She seemed to recognize him, and w.i.l.l.y seemed to think he remembered her too. w.i.l.l.y pulled over and got out of the vehicle to meet her. His excitement was squelched when the woman withdrew a Ruger pistol and aimed it right at him.

THE PIEDMONT INN.

Once inside The Piedmont Inn, James began re-piecing the barricade. James placed a large table against the entrance doors. The original lock on the double doors was missing, Brock noticed, as if it was unscrewed and completely removed. Brock joined in on the effort, and together, they tossed chairs, benches, and finally, a fine leather couch onto the heap. Stopping the effort once James seemed satisfied, the man rushed to the corner bar called "The Blue Note Bistro." Reaching beneath the counter, he located a baseball bat with the words "Peacemaker" scrawled in magic marker across its stock.

"This is just a prop," James said, "but it's real. I knew the guy who ran this place. He tried to shoot me for the ten bucks I had left in my wallet only days ago."

The last sentence threw Brock, but he didn't ask for more details. He instead thought about Angel. "My sister said she was staying here, but I don't know in which room."

Brock spotted the front desk and checked the computer. The screen had been smashed. Brock located the guestbook and read through the past week and a half. He wondered if this strange situation had been going on for that long. If so, why had Angel mailed him a letter to come visit her less than four days ago? Why wasn't the letter a distress call? Why weren't the police here? Blue Hills was a graveyard, the survivors being men with axes, guns, and criminal intentions, that was except for James, who appeared to be another victim who hadn't given up on his life or the hope of seeing the end of the situation.

"Is she in the guest book?" James asked, clutching the bat and eying the windows. He kept pivoting in a slow circle to ensure the way was safe. "Hurry up, I'm getting nervous. I've lived this long by staying on the move. It's the only way to survive."

Brock kept scanning the guest book. He was nervous as h.e.l.l that he didn't have a weapon or any means to protect himself. It also made him nervous James had a weapon. Brock couldn't completely trust the stranger.

Brock spotted Angel's name. She was staying in room 114.

"She's in room 114."

"What if she's not there? Or she's..."

"Or she's what? You've got a lot to explain. Yes, you've helped me get to town, but you haven't been that much help other than that. This whole town is either dead or, or I don't know what. Why are the phones covered in steel squares? Can you at least tell me that?"

"I'll tell you everything, I promise. But first, let's deal with your sister."

Brock followed the man down a hall of rooms: 101, 102, 103, and so on, until they stopped outside room 114. Brock took the initiative to knock first. James was behind him waving the baseball bat as if to take a Babe Ruth death swing.

"Open it," James whispered to him. "She won't answer. You'll see. n.o.body's there."

He held back to urge to snap, How the f.u.c.k do you know?

Brock knocked again. There wasn't a response. "Angel, it's me, your brother, Brock. Are you in there?"

"If she is, she's not answering. She's dead. Or she's like the rest of them. They'd slit your throat for a dollar."

As good as it's been finding you, you're acting like a G.o.dd.a.m.n p.r.i.c.k. "Why do you say that? And don't tell me it has to wait."

"Do you think I'm f.u.c.king around? I've been here since this s.h.i.t started. It's been two weeks of h.e.l.l. I have no idea why it's happening or what it is. Look, I'm in a bad place too. My wife drowned in burning hot oil that came up from the ground that was full of corpse bones. Does that make sense to you? Is that logical to you? And don't apologize to me, because it doesn't change a thing. My wife's gone forever. I'm helping you, and I'm trusting you not to stab me in the back or rob me and leave me for dead like everyone else has tried. Why I'm trusting you, I don't know."

"Why would I rob you?"

"Because you'd..." He trailed off, resting his head against the wall and expelling a long, weary breath. He watched Brock carefully and made a realization. "You really haven't been here that long, have you?"

"Two days, but most of that was spent in a house hiding."

"You were wise to do that." James's piercing eyes made Brock shiver. "You open that door, see if you find your sister, and I'll tell you everything. But we must be safe when I tell you this. It's a long explanation. And you won't like it."

Nervousness and a driving need for the truth compelled Brock to turn the doork.n.o.b. The door opened a crack, then it stopped against a barricade. "d.a.m.n, it's blocked from the other side."

James rammed his shoulder against it to little change, so he motioned for Brock to press his hands up against the door and combine their strength to defeat the barricade. "Some shelves," James grunted, "and maybe a chair wedged underneath the doork.n.o.b. We'll get through it. Help me. Keep pushing."

"Angel, are you in there?" Brock asked, grunting as he pushed both hands against the door and hoping it would pop open. "It's your brother. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not those other people."

"She's not buying it if she's in there." James now spoke through gritted teeth. "If she shoots at us, I'm getting out of here. It's been nice meeting someone who doesn't want to rob and kill me and all, but I'm not dying for you. No offense."

"None taken." Brock pushed harder, both old men working their arms and shoulders to their full potential until the door began to widen and widen, the sound of bending and creaking wood increasing as their vigor paid dividends. "We're doing it! Keep pushing!"

After the sound of a chair leg snapping, they were able to shove through the door. Brock followed James inside, and then James went about reapplying the barricade. He pushed the bookshelf they'd shoved back flush against the door. The man was about to locate another wedge when both of their gazes fell upon Angel.

Brock looked at his sister on the hotel bed. Angel was downy white. White as daffodil petals. Lips blue as ice over a frozen river. Her body was locked in a side fetal position, and her hands were positioned at her chest. Angel's black hair was askew and pasted on her forehead. She looked to be recently dead.

He was afraid to pose the question to himself never mind out loud, but Brock asked it anyway, "If she's dead, why doesn't she...smell?"

James moved to the bed with practiced speed and confidence. He touched his fingers beneath her neck and spoke clinically, "She's warm and still has a pulse. She recently went to sleep. If you stay like that for too long, you begin to rot. It requires more to bring you back to life in that case. It happened to my wife days before the oil swallowed her up."

Brock tried his best to sound patient. "What exactly happened to your wife?"

"It started with the voices you heard earlier carrying in the air. Then the smell arrived. Deathly smells, not just rotting, Brock, but varying forms of death. Open wounds. Burnt flesh. Singed hair. Gangrene infected flesh. Coffin rot. Spilled blood. Blood turned to smoke. Sulfur. It was all a form of putrescence that corrupted the air. I'm familiar with it, because I embalmed bodies for funerals. I did everything at that cemetery.

"And then anybody who tried to leave town suddenly couldn't leave. If they tried, the roads, the ground, whatever was below their feet, would open up. The death smell would come up through the ground as would that infernal black oil. Have you seen the black oil?" He wasn't asking Brock, only posing a rhetorical question. "If you have, you've seen the bones floating in the boiling mess. The oil is as hot as magma beneath the earth's crust. If you ran from it, you'd be sucked down, then vaporized. You'd ultimately vanish. That insistent chattering would play on the air, those voices over voices over voices. I swear they're all speaking to different ends. Some are laughing, others are warning you danger's here, while others are instructing. G.o.d knows what their intentions are. I don't. So what do you do when you can't leave town? You call the police, right?" He eyed Brock, making sure his listener hadn't dismissed him as mad. "What happens when the phone doesn't work anymore?"

Brock broke in, "You panic, that's what you do." He imagined his cell phone and how it had changed without any indication. "My cell phone was covered in a steel plate, as was the phone in that house we hid in last night. It was like someone was trying to deny us the privilege."

James nodded. "Yes, everybody's phones and communication devices were suddenly covered in steel with that thin little slot in the middle. It literally happened overnight. One moment everything was normal, and the next, it was f.u.c.king crazy."

"Why are things covered in steel like that? I still don't understand the significance."

James pointed at Angel. "Do me a favor and touch her."

Offended, "Excuse me."

"Before I explain more, I want you to understand something. Check for yourself. She's warm. She's alive. Right?"

For the sake of receiving more of the explanation, Brock moved to the bed. He extended his hand and touched Angel's neck and was startled to feel the warmth. Her pulse was faint, as if on hibernation mode.

"She's alive, yes. Now what's your point?"

"I heard a rattling in your pocket. I pray it's what I'm thinking it is."

Brock dug it out. He was shocked at how James's face lit up, as if he was an alcoholic and Brock had removed a fifth of bourbon from his pocket instead of the thirty-five cents. "It's pocket change. So what?"

Relief played on the man's features. He pointed at Angel, afraid to come any closer to Brock's quarter and a dime. An expression of dread played upon his eyes, one of pure loathing. "Okay, just do as I say." He was out-of-breath, sweating profusely, and aiming his finger at Angel's arm. "Just place the coins on her arm."

"What?"

"Place them on her arm. And make sure they don't fall off."

Brock was dumb to what he was being asked. "Now why would I need to do that?"

A vein tensed in James's neck. His face was turning plum red. James seemed to restrain himself from reaching out and throttling Brock's neck. Instead, the distraught man shouted, "f.u.c.king place the coins on her arm, or I'll leave you right now to figure it all out for yourself!"

Brock's hands were shaking. He feared further provocation with James, or being left alone in this awful town, so Brock carefully placed the quarter and dime on Angel's forearm. He took a step back and looked at the coins that didn't move. Brock wanted to shout, 'Now what?' but thought against it. Instead, they stood together watching his sister's body on the bed and the two coins.

"Any moment." James's words were hushed. He kept pointing urgently at the coins. "It happens fast. I don't want you to miss it, Brock. Keep your eyes open. Trust me. Keep waiting."

Biting his lip, tucking his hands behind his back and leaning towards Angel, Brock strained his eyes and patience waiting for the miraculous to happen.

And it did.

The coins were gone.

They vanished.

Brock replayed what happened in his mind so many times, he couldn't deny it. The coins were sucked down into the threads of skin that opened up, pulling the coinage down. The flesh healed back up as if nothing had ever happened. Like it was natural.

Terrified by the occurrence, James began to speak, coaching Brock so he wouldn't lose his calm. "It's happening to all of us, Brock. Even me. Without money, coins, rings, gold, jewelry, anything that has monetary worth, we can't live. We fall asleep like your poor sister. And you don't want to fall asleep. If someone doesn't come along and put money in you, you begin to rot. You don't get to wake up."

Brock watched his sister.

"Wait for it."

Grabbing James's arm and forcing him up against the wall, he shouted, "Why should I wait? Maybe I'm under a f.u.c.king spell, but there's got to be a logical reasoning as to why my sister's arm just sucked down those coins. I mean where did they go?"

James didn't retaliate against Brock accosting him. "Just wait, Brock. You have to see this before I tell you anything. I can't convince you it's real until you see it."

Without realizing it, James urged him to once again study Angel. "I can't explain much more unless you believe what I'm telling you. I'm sorry it has to be like this. There's no other way."

Brock was startled by the sound of someone just escaping from underwater and gasping for a much needed breath. Then there was sobbing. He rushed to his sister who was suddenly alive, flopping back and forth on the bed as if shrugging a bad nightmare, weeping with her hands digging into the sheets, her eyes inflamed and bloodshot, her mouth bent in crooked disdain. He believed his sister was having a vicious panic attack until she set eyes on Brock and stopped.

She muttered it like a curse, "What the h.e.l.l are you doing here, Brock?"

Brock was shocked and spoke with a limp tongue. "I, you sent me a letter. You wanted me to visit you. You wanted to talk to me. You told me you were staying here, so here I am."

Her eyes couldn't shape the scorn that was brewing in her mind. "I'd never mail you anything in a thousand years!"

Brock backed up from the bed. "You sent me a letter. I wanted to help you. Can't you be happy to see me? I know our relationship has taken a stab in the back, but I'm here now. I'm here to make things better. At least I'm here to try."

She sounded much angrier now. "I would rather go back to being unconscious than rekindle a relationship with you."

"Did you know I've lost Hannah looking for you? She was here with me. We're going to get married, if you care. But somebody's taken her. If I didn't come here in the first place, we'd both be safe."

Angel wasn't affected by his speech. "My boyfriend's dead. This whole town's a graveyard. I was actually hoping I was dead. I was hoping to be dead for good." Sneering with tears streaming down her face, she folded to her emotions. On the bed, she whispered in a hurt voice, "Why did you wake me? I don't want to be awake anymore."

James tried to mend the already terrible conversation. "You don't have much time, Angel. He only put thirty-five cents in you."

Angel and Brock waited for James to continue, and he did, happy he had their undivided attention. "The man with the golden axe, he got to you, didn't he?"

Angel's eyes met James's face. "Yes. How did you know?"

"Those who live in Blue Hills, we woke up changed about two weeks ago. I'm thinking it has something to do with the voices on the air. Perhaps it's supernatural, because no person could alter hundreds of people so quickly. Whatever the change did to our bodies, it turns us into machines that require money to live."

Brock recalled the man with the golden axe, and that was the man who had attacked them earlier in the woods. "The guy with the axe was the one who took Hannah. Do you know where he is? Is he making people change too?

"I don't know where he is, but yes, he's been going after people who come into town and altering them like the rest of us have been altered. He hides. The man skulks about town, finding people, and he dismantles them. He also collects the money inside of you. What he does with the money, where he goes, where he hides, is beyond me. The situation was terrible, but it became far worse when Chuck Durnham became who he was. Everybody calls him the man with the golden axe because he uses it to attack everyone. He can mutilate you, and then bring you back as a machine. I don't know how he does it. He just does it."

Brock put the information together the best he could. The situation didn't have to make sense, but it had to end in getting Hannah back alive and safe. "Then this Chuck Durnham a.s.shole is the guy we need to find. We can force him to tell us what we need to know to get out of here. He'll tell us where Hannah is, and how to fix you guys."

Brock was determined to inspire them, but the two of them visibly failed to match his enthusiasm. They were too scared.

"I don't want anything to do with that man," Angel confessed, curling up against the headboard. She was happy playing the defeatist. In a miserable voice, "When I woke up the last time before this, my head was on a hook and my body was on a table. Chuck was working on me. G.o.d knows what he was doing. Modifying me, maybe. There were body parts everywhere, like human projects left unfinished. Like I said, I'm not going anywhere near that man, if he is a man."

"He used to be a local firefighter." James checked the barricade, and happy it was solid, he focused on them again. "Chuck's father gave him a golden axe when he got his first job in a firehouse just outside of Blue Hills, though the man lived here in town. I don't know why Chuck became the way he became. Whatever's changed, we're now machines that run on money. It's like we have meters inside of us, and if they run empty, we expire."

Brock couldn't help but shake his head. "That doesn't explain the voices on the air, and the hot oil you described coming up from the ground."

"I've seen it too, the black oil." Angel suddenly had a thought, so she turned to Brock. "Wait, I was hiding from that horrible man, and I entered a house. A typewriter was typing out a message. Yeah, I remember it now. It was a letter to you. The typewriter was typing by itself, but I heard voices, and the air reeked of rotting flesh. I ran out of there and oil dripped from the walls and the floor, and the whole place sank into this pool of black oil. The house was gone."

"So you didn't write me." It came out just as he thought it, all hope for saving a relationship with his sister a failure.

She refused to console him. "Like I said, it was them, whoever's in the air. It's supernatural or...or it's..."

"It's death," James broke in, his fingers posed contemplatively on his chin, rethinking everything he believed about the predicament in Blue Hills. "These voices are obviously doing things to bring in people from the outside, including you, Brock."

"It brought me here too," Angel conceited, getting up, and searching through the mini-fridge and discovering a bottle of rum. The fridge was already open. Angel told them she'd put money into the slot without knowing what it meant and the door opened on its own. She tilted the bottle into her mouth, sucking it down, and Brock was surprised when she offered him a taste. "I'm sure you need this as much as I do."

"I'm sober now."

To her, it was a f.u.c.k you.

She asked James, "How about you? You get your life together too?"

"Maybe later I'll have a drink," he said.

Not discouraged by their declines, Angel downed the rest of the mini-bottle and claimed another one in the fridge, but not before saying, "I was led here with my boyfriend. He's a drug dealer. He said he got a call about a cheap deal going down in Blue Hills. The details were sketchy, but it brought us here. That's when the man with the axe got a hold of us. Then I woke in a room, my head was on a hook, and my boyfriend, I don't know what happened to him."

She mentioned the detail without any shift in emotion. She was still addicted. Her boyfriend was a resource, a tool to receive drugs and nothing more. The front of s.e.x and fake romance won most dealers over. Nothing much had changed since the last time Brock talked to her when she left the rehab clinic in Beverly Hills.

"So this force in town, it's bringing in new people," James said to himself and then snapped his fingers once. "Yes, it makes sense. To bring in more money, right? How else would this horrible place keep trickling on?"

"But why create this situation in the first place?" Brock refocused the conversation to getting out of this room and searching for Hannah. "I have to find Hannah. I think this axe guy, what's-his-name, Chuck Durnham, is the only way to go forward. We have to get him in a position where he'll tell us what he knows. We can talk all we want, because it's only guesses. We're wasting our time in here."