John was still deep in REM sleep. George was watching him closely and keeping his right hand on Lonetree’s left. Gabriel would carefully raise John’s right eyelid to check for any pupil dilation that would indicate that the Demerol used was possibly interfering, a problem he and Lonetree had many years before during a session in college. John had became incoherent in his deep thoughts during the dreamwalk and nearly flatlined. The drug wasn’t enough to overdose him but had been enough to confuse his dreaming mind. The body usually did what the brain ordered, and that was the danger they had watched for. He nodded when he was finished, and Jennifer took a breath of relief.
“I’m picking up a rise in anxiety,” George said. “Not much, but John is experiencing possibly fright or mild excitement.”
“Your visions are as clear and precise as usual,” Damian muttered, and George shot him a dirty look. Jackson looked at his watch. “He’s been under for thirty-five minutes.”
Gabriel watched John’s serene face with worry. The longest he had ever been under was twenty-two minutes. In that instance, John found himself unable to concentrate for days afterward.
George let go of Lonetree’s hand and then fixed Gabriel with a worried look. He shook his head at Gabe’s reluctance to end the session. He was under the illusion that his friend was in control, but he was thinking something entirely different. This wasn’t a normal dreamwalk. He was getting the vibe that John was being led down a trail by poisonous bread crumbs.
“That thing, whatever it is, is using John and doesn’t really give a damn if it kills him. It’s having fun reliving this through him.” George pointed at John’s sleeping form. “Bring him out, Gabe; we can get to the bottom of this by allowing this thing to play out real time.”
“We would be sacrificing the president,” Jennifer said. “You know John would never protect himself if there is the slightest chance he can help in his way.”
Gabriel looked at George for the longest time and then reached behind him for the syringe of Adrenalin from the small table. He looked at Jennifer.
“Another person lost on this team is not going to solve anything,” George said, sitting back in his chair with his eyes on Lonetree.
“Trading one life for another—is that what we do now, Gabriel?” Jennifer asked in protest for caving into George and his fears. She wanted no harm to come to John, but he had been adamant about helping the president in his way. They were too far short of time for anything else. Halloween was here, and they all knew that date was the tipping point for whatever was happening in Moreno.
Kennedy ignored further argument. He couldn’t risk another of his friends’ lives.
Jennifer watched without further comment as Gabe stuck the needle into John’s arm.
“John, it’s time to wake up,” Gabriel said softly, leaning over Lonetree, as he placed the empty syringe on the table.
Jennifer took up John’s left hand and squeezed. “Come on back; you’ve been under too long.”
Lonetree’s eyes stopped moving, and his breathing became deeper.
“Heart rate coming up and coming up fast,” Leonard said as he studied the monitors in front of him. The small black man nodded at Harvey, who was watching Leonard move from monitor to monitor. “Blood pressure is also rising. He’s coming around.” Leonard leaned over to adjust the heart rate to get an accurate count on beats per minute when the laptops and monitors suddenly went blank. “What the hell?” he asked himself as he looked around the darkened room. “Hey, J. Edgar, turn on the overhead lights.”
Damian stood and then walked to the wall and hit all ten of the old-fashioned switches. He looked up as the fluorescent lighting flickered as if coming to life and then went out. Damian hit the switches twice, up and down and then finally up.
Gabriel stood from his chair as the only lights they had on was the two small lamps on the table. He looked around and settled on Leonard, who shrugged. Sickles turned and pulled up the old-fashioned yellow roll-up blind that covered one of the main second-floor windows.
“The lights at the radio station are on. I even saw light from the first floor reflecting off the water in the street.” A flash of lightning made Leonard flinch and step back from the glass. Harvey moved past him and then saw what had caught his attention just a moment before.
“Uh-oh,” he said, “that damn K-Rave sign is on again.”
“What’s so mysterious about that?” Damian asked as he stepped up to the window and looked down into the storm. He saw the bright red gas-fed fluorescents glow.
“That damn light has been busted since the sixties. It doesn’t even have a ballast for the damn gas. And according to old Bob and Linda, strange shit starts to happen when that light comes on. I didn’t believe it until now.” He turned away from the window. “I had this feeling in ’65 when the damn Vietcong zapped us but good in the Ia Drang Valley. They chewed our asses up. There’s something out there, and now I think I should have done what all the others did and gotten the hell out of here.”
“He’s coming around,” Jenny said.
George felt relief momentarily settle his mind.
“Okay, let’s—” Gabriel began but was stopped when the windows across the entire circumference of the second floor exploded inward. Windswept rain and glass inundated the entire area of the darkened floor. There was just enough light coming from the empty elevator shaft and the emergency stairwell they had propped open.
“NOOOO,” came the deep and booming voice. It reverberated in their ears. Leonard forgot about the glass that had peppered his face when he became more aware of his eardrums about to burst. Gabriel bent at the waist, and Jennifer collapsed onto John in terrible pain. Damian fell to his knees, and Harvey hit the floor as if mortar rounds were striking inside his old firebase in Southeast Asia. “BRING HIM BACK!” the voice screamed in abject anger.
George felt the force as it took him by the throat and raised him to the thirteen-foot-high ceiling. He was taken so hard and so fast that Gabe actually lost sight of him. As he raised his head, still holding his ears from not only the explosion of glass but the booming voice that shook their world. He and Jennifer, with a waking Lonetree, saw Cordero as he was slammed over and over again into the old, water-stained ceiling until his head was punched all the way through it. His legs were kicking for the briefest of moments, and then his body was released and he fell to the floor with a bone-crunching impact.
Gabriel was horrified as he tried to move toward the dark and still form of his friend. He made it in two steps when he hit the small table and the medication there went crashing to the floor. The empty syringes bounced once, twice, and then flew up. In the soft light, Jennifer screamed when she saw the four syringes spin in one spot for the briefest of moments and then shoot like darts at Kennedy. The first two struck him in the chest, the third near his collarbone, and the fourth in his shoulder with a force hard enough to send Gabriel flying backward over the still form of George Cordero.
Jennifer left John, who was trying to gain some sense of what was happening around him. He shook his head as he watched Jennifer run and then fall out of his sight. On the floor, she reached for Gabe’s ankle as he tried to get his own wits together. His leg was ripped from her grasp, and then they all watched as Gabriel was smashed against the wall while grabbing at his throat, and then he went straight up as he was propelled into the air by the unseen force just as George had been a brief moment before. His shoes kicked holes in the old plaster as he was lifted. Damian and Harvey had recovered faster than they would have thought possible for being as scared as they were. For Jackson, this was not like the past six years chasing down hoaxers and frauds; this was real, and now he remembered how scared one man can be. Damian dove for the Gabe’s kicking feet only to hit his heel, and then he went sprawling, sliding on the old tile floor until he impacted the wall with his head and shoulder. Harvey followed suit and missed completely, going headfirst into the wall that he never saw coming.
“STOP IT! STOP IT NOW!” came the booming voice that seemed to come from all directions. “I DIDN’T NEED YOU FOR THIS! THEY ARE TO WITNESS WHAT WAS!”
The old department store shook as if an earthquake had struck the area. The remaining glass flew from the window frames, and a crack formed in the tile-covered cement floor. It moved like an aggressive snake until it slowly stopped its run. Rainwater was pushed inside by the powerful wind that had tripled in strength in the past few seconds.
Suddenly, Gabriel released his hand from his own throat that was foolishly trying to hold off the choking fingers of the entity, and he felt himself falling. He hit so hard that he went out like a light. Damian was the first to him just as the overhead fluorescents flared to life, blinking on and off, and then settling into their steady, cold light.
John was finally able to sit up and stumble from the bed. He actually kicked Jennifer as he tried to find her. She was half under the bed.
“Ow,” she said and then wiggled out of the tight space. “Go check George and Gabe!” she screamed.
“George is dead,” Damian answered solemnly as he kneeled next to Cordero’s broken body. Jackson flicked blood away that fell into his eyes from the gash on his forehead. “Are you okay, old-timer?” Jackson asked Harvey, who was sitting with his legs splayed against the wall.
His eyes moved first and then his head. Leach had several cuts on his face from flying glass and a rather good-sized bump on his head from his collision with the formidable wall.
“This town has seriously gone downhill,” Harvey said as he stared at the large black man leaning over him.
John finally reached Gabriel, who was being held by Julie. She brushed some of his brown hair out of his eyes and then retrieved his glasses and slid them on his face. Lonetree stopped cold and stared down at his friend. Then his heart started beating once again as Gabriel moaned and then opened his eyes.
“Hey, we saw the lights come on and thought you might … want … some … coffee,” the female voice said from the stairwell’s opening as the newcomers saw the state of everyone. Bob and Linda stopped when they saw the devastation on the second floor, and then Linda dropped the tray of coffee and cups. They smashed on the floor at her feet.
Their eyes moved to Damian, Julie, and John as they assisted a bruised Gabriel to his shaky feet. They heard Jennifer crying as she sat beside the crumpled body of George Cordero. She had a hand on his head and was trying in vain to wipe some of the blood away. Leonard was standing in shock by his computers and monitors. He angrily turned and pushed two of his laptops from the table and then kicked at them.
“A lot of good this shit is against that!” he said, pointing at the top of the thirteen-foot-high ceiling.
Damian, Julie, and John got Gabriel to the chair. He sat as they tried to get a cut on the back of his head to stop bleeding. Jennifer found a dust cover and covered George’s body with it. The entire time, Gabriel’s eyes never left the scene.
“We can’t fight this,” he said, watching Jennifer wipe her eyes as she stared down at George.
John dabbed a washcloth at the six-inch-long gash in his head. “Yes, we can,” he said, tossing the cloth down onto the floor. “I have to go back in.”
Jennifer looked up. “Stupid red man.”
They all turned to see her standing in a slouched position while eyeing George’s still form at her feet. Then her head, barely inches from her chest, turned and faced Lonetree. By the stairwell, Bob and Linda wanted to turn and run but were mesmerized by what amounted to one wicked acid trip.
“I’ve been here watching you idiots fumble around with something that you have never encountered, and your deal here is not only going to get yourselves killed but Jenny also.” She smiled and then moved a few steps closer to George’s body. She looked down. “Ritchie Valens here was right. You’re being led down the garden path, and he knew—or had a pretty good guess—that was the way of things. They wanted the medicine man here to keep dreaming, to witness what was done to her. And let me tell you something, guys and dolls—she has help, a lot of it. Help the likes of which you can never begin to imagine. They are strong; they were created to be strong. And now she is to the point that she can no longer control them.” Jennifer smiled—or Bobby Lee McKinnon did. “They are out again, just like they were out that night, and we all know what happened then, don’t we? You, Injun Joe, will get Jenny killed.” Bobby Lee in the guise of Jennifer Tilden looked around at everyone in the room one at a time. “Only one of them is like me. Power from them feed her. They also warp her. She sees things they want her to see, believes things they want her to believe. Misreads intentions of love and hate.”
Jennifer collapsed into a ball on the floor. “Ow,” she said again as she sat up rubbing her head.
John was there in a flash. “You okay?”
“Yeah, this time, I was aware of everything he said. Bobbly Lee is terrified of what we’re facing here.”
“We got that point,” Julie said, relieving Lonetree of Jennifer and leading her to the chair beside Gabriel. “Look, we’ve lost two friends here, but if you guys want to stay, I’m with you,” the former reporter said as she sat in between Jenny and Gabe and tried to attend them both.
“You guys are out of your minds,” Bob said from the doorway of the stairwell.
“We don’t run,” John said, pacing. “I know one thing here. We have a chance to find out what started all of this and what actually happened in 1962. All I need is a few minutes back inside. This thing thinks it can kill us and that we’ll just accept that and run.”
“We don’t have George anymore,” Jennifer said with tears in her eyes. “And Bobby Lee won’t help.”
“Something got mad that George and I brought John out of his dreamwalk, that was for sure. But that same presence was angered that something else took things too far in its attack.” Gabe looked over at John. “What lead did you learn from the dream that you say can give us an advantage?”
John walked over and gently lifted the covered body of George Cordero into his arms and faced Kennedy. “Julie, you spent three years at your network’s Berlin bureau, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she answered, looking not at John but the small body of their friend.
“You can read German?”
“A little, not much.”
“I can read and speak it. Don’t like to, but my mama was a war bride from Germany. She grew up in Nuremberg.”
They all turned and looked at Harvey Leach.
“Does this have anything to do with that creepy Dr. Fromm? The man was a nut, always coming in before my ma died, thinking that they could be friends because they were both refugees out of Germany, but she never liked him. The man was bad, and she knew it from the get-go.”
“I need to go back in and get something,” John said. “It may be there, it may not be.”
“Without George and his ability, we won’t know what you find, and you can’t read German. You can’t take Harvey with you.” All eyes turned to Gabriel, who dashed a few hopes with his obvious observation.
“That won’t be a problem. In my dreamwalk, those two crazy kids found something in Dean’s father’s locked office. It was a journal of that man Harvey just mentioned, Dr. Jürgen Fromm. He and the founders of this town brought a souvenir back from the war; that’s the key here.”
Gabriel moved his head too fast and winced at the sharp stab of pain. He grimaced and looked over at Leonard, who was silently picking up the remains of two laptops.
“Is there any chance you can get those computers connected so you can get some dirt on someone?”
Leonard stopped what he was doing and threw the cover of one of the destroyed laptops against the wall.
“One of the feds’ satellite phones, but not tonight. There’s way too much electricity in the air. It would take forever to get online.”
“Gabe, the only way we can get the information you need is in that damn black journal. If I go back in, I’ll know where to find it. Gloria and Dean would never take it back to his house; they will stash it someplace. I can find that place if it still exists. I have to go back and find out what they did with it. It’s the only way.”
Gabriel watched John move George’s body to the bed, and Lonetree laid him down, still covered in the dustcloth. He placed a hand over his chest and closed his eyes as he prayed for his ancestors to watch over his friend.
“Okay, if everyone is agreed.”
“Yeah, for George,” Leonard said as he tossed the remains of one of the laptops into a garbage can.
“Whatever it is, we can’t let it do this to anyone,” Julie said, looking at Jennifer, who smiled and nodded.
“All right. Mr. Leach, can we ask you to brave a little bit more of this madness until John can find what he is looking for?”
“I can’t say I never felt like runnin’ from a fight more than this one, but I can see you’re hurting for your friend here. We lost a lot of good folks back in ’62; maybe I owe them too, so running’s not an option.” Harvey looked over at Bob and Linda. “You two should skedaddle.”
Bob opened his mouth to say something but closed it when Linda cut him off. “We have to stay and get what that damn company owes us, or we’ll spend the rest of our lives broke and looking for work suitable for two old and broken-down hippies. Hell, we’re not even hippies; I grew up in an affluent section of Marin County, and Bob is from Pasadena, for God’s sake.”
“Mrs. Culbertson, I will guarantee you receive what your contract calls for. You have my word. If they don’t, I’ll pay you and then take it out of someone’s ass later,” Gabriel said with the hint of a smile.
Linda looked at Bob and then over at Harvey Leach. She tried to smile, but her shaking legs said that would be a failure for the circumstance they faced.
“Harvey’s our friend, just like Mr. Cordero was yours. Maybe we’ll stay and help our friend,” Bob said, wrapping an arm around Linda’s shoulders. “Fuck it. We went through a rougher time throughout the sixties and the seventies. We faced down the Reagan years and trickle-down economics, and we still survived it all, just to meet each other through a shitty job offer to watch over this town. Wouldn’t say much for us if the very first time Moreno needed us, we split. As much as we complained about it, it’s been our home too.”
“All right, thank you,” Gabriel said, walking toward the door.
“What’s first?” Damian asked, making sure his nine-millimeter was loaded and snapped into its holster. He winced as Julie applied a gauze bandage to his head. He looked comical as if he were wearing a small dairy girl’s hat.
“We go down and warn the feds that all hell may break loose. And maybe it is time to get them and the president out of here.”
“And you do remember that ghosts aren’t very susceptible to bullets, Serpico?” Leonard said, struggling to contain his laughter over the silly-looking bandage on Jackson’s head.
“Yeah, well, like all of you scientific types, I plan to test that bullets-don’t-hurt-ghosts theory over and over until it does work.”
“Well, it’s past twelve. It’s now Halloween,” Julie said.
At that moment, just like the scene out of a very bad horror movie, the lightning lit up the room and the lights flickered. The thunder was distant but strong. The rain increased.
“For people who claim that hauntings are few and far between and that most of the claims are hoaxes, you sure were wrong about a few things. Maybe you should stop chasing the supernatural,” Bob said as he and Linda started for the stairs.
John looked from Jennifer to Gabriel.
“We would, if only the damn things would stop chasing us.”