Chapter Sixteen

I'm having a minor freak-out. I may actually have more plot than words. I think I can wrap it up relatively nicely, but it's going to take effort. Not that I mind. I think it's awesome.

Still Not PG-13. Yeesh. I have a dirty mouth. Well, so do my favorite authors, but still.

Stranger honestly wasn't really aware of the trip back to George's place. George was beside him in the passenger seat, drifting in and out of a hazy kind of consciousness. Alice's CPU was sitting in the back seat, carefully belted in. He didn't remember getting either of them there. He was just mentally fried. When he did get back to the parking garage dedicated to Stranger's building, the valet had raised an eyebrow, but made no comment. Someone had obviously paid him off to never speak of George's comings and goings, nor speak to him about them. That was nice. Stranger only really came back to full awareness when he heard someone wrapping on the window, trying to get his attention. "Stranger - Stranger, open up!"

He looked out. Jean was the one knocking on the glass, but the rest of the group - minus Havisham, who was probably back at the penthouse or standing guard somewhere, and Persephone, who was probably saving the universe - were all looking in at him with worried expressions. He opened the door, and stepped out, trying not to look too strained as he smiled at them. "Hey," he said. "Got him back. And Alice, hopefully."

"We see," Jean said. "Are you okay, though?"

"Yeah, fine," Stranger said. "Just... pissed, and tired, and feeling like the universe is a cruel mistress." It was true, all of it, although every word was an understatement of the highest caliber.

Jean eyed him warily, like he expected him to break down there in the garage. "If you say so," he said, then moved around to the other side of the car, with Caroline, to help George. Now merely groggy and suffering from a fierce headache, if his semi-coherent mutterings were anything to go by, he got out mostly under his own power. Meanwhile, MacAlleister got Stranger, pulling him out of the car and upright.

"You are not fine," she said, running a diagnostic eye over him. "But I'm not going to argue. Head inside, there's coffee and food."

The thought of food made Stranger feel at least slightly more human. "Good coffee?" he asked. "Not instant swill?"

"Not instant swill," she said, mock-affronted. "You've seen the coffee makers that were on the bus. We won't accept anything less than the highest caliber."

"Good to know," Stranger said, and tried another smile. This one felt at least marginally less like he would crack if he moved a muscle wrong. He wandered inside, slowly. The other actually passed him on the way in, dealing with a hungover George. A  hungover George, especially one who had moderate injuries from torture he didn't actually remember, was not a happy George. Seeing that he was mentally okay, and on his way to being physically fine, too, helped Stranger also. But to be completely honest, what helped him shake off the whole business the best was when he was attacked the moment he set foot inside the foyer. Persephone basically tackled him around the knees and held onto him for a while, not saying anything.

Finally, Stranger had to shift, because he'd had a bit of a rough time of it the past week or so, what with falling off roofs and bus crashes and all that, and lying on the floor, even while being hugged by Persephone, was not the most comfortable thing. This cued her to look up at him, a terrifying scowl on her face, and say, "You. I told you to try not to get yourself killed. You agree, then you immediately run off to get yourself killed. I intend to have dinner with you after all this is over, so I strongly object to your new-found suicidal tendencies."

"Not suicidal," Stranger protested, pushing himself into a sitting position.

"Stupidly brave, suicidal, pissed off," she said, waving a hand. "No difference. You are not to get yourself killed, nor needlessly enter situations in which death is a likely outcome because of some misguided sense of responsibility. Capische?"

"Got it," Stranger said, obediently. "Now, my entire spinal column is in the very early stages of recovery from a great fall, so, if you could be so kind as to let me up?"

She let him move, although a bit reluctantly, and he got back up gingerly. He wasn't in a huge hurry to actually do anything, though. There still didn't seem like a ton he could do. And then the exhaustion hit him. "Ah, is there somewhere I could sleep for a couple hours?" Stranger asked.

She looked at him, and then realized, "Oh, you haven't slept since yesterday, have you?"

"Not really, no," Stranger said. "I'd really settle for a corner where no one will step on me, at this point."

"Sure, just let me -" She was cut off by Havisham coming in again, looking worried.

"We've got twenty minutes to be somewhere untraceable," he said, abruptly. "We're leaving. Now."

And he all put grabbed their arms and pulled them back out of the room. Stranger looked longingly at the plush carpet he could see through the living room's open door as he went.

"You know, I'm experiencing the weirdest feeling of deja vu," Stranger cracked, as he was shoved into the driver seat of the caddy.  "I wonder why?"

Persephone just rolled her eyes at him as she slipped in the passenger seat, and George sort of toppled into the back. Caroline shoved his legs in properly and shut the door behind him, and said, "The Super 8 motel. You know the one. The creepy one," and made for the Vannagon.

Stranger went. This whole being-mortal-danger-without-a-say bit was getting old, but Persephone turned on some classic rock and started singing along. He decided there were definitely worse things to be doing that driving a classic convertible on a summer's day with a woman who wanted to take him out to dinner singing beside him. Of course, it was raining again, but he didn't really care. It made the drive that much easier, with fewer scary Boston drivers out and about.

The Super 8 was considered the scary motel in town, but Stranger saw it through different eyes as he pulled into the cracked asphalt parking lot. Compared to his last motel, this place was downright homey. It was an institutional kind of sketchy, just something built into the whole franchise.  It was welcoming, almost, to someone willing himself through the final dregs of exhaustion like Stranger was. He got out of the car and made it around to the other side of the car in record time, for all his exhaustion, to hold the door for Persephone.

"Chivalry isn't necessary," she told him, getting out. "I've already told you I'm taking you out for dinner."

"Maybe I want to be chivalrous," Stranger said, watching her sway back and forth. Actually, considering the fact that everything was swaying, it was more likely he was swaying. Unfortunate, that.

She grabbed his arm and steadied him. "Come on, sir knight," she said. "Let's get you to a bed."

George struggled upright in the back seat and Stranger turned towards him. "Oh, yeah, don't mind the severely injured billionaire," George said, bitterly. "Just go off and flirt with each other, I'm fine."

"George, you're bandaged up in roughly a million places," Stranger told him. "Your injuries have been taken care of."

"Then why do I fucking hurt?" George snapped, hauling himself out of the car.

"Because you got the snot beaten out of you," Stranger said. He turned to Persephone again. "Do you think anyone in the hotel will care if we book a room for three?"

"I'm sure it's happened before," she told him. "Come one, then."

Stranger grabbed George's arm and slung it over his shoulder, and George grabbed his and did the same. Thus keeping each other upright, they staggered after Persephone and inside.

The smell of both fresh and moldy plaster pervaded the lobby. It was obvious where the scents were coming from. The fresh plaster came from the wall where big ugly sets of scaffolding were up, and the moldy plaster came from literally everywhere else. The place didn't try to hide what it was, i.e. a place for slightly shady hookups of all kinds. The desk clerk didn't even raise an eyebrow at the time of day, nor when Persephone told him they'd need a single room. It did rise when she asked for three beds, though. Evidently having everyone sleep separately wasn't exactly common. But they got a room key and wandered down the hall. Stranger was glad that they had a room on the bottom floor. He was pretty sure that he wasn't doing any more defying of gravity than what it took to stay upright until he'd gotten at least fifty winks in, if not more. And George was just muttering imprecations against the world in general, and limping slightly. He was, suffice to say, not happy.

Their room was 113. Stranger watched the number swim a little as Persephone unlocked the room, and then headed inside after her. There were beds. There were two beds and a couch that could turn into a bed. Stranger abandoned George to fend for himself and fell, face-first, onto the nearest comforter. He didn't remember anything further for a long while.

------

When he did wake up, it was pitch black in the room, George was absent, because there were no logs being sawn, and Persephone was snoring gently on the sofa-bed. He shouldn't have found that endearing, but it was. But watching her sleep was a level of creepy heretofore undelved by mankind, and so he wrote a quick note - just out for food - and grabbed a keycard from where she'd put them on the nightstand and wandered out in search of sustenance. Predictably, there was none in the hallways, so he continued his wanderings out to the lobby and the desk clerk. Remembering the whole 'we need to leave now' bit from earlier, hazy though that memory might be, he realized it might be a good thing to find out whether the rest had all arrived intact. So he wandered up to the night clerk and said, "Excuse me, but did a group of people - two guys, two girls - arrive here ealier? One of the guys would be a giant, more or less, and one of the girls would have been a tiny little ginger. Ring a bell?"

"Oh, yeah," said the bored kid. "Checked in about an hour ago. Asked for adjoining rooms, if you know what I mean." And the kid winked at him. Stranger was only vaguely sure he knew what the kid had meant, and felt like his soul needed a rub down with a brillo pad for it. "Anyway, rooms, 114 and 116," the kid told him. "Have a good night, sir."

Stranger wandered back down the hall. Wandering was a good mode of transport, he felt, and so he employed it whenever possible. It was close to an amble, but with more side-to-side movement. It allowed one to take in all the sights thoroughly and spend as little time at the destination as was possible while still going there in a relatively straight line. As he was still mentally scrubbing himself, he wasn't overly eager to interrupt, in case the kid was right. (On a side note, it was just wrong that a spotty teen who probably knew more about Pokemon then he knew about anything else could fill a sentence with as much directionless innuendo as a leisure suit Larry.) And besides, this might have been his exposure to Alice talking, but it really seemed as if every time he rejoined the main group, bad things happened and he ended up nearly dying.

But still, Persephone would be upset if he'd gone out and not even tried, so he went.

He knocked on the door to 114, and Caroline opened it almost immediately, looking a little like death. "Have you heard about this thing called sleep?" he asked her. "It's the new caffeine. Way better for you, too."

"Shut up and don't talk to me until you're properly exhausted again," she told him, and pulled him inside. The door to the adjoining room was open, and Stranger saw George, shirtless, sitting on a bed, and getting his wounds tended to. The gash on his cheek had been thoroughly bandaged, as had several cuts on his arms and chest. Now Jean was kneading some sort of balm into his bruised and was showing no mercy. George was regularly wincing and twitching, but not saying anything. Stranger suspected that someone had been smacking him every time he talked. It was an effective method, and one Stranger often used himself.

He crossed through to that room, and said, "Hey. You okay?"

"Aside from the pain, and the scars that are going to form, and the fact that this guy here hates me and is taking it out on my poor battered body, I'm fine," George said, twisting as Jean did something particularly vicious to the bruises on his upped back. But then, he looked back at Stranger, and said, "Sorry, I'm being a dick. It's just. Everything. It all hurts. My fucking hair hurts."

"It's fine," Stranger said. And it was, honestly. He'd deal with a dickish George any day rather than think he was the reason the idiot had gotten killed. "But you owe me, like, all the money now."

George snorted, then winced, as Jean did something else. "Yeah, right. You'll settle for a hot dog and a drink."

"Probably," Stranger said, grinning at his friend's misfortune. Then he wandered back to the other room as George started berating Jean. "Is he really okay?" Stranger asked Caroline quietly.

"Amazingly, yeah," she told him. "No internal injuries, as far as we can tell, which is a shock considering all the contusions and such he's got. He's perfectly fine." There was a thwack from the other room and a sharp, "Ow, goddammit, really?" from George.

"Oh, by the way," Stranger said. "Persephone's still back in room 113. Although I guess you know that now."

"Yeah, we did," Caroline said. "Now go away and let me sleep."

"Yes, ma'am," Stranger said. He went back to the other room and watched George be treated for kicks, and called out for pizza to be delivered.

------

He had been reconsidering the whole 'main group = doom' thing he'd decided on when the sun rose an hour or so later and he'd gorged himself on pizzas with ungodly topping combinations - pineapple and sardine, honestly, MacAlleister was a sick woman. Maybe they'd been in time, they'd gotten out clean, and Leroy had no idea where they were. Of course, the author part of his brain, the part that had dutifully recorded both spy gibberish and the exact sensation of being so pissed off he'd gone numb, recognized his mistake. He repented immediately, of course, thinking about how much awful stuff they'd been through, how they were still unrecovered, worrying about George, but to no avail. Just to prove that the universe really did operate on story-logic, that it had a narrative, and that the author, whatever that might be, hated Stranger, Jean looked up from his laptop, his face pale.

"We need to go. Now." His voice brooked no argument. Every got up immediately, grabbed whatever stuff they'd brought with them, and made for the door, George pulling his shirt back on as he went. Stranger grabbed a box of pizza (mushroom, pineapple, and green peppers, now there was a combination) and hurried back to 113.

"Persephone?" he said, as soon as he was in the room. Then he heard the shower running, and cursed, as inventively as he could. "Persephone, tell me you can get out of there and decent in a minute and a half. We need to go, two minutes ago."

"Of course I can," she said through the door, the water already off. Stranger slowly started counting, trying to keep his breathing steady and slow enough he wouldn't hyperventilate. He'd only gotten to about twelve when the door burst open and she came tumbling out, her clothes rumpled and slightly damp, and her hair done up in a towel. "What are you doing?" she asked. "You said we need to go!"

She grabbed his hand and hauled him towards the door, shaking the towel out of her hair as she went. "I got you pizza," Stranger told her, following.

"That's nice," she said. "I'll thank you once we're moving again."

They tore past the main desk, where Jean was evidently checking them collectively out of their rooms. Stranger privately wished him good luck with that - the same clerk was working now as had been earlier, and Stranger didn't see him being the easiest person to work with in times of stress. They got out to the Caddy in what might have been record time, and Persephone all but dove into the passenger seat as Stranger got in. "Come on," she said, "Move, get us going, now."

Stranger started the car and was pulling out when he heard Caroline shouting behind him. He put it back in park, and turned to find out what the matter was, only to see her, Havisham, Jean, MacAlleister, and George stuffing themselves into the the back seat meant for three at most. "What?" he said, utterly confused.

"The Vannagon died," Jean said, tersely, looking around Caroline's head. "Just go, now."

"Going, driving," Stranger said, putting it back in gear. The Caddy, thank god, still worked perfectly. He drove out into the morning rush of Boston traffic, and hoped that that would help keep whatever was causing the others' distress from getting to them too quickly. "Might I ask why we're running away?"

"We're running away because all lines from our few extant agents in the States went dead about five minutes after they all started reporting that Leroy's organization is panicking," Havisham told him. "That means bad things are happening, one way or another. When even the biggest shark in the pond starts freaking out, the little fish all run and hide. Unfortunately, for the moment, we are a little fish. We are barely above plankton, until we get a couple months to rebuild."

"Got it," Stranger said, feeling a little queasy. He didn't even want to know what might cause Leroy to panic.

The traffic was awful, and he was trying to baby the car through it without some douche rear-ending him out of jealousy when he noticed the car tailing them. It was non-descript, a little rust bucket of a car, something from the mid-eighties that kept running out of sheer determination. And it took every turn they took, getting slowly closer as it weaved through the other cars on the road.

"Don't look now," Stranger said, "But I think someone's following us. Shit, I can't believe I just said that."

"Ow!" Stranger heard from the back seat. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw that Havisham had a grip on George's head, who'd tried to turn and look out the back window.

"Don't look at them," Havisham told him. "That tells them we've noticed them. Stranger, can you make out who's in it?"

"As far as I can tell," Stranger said, glancing at the car in the mirror every couple seconds, in between watching the road and the other cars, "It's Leroy and that bodyguard. They both look pissed. I think Leroy might be frothing at the mouth."

"But is there anyone else with them?" Havisham asked urgently. "Or any other cars?"

"No, not really," Stranger said. "And the car is an absolute beater. I think Leroy might be on the run, too."

There was silence from the back seat, and Stranger concentrated on navigating the particularly nasty intersection coming up. Then, as he narrowly avoided two cars that wanted his hood ornament for a wall trophy, he heard Jean say, "This could very well be an opportunity."

Stranger thought oh shit.

"Stranger, get out of this part of town and head for the warehouse region."
 
Oh shit.

"We're going to face him down."

Ohshitohshitohshi-

His internal monologue remained the same through the rest of the hour or so it took to successfully get them out of the main part of the city and to the wharves. It didn't change while he found a suitably abandoned parking lot, nor while he parked and everyone spilled out of the car into the early morning drizzle. It didn't change when the rust bucket pulled in after them and did likewise. It did change when the pair of men got out of the car, both of then wielding guns so nasty-looking that holding one counted as a misdemeanor.

Ohshitohshitohfuck.