Liquid fear

CHAPTER TWENTY

Damn, Wendy, never there when I need you. Some things never change.

Roland had been lucky enough to find the last working pay phone in the mountains of Virginia, at a run-down gas station where the pumps turned numbers on dials to tally the bill. Roland had made change inside, drawing a long look from the cigarette-huffing woman behind the counter.

He wondered if he looked suspicious as he staggered toward the phone. He was running from something, but that was nothing new. However, this one felt bigger than all those other forgotten failures.

And that damned David Underwood driver’s license stared at him as he stood at the counter. He had to remind himself again that he was Roland Doyle, and in forcing the name into his brain, Cincinnati came back in a rush.

Hell of a week. Fall off the wagon, kill a woman, and turn into somebody else. That sounds exactly like the kind of thing that would happen to me.

“Can I help you, sir?” It was the woman from the counter, who’d taken a break from her cigarette break. She’d rolled the sleeves of her Jeff Gordon racing jacket to her elbows.

Roland realized he’d been leaning with his head against the phone, idly fingering the change slot. He might have been muttering to himself, because the words “Monkey House” spun around his skull like the metal ball of a roulette wheel. “I’m fine.”

“You sure don’t look so hot.”

“A little touch of the flu,” he said.

The woman jumped back as if the virus had wings. “You can keep it.”

“I’m not contagious,” he said. Insanity is only catching in a crowd.

“You ought to take something for that,” she said, retreating to the safety of the store and its carcinogenic atmosphere.

Roland took the vial of pills from his pocket and held them aloft. “Got it right here. Just what the doctor ordered.”

He looked at the vial’s label and then checked his watch. Ten minutes to go. Until what? How many had he taken?

More importantly, how many did he have left?

Three.

The thing that would happen if he didn’t take the pill was already building inside him. It was like a black tsunami, a force that would crush all thoughts and sweep away the foundations of all that made him Roland Doyle.

And as fucked up as Roland Doyle was, it was all he had.

He dropped coins in the slot. As he tried Wendy’s number again, a dark Lexus with tinted windows pulled alongside the pumps. The car had that suspicious sheen of officialdom, though the plates were standard Virginia issue. Roland let the phone ring seven times, just for luck, before he gave up.

No one had moved from the car, though a large, hand-painted sign by the road said “Self Serve Only.”

Could be anybody. Or it could be him.

Now why did I think that? And who is “him”?

Roland wondered if this was how schizophrenics thought just before they slid into an episode. Just clued in enough to know they weren’t thinking quite right, but unable to escape their own buggy thoughts. He headed for his rental car, determined to be casual, though his legs wanted to break into a run.

He was sweating and lightheaded by the time he slid behind the wheel. He’d be in Chapel Hill at about the time he’d have to make a decision about the last pill. First he’d find Wendy, and maybe they could call their friend, the chemistry professor. He knew the professor’s name but couldn’t summon it. All he remembered was her glittering blue eyes, a beauty mark on one side of her chin, and sweeping auburn hair.

And someone else.

Susan? Was that her name?

He pulled onto the road, driving carefully, afraid of weaving and drawing police attention. He couldn’t afford to get arrested, not like this. He’d only been driving a couple of minutes, five miles under the speed limit, when the dark Lexus gunned past him on the left.

Guess they had enough gas after all. Must not have been THEM, whoever they are.

But it could have been. He could run from a murder scene, but he couldn’t run from whatever had happened ten years ago, and he couldn’t hide from himself. Whoever he was.

He tried to concentrate on Wendy, because she reminded him he was Roland. As long as he had her, he couldn’t turn into David Underwood.

He had met her as an undergrad in Wilson Library, literally bumping into her at the DVD archive, a popular destination of budget-minded students. She was looking for anything zany and breezy and he’d had a craving for a big-bug science-fiction movie.

They’d been one of those cases of “opposites attract,” which they both should have taken as a warning, but the attraction hit hard and they never had a chance. The Tibetan artist and the Rocky Mount trailer-trash boy trying to make good.

It sounded like a quirky rom-com. Both struggling financially, they’d found ways to improvise, including showing up at artist’s receptions to scarf down cheese and grapes, and they’d also sold their own plasma. Then they’d accepted that offer to serve in the experiment.

The experiment. Me, Wendy, that professor. Wasn’t there some more people?

He had a headache so he went back to picturing Wendy, standing in the brilliance of a sun-splashed room, painting naked, breasts swaying sensually as she danced with the brush.

Then his vision shifted to what she was painting-Susan after what they’d done to her-and he nearly drove off the road.

He popped open the vial with one hand and swallowed the pill even though it went down like a bone.

God, please don’t make me see that again.