his clothes if he left them there all night.
He rifled through his things before he left, gathering supplies — his gun, a flashlight and a few flares, although he wasn’t sure what good they’d be if he was trying to avoid detection. The air was cool as he stepped outside, full of the relentless chirp-and-rustle of lonely insects seeking mates. He left the door unlocked behind him and headed around back. The beam of the flashlight illuminated everything too brightly; his eyes caught on funny shadows in the tall grass, and he couldn’t bring himself to shine it out into the trees. If something was there, Frank thought he’d prefer not to know.
He made it to the laundry shed without incident, shutting the plywood door behind him with a sense of relief. The walls surrounding him were stained with rust; the ceiling was veined with spiderwebs and their dangling occupants. He collected his clothes in record time, took one last deep breath, and headed back out. Every nerve in his body was tingling. Just setting foot outside the door set his hair on end. Following some sudden instinct, he skirted the open field in favor of the longer, quieter path around the margin of the grass. His breath caught in his throat. He imagined noises that broke the stillness, but none came, and it got so quiet he thought he might scream. Each twig he stepped on snapped beneath his foot like a gunshot.
He was almost back to the motel when it started. A humming, throbbing sound, so low it shook the ground beneath his feet. Frank staggered backward, his heart leaping into his throat. After a moment’s consideration, he turned the flashlight off and waited there, bright spots leaping in his field of vision. It took him a while to realize the spots weren’t fading; they weren’t his eyes adjusting to the dark. Blinking lights floated in the night sky, far too large and bright to be stars. He watched them trace lazy figure-eights as the buzzing grew slowly louder and louder. It began to hurt his ears. He didn’t know what he was seeing right now, couldn’t even — he clutched his laundry tightly. There was an eardrum-shattering crack, and one of the lights was filtering down now, shining a search beam onto the ground. It scanned the field slowly, methodically, almost as if it were searching…
Frank ran to his room as fast as his shaking legs could carry him. He locked the door from the inside and collapsed against it, sobbing as blinding white light shone through the curtains. Shit, shit, and he shoved a fist in his mouth to muffle the noises. And the light passed, leaving silence, and after a while the bugs started their relentless chorus again. Mikey was long gone; the bed was cold and unmade. Frank fell into it, too terrified to do anything else. For hours after the ships had passed, he lay there panting and heaving with fear.
ʬ ʬ ʬ
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