Preview: Trail of Madness

Prologue
2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14

Thursday, August 22nd, 1996 12:45 PM
Odessa, Texas

She is in her bedroom by the closet door. Her eyes drift around the room slowly, but while nothing appears to be out of place, she still knows instinctively that something is not right. There is a soft, wet sound that she cannot place but which causes her more distress the longer she hears it. She searches her room to find the source of the sound, but she is alone.
Though every instinct tells her not to move, she walks to the bedroom door and opens it. Her mother’s body is in the middle of the living room floor. She sees the haunted fearful look frozen forever in her mother’s dead eyes, and she utters a small whimper as the eyes move to look at her.
“Why couldn’t you save me?” her mother whispers.
She tries to look away from her mother, only to find her father hunched over in the corner of the living room. His red bloodshot eyes gleam at her as he chews on his wife’s heart, and she realizes that the sound she hears is wet flesh tearing.

Wendy’s terrified scream drew Jobe out of his thoughts, and he turned from the window to move to the bed. He tried to take hold of her arms to calm her down, and she panicked, thrashing her legs as she began struggling to get away.
“Wendy, it’s me,” Jobe said, grunting as he took a knee in the side of his chest just below his bandaged wound. His fractured ribs protested immediately, but he tried to keep the tone of his voice gentle. “It’s only a nightmare, okay?” He pulled Wendy against his chest and patted down the back of her hair until she began to calm down.
“I’m okay.” Wendy gave Jobe a strained smile as he sat back from her. “I’m sorry I keep waking you up like this.”
“Nah, you’ve got nothing to be sorry for. After everything you’ve been through in the last few days, you deserve the chance to break down a little bit.”
“We don’t have time for me to break down. We still have to find this contact that my dad was supposed to be meeting.”

“Wendy, you can’t keep this bottled up forever.” Jobe said before reaching out to rub her back. “I know you’re tough, but if you don’t let this out now, it’s going to be eating away at you.”
“But this isn’t something I can just... god, I miss Sam,” she whimpered as her face started to crumple. Jobe leaned over to hold her, and he remained silent while he listened to her cry.
It had only been two days since they had left Devine to search first for Candy Duncan, the woman who could supposedly lead them to Gene Stoffel’s new contact. Jobe wanted to begin right away, but it had become obvious that Wendy was an emotional train wreck that hadn’t yet finished the crash. He didn’t need his reflection to tell him that he had to wait out her grief, because he knew that he would need Wendy’s help to make any progress in finding her father’s kidnappers.
Wendy stilled and began sniffle, raising her hands to wipe her cheeks. Jobe cleared his throat as he looked toward the mirror. “Hey buddy, where’s the wonder twin?”
“In the chair to the left of the table,” his reflection said.
Jobe nodded and turned to face the chair. “Jamie, if it’s all right, I need you to scout around on the campus. We don’t know much about the person we’re looking for beyond a name. For now, I need you to start finding the local dealers on the campus. Three or four of them are supposed to work for Candy, so maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will drop her name in front of you.”
“Tell him I appreciate him making the effort to look at me,” Jamie said as he got up from his chair.
“He said thank you for making the effort to look at him,” Wendy said and sat back on the headboard while she wiped at her eyes with the neck of her shirt.
“It’s the least I can do for all the help you provide,” Jobe said before returning his attention back to Wendy. “Are you hungry? You haven’t eaten anything for a day and half now.”
She nodded and sniffled as she slid her legs off the side of the bed. “It’s been too hard to eat with my head full. All I can think about is the bodies, and my stomach just locks up. Nothing appeals to me right now.”
“We need to have you fake it for today.” Jobe got up and moved to the table to grab Wendy’s backpack. He held it out to her, watching her shuffle into the bathroom before he looked at his reflection. “How long?”
His reflection shook its head. “It’s hard to say. She’s a mess right now, and you can’t rush the grieving process.”
“I’m not trying to, but we need to find out what happened to her father. If he never made it to the meeting, then it stands to reason we should find the contact fine, fit, and clueless as to what happened to Gene.”
“Yes, and both Wendy and I will be able to confirm that,” the reflection agreed before shrugging its shoulders. “But Jamie is more limited in his search. The way I understand it, Wendy’s the telepathic one, and Jamie is something of an

astral body who uses Wendy as his link to the world. But that means someone would really have to drop Candy’s name for him to find her.”
“Yes, I know that.” Jobe glanced toward the bathroom door as the shower came on. “But Jamie can still find all of the small time dealers working the campus and lead Wendy and I to them. Once we get close enough, we can try to stake out a few of the dealers until we can find one who does work for Candy.”
“Okay, so far this sounds like a reasonable plan.”
“Thank you,” Jobe said as he sat down in the chair. “Now that we’re clear on who you are, you won’t be telling me about my messages coming from the ‘holy one’ anymore, right?”
“No, mainly because you wouldn’t believe me. It’s my current theory that if this case plays out the way you think it will, it’s going to prove that Jamie is right, and I’m just a fractured part of your own personality,” the reflection said. “But now that places the burden of doing the work solely on your shoulders. I can tell you which people are bad, but it has to be left up to you what you’ll do about it.”
“I don’t know that this contact will give us any other leads. That’s what worries me. These guys aren’t likely to conduct two tests in the same time period, and unless they’re still hanging around town, Wendy and I won’t find them by just walking around.”
“So why not work backwards if this lead doesn’t pan out? We can head to Montana next to check up on Neal Mosley and see if there was something to connect him to Gene.”
“It’s a long shot. Still it’s not like we’ve got much to work on here.”

***

Thursday 12:50 PM

The white van that pulled into the Comfort Suites motel parking lot drew a few looks from people leaving their rooms or walking to their cars, but there seemed nothing out of the ordinary about the vehicle. It looked pretty much like any of the other work vans parked in the motel parking lot, and the two men that sat in the front seats didn’t seem out of place in their denim work shirts and dark baseball caps.
The small magnetic decals on the doors declared that the occupants were employed by Fender Brothers Construction and Contracting, though in fact, no such company existed. The men all carried identification, but as with the company they worked for, their identities were complete works of fiction.
The van pulled around to the back of the parking lot while the driver and passenger scanned the area for witnesses. The back of the motel was quiet, and the driver turned the van into a parking slot before he cut the engine off.

Getting out of the van first, the driver again glanced around the back parking lot with narrowed eyes. He walked to the door of the room in front of the van, moving in a way that might have seemed suspicious if anyone had seen him. Yet no one did, and the driver dug the motel key out of his pocket to unlock the room before he moved to the side door of the van.
It opened and two men backed out of the van carrying another man between them. The man groaned as they carried him into the room, but he made no effort to resist them in his drugged condition. The men laid him out on the bed and moved back outside to the van.
The driver went to the nightstand beside the bed to set down the room key before he back to the door. Locking the door from the inside, he shut it and walked back to the van with the same cautious stride while he surveyed the back parking lot. Their deposit had gone unnoticed, and within minutes, the van was back on the highway; easily ignored, and easily forgotten.

***

Thursday 1:30 PM

Jobe smiled as he watched Wendy pack away her second order of pancakes. He had already finished his own breakfast, and he nursed his second cup of coffee while Wendy seemingly tried to make up for lost meals.
She finally set the fork down, shaking her head and giving a small sigh. “Okay, I surrender. The pancakes have won.”
“Sure, you may have lost the war, but many pancakes fell to you,” Jobe teased though his expression was still filled with concern. “Should we head back to the motel to let you rest for a little while longer?”
“No, we’re just wasting what little money we have by sitting around,” Wendy said before she paused to sip her orange juice. “We need to find Candy, and we have a lot better chance of doing it than Jamie does.”
“I thought Jamie knows everything.”
“No, he doesn’t. I think I understand what happened and why Jamie can’t really know everything. Jamie knows what he does in the same way that your reflection does. Just as your reflection gets his messages through your telepathic ability, Jamie gains his information through my contact with other people.
“There weren’t too many people in Devine that I didn’t know, so Jamie thought that he had a pretty good understanding of everything that went on, right up until…” Wendy trailed off, shaking her head in a vain effort deny her bleak feelings. “Right up until my dad showed up under the effects of the virus. All it took was one random mind to throw off his ability to know everything.”
Jobe rested his head in his hand as he regarded Wendy quietly. “That still leaves the unexplainable visions you had of the phantom car.”

“I’ve got nothing on those, which of course brings us to the question of whether they were a miracle, or if this kind of vision is another ability of mine. I have to wait and see if anything like it happens again.”
“You have a second soul, but you can’t believe in a miracle.”
“You don’t either.”
“Maybe a little bit, yeah,” Jobe said and shrugged. “I couldn’t believe that God was talking to me, but I did for a while.”
“So why did you stop believing?” Wendy asked.
“Guilt, mostly. Bit by bit, I began admitting to myself that it was more likely I was talking to a hallucination instead of God’s messenger. Ultimately, that admission led me to second guess every decision I’ve made over the course of several jobs. I was already questioning my hallucination’s information before I met you, and Jamie validated most of my suspicions. I still think there may be a God, but I know for a fact that he isn’t really talking to me.”
“But because of what happened in Devine, you’ve confirmed that the people you killed were criminals.”
“Some of them were, but I still have other people on my conscience who weren’t guilty. There’s no one to blame but me for being indiscriminate in my attacks, so even if my reflection was giving me the truth, it doesn’t really excuse the things I’ve done.”
“If you’re feeling guilty about your past, what exactly is our plan once we catch up to the people who infected my dad?”
“I’m really not sure. To be honest, I haven’t sorted out how we’re going to find them yet. I may have made it sound like I could easily hunt these guys down, but I’m not a detective. This is really the first time I’ve had a job where the point was to look for someone specific. Even when we do find this contact, there’s a good chance they’ll be a dead end. After that, there isn’t much else for us to work with.”
“Sure, but we do have another lead to check on with Neal’s case.”
“The reflection pointed that out to me while you were in the shower, but locating any information on him presents us with the same problem. This is a cold case, and we aren’t detectives. We’re extremely limited in our resources, so all we’ve got to work with is publicly available information.”
“We’ll sort it out after we’re ready to leave town. For now I’m more concerned with our budget. We’ve only got enough money left for four or five more nights at the motel depending on how often we eat, so we really ought to sort out some way to get some money together. The truck won’t run on prayers, you know.”
“Yeah, I know, but the only things I can come up with are either that I work in day labor, or we try to sell the truck-”
“I’m not walking,” Wendy cut him off.
“Right, so we need a plan C,” Jobe agreed.

***

Thursday 3:06 PM

He woke up slowly, opening his eyes to stare at the ceiling in confusion. Rolling his head to the side, he looked at the unfamiliar furniture in the room, wondering how he had arrived. He sat up, feeling gradually more puzzled by his surroundings. The room was alien to him, and the deafening silence left him feeling increasingly claustrophobic.
Even as he tried to calm himself, new questions passed through his mind that added to his growing sense of bewilderment. He had no idea how he had come to be in the room, but then he also couldn’t remember anything to help him explain where he was, or even who he was.
He rolled off of the bed, moving to look at himself in a mirror, and uttering a short surprised groan at the sight of his own eyes. He had no white surrounding his irises, only a shocking red stain that made the dark brown color of his eyes seem more menacing.
Nothing about his face was familiar to him; not the wide humps of his brow, nor the thickness of his chin and jaw. He raised a hand, running it through his stringy black hair before pulling his hand away to look at it absently.
He turned his hand over, finding a faint round scar at the base of his thumb that appeared as if it might have come from some kind of burn. His eyes flicked back up to his reflection while he tried to remember how he had burned himself, but when nothing came to mind, he instead began wondering what his name was.
He gave up, his gaze falling to the desk. The phone and memo pad felt both oddly familiar and maddeningly foreign to him at the same time.
He pulled the tiny memo pad around to read the name of the motel, Comfort Suites, and then the address. Neither were familiar, and he furrowed his brow, trying again to remember any one detail about himself. Who was he? No answer. Where did he live? Nothing. The longer he tried to focus, the angrier he became. He began balling his fists, clenching them so tightly that his knuckles were white.
He turned at the sound of the door opening, a feeling of confusion filling his thoughts as he watched the woman walking into the room. Her black dress and apron should have been familiar to him, and on some level, his mind registered that much.
Opening his mouth to ask the woman who she was, he took a step back in surprise as she started to scream when she saw him. He raised his hand to try calming her down, and she stumbled back out of the door. The woman paused just long enough to regain her balance with a hand on the door frame before she took off at a run.
He walked to the door hesitantly, peering around the frame to see the woman still screaming hysterically as she sprinted away from him. His

attention wandered from her, and he glanced around the parking lot at the cars. He blinked, looking down and wondering how he could know what cars were. Stepping outside, he wandered around a car to glance down at the trunk. Nothing about his circumstances made sense to him. He knew it was a trunk, but he couldn’t remember where he’d leaned the term. He looked down at the name of the car: Civic. He could read the word and understand it, but he had no idea of where he’d learned to read.
Shaking his head, he looked back to where the woman was running, only to find her returning with two men. He noticed both men slowed down well before getting close to him, and he began to suspect that they were afraid of him.
Raising his hands, he tried to assure them that he wasn’t dangerous, but his words came out sounding like gibberish in his own ears. One of the men shouted something back at him, but it was also incoherent babbling as far as he could tell. He made a half attempt to explain that he couldn’t understand them, but gave up once it became clear that he was unable to understand himself.
He frowned, turning away from the men to study his reflection in the rear window of the car. He was dressed in a long sleeved denim shirt and a pair of dark blue denim jeans, but neither they nor his black hiking boots felt familiar to him. He couldn’t remember putting them on, and the more he tried to remember, the angrier it made him that every question he posed to himself was coming up as a blank for an answer.
He turned at a hand clapping down on his shoulder, finding both of the men standing very close to him. They were standing so close that he started to feel trapped between them. He pushed the man’s arm aside, shouting at both of the men to keep their distance. Again his words came out sounding garbled, and it only served to heat his temper further.
The taller of the two men shouted at him in more of the same nonsensical gibberish, and he growled, turning to walk away again. Both of the men moved to grab him, and he twisted his body sideways, driving his knee into the pudgy gut of the shorter man. The other man let go of his arm, and he drove his elbow up into the man’s chin. The man’s teeth clapped shut over the tip of his tongue, and blood poured from his mouth as he fell back onto the ground screaming.
Settling his shirt back over his shoulders, he walked away quickly, ignoring the woman while she continued to shriek a high pitched stream of babble at him.

***

Thursday 4:19 PM

Jobe wandered around the campus bookstore, nodding to himself as he found a small rotating case of reading glasses. He walked over to the display, spinning it around to look for a pair of low power round frames.

Instead he found a pair of glasses with a slender silver frame around oval lenses. Pulling the glasses down, he slipped them on to make sure the magnification of the lenses wasn’t so strong as to be distracting.
“It’s a good plan,” the reflection complimented, its voice coming from the mirror at the top of the case and from all of the lenses in front of Jobe. “With a normal pair of glasses on, I can relay you information as I get it.”
Jobe gave a short nod of agreement, slipping off the glasses and taking them to the cashier to pay for them. He put the glasses back on as he walked outside, glancing around to make sure no one was near him. “All right, now that I’m far enough out to test this, have you found anyone here who knows Candy?”
“No, I’m afraid not, but then making a specific search like this will take a few days at the very least. If you were just looking for random criminals, you’ve passed a hit and run drunk driver and a serial rapist.”
Jobe grimaced, shaking his head. “Spare me the details. They work small scale evil, and whoever is behind this virus is working the upper end. For now, we just have to let the little ones go.”
“Yes, I figured as much,” the reflection agreed, and in the lenses, he could see a smaller version of himself frowning back at him. “I guess no longer being a servant of God, I have to stop thinking about all the women who have been hurt by one man.”
“What do you expect me to do, exactly?” Jobe asked, pausing to glance around before he began walking back across the campus to look for Wendy. “I can’t make new weapons without money, and all I’ve got right now are my bare hands. Unless this guy keeps some kind of evidence that I can give to the police, I’d have to deal with him directly.
“More to the point, if I were a servant of God, I’d think I’d have to follow some of his rules, and I seem to recall one of them being pretty specific about killing. But I’m not a servant of God. I’m just a schizophrenic with paranoid delusions of grandeur. Lately, reality is starting to intrude on my fantasies, because for once, I’ve stumbled into a real conspiracy. If I’m not being guided by the holy spirit, I have got to prioritize which crime is worse. Which case would be more important to you? Do we need to go murder a man for raping women, or do we need to find this group, whose favorite indirect targets are typically children?”
The reflection was quiet for a while before giving a short nod. “I don’t like it, but I’ll do my best to ignore the others.”
Jobe sighed. “I don’t like it either, buddy. But if we don’t stop these guys, I get the feeling there’s going to be a lot more ‘demonically possessed’ serial killers popping up all of the country, maybe even the world.”
“Yes, I can see what you mean,” the reflection conceded. “It isn’t just the children who need our help, but the random victims and the infected killers themselves as well.”

“Imagine a killer like this in every town, and it’s that much easier to understand why I have to focus,” Jobe said, falling silent as a group of women walked past him. “The odds are actually good that this group will go into hiding for a little while before they try the same trick again. They can hide as long as they like, and we’ve got very little in the way of leads to find them before they’ve selected a new target.”

***

Thursday 4:25 PM

Jamie sat down on the bench beside his sister, smiling at her with a hopeful expression. “You look better.”
“Give me a few hours and I’ll be in the mood for another crying fit,” Wendy muttered, glancing around at the mostly empty campus. The classes were all in session, and so there weren’t any students within Wendy’s range without her wandering into classrooms. “Have you found any drug dealers?”
“Yeah, I found a lot of drug dealers, but nobody has mentioned their sources yet, as you might expect. Where’s Jobe?”
“He went to the campus bookstore. He said he had some kind of idea that might help him find Candy.”
“Don’t look, but a campus security guard is walking over here on your right.”
“It’s okay,” Wendy said. “I’ve got my story figured out already.” She turned her head, smiling at the burly Hispanic walking toward her. He returned the smile, though as he got closer, she sensed that he was worried she was homeless and begging for change on the campus. “Good afternoon, officer.”
The guard smiled, “Good afternoon to you, ma’am. May I ask what you’re doing here?”
“Yes, my cousin is visiting the campus to see if he’d like to study here next semester. He’s at the book store now, I think.”
The guard nodded as his posture relaxed. “So where are you from?”
“Arizona, originally. My family moved around a lot.”
“Do you just live with your cousin?”
“I do now,” Wendy said, her expression falling. “I lost most of my family very recently.”
“I see,” the guard said. “Does your cousin have a place for you to live?”
“We’re working on it now,” Wendy said and sighed. “I don’t mean to put you off, but do you mind not asking me about my family? I’m really not that far off from crying again if you keep this up.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, there you are,” Jobe called as he strolled up to the bench to stand beside Wendy. “Are you making trouble yet?”

“Hey cuz.” Wendy made a strained smile while she gestured at the officer. “I was just telling Robert here about your interest in taking classes next semester.”
“Oh, well it might not work out. The tuition fees are a lot higher than I was expecting,” Jobe said and looked to the guard, noticing that he was instead staring at Wendy.
“How did you know my name?” the guard asked.
“I read it off your name tag.” Wendy stood up. “I’ve got good eyesight.”
“I guess so,” the guard said before his expression became apologetic. “Anyway, I’m sorry for disturbing you. I’m just-”
“Doing your job, yes,” Wendy interrupted him. “It’s okay. I understand.”
Jobe watched the guard walk away before turning to give Wendy a concerned look. “Are you okay?”
“No. The first thing he did was ask about my family, and it’s digging a hole in my stomach.”
“We can back to the room for now,” Jobe said.
“No, Jamie has some leads we should check out first.” Wendy insisted, pouting at her when he turned to watch her with a conflicted expression. “I appreciate that you’re waiting for me, but this isn’t something I can just get over, and we don’t have that kind of time to let me heal.”
Jobe sighed. “All right, have Jamie lead the way.”

***

Thursday 7:05 PM

Very little was said while they wandered from person to person, allowing Jobe’s reflection to sort through the thoughts of each dealer from a discreet distance. The long silence left time for Wendy to think over her problems once again.
Though she wanted to stay focused on finding Candy, her mind kept returning to her nagging worries about Jobe. Wendy couldn’t have made the trip to Odessa on her own. She knew she needed an adult to play the role of her guardian, and Jobe was able to provide that along with any number of useful skills. With his help, she could believe in the possibility of getting the truth.
Jobe had agreed to help her find the men behind her father’s kidnapping, and beyond that, the future for Wendy and her brother became frighteningly uncertain if he chose to walk away from them.
Wendy turned to study him as she considered her question. “Jobe, if we get lucky and somehow gather enough evidence to have these people arrested, what’s going to happen to us? I mean, are we going to part ways then, or will you be staying with us?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it much. The decision is more for you to make than for me. So long as you feel like you can deal with me, I could watch over you.”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I could get used to your job.”
“Wendy, I think I’ve already made it clear that the direction of my own future has been under question recently. You have my word that I’m not leaving after we expose this group, but there’s a lot of time between here and there.”
“Yeah. We don’t even know what to do about the kidnappers yet either.”
“Maybe we can get the police to show up at just the right time through some well placed anonymous tips.”
“That’s what I’m thinking as well.”
“We’ll worry about that once we know who the masterminds behind the experiments are. For now, I’d rather just focus on finding Gene’s contact. I’m already breaking my brains trying to figure out how to find them.”
“This guy isn’t employed by Candy either,” his reflection declared.
Jobe sighed and glanced down at his watch. “We’ve got another loser. I’m voting we take a dinner break.”
“Yeah, my breakfast wore off a while ago.”
“It is a good sign that you’re willing to eat again,” Jobe said as they began walking off of the campus. “What are you in the mood for?”
“Anything edible.”
“Right, Chinese it is.”
Wendy smiled, but it fell quickly at a stray thought. “Jobe, did my mom ever say which college Candy’s people worked at?”
“Uh, no, I don’t believe she did.”
“So how many colleges are here in town?” Wendy asked, shaking her head in the following silence. “Some detectives we are. Crap, we could be here forever and still not find Candy.”
“No, it’s still just a process of elimination. We’ll just track down all the dealers here, and if none of them work for Candy, we can check out the other campuses. Still, this is Odessa College, and she said ‘the college’. I kind of hoped we might get lucky.”
Wendy stared at him with utter disbelief. “I’m sorry, did you just say that you were hoping we might get lucky?”
“It is something of a long shot, isn’t it?” Jobe conceded.

***

Thursday 9:00 PM

The white van parked outside of the motel, its engine idling for a few seconds before falling silent with a short sputter. Though the magnetic signs on the doors claimed that the occupants were employed by Trust-e Office supplies, the men

weren’t dressed any differently save for a change of caps which shared the same corporate logo as the labels on the doors. The license plates had already been changed as well, leaving no way to connect the van to its previous delivery.
Three men got out and walked to a door to file inside the room. Their bland expressions seemed permanently etched into their faces, but people who saw the men walking wouldn’t have noticed their facial features so much as the unsettling way in which the men moved in unison. Even walking at a casual pace, the men looked as though they were marching.
The driver looked to the four men sitting around the small round table under the single window at the front of the room. They were dressed not in denim work clothes, but in black uniforms that bore no insignias or patches. Snapping a salute to one of the men who stood up, the driver’s expression changed as he allowed himself the tiniest of smiles.
“Thorne, do you have something to smile about?”
Thorne’s face faulted, but he quickly worked it back in a passive expression as he shook his head. “No sir.”
“Were you spotted?”
“No sir.”
The man nodded as his gaze cast around the room slowly. “We can consider the first half of this experiment a failure. I agree with my superiors. We relaxed too much during the last experiment, and our initial successes made us lazy.
“As a result, the virus and the program have both been exposed. It’s my opinion that we should cancel this half of the experiment, but my request to postpone the test and use another control has been denied.
“Our intelligence reports suggested that the test subject’s daughter and a vagrant were able to end the experiment prematurely, and frankly, I think that’s rather pathetic. You got sloppy, and you let a little girl ruin what should have been a routine operation.”
“Sir, permission to speak freely,” Thorne requested.
His commander regarded him coolly before nodding and giving a brief wave of his hand. “Try me.”
“Sir, we never had to maintain a close watch on either of the first test subjects. I don’t think anyone could have predicted how much help the girl would receive from her acquaintance in the local police.”
“Fair enough, but it was clear that something was going wrong with the experiment.”
“No sir. In monitoring the radio traffic of the local police, we found the environment was no different from the last two cases. The police had no way to predict the killer’s patterns, and the subject was approaching the point of a full possession. This girl literally came from out of nowhere, but then being who she is, it was the initial selection of the test subject which should be faulted.”
His commander smiled coldly, forcing Thorne to look away. “So would you like to blame your superiors for botching this mission before you arrived?”

“No sir. As I stated, no one could have predicted that this girl would have any impact on the success of the experiment.”
“Be that as it may, we will have to maintain a closer watch on this control subject. If there’s even the slightest risk of exposure, we will eliminate the control. That will be considered a failure by our superiors, and we’re already treading on thin ice. I expect better from you, and you will give everything for the success of this experiment. Is that clear?”
“Yes sir,” the other men agreed quickly.
The man nodded and went to the phone to dial a number from memory. “Please leave a message,” a metallic computerized voice instructed.
“Richter, the control has been delivered.”

***

Thursday 9:47 PM

Wendy sat down on the bed, watching Jobe drop tiredly into the chair on the other side of the room. “Well, we’ve covered most of the dealers on the Odessa campus, and none of them even know Candy.” She grimaced as she started to pry off her shoes. “Pity our next stop is Texas Tech.”
“Yeah, it’s a lot of ground to cover.”
“How are we going to pay for anything, Jobe?”
“I don’t know. I normally work day labor or take odd jobs. That would leave you on your own for part of the day.”
“I don’t like that idea, especially considering that we’re asking questions about people who have a history of kidnapping.”
“Which only leaves us with criminal options.”
“Suppose we robbed someone like a mugger or a drug dealer,” Wendy said.
“I don’t know if that would be a good idea. We’re needing to ask questions of some of the dealers around here, and if we rob one of them, it can get around the grapevine pretty fast. As for the muggers, we’d never really get much out of it, even if we track one all night. That would be something of an ethical dilemma anyway; that we should let a mugger attack people all night, and then pretend we’re blameless for stealing their money.”
“We might as well mug them ourselves, and they wouldn’t have much money even if we waited most of the night. What we need is a wealthy criminal that could pay off big with one strike.”
“Yeah, with a decent cash supply, I could make us a stockpile of improvised weapons. I’ve got a hunch that we will be needing them. Maybe not here in town, but we will need them once we run into the group behind these experiments.”
“Without weapons, we could end up becoming the next phase of the test,” Wendy agreed. “If we could figure out a way to rob a criminal that has a lot of cash, do you think that’s going to cause backlash problems?”

“What do you mean?”
“You weren’t having luck pulling off crimes of any kind without a karmic backlash in Devine. Do we know if that’s still the case?”
“No, not really,” Jobe said and made a thin lipped smirk. “Here, I’ll try asking God.” He put his hands together as he looked up at the ceiling. “Hi God. We’re down here trying to sort out what happened to Wendy’s dad, and we could use your help. See, we’ve got enough money to fill up the gas tank a few more times, and maybe four more nights here at the motel. After that, we’re broke, and we don’t have any good options.”
Wendy surprised him as she spoke up. “The thing is, God, we need to know where we stand with you. I don’t recall being one of the good guys, so I’m not sure if I care about committing a few crimes here and there to keep us going. We’ll try really hard to only attack real criminals, but both of us need to have your forgiveness in advance of anything we might do. So, unless you speak up and tell us not to do something, we’re going to have to act in our own best interests.” She smiled impishly. “Does that cover everything?”
Jobe laughed and shook his head. “I’m going to ask for permission to make some grenades, maybe even to pick up a few guns. While we’re asking for bullshit, I might as well aim high.”
“Then why not just go ahead and ask to be pre-forgiven for murder?”
It came out sounding a lot colder than Wendy intended, and they stared at each other as their smiles melted. It wasn’t that she’d said anything out of line, only the realization that they had both come to. They would need to kill someone in the future, and even if the act was seemingly made in self defense, their actions would make them guilty of premeditated murder.
The knowledge only served to remind Jobe of their real positions in life. He and Wendy weren’t heroes. He was a delusional schizophrenic with a lot of innocent blood on his hands, and she was an orphan with nowhere else to go. In the grand scheme of things, they couldn’t be any smaller or more pathetic if they tried.
Jobe got up from his chair, refusing to let himself give in to his feelings of apathy. He went to stand by the window and look outside. “We need a clue, God,” he said after many minutes of silence. “We need one in the worst way.”