Home Away From Home

The insurance company put my mother and me in a hotel while they figured out what they were going to do about our burned-down house. The options were seemingly to have them pay to rebuild it or for them to just send us a stupid huge check for the value so we could buy our own house. I wanted the latter, for receiving stupid huge checks from insurance companies was becoming a pastime of mine.

Though I wasn't a fan of losing the things important to me beforehand.

The hotel they put us in wasn't a traditional hotel in the "bed and a bathroom" sense, it was one of those home-away-from-home places for traveling businessmen or families whose homes have burned down. All the rooms were suites with two bedrooms and bathrooms, a living room, and a full kitchen. Down in the lobby they had full meals served buffet-style for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and inside the room there was a card we could fill out for what kind of groceries we wanted and some hotel lackey would run out and get it, charging it to the room. Insurance was paying the room bill, so we went a little nuts on the lackey groceries.

After one day, the insurance company had a guy go out and look at the remains of the house and he determined that it was a total loss and cut us a rather large check for us to start replacing clothes and furniture. He also noted that the garage had fallen onto my Dad's Cadillac and suggested we call our auto insurance for that.

My mom was still a mess from all of this, but I was almost enjoying it. It was unique and interesting, and nobody was shooting at me so I could remain myself through it all. It seemed that I wasn't too attached to any of my stuff after all, at least not so attached that I couldn't re-attach myself to something that insurance check couldn't replace. Maybe I could get that larger bed I always wanted, or the more expensive clothes I had been thinking about; only this time using the new insurance money instead of the old. Tracking my windfalls was getting complicated, though, it seemed like I could make a new profession out of having insurance companies buy all my stuff.

Don't be morbid, your dad died for some of that money, echoed a voice in my head. I was beginning to think it was worth it, after all. My dad practically built me from scratch and unloaded me onto some mind-warped doctors to test some unethical experiment, then he tried to sell all that information to, what, Russia? North Korea? That insurance policy was just so we wouldn't be completely screwed if his plan failed and he was killed for his treason. Some consolation prize. Did he hope I wouldn't find out? Or that the money would make me overlook the fact that my whole life was a lie and that he tried to sell that lie for a quick buck?

Whatever he did, it was probably his fault that the house was destroyed. It's probably his fault that people are coming at me from all angles, trying to get their hands on the amazing hypno-killer boy.

Screw it, I'd take the money but I wouldn't accept it as some kind of reparations for my bungled life. I'll buy overpriced jeans, handguns, or a million candy bars if I want to. I'll let that postmortem bribe buy me a new life, not forgiveness.

Amy, surprisingly, had opted to return to school on Monday. She must have been worried about graduating, because at this point I couldn't be bothered to even consider school. I was living in a hotel, the only things I owned were a pair of pants and a handful of weapons. I was slowly coming to accept the fact that there was a killer inside my head, and that there was little chance that my life would ever be normal. Ever since that phone call a month ago, my life took a running leap away from normal.

It was Tuesday when the insurance adjuster came out and cut that check. We'd just gotten back to the hotel when my cell phone, for which I no longer had a charger, rang. I recognized the number as either Rubino or Bremer's, didn't really care either way which one it was, and answered accordingly.

"Chris, it's Special Agent Bremer."
"Special. I know," I said. I could tell it was Bremer from the first word, the coarseness of his weary old voice was more pronounced over the phone.
"We'd like to see you for a bit of a debrief, sit down with you so you can tell us what it is exactly you know so far, what Schumer told you, and so on."

I wasn't sure how I felt about these FBI Agents -- Special Agents -- anymore. At first they had been a pretty decent, if unpredictable source of information. Now, it seemed like they only wanted information. Schumer said my dad was killed in a shootout at a botched FBI sting. For all I knew it could have been Bremer or Rubino who pulled the trigger, if even that was supposed to be a bad thing. The thing that bothered me the most was that they seemed to want to know everything about Schumer and his blasted "program" as he called it. If the FBI's only attachment to this was that they caught and stopped my dad from selling secrets abroad, why would they care about what those secrets were. If it was a black-ops, black-budget outfit, it seems that the FBI would want to keep its collective nose out of it, but here it seemed like my two Bureau buddies were just as interested in getting their hands on the specifics as whomever my dad was trying to sell them to.

"Ok," I said, knowing I didn't have a choice, "when and where?"
"We can come to your hotel room tonight, around seven or eight."
I looked around for a clock, found the one by the bed in the room that had become my own and saw that it was just after 2PM. "Alright, I guess. Though, maybe somewhere outside the room, like the conference room down in the business center."
"Why there?" Bremer asked.
I didn't want them in my room because I didn't want my mom hearing any of what they or I would have to say, and also I had some kind of instinct to protect my property from people I didn't like. I couldn't say that, though, so I said, "There's not a lot of room in here, it's kind of cramped with the two of us. And, hey, I can have the conference room catered. Insurance company's treat."
"Whatever, we'll call you when we're outside the hotel." He hung up.

I tossed the phone onto my bed and went back out into the common area and got a bottle of water from the fridge. My mom was at the kitchen table, looking through the paperwork the insurance guy had given her and idly tapping the check with her free hand.

"I should probably put this in the joint checking account so you can use your debit card to buy yourself some clothes or other stuff," she said, watching me spin the cap to the water bottle.
"Or you could put it in the savings account with the rest of the money, let it earn some interest," I said, leaning against the counter.
"Then you couldn't spend it with your card," she said, looking down at the paperwork again.
"I could withdraw cash from it at an ATM with my card," I said.
"You don't want to have to walk around a mall or a store with a bunch of cash on you."

I remembered being back at Dulles airport and pulling a thousand dollars from an ATM, and consistently feeling like a whole band of ninjas was going to appear from nowhere and rob me or pick my pockets until I'd spent most of the cash. I also remembered that I'd spent most of the cash on an Austrian sparbuch account, and that the only things proving I owned that bank account had gone up in flames along with the house. That sucked, wasting however-many real dollars that thing cost me. It meant that that account was going to sit idle, untouched, for years and years. That 100-Euro balance was going to accrue interest until the global economy fails. Some bank teller will notice in a thousand years that there's an anonymous sparbuch account that nobody's touched since the 21st century with a balance in the billions. Oh, my imagination.

I told my mom she could deposit it into the checking account and whatever we didn't spend after a while could go into savings later, then went back to my room and shut the door. If Amy was still skipping her afternoon classes, she should be out by now. I sent a text message to her phone asking just that. While I waited for a response I sat at the edge of my bed, opening and closing the bottom drawer of the dresser with my foot. Under a folded blanket were three pistols, the USP .45 I'd bought before and the two Beretta 92s I'd taken off Schumer's impromptu bodyguards. I didn't know what else to do with the guns, so I just hid them in the drawer and every few hours had a compulsion to make sure they were still there. I had three loaded magazines for the USP, and one apiece for the Berettas. The 92s used 9mm ammo, so I couldn't use any of the .45 ammo I'd already bought, though that wouldn't matter because everything I couldn't fit into clips was left in the house. The one that burned down.

Looking at the guns in the drawer, I did some mental arithmetic to determine I had 69 rounds if all the mags were fully loaded. If the boogeyman came through the front door of the hotel suite, at three-round bursts fired twice per ten seconds, I could hold the boogeyman off for just over a minute and a half.

My phone beeped, distracting me from my wandering mind. Amy said she was out and asked if I wanted her to come see the the hotel room. I sent back that she should come over around 6PM.

There were still some things I wanted to go over with her before I had a sit-down with the FBI.

In the meantime, my mom and I went to the bank together to deposit the check. She jokingly said I made a good bodyguard, since I was so quiet. The quiet was on account of the contemplating I'd been doing, but the idea was interesting to me. When I'd read that novel on the plane to Vienna about a bodyguard, I thought it sounded like it might be a cool job. Swearing your life to protect somebody, it seemed noble. It was interesting to watch the teller at the small bank branch try to hide her reaction to the amount on the check, the same way they had when we deposited our life insurance checks.

After a few hours of staring at my arsenal, Amy sent notice that she was downstairs. I told my mom I was going to go check out the dinner buffet in the lobby, but that's not what I did.

"Am I not going to see your room?" she asked when I approached her in the lobby.
"I'm sure you can imagine it," I said, walking toward the business center where there was a room with a few computers to rent. It was empty, and suitably private.

"So you're still leaving school at lunch?" I asked.
"Well, I wasn't going to. I was going to start hitting classes four through six, but yesterday I got a memo from the office that fourth-hour study hall was canceled for the day so I thought, what the hell, and called off the rest of the day."
"They canceled study hall?"
"Yeah, couldn't get anybody to proctor it or something."
"How hard is it? Everybody just sits there."
She shrugged.
"So, was Comstock there?" I asked.
"At school?"
"Yeah."
"No, not today or yesterday."
"Alright, we need to go talk to him," I said.
Amy paused, thinking. "Why?" she asked after not coming up with an answer herself.

I told her about the meeting I was supposed to have with my FBI friends tonight, how they wanted me to tell them everything I knew, but that there was too much I didn't know. Comstock would have those answers, so I had to ask him.

"Do you have his number?" she asked.
"I did," I said, "it went with the house."
Amy looked down at the bank of computers. "Is that camera thing still there? We could at least see if he's home."
I thought about it. I didn't have the address to view the camera feed, but I could get it from my email. "Good idea," I said.

I sat at one of the computers, logged onto my email, got the address, and in a few seconds the familiarly grainy and tree-obstructed picture of the front of Comstock's house was on the screen. The lights were on inside the house.

"Good enough for me," I said.

Before we left I stopped at the business center's main desk and asked if I could reserve the small conference room from seven to nine tonight. It was available, so I reserved it and asked for a coffee service and a sandwich tray or something for the room. I walked away feeling like a rich person, realized I technically was a rich person, but felt better about it knowing it wasn't my money I was spending.

"What do you need to talk to Comstock about, anyway?" Amy asked in the middle of the drive across town to his place.
"What Schumer told me doesn't add up," I said. "He says that Comstock's main job was to wrangle some free class into my schedule so I could have my brain blasted with Marine Corps trivia every day, but if that's the case, why do I remember every single class? There should be on class where I can't remember any classmates, or that I can't really focus on."

Amy and I walked through my class schedule for this semester. College Writing first hour I had with kids from other classes, and I had group projects that I'd talked about with other kids. Anatomy second hour I also had with kids from other classes, had done group projects, and I'd had to memorize and learn so many terms that it had to be real. Third hour was Pre-Calc/Trig, and while it was amazingly boring, I remembered it too vividly and I'd done too much homework for it to all be a self-imagined product of hypnosis. After lunch was fourth hour study hall, which I had with Amy so that had to be real, plus I can remember all the other students from the class. After that was Euro History and Computer Hardware, and there were two kids who were in both of those classes with me, and I walked from one class to the other with.

"Maybe all the hypnosis-classes were before, and since this is your last semester there aren't any fake classes this time," Amy suggested.
"Schumer said this all started because I stopped showing up for my daily brainwashing after the fight, and he said that if I had kept going to classes that they could have just 'fixed' whatever went wrong with my brain."
"So maybe Schumer was lying," Amy said.
"He was lying about something, I know that much. If he was lying about this, then it changes everything."
"So you want Comstock's side of it?" Amy asked.
"Yes, and another thing," I grinned.
"What?"
"I, uh, want to have him make sure I graduate," I said.
Amy was silent, then laughed. "What, you're going to hold him at gunpoint and tell him to make sure you have the credits?"
"I don't have any guns on me. I could hold him at knife-point. Again."
"You're serious?" she asked.
"I-- no, not about that, but I can still ask him. He owes me that. I don't want to have to make up a summer of classes if I want a diploma, all because of this stupid program. He can fiddle with my grades the same way he fiddles with everything else about my school life."
"Allegedly."
"Right."

We arrived at Comstock's house and, for the first time, didn't have to sneak around. I pulled into his driveway, and we both got out and walked up to the front door. I was practicing in my head how this would all go, I could play it straight or I could try to be the bully again. Did he even know that it was me in Vienna? I thought Schumer said he figured it out, but I couldn't remember.

We got to the door and Amy reached out to ring the bell but I stopped her. Something was twitching in the back of my mind, something wasn't right. The door was already open a crack, I noticed.

I stepped around and tried to look through the windows beside the door but couldn't see anything inside, just empty hallways and a living room. I reached my palm out the door and gave it a light tap to swing it open, but the door didn't move. I pushed again, something was blocking it. I used both hands and my shoulder and pushed, the door opened slowly, pushing whatever was obstructing it. After a few feet, the obstruction had been pushed out of the way and the door, newly free, swung open and slammed into the stopper loudly.

The foyer wasn't lit, but the thing blocking the door was evident. It was about five feet long, laying on the floor awkwardly, and looked a lot like a dead Nathan Comstock.