Book Five, Chapter 119: Hey ya, Fella

🔴 REC    SEP 25, 2018 06:24:07    [▮▮▮▮▮ 100%]

Suddenly, we didn’t feel safe in the museum.

“What the heck was that?” Logan asked as we found ourselves settling into the back booth at the Diner. “And why the hell are we in this fishbowl?”

I panned the camera around so that they could see all the windows in the diner. If there was someone looking for us, they would see us here.

“Clearly, he doesn’t have trouble finding us,” Kimberly said. “So we need to be somewhere where we can see him coming. Maybe—I don’t know.” She turned her attention away from Logan. “Anna,” she said, “did he do anything like that before?”

Anna sat in the booth, eyes wide open, confused.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember anything like that. But I told you that he can always find you. Once he knew that you existed, he was always going to be able to find you.”

“You said that if we hid in the past, we could stay safe,” Logan said. “Did we just cause all those deaths for nothing?”

“I didn’t know that would happen!” Anna said. “We need to find Camden. Maybe he knows something about this.”

“The list of things that we hope Camden knows grows ever longer,” Logan said.

Logan was really good at the internal conflict part. He could act simultaneously worried and a bit antagonistic, but then he could turn on charm to almost make himself seem more human because of his worry. I wondered if he would show Ramona the ropes because that was something that Hysterics also did—especially Defiant Hysterics.

“We just need to get to a place where we don’t have to worry about that man—or whatever he is,” Logan said.

“Look,” Anna said. “Camden is in walking distance right now. The only problem is that I’m there too, and I don’t know what happens if we show up before I leave.”

They continued talking, and I decided to pan the camera around the diner, showing the individual NPCs. As a reaction to our decision to go there, the NPCs had been changed out.

One in particular that I noticed was a cop sitting at the bar area, just out of hearing range of where we were. But the thing that made him peculiar was that he had his police radio. I could hear reports coming in over it, and he was listening to them while drinking his coffee. He wasn’t that important of a character—his title was Police Officer, without even a last name.

I assumed Carousel was trying to tell us something. After zooming in on his radio, I turned the camera back to the others and said, “Did you guys notice that the guy had a radio?”

“Generation Killer?” Kimberly asked.

“Can we stop calling him that?” Logan asked.

“Yes. Grant Leitner,” I answered. “The boogeyman. The guy that travels through your memories or the past or something like that. He had a radio—an old-fashioned one with a long silver antenna. Did you guys see it?”

“Yeah,” Kimberly said.

I heard a bark from outside and turned the camera around to zoom in on Bobby, who was outside with the dogs.

Nothing else happened, but everyone at the table held their breath.

Turning the camera back to them, I said, “I think that’s it. I think that radio is a way for him to communicate with his other selves.”

Was that the hint that Carousel was giving us by putting the police officer there?

We knew that he had a trope called Always Watching, and having one of his alternate selves somehow stuck outside of time with a radio was one way for that trope to be used.

He could spy on us anytime now that he had our scent, so to speak.

The paper that I threw had passed right through him, which should mean that we were not going to be able to kill him. But the other versions of him seemed flesh and blood enough from Anna’s descriptions.

Whether or not we could kill them was a different question.

Behind me, the policeman’s radio started to go off.

“All units be advised, we have multiple disturbances. Stand by for details,” a woman’s voice said over the radio.

The police officer stood up and said something into his radio—I couldn’t quite catch it because the radio was still going off.

“Multiple fires reported throughout Carousel. Robberies reported at Fourth and Glibly, and at Milk and Dour. Someone’s run a car through the entrance of the mall. Stand by,” the voice said over the radio, clearly flustered.

The cop quickly walked out the door, yelling behind him, “I’ll pay when I get back! I have to go!”

The waitress, who was also the owner, waved him off. She looked very concerned and lifted a small TV out from under the counter, flipping it on.

As soon as she did, it went right to the news, but I couldn’t get a good angle on it. All I could see was the orange glow of fire being filmed from a helicopter.

There was a loud bang on the glass as Bobby tried to get our attention.

Outside, it wasn’t quite light yet. There was still a rind of darkness in the sky. And yet, as we all ran outside, I panned the camera to see the skyline. The clouds above reflected that same orange that the TV had shown.

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“What the heck is happening?” Bobby asked.

It was hectic. I could hear sirens all around—police, fire, and ambulance services in all directions.

“Is this about us?” Kimberly asked.

What an absurd question to ask in real life. But in this situation, it was the only logical answer.

“He’s committing crimes all over the place?” Logan asked. “To what end?”

I made sure to get a shot of everyone as we stared at the glowing fires in the distance, their black smoke trails snaking up into the sky from at least half a dozen locations.

“Why would he do this?” Antoine asked. “What’s his game?”

I knew this one.

“It’s like Die Hard with a Vengeance. He’s committing crimes all over town. Why would someone want to do that?” I said. “Unless you needed the police distracted.”

“If you don’t want to have to deal with the police, you act sneaky,” Logan said. “You don’t start fires all over town.”

We were racing across the parking lot in the direction of Dyer’s Lake.

“You do if the place you’re trying to do crime at is the police station,” I said.

I got a good shot of Logan realizing what I had figured out already.

■ STOP

🔴 REC    SEP 25, 2018 07:15:14    [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]

We found a cabin that had been part of a motel at some point in time—one that was now clearly abandoned.

Antoine had kept my television inside his duffel bag, using his luggage tag, which could now carry more thanks to receiving new tags after the werewolf storyline.

We pretended like we had found it at the cabin. We had to plug it in with an extension cord, which we had also brought, running it to an outlet that had been part of the camping area—now overgrown and unused.

I turned on the TV, and just like the one at the diner, this one immediately turned to the news. It was a classic trope, and we didn’t even have to bring it into the story.

“Good morning,” the news anchor said. “We begin with a stunning attack overnight at the Carousel Police Department. A group of men used a stolen bulldozer to smash through the front of the downtown station, overpowering officers and kidnapping a man from lockup.

“Police say the man wasn’t suspected of any crime but was being held for a mental health evaluation. The attackers moved quickly, escaping before backup could arrive.

“Authorities believe the attack was carefully timed—officers were stretched thin responding to multiple emergencies across the city. This morning, police are searching for the suspects and the man they took. Anyone with information is urged to come forward. More updates as they come in.”

I continued filming as the news station cut to footage from overhead: a group of men wearing overcoats and fedoras dragging a man in a business suit out of the police station and into an abandoned warehouse nearby.

“That’s the guy who bumped into us,” Kimberly said. “The guy that we accidentally dragged back here.”

“He must have gone to the police and told them that he got dragged back in time,” Bobby said. “No wonder he was up for a mental evaluation.”

Kimberly turned to Anna. “We have to go get Camden. Now.”