God, I was tired. My face sore. Al’s slap had broken the trance while giving my bruises a bruise. Injury on top of insult on top of insanity.

Al’s eyes were on the road, but I felt him watching me. “You fell into a trance there while talking. What happened?”

There was still a residual fog in my brain. Like someone had taken an eraser to my mind. Or removed matter to clear space. Shaking my head didn’t help, as I’d hoped. Maybe I needed another slap from Al. “I don’t know, Al. It happened back at the place they took me to as well. Was part of this crazy-ass story they told. Some kind of hypnosis, or something. Some kind of mind control. That’s what it feels like, anyway.” Take this train of logic any further and I’d need a tin-foil hat to ride. “This is so fucked up,” felt like a proper summary.

We had left the city an hour before and had the two-lane highway mostly to ourselves, which worried me. I would have preferred the company of others. Would have felt more comfortable in gridlock than out on the open road.

“You said this started with a book?”

“Kind of,” I said. “The dude I was just on the phone with, Solomon. Our drummer. Was our drummer, I mean. For the Rising Dead. He told me about it. A book about someone who haunts the people who read it. I figured it was bullshit. I mean, you can buy the fucking thing at bookstores. Who knows how many people have read it; this shit can’t be happening to all of them.”

“So why you, then?”

Connective threads. That’s what Malia had been implying. That somehow our histories were related in a way that singled us out.

“I have no idea,” I said. But what I really meant to say was, I have no idea what to say that won’t sound insane. “At first I thought it was the other guys putting this on as some sort of stunt to add excitement to my mundane life. Punishment for succumbing to domestication, or something. But that’s not it. I don’t know what this is.”

“That was your friend on the phone? The one who told you about the book?”

“Yes and no,” I said, sighing in frustration. “Sounded like him, but it wasn’t him. Shit he was saying isn’t shit he would say. Then, that hypnosis thing. He doesn’t know how to do anything like that, and would have no reason to try it on me. Solomon’s a softy. The guy I know would do anything to help a friend. He wouldn’t fuck with me like this.”