As Far as the Sky, part 7
May. 31st, 2008 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamcranverPart 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
“Hmm,” Gabe said, leaning over the front of the van. Somebody’d done a real number on it—the frayed end of wires, pulled apart, were spread everywhere, the oil was drained, and the engine actually seemed detached from the car.
“So…this is Bob Bryar’s van?” Patrick asked. His heart had been in his throat since they’d found the van, abandoned, in a rest stop parking lot, and now he was almost afraid to breathe.
Ryland, who’d pressed his face to the back window, straightened up. “Probably,” he said. “The back’s full of sound equipment.”
Victoria made a scornful noise in the back of her throat and jerked a thumb towards the licence plate. “Plate numbers match, dumbass. It’s definitely Bryar’s.”
“Well, what the hell happened to it?” Pete asked irritably. He walked back and forth, peering through the windows as if there was some clue in the van as to where its passengers had gone.
“Hell if I know,” said Gabe with an elaborate shrug. “I mean, even if the guy switched vehicles, why would he trash his own van?”
“To throw us off the trail?” Nate suggested, but Gabe shook his head.
“How would that throw us off the trail? We already know it’s his van, we already know he was traveling with the kids.” He frowned. “I don’t know, maybe he gets himself another car and then somebody else trashes the car, but why? That sound stuff in the back’s worth something, but they didn’t take any.”
There are bad guys after us, Mikey and Gerard had said in their note. As far as they knew, Patrick thought, Bob Bryar might not have even known the kids were hitching a ride, and there was no way that Mikey and Gerard would have gotten into a “bad guy’s” van. “Maybe…,” he said slowly, “whoever the boys thought was after them wanted to stop them from getting away.”
“You really think someone’s after them?” asked Gabe, one eyebrow raised.
At this point, Patrick really didn’t know what to think. He just hoped that whoever the boys had been frightened of hadn’t taken them from Bryar’s van, leaving the van as a mocking reminder of Pete and Patrick’s own complete incompetence at finding a couple of pre-adolescent boys.
“Hey,” Alex said, “whether someone’s after them or not, I say we get local law enforcement involved.” He pulled out his cell phone. “I know people.”
“Jesus Christ, Suarez,” said Pete. He sounded impressed, but his fake smile wasn’t too convincing. “You really get around, don’t you?”
“You know it,” Gabe said, draping an arm around Alex. “The Cobra never misses its man. Or kids, as the case may be.”
Alex shrugged Gabe’s arm off. “Not now, dude,” he said, holding the cell phone to his ear. He turned to speak into the receiver. “Yo, this is Alex Suarez. Put Chief McCoy on. Hey, Travis! Dude, this is gonna sound a little nuts, but I need a favor.”
**
“Fuck!” Agent Palmer slammed her hand into the dashboard.
Agent Viglione, disappointed on his own account but familiar enough with his partner’s rages to know when to stay quiet, sent a quick text message to Ivarsson, updating her on the pursuit.
“Did the fucker steal a car?” asked Palmer, her tone deceptively conversational. “Is he suddenly buddies with the fucking rest stop attendants? Did a spaceship come down and take them all back to the mothership?” Her voice was getting progressively louder. “Maybe he’s an alien, too, and he teleported their asses out of there! In fact, I think that must be it, because otherwise, I can’t think how a man with three small children and no working vehicle could fucking vanish from a rest stop in Bum Fuck, New Jersey!”
“You done?” asked Viglione.
Palmer took a deep breath. “Yeah,” she said in a more normal tone of voice. “They must have taken off from a vehicle in the back lot, but I didn’t get a look at any of the cars back there.”
“I did, while you were looking under the hood of the van. A green Ford sedan and a beat-up old recreational vehicle.”
She rewarded him with a brilliant smile. “Brian, you are the man.”
“I know,” said Viglione with a smirk. “What say we call the local law enforcement and set up a roadblock or two?”
Palmer frowned thoughtfully. “A little old-school,” she said. “But sometimes I guess that’s the best way to do it.” She grinned and pulled the car back into Drive.
**
Gerard had never thought he would ever hit a point where he’d be too tired to be scared, but as he and Mikey curled up on one of the bunks in Ray’s camper, he couldn’t muster any thought more serious than that Ray had really good taste in music.
Frank was clearly thinking along similar lines. “Yo, Ray,” he said, “what CD is this? It rocks!”
“This?” Ray said, sounding a little startled. “Um. It’s Iron Maiden, The Number of the Beast. You a metal fan?”
Frank shrugged from his position on the floor. He looked even littler than usual, his knees against his chest as he leaned against the wall by the bunks. “Not really,” he said, “but this is pretty good.”
“They’re music connoisseurs,” said Bob drily from the passenger’s seat. Gerard thought he was probably making fun of them, but it didn’t sound terribly mean, and Gerard was way too tired to protest.
“Hey,” he said, poking Mikey in the back. Mikey’d been a silent lump on the bunk for the last half hour or so—even when Gerard reached out mentally, Mikey felt a million miles away. It was weird.
Mikey rolled over and blinked, dazed-looking. Are we there yet? he asked.
“No,” said Gerard, then he raised his voice. “Mikey wants to know when we’re gonna get there.”
Bob and Ray exchanged looks in the front seat, like they were still sort of figuring each other out. “Well,” Ray said, “I know you guys have a specific destination in mind, but I’d kind of like to keep those guys from figuring out where you’re going, if they’re following us. So….”
“Bert and Quinn—some guys I know--have a cabin around Cork Valley,” Bob broke in.
Ray nodded. “Lotta people do, for fishing and stuff.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not what they do up there,” said Bob with a snort, but he looked back at Mikey and Frank and Gerard and shut his mouth. His friends probably had sex up there, Gerard thought. That was the kind of thing that adults always tried and failed to hide from kids, as if they didn’t know what people did in bed.
Mikey was getting a sort of spaced-out look again, and Gerard made a mental note to ask him what he was seeing after he figured out what was going on. “So,” he said, “do you guys wanna go to the cabin and hide out or something?” This whole thing was only supposed to take a day, he thought with vague disappointment. Still, better late than never.
Ray shot Bob a look. “If it’s okay with you,” he said.
Bob shrugged and said, “I’m not the one on the run.” He twisted around in his seat to look at Mikey and Gerard. “Are you guys gonna be okay not figuring out the whole map thing until you get some psychic message that those people aren’t following us anymore?”
“I guess,” said Gerard, but he wasn’t really paying attention anymore. Mikey was getting that look on his face that always meant he was remembering something Gerard couldn’t. He poked Mikey in the shoulder again. “Mikey! Snap out of it!”
Frank perked up. “What’s he doing?”
“Ouch,” said Mikey, putting a hand to his shoulder. “You didn’t have to poke so hard.”
Gerard sighed. “Sorry.”
“I was just thinking…well, Ray was talking about fishing, so I started thinking about fishing—I mean, not that I’ve ever been fishing, but the idea, you know. And…I remembered being in a boat.”
“The one that crashed?” asked Frank.
Mikey shook his head. “No, this was afterwards. It was, like, a Coast Guard boat. They were pulling us out of the water and wrapping us up in blankets, because we had frostbite or something. And they kept asking us stuff, but we didn’t understand what they were saying, and we just kept saying our names were Mikey and Gerard Way.”
Gerard blinked. “Wait, our last name’s Way?” That was more useful information than anything else Mikey’d remembered so far.
“Well, that’s the thing,” said Mikey, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I don’t think it is. I think we couldn’t pronounce whatever our last name was, so we just said it was Way because we could pronounce that.”
“Why wouldn’t we be able to pronounce our own name?” asked Gerard. Even if they hadn’t been able to speak English, which seemed to have been the case, it didn’t make a lot of sense. Gerard had been, like, five years old—that was plenty old enough to know his own name.
Mikey shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s all I remembered.”
“That’s pretty trippy,” said Ray from the driver’s seat. “So, wait, you guys are trying to find your biological family, but you don’t know their name?”
“It’s complicated.” Gerard sighed. All he really wanted to do was take a nap, but he was terrified that if he closed his eyes, he’d wake up to find that the people chasing them had caught them, and something terrible had happened to Frank and Bob and Ray.
Mikey blinked and gave him a crooked little half smile, leaning against Gerard’s chest. I think it’s okay, for now at least.
“Hey, Mikey,” Bob said, “can I see your starcase for a minute? I’d like to show Ray that map again.”
Mikey groaned, but he pulled himself out of the bunk to hand it to Bob without complaining. Gerard supposed he could have floated it over, but his head was starting to hurt.
“Look at this,” Bob said, pointing at something. “You see this line here? I’ve been looking through your atlas here, and this line isn’t a road or anything. I’m thinking it’s a trail.”
“Well, there are a ton of trails in those mountains,” Ray said, leaning over to peer quickly at the starcase before returning his attention to the road.
“That’s what I thought,” said Bob. “So why mark this one, unless it’s the one we’re—I mean, the boys are supposed to take?”
Ray looked over at the starcase again. “So, wait,” he said, as if Bob hadn’t said anything. “Lemme get this straight. You’ve had this thing, this starcase, what, how long, Mikey?”
“Forever,” Gerard answered, too tired to explain about the whole memory loss thing.
“Okay, and you never asked to go to the places on this map before? Why now?”
“We just found the map a couple months ago,” Frank piped up. “The starcase got broken in a fight, and we were trying to fix it.”
“What are you getting at?” Bob asked, frowning.
“Just, I mean, isn’t it kind of weird to hide a map like that? Why do you even have this starcase? Who’d put a map in there for you to follow and then hide it?”
Gerard’s brain felt fuzzy with exhaustion, but he struggled to think. “Maybe whoever gave it to us wanted to keep it a secret,” he said. And it made sense, because if they came from people as strange as Mikey and Gerard, those people would probably want to keep under the radar. “And…I don’t know, maybe they just figured we’d find it out or that we knew where it was, but they didn’t want anyone else to know about it.”
“Yeah, but…” Gerard had buried his face in the pillow, so he couldn’t see Ray, but he could picture him biting his lip. “It seems like an awful lot of trouble, doesn’t it? To carve a little map, and hide it so well that you only found it after nine years….” Gerard could hear the swishy sound of Ray shaking his head. “I mean, God, I’m getting really curious as to what we’re gonna find out there.”
“The mothership,” Frank said cheerfully, and Gerard felt a weird shiver run down his spine. Of course, it’d probably be better to find out he was an alien than find out he was from a bunch of bee-worshipping cultists like in The Wicker Man, or the Children of the Corn or something. Still, it was pretty weird to think about.
I’m holding out for the lost island of Avalon, said Mikey. Maybe we’ll find out Merlin was our grandpa or something.
“Avalon’s in England, moron,” Gerard said, the last word distorted by a huge yawn. Plus, he maybe didn’t remember things as well as Mikey did, but something told him that they weren’t from King Arthur’s court or something like that, they were from someplace stranger than that. Someplace that should have felt unfamiliar, but that was hovering around the edges of his brain like something he should have been able to remember. He sighed in frustration, which made him yawn again.
“Hey,” said Bob, “if you guys wanna take a nap, we’ve still got a ways to go. We’ll wake you up if anything interesting happens.”
Frank scrambled into the bunk with Gerard and Mikey. “Awesome,” he said. “Hey, is it okay if I crash here?”
As if they were really gonna kick him out, seriously. Plus, it wasn’t like Frank took up that much space. Gerard yawned again, feeling like keeping his eyes open was really way too much effort, and said, “I don’t care.” He rolled over against the wall to make more room for Frank, and Mikey scooted over with him.
I’ve got a good feeling, Gee, said Mikey. This is gonna work, I know it.
Gerard tried to hold on to the warm feeling of Mikey’s reassurance in his mind as he slipped into darkness.
**
It wasn’t as if the whole day hadn’t been one weird thing after another, Bob thought, but somehow riding in the front seat with Ray in total silence while the kids slept in the back was a new and special kind of awkward.
“So,” he said, trying to break the silence, before he realized he really didn’t have anything to say to Ray. ‘How’s being a rest stop janitor working out for you?’ Or maybe, ‘So, how about those guys with guns who’re probably still following us?’ He finally settled on, “Thanks again for giving us a ride.”
Ray shrugged. “Oh, sure!” he said with an enthusiasm that seemed sincere, if a little strained. He had a kind of high voice for a guy, Bob thought.
“Well, you didn’t have to, but we really appreciate it.”
Ray smiled. “Not a problem, man. I mean, I felt kind of bad for giving you such a hard time earlier.”
“Eh,” Bob said. He really couldn’t blame Ray for thinking he was some kind of creepy kidnapper. That’s probably what he would have thought in Ray’s place. “You were just trying to do the right thing. I probably should have called the cops when I found them—they snuck in the back of my van and hitched a ride,” he explained when Ray gave him a curious look. “But the whole psychic thing’s kind of out of my range of experience, you know, and if they’re really getting chased by the government or whatever….” Bob trailed off. He still wasn’t sure why he’d chosen to believe a couple of kids over every shred of common sense telling him that they were probably making it up, and even if they weren’t, the police would do a better job handling it than Bob would. “I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them,” he finished, hoping Ray wouldn’t ask him to explain.
“No, I get it,” Ray said, nodding earnestly. “They seem like really nice kids.”
Bob looked quickly over his shoulder at the bunk. All three boys were crammed onto it in a pile of skinny limbs and dark clothes, Mikey snoring against Gerard’s chest and Frank draped across the Minnellis like a blanket. Bob smiled. “They are,” he said.
The conversation kind of fell into a lull, and Bob found himself following the yellow lines on the asphalt with his eyes. As a result, it took him what was probably an embarrassingly long time to figure out that Ray was looking at him.
“What?” he asked gruffly. He probably looked like a bum, he knew—it’d been a long fucking day, and it wasn’t like he got dressed up to just drive around by himself and be alone. But it wasn’t like Ray could really talk, with his stained jumpsuit and his crazy hair.
To his surprise, Ray kind of reddened and looked back at the road. “Nothing,” he muttered, sounding more uncomfortable and unsure than Bob had ever heard him sound in their admittedly brief acquaintance.
Whatever. It wasn’t like Bob was gonna go into a big long chat about whatever the hell Ray’s issues were. So instead, he said, “Iron Maiden, huh?”
Ray grinned with one side of his mouth. “Yeah, my brother was a total metalhead, kind of passed it on to me. You a fan?” It was a casual enough question, but Ray seemed to be awaiting its answer with a disproportionately eager interest.
“Sure,” said Bob. “It’s been a long time since I’ve heard them, though.”
“Well, sure, it’s like the music of our youth,” Ray said. “Man, this album totally brings me back to high school, hanging out in my basement and figuring out all the chords to ‘Run to the Hills.’”
“You play the guitar?”
“Not in a long time.” He sighed and drummed his fingers on the dashboard. “I used to play all the time when I was a kid, though. I was pretty sure I was gonna be the lead guitar in a huge metal band, be a big rock star, all that.”
Bob tried to picture Ray, with his earnest smiles and awkward stares, as one of the musicians on his last tour. He’d be good at it, Bob decided—he wasn’t a douche, and he seemed pretty responsible, and he really liked music, if his enthusiasm for Iron Maiden was any indication. “That’s cool, man,” he said. “Did you ever end up playing in any bands?”
“I was in a metalcore band for a while,” Ray said. “We kind of sucked, but it was fun, you know? ‘Course, then I came out to them, and it was totally awkward. So. That was the end of that.”
Ah. What exactly did one say in response to that? “That sucks,” Bob said slowly.
“It happens,” said Ray, matter-of-fact. “So, how about you? What do you do, when you’re not rescuing kids with super powers?”
Bob could feel his face redden, just a bit, though whether it was with pleasure or embarrassment he couldn’t tell. “I wouldn’t really say I rescued them,” he said. “They could have caught another ride, maybe one that would’ve worked out better.”
Ray made an amused snorting noise in the the back of his throat. “I doubt it,” he said. “I mean….” He shot Bob a sidelong look, not nervous exactly, but a little hesitant. “If I step out of line here, feel free to shut me up, but seriously, if I didn’t know they were orphans on the run, and you told me you’d adopted those kids a year ago and you were taking a family road trip when some weirdos with guns trashed your van, I’d totally believe you.”
“Uh-huh. Whatever you say,” Bob said. Still, he couldn’t help feel a little…hell, what was he feeling? A little protective, a little proud, and pretty damn ridiculous, because he’d known these kids for about six hours total.
“See!” said Ray, shaking a triumphant finger in Bob’s direction. “There you go again, with the dad-face!”
Bob shook his head. “Dude, seriously.”
“No, I’m not kidding!” Ray said with a laugh. “You get this expression on your face that’s just….” He shook his head and muttered, “Pretty hot.”
Bob froze, and turned his head from Ray to look out the window, at the striped pattern of shadows the pine trees threw onto the road. So that was what the staring earlier had been about. “Look, Ray,” Bob said, doing his best to ignore the voices in his head shrieking, Dude, and now you have to ride together! With the kids! Awkward! “I really, um, you’ve been really great, and I really appreciate it, just. I’m straight.”
Ray flushed so hard that he looked like a tomato with an especially fluffy wig. “No, dude, I—yeah, I know. Sorry. Just.” He waved a hand in a vague motion. “Forget I said anything.”
The silence that followed was as thick and awkward as any Bob had ever experienced, and he felt a little nauseated. Part of it was probably the fact that he’d taken to counting the shadows on the road, and the trees whipping by were going too fast for that to be a comfortable habit to fall into, but he thought part of it was the claustrophobic sense of being trapped in this completely insufferable tension. “So. You asked earlier--I’m a roadie,” Bob said, willing at this point to say absolutely anything to break the silence. “Drum tech, specifically. Well, I used to be, anyway. I think I’m technically on a leave of absence at the moment.”
“Oh, yeah?” Some of the interest in Ray’s voice was probably forced, but it sounded pretty genuine. “Is that as awesome as it sounds?”
They talked comfortably enough for a while about Bob’s job, and the music scene, and then about various jerks and idiots they’d worked with before. Bob felt the tension in his stomach loosen, and Ray’s face was finally beginning to relax, when the sight of a white and black car up ahead filled Bob with such a sudden and unexpected fear that his head swam and a weird buzzing drowned out the sound of Ray’s voice.
“Shit,” he said. “Is that a roadblock?”
“Looks like it,” said Ray, peering ahead. “It, you know, it probably doesn’t have anything to do with us, but…you think some super powers might be able to help us out here?”
Using the kids’ powers to get themselves out of police roadblocks seemed like a pretty unethical and shitty thing to do, but it wasn’t like they had many other options if being caught by the cops meant that Mikey and Gerard and Frank were gonna get sent back to wherever they’d come from. Bob unbuckled himself from his seat and went to the back of the camper to gently reach out for the first shoulder he encountered.
It was Mikey’s. He blinked up at Bob, looking vaguely disoriented, with his glasses hanging crookedly from one ear.
“Hey,” Bob said softly. “Sorry to wake you, but there are some cops up ahead. We aren’t sure if they’re looking for you guys or not, but….”
Mikey nodded and put his glasses on properly, and then he turned to shake his brother awake.
Gerard groaned, rolling over. Frank, who was shoved off Gerard and onto the edge of the bunk in the process, coming dangerously close to falling off, woke up with a loud grunt. “What? What’s going on?” Frank asked, looking way more alert than Bob had expected.
“Cops,” Mikey said shortly, and Frank’s eyes widened.
“Shit,” he said concisely, and despite the gravity of the situation, Bob wanted to laugh.
Whether it was Frank’s rolling over, the word ‘cops,’ or something Mikey had said psychically, Gerard muttered, “All right, I’m up.” He sat up and rubbed his eyes, yawning.
“Um, guys?” said Ray from the front, sounding a little frantic. “They’re, like, searching cars. This isn’t good.”
“What the hell?” said Frank, sounding frustrated. “Cops can’t just search your car like that! Don’t they need warrants and stuff? I’ve seen Law & Order!”
“They don’t need warrants if you give them permission,” Ray said, “and I bet if you don’t give them permission, they get suspicious.” He craned his neck, looking at the rapidly-shrinking line of cars ahead of them. “Guys, we don’t have a lot of time here. If we’re gonna do something, we gotta do it now.”
Gerard frowned, looking like he was concentrating on something really hard, and then sighed. “Distraction,” he muttered. “That’s what we need. But I don’t think Bunny’s gonna cut it, and I don’t wanna….” He shot Bob a worried glance. “I’m trying to think of something that doesn’t involve, like, moving cars, ‘cause I don’t think I could do that anyway, or the cops’ guns. I don’t know. I guess I’m not that good at distractions.”
“I maybe have an idea,” Frank said, “but it’s kind of lame.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Bob. At this point, he was willing to hear any and all suggestions—the only thing he’d come up with thus far was driving right through the checkpoint, and that probably wasn’t going to fly.
Frank shrugged. “Well, they probably can’t see us from here, right? We could just duck out into the woods, walk a little ways, and then jump back in when they can’t see us anymore.”
“Holy shit, that’s brilliant!” said Ray. “Next time I’m on the run, Frank, I’m totally calling you for advice.”
Frank blushed with pleasure and ducked his head, making him look even younger than he was. “I watch a lot of action movies,” he said.
“How far should we go?” asked Gerard, who hadn’t lost his worried expression. “And how are we gonna find you again? It’s not like we can walk as fast as you can drive.”
Bob turned to Ray. “You got a cell phone?”
Ray nodded, and dug one out of his pocket to hand it to Bob.
Bob quickly programmed Ray’s number into his own phone and his number into Ray’s. “Here,” he said, handing the phone back. “You call us when you’ve found a place to stop, and we’ll catch up with you.”
Mikey blinked up at Bob. “You’re coming with us?”
You’re the psychic, Bob thought. You tell me—you really think I’d leave the three of you on your own? Out loud, he said, “Of course I am.”
He didn’t know whether Mikey had heard his thoughts or not, but the kid’s smile, warm and slow, made him think that at least the sentiment behind the thoughts had been understood.
The camper had already slowed to a crawl in the sluggish line of cars leading to the roard stop, but Ray stopped it entirely. “I’ll call you as soon as I think it’s safe,” he said. “You guys watch yourselves. I haven’t seen those guys with the guns following us, but…be careful.”
Bob nodded. He grabbed Mikey with one hand and Frank with the other and helped them down out of the camper. Gerard followed, with a quiet “Thank you” to Ray as he stepped down.
“No problem,” Ray said, giving Bob a tight smile.
Mikey frowned at Bunny, who was still curled up in the corner where she couldn’t wreak havok on Gerard’s allergies, snoring softly. He sighed and said to Ray, “Take care of Bunny, okay?”
“Will do,” said Ray.
They dashed into the woods on the side of the road, going far enough in that Bob thought they probably couldn’t be seen from the road. There wasn’t a lot of brush to hide them, but the trees got thicker deeper in, and though there wasn’t a trail, the ground was pretty level and easy to navigate.
“I hope Ray doesn’t go too far,” said Gerard. “Think about how much walking we’ve done today!”
Frank rolled his eyes. “You can’t be tired!” he said. “We just slept for, like, hours!”
“It’s not the same if you don’t get a full night’s sleep. That’s when your body goes in and fixes stuff—it can’t do that when you’re just napping,” Gerard said with an air of great knowledgeability.
“Hey,” Bob said, absently wondering if Gerard watched the Discovery Channel, “less talking, more walking.”
They hiked on for a while in silence, more or less, broken only occasionally by Frank pointing out something he thought was awesome in the woods, or Gerard responding to something Mikey had said to him psychically. Bob was pretty sure they’d passed the road stop, but it was hard to tell—they were far enough in the woods that the noises from the road were faint and sounded too distant to really interpret.
It was kind of a comfortable rhythm, Bob thought, the kind of relaxing isolation from people that had been the whole point of his trip to begin with. Sure, the circumstances weren’t ideal, but it was a pretty day, not too hot, and it had been a long time since he’d just listened to the birds and the rustle of leaves in the woods.
Gerard seemed to be listening to something, too, but whatever it was didn’t make him very happy. “Did you hear that?” he said, stopping in his tracks and looking around him nervously.
Bob’s every sense kicked into high alert. “What was it?” he asked.
Gerard made a face, twisting his mouth into a focused, frustrated expression. “I don’t know, just….” He turned to his brother. “Did you hear it?”
Mikey stopped walking and turned his head from one side to another, like he was a satellite picking up signals, and Bob wondered if he was just listening, or if he’d opened some senses that most people didn’t have, taking in information that passed by the rest of the world. It was kind of fascinating to watch. After a long moment, though, he closed his eyes, and his face crumpled up like he was trying not to cry.
Oh, shit, thought Bob, just as he heard the cracking of a stick behind him.
He could have guessed that it wasn’t going to be anything he wanted to see, but he turned around anyway. It was a cop, a young guy with an abundance of tattoos that reminded Bob more of the bands he toured with than law enforcement officers. Bob could have taken some reassurance from the fact that the cop looked as nervous as Bob felt, but given that the cop had his hand visibly on the gun in his holster, it wasn’t actually that comforting.
“Are you guys Gerard and Mikey Minnelli and Frank Iero?” the cop asked.
Frank sighed, looking so bored that Bob wanted to poke him and tell him to take this seriously. “If we said no, would you believe us?”
“Um,” the cop said, looking like he wasn’t sure whether to actually answer that or not. He decided on not, apparently, because he turned to Bob and asked, a lot more hostile, “Who are you?”
“My name’s Bob Bryar,” said Bob, making sure the cop could see that both of his hands were empty. “I know this doesn’t look good, but--”
“Running from a police checkpoint with three missing children?” The cop laughed, somehow managing to sound anxious and scornful simultaneously. “You bet it doesn’t look good. Until I figure out what the hell your deal is, you’re under arrest.”
Great. Just fucking great.
**
“So that’s when Nickelodeon went downhill, when they ditched the real stories for this sitcom bullshit.” Travis looked over to the desk next to him, where Disashi was rummaging through the drawers. “You even listening to me, man?”
“Sure,” said Disashi. “No stories, sitcom bullshit, downfall of Nickelodeon. Got it. Aha!” He pulled out a big bottle of what looked like some kind of lotion from the drawer. “I’ve been looking for this for weeks. I knew I left it at work somewhere.”
“Dude,” said Travis, leaning forward so that for once, all four legs of his chair were on the floor at the same time. “What is that?”
“Hand cream.”
Travis shook his head. “How metrosexual are you?”
“How 2002 are you?” Disashi shot back. “’Metrosexual,’ Jesus. I know this is gonna come as a surprise to you, but most ladies like men who don’t smell like old sweat socks.”
“Old sweat socks? I’ll show you old sweat socks, you--” And then the phone rang. “Saved by the bell, sucker,” Travis said, though it probably applied more to him than it did to Disashi, since he didn’t really have a clever comeback ready, and Disashi knew it, damn him. “Hero County Police Department,” he said.
“Yo, Travis?” It was Matt, which meant maybe something interesting had happened at the road stops after all. Travis sat up straight.
“What’s up?”
“Well, Tyga thought he saw some guys walking around in the woods, so he went to check it out, and—get ready for this—it was all three missing kids, and some guy was with them.”
“You’re shitting me!” They didn’t have a lot of major crimes in Hero County, especially not ones the goddamned FBI was involved in, and this was the first missing persons case Travis had ever worked on. Still, he’d always gotten the impression that runaway or kidnapped kids were pretty hard to find. He’d never been so glad to be proven wrong.
“Nope,” said Matt. “Tyga’s sitting with the kids, and Eric’s with the guy—the guy’s name is Bob Bryar, FYI, if you want to look him up, see if he has a record.”
“Gotcha.” He put a hand over the receiver. “Yo, yo, Disashi, you got a paper and pencil or something over there?” Travis probably had some kind of writing implement in his desk, but he was so not in the mood to dig through his crap right now.
Disashi rolled his eyes, but he tossed over a pad of paper and a pen. Travis hurriedly scribbled down the name—he was pretty sure he’d spelled ‘Bryar’ right. “You gonna bring ‘em in?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Matt. “On our way now.”
“Awesome,” Travis said, and he hung up the phone. “Dude!” he said to Disashi. “I feel so Lenny Briscoe right now. No joke, Matt and Eric and Tyga found those missing kids, and maybe some dude involved in kidnapping them or something.”
“Seriously?”
Travis felt a little smug—it wasn’t often he got a chance to put an expression that dumbstruck on Disashi’s face. “Seriously.”
They looked up Bryar—no priors, but his running through the woods with the missing kids was suspicious enough that Travis started filling out a report on him. Usually he hated doing paperwork, but then again, usually he was writing up people for hunting with an expired licence or driving with a broken taillight. This was some serious NYPD Blue shit. He was gonna have to send Alex Suarez a six-pack or something. Maybe a bottle of wine—Suarez was a classy motherfucker.
They called the number given for Pete Wentz, and got an intense-sounding guy named Andy Hurley who thanked him and hung up before Travis could ask just what they were supposed to do with the kids.
It was another half hour before Matt, Eric, and Tyga walked in, herding a disgruntled-looking blond man and three scared-looking kids.
“Oh, thank God,” Eric said, shutting the door behind him with one hand while grabbing on to the collar of the shortest kid’s shirt with the other. “Longest car trip ever.”
The biggest kid wriggled out of Tyga’s grip, looked from Travis to Disashi and back again, and said, “Are you the chief?”
“Uh, yeah,” Travis said. “Are you okay?” The kid looked stressed, but not as freaked out as Travis thought a kid who’d been kidnapped would probably look.
The kid nodded. “I’ve been trying to explain it—look, see, Bob didn’t kidnap us, he was helping us get away from these people who were trying to kidnap us. He didn’t do anything wrong, so you should let him go.”
Ah, shit, this sounded like it was actually gonna be pretty complicated. “Can’t do that until I’ve figured out what’s going on,” Travis said, doing his best to sound businesslike. Disashi wordlessly handed him a blank report, and he gave him a brief smile in thanks. “Now, why don’t you guys sit down and explain this all to me. You too,” he added to Bryar.
Eric and Tyga deposited their charges in the chairs in front of Travis’s desk while Disashi ran to get some fold-out chairs for Bryar and the biggest kid. Once everyone seemed more or less settled, Travis picked up a pen.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s start at the beginning. What are your names, again?”
“Frank Iero,” said the littlest kid, who’d given up trying to dart out the door but had crossed his arms, hunched over in his seat and looking hilariously sullen.
“Mikey Castaway,” said the geeky-looking kid who hadn’t spoken yet. Bryar shot him a strange look.
“Gerard Casta--” the big one began, breaking off mid-word and looking confused.
Well, whatever, Travis might not have a photographic memory or anything, but he was pretty sure he’d remember a name like ‘Castaway,’ and he didn’t. He dug the missing persons report Suarez had faxed over out of a folder on his desk. “It says here your last name’s Minnelli,” he said. “You guys playing around with me here?”
“I don’t…” Gerard shook his head and turned to his brother. “Hey—you said we kept saying our name was ‘Way,’ right? Maybe ‘Castaway’ was the thing we couldn’t pronounce.”
“Well, that’s a stupid last name,” Mikey grumbled, before he and Gerard started apparently communicating through a series of increasingly absurd eyebrow quirks.
Travis had to agree, which brought him right back to wondering why in the hell they’d said it was their last name to begin with. “What are you talking about?”
They turned in unison to blink at him in slight consternation, like they’d forgotten he was there. “Um,” Gerard began. “It’s…okay, it takes too long to explain, and it doesn’t really matter anyway.” Mikey glared at him, and he added, “To you, I mean.”
“Right.” Travis turned to give Disashi an imploring look—he would have actually said, “Help me out here, man!” if it didn’t compromise his image as a tough, cool police chief.
Disashi smirked and mouthed, “You’re on your own, Chief!” at him. Traitor.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Matt said, rolling his eyes. He moved from behind Bryar’s chair to sit on the edge of Travis’s desk, shoving his slinky aside. “Okay, guys,” he said to the kids, “why don’t you tell me when you decided to run away, and why. And then we’ll move onto when you met up with Bob. That cool?”
It took a while, but to Travis’s amazement, Matt actually managed to get the whole story out of the kids, with Travis asking a few questions every now and then for clarification. Bryar hadn’t actually kidnapped them, it seemed, only picked them up on the highway, which was kind of admirable. The problem was, he’d obviously known they were missing and that the police were looking for them, or he wouldn’t have been sneaking around in the woods to avoid the road stop. The kids seemed to like him, but it was crazy suspicious. Who actually believed a crazy kids’ story about being on the run from secret agents instead of calling the cops?
The phone rang, and Disashi picked it up. “Hero County Police,” he said. “Uh-huh. Yeah, okay. That’s fine. See you then. Thanks for calling. Bye.”
“Who was that?” asked Matt.
“That was Pete Wentz’s assistant, Patrick Stump. He and Wentz are on their way—they should be here in about two hours.”
An unhappy expression spread over Gerard’s face, and he said, “They know we’re okay, right? You told them?”
“Yeah, we told them. ‘Course, they’d already know you were okay if you hadn’t run off like that.” Travis felt kind of like a shit for guilt-tripping a fourteen-year old, but seriously, what a hell of a lot of hassle for three runaway kids, two of whom lived with a fucking millionaire.
Frank, who’d been silent a good long while now, rolled his eyes. “You don’t get it,” he said.
Travis shrugged; if they weren’t gonna tell him anything else besides this bullshit story about running away from Mulder and Scully, he really didn’t get it and wasn’t likely to.
“What are we gonna do with them for two hours?” Eric said. “Seriously, it’s like seven-thirty now; do we ever get to go home tonight?”
“Shit, seriously?” He hadn’t realized it had gotten that late. “Well. Huh. Well, the kids have to stay nearby. You guys eaten yet?” He addressed that part to the kids, since he had no doubt the guys on patrol had gotten Subway or something.
“Not for a while,” Frank said.
“Okay, then, let’s grab some dinner at Hayley’s next door. You kids are gonna love this place—swear to God, anything you could think of to eat, they got it.”
“What about….” Matt jerked his head in Bryar’s direction.
Oh. Travis had almost forgotten about him. After all the extra effort his guys had put in today, it seemed kind of shitty to make one of them sit around and babysit Bryar. They couldn’t just let him go, though, not until they’d talked to a lawyer and figured out if he’d actually committed a crime or was just kind of sketchy.
“There’s always the cell,” Disashi said. Sometimes they had a couple of drunks who’d been driving or being a public nuisance in there, but at the moment it was empty.
Bryar, who’d been pretty stoic throughout, winced. Well, he could just suck it up, as far as Travis was concerned; if he’d just called the police when he picked the kids up instead of leading them all on a wild goose chase, Travis would have already been home and watching the disaster movie marathon on TNT.
“Awesome,” Travis said. “Make it so, Number Two!” Disashi flipped him the bird, but he went to grab Bryar by the shoulder and steer him towards the back, where the cell was.
The kids looked after Bryar with worried eyes. Travis gave them what he hoped was a reassuring smile and said, “Come on, let’s get some food.”
“Hey, Travie,” Tyga said, “you want me to come along? Help you with the kids?”
“Help me with the kids, my ass. Eat off my credit card, more like.”
Tyga shook his head. “No, seriously, you might need some help.”
“Oh, come on,” said Travis, feeling like Tyga was just messing with him now. He gestured towards where the kids sat, three little mini goth-punk-geek types, with their dark clothes and stupid hair. “How much trouble you think they’re gonna be?”
Matt snorted, and said, “Those are some famous last words, if ever I heard ‘em.”
Part 8
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
“Hmm,” Gabe said, leaning over the front of the van. Somebody’d done a real number on it—the frayed end of wires, pulled apart, were spread everywhere, the oil was drained, and the engine actually seemed detached from the car.
“So…this is Bob Bryar’s van?” Patrick asked. His heart had been in his throat since they’d found the van, abandoned, in a rest stop parking lot, and now he was almost afraid to breathe.
Ryland, who’d pressed his face to the back window, straightened up. “Probably,” he said. “The back’s full of sound equipment.”
Victoria made a scornful noise in the back of her throat and jerked a thumb towards the licence plate. “Plate numbers match, dumbass. It’s definitely Bryar’s.”
“Well, what the hell happened to it?” Pete asked irritably. He walked back and forth, peering through the windows as if there was some clue in the van as to where its passengers had gone.
“Hell if I know,” said Gabe with an elaborate shrug. “I mean, even if the guy switched vehicles, why would he trash his own van?”
“To throw us off the trail?” Nate suggested, but Gabe shook his head.
“How would that throw us off the trail? We already know it’s his van, we already know he was traveling with the kids.” He frowned. “I don’t know, maybe he gets himself another car and then somebody else trashes the car, but why? That sound stuff in the back’s worth something, but they didn’t take any.”
There are bad guys after us, Mikey and Gerard had said in their note. As far as they knew, Patrick thought, Bob Bryar might not have even known the kids were hitching a ride, and there was no way that Mikey and Gerard would have gotten into a “bad guy’s” van. “Maybe…,” he said slowly, “whoever the boys thought was after them wanted to stop them from getting away.”
“You really think someone’s after them?” asked Gabe, one eyebrow raised.
At this point, Patrick really didn’t know what to think. He just hoped that whoever the boys had been frightened of hadn’t taken them from Bryar’s van, leaving the van as a mocking reminder of Pete and Patrick’s own complete incompetence at finding a couple of pre-adolescent boys.
“Hey,” Alex said, “whether someone’s after them or not, I say we get local law enforcement involved.” He pulled out his cell phone. “I know people.”
“Jesus Christ, Suarez,” said Pete. He sounded impressed, but his fake smile wasn’t too convincing. “You really get around, don’t you?”
“You know it,” Gabe said, draping an arm around Alex. “The Cobra never misses its man. Or kids, as the case may be.”
Alex shrugged Gabe’s arm off. “Not now, dude,” he said, holding the cell phone to his ear. He turned to speak into the receiver. “Yo, this is Alex Suarez. Put Chief McCoy on. Hey, Travis! Dude, this is gonna sound a little nuts, but I need a favor.”
**
“Fuck!” Agent Palmer slammed her hand into the dashboard.
Agent Viglione, disappointed on his own account but familiar enough with his partner’s rages to know when to stay quiet, sent a quick text message to Ivarsson, updating her on the pursuit.
“Did the fucker steal a car?” asked Palmer, her tone deceptively conversational. “Is he suddenly buddies with the fucking rest stop attendants? Did a spaceship come down and take them all back to the mothership?” Her voice was getting progressively louder. “Maybe he’s an alien, too, and he teleported their asses out of there! In fact, I think that must be it, because otherwise, I can’t think how a man with three small children and no working vehicle could fucking vanish from a rest stop in Bum Fuck, New Jersey!”
“You done?” asked Viglione.
Palmer took a deep breath. “Yeah,” she said in a more normal tone of voice. “They must have taken off from a vehicle in the back lot, but I didn’t get a look at any of the cars back there.”
“I did, while you were looking under the hood of the van. A green Ford sedan and a beat-up old recreational vehicle.”
She rewarded him with a brilliant smile. “Brian, you are the man.”
“I know,” said Viglione with a smirk. “What say we call the local law enforcement and set up a roadblock or two?”
Palmer frowned thoughtfully. “A little old-school,” she said. “But sometimes I guess that’s the best way to do it.” She grinned and pulled the car back into Drive.
**
Gerard had never thought he would ever hit a point where he’d be too tired to be scared, but as he and Mikey curled up on one of the bunks in Ray’s camper, he couldn’t muster any thought more serious than that Ray had really good taste in music.
Frank was clearly thinking along similar lines. “Yo, Ray,” he said, “what CD is this? It rocks!”
“This?” Ray said, sounding a little startled. “Um. It’s Iron Maiden, The Number of the Beast. You a metal fan?”
Frank shrugged from his position on the floor. He looked even littler than usual, his knees against his chest as he leaned against the wall by the bunks. “Not really,” he said, “but this is pretty good.”
“They’re music connoisseurs,” said Bob drily from the passenger’s seat. Gerard thought he was probably making fun of them, but it didn’t sound terribly mean, and Gerard was way too tired to protest.
“Hey,” he said, poking Mikey in the back. Mikey’d been a silent lump on the bunk for the last half hour or so—even when Gerard reached out mentally, Mikey felt a million miles away. It was weird.
Mikey rolled over and blinked, dazed-looking. Are we there yet? he asked.
“No,” said Gerard, then he raised his voice. “Mikey wants to know when we’re gonna get there.”
Bob and Ray exchanged looks in the front seat, like they were still sort of figuring each other out. “Well,” Ray said, “I know you guys have a specific destination in mind, but I’d kind of like to keep those guys from figuring out where you’re going, if they’re following us. So….”
“Bert and Quinn—some guys I know--have a cabin around Cork Valley,” Bob broke in.
Ray nodded. “Lotta people do, for fishing and stuff.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not what they do up there,” said Bob with a snort, but he looked back at Mikey and Frank and Gerard and shut his mouth. His friends probably had sex up there, Gerard thought. That was the kind of thing that adults always tried and failed to hide from kids, as if they didn’t know what people did in bed.
Mikey was getting a sort of spaced-out look again, and Gerard made a mental note to ask him what he was seeing after he figured out what was going on. “So,” he said, “do you guys wanna go to the cabin and hide out or something?” This whole thing was only supposed to take a day, he thought with vague disappointment. Still, better late than never.
Ray shot Bob a look. “If it’s okay with you,” he said.
Bob shrugged and said, “I’m not the one on the run.” He twisted around in his seat to look at Mikey and Gerard. “Are you guys gonna be okay not figuring out the whole map thing until you get some psychic message that those people aren’t following us anymore?”
“I guess,” said Gerard, but he wasn’t really paying attention anymore. Mikey was getting that look on his face that always meant he was remembering something Gerard couldn’t. He poked Mikey in the shoulder again. “Mikey! Snap out of it!”
Frank perked up. “What’s he doing?”
“Ouch,” said Mikey, putting a hand to his shoulder. “You didn’t have to poke so hard.”
Gerard sighed. “Sorry.”
“I was just thinking…well, Ray was talking about fishing, so I started thinking about fishing—I mean, not that I’ve ever been fishing, but the idea, you know. And…I remembered being in a boat.”
“The one that crashed?” asked Frank.
Mikey shook his head. “No, this was afterwards. It was, like, a Coast Guard boat. They were pulling us out of the water and wrapping us up in blankets, because we had frostbite or something. And they kept asking us stuff, but we didn’t understand what they were saying, and we just kept saying our names were Mikey and Gerard Way.”
Gerard blinked. “Wait, our last name’s Way?” That was more useful information than anything else Mikey’d remembered so far.
“Well, that’s the thing,” said Mikey, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I don’t think it is. I think we couldn’t pronounce whatever our last name was, so we just said it was Way because we could pronounce that.”
“Why wouldn’t we be able to pronounce our own name?” asked Gerard. Even if they hadn’t been able to speak English, which seemed to have been the case, it didn’t make a lot of sense. Gerard had been, like, five years old—that was plenty old enough to know his own name.
Mikey shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s all I remembered.”
“That’s pretty trippy,” said Ray from the driver’s seat. “So, wait, you guys are trying to find your biological family, but you don’t know their name?”
“It’s complicated.” Gerard sighed. All he really wanted to do was take a nap, but he was terrified that if he closed his eyes, he’d wake up to find that the people chasing them had caught them, and something terrible had happened to Frank and Bob and Ray.
Mikey blinked and gave him a crooked little half smile, leaning against Gerard’s chest. I think it’s okay, for now at least.
“Hey, Mikey,” Bob said, “can I see your starcase for a minute? I’d like to show Ray that map again.”
Mikey groaned, but he pulled himself out of the bunk to hand it to Bob without complaining. Gerard supposed he could have floated it over, but his head was starting to hurt.
“Look at this,” Bob said, pointing at something. “You see this line here? I’ve been looking through your atlas here, and this line isn’t a road or anything. I’m thinking it’s a trail.”
“Well, there are a ton of trails in those mountains,” Ray said, leaning over to peer quickly at the starcase before returning his attention to the road.
“That’s what I thought,” said Bob. “So why mark this one, unless it’s the one we’re—I mean, the boys are supposed to take?”
Ray looked over at the starcase again. “So, wait,” he said, as if Bob hadn’t said anything. “Lemme get this straight. You’ve had this thing, this starcase, what, how long, Mikey?”
“Forever,” Gerard answered, too tired to explain about the whole memory loss thing.
“Okay, and you never asked to go to the places on this map before? Why now?”
“We just found the map a couple months ago,” Frank piped up. “The starcase got broken in a fight, and we were trying to fix it.”
“What are you getting at?” Bob asked, frowning.
“Just, I mean, isn’t it kind of weird to hide a map like that? Why do you even have this starcase? Who’d put a map in there for you to follow and then hide it?”
Gerard’s brain felt fuzzy with exhaustion, but he struggled to think. “Maybe whoever gave it to us wanted to keep it a secret,” he said. And it made sense, because if they came from people as strange as Mikey and Gerard, those people would probably want to keep under the radar. “And…I don’t know, maybe they just figured we’d find it out or that we knew where it was, but they didn’t want anyone else to know about it.”
“Yeah, but…” Gerard had buried his face in the pillow, so he couldn’t see Ray, but he could picture him biting his lip. “It seems like an awful lot of trouble, doesn’t it? To carve a little map, and hide it so well that you only found it after nine years….” Gerard could hear the swishy sound of Ray shaking his head. “I mean, God, I’m getting really curious as to what we’re gonna find out there.”
“The mothership,” Frank said cheerfully, and Gerard felt a weird shiver run down his spine. Of course, it’d probably be better to find out he was an alien than find out he was from a bunch of bee-worshipping cultists like in The Wicker Man, or the Children of the Corn or something. Still, it was pretty weird to think about.
I’m holding out for the lost island of Avalon, said Mikey. Maybe we’ll find out Merlin was our grandpa or something.
“Avalon’s in England, moron,” Gerard said, the last word distorted by a huge yawn. Plus, he maybe didn’t remember things as well as Mikey did, but something told him that they weren’t from King Arthur’s court or something like that, they were from someplace stranger than that. Someplace that should have felt unfamiliar, but that was hovering around the edges of his brain like something he should have been able to remember. He sighed in frustration, which made him yawn again.
“Hey,” said Bob, “if you guys wanna take a nap, we’ve still got a ways to go. We’ll wake you up if anything interesting happens.”
Frank scrambled into the bunk with Gerard and Mikey. “Awesome,” he said. “Hey, is it okay if I crash here?”
As if they were really gonna kick him out, seriously. Plus, it wasn’t like Frank took up that much space. Gerard yawned again, feeling like keeping his eyes open was really way too much effort, and said, “I don’t care.” He rolled over against the wall to make more room for Frank, and Mikey scooted over with him.
I’ve got a good feeling, Gee, said Mikey. This is gonna work, I know it.
Gerard tried to hold on to the warm feeling of Mikey’s reassurance in his mind as he slipped into darkness.
**
It wasn’t as if the whole day hadn’t been one weird thing after another, Bob thought, but somehow riding in the front seat with Ray in total silence while the kids slept in the back was a new and special kind of awkward.
“So,” he said, trying to break the silence, before he realized he really didn’t have anything to say to Ray. ‘How’s being a rest stop janitor working out for you?’ Or maybe, ‘So, how about those guys with guns who’re probably still following us?’ He finally settled on, “Thanks again for giving us a ride.”
Ray shrugged. “Oh, sure!” he said with an enthusiasm that seemed sincere, if a little strained. He had a kind of high voice for a guy, Bob thought.
“Well, you didn’t have to, but we really appreciate it.”
Ray smiled. “Not a problem, man. I mean, I felt kind of bad for giving you such a hard time earlier.”
“Eh,” Bob said. He really couldn’t blame Ray for thinking he was some kind of creepy kidnapper. That’s probably what he would have thought in Ray’s place. “You were just trying to do the right thing. I probably should have called the cops when I found them—they snuck in the back of my van and hitched a ride,” he explained when Ray gave him a curious look. “But the whole psychic thing’s kind of out of my range of experience, you know, and if they’re really getting chased by the government or whatever….” Bob trailed off. He still wasn’t sure why he’d chosen to believe a couple of kids over every shred of common sense telling him that they were probably making it up, and even if they weren’t, the police would do a better job handling it than Bob would. “I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them,” he finished, hoping Ray wouldn’t ask him to explain.
“No, I get it,” Ray said, nodding earnestly. “They seem like really nice kids.”
Bob looked quickly over his shoulder at the bunk. All three boys were crammed onto it in a pile of skinny limbs and dark clothes, Mikey snoring against Gerard’s chest and Frank draped across the Minnellis like a blanket. Bob smiled. “They are,” he said.
The conversation kind of fell into a lull, and Bob found himself following the yellow lines on the asphalt with his eyes. As a result, it took him what was probably an embarrassingly long time to figure out that Ray was looking at him.
“What?” he asked gruffly. He probably looked like a bum, he knew—it’d been a long fucking day, and it wasn’t like he got dressed up to just drive around by himself and be alone. But it wasn’t like Ray could really talk, with his stained jumpsuit and his crazy hair.
To his surprise, Ray kind of reddened and looked back at the road. “Nothing,” he muttered, sounding more uncomfortable and unsure than Bob had ever heard him sound in their admittedly brief acquaintance.
Whatever. It wasn’t like Bob was gonna go into a big long chat about whatever the hell Ray’s issues were. So instead, he said, “Iron Maiden, huh?”
Ray grinned with one side of his mouth. “Yeah, my brother was a total metalhead, kind of passed it on to me. You a fan?” It was a casual enough question, but Ray seemed to be awaiting its answer with a disproportionately eager interest.
“Sure,” said Bob. “It’s been a long time since I’ve heard them, though.”
“Well, sure, it’s like the music of our youth,” Ray said. “Man, this album totally brings me back to high school, hanging out in my basement and figuring out all the chords to ‘Run to the Hills.’”
“You play the guitar?”
“Not in a long time.” He sighed and drummed his fingers on the dashboard. “I used to play all the time when I was a kid, though. I was pretty sure I was gonna be the lead guitar in a huge metal band, be a big rock star, all that.”
Bob tried to picture Ray, with his earnest smiles and awkward stares, as one of the musicians on his last tour. He’d be good at it, Bob decided—he wasn’t a douche, and he seemed pretty responsible, and he really liked music, if his enthusiasm for Iron Maiden was any indication. “That’s cool, man,” he said. “Did you ever end up playing in any bands?”
“I was in a metalcore band for a while,” Ray said. “We kind of sucked, but it was fun, you know? ‘Course, then I came out to them, and it was totally awkward. So. That was the end of that.”
Ah. What exactly did one say in response to that? “That sucks,” Bob said slowly.
“It happens,” said Ray, matter-of-fact. “So, how about you? What do you do, when you’re not rescuing kids with super powers?”
Bob could feel his face redden, just a bit, though whether it was with pleasure or embarrassment he couldn’t tell. “I wouldn’t really say I rescued them,” he said. “They could have caught another ride, maybe one that would’ve worked out better.”
Ray made an amused snorting noise in the the back of his throat. “I doubt it,” he said. “I mean….” He shot Bob a sidelong look, not nervous exactly, but a little hesitant. “If I step out of line here, feel free to shut me up, but seriously, if I didn’t know they were orphans on the run, and you told me you’d adopted those kids a year ago and you were taking a family road trip when some weirdos with guns trashed your van, I’d totally believe you.”
“Uh-huh. Whatever you say,” Bob said. Still, he couldn’t help feel a little…hell, what was he feeling? A little protective, a little proud, and pretty damn ridiculous, because he’d known these kids for about six hours total.
“See!” said Ray, shaking a triumphant finger in Bob’s direction. “There you go again, with the dad-face!”
Bob shook his head. “Dude, seriously.”
“No, I’m not kidding!” Ray said with a laugh. “You get this expression on your face that’s just….” He shook his head and muttered, “Pretty hot.”
Bob froze, and turned his head from Ray to look out the window, at the striped pattern of shadows the pine trees threw onto the road. So that was what the staring earlier had been about. “Look, Ray,” Bob said, doing his best to ignore the voices in his head shrieking, Dude, and now you have to ride together! With the kids! Awkward! “I really, um, you’ve been really great, and I really appreciate it, just. I’m straight.”
Ray flushed so hard that he looked like a tomato with an especially fluffy wig. “No, dude, I—yeah, I know. Sorry. Just.” He waved a hand in a vague motion. “Forget I said anything.”
The silence that followed was as thick and awkward as any Bob had ever experienced, and he felt a little nauseated. Part of it was probably the fact that he’d taken to counting the shadows on the road, and the trees whipping by were going too fast for that to be a comfortable habit to fall into, but he thought part of it was the claustrophobic sense of being trapped in this completely insufferable tension. “So. You asked earlier--I’m a roadie,” Bob said, willing at this point to say absolutely anything to break the silence. “Drum tech, specifically. Well, I used to be, anyway. I think I’m technically on a leave of absence at the moment.”
“Oh, yeah?” Some of the interest in Ray’s voice was probably forced, but it sounded pretty genuine. “Is that as awesome as it sounds?”
They talked comfortably enough for a while about Bob’s job, and the music scene, and then about various jerks and idiots they’d worked with before. Bob felt the tension in his stomach loosen, and Ray’s face was finally beginning to relax, when the sight of a white and black car up ahead filled Bob with such a sudden and unexpected fear that his head swam and a weird buzzing drowned out the sound of Ray’s voice.
“Shit,” he said. “Is that a roadblock?”
“Looks like it,” said Ray, peering ahead. “It, you know, it probably doesn’t have anything to do with us, but…you think some super powers might be able to help us out here?”
Using the kids’ powers to get themselves out of police roadblocks seemed like a pretty unethical and shitty thing to do, but it wasn’t like they had many other options if being caught by the cops meant that Mikey and Gerard and Frank were gonna get sent back to wherever they’d come from. Bob unbuckled himself from his seat and went to the back of the camper to gently reach out for the first shoulder he encountered.
It was Mikey’s. He blinked up at Bob, looking vaguely disoriented, with his glasses hanging crookedly from one ear.
“Hey,” Bob said softly. “Sorry to wake you, but there are some cops up ahead. We aren’t sure if they’re looking for you guys or not, but….”
Mikey nodded and put his glasses on properly, and then he turned to shake his brother awake.
Gerard groaned, rolling over. Frank, who was shoved off Gerard and onto the edge of the bunk in the process, coming dangerously close to falling off, woke up with a loud grunt. “What? What’s going on?” Frank asked, looking way more alert than Bob had expected.
“Cops,” Mikey said shortly, and Frank’s eyes widened.
“Shit,” he said concisely, and despite the gravity of the situation, Bob wanted to laugh.
Whether it was Frank’s rolling over, the word ‘cops,’ or something Mikey had said psychically, Gerard muttered, “All right, I’m up.” He sat up and rubbed his eyes, yawning.
“Um, guys?” said Ray from the front, sounding a little frantic. “They’re, like, searching cars. This isn’t good.”
“What the hell?” said Frank, sounding frustrated. “Cops can’t just search your car like that! Don’t they need warrants and stuff? I’ve seen Law & Order!”
“They don’t need warrants if you give them permission,” Ray said, “and I bet if you don’t give them permission, they get suspicious.” He craned his neck, looking at the rapidly-shrinking line of cars ahead of them. “Guys, we don’t have a lot of time here. If we’re gonna do something, we gotta do it now.”
Gerard frowned, looking like he was concentrating on something really hard, and then sighed. “Distraction,” he muttered. “That’s what we need. But I don’t think Bunny’s gonna cut it, and I don’t wanna….” He shot Bob a worried glance. “I’m trying to think of something that doesn’t involve, like, moving cars, ‘cause I don’t think I could do that anyway, or the cops’ guns. I don’t know. I guess I’m not that good at distractions.”
“I maybe have an idea,” Frank said, “but it’s kind of lame.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Bob. At this point, he was willing to hear any and all suggestions—the only thing he’d come up with thus far was driving right through the checkpoint, and that probably wasn’t going to fly.
Frank shrugged. “Well, they probably can’t see us from here, right? We could just duck out into the woods, walk a little ways, and then jump back in when they can’t see us anymore.”
“Holy shit, that’s brilliant!” said Ray. “Next time I’m on the run, Frank, I’m totally calling you for advice.”
Frank blushed with pleasure and ducked his head, making him look even younger than he was. “I watch a lot of action movies,” he said.
“How far should we go?” asked Gerard, who hadn’t lost his worried expression. “And how are we gonna find you again? It’s not like we can walk as fast as you can drive.”
Bob turned to Ray. “You got a cell phone?”
Ray nodded, and dug one out of his pocket to hand it to Bob.
Bob quickly programmed Ray’s number into his own phone and his number into Ray’s. “Here,” he said, handing the phone back. “You call us when you’ve found a place to stop, and we’ll catch up with you.”
Mikey blinked up at Bob. “You’re coming with us?”
You’re the psychic, Bob thought. You tell me—you really think I’d leave the three of you on your own? Out loud, he said, “Of course I am.”
He didn’t know whether Mikey had heard his thoughts or not, but the kid’s smile, warm and slow, made him think that at least the sentiment behind the thoughts had been understood.
The camper had already slowed to a crawl in the sluggish line of cars leading to the roard stop, but Ray stopped it entirely. “I’ll call you as soon as I think it’s safe,” he said. “You guys watch yourselves. I haven’t seen those guys with the guns following us, but…be careful.”
Bob nodded. He grabbed Mikey with one hand and Frank with the other and helped them down out of the camper. Gerard followed, with a quiet “Thank you” to Ray as he stepped down.
“No problem,” Ray said, giving Bob a tight smile.
Mikey frowned at Bunny, who was still curled up in the corner where she couldn’t wreak havok on Gerard’s allergies, snoring softly. He sighed and said to Ray, “Take care of Bunny, okay?”
“Will do,” said Ray.
They dashed into the woods on the side of the road, going far enough in that Bob thought they probably couldn’t be seen from the road. There wasn’t a lot of brush to hide them, but the trees got thicker deeper in, and though there wasn’t a trail, the ground was pretty level and easy to navigate.
“I hope Ray doesn’t go too far,” said Gerard. “Think about how much walking we’ve done today!”
Frank rolled his eyes. “You can’t be tired!” he said. “We just slept for, like, hours!”
“It’s not the same if you don’t get a full night’s sleep. That’s when your body goes in and fixes stuff—it can’t do that when you’re just napping,” Gerard said with an air of great knowledgeability.
“Hey,” Bob said, absently wondering if Gerard watched the Discovery Channel, “less talking, more walking.”
They hiked on for a while in silence, more or less, broken only occasionally by Frank pointing out something he thought was awesome in the woods, or Gerard responding to something Mikey had said to him psychically. Bob was pretty sure they’d passed the road stop, but it was hard to tell—they were far enough in the woods that the noises from the road were faint and sounded too distant to really interpret.
It was kind of a comfortable rhythm, Bob thought, the kind of relaxing isolation from people that had been the whole point of his trip to begin with. Sure, the circumstances weren’t ideal, but it was a pretty day, not too hot, and it had been a long time since he’d just listened to the birds and the rustle of leaves in the woods.
Gerard seemed to be listening to something, too, but whatever it was didn’t make him very happy. “Did you hear that?” he said, stopping in his tracks and looking around him nervously.
Bob’s every sense kicked into high alert. “What was it?” he asked.
Gerard made a face, twisting his mouth into a focused, frustrated expression. “I don’t know, just….” He turned to his brother. “Did you hear it?”
Mikey stopped walking and turned his head from one side to another, like he was a satellite picking up signals, and Bob wondered if he was just listening, or if he’d opened some senses that most people didn’t have, taking in information that passed by the rest of the world. It was kind of fascinating to watch. After a long moment, though, he closed his eyes, and his face crumpled up like he was trying not to cry.
Oh, shit, thought Bob, just as he heard the cracking of a stick behind him.
He could have guessed that it wasn’t going to be anything he wanted to see, but he turned around anyway. It was a cop, a young guy with an abundance of tattoos that reminded Bob more of the bands he toured with than law enforcement officers. Bob could have taken some reassurance from the fact that the cop looked as nervous as Bob felt, but given that the cop had his hand visibly on the gun in his holster, it wasn’t actually that comforting.
“Are you guys Gerard and Mikey Minnelli and Frank Iero?” the cop asked.
Frank sighed, looking so bored that Bob wanted to poke him and tell him to take this seriously. “If we said no, would you believe us?”
“Um,” the cop said, looking like he wasn’t sure whether to actually answer that or not. He decided on not, apparently, because he turned to Bob and asked, a lot more hostile, “Who are you?”
“My name’s Bob Bryar,” said Bob, making sure the cop could see that both of his hands were empty. “I know this doesn’t look good, but--”
“Running from a police checkpoint with three missing children?” The cop laughed, somehow managing to sound anxious and scornful simultaneously. “You bet it doesn’t look good. Until I figure out what the hell your deal is, you’re under arrest.”
Great. Just fucking great.
**
“So that’s when Nickelodeon went downhill, when they ditched the real stories for this sitcom bullshit.” Travis looked over to the desk next to him, where Disashi was rummaging through the drawers. “You even listening to me, man?”
“Sure,” said Disashi. “No stories, sitcom bullshit, downfall of Nickelodeon. Got it. Aha!” He pulled out a big bottle of what looked like some kind of lotion from the drawer. “I’ve been looking for this for weeks. I knew I left it at work somewhere.”
“Dude,” said Travis, leaning forward so that for once, all four legs of his chair were on the floor at the same time. “What is that?”
“Hand cream.”
Travis shook his head. “How metrosexual are you?”
“How 2002 are you?” Disashi shot back. “’Metrosexual,’ Jesus. I know this is gonna come as a surprise to you, but most ladies like men who don’t smell like old sweat socks.”
“Old sweat socks? I’ll show you old sweat socks, you--” And then the phone rang. “Saved by the bell, sucker,” Travis said, though it probably applied more to him than it did to Disashi, since he didn’t really have a clever comeback ready, and Disashi knew it, damn him. “Hero County Police Department,” he said.
“Yo, Travis?” It was Matt, which meant maybe something interesting had happened at the road stops after all. Travis sat up straight.
“What’s up?”
“Well, Tyga thought he saw some guys walking around in the woods, so he went to check it out, and—get ready for this—it was all three missing kids, and some guy was with them.”
“You’re shitting me!” They didn’t have a lot of major crimes in Hero County, especially not ones the goddamned FBI was involved in, and this was the first missing persons case Travis had ever worked on. Still, he’d always gotten the impression that runaway or kidnapped kids were pretty hard to find. He’d never been so glad to be proven wrong.
“Nope,” said Matt. “Tyga’s sitting with the kids, and Eric’s with the guy—the guy’s name is Bob Bryar, FYI, if you want to look him up, see if he has a record.”
“Gotcha.” He put a hand over the receiver. “Yo, yo, Disashi, you got a paper and pencil or something over there?” Travis probably had some kind of writing implement in his desk, but he was so not in the mood to dig through his crap right now.
Disashi rolled his eyes, but he tossed over a pad of paper and a pen. Travis hurriedly scribbled down the name—he was pretty sure he’d spelled ‘Bryar’ right. “You gonna bring ‘em in?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Matt. “On our way now.”
“Awesome,” Travis said, and he hung up the phone. “Dude!” he said to Disashi. “I feel so Lenny Briscoe right now. No joke, Matt and Eric and Tyga found those missing kids, and maybe some dude involved in kidnapping them or something.”
“Seriously?”
Travis felt a little smug—it wasn’t often he got a chance to put an expression that dumbstruck on Disashi’s face. “Seriously.”
They looked up Bryar—no priors, but his running through the woods with the missing kids was suspicious enough that Travis started filling out a report on him. Usually he hated doing paperwork, but then again, usually he was writing up people for hunting with an expired licence or driving with a broken taillight. This was some serious NYPD Blue shit. He was gonna have to send Alex Suarez a six-pack or something. Maybe a bottle of wine—Suarez was a classy motherfucker.
They called the number given for Pete Wentz, and got an intense-sounding guy named Andy Hurley who thanked him and hung up before Travis could ask just what they were supposed to do with the kids.
It was another half hour before Matt, Eric, and Tyga walked in, herding a disgruntled-looking blond man and three scared-looking kids.
“Oh, thank God,” Eric said, shutting the door behind him with one hand while grabbing on to the collar of the shortest kid’s shirt with the other. “Longest car trip ever.”
The biggest kid wriggled out of Tyga’s grip, looked from Travis to Disashi and back again, and said, “Are you the chief?”
“Uh, yeah,” Travis said. “Are you okay?” The kid looked stressed, but not as freaked out as Travis thought a kid who’d been kidnapped would probably look.
The kid nodded. “I’ve been trying to explain it—look, see, Bob didn’t kidnap us, he was helping us get away from these people who were trying to kidnap us. He didn’t do anything wrong, so you should let him go.”
Ah, shit, this sounded like it was actually gonna be pretty complicated. “Can’t do that until I’ve figured out what’s going on,” Travis said, doing his best to sound businesslike. Disashi wordlessly handed him a blank report, and he gave him a brief smile in thanks. “Now, why don’t you guys sit down and explain this all to me. You too,” he added to Bryar.
Eric and Tyga deposited their charges in the chairs in front of Travis’s desk while Disashi ran to get some fold-out chairs for Bryar and the biggest kid. Once everyone seemed more or less settled, Travis picked up a pen.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s start at the beginning. What are your names, again?”
“Frank Iero,” said the littlest kid, who’d given up trying to dart out the door but had crossed his arms, hunched over in his seat and looking hilariously sullen.
“Mikey Castaway,” said the geeky-looking kid who hadn’t spoken yet. Bryar shot him a strange look.
“Gerard Casta--” the big one began, breaking off mid-word and looking confused.
Well, whatever, Travis might not have a photographic memory or anything, but he was pretty sure he’d remember a name like ‘Castaway,’ and he didn’t. He dug the missing persons report Suarez had faxed over out of a folder on his desk. “It says here your last name’s Minnelli,” he said. “You guys playing around with me here?”
“I don’t…” Gerard shook his head and turned to his brother. “Hey—you said we kept saying our name was ‘Way,’ right? Maybe ‘Castaway’ was the thing we couldn’t pronounce.”
“Well, that’s a stupid last name,” Mikey grumbled, before he and Gerard started apparently communicating through a series of increasingly absurd eyebrow quirks.
Travis had to agree, which brought him right back to wondering why in the hell they’d said it was their last name to begin with. “What are you talking about?”
They turned in unison to blink at him in slight consternation, like they’d forgotten he was there. “Um,” Gerard began. “It’s…okay, it takes too long to explain, and it doesn’t really matter anyway.” Mikey glared at him, and he added, “To you, I mean.”
“Right.” Travis turned to give Disashi an imploring look—he would have actually said, “Help me out here, man!” if it didn’t compromise his image as a tough, cool police chief.
Disashi smirked and mouthed, “You’re on your own, Chief!” at him. Traitor.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Matt said, rolling his eyes. He moved from behind Bryar’s chair to sit on the edge of Travis’s desk, shoving his slinky aside. “Okay, guys,” he said to the kids, “why don’t you tell me when you decided to run away, and why. And then we’ll move onto when you met up with Bob. That cool?”
It took a while, but to Travis’s amazement, Matt actually managed to get the whole story out of the kids, with Travis asking a few questions every now and then for clarification. Bryar hadn’t actually kidnapped them, it seemed, only picked them up on the highway, which was kind of admirable. The problem was, he’d obviously known they were missing and that the police were looking for them, or he wouldn’t have been sneaking around in the woods to avoid the road stop. The kids seemed to like him, but it was crazy suspicious. Who actually believed a crazy kids’ story about being on the run from secret agents instead of calling the cops?
The phone rang, and Disashi picked it up. “Hero County Police,” he said. “Uh-huh. Yeah, okay. That’s fine. See you then. Thanks for calling. Bye.”
“Who was that?” asked Matt.
“That was Pete Wentz’s assistant, Patrick Stump. He and Wentz are on their way—they should be here in about two hours.”
An unhappy expression spread over Gerard’s face, and he said, “They know we’re okay, right? You told them?”
“Yeah, we told them. ‘Course, they’d already know you were okay if you hadn’t run off like that.” Travis felt kind of like a shit for guilt-tripping a fourteen-year old, but seriously, what a hell of a lot of hassle for three runaway kids, two of whom lived with a fucking millionaire.
Frank, who’d been silent a good long while now, rolled his eyes. “You don’t get it,” he said.
Travis shrugged; if they weren’t gonna tell him anything else besides this bullshit story about running away from Mulder and Scully, he really didn’t get it and wasn’t likely to.
“What are we gonna do with them for two hours?” Eric said. “Seriously, it’s like seven-thirty now; do we ever get to go home tonight?”
“Shit, seriously?” He hadn’t realized it had gotten that late. “Well. Huh. Well, the kids have to stay nearby. You guys eaten yet?” He addressed that part to the kids, since he had no doubt the guys on patrol had gotten Subway or something.
“Not for a while,” Frank said.
“Okay, then, let’s grab some dinner at Hayley’s next door. You kids are gonna love this place—swear to God, anything you could think of to eat, they got it.”
“What about….” Matt jerked his head in Bryar’s direction.
Oh. Travis had almost forgotten about him. After all the extra effort his guys had put in today, it seemed kind of shitty to make one of them sit around and babysit Bryar. They couldn’t just let him go, though, not until they’d talked to a lawyer and figured out if he’d actually committed a crime or was just kind of sketchy.
“There’s always the cell,” Disashi said. Sometimes they had a couple of drunks who’d been driving or being a public nuisance in there, but at the moment it was empty.
Bryar, who’d been pretty stoic throughout, winced. Well, he could just suck it up, as far as Travis was concerned; if he’d just called the police when he picked the kids up instead of leading them all on a wild goose chase, Travis would have already been home and watching the disaster movie marathon on TNT.
“Awesome,” Travis said. “Make it so, Number Two!” Disashi flipped him the bird, but he went to grab Bryar by the shoulder and steer him towards the back, where the cell was.
The kids looked after Bryar with worried eyes. Travis gave them what he hoped was a reassuring smile and said, “Come on, let’s get some food.”
“Hey, Travie,” Tyga said, “you want me to come along? Help you with the kids?”
“Help me with the kids, my ass. Eat off my credit card, more like.”
Tyga shook his head. “No, seriously, you might need some help.”
“Oh, come on,” said Travis, feeling like Tyga was just messing with him now. He gestured towards where the kids sat, three little mini goth-punk-geek types, with their dark clothes and stupid hair. “How much trouble you think they’re gonna be?”
Matt snorted, and said, “Those are some famous last words, if ever I heard ‘em.”
Part 8