“It made for top-shelf entertainment, though. Camped out in an underpass for some dilapidated road. Decorated with the most lurid shit you’ve ever seen drawn in graffiti. Demons with pitchfork dicks. Cannibal farms with bodies lined up like crops, limbs for the picking like ears of corn. Had a secret-society feel to it. Dangerous and taboo. I’m so high I’m just wanting to see what’s next. Eat from the forbidden fruit, you know. They’d get into their rituals. Painted up in soot. Chanting these incantations while taking their zombie powder, then some of them would space out. Some of them wouldn’t. These ones, they’d get quiet and super focused. Mouthing those incantations. Making noises like I heard coming out of your phone. And then I swear, crazy as it sounds, they’d enter the minds of those all zoned out. Parade them around like puppets. Whispering words that came out of their puppet’s mouth, making gestures that the puppet would mime. And not like it was scripted out. Fucking spontaneous. At least, that’s how it seemed. Again, I was flying back then and realize my perception was skewed. But, you know me. I’m a skeptic if there ever was one. Which I guess is why I never told anyone about that before. But there was something going on then that has the feel of what’s going on here. You looked like those people under the underpass before they got paraded around.”

And it had felt like something invading my consciousness, both times I’d been under that bizarre spell. “So, mind control,” I said.

“Something like that, yeah.”

“But why? And why all the other freakshow shit surrounding it?”

Al patted his front pocket, reaching for the pack of cigarettes he’d quit years ago. A look of mourning passed his face. He grabbed a pack of Trident from the front console, offered me a piece, which I declined, and then popped one in his mouth. He breathed heavily while trying to chew the stick of gum to paste. “Wish I had the answer, my friend. I don’t. Just theories and observations. I say we hunker down in the mountains for a few days and see how things feel then. Allow some time for whatever may be in your system to flush out, then reassess. Meanwhile, figure out what kind of olive branch we’ll need to get Cassie back.”

“Shit,” I said. “I could have a flock of doves deliver diamond-encrusted olives and she’d shoot them out of the air.”

Al smiled. Tried to stifle it, and failed. Instead he chuckled. “Fucking dove hunter. That’s some cranky shit.”