The Lance Brody Series: Books 3 and 4

by Robertson Jr, Michael

  Again. Two steps and the invisible bungee caught and snapped tight and pulled back and his peripheral vision danced and swirled and he was back where he started, looking at the middle-aged husband and wife, their faces reset in the exact same looks as before, staring after the boy as he made his way to the office.

  Lance sighed. Looked over his shoulder and watched as the boy pushed through the office door and disappeared inside. When he was gone, Lance looked back to the couple and said, “Well, looks like it’s just the three of us.”

  Point taken. This was where he was supposed to be. With them. He’d just have to wait and see why.

  Neither the man or the woman heard or answered him. Lance was not surprised. He waited patiently.

  The man looked to his wife, her eyes still wet with her happy tears, and said, “Let’s go inside.”

  And Lance watched as the man and woman shared a look, one full of secret meaning that only they as a couple would understand. Unspoken words carried across by love. It made him think of Leah, and he wished he could be standing here with her right now. Looking into her eyes the way the man was looking into the woman’s eyes. Hoping that she could understand all the things his look would tell her.

  The man fished the room key from his pocket, same plastic key chain as the motel was using now—however far in the future Lance’s now might be—and he unlocked the door and grabbed his wife’s hand and pulled her in.

  Lance moved as quickly—quicker, maybe—as he had when he’d tried to catch up with the boy, wanting to get inside the room before the couple closed the door on him. He had a flash of memory of reaching down to grab the letter the dead woman from room one had written Meriam, and how his hand had simply passed through it. If the man and woman closed the door to room two, Lance had no idea if he could open it—physically or mentally or in whatever state he existed in this new time and place. And he wasn’t sure he was up to trying to pass through it, either, like Patrick Swayze in that movie Ghost.

  Mom always liked that movie, Lance found himself thinking as he rushed to the door of room two. Though she never watched the ending. Always said it was too sad.

  The couple disappeared into room two, and Lance took two more giant steps and then leapt through the shrinking opening as he saw the woman turn and begin to close the door—slowly, thankfully. He went airborne and headfirst, like a baseball player making a desperation slide for home plate, and for a moment he felt weightless, like he was breaking the laws of physics, but then he crashed down onto the carpet just as he heard the door click closed behind him.

  He stayed that way for just a second or two, lying prone and facedown on the carpet, staring into the fibers and breathing in an aroma of dust mixed with the faintest hint of something akin to a more potent formulation of the baby shampoo his mother had used on him when he was just a little thing, laughing and splashing in the tub, probably the remnants of industrial carpet cleaner from long ago. He pushed himself quickly off the floor and stood, prepared to step out of the way of the man and the woman, wanting to become a fly on the wall for whatever might be about to transpire that the Universe had made sure he was going to stick around to see with his own eyes.

  As he stood, a simple act that took him less than a second, there was just a momentary flash in his vision as he made his way from prone to fully upright. But in that flash, everything changed.

  The room was no longer gently kissed by the light of the setting sun creeping through the curtains. Instead, it was darkened, night having fallen. The small lamp on the bedside table cast a perimeter of harsh and artificial light that didn’t stretch far and left the corners of the room dark and ominous.

  The man and woman were dead.

  The man’s body was sprawled half on and half off the bed, near the end, his feet tangled in the bedsheets and his torso at a strange angle and his head resting sideways on the carpet, eyes open, mouth agape. He was naked except for his boxer shorts.

  The woman was slumped back against the headboard, her naked torso rigid and stiff, arms splayed out at her sides like she’d gotten frustrated and given up and had fallen back in exhaustion. Her eyes were open as well, staring straight ahead toward the television as if she were absorbed in a show nobody else could see.

  They both had bullet holes in their heads. The woman’s was dead center of the forehead, execution-like. The man had one here as well, but as Lance leaned down to look more closely, he saw that the guy had also taken another shot, this one high up on the right side of his chest. Blood had spilled down the man’s rib cage and dried in a darkened smear. Lance tried to put the pieces together in his head, imagine what had happened. Figured the man had tried to take down the intruder, taken him by surprise maybe, thus the impromptu and poorly placed shot to the chest. Then the killer had performed the kill shot to the head. More precise. Planned for.

  The woman, probably stunned in terror at witnessing her husband’s murder, hadn’t even had time to react fully before she’d suffered the same fate.

  Lance recalled the image of the two of them out on the sidewalk together, that look they’d shared, silent but tremendously loud all the same. So much love. He hoped they were together somewhere else.

  And then Lance noticed something shift in his peripheral vision, slow and quiet. He’d still been crouched on the floor by the dead man’s body, and from the corner of his eye, he saw movement on the bed.

  Lance Brody lifted his head and looked to the woman.

  She was sitting up now, her back ramrod straight, arms still dangling limply at her sides, palms up. The light from the lamp on the bedside table cast her huge shadow against the wall, like an image from a long-ago monster movie. Her neck twisted toward Lance, and her dead eyes fell on him and her mouth opened and she said, “He’ll be waiting.”

  12

  “He’ll be waiting.”

  Those words again. The same three words uttered by the dead woman from room one as her hanged body had dangled from the bedsheet she’d used to kill herself. Lifeless, but able to reanimate just long enough to deliver the message.

  The same as the woman on the bed now in room two. A bullet hole through her forehead, body limp, but her blank stare able to find Lance and her words able to reach his ears, his mind.

  What did it mean? He’ll be waiting. Who? Where? When?

  The usual gamut of curiosity cascaded through Lance’s thoughts. This was twice now he’d been given the same information from two different … what were they exactly? Lance had spoken to enough spirits, ghosts, lingering dead, whatever you wanted to label them, to understand that the women in room one and two were something different. They were not as alive as ghosts were—for lack of a better term. There was no interaction between them and Lance. They were more like envelopes, sealed long ago by the past, waiting for somebody to come along so they could open themselves and reveal their contents.

  Waiting for Lance.

  And now, apparently, somebody else was waiting for Lance, too.

  “Who?” Lance asked, his own voice surprising him. It sounded strange, off-kilter. Distorted in some way, yet only just noticeable. It was flat, the echo and reverb you’d expect to hear in the enclosed environment of the motel room somehow eliminated, as if his voice had been run through some elaborate piece of audio processing software.

  Because I’m not really here, Lance thought. Wherever here was, the past or some cosmic recreation of it, Lance’s presence here was created in some other time and space. He existed here, but only on a certain level. And he had no idea what limitations that level held him to.

  “Who will be waiting?” Lance tried again.

  The dead woman with the bullet hole in her head did not move for a moment, her empty eyes locked onto Lance for another few seconds before her neck twisted back to its normal position, gaze fixed straight ahead, back onto the blank television screen. Then her entire torso inched its way backward, arching down slowly toward the headboard. Her bare back came to rest half on the pillow, h
alf on the wood of the headboard, and then she was again completely motionless, having stopped in the exact same position she’d been in when Lance had first seen her.

  The position she’d been in when she’d been murdered.

  Lance stood still for a full minute, waiting to see if the woman would repeat her movements and message, like some sort of animatronic character at Disney World. But she did not. Lance sighed and looked down to the man and—

  And the man was gone, a dark wet spot on the carpet where the blood from his chest wound had pooled the only evidence he’d been there at all. Lance took a quick step backward and then looked back toward the woman.

  She was gone, too.

  In the blink of his eyes, and in the slightest shifts in Lance’s line of vision, the world around him seemed to be able to change and morph and speed up and slow down however it chose to. It was moments like these when Lance felt helpless. Completely at the mercy of whatever guiding force was running the show.

  But the moments also gave a sense of encouragement. It was as though his hand was being held and he led along the proper path, being shown only what he needed to see and cutting out all the unnecessary bits. It was a path with a purpose.

  But that didn’t mean Lance had any better understanding what that purpose was.

  Or who it was that was waiting for him.

  Lance looked down again at the puddle of blood seeping into the motel room’s carpet. Something was different about it. No … not about the blood, or the carpet, but…

  The bed. The bed was different. Lance let his eyes slide from the headboard all the way down to the end, where the man had been lying tangled in the comforter and—

  The comforter is gone, Lance realized. On the bed now there was nothing but the plain white sheets, pulled back and twisted, splattered faintly with a spray of blood near the end where the man had probably first been shot.

  Outside, the sound of an engine cranking to a start sounded like an explosion after the motel room being so still and quiet. Lance spun around and rushed to the window to peer through the blinds. He reached up with one hand, fingers splayed to pull down the slats to look through, and his hand went right through, a very faint tingling spreading through his fingertips when it did. Lance pulled his hand back and clutched it to his chest, then opened and closed his fist, testing to make sure everything was still in working order. Everything seemed fine.

  The engine outside the room had been idling, and Lance’s ears picked up a change in frequency as the vehicle was shifted into gear.

  I’ve got to get out of here, Lance thought. Because everything about the moment told Lance he needed to see what vehicle that engine noise belonged to, and hopefully who was driving it.

  He looked at the motel room door. Studied it for longer than he felt he had time for. Remembered the tingling in his fingers as he’d passed through the blinds and wondered what that would be like if it spread across his entire body. Thought about Patrick Swayze in Ghost again and then wondered how many people had gotten injured or killed attempting to do something they’d seen in the movies.

  Fiction versus reality.

  Lance Brody lived somewhere in the middle.

  He ran for the door. Whatever was going to happen, he’d rather it happen fast.

  Four quick steps and he was there, charging straight for it. It went against everything instinctive about being a human, having your brain convince your body to continue full-speed and hurl itself into a solid object. Lance squeezed his eyes shut on the last step, felt his face pull back into a grimace, prepared for impact, and then he threw up his arms in front of his body and pushed through the final step and instead of a painful collision he felt … almost nothing at all. Almost as if he himself were nothing at all. Weightless, floating, empty.

  And then he felt concrete under his sneakers instead of carpet, smelled the sticky summer night air, and heard the sounds of the engine growling and tires purring directly in front of him.

  It was the blue Dodge pickup the man and woman had arrived in. The headlights were off and Lance had made it outside the room just in time to watch as the unseen driver finished off a three-point turn and then drove forward across the parking lot, picking up speed as they approached the road.

  Lance sprinted after the truck, finding himself halfway across the parking lot before he even knew he was moving. He wanted to try and get a glimpse of the driver, but he knew that in the darkness of night and given the fact he was so far behind, it would be impossible. But he’d seen something else as the truck had finished its maneuver in the parking lot before heading off.

  A piece of heavy red fabric poking out of the tailgate where it’d gotten caught. Probably when somebody had closed it in a hurry and hadn’t been paying attention, distracted by the task at hand. Lance knew it was the comforter from the motel room bed. And he knew exactly why it was in the back of the truck.

  It was covering the dead bodies of the man and the woman. Their murderer was stealing their truck and disposing of them. Which caused Lance to have a thought: the murder must have been premeditated. Somebody doing a smash-and-grab job, a robbery gone wrong, maybe, would have left the bodies behind and fled the scene with no questions asked. No, there was more at work here. This had been planned.

  The truck slowed just a bit to make the turn onto the road, and Lance saw his chance. He changed his path and started moving on a diagonal, pumping his legs hard to pick up speed just as the truck’s front tires hit the road. If Lance was fast enough, he could essentially cut it off and be positioned perfectly to see the driver’s face as the truck passed him by.

  Or you could jump in front of it. See if they’ll stop.

  This was a thought meant for Lance in the present, not this past world he was currently trapped in. He remembered that the driver of the truck wouldn’t be able to see him at all, and even though Lance’s body seemed to be able to pass through objects, convincing himself to jump through a closed door was one thing, hoping a speeding pickup truck would simply pass through him and leave him unharmed was quite another.

  He cried out with the effort of his sprint, saw the truck encroaching in on him in his peripheral vision. Three more steps and he could jump out into the road, just where the end of the motel’s parking lot met the shoulder and the truck would just be passing.

  One and two and three and as his sneakers left the parking lot and were about to land on road, the entire world spun around and Lance felt that weightless feeling from earlier when he’d passed through the door, coupled with a great sense of speed, and when his sneakers found the ground again he was standing right back where he’d started as the truck had been pulling away, right back in front of the door to room two.

  In the distance, far off to his left, he heard the growl of the Dodge’s engine fade away to nothing, leaving Lance standing alone on the sidewalk, chest heaving as he fought to catch his breath. Thirty seconds, maybe a minute, and his breathing returned to normal, but his curiosity had not waned at all. With his eyes locked onto the spot across the parking lot where he’d felt the Universe grab him and hurl him back to his starting point, Lance stepped off the walkway and started walking.

  He stopped just short of where the parking lot ended and the road began, his eyes searching in the darkness for anything out of the ordinary, anything to signify that this spot was different, or held some sort of energy.

  Lance saw nothing.

  He shrugged, figured he’d survived enough of these moments not to have to worry too much, and then took the last step, crossing the threshold of the parking lot.

  Again, before his sneakers hit the ground, he was back in front of room two, his vision just clearing from the crazy, unexplainable trip. Another blur of sound and light and the great rush of speed.

  He started walking again. This time in a straight line across the parking lot, right up the middle, stopping right at the road. He stood and looked across the blacktop, saw the dancing of fireflies in the air, swirling among the
high grass and the trees. He looked left and right, saw no traffic, and then stepped out onto the road.

  And was right back in front of room two.

  Which, of course, confirmed it. Lance remembered when he had first arrived at the motel, the way he had somehow blacked out and then woken up on the snow-covered ground. It had happened right as he’d crossed the threshold, leaving the road and entering the parking lot.

  Some sort of barrier, Lance thought. A dividing line between the rest of the world and whatever this is.

  But the thought that followed this was much more sinister.

  Whatever force governed this barrier had let Lance in, but it didn’t want to let him leave.

  Not until I’m finished, he thought. Whatever that means.

  Movement caught Lance’s eye, and he swung his head to the right in time to see the door to the motel’s office swing shut behind somebody who’d just stepped inside.

  Somebody else had been out here when the truck had pulled away.

  Somebody else had been watching.

  Somebody else knew exactly what had happened.

  13

  Lance hurried to the door to the motel’s office and stopped outside of it. Peered in through the glass and saw nobody inside, just the same layout—the check-in counter, the ledger book, the bowl of peppermint candies, and the watercooler, though it was an older model than what had been there when Lance had checked in earlier … or later, rather, if he was still seeing the past. But the door to the back living area where Lance had shared coffee with Meriam was wide open and the lights were on, so somebody had to be back there. Somebody had just come through the door, and unless they were hiding in the darkened bathroom at the rear of the office, there was nowhere else they could be.

  Much like his second test run against the barrier at the edge of the motel’s parking lot, Lance didn’t hesitate this time. He just closed his eyes and took a deep breath and walked through the office door.